by Ian Slater
Lenore shook her head. Mike always had an answer.
“Listen, Johnny—” Ricardo started, but had to repeat himself; the band was killing Sousa with the base drum. “You want to come over to Pete’s place after, for a few beers?”
Johnny nodded toward Lenore. “Have to check with the boss here.”
“Pete’s looking at a Camaro,” cut in Ricardo, indicating a copy of the Post classifieds. “Wants us to give it the once-over.”
“Before or after the beers?” Lenore sighed.
“Well, you know…” said Ricardo, grinning.
“Yeah,” she said resignedly, “I do. Well,” she turned to Johnny, her elbow pressing his, “be home by midnight.”
“Yeah,” he replied, but it was said as if he hadn’t really heard. The truth was, he was in shock. The ad for the Camaro was the tip-off for another ad in the Personals:
Man in early thirties desires live-in companion. Sexual preference not important. Must like cats and be prepared to share household chores. No Republicans.
He’d been waiting so long that now it was here, he suddenly felt he was no longer ready. “Yeah,” he answered. “No problem.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” began one of the politicians, a Democratic representative for New York. “It’s my pleasure and privilege to introduce you to—”
“I can’t see,” grumbled Danny.
* * *
After all the waiting — all the years — it took only three hours to answer the ad, to drive up to the Hillsview Reservoir.
When Johnny returned that evening, he was in a hell of a mood, and they were saying there’d been more power “outs” at Con Ed. So he knew everyone had been working, that the ad had been the signal for all of them.
“Danny!” yelled Johnny Ferrago, his shadow enormous in the candlelit kitchen. “Get away from there!”
Young Danny jumped back from the kitchen sink and, despite a brave effort, began crying. “I forgot.”
“Well don’t. What’d I tell you in the car?”
“I forgot,” repeated Danny, now clinging to his mother, who drew him close.
“Lay off, Johnny,” she told him. “He just forgot. What’s the big panic anyway? You said you’d turned off all the water.”
Johnny rose, picked up the cup Danny had been about to use and put it in the dishwasher. “There’s still water in the pipes.”
“I thought you said you ran it out?”
“You can’t run it all out. Besides, from what they say on che radio, one drop’d be enough to kill you.”
“How come they don’t know how to fix it quicker?” complained Lenore. “Last time some idiot poisoned the water, they—”
“Because, last time was just peanuts,” snapped Johnny, his metaphors going to hell with his temper. “Car radio says this time it’s much bigger. Poured it over the spillways, apparently. So I don’t want any of you going anywhere near taps. And Danny — stop your goddamn blubbering!”
“Why can’t we use the toilet, Daddy?” asked Linda.
“Because you can’t flush it, that’s why,” Johnny told her gruffly, pouring himself another scotch — putting in a dash of the bottled mineral water.
“I don’t like using that poopy seat,” said Linda, referring to the portable camper toilet in the basement. “It’s scary down there.”
“And how come Con Ed’s on the fritz again?” said Lenore.
Johnny ignored her, turning to Linda. “Tell Mummy when you want to go down,” he said. “You can use the big flashlight — that’s what it’s there for.” His tone continued to be gruff, angry at his own bad temper but unable to rein it in. “It won’t be for long,” he said. “You all right, Danny?”
“No. I’m thirsty.”
“Come over here,” Johnny told him, and gave him a glass of the bottled water. “There y’are.” Danny gulped the water. “Taste good?” inquired Johnny in a conciliatory tone.
Danny shook his head vigorously from side to side.
“For Chrissakes, Danny! You’re spilling it. Can’t you—”
Lenore interceded, quickly yet gently ushering the children into their bedroom off the hallway. Danny was still grumping. “It’s not time for bed.”
“You don’t have to go to bed,” Lenore assured them. “Just sit and play or do—”
“Why can’t we watch TV, Mommy?” asked Linda.
“ ‘Cause,” answered Danny, “there isn’t any power, stupid.”
“Don’t you call me stupid—”
“Knock it off!” yelled Johnny from the dark recesses of the kitchen. “Or I’ll tan both of you.”
There was silence, Lenore aware for the first time she could remember that she could no longer hear even the faint hum of their refrigerator as she hustled and cajoled the children to get into their pajamas. If they were quick, she’d read them a story—”by candlelight!”
“Haven’t cleaned my teeth,” said Danny.
“All right,” said Lenore, “Then go — no, wait a minute. I’ll bring the brush in here with some bottled water.”
“Yuk!”
Out in the kitchen, the shadow of her arm stretching like a huge derrick in the candlelight, Lenore poured the mineral water sparingly into a Big Bird cup. “This is getting to be a real pain,” she said. “How long do you think we’ll be without power and water?”
Johnny shrugged. “Probably won’t get full power back for weeks, from what the radio says. It’ll be staggered, I guess. Brownouts — a bit here, a bit there. As for water?” He turned his scotch and Canada Dry club soda nearer the candle. “No idea.”
“What kind of people could do that?” she asked, screwing the cap back on. “Blowing up power stations is one thing, but poisoning the water — that’s — that’s sick.”
“So was Agent Orange,” said Johnny, sipping his scotch.
“That’s different,” Lenore said, reaching to put the bottle into the refrigerator from habit.
“Sure,” said Johnny. “You weren’t in Vietnam.”
“Neither were you,” she said, an edge to her voice. She really didn’t know how long she could put up with the inconvenience. They’d most likely close the schools, and then, God help her, the kids would be home all day. “Anyway, that was war.”
“Christ! What do you think this is?” he shot back. “No worse than what we did to the Vietnamese.”
She peered in the flickering candlelight at an unrecognizable shape deep in the refrigerator’s vegetable bin. “My God — what’s this?”
“What?”
“This—” She made a noise as if she was picking up a snake, the lump in the plastic bag half solid, half liquid, squishy. She held it out toward him, outstretched fingers like laboratory tongs, face grimacing with repulsion. “It’s a cucumber — I think. Or was.” She was heading toward the bathroom, holding it at arm’s length.
“You can’t flush it,” Johnny reminded her.
She stood motionless in the hallway. “Well, where can I put it?”
“Put it in the goddamn garbage.” They heard the wailings of more sirens — gunshots.
“Looters,” Johnny said. “Now we’ll see how our fellow Americans behave when the lights go out.”
“Well, they’re not all like that,” she said. “Would you go looting?”
“ ‘Course not. What a dumb question.”
“See?” she said good-naturedly. “You wouldn’t.” She couldn’t tell whether he was smiling or not in the shadow of the candle’s glow.
“Johnny — no! No!” she yelled.
“What the hell—”
“Look, the Jameses’—oh my God, she’s got her kitchen tap running. I’m sure of it — look, she’s leaning over with the kettle to — she mustn’t have heard that radio announcement you — oh my God, Johnny—”
She dropped the bag in the kitchen garbage pail, then grabbed the phone. It was dead. Slamming it down, she ran out the kitchen door, clattering down the darkened steps onto the crazy-stone b
ackyard, yelling as she called out to her neighbor across the lane, an elderly woman — from where Lenore was, a small figure bending in a soft square of a camp light. “No — no, Mrs. James—”
“Daddy? Daddy? What’s the matter?” called out Linda.
“Nothing,” Ferrago replied. “Go to sleep.” It was 8:04 P.M.
At 8:05 p.m., when Lenore Ferrago had pounded on her neighbor’s back door she so terrified the elderly Mrs. James that the woman dropped the cat’s filled water dish, the plastic bowl creating an enormous shadow in the candlelight as it bounced high against the dishwasher before banging to the floor and rolling, toplike, already empty of water and reverberating as it spun to a stop on the pale green linoleum floor.
“Martha!” bellowed Mrs. James’s husband. “You okay?”
When he came in from the living room, the cat meowing safely behind him, his wife had one hand on her heart, the other on the doorknob, using it as a rest as she opened the back door. “It’s — It’s all right,” she assured her husband, weakly waving for Lenore to come in. “It’s Lenore Ferrago.”
“Sorry,” began Lenore, “but you mustn’t use the water!” She paused for breath. “… Radio’s warning everyone in the Bronx, Westchester, not to—” She had to stop.
Mr. James picked up the newspaper he’d been reading, peered through his bifocals then quickly pulled one of the kitchen chairs out from the table toward Lenore. “Here, sit down. You’ll have a heart attack.”
Lenore took the chair but hurried on. “Someone’s apparently put poison in the water supply.”
“Good gracious!” said Mrs. James. “Not again.” She turned to her husband. “Les, put the radio on—”
“Can’t put it on, Martha. No power.”
“No, no, Betty’s — the battery radio. I think it’s in her third drawer down. You know, the Walkman.”
Les James doubled up the paper and, taking a flashlight from the top of the fridge, moved off to get the radio.
“Les!”
His wife’s shout struck James with the force of a physical blow. By the time he had returned to the kitchen, she was crumpled on the floor, the cat, having licked up some of the spilled water, already in convulsions, writhing in an agony the likes of which he had never seen, nor wanted to ever again.
In that tiny kitchen the threat to the eleven million people in New York had become real, and meanwhile, all over the state and indeed the nation, the threat was becoming a palpable nightmare of sudden yet agonized death, its full extent withheld from the American public not by any government decision, but by increasing power failures resulting in communication brownouts.
* * *
When the news of the explosion in Hillsboro first hit the streets, there was confusion over the name. Some reporters confused it with the Hillsview Reservoir. Others thought it was the Hillsboro of movie fame, the stand-in for Dayton, Tennessee, made famous or infamous, depending on the point of view, by its “Monkey Trial” in 1925, wherein newspaper luminary H. L. Mencken, writing for the Boston Globe, reported the clash of the Titans, when presidential hopeful William Jennings Bryan and the great defense attorney Clarence Darrow battled it out over the Tennessee school law forbidding the teaching of evolution.
But the Hillsboro in question was in Wisconsin, and there was no confusion on the part of the “sleeper” SPETS team, suspected by FBI investigators later to have consisted of two cells of three men each, which, using heavy eighty-one-millimeter mortars, blew the cesium clock building to hell, also knocking out the electric “feed-in” for the backup atomic clock.
Kirov’s “Ballet” had begun. AT&T’s big “tote board” in New Jersey went crazy, the byte — eight bits to a byte — slippage in every mainframe computer irreversible. This meant not only that Lana La Roche, nee Brentwood, couldn’t phone from Dutch Harbor to California to find out whether Frank Shirer was as yet in overseas B-52 training or had been caught in the helter-skelter sabotage that was apparently breaking out all over the U.S., but also that all defense computers and most phone lines were down.
In fact, Shirer was already en route to Nayoro, for Freeman had sent out an urgent request for BUFFs. No one knew why, because while the “big ugly fat fellows” could bomb from thirty thousand feet outside most AA missile envelopes, all the pilots, including Frank, knew that you simply wouldn’t have the accuracy from that height, and certainly not in the blizzard conditions.
In any event, even if the U.S. phone networks hadn’t been shut down, Lana wouldn’t have been told where Shirer was. But if the shutdown of all personal calls was a trial for the ordinary citizen, the Defense Department had a much more serious problem. All ICBM silo computers were down, including those inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain and those responsible for the prearranged coded “burst” messages to American submarines, like Robert Brentwood’s USS Reagan, a dual purpose SSBN/SSN, ICBM/Hunter-Killer Sea Wolf II.
In the Pacific Northwest, in Washington State, another sub, the USS Corpus Christi, a 16,000-ton Trident II, her gold crew aboard, slid effortlessly through the long, moonlit race of water stretching out from the Bangor Base into Hood Canal. The pine-scented banks slipped by like spiked velvet, and the “boomer”—as they called the intercontinental ballistic missile Trident — headed out to join the First Pacific Fleet several thousand miles west nor’west of Bangor. She was to become part of the hectic American buildup and resupply of Second Army, or rather, one of the hidden protectors of the convoys racing to satisfy the enormous appetite for materiel created by the logistics of fighting a two-front war across the other side of the world.
The OOD — officer of the deck — Ben Cashell, reported, “Degaussing station coming up,” informing the captain and the crew in the redded-out control room beneath the sail that the sub was entering the huge “magnetic wiping” shed which would temporarily erase the Corpus Christi’s telltale magnetic signature. At the very least, her signature would be sufficiently altered so that it couldn’t be easily identified by any of the Siberian nuclear subs. Some of the Sibirs, as they were known by the U.S. submarines, had passive sonar arrays-big spools of transparent, oil-filled cable that housed listening mikes, which they trolled hundreds of yards behind them in the oceanic sound channels off the American west coast.
Cashell, a native of the drier regions of Texas before he graduated from Annapolis as the first black to be so rapidly promoted to executive officer aboard Tridents IIs, reveled in the sheer natural beauty of the deep-water sound, the fresh ocean smell mingling with that of the pine forests that swept right down to the sea, the moon a silver disk above the heavy, dark foliage of the timbered hillsides — all of it elemental in its mystery. He heard the depth readout from control and looked farther down at the bow, watching the thin line of phosphorescence, caused as much by the incoming tide as by the sub’s egress speed, and he knew that soon, a moment he always savored — once they were beyond the sound and approaching patrol speed — the Corpus Christi’s thin line of foam would become a creamy bow wave before the “cut-out” speed. Then there would be no visible bow wave at all, just a continuous, oily-looking hump of water sliding over the forward section as the sub, carrying ten MIRV nuclear warheads on each of its twenty-four missiles — more than all the explosive power used in World War II — headed quietly out to deep water.
For some, the subs represented a monstrous intrusion into nature’s realm, but for Cashell the ship immersed in the sea represented not a conflict, but a harmony between man and nature. Far from violating the integrity of the natural realm, the sub became part of it, its very shape — a giant forty-two-foot-wide, 560-foot-long cylinder with a bulbous bow like that of a great whale, and streamlined sail, diving planes, and pressure hull — moving in concert like the fins of a great fish in a perfect marriage of function and form. And because of this, unlike the older submarines of World War II, which had to make most of their torpedo attacks on the surface, the Tridents and their smaller cousins, the Sea Wolfs, attacked from below. Here e
ven the enormous bulk of the 16,000-ton Trident, a whale compared to the smaller Sea Wolf, was as responsive as any marine mammal to the slightest change in the ocean’s environment.
Corpus Christi was all but through the “chicken wire” of the degaussing station and when Cashell saw the light he thought it was a hunter’s flashlight blink from shore. Then the starboard lookout yelled, “Incoming!” That’s all Cashell remembered.
The first blink was followed by two others — three ninety-four-pound Hellfire antitank missiles.
No one in the sub’s control was hit, but fourteen seamen on the forward starboard side were killed instantly when one of the sub’s Mark-48 torpedoes exploded beneath them following the Hellfire’s impact, the antitank missile ripping open the hull forward of the sail at the waterline, wiping out all bow-inset sonar sensors as well as gutting the torpedo room. Three more men were found dead, trapped in the tangled wreckage of the forward section’s fourth level, another five having survived by being sucked out after the initial inrush of water which had doused fires immediately. As the sub had been on the surface, these five managed to swim ashore. But the sub, barely kept afloat by a chief of the boat who had quickly ordered all affected compartments sealed off from the rest of the ship, was effectively out of commission for what the Bremerton yard boss later estimated would be at least six months.
In San Diego the Aegis-equipped guided missile cruiser, the Santa Fe, had been sunk, the torpedoes used in the attack thought by both the CIA and FBI to have been two of three stolen from the San Diego Naval Yards during the Super Bowl game, the attention of perimeter guards diverted. Subsequent spectroscopic analysis, however, proved that the torpedoes, though definitely U.S. Mk-48s, had come from the Canadian west coast naval base of Esquimau. Presumably they had been smuggled across at some point along the three-thousand-mile U.S.-Canada border by “illegals” who, like their cohorts in the U.S., had entered North America during the Gorbachev-Bush honeymoon, possibly having slipped in from a Russian trawler in for “repairs” at one of Canada’s ports. The CIA in particular drew the president’s attention to the “peculiar reluctance” of CSIS — Canadian Security Intelligence Service — to follow suspected illegals across their border into the U.S. “They’re very good in Signals Intelligence, sir,” reported presidential press secretary Trainor. “But when it comes to HUMINT…” He shook his head.
