by Fritz Galt
Then he felt someone else helping. It was Boris. Working together, they tore the wood away, revealing the back of Harry’s head. In front of him, through the frosted window, he made out a swaying, swerving landscape of muted white with the occasional shadow of a tree.
Harry was aiming his semi-automatic pistol straight down into the snow. Sean could see why. A tiger was trying to sink its teeth into the truck’s front left tire. Harry was screaming at another tiger that was bounding along on its wide, padded paws keeping pace with the truck.
They ground higher up the slope, at times sliding back a few feet before finding better traction elsewhere.
“Why are we going up there?” Sean shouted through the opening.
“Can’t you see them?” Harry yelled. He took his hand off the steering wheel for only a second to point directly ahead.
Sean had trouble focusing on the distance. The windshield was all but covered with ice and anything beyond that was a blur of motion.
Then he saw a small cluster of black shapes clawing their way up the hill.
“It’s your family!” Harry shouted.
Sean glued his eyes to them.
“Kate! Jane! Sammy!” he called frantically. “Climb into the truck!”
The personnel carrier was falling further behind his family, and the distraction of the pair of tigers gnawing on their tires kept Harry from concentrating fully on climbing the hill.
“Can’t you shoot the tigers?” Sean yelled.
“I’ve wounded mine,” Harry said, “But he won’t stop. He’s just getting angrier.”
Sean did recognize one advantage to Harry chasing his family up the hill. He was distracting the tigers, offering up the army truck as a more promising prey than the humans.
He scrambled backward in the rear compartment where Badger was trying to hold the flap shut. Tripping in the darkness and falling over several pairs of legs, he reached the canvas opening.
“What are you doing?” Badger shouted. “There’s a pack of tigers following us.”
Sean fought to wrest the canvas from his hands. He would throw himself into the snow. Let them gnaw him to death. Just spare his family.
With a grinding lurch, the vehicle sent him flying off his feet once more. He came down hard on the corrugated metal floor as it came up to meet him. He scrambled to his feet only to have them skid out from under him as the vehicle rapidly gained speed.
It took him a few seconds of cold metal bashing against the back of his head to realize that they were moving again. In fact the truck must have breeched the top of the hill and was heading straight down the other side.
He scrambled to his hands and knees and faced the rear of the truck where Badger had lost his grip on the canvas. In the intermittent light, he caught sight of his family as the personnel carrier whizzed past them.
Sean rose to his full height, his mouth agape.
Kate dashed through the deep snow, clutching her chest with one hand and clawing the air with the other. She ran at full tilt, with little Sammy clinging to the fabric of her sleeve. Then they passed his daughter Jane, who was running ahead of them. She always was a good runner.
He and the team were drawing too far ahead. They had to slow down!
Following closely in the snow kicked up by the rear wheels was a pack of a dozen tigers, streaking through the graying shadows after the vehicle.
“Hold on!” Harry cried through the opening to the cabin.
With both hands, Sean clutched the metal rim that held the canvas roof in place.
A moment later his fingers were ripped from the metal and he fell backward under a jolting thud, followed by the clatter of a crashing fence. The collision had thrown him away from the canvas opening, but he scrambled to grab the rear gate and steady himself.
First the front wheels flattened the perimeter fence. Then the back wheels smashed what was left of the chain link fence into the snow.
And the tigers kept running.
Sean pulled himself to his feet. His family slowed down, panting, to watch.
Harry was setting the tigers free!
The mass of orange and black and white fur and dark gums and gleaming fangs slowed as the beasts found themselves in unfamiliar territory.
Sean was aware of the situation long before the tigers were. “You’re free!” he shouted.
He threw his hands in the air to shoo them off.
“Run away. You’re free!”
The personnel carrier was limping on several blown tires, but the furry predators didn’t seem to care. Their attention had turned away from the chase and toward their new horizon. One by one, they scampered off across the snowy fields that opened up before them, a land of farms and forests, where there were no fences to imprison them.
Sean was the first to recognize that the personnel carrier’s forward motion had stopped. He scrambled over the rear gate, jumped out and landed on the flattened mesh that was embedded in the snow.
“It’s me!” he shouted. “It’s Daddy!”
He reached his family just as they stepped tentatively onto the broken fence. They looked at him without recognition.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s all over. Daddy has come to get you.”
Kate was leaning forward, coughing, and clutching a bundle within her coat. He grabbed her before she slumped to the snow. “Sean?” she asked, as if the name were coming back to her over a great distance.
“Yes, it’s me!”
Her model-like, half-moon eyes with their light green irises could use a touch of makeup, her skin was worn with worry, her cheeks gaunt and sallow and her hair had become streaked with gray. But her inner radiance seemed no worse for the wear. In fact, she seemed to have been invigorated by the romp in the snow. She was a survivor.
It was young Sammy who was in tears from the frightening events. He gasped for breath and tried to rein in his racing heart.
With Kate holding onto him, Sean raised Sammy into his arms and held him tight to his chest. The young lad was inconsolable.
“That’s okay,” Sean said. “You may cry all you want.”
He felt a tug from behind.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, honey,” he said, turning to kneel beside Jane.
“You aren’t wearing a coat.”
“You’re right! You’re absolutely right! I am not wearing a coat, and I should be, shouldn’t I?”
Kate let out an involuntary laugh.
“How silly of me not to be wearing a coat,” Sean said. “We’ll have to do something about that won’t we?”
Jane threw her arms around one of his legs, throwing him and Sammy slightly off balance. He had to lean against Kate for support.
Then a small whimper drifted out of the folds of her coat.
Kate smiled at him with a mischievous grin. “I think it’s time you met Sean, Junior,” she said.
“Huh?”
She peeled back her collar and unfastened the top button. A small, bald head emerged, then a pair of hazel eyes blinking in the cold air.
“We have a new baby!” she announced.
Before Sean could ask where Junior had come from, he knew the answer. He had last seen his family nine months before. Sean Junior was his child!
He leaned down to touch the tiny round head with his lips. “Hi, fella,” he said. “I’m your Daddy.”
There was another whimper, this one of pleasure.
He stood back and looked at Kate. What a woman.
In the distance, he glimpsed a cluster of people scampering through the snow, dodging across open fields.
“Who are they?” he asked.
Tears rolled down Kate’s cheeks. “That’s the North Koreans,” she said. “This man gave us all the keys to our freedom.”
He found himself looking into the eyes of the man called Badger McGlade.
No amount of words could express his thanks.
He grabbed Harry Black by the lapels and drew him forward. “And this man gav
e me the keys to my freedom.”
Kate stared at Harry, unable to comprehend the full story behind Sean’s harrowing journey to freedom.
“Shall we go home now?” Harry asked.
The term “home” seemed to have no particular meaning to Kate and the kids. Or to Sean, for that matter.
Two more pairs of tigers bounded past them into the open field, mere streaks of color in the gathering dusk.
“I think we can find somewhere to take you,” Harry said, a wisp of steam rising from his lips and disappearing into the vast Manchurian sky.
“We’re not far from Russia,” Boris piped up. “Anyone game for a ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway?”
Chapter 38
“Your Honor,” Stanley Polk said, standing firmly before Federal Judge Henry R. Smith’s desk. The two played golf every Wednesday during the summer, but that had no bearing on the formality with which he treated his judicial friend at the moment. The two were alone in the judge’s chambers, yet Stanley treated it as a meeting on the record. “I would like you to convene a Federal Grand Jury in the Chinagate case.”
“What sort of evidence do you have to present?” Smith asked in measured tones.
Even though a grand jury hearing did not assert a defendant’s guilt, it would look at all the evidence to be presented by the prosecution in order to determine if there were enough grounds to go to a full trial. Stanley believed that he had that evidence.
“Your Honor, I wish to present Sean Cooper’ testimony to the jury. This evidence will expose various crimes, all of which I am charging against the defendant.”
“Such as?”
“I will accuse the president of taking a bribe, tax evasion, violation of laws limiting sources of income by federal employees, conflict of interest, financing terrorists, attempting to conceal a crime, fraud, misuse of government resources, and several other counts.”
“Any other evidence?”
Stanley had to give him a sneak preview of whatever he wanted to see.
“Yes, a pathologist will assert that Cooper’ family did not die of SARS, rather the State Department gave him an urn full of canine remains.”
Judge Henry R. Smith rolled his eyes. “What witnesses do you wish to call?”
“I will move to subpoena various government employees, including the U.S. Trade Representative, the White House Chief of Staff and the Director of Central Intelligence. Owing to the probability that many of said witnesses may plead the Fifth Amendment so as not to incriminate themselves, I will need to call on the president himself.”
“Do you know that making the chief executive testify under oath in a court of law is unprecedented?”
“I am fully aware of that fact, your Honor. However, it does fall within your jurisdiction—”
“Thank you, counselor,” Judge Smith cut him off. “I know my authority.” He considered for a moment and then made a pronouncement. “Due to the immediate and grave importance of this matter to our nation, I will convene a hearing at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you, your Honor.”
On a snowy evening in Moscow, a bedraggled Sean and his family appeared at the front gate of the monolithic American Embassy on Novinskiy Boulevard.
He held his arms protectively around his family as he urged them up to the guard booth that stood between them and the twelve-story half-glass, half-concrete chancery.
“Are you sure they’ll let us in?” Kate asked, clutching their baby tighter. She was reluctant to move any closer to the forbidding window through which they could see nothing, only the reflection of their shivering, huddled family.
“Harry Black told me it would be okay,” Sean said. “I’ve trusted him so far and I’m not about to stop.”
“But don’t they want you, dear?” Kate whispered to him, her moist, jade-colored eyes revealing the full extent of her fear.
“I have stopped running,” Sean said bravely. “Besides, Sandi DiMartino said I would get my charges dropped if I testify in court.”
Kate looked beyond him, alarm registering further in her eyes.
“Come on, Daddy,” Jane urged. “I see the American flag.”
“Me, too,” Sammy said.
Sean looked around him. Strangers under umbrellas were closing in on him.
His wife gave one final plea. “But will the president accept you back?”
Sean shook his head slowly, words becoming stuck in his throat. He tried to take a decisive step forward toward the glass window, the Marines, the American Embassy, home.
But a hand held him back.
He turned around, and someone thrust a microphone in his face.
A television news correspondent posted to Moscow leaned into the heavy, driving snow. Wind howled against her microphone.
Sandi DiMartino stood nerve-wracked in Attorney General Caleb Perkins’s office suite overlooking an oddly quiet Pennsylvania Avenue.
“A family finally returning to the United States a year after the SARS epidemic had swept through China would seem to have undergone a particularly harrowing experience.”
The reporter paused to sweep snowflakes out of her hair.
“But just imagine that the American Government forced the family to remain there despite the enormous risk, confined to SARS wards and later a Chinese prison, all at the president’s behest, merely for political expediency.”
The woman set her script aside and spoke plainly to the camera.
“Is a president’s political survival so essential to national security that he should be allowed to negotiate privately with terrorists and suppress the rights of American citizens? Is the president not only above the law, but above humanity?”
“Hey,” Sandi said. “Isn’t that Rob Reiner in the background? Probably taking down notes for his next Hollywood blockbuster.”
Then, behind the reporter, a chant rose up from the throng of spectators. The words were in Russian, a foreign language to Sandi, but the impact was clear. It seemed to embolden the bespectacled Sean, who prodded his wife and children toward the American Embassy. They took a few steps closer to the locked gate, but were met by imposing coldness.
Sean leaned down to whisper to his family, or perhaps to shout in their ears as the cry from the crowd rose to a piercing level. Even veteran reporters set down their equipment to encourage the maverick American to step forward, for his homeland to take him back.
His small boy turned to look over his shoulder at the bank of cameras, a question mark written plainly across his face.
Then a tremendous roar rose from the assembled crowd. Sandi scoured the image to find out why. The cameraman was holding the camera high above his head, as the crowd buffeted him.
Snowflakes landed on the lens, but suddenly the cause for celebration became clear.
Slowly, as if the castle ogre had finally concluded his deliberations, the front gate of the Embassy began to swing open for Sean.
Walking hesitantly toward it, he tried to reassure his family with pats on the back. Then, as an afterthought, he turned and waved at all the people who had gathered to give him encouragement.
Finally, they disappeared from view on the Embassy grounds, and the gate gently swung back in place.
Epilogue
Sandi turned from the television with tears in her eyes. Caleb came up to her, offering his handkerchief.
“Thanks, Caleb,” she said. “You’re awfully nice.”
“Nice? Isn’t that a bit tame?” he asked. “I want to be gallant.”
She smiled hopelessly at him.
The television anchor began to introduce another story. “Now, in related news, a New Jersey butcher named Hiram Klug was named today as the new President of Purang, a tiny island nation in the Pacific. Congratulations President Klug—”
Sandi leaned against Caleb Perkins’ desk and was in the process of digesting that story when a blue seal with an American eagle flashed onto the television screen. It was the Presidential Seal. The news s
tation was cutting to the White House for further breaking news.
She watched with fascination as the image dissolved to that of President Bernard White slumped behind his desk in the Oval Office.
She gripped the hard edge of Caleb’s desk. She felt as if the entire world were tipped up on one edge and ready to fall in either direction.
The president looked up from the white index cards that he held and appeared to want to speak candidly into the camera. But, then, losing nerve, he returned to his speech and began to read.
“My fellow Americans, due to recent events, many of which were beyond my control, it has become readily apparent that those who wish to obstruct me have put up insurmountable roadblocks to my Presidency. So, as of twelve noon today, I will be stepping down as President of the United States.”
He paused, his head still bowed as if he had even more painful news to impart.
He cleared his throat and then looked directly up at the television camera. “And I also wish to take this moment to announce that by mutual consent, Loretta Blythe Crawford and I have agreed to dissolve our engagement.”
His own words seemed too hard to bear, and he remained staring at the camera, a painfully blank expression on his face.
Sandi caught a brief snatch of what sounded like Chuck Romer’s disappointed voice in the background saying, “Cut. That’s all.”
She turned to face the attorney general as the blue presidential emblem returned to the screen.
Caleb Perkins was standing on the tips of his toes right before the television set, a smile frozen on his face. How could such a moment of triumph feel so awful?
Then the intercom crackled as if a normal business day was in progress. It was Caleb’s secretary. “Mr. Perkins,” she announced. “William Ford from party headquarters is on the line.”
Caleb shot Sandi a significant look. It was a look of a man with great fortitude, of one who could weather the trials of high office. Then he picked up the phone firmly and decisively.
“Hello, William,” he said.
Sandi watched his expression as he listened attentively to his party’s kingmaker. Strangely, his features did not shed any light on the direction of the conversation. He merely listened, then thanked the party chief and hung up the phone.
