been trim and shapely, but the office had taken a toll on her and made her thin. She kept her brown hair long but tied up in a French braid behind her head, off the collar of her brown business suit, which only served to make her face seem even thinner. Her blue eyes still shined behind her simple rimless glasses, but the worry and edginess of her position had deepened the lines around those beautiful eyes.
“I knew you wouldn’t make it,” she said.
“Sorry.” He reached out with his right hand and touched her left in their little expression of love in that very public of places, but her hand was as cold as stone, as cold as her voice. “Traffic was murder.”
“I don’t think anyone’s in the mood for jokes, Patrick,” she said. She gave Boomer a nod and shook his hand. “You two okay?”
“We’re fine, Miss Vice President,” Noble said.
“Good.” She was all business again. “It’ll be you two meeting with the President, myself, SECDEF, NCA, and CJCS. The press somehow got wind of the spaceplane proposal, and they might have info on the flight you just took.”
“We knew they would, ma’am.”
“Why is that? The project is supposed to be classified.”
“We began daylight ops two weeks ago, Miss Vice President,” Patrick said. She noticed Maureen’s eyes narrow a bit when Patrick addressed her formally — she knew it was only proper, but she felt isolated and detached from him whenever he did it. “I warned everyone it was going to be just a matter of time before it was all over the press. We saw the first ‘LakeSpotter’ reports four days later on the Internet…”
“We were notified that the report was coming out in tomorrow’s paper just this morning,” Maureen said. “No requests, no opportunity to squash it — just notification. Everyone’s pissed.”
“It’s no secret who wants what, Miss Vice President,” Patrick said. “Congress has made that quite clear. Everyone has got their own ideas, and none of them include the Stud.”
“You’re still going with your original recommendations, Patrick?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Maureen’s lips went hard and straight with concern, but she nodded. Miss Parks, the Oval Office assistant, approached and informed her that the meeting had been moved to the Oval Office and the President was waiting. “Okay. Ready?”
“Ready.” He tried to reach out again to her, but she had already spun on her heel and headed toward the door to the Oval Office. He swallowed his feeling of dejection, then turned to Hunter. “Ready to do it, Boomer?” Patrick whispered.
“Do I have time to change my shorts first, sir?” Noble asked.
“Negative. Follow me.”
Maureen peeked through the peephole in the door, saw nothing out of the ordinary, knocked lightly, then thrust open the door, and before Boomer knew it they were inside. Like much of the rest of the place he had seen, the Oval Office was not the largest or most ornate office he had ever been in — in fact, it was pretty plain. Boomer expected that, but what he was waiting for was the experience of feeling the aura of power that was supposed to emanate from this historic room. This was the place, he knew, where hundreds of decisions a day were made affecting the lives of billions of people all over the world, where the word of a single man could commit the resources of the most powerful nation ever to inhabit the planet to a goal.
But he didn’t sense that either. This was a workaday office — he felt nothing more. No sooner had they walked into the room than the outer office assistant came in and handed papers to the Secretary of Defense, Joseph Gardner, and hustled out, only to be followed by someone else a few moments later. There was no sense of anticipation, no excitement, no…nothing, really, except for a sense of business, perhaps with a slight undercurrent of uncertainty and urgency.
The one thing he did notice was the large rug in the middle of the room with the presidential seal on it. Boomer knew that before World War Two the eagle’s head had been turned toward the thirteen arrows it was clutching in its talons; after World War Two, President Harry Truman redesigned the seal so that the eagle’s head was turned toward the olive branches, signifying a desire and emphasis for peace. But after the attacks on the United States, President Martindale ordered the eagle’s head on the seal turned back toward the arrows, signifying America’s de facto perpetual readiness for war.
Boomer wasn’t sure if he agreed with that sentiment or not, but clearly the President did, and it hung heavy like a fog in the famous historic room.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General William Glenbrook, looked as if he was going to get to his feet when Maureen Hershel stepped into the room, but he kept his seat. Apparently there was some informal but clearly understood rule that no one rose for the Vice President entering any executive office unless she was the senior official present or unless the President did, and he was too distracted by his chief of staff, former U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader Carl Minden, to notice. Minden himself noticed, but he only scowled and turned back to whatever he was showing the President. Finally the President impatiently looked up from his desk, wondering when his next meeting was going to start and finding the participants waiting on him.
Kevin Martindale was a long-time fixture on Capitol Hill and the White House. A former Congressman and former two-term vice president, he served one term as president before being defeated by the ultra-isolationist Jeffersonian Party candidate Thomas Thorn. He had been gearing up for another run at the presidency when the Russian Air Force attacked the United States. Amidst Thorn’s decision not to seek a second term and with only twenty percent voter turnout, Martindale and Hershel — the only candidates to run for the White House that year — were elected. “Well well, the rocket boys,” he said jovially. “Welcome home.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Patrick responded. “Nice to be home.” Per protocol, he waited in place quietly until told where to go.
The President finished what he was doing then got up, stepped toward them, and shook hands with Patrick. Martindale was thin and rakishly handsome, a little more than average height, with dark secretive eyebrows, small dark eyes, and longish salt-and-pepper hair parted in the middle. He was famous for the “photographer’s dream”— two curls of silver hair that appeared on his forehead without any manual manipulation whenever he was peeved or animated. While out of office Martindale had grown a beard which had made him look rather sinister; he had shaved the beard after the American Holocaust, but kept the long hair, so now he just looked roguish. “I hope you know,” he said quietly into Patrick’s ear, not yet releasing his handshake and keeping Patrick close to him, “we created quite a ruckus out there, Patrick.”
“I was hoping so, sir,” Patrick responded.
“Me too,” the President said. “Did you get it?”
“You bet we did, sir,” Patrick replied. “Direct hit.”
“Good job,” the President said. “No radiation detected?”
“They’d be crazy to put real nuclear warheads on that test shot, sir.”
“But you checked anyway…?”
“Of course, sir. No radiation detected.”
“Great.” He shook his head with a smile. “Did the bastards really think we were going to allow them to base a nuclear-capable medium-range missile within striking distance of Diego Garcia, one of our most vital air bases in Asia?”
“Apparently so, sir,” Patrick said. “But we only took out one of those Shahab-5s — they’ve got possibly a half-dozen more ready to fly. And we know they still have as many as three or four nuclear warheads, plus any number of chemical, biological, or high explosive warheads deliverable by the Shahab-5s.”
“This one was a warning,” the President said with a smile. “We’ll keep an eye on the others and take them out if we need to.”
“Faster than you can imagine, sir.”
“Outstanding.” His voice turned serious, and the “photographer’s dream” devil’s locks slowly appeared as he went on: “I should have guessed you were going to fly the thing, but I sure as hell didn’t know you were going to go into orbit. That was unwise and unauthorized. What made you think you could do that without permission, Patrick? You work for me. I make the calls.”
“Sir, you know me,” Patrick said. “As long as I’ve been in uniform I have flown the first operational test flight of every manned aerospace vehicle coming out of the ‘Lake’ for the past twelve years. This one was no different just because we went into space.”
