Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  “No.” The president shook his head. They’d been over this many times, and the idea sickened him. “No. We will not deliver a first strike.”

  “The Soviets,” Hannan continued patiently, “understand the diplomacy of the fist. I’m not saying I think we should destroy the Soviet Union. But I do believe—fervently—that now is the time to tell them, and decisively, that we’ll not be pushed, and we won’t let their nuclear submarines sit off our shores waiting for launch codes!”

  The president stared at his hands. The knot of his tie felt like a hangman’s noose, and there was sweat under his arms and at the small of his back. “Meaning what?” he asked.

  “Meaning we intercept those goddamned submarines immediately. We destroy them if they won’t turn back. We go to Defcon Three at all air bases and ICBM installations.” Hannan looked quickly around the table to judge who stood with him. Only the vice-president glanced away, but Hannan knew he was a weak man and his opinion carried no weight. “We intercept any Soviet nuclear vessel leaving Riga, Murmansk or Vladivostok. We take control of the sea again—and if that means limited nuclear contact, then so be it.”

  “Blockade,” the president said. “Wouldn’t that make them more eager to fight?”

  “Sir?” General Sinclair spoke in a folksy, down-home Virginia drawl. “I think the reasonin’ goes like this: Ivan’s got to believe we’ll risk our asses to blow him to hell and back. And to be honest, sir, I don’t think there’s a man jack here who’ll sit still and let Ivan throw a shitload of SLBMs at us without gettin’ our own knock in. No matter what the casualty toll.” He leaned forward, his piercing stare directed at the president. “I can put SAC and NORAD on Defcon Three within two minutes of your okay. I can send a squadron of B-1s right up to Ivan’s back door within one hour. Just kinda give him a gentle prod, y’see.”

  “But ... they’ll think we’re attacking!”

  “The point is that they’ll know we’re not afraid.” Hannan tapped a stalk of ash into his ashtray. “If that’s crazy, okay. But by God, the Russians respect insanity more than they respect fear! If we let them bring nuclear missiles to bear on our coastlines without lifting a finger, we’re signing a death warrant for the United States of America!”

  The president closed his eyes. Jerked them open again. He had seen burning cities and charred black things that had once been human beings. With an effort he said, “I don’t ... I don’t want to be the man who starts World War Three. Can you understand that?”

  “It’s already started,” Sinclair spoke up. “Hell, the whole damned world’s at war, and everybody’s waitin’ for either Ivan or us to give the knockout punch. Maybe the whole future of the world depends on who’s willin’ to be the craziest! I agree with Hans; if we don’t make a move right soon, a mighty hard rain’s gonna fall on our tin roof.”

  “They’ll back off,” Narramore said flatly. “They’ve backed off before. If we send hunter-killer groups after those subs and blow them out of the water, they’ll know where the line’s drawn. So: Do we sit and wait, or do we show them our muscle?”

  “Sir?” Hannan prodded. He glanced again at the clock, which showed fifty-eight minutes after ten. “I think the decision belongs to you now.”

  I don’t want it! he almost shouted. He needed time, needed to go to Camp David or off on one of those long fishing trips he had enjoyed as a senator. But now there was no more time. His hands were gripped before him. His face felt so tight he feared it would crack and fall to pieces like a mask, and he wouldn’t want to see what lay underneath. When he looked up, the watching and powerful men were still there, and his senses seemed to whirl away from him.

  The decision. The decision had to be made. Right now.

  “Yes.” The word had never sounded so terrible before. “All right. We go to”—he paused, drew a deep breath—“we go to Defcon Three. Admiral, alert your task forces. General Sinclair, I don’t want those B-ls over one inch of Russian territory. Is that clear?”

  “My crews could walk that line in their sleep.”

  “Punch your codes.”

  Sinclair went to work on the keyboard console before him, then lifted his telephone to make the voice authorization to Strategic Air Command in Omaha and the North American Air Defense fortress in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. Admiral Narramore picked up the phone that instantly put him in touch with Naval Operations at the Pentagon. Within minutes there would be heightened activity at the country’s air and naval bases. The Defcon Three codes would hum through the wires, and yet another check would be carried out on radar equipment, sensors, monitors, computers and hundreds of other pieces of high-tech military hardware, as well as the dozens of Cruise missiles and thousands of nuclear warheads hidden in silos across the Midwest from Montana to Kansas.

  The president was numb. The decision was made. Chief of Staff Bergholz adjourned the meeting and came over to grasp the president’s shoulder and say what a good, solid decision it was. As the military advisors and officials left the Situations Room and moved to the elevator in the outside hallway the president sat alone. His pipe was cold, and he did not care to relight it.

  “Sir?”

  He jumped, turning his head toward the voice. Hannan stood beside the door. “Are you all right?”

  “A-OK.” The president smiled wanly. A memory of his glory days as an astronaut had just flashed by. “No. Jesus Christ, I don’t know. I think I am.”

  “You made the correct decision. We both know that. The Soviets have to realize we’re not afraid.”

  “I am afraid, Hans! I’m damned afraid!”

  “So am I. So is everyone, but we must not be ruled by fear.” He approached the table and paged through some of the folders. In a few minutes, a young CIA man would be in to shred all the documents. “I think you’d better send Julianne and Cory to the Basement tonight, as soon as they can pack. We’ll work out something with the press.”

  The president nodded. The Basement was an underground shelter in Delaware where the first lady, the president’s seventeen-year-old son, ranking cabinet members and staff people would—they hoped—be protected from all but a direct hit by a one-megaton nuclear warhead. Since news of the carefully constructed Basement had leaked to the public several years before, such underground shelters had started appearing all over the country, some dug into old mines and others into mountains. The “survivalist” business was booming as never before.

  “There’s a subject we need to talk about,” Hannan said. The president could see his own face, weary and hollow-eyed, reflected in the man’s glasses. “Talons.”

  “It’s not time for that yet.” His stomach had knotted. “Not nearly time.”

  “Yes. It is time. I think you’d be safer in the Airborne Command Center. One of the first targets would be the roof of the White House. I’m going to send Paula to the Basement, and, as you know, you have the authority to send whomever else you want there. But I’d like to join you in the Airborne Center, if I may.”

  “Yes. Of course. I want you with me.”

  “And,” Hannan continued, “there’ll be an Air Force officer aboard with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. Do you know your codes?”

  “I know them.” Those particular codes were among the first things he’d learned after taking office. An iron band of tension gripped the back of his neck. “But ... I won’t have to use them, will I, Hans?” he asked, almost pleadingly.

  “Most likely not. But if you do—if you do—I want you to remember that by then the America we love will be dead, and no invader has ever, or will ever, set foot on American earth.” He reached out and squeezed the president’s shoulder in a grandfatherly gesture. “Right?”

  “The point of no return,” the president said, his eyes glazed and distant.

  “What?”

  “We’re about to cross the point of no return. Maybe we already have. Maybe it’s way too late to turn back. God help us, Hans; we’re flying in the dark, and we don’t know where th
e hell we’re going.”

  “We’ll figure it out when we get there. We always have before.”

  “Hans?” The president’s voice was as soft as a child’s. “If ... if you were God ... would you destroy this world?”

  Hannan didn’t respond for a moment. Then, “I suppose ... I’d wait and watch. If I were God, I mean.”

  “Wait and watch for what?”

  “To find out who wins. The good guys or the bad guys.”

  “Is there a difference anymore?”

  Hannan paused. He started to answer, and then he realized he could not. “I’ll get the elevator,” he said, and he walked out of the Situations Room.

  The president unclasped his hands. The overhead lights sparkled on the cufflinks he always wore, embossed with the seal of the president of the United States.

  “I’m A-OK,” he said to himself. “All systems go.”

  Something broke inside him, and he almost cried. He wanted to go home, but home was a long, long way from this chair.

  “Sir?” Hannan called him.

  Moving as slowly and stiffly as an elderly man, the president stood up and went out to face the future.

  2

  11:19 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  NEW YORK CITY

  WHACK!

  She felt somebody kick the side of her cardboard box, and she stirred and hugged her canvas bag closer. She was tired and wanted to rest. A girl needs her beauty sleep, she thought, and she closed her eyes again.

  “I said get outta there!”

  Hands grabbed her ankles and hauled her roughly out of the box onto the pavement. As she came out she shouted in indignation and started kicking wildly. “You bastard sonofabitching bastard lemme alone you bastard!”

  “Shit, lookit that!” said one of the two figures standing above her, outlined in red neon from the sign of a Vietnamese takeout restaurant across West Thirty-sixth Street. “He’s a woman!”

  The other man, who’d grabbed her ankles above her dirty sneakers and hauled her out, growled in a darker, meaner voice, “Woman or not, I’m gonna stomp her ass.”

  She sat up, the canvas bag holding her worldly belongings clutched close to her chest. In the red wash of neon, her square-jawed, sturdy face was deeply lined and streaked with street grime. Her eyes, sunken in violet-tinged hollows, were a pale, watery blue and glinted with both fear and anger. On her head she wore a blue cap that she’d found the day before in a split-open garbage bag. Her outfit consisted of a dirty gray printed short-sleeved blouse and a baggy pair of brown men’s trousers with patched knees. She was a big-boned, fleshy woman, and her stomach and hips strained against the coarse material of her trousers; her clothes, as well as the canvas duffel bag she carried, had come from a kindly minister at the Salvation Army. Under the cap, her gray-streaked brown hair hung untidily around her shoulders, parts of it chopped off here and there where she’d taken scissors to it. Stuffed into her canvas bag was a melange of objects: a roll of fishing line, a tattered bright orange sweater, a pair of cowboy boots with both heels broken off, a dented mess tray, paper cups and plastic eating utensils, a year-old copy of Cosmopolitan, a length of chain, several packages of Juicy Fruit chewing gum and other items buried in the bag that even she’d forgotten were there. As the two men stared at her—one with menacing intent—she clutched the bag tighter. Her left eye and cheekbone were bruised and swollen, and her ribs hurt where she’d been pushed down a flight of stairs by another indigent woman at the Christian Shelter three days before. She’d picked herself off the floor, stalked up the stairs and knocked two teeth out of the woman’s head with a roundhouse right.

  “You’re in my box,” the dark-voiced man said. He was tall and skinny, wearing only a pair of blue jeans, his chest shining with sweat. His face was bearded, his eyes filled with shadow. The second man, shorter and heavier, wore a sweaty T-shirt and green Army surplus pants pocked with cigarette burns. He had oily dark hair, and he kept scratching his crotch. The first man prodded her in the side with the toe of his boot, and she winced at the pain to her ribs. “You deaf, bitch? I said you’re in my fuckin’ box!”

  The cardboard box in which she’d been sleeping lay on its side amid a sea of oozing garbage bags, a symptom of the garbage strike that had clogged Manhattan’s streets and gutters for over two weeks. In the suffocating heat of one-hundred-degree days and ninety-degree nights, the bags had swollen and exploded. Rats were having festival days, and mountains of garbage lay uncollected, blocking off traffic on some streets.

  She looked dazedly up at the two men, the contents of a half bottle of Red Dagger percolating in her stomach. Her last meal had been the remnants of chicken bones and the scrapings from a discarded TV dinner. “Huh?”

  “My box!” the bearded man shouted in her face. “This is my place! You crazy or somethin’?”

  “She don’t have no sense,” the other one said. “She’s crazy as hell.”

  “Ugly as hell, too. Hey, whatcha got in that bag? Lemme see!” He grabbed at it and yanked, but the woman emitted a loud howl and refused to give it up, her eyes wide and terrified. “You got some money in there? Somethin’ to drink? Give it here, bitch!” The man almost tore it from her arms, but she whimpered and hung on. Red light sparked off an ornament around her neck—a small, cheap crucifix attached to a necklace made of linked gemclips.

  “Hey!” the second man said. “Looky there! I know who she is! I seen her panhandlin’ on Forty-second Street. She thinks she’s a damned saint, always preachin’ to people. They call her Sister Creep.”

  “Yeah? Well, maybe we can pawn us that trinket, then.” He reached to tear the crucifix off her neck, but she turned her head away. The man grabbed the back of her neck, snarled and balled up his other hand to strike her.

  “Please!” she begged, about to sob. “Please don’t hurt me! I got somethin’ for you!” She started rummaging through the bag.

  “Get it out, and hurry! I oughta bust your head for sleepin’ in my box.” He let her head go, but he kept his fist poised and ready.

  She made little weak whimpering noises as she searched. “Somewhere in here,” she muttered. “Got it somewhere.”

  “Put it right here!” He thrust his palm at her. “And maybe I won’t kick your ass.”

  Her hand closed around what she was looking for. “Found it,” she said. “Sure did.”

  “Well, put it here!”

  “Okay,” the woman replied; the whimpering was gone, and her voice was as tough as sunbaked leather. With one blurred, smooth motion she withdrew a straight razor, flicked it open with a snap of her wrist and slashed it hard across the bearded man’s open hand.

  Blood jetted from the gash. The man’s face went white. He gripped his wrist; his mouth contorted into an O, and then the scream came out like the sound of a strangling cat. At once the woman was on her stocky legs, holding the canvas bag in front of her like a shield and swiping again at the two men, who tumbled back into each other, slipped on the garbage-slimed pavement and went down. The bearded man, blood streaming down his hand, came up holding a piece of wood studded with rusty nails; his eyes gleamed with rage. “I’ll show you!” he screamed. “I’ll show you right now!”

  He swung at her, but she ducked under the blow and slashed at him with the razor. He staggered back again and stood looking dumbly at the line of blood that leaked from his chest.

  Sister Creep didn’t pause; she turned and ran—almost slipping in a pool of ooze, but regaining her balance—with the shouts of the two men ringing out behind her. “Gonna get you!” the bearded one warned. “I’ll find you, bitch! You just wait!”

  She didn’t. She kept going, her sneakers slapping the pavement, until she came to a barrier of a thousand split-open garbage bags. She crawled over it, taking the time to pick up a few interesting items, like a broken salt shaker and a soggy copy of National Geographic, and stuff them into her bag. Then she was over the barrier, and she kept walking, the breath still rasping in her lu
ngs and her body trembling. That had been close, she thought. The demons almost got me! But glory be to Jesus, and when he arrives in his flying saucer from the planet Jupiter I’ll be there on the golden shore to kiss his hand!

  She stood on the corner of Thirty-eighth and Seventh Avenue, catching her breath and watching the traffic pass like a stampeding herd of cattle. The yellow haze of garbage fumes and automobile exhaust stirred like the stagnant matter atop a pond, and the wet heat pressed in on Sister Creep; beads of sweat broke and ran down her face. Her clothes were damp; she wished she had some deodorant, but the last of the Secret was gone. She looked around at the faces of strangers, daubed the color of wounds in the glare of pulsing neon. She didn’t know where she was going, and she hardly remembered where she’d been. But she knew she couldn’t stand on this corner all night; standing out in the open, she’d realized a long time ago, brought the demon X rays jabbing at your head, trying to scramble your brains. She began walking north, her head ducked and her shoulders hunched, in the direction of Central Park.

  Her nerves were jangling from her experience with the two heathen who’d tried to rob her. Sin was everywhere! she thought. In the ground, in the air, in the water—nothing but rank, black and evil sin! And it was in people’s faces, too, oh, yes! You could see the sin creeping over people’s faces, hooding their eyes and making their mouths go crooked. It was the world and the demons that were making innocent people crazy, she knew. Never before had the demons been so busy, or so greedy for innocent souls.

  She thought of the magic place, way over on Fifth Avenue, and her hard, worried frown softened. She often went there to look at the beautiful things in the windows; the delicate objects displayed there had the power to soothe her soul, and even though the guard at the door wouldn’t let her pass she was content to just stand outside and stare. She recalled a glass angel in the window once—a powerful figure: the angel’s long hair was swept back like holy, glittering fire, and her wings were about to unfold from a strong, sleek body. And in that angel’s beautiful face the eyes shone with multicolored, wonderful lights. Sister Creep had journeyed to look at that angel every day for a month, until they replaced it with a glass whale leaping from a stormy blue-green glass sea. Of course, there were other places with treasures along Fifth Avenue, and Sister knew their names—Saks, Fortunoff s, Cartier, Gucci, Tiffany—but she was drawn to the sculptures on display at the Steuben Glass shop, the magic place of soul-soothing dreams, where the silken sheen of polished glass under soft lights made her think how lovely Heaven was going to be.