Last Gasp

South, rich-poor, black-white . . . keep them all happy, for God's sake.

This time it would be different. Heartfelt pleas for worldwide cooperation were useless, they had both agreed. A complete and utter waste of time and breath. Taking up Prothero's suggested title, 'The Point of No Return,' Ingrid had worked on the speech for months, extracting information from UN files and reports, while Prothero had unearthed material from the archives of the defunct Environmental Protection Agency. This time there was to be no compromise, no half-measures. The finger of accusation was to be pointed at the industrialized nations and their abysmal record of environmental conservation. The billions of tons of noxious chemicals released into the atmosphere. The wanton spoilage of lakes and rivers and forests. The vast amounts of herbicides and pesticides still manufactured and used despite legislated controls. The dumping of toxic and nuclear wastes in the oceans.

More important, each country would be named and its offenses cataloged. In summary, Ingrid would emphasize the vital and desperate need for all nations to forget the old hatreds and enmities: The planet was approaching the point of no return while they squabbled among themselves like greedy, spoiled children.

It was a last-ditch attempt, Prothero realized. At a more personal level he knew that he was laying his head on the political chopping block. The documented evidence he had obtained from the EPA on the strength of his standing as a senator was politically explosive-- especially as it was to be used against his own country. There would be cries of 'traitor' and 'treason,' and it could mean the end of his career in public office. His wife's reaction he didn't care about, but he was afraid of what it would do to his three children.

Ingrid let the last typewritten page flutter to the table and stubbed her cigarette out. She took off her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose. 'I've been through it so many times the words have become meaningless.'

'It'll be great, I know,' Prothero reassured her. 'Drink your drink and relax. There's still a few days in which to look it over.'

Ingrid smiled up at him wanly. 'Before we get kicked up the ass, you mean.'

'They wouldn't dare kick your ass, darling. It's too pretty.' Prothero smiled, but the image in his mind, which still haunted him after all these years, had a loathsome dimension. It was of the suppurating mess of skin and bone that had been his brother Tom, a chopper pilot in Vietnam. Pro had been twenty, his brother twenty-six when he died. Agent Orange. Dioxin. Waste. Death. A sick miserable tragedy. What was his career when set against that?

'Pro,' Ingrid said anxiously. 'You will be there, won't you?'

'Ringside seat. You're going to be terrific, Ingrid, 1 know it. Don't worry!'

'I'm not worried for myself.'

'Well, we're both of us in the firing line,' Prothero said, thinking he understood her. He realized he was mistaken when Ingrid said:

'These madmen will have marked you down, Pro. You've spoken out more than anyone--even more than Redman or Lautner. They've shown they can get to anyone, no matter who or how well they're protected.'

It was the pyro-assassinations that worried her, not their respective political futures. Prothero waved his hand nonchalantly. 'I'm too small a fish to fry.'

'Don't make such a horrible joke!' Ingrid said, distraught. 'They can do it!'

Prothero slid down beside her and took her hand. 'Ingrid, honey, I can't crawl under a rock and disappear. I know what the risk is, believe me. These 'madmen' as you call them are going to have to work mighty hard to get anywhere near old Pro.' He pulled her close and smelled the faint scent of lavender in the warmth of her neck.

They made love on the long curved couch. The bright pool of light under the lamp made the shadows blacker and more mysterious. Mozart gave way to Sibelius, which Prothero thought entirely appropriate, the sound of chill Nordic symmetry swirling above their heads.

Afterward, Ingrid made sandwiches and coffee while Prothero padded naked to the bathroom. He urinated, patted the underside of his chin in the mirror, stepped in the shower cubicle.

His manicured hand spun the control.

Turning his face upward to receive the hot cleansing water he found himself staring into the convex steel showerhead that contained his own distorted terrified face and elongated body inside the concentric pattern of holes.

For an instant he stared at himself. He saw the holes bubble and burst with water, and the next thing he knew he was enveloped in a warm caressing spray that soothed and subdued the hammering of his heart.

19

From nine thousand feet Starbuck Island resembled a pink coral necklace on plush blue velvet. The pilot of the USAF K-113 Aurora strato-shuttle banked to starboard and raised the lead-lined shutters from the tiny saucer-size windows to give his passengers their first view.

'One-third power and full flaps,' he rapped out to the flight engineer. 'Check yaw and drift stabilization.'

The engineer acknowledged, throwing levers, watching gauges.

The stubby silver craft with its embryonic wings and steeply raked tail plane was ungainly at this height and speed, dominated as it was by the huge rocket engines that protruded aft from the rectangular fuselage like the gaping maw of a deep-sea predator.

The Aurora had arced across the Pacific at a height of one hundred twenty thousand feet. Because exposure to ultraviolet and cosmic radiation at this altitude could cause skin cancer and total hair loss in under an hour, the entire craft was encased in lead shielding. The passengers saw daylight only when the shutters were raised below ten thousand feet.

Strapped into a padded reclining seat, Lt. Cy Skrote stared rigidly at the curved ceiling panel directly above him. The muscles on his thin freckled neck were corded and covered in perspiration. He'd never liked flying, but he absolutely hated rocket flights. The high g forces on lift-off and reentry made him fear he might lose control of his bodily functions.

In the seat next to his, nearest the window, Maj. Jarvis Jones was leaning forward against the straps, straining to see outside, a black hand cupped to his eyes to reduce glare. Nothing got to him, thought Skrote. Made out of rock.

Yet if Jones was rock, what in hell was Colonel Madden in the seat in front, who'd spent the two-and-a-half- hour six-thousand-mile flight with an open file across his knees? Skrote guessed that for him it was simply the quickest way of getting from A to B over long distances. End of story.

Skrote instinctively gripped the arms of his seat as the pitch of the engines deepened. The rapid deceleration was making his eyeballs bulge. Luckily for him, the pilot was experienced and brought the Aurora in on the first pass, lining her up dead-center on the twelve-thousand-foot floating concrete runway anchored two miles off the island. Fifteen minutes later the three ASP officers could taste salt on their lips as the launch cut a creamy swathe through the glittering blue ocean.

'I never expected this!' Skrote shouted. The warm wind snatched his words away. He gestured all around with one hand, holding on to his peaked cap with the other.

'The oxygen level is only a fraction of a percent below normal in this area,' Madden called back. He pointed. 'Two thousand miles southwest of here, on the other side of the Kermadec Trench, it's solid weed. New Zealand is completely surrounded. Have to evacuate soon.'

Cy Skrote raised his sparse eyebrows and nodded. Marine ecology wasn't his subject.

From the jetty they were taken to Zone 2, the bacteriological research center where the director, Dr. Jeremiah Rolsom, and members of his staff were waiting to greet them. Everyone donned protective white suits and technicians adjusted the air supply to the bulky fishbowl helmets. Then the party lumbered out like spacemen on their tour of the sterile bays.

'The problem is twofold,' Rolsom explained over the intercom. 'Deployment and containment. If that seems contradictory, that's because it is. TCDD has extreme toxicity and we don't want to spread the stuff around indiscriminately. Somehow we've got to keep it away from the protected territories, namely the United States, Russia, and parts of Europe. So you'll understand it's a matter of precise selectivity.'

Skrote understood very well indeed. Tetrachlorodibenzo-paradioxin was the most virulent poison known to man. Spray Africa from cruise missiles, for example, and there was the danger of wiping out the populations of Spain, Portugal, and most of southern Europe as well.