by Cindy Dees
Carter looked back at her sharply. His face froze in shock for a moment, and then he broke into a big grin.
“By the way, how’d you manage to keep going without tensing up when those Russians were chasing you?” she asked him, disgruntled.
“I had a seizure,” he admitted low. “I just thawed faster than I used to. I was lucky. I’d gotten enough of a head start on them that by then they were already off following my false trail.”
Lucky, indeed. He started crawling again all too soon. She told herself it was for a good cause. Saving the world was more important than her pain. But that didn’t make it hurt one bit less. This being a hero stuff was for the birds. Carter could have it.
Several eternities later, Carter stopped and she looked up wearily to spy a ditch yawning before him. They’d made it. The road. Now to convince someone to stop and pick them up.
They must have lain there for ten minutes before she heard the sound of a vehicle coming along. But it wasn’t an automobile. It was louder. Punctuated by a steady pop-pop-popping sound. Carter grinned beside her. He must recognize whatever it was.
A big, old, rusty tractor chugged into sight. It was pulling a huge set of plows, folded up at the moment behind the tractor.
Carter jumped up and waved his arms at the farmer and the man stopped the tractor. She joined Carter when he gestured.
“We could use a ride, mister,” Carter yelled. He pulled out his military ID. “I’m in the army and we’re in trouble.”
“You got something to do with all those cops flying up and down the highway a while back?” the white-haired man challenged.
“We’re running from the bad guys all those folks are chasing. On my word of honor, sir, we’re the good guys. And we desperately need your help.”
“Climb up.”
Lily blinked as Carter slid between the giant tire and the diesel engine and nimbly jumped up on what looked like the tire’s axle housing. He held a hand down to her, grinning. Hesitantly, she took it and he hoisted her up beside him and shouted over the din of the engine, “I’m Carter, and this is my girl, Lily.”
“Pleased to meet you, miss,” the farmer shouted.
They putt-putted down the road for maybe a quarter mile. The tractor slowed and the farmer shouted, “Let me just drop off this plow and then I’ll take you up to the house and we’ll sort out your troubles.”
Carter jumped down to help the guy unhitch the plow. Apparently, he had some experience around farm equipment because he seemed to know what he was doing. In a few moments, they took off across the field, away from the road. Carter must have suggested the guy go cross-country to get home. Good idea. Less exposure to possible Russian death squads.
The farmer’s house was a modest, one-story affair, a tidy little cottage tucked under a grove of big, old sycamore trees. The man’s wife came out on the porch to stare at them as they walked up to the house from the big red barn.
The woman welcomed them inside and poured them tall glasses of made-from-scratch lemonade and insisted on serving them slices of the strawberry pie she’d made for supper. Carter stepped outside to update H.O.T. Watch Ops and request a vehicle out here to pick them up and take them to Camp David.
“Handsome young man,” the farmer’s wife commented to Lily. “Looks like good people,” she added sagely.
Lily smiled. “He is a fine man.”
“He seems to like you well enough. Never takes his eyes off you when you’re not looking.”
Lily smiled, her insides all tingly at the thought of Carter being fascinated by her.
“Sure as I’m sitting here that young feller’s smitten with you.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Lily murmured.
“Oh, so you like him back, do you?” The woman laughed. “Well, good luck with him. He looks the type to lead the ladies on a merry chase.”
Lily laughed, too. “Believe me. He’s led me on the merriest of chases. You have no idea.”
Carter stepped back inside. “They’ll have someone here in a little while. I hate to impose on your hospitality any longer than we have to, but it’ll give me an excuse to have another slice of that amazing pie of yours, ma’am.”
Lily smiled at how his Southern accent got so much more pronounced when he was flirting like that. The farmer’s wife simpered and fluttered and ate up every bit of it, which only encouraged Carter to lay on the charm even thicker. Before they got out of here, the woman was going to have emptied her entire refrigerator onto his plate.
The couple really was lovely, and she enjoyed sitting in their neat little living room listening to their easy banter with Carter. This was the stuff everyday life was made of. People going about their daily routines, making a living, creating a home and growing old together. Sharing a meal with a stranger out of the goodness of their hearts. What she wouldn’t give to have this with Carter. But as it was, she didn’t even know if any of them would be alive at this time tomorrow.
It took about two hours, but when their ride came, it really came. A half-dozen big, black SUVs similar to the one that had crashed so disastrously earlier, pulled into the open barnyard.
“Who’d you say you were, boy?” the farmer exclaimed. “It looks like the whole FBI came to get you!”
“Actually, they’re Secret Service,” Carter replied, grinning. “Thanks for everything. And I’ll have my mother send you that recipe for rhubarb pie right away.”
And as quickly as their unexpectedly pleasant interlude had begun, it ended. She and Carter were stuffed into one of the vehicles, and the whole cavalcade pulled out without further ado. The SUVs drove fast, changing positions every few minutes. Sometimes they were first in line, sometimes last, sometimes in the middle. The men in the car with them made no secret of having their weapons drawn and scanned the road and sky constantly with binoculars. It was nerve-wracking stuff to realize someone might want them dead badly enough to tangle with this bunch.
She glanced over at Carter. He seemed relaxed enough. “No symptoms?” she asked quietly.
“Nope. That last piece of strawberry pie did the trick.”
She made a face at him. This was no time for joking around. But he seemed as cool as a cucumber. Finally, she asked under her breath, “Shouldn’t you be at least a little nervous?”
“I’m definitely nervous, but it takes a lot more than it used to for me to lock up. And besides, have you seen how these guys are armed?”
Despite his calm, she was tense for the nearly two-hour ride. Finally, the convoy slowed and turned onto a narrow road. In a few minutes, it turned onto an even narrower and, this time, dirt road.
“Looks like we’re coming in the back door,” Carter commented to her.
“The back door to what?”
“Camp David, of course.”
She looked up sharply. All she saw were trees and more trees. And then, without warning, the road turned and a Fort Knox-like fence loomed in front of them. Even in the company of the Secret Service itself, it still took them a while to get through all the security checks at the gate.
“Time?” Carter murmured to her.
She didn’t have to ask him what he meant. “Fourteen hours.”
He winced. “We could be cutting it close.”
“Why? That’s plenty of time to convince someone here to call someone there and shut down their machine.”
He said quietly, “Systems like that don’t just shut down. I’m sure there will be an elaborate protocol they’ll have to go through to convince the machine that it’s receiving a legitimate order to shut itself off. It’ll have layer after layer of encryption and fail-safes designed to keep everyone but a very few authorized people from pulling the plug.”
She gasped in dismay. “How long could that take?”
He shrugged. “Anywhere from a few minutes to hours. Worst case, we’ve got to assume it’ll take the Russians several hours. For that matter, the Russian prime minister won’t be able to just pick up the phone and
give an order like that. He’ll no doubt have to go through some sort of procedure to verify his orders with his subordinates.”
“Good grief,” she exclaimed. Were they already too late?
Chapter 12
Time seemed to alternately fly at double or triple speed, and then slow down to a maddening crawl as she waited impatiently for Carter to talk his way through the various layers of security surrounding the president and his cabinet. Apparently, someone named General Wittenauer had made some phone calls and greased the skids, but there were still protocols to be followed before anyone spoke to the president.
Lily still couldn’t quite believe she was going to brief the president. In person. And she’d thought giving the oral defense of her dissertation had been nerve-wracking!
Someone, a younger man in a dark suit, explained it to her and Carter. “You’ll brief the chief of staff first. He’ll prep you with any questions he has and you’ll want to incorporate whatever information he asks for into your final briefing. Assuming he sees no serious problems with the material, you’ll then brief the president. Be concise. Get to the point. Don’t waste his time.”
Lily nodded numbly and clung to Carter’s hand tightly. She could do this. She’d endured being buried alive. How bad could it be to talk to a man who was reported to be imminently reasonable and intelligent? The president was just another American citizen. Right? Just a really, really powerful and important one.
Carter briefed the chief of staff about the intelligence that led H.O.T. Watch to believe a doomsday device, indeed, existed. Most of that information she’d never heard before. It was convincing to say the least. Then she was up to bat. She stumbled and stammered, but the chief of staff seemed so appalled by their presentation that he barely asked any questions. He merely nodded when the aide asked if they were cleared to present their briefing.
The aide replied, “The president is just finishing up supper. Can you wait a half hour?”
Lily surprised herself by answering firmly, “No, we can’t. We’ve jumped through all of your hoops and been as cooperative as we can be. But no. We need to speak to the president right now. Time is of the absolute essence.”
“She’s right,” the chief of staff declared. “Tell the boss to skip dessert. This briefing’s going to give him a serious case of indigestion anyway.”
The aide looked alarmed and left the room hastily.
Lily glanced over at Carter. He smiled at her, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. It was time to do or die. She murmured, “Hey, at least this place probably has a great bomb shelter. If they’ll let us in, we’ll live long enough to see the nuclear winter.”
“Yippee,” Carter muttered. “I think I’d rather go in the first wave. Quick and painless, and then it’s over. I’m not into long, drawn-out suffering.”
She supposed he would know. He’d been through plenty of it in the past few months.
“Okay, you’re on,” the aide told them as he returned. “The first lady is just leaving the dining room and then I’ll walk you in.”
“I’ll walk them in,” the chief of staff said grimly.
A few seconds later, a silent Secret Service man opened the door and gestured them through it. And in about a dozen steps, she was standing in front of the president of the United States at the dinner table. She vaguely registered the faces of a dozen other people at the table—the assembled cabinet members.
The chief of staff said soberly, “Sir, these young people have quite a story to tell you.”
The president stood up, offered his hand to Carter and then to her. “I’m Henry Stanforth. I’m interested to hear what’s got the staff in such a tizzy. Please, sit down.”
Someone stepped forward to whisk the remaining dinner dishes out of the way as Lily murmured, “I think I’d rather stand, sir. I’m too nervous to sit still.”
He smiled kindly at her. “I won’t bite your head off. Just tell me what you came to say.”
Carter started into his briefing. He, too, was stiff at first, but then warmed to his topic and smoothly went through the documentation and evidence H.O.T. Watch had gathered to prove the doomsday machine existed. He then gave a quick overview of what H.O.T. Watch believed it would do if activated and what the conditions were under which it would fire.
And then it was her turn. Familiar to her from television, a keenly intelligent pair of hazel eyes speared into her. She took a deep breath and then spoke. “Well, sir. It all started with an asteroid. An insignificant little chunk of rock, really…”
It took her a few minutes, but somewhere along the way, as the president asked an occasional question and nodded in comprehension at her explanations, she began to relax. At least as much as it was possible to relax when standing in front of the president of the United States and telling him the world was going to end in a few hours.
She finished, and the room was dead silent.
“Well, then,” Stanforth finally said quietly. “It seems like we’ve got a problem on our hands. What do you want me to do about it?”
Carter answered, “I…we…need you to contact the Russian prime minister. You’ve got to convince him to turn the machine off ASAP.”
Stanforth leaned back in his chair, thinking. Lily felt the man’s mind at work, turning over all the possibilities. No doubt he was already formulating the best arguments to use to convince the Russian prime minister and weighing which ones would succeed or fail.
“Comments?” Stanforth asked.
Lily started. She’d been so mesmerized by him that she’d nearly forgotten the entire cabinet was also in the room. A man she recognized as the secretary of defense, but whose name she couldn’t remember for the life of her at the moment, replied. “Time is of the essence. I don’t think we should let this thing get too bogged down in discussion and options before you act. Seems to me these young people have done their homework and exhausted every other reasonable avenue for contacting the Russians.”
“Boris is going to have a cow when I reveal to him that we know about their little device,” Stanforth commented mildly. “It’s quite an intelligence edge for us to just give away.”
The national security adviser grimaced. “I’d say in the current circumstances the sacrifice is worth it, sir.”
“Never thought I’d hear you say something so sensible, Tom,” Stanforth replied. There were chuckles up and down the table.
“Well, then. It seems this is a call for the red phone,” Stanforth announced quietly.
There was an audible intake of breath in the room. Lily recalled dimly that the red phone was supposed to be used only in case of impending nuclear war or times of extreme crisis on that scale. Wow.
A man in a navy uniform stepped forward immediately and laid a briefcase on the table in front of the president. Lily was startled to see that it really was handcuffed to the guy’s wrist. The navy officer dialed in a pair of combinations and the lid popped open. And, indeed, a red telephone lay there. She imagined the technology behind it had been updated substantially since the thing had been invented, but it was still an old-fashioned red handset.
President Stanforth picked it up and murmured a string of letters and numbers into it. “How do you put this thing on speakerphone?” he asked.
The navy man leaned forward and pushed a button. A female voice with a faint Russian accent said, “Stand by for the prime minister, Mr. President.”
A male voice said something in Russian that sounded like letters and numbers. And then the voice said, “Henry, why do you wake me up at this hour to speak on the red phone?”
Lily didn’t know the prime minster spoke English so well. It must make communications between these two powerful men easier without having to rely on translators.
“Boris, I’m sorry to wake you up.”
Lily listened for the next several minutes as President Stanforth did a masterful job of explaining the crisis without ever putting the prime minister in a situation to have to confirm or deny
the existence of the doomsday machine.
Finally, the Russian said heavily, “It is extraordinary story you tell me, Henry. You understand I must speak to my army about this.”
“Just do it quickly, Boris. You may have only an hour or two to get the shut-down sequence started in time to avoid disaster. Assuming such a sequence of events turns out to be necessary, of course.”
“Of course. I will be in touch. Dobrii vecher, Henry.”
“Good night, Boris. I’ll wait for your call.”
Carter thought time had moved slowly during those terrible two weeks when he’d been completely paralyzed and unsure if he would ever be able to move again. But this, this was worse.
He and Lily had been escorted to a homey room stuffed with books of all kinds, and they sat side-by-side on a couch, staring at a selection of popular paperback novels. He couldn’t remember any of their titles two seconds after reading them. By mutual unspoken consent, they’d agreed to ignore the elephant in the corner for now—their earlier declarations of love would have to wait until later. After they’d saved the world.
“How’re you holding up?” Lily startled him by leaning close to murmur.
“Okay under the circumstances, I suppose.”
“No sign of a seize-up?”
He shook his head, and she, in turn, looked surprised. Now that he thought about it, he guessed he was, too. Standing in front of the president and his cabinet by all rights should have sent him into full-blown statue mode. But he’d gotten through it. He’d told himself that Lily was depending on him and he couldn’t let her down. Surely his cure wasn’t as simple as that. Some woman loved him, so now it was all better?
Except that woman was Lily, and she was anything but “some woman.” She was extraordinary in just about every way.
The debate raged in his head until a Secret Service man cleared his throat in the doorway. “You’re needed in the conference room.”
