by Ben Bova
The waiting room to hell, Cole Alexander thought.
Amanda Alexander was small, a slim little girl with a sweet smile who had grown to a petite white-haired woman who could always charm any man she met. Seeing her in that crowded basement shelter, with the stench of hundreds of bodies pressed too close together. Cole realized with a shock that his mother was old: her face was webbed with tiny wrinkles, there were dark lines under her eyes, she seemed haggard and worn-out.
"Don't look so shocked," she said after he had kissed her cheek. "You haven't seen me without makeup for years."
Then she smiled and he felt all right again.
"I've come to take you and Dad out of here," Cole said.
"That's not necessary. I'm fine right here."
"I've got a jet sitting at the airport . . ."
His mother seemed genuinely surprised. "How did you do that?"
He shrugged. "Sold the business to Palmerson; he's been after it for a year now. Spent a chunk of it on the plane. Couldn't find a pilot on such short notice so I flew it myself. Now, come on, before somebody steals it."
"Your father's not here," she said. "They sent him to Tel Aviv."
"Goddamned State Department," Cole muttered.
"Okay. We'll fly to Tel Aviv and pick him up there. Phone him from here first."
"He can't just go, " his mother said, "simply because his impetuous son wants him to. He's got a job to do. He's got responsibilities."
"They're throwing nuclear bombs around. Mom! You and Dad have got to get out of here, to where it's safe!"
"They won't bomb Jerusalem. General Shamar has given his word. The Moslems revere the city just as much as the Israelis do."
Alexander forced down his temper. This was his mother he was dealing with. "Mom, they've already nuked Haifa and Damascus. The fallout ..."
"I'm not leaving. Cole. Your father can't leave, and I won't go without him."
That was when the black Marine sergeant picked his way through the overcrowded basement toward them.
"Mrs. Alexander," he said, so softly that Cole could barely hear him against the background murmurs. " 'Fraid I got very bad news, ma'am. We just got word, Tel Aviv got hit."
Amanda Alexander stared at the sergeant as if she could not understand his words.
"A nuclear strike?" Cole asked, his voice choking.
"Yeah." The sergeant nodded.
"Oh, my Christ."
His mother reached out and touched the Marine sergeant's arm. "That . . . that doesn't mean that everyone . . . everyone in the city's been . . . killed, does it?"
"No," the black man admitted. "We don't know how bad the damage is or how many casualties. Bound to be plenty, though. Thousands. Tens of thousands, at least."
Cole grasped his mother's wrist. "We're getting out. Now."
"No!" She pulled her arm free with surprising strength.
"Your father may be all right. Or he may be hurt. I'm not leaving. Not until I know."
"But that's . . ."
"I'm not leaving. Cole."
So he stayed with her in the basement of the U.S. embassy building in Jerusalem.
It had started as another round of the eternal Middle East wars between Israel and its neighbors. In three days it escalated into a nuclear exchange. By the time four ancient cities had been blown into mushroom clouds, the two great superpowers decided to intervene. For the first time in more than fifty years, the Soviet Union and the United States acted in harmony to end the brief, brutal conflagration that is now called the Final War.
The Americans and Soviets imposed a cease-fire and ringed Syria, Israel and Lebanon with enough troops, ships and planes to make it clear they would brook no resistance.
The U.S. Navy moved in force into the Persian Gulf while Russian divisions massed on Iran's northern border. With Damascus and Tehran both reduced to radioactive rubble, with Haifa and Tel Aviv similarly demolished, the fighting stopped.
That was when General Jabal Shamar, supreme commander of the Pan-Arab Armed Forces, sent a special squadron of cargo planes to Jerusalem. The lumbering four-engined aircraft circled over the city at an altitude of some three thousand meters, cruising lazily through a sky just starting to turn blue again after three days of darkness.
Men and women cautiously came out into the streets, blinking at the brightening sky and the glinting silvery planes circling gently above. They were obviously not warplanes, not the sleek angry falcons painted in camouflage grays and browns that hurled deadly eggs at the ground. These were fat clumsy cargo carriers, their unpainted aluminum gleaming cheerfully against the clearing sky.
The powder that the planes spewed from their cargo hatches was so radioactive that every crewman in the squadron died within two weeks. So did most of the living creatures in Jerusalem: men, women, children, pets, rats, insects, even trees curled their brown leaves and died.
Moslem and Jew alike bled at the pores and died in convulsive agonies. Citizens of the city, refugees who had fled there for safety, tourists trapped by the war, news reporters camping in the hotels, foreigners on duty in Jerusalem—they all died. Two and a half million of them.
After the cease-fire had been declared.
The medical help rushed into the city by the Americans and Europeans saved a pitiful few. Cole Alexander was among those who survived. He was young enough and strong enough to pull through a terrible ordeal of radiation sickness, although it left his hair dead white and triggered a form of leukemia that the doctors said could be "controlled" but never cured. It also left him sterile.
His mother did not survive. Cole watched her die, inch by excruciating inch, over the next seven weeks. She finally gave up the fight when the news came that her husband.
Cole's father, had been vaporized in the nuclear bombing of Tel Aviv. The American consulate there had been practically at ground zero.
The Final War led to the Athens Peace
Conference, and that's where I suppose I'll
have to begin the official history of the
Peacekeepers. With the impressive figure of
Harold Red Eagle, of course.
ATHENS
Year 1
HE was a very large man, very grave, and so respected in his own land that not even the ultraconservatives ever had the nerve to make jokes about his name.
Harold Red Eagle was considerably over two meters tall.
In his young manhood, when he had made a national reputation for himself as a lineman for the Los Angeles Raiders, he had weighed nearly 130 kilos. Even so, he could chase down the fleetest of running backs. And once Red Eagle got his hands on a ball carrier, the man went down. No one broke his tackles.
The Raiders had been known to be a hell-raising team of undisciplined egotists. Red Eagle changed that. He spoke barely a word, and he certainly gave no speeches. He neither exhorted his teammates to self-sacrifice nor berated them for their macho antics. He merely set an example, off the field and especially on it, that no man could ignore or resist. He made the Raiders not only into champions, but hallowed heroes.
Football was merely a means to an end for Harold Red Eagle. For an impoverished son of the proud Comanche people, college football was the key to an education.
Professional football paid for law school and provided the glory that established him in a lucrative practice in his native Oklahoma.
When he retired from his athletic career, the governor of the state appointed him to the bench. (A rather neat pun there, don't you think?) A few years later he became the youngest federal judge ever to serve that district. A canny President nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and during the Senate confirmation hearings not a word was spoken against this Amerind, whose massive dignity could strike even TV talk-show hosts into reverent awe.
Harold Red Eagle was appointed by the next President (a political opponent of the previous one) to be part of the American delegation to the Athens Peace Conference. It was there that the first step toward the Interna
tional Peacekeeping Force was made.
The moment was dramatic. Representatives of Israel, Syria and Iran all demanded reparations for the damage to their nations. Other Moslem figures warned of the need to find a homeland for the Palestinian refugees. The Western Europeans and Americans, terrified of renewed nuclear war, demanded that the belligerent nations be disarmed and occupied for an indeterminate time by an international army that would enforce the peace. The Soviets and Chinese jointly suggested the conference be enlarged to consider dismantling every nation's nuclear arsenal.
Instead of patching together a peace in the Middle East, the Athens conference was threatening to tear itself asunder over the old Cold War issues separating East and West.
That was when Red Eagle rose to his feet.
All talk around the wide green-baize-covered circular table ceased. The Comanche loomed over the other delegates, his deep brown face solemn with the racial memories of innumerable wars and slaughters.
"It is time," he said slowly, "that we end this Cold War. Nothing of peace can be accomplished until we do."
It was as if he had trained a powerful gun on them all.
The delegates—politicians and diplomats, for the most part—sat in silent awe as Red Eagle calmly enunciated the plan that he had been shaping in his mind over the many weeks of the conference's fruitless wrangling.
His plan was simple and breathtakingly daring. East and West were at that time both deploying heavily armed satellites in space, each claiming them to be purely defensive in nature. Let a true international peacekeeping force be created, said Red Eagle, to operate both systems of satellites as one and protect every nation on Earth against attack by any nation.
Further, let this peacekeeping force be empowered to act immediately against any kind of aggression across any international frontier. Give it the weapons and authority to stop wars as soon as they are started.
Impossible! countered the delegates. But over the next several weeks they listened to Red Eagle and a growing host of technical and military experts. Yes, it would be possible to observe military buildups from surveillance satellites in orbit. Yes, defensive technologies could produce highly automated systems that are cheaper and more effective than massive offensive weaponry.
But who would control such an international force? the delegates asked. How could it be prevented from turning into a world dictatorship?
"The problem is war," Red Eagle told them. "Create a peacekeeping force that will prevent war. No nation need disarm, if it does not care to do so. Whatever goes on within a nation's borders will be of no concern to the peacekeepers. The peacekeepers will acquire no nuclear weapons, no weapons of mass destruction of any kind. Their sole function will be to prevent attacks—nuclear or conventional—across international borders."
The force of Red Eagle's personality greatly multiplied the sheer power of his ideas. Slowly, grudgingly, the conference delegates came to accept the notion that an international peacekeeping force could be created. It might even work.
They offered command of the force to Red Eagle, of course. Just as naturally, he politely refused. (The man they did give the command to, unfortunately, was a political compromise, a nonentity who ignored the warning signs and was caught desperately unprepared for the revolt that nearly shattered the IPF. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)
After several months of deliberations the Athens Peace Conference concluded with the signing of the Middle East Treaty. More important, a week later the nations met on the Acropolis, before the ancient splendor of the Parthenon, to sign the document that created the International Peacekeeping Force.
The conference ended on a public note of optimism and private snickers of cynicism. Perhaps this was the way to save the world from nuclear holocaust, the delegates told each other. But none of them truly believed it. It was a gesture, at best. No one expected peace to last in the Middle East. No one expected the newly created IPF to finally end the scourge of war.
But they had tried to take a step in the proper direction.
Even the hard-boiled media reporters seemed impressed.
Hardly any of them offered a word of criticism or mentioned the fact that General Jabal Shamar, the man responsible for the Jerusalem Genocide, had not yet been apprehended.
I joined the IPF the first day of its
existence, I'm proud to say. At first, they
put me in an intelligence billet. That
experience will serve me well now that I'm
an archivist; I have had access to electronic
intercepts and other forms of snooping that
would have made J. Edgar Hoover tremble
with joy. Most of these snippets can't be
used in the official history of the IPF, where
every source must have its own footnote.
But I can use them here. Happily.
MOSCOW
Year 1
THE General Secretary eased his tired body into the gleaming stainless-steel tub. His valet made certain that the old man was safely settled in the steaming water, then touched the button that started the whirlpool action.
The General Secretary leaned back and sighed. It had been a long, difficult meeting. He saw that his valet was sweating heavily, rivers running down his face, dark stains growing on his shirtfront.
"You can remove your shirt, Yuri," he said, over the throbbing and gurgling of the agitated water. "It's all right."
"Thank you, sir," replied Yuri. But he made no move to disrobe.
Always the proprietaries, thought the General Secretary. If I asked Yuri to dash out into the snow and into the path of an oncoming tank he would do it without hesitation. But he will never willingly bare his chest in my presence.
The steaming hot water bubbled and frothed, relaxing the tensed muscles of the General Secretary's back and legs. I'm getting old, he thought. The Kremlin ages a man.
The responsibilities . . .
He leaned his head back against the soft padding and smiled up at his valet. Yuri looks ten years younger than I.
Still has his hair, and it's still as dark as it was twenty years ago. No responsibilities. No worries.
"Yuri, my old friend, what do you think of this International Peacekeeping Force?"
"You signed the treaty in Athens." The valet had to raise his voice to be heard over the whirlpool.
"Yes. It was quite a moment, wasn't it? The Parthenon is one of the most beautiful buildings in the world."
"Too delicate for me. I prefer something more solid, like St. Basil's . . ."
"I don't intend to argue architecture with you! What do you think of this Peacekeeping Force?"
"My son wants to join it."
The General Secretary felt his brows rise. "Little Gregor?"
"He is almost twenty-five, sir," said Yuri with some gentleness. "A lieutenant in the Guards."
Twenty-five, thought the General Secretary. The length of time of a generation.
"Will it be possible for him to join the international force?" asked Yuri. "It won't be a mark against him on his record, will it?"
"Of course not," the General Secretary replied almost absently. "We want loyal Russians in the IPF. It is necessary."
"And we will disband the Red Army?"
The General Secretary felt astonished. "Whatever gave you that idea?"
"From what people say . . . there are so many rumors, and no two of them are the same."
"We have agreed to reduce the size of our armed forces—slowly, according to a fixed timetable. We will also dismantle our nuclear weapons; again, in keeping with a strict schedule. The Americans and Chinese and all the others will do the same. There will be teams of international inspectors."
"Spies," muttered Yuri.
"Our own people will be on the inspection teams," replied the General Secretary. "Our own people will watch the imperialists dismantle their bombs."
"Do you trust them?"
With a slow smile, "Yes, of cours
e. As much as they trust us."
Yuri laughed.
But the General Secretary grew serious again. "My old friend, there have been many changes in the Soviet Union since I dandled your Gregor on my knee."
"Many changes," Yuri agreed.
"We have lived through turbulent times."
"You have been a great leader, sir. The Soviet Union—the Russian people—are richer and stronger because of you."
Accustomed to flattery, the General Secretary asked, "But are they happier?"
"Yes!" Yuri's answer was so swift and certain that the General Secretary knew his valet believed it to be the truth.
He slid down lower in the bubbling water until it was up to his chin. He could feel the knots in his neck and shoulders easing.
Yuri stood by the tub, silent, stoic, as enduring as the endless steppes and the birch forests. Finally he asked "Once we have taken apart all our hydrogen bombs, what will we do with the pieces?"
The General Secretary smiled lazily. "Why, put them back together again, of course. You don't think that I would leave the nation defenseless, do you?"
I admit to some embellishments in the
preceding account, although each word
attributed to the two Russians comes
straight out of the Security Agency's
transcripts. I can't use such dramatic
devices in the official history; it's got to be
dry, factual, and nonthreatening. Twenty
committees will sit in judgment before it
will ever see the light of publication. I
shudder to think that my name might be on
it.
What follows is another (slightly
embellished) transcript, this one from a
videotape. As I said, being in IPF
intelligence was a good experience for me,
although, at the time, I fought and argued
and fumed through the system until they
transferred me to an active unit. Which is
how I lost my hand, of course. Young men
want glory. They never think about the
