“Sorry to interrupt, Roberta, and I appreciate your concern. But the Speaker also said that Congress is prepared to pass a declaration of war pursuant to Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution.”
“That’s absurd!” Williams exclaimed. “It’s outrageous. The United States has declared war only five times in our history and always at the request of the president. Section Eight was intended to prevent our commander-in-chief from taking the nation to war without the consent of the American people. It was not a grant of power to Congress to force the commander-in-chief to take us to war. I repeat, it’s absurd, unprecedented. They’re a bunch of Visigoths!”
“I agree, Roberta. It’s unprecedented. But the Visigoths, as you call them, insist that their power is exclusive and that the language in the Constitution is absolute.”
“And they can quote Scripture as well if they want to,” she said, her rage unchecked. “It doesn’t mean they have virtue. They are choosing to ignore the War Powers Act of 1973. That says the president can only send combat troops into battle for sixty days without either a declaration of war by Congress or a congressional mandate. But there is nothing in the act that says what Congress can do if the President refuses to comply with the act.”
“Roberta, I can assemble every constitutional scholar in the country to debate the issue. That won’t help. This is not a legal issue anymore. It’s political. I can refuse to attend the joint session. I can refuse to call for a declaration of war. Congress could pass one without me, and I can refuse to sign or execute.
“Congress could then cite my refusal to take up the shield and sword to defend the nation as an abdication of my responsibility as commander-in-chief. That guarantees a vote to impeach me and remove me from office. We can battle it out in the Supreme Court, but in reality the battle would be long over.”
“Yeah,” Quinlan said, his face twisted in rage and disgust, “Stanfield blows the bugle, holds up the flag, and gives a rebel yell: ‘Follow me.’”
“Right into the jaws of hell,” Falcone added.
“Maybe the election is thrown to the court. But he wins in November and we pack our bags,” Quinlan said, as the screen shifted from one face to the other.
“I’m afraid that Ray is right,” Oxley said, turning to Sean. “At least on the political reality. I’m not saying what I’ll decide to do. But I wanted everyone to understand where things stand at the moment. There’s much more that we have to do, and not much time. So, let’s get back to work. And thank you all.”
Oxley pointed his remote control at the large plasma screen before him and clicked it off.
Quinlan walked out of the Oval Office without a word. Falcone moved more slowly, standing up as if he were in a contest with gravity.
“Remember what happened to your predecessor, Sean,” Oxley said, with obvious concern. “I don’t want you dying on the job. Get at least a couple of hours’ sleep. That’s an order.”
“Yes, sir,” Falcone said. He felt his body resisting his orders to stand and walk toward the door.
50
PRECISELY ONE hour after he had last talked to Liz Dalton, Lanier opened the sliding door of the laboratory. Before he could speak, Dalton came to the door and said, “We’ve found a big ambiguity, Rube. Very big,” Dalton said. “I was just about to go find you.”
She shut down the mass spectrometer she had been using, stood, and touched Malcomson on the shoulder. “Fred, I’m checking out for a few minutes. Hold the fort.”
Malcomson nodded without taking his eyes off a computer monitor filled with fluctuating horizontal lines.
“We have to talk, Rube,” she said, motioning him toward a door leading to a fire escape.
Lanier followed Dalton and closed the door behind him. Standing on the gridded metal platform, she stared for a moment into the night. The darkened fort looked to her like a village gone to bed. She turned to Lanier and said softly, “So far, I have not put one word of this into a database. I haven’t even spoken to Fred about it. I’ll give you a verbal report, and you can do what you judge best about it.”
*
AFTER talking with Dalton, Lanier left the barracks, got into an Army staff car assigned to him, and sped through the darkness toward Hunter Airfield. From his cell phone he put in a call to Falcone’s direct-call line.
Falcone had switched his cell phone over to the direct line before flopping on a cot that Mae had ordered for an anteroom to his office. She had also installed a microwave, a coffeemaker, and a portable refrigerator stocked with small containers of yogurt and large containers of orange juice. On a table next to the cot, she had laid out an array of bottles containing various vitamins.
He picked up the cell phone from the table and managed to say, “Falcone.”
“Rube here. I’ve got a report. I’ll be in Andrews in about forty-five minutes.”
“You can send it on the intel computer net,” Falcone said, amazed he was able to utter a complete sentence.
“I know. But no thanks. I need to make it verbally. Face-to-face.”
“I looked you up,” Falcone said, his voice scratchy and irritated. “One of your admirers calls you an eccentric pain in the ass.”
“Correct.”
“You can’t wait until daylight?”
“This is urgent. As urgent as anything I’ve ever known.”
“Okay. Do it your way. There’ll be a White House vehicle at Andrews to pick you up.”
“Yes. And you’ll be in it.”
“Come on, Lanier. Stop living up to your reputation.”
“I’m not kidding. I’m about to get into the aircraft. This is serious. We have to talk. I am saying this in terms of national security. I am not playing a game. I assure you.”
Falcone called Andrews operations and said that an F-16B Falcon with White House priority was in the air from Hunter. He ordered a White House SUV and said he wanted a fast trip to Andrews.
“At two A.M., it’s bound to be fast,” the motor pool manager said.
Falcone stumbled out of the office, out to the cold night, and into the warmth of the SUV. He instantly fell asleep.
*
FALCONE was sitting in an easy chair at the VIP lounge in Andrews, dozing off with a yellow pad on his lap, when Lanier walked in.
Falcone had seen Lanier’s head-and-shoulders photo in his DOE personnel file, but he would know Lanier just from his gait—somehow a mix of strutting and slouching that sent the message that he was a hard man to deal with.
They shook hands and Falcone motioned Lanier to a chair across from him and asked, “What have you got?”
“It’s one of ours.”
“What?”
“The signature. The composition of the radioactive materials. One of our weapons. Late fifties. Absolutely.”
“Jesus Christ! Who got it? Where did they get it?” Falcone asked, suddenly fully awake.
“I don’t know ‘who’ and I don’t know ‘where.’ All I know is what I said: It’s one of ours.”
“Who else knows?”
“Just two: Liz Dalton and I, with a possible three—a scientist named Malcomson, who is in the deployable lab with her at Stewart.”
“Any chance—any possible chance—that this … this information is wrong? I mean, ‘deployable lab’ and a quick assessment. No chance of a hasty call?”
“Not a chance in the world, Sean. Liz is the best we’ve got. If she said, ‘Pakistan’ or ‘China,’ maybe there would be a doubt because this is not a perfect science. But the analysis is written on the mass spectrograph like it’s carved in stone: One of ours.”
“What now?” Falcone asked.
“I was about to ask the same thing,” Lanier said. He stood. “This is where NEST ends. Liz will write a tech report. Then it’s all intel and FBI.”
“Keep that report tight,” Falcone said.
“There are regulations. I must brief Dr. Graham.”
“Until you hear from me, don’t brief anyone. Tha
t is a presidential order. I’m going from here directly to the President. I will recommend to him the people to be briefed. They will not yet include Dr. Graham. This information cannot be disclosed right now. Consider yourself and your two people to be absolutely silenced. The President alone will decide how to handle the information.”
“Okay. But there’s something else.”
“My God! What now?”
“A coincidence. And I don’t like coincidences. I don’t trust them.”
“Neither do I”
“In 1958, a hydrogen bomb was dropped near the mouth of the Savannah River.”
“A bomb in the river? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Right at the beginning, I wondered, Why Savannah?” Lanier said. “If you’re going to knock out an American port, why not New York? Newark? Baltimore? Long Beach? Even Charleston? Back in my mind, somewhere, I had known about that 1958 bomb. So did Liz. We didn’t give it credibility for this explosion. But her analysis looked like—not exactly, but like—the radioactivity that would have been produced by the explosion of that bomb.”
“Like. I would think you’d have the exact signature and—”
“We do know what the exact signature of that kind of bomb—a Mark fifteen Mod zero, to be exact. But fissile material is unstable. In half a century, the uranium core would degrade, producing isotopes that we can deduce, but not with certainty. That type of bomb was a hybrid, a transitional design between fission—the Hiroshima atomic bomb—and thermonuclear, the hydrogen bomb. It used a uranium fission implosion to produce a secondary implosion. As a result—”
“Never mind the physics for now, Rube. How the hell did it get there?”
“The Strategic Air Command—SAC—was staging an exercise. A SAC bomber, a B-47, simulated the dropping of a bomb on a Soviet city while evading Air Force fighters simulating Soviet interceptors. The city playing the Soviet role was a place near Washington—Reston, Virginia, I think. When the pilot thought he was over the target, he pressed a button on a gadget that figured out how close he had come to hitting the target.
“Then the plane headed to its base in Florida, supposedly flying through Soviet fighters, simulated by Air Force F-86 Sabrejets. Something went wrong. A jet crashed into the B-47. In an attempt to land, the pilot of the B-47 decided to jettison the bomb and—”
“A real bomb?”
“Yes. One of our first hydrogen bombs. SAC demanded absolute realism.”
Falcone nodded, looking stunned. “Go on,” he said.
“The F-86 pilot was able to eject. He survived. The pilot of the B-47 managed to land, saving himself and his crew by jettisoning the bomb off the coast. The plane landed at Hunter—the same field I just flew from. It was a SAC base then. When news got out, the Air Force said the bomb was incapable of a nuclear explosion because it did not have its triggering mechanism.
“The Air Force searched an area around the mouth of the river for several weeks. But they didn’t find anything. There was another unsuccessful search a few years ago. End of story—until now.
“It’s only a matter of time before GNN or somebody digs up that story and starts speculating. There are survivors in Savannah right now who are wondering about that bomb. They haven’t forgotten about it the way most of us have. It’s only a matter of time—a short time—before there’s talk about the bomb, our bomb.”
“You’re absolutely right, Rube. Any suggestions?”
“I’m a big guy for telling the truth.”
“But what’s the truth here? Some bad guys set off one of our bombs? What bad guys? How did they get it? Or did the goddamn thing finally go off on its own? If so, why? And has the Air Force been lying all these years? Questions, questions. And no answers. That’s what I have to tell the President.”
“There’s some other news you can tell him,” Lanier said. He reached into the black briefcase he had on his lap. “Preliminary report on destruction and radiation levels,” he said, handing Falcone a few sheets of paper stapled together. “But there’s more … more than a report. Sean, I don’t want to go back there. No one would want to go back there. I will. I know I must. But there has never been anything like this. Sean, it’s beyond reports, beyond anything that can be put on paper—or put on a TV screen.
“I read about someone in Hiroshima seeing bones stacked upon bones and bodies that were half bones, half ashes. Well, there was one place, near the river, a few hundred meters probably from where it detonated. And there was nothing there. Nothing. No bones. No bodies. Nothing.
“The temperature there, for a nanosecond, was probably about 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, things simply vaporize or become ashes, and the ashes blow away. There was a slight breeze when we drove up, and we could see ashes blowing in the wind. Ashes. People as ashes.
“You know those charts we’ve seen at briefings about the bomb? Those concentric circles, with ground zero in the middle? Well, forget about those concentric circles. The reality is that this … this thing I’ve lived with for most of my life is not neat. It flows up a river. Or it gets stopped by a little hill. Or it runs in jagged line. It’s a monster, Sean. Not neat.
“But there always has to be a report, doesn’t there? Well, now you have a report. The report will tell you that things are not as bad as they first seemed—and this is not just bullshit to relieve the President.
“Let me give you a few fast facts and suppositions. Because this happened at night, most people were indoors. Kids in bed. Mom and Pop watching TV. There’s a blinding flash as something explodes. We believe it went off just above the ocean surface. We aren’t sure about that, but it’s a good bet.
“There is an electromagnetic pulse, a surge of hellish heat. Then an enormous wave and a terrific wind rush up the river, crushing buildings, sinking ships—doing the kind of damage and killing associated with tsunamis or earthquakes.
“Radioactive particles are borne by the water and wind. The particles vary—and so do their effects. Just about all of our real and theoretical studies have been based on air bursts, some at high levels, some lower. We have to extrapolate—well, guess—about this kind of explosion. About the only data we have is from a nuclear weapon detonated during tests of effects against ships, back in the forties.
“On the basis of that data, along with our aerial photos, on-the-ground survey, and other NNSA analyses, we estimate that immediate deaths—due to drowning and being crushed to death, mostly—to be somewhere between two thousand and three thousand, with injuries running as high as thirty thousand.
“As for radiation deaths, we believe that there were few, if any, deaths due to acute radiation syndrome. Most survivors were inside, and even those who were outside are not going to drop dead.
“But we simply do not know what the long-term effects of this disaster will be. We can only watch and wait, hoping that we don’t see increases in thyroid cancer or leukemia, as happened after the reactor explosion in Chernobyl and as we expect in Japan. The last estimate I’ve seen is that the ultimate long-term death toll for Chernobyl will be about four thousand premature deaths caused by radiation-induced cancer.”
Lanier sounded like a scientist used to lecturing nonscientists. Now, he paused, and Falcone half-expected him to say, “Any questions?”
But instead, he simply said, “We live in a fucked-up world, Sean, a very fucked-up world.”
51
AS LANIER was flying back to Georgia, Falcone was in the Oval Office briefing President Oxley about Lanier’s discovery. Oxley listened impassively, never asking a question or showing a response, even when Falcone told of the jettisoned bomb. Falcone ended the briefing by handing Oxley the NEST preliminary report in a blue folder bearing the presidential seal.
Oxley read slowly. The only sounds in the Oval Office were his sighs as he turned the pages. After reading the last page and closing the folder, he looked across his desk at Falcone and said, “What can I say? What can anyone say? Except ‘why …
why?’” His jaw tightened and his face turned grim. “And ‘who?’ Who in the name of God did this?”
“I have no answers, Mr. President.”
“That’s what I’m supposed to have, Sean. Answers.” Oxley said after a pause, “And I don’t have any. Not a single goddamn answer.”
“Well, sir, this report contradicts Stanfield’s claim about the bomb being carried on the Regal. If the explosion was one of ours … a bomb about twelve feet long and weighing seven thousand six hundred pounds—those are Lanier’s figures—then it wasn’t a matter of a suitcase bomb. Whatever they carried aboard—if they carried anything aboard—it could not be a Mark fifteen Mod zero.”
Oxley nodded, as if there were no words left.
“The report,” Falcone said. “Should I—”
“The report,” Oxley said softly, picking up the folder. “Yes, the estimates of the dead, the dead without names or ages or faces. The dead. We’ve got to find out who did this, Sean. Who did this.…”
He placed the folder on the desk, moving it carefully so that it lined up inside some invisible desktop grid. “Who knows about this, Sean?” Oxley asked.
“Lanier and two lab technicians,” Falcone said. “Lanier agreed to keep it tightly held. Distribution is up to you.”
“Good. I’m calling in Ray and Steve and Stephanie. I want to get Steve working on a statement. And I’ll ask Stephanie for advice on getting this out. I’ll tell them about the good news on radiation. And figure how to spread the good news. Yes. And I’ll tell them about the estimates of the dead. I’ll tell them all that.”
Oxley was talking at an unusually slow pace. Falcone sensed that the President was a man coming out of shock, a man who was struggling to comprehend the incomprehensible.
Falcone spoke into the silence: “My advice, Mr. President, is to publish the entire report—it’s only fifteen pages long. The Times, maybe the Post, will publish it and you can put it on the White House Web site. If you keep anything out, people will wonder what is being hidden. When you announce it—”
“I’m not making any announcement, Sean,” Oxley said after a pause. His voice was again firm and cool. He held up the blue folder and waved it like a banner. “Sean, this has got to be absolutely secret.”
Blink of an Eye Page 30
