by Ben Bova
price.
WASHINGTON,
Year 1
"I wouldn't trust those Commie sumbitches if Jesus Christ himself came down from heaven and pleaded their case!"
"But that's the beauty of the system: we don't have to trust them. We don't have to give up anything unless they do."
The three men sat at one end of a long polished table in a conference room in the Old Executive Building, that rambling pile of Victorian stonework that stands next to the White House. The conference room had old-fashioned luxury built into it: high cofferwork ceiling, oak parquet floor, gracious long windows, the kind of spaciousness that modern office buildings are too efficient to afford.
Senator Zachary, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, chewed on his tongue for a moment, a habit he had acquired when his first heart attack ended his smoking.
Senator Foxworth, the committee's minority leader, silently wished Zachary would bite the damned tongue off and choke on it.
Aloysius B. Zachary was rake thin, his brittle-looking skin mottled with liver spots, his wispy white hair hanging long and dead down to the collar of his baggy suit. He had been much heavier before each of his heart attacks; lost weight after each one, only to gradually fatten up and have another attack. He was only a month out of the hospital after his latest. A waddling dewlap of grayish skin hung from his chin. For a dozen years now he had chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, wielding as much power over U.S. foreign policy as most Presidents did.
Foxworth knew that only death would remove this ignorant, arrogant, stubborn old fool from his powerful position. His Louisiana political machine would reelect him to the Senate for as long as he lived. As far as Foxworth was concerned, that had already been about one decade too long.
Jim Foxworth was known to be the best poker player on Capitol Hill. His face never betrayed him. He smiled always, especially when he was angry or fearful or making the final arrangements to drive the knife into an opponent's back.
He had the compact build of the health-food athlete: slightly bulging in the middle, but otherwise taut and fit.
Tennis and swimming. Horseback riding back home in Wyoming.
The third man in the conference room, seated between the two senators, wore the blue uniform and four stars of an Air Force general. A former fighter pilot, former astronaut, and the first black man to be appointed chief of staff, Charles Madison held degrees in engineering, management and communications. Of all the braid and decorations heaped upon him, though, he treasured most highly the two kills he had made against Nicaraguan MiGs during the Central American War.
"Lemme ask you, General," said Senator Zachary, his dewlap quivering with emotion, "d'y'all trust the Russkies to live up to this treaty they signed?"
"We signed it, too," Foxworth snapped.
"But we ain't ratified it. Senator!" Zachary leveled a forefinger at the younger man.
Foxworth turned to General Madison, smiling with his lips only.
"I don't trust the Russians, no, sir," said the general.
"And I certainly don't trust this international committee that's supposed to protect us against nuclear attack. I don't like the idea of turning our SDI satellites over to them. I don't like it one bit."
Zachary bobbed his head and sneered at Foxworth.
"Y'see?"
At that moment the corridor door opened and the ponderous figure of Harold Red Eagle filled the door frame. He wore a business suit of dark blue with a maroon tie knotted precisely.
"Forgive me, gentlemen," Red Eagle said in his deep, slow voice. It was like the rumble of distant thunder, or the suppressed growl of a restless volcano. "I was delayed at the Court. The computer was down for about an hour."
From the size of him, Foxworth thought, he may have broken the computer merely by laying his hamhock paws on it.
Red Eagle pulled a chair out and sat carefully on it, as if testing to see if it could hold his weight. Suddenly the head of the table was where he sat, and the three others turned to face him.
"I understand that you have grave doubts about the International Peacekeeping Force. I have come here to answer your questions, if I can, and relieve your fears."
"If you can," Zachary said.
Red Eagle turned his sad brown eyes to the senator from Louisiana. "If I can," he acknowledged. Zachary unconsciously edged back a little.
The gist of Red Eagle's argument was simple: The United States need give up none of its defenses. The Strategic Defense satellites were already_ under NATO control; by allowing the new International Peacekeeping Force to operate them, they lost very little and gained the entire fleet of Soviet SDI satellites, as well.
There would be no disarmament, no dismantling of nuclear weapons, no shrinkage of the armed services that was not matched by the Soviets—gun for gun, bomb for bomb, man for man.
"That still leaves the Russians with three times the conventional forces that we have," said General Madison.
"Yes, it does," admitted Red Eagle. "And three times the burden on their economy."
"If they decide to attack Western Europe . . ."
"The International Peacekeeping Force will stop them."
"That's not possible."
"General," said Red Eagle, gazing at the black man, "it is possible. It is even inevitable, if you serve the IPF with all the heart and intelligence that you now devote to the defense of the United States."
"Now, see here," Zachary fumed.
Red Eagle silenced him by raising one enormous hand.
"Gentlemen," he said, "the ways of peace are difficult and strange, especially to men accustomed to war. My people, the Comanche, were a nation of warriors. We drove the Apache into the desert. We defeated the U.S. Army more than once. Yet war ultimately destroyed us. Do not let war destroy your nation."
Foxworth cleared his throat. Otherwise the conference room was quiet.
Red Eagle went on, "The ancient Athenians in all their glory could not conceive of a political loyalty higher than that which they gave to their city. There was no concept of Greece in those days. There was only Athens, or Sparta, or Thebes, Corinth and other city-states, constantly at war with one another. That civilization perished. Today you men give your highest political loyalty to your nation. Yet I say to you that unless you have the greatness of soul to see a higher loyalty, a loyalty to planet Earth, to the human race in its greatness and entirety, this civilization will soon perish. And there will be none to follow. None! The human race will die."
The three men glanced uneasily at one another.
"A small war has utterly destroyed four of the ancient cities of the Middle East. Seventeen million men, women, and children perished in less than a week. What will the next war bring?"
Zachary, his voice trembling slightly, said, "Nobody wants another war."
"Then support the Peacekeepers who will make wars impossible."
"But how do we know it'll work?" General Madison asked.
"You must make it work."
The general shook his head.
"I understand. There are many, many unknowns. We are striking out into uncharted territory. There is much to fear." Then Red Eagle added, "Including the fact that the pressure to drastically reduce the defense budget will become enormous."
For once in his life, Foxworth let his self-control slip. He threw his head back and guflfawed.
General Madison made a sour face, let out a pained sigh and loosened the tie of his blue uniform.
I should point out several things at this
point. (Two uses of the same word too close
together, I know. Necessary, though.)
First, these events led—rather indirectly,
I admit—to the cataclysm at Valledupar.
Second, we in IPF intelligence were getting
faint but constant hints that a cabal was
being formed among some of the line
officers. Our warnings to the political
appointee
who headed the Force went
unheeded, alas. Third, the nations of the
world had not the slightest intention of
giving up war as a means to achieve their
goals. Not the slightest.
OTTAWA,"
Year 2
SHE was a tiny figure, skating alone in the darkness. Dow's Lake was firmly frozen this late in December.
Earlier in the evening the ice had been covered with skaters in their holiday finery, the pavilion crammed with couples dancing to the heavy beat of rock music.
But this close to midnight, Kelly skated alone, bundled against the cold with a thickly quilted jacket that made her look almost like one of those ragamuffin toy dolls the stores were selling that year.
The wind keened through the empty night. The only light on the ice came from the nearly full Moon grinning lopsidedly at Kelly as she spun and spiraled in time to the music in her head.
Swan Lake was playing in her stereo earplugs, the same music she had skated to when she failed to make the Olympic team. The music's dark passion, its sense of foreboding, fitted Kelly's mood exactly. She skated alone, without audience, without judges. Without anyone. Her mother had died six months ago, leaving her alone except for a father who had not even bothered to give her his name.
I don't care, she told herself. It's better alone. I don't need any of them.
She was just starting a double axel when the beep from the communicator interrupted the music, startling her so badly that she faltered and went sprawling on her backside.
Sitting spraddle-legged on the ice, Kelly thumbed the communicator at her belt and heard:
"Angel Star, this is Robbie. We've got a crisis. All hands to their stations. Reply at once."
Kelly hated the nickname. Her mother had christened her Stella Angela, but she had grown up to be a feisty, snub-nosed, freckled little redhead, more the neighborhood's tomboy roughneck than an angelic little star. At ten she could beat up any boy in school; at thirteen she had earned a karate black belt. But she could not gain a place on the national skating team. And she could not make friends.
She was stubby, quick with her reflexes and her wits. Her figure was nonexistent, a nearly straight drop from her shoulders to her hips.
And she could not make friends, even after three months of being stationed here in Ottawa.
Picking herself up from the ice, Kelly pulled off her right mitten and yanked the pinhead mike from the communicator, its hair-thin wire whirring faintly.
"Okay, Robert, I'm on my way. Seems like a damned odd night for a crisis, if you ask me."
Robbie's voice was dead serious. "We don't make 'em. we just stop 'em from blowing up. Get your little butt down here, sweetie, double quick."
Kelly skated to the dark and empty pavilion, grumbling to herself all the way. My twenty-second birthday tomorrow, she groused silently. Think they know? Think they care? But underneath the cynical veneer she hoped desperately that they did know and did care. Especially Robert.
The base was less than a mile from the pavilion, a clump of low buildings on the site of the old experimental farm.
Kelly rode her electric bike along the bumpy road, man-tall banks of snow on either side, the towers of Ottawa glistening and winking in the distance, brilliant with their holiday decorations.
Past the wire fence of the perimeter and directly into the big open doors of the main entrance she rode, paying scant attention to the motto engraved above it. Locking the bike in the rack just inside the entrance, she nodded hello to the two guards lounging by the electric heater inside their booth, perfunctorily waved her identification badge at them, then clumped in her winter boots down the ramp toward the underground monitoring center.
If there's a friggin' crisis, she thought, the dumb guards sure don't show it.
In the locker room Kelly stripped off her bulging coat and the boots. She wore the sky-blue uniform of the Peacekeepers beneath it. The silver bars on her shoulders proclaimed her to be a junior lieutenant. A silver stylized T, shaped like an extended, almost mechanical hand, was clipped to her high collar; it identified her as a teleoperator.
Helluva night to make me come in to work, she complained to herself as she changed into her blue-gray duty fatigues. There are plenty of others who could fill in this shift. Why do they always pick on me? And why can't they make this damned cave warm enough to work in?
But then two more operators clumped in, silent and grim-faced. The men nodded to Kelly; she nodded back.
Shivering slightly against the damp chill, Kelly briefly debated bringing her coat with her into the monitoring center, then decided against it. As she pushed the door to the hall open, another three people in fatigues were hurrying past, down the cold concrete corridor toward the center: two women and a man. One of the women was still zipping her cuffs as she rushed by.
Robbie was outwardly cheerful: a six-three Adonis with a smile that could melt tungsten steel. His uniforms, even his fatigues, fitted him like a second skin. He wore the four-pointed star of a captain on his shoulders.
"Sorry to roust you, tonight of all nights," he said, treating her to his smile. "We've got a bit of a mess shaping up. Angel Star."
If anyone else called her anything but her last name, Kelly bristled. But she let handsome Robert get away with his pet name for her.
"What's going on?" she asked.
She saw that all ten monitoring consoles were occupied and working, ten men and women sitting in deeply padded chairs, headsets clamped over their ears, eyes riveted to the banks of display screens curving around them, fingers playing ceaselessly over the keyboards in front of them.
Tension sizzled in the air. The room felt hot and crowded, sweaty. Images from the display screens provided the only light, flickering like flames from a fireplace, throwing nervous, jittering shadows against the bare concrete walls.
Several of the pilots were lounging in the chairs off to one side, trying to look relaxed even though they knew they might be called to action at any moment. Robert was in charge of this shift, sitting in the communicator's high chair above and behind the monitors. Standing her tallest, Kelly was virtually at eye level with him.
"What isn't going on?" Robbie replied. "You'd think tonight of all nights everybody'd be at home with their families."
He waved a hand toward the screens as the displays on them blinked back and forth, showing scenes from dozens of locations around the world.
"Got a family of mountain climbers trapped on Mt.Burgess up in the Yukon Territory. Satellite picked up their emergency signal." Kelly saw an infrared image of rugged mountainous country over the shoulder of Jan Van der Meer, one of the few monitors she knew by name.
"And some loony terrorists" Robbie went on, pointing to another console down the line, "tried to hijack one of the nuclear submarines being decommissioned by the U.S.Navy in Connecticut."
Kelly saw the submarine tied to a pier from a groundlevel view. Military police in polished steel helmets were leading a ragged gaggle of men and women, their faces smeared with camouflage paint, up the gangway and into a w^ting police van.
"But the crisis is Eritrea," said Robert.
"Not again," Kelly grumbled. "They've been farting around there for more than a year."
Nodding tightly, Robert touched a button in the armrest of his high chair and pulled the pin mike of his headset down before his lips. "Jan, pick up the Eritrea situation, please."
Van der Meer, a languid, laconic Dutchman whose uniform always seemed too big for him, looked over his shoulder almost shyly and nodded. With his deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks and bony face, he looked like a death's head beckoning. He tapped his keypad with a long slim finger, and his display screens showed ghostly images in infrared, taken from a reconnaissance satellite gliding in orbit over East Africa.
It took Kelly a moment to identify the vague shapes and shadows. Tanks. And behind them, self-propelled artillery pieces. Threading their way in predawn darkness throug
h the mountains along the border of Eritrea.
"They're really going to attack?" Kelly asked, her voice suddenly high and squeaky, like a frightened little girl's.
"If we let them," answered Robbie, quite serious now.
"But they must know we'll throw everything we have at them!"
Robert arched his brows, making his smooth young forehead wrinkle slightly. "I guess they think they can get away with it. Maybe they think we won't be able to react fast enough, or their friends in the African Bloc will prevent Geneva from acting at all. We've never had to stop a real shooting war; not yet."
"Maybe they're bluffing," Kelly heard her voice saying.
"Maybe they'll back down . . ."
"Priority One from Geneva!" called Bailey, the black woman working station three. She was an American, from Los Angeles, tall and leggy and graceful enough to make Kelly ache with jealousy over her good looks and smooth cocoa-butter skin. She had almond-shaped eyes, too, dark and exotic. Kelly's eyes were plain dumb brown.
Robert clamped a hand to his earphone. His eyes narrowed, then shifted to lock onto Kelly's.
Nodding and whispering a response, he pushed the mike up and away, then said, "This is it, kid. Everybody up!"
Kelly felt a surge of electricity bum through her: part fear, part excitement. The other pilots stirred, too.
"I'm on my way," she said.
But Robert had already shifted his mike down again and was calling through the station's intercom, "Pilots, man your planes. All pilots, man your planes."
As Kelly dashed through the monitoring center's doors and out into the long central corridor, she thought she heard Robbie wishing her good luck. But she wasn't certain.
Doesn't matter, she told herself, knowing it was a lie.
The technicians backed away as Kelly slid into the cockpit and cast a swift professional glance at the instruments. On the screen in front of her she saw the little plane's snub nose, painted dead black, glinting in the predawn starlight.
She clamped her comm set over her chopped-short red hair and listened to her mission briefing. There was no preflight checkout; the technicians did that and punched it into the flight computer. She swung the opaque canopy down and locked it shut, then took off into the darkness, getting her mission profile briefing from Geneva as she flew.
