“So it would seem,” said Georgia with a smile. “You never said anything or did anything nasty to me, no sir. No needling little remarks or smirks behind my back, like some. You just looked through me like I wasn’t there, like most of the players around here did.”
“That must have been very useful, to be invisible,” said Lee Lyons, scowling at her.
“Sometimes,” she said with a glance at him.
“The president is about to launch a full nuclear missile strike against the Northwest Republic,” said Jenner. “He is in the Oval Office right now, with some military officers who we have reason to believe will do nothing to dissuade him, and who will actually encourage him. He will not listen to anyone, not to me, not to senior military men who believe as I do that such an act will be a catastrophe from which the United States will never recover, and which may well lead to the destruction of what is left of this country.”
“You want to stop him?” asked Georgia. “I thought you were from Oregon and you wanted to destroy the Republic?”
“I am an Oregonian by birth, yes, but I am an American first,” said Jenner. “That is where I differ from—well, from the people running things in Oregon now. I suppose in a way that’s what it was all about, all that bloodshed and horror back then. Some of us wanted to give up on America, some of us didn’t. I didn’t.”
“I think if you were to ask them, sir, they would say it was because they wanted to secure the existence of their people and a future for white children,” said Georgia. “At least, I remember hearing that phrase at the time. What, exactly, do you want me to do?”
“Talk him out of it,” said Jenner. “I understand that you still have family living in the Northwest, and so I will assume for that reason, if for no other, that you have a strong motivation to prevent an atomic attack on them. It is possible that Hunter Wallace will listen to you when he will listen to no one else, because of your, ah, personal relationship.”
“Relationship?” said Georgia with a bitter laugh. “Is that what it is? I’m sorry, Mr. Vice President, please go on.”
“If you can’t talk him out of it, at least buy us some time,” said Jenner. “We have someone else on his way who may be able to step in and give you a hand in keeping his finger off the button, although it isn’t actually a button, it’s a series of commands he has to give to the units of the Strategic Defense Command. Appeal to his better nature, if you think he has one. Do, well, whatever you have to do in order to distract him from the contents if that briefcase.” The Vice President was clearly uncomfortable with the topic.
“You mean an impending nuclear holocaust might get him so horny he’ll want to break for a quickie?” she said with a merry laugh. Then she stopped laughing. “I’ll do what I can. When? Now?”
“We need to get those three officers out of the Oval Office somehow,” said Jenner. “Then we’ll send you in. He’s locked the door, but Agent Lyons has a master pass card.”
Lyons spoke up. “Sir, with all due respect—you want me to let her in to be alone with the president? At a time like this? Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“No, but Hunter Wallace has,” said Jenner seriously. “Lee, have you ever seen any of those old photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pictures of the people who survived the atomic blast itself? Never mind the Northmen. I know you were a FATPO, and you fought them, and you don’t care about them, but we have hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and Marines within the heavy fallout range of major target areas, not to mention over a dozen major cities in the United States and Canada and millions of people in smaller American and Canadian cities and towns. Men, women, children, do you want them to die from the radioactive isotopes tearing their hearts and lungs to pieces and their burned flesh falling off their bones while they’re still alive? All because a little tribe of Oriental parasites can’t stand to lose their wealth and their power and their egomaniacal self-image as God’s own butt buddies? What is about to happen is inhuman, and we have to try everything to stop it.”
Lyons’ phone rang. He flipped it open and listened. “All right, Sanchez. Wait until they get downstairs, detain them and take them to the holding cells. No, I didn’t say arrest them, I just said grab ’em and throw ’em in the can. We’ll sort it out later. We have to keep them away from the president.” He closed his phone. “Those three Pentagon visitors got hungry and left the Oval Office for the mess downstairs, looking for breakfast. My guys are on them. The president is alone.”
“Volunteer luck,” said Georgia to herself with a rueful smile.
“What?” said Lyons. “Where the hell did you hear that expression?”
“Another phrase I seem to recall from my dim past,” said Georgia. “Well? Do you want me to give it a shot?”
“Why should we trust you?” demanded Lyons.
“Logically, I suppose you shouldn’t,” she replied coolly, looking up at the Secret Serviceman’s glaring face. “But you’re right, Mr. Vice President. I don’t want Hunter Wallace exploding nuclear weapons in the Northwest Republic, and I will do what I can to prevent that. Do my reasons really matter?”
“No,” said Jenner. “Just try to buy us some time. When this other person gets here we’ll find some way to bring him in.” Georgia rose from her seat.
“Sir, I don’t think this is a good idea!” protested Lyons.
“Give me your master key card, in case he’s locked himself in again,” said Jenner. “I’ll do it. The responsibility will be mine. Otherwise we’ll have to knock on the door and try to talk her in, and that may waste time we don’t have.” Wordlessly Lyons took the electronic card from his pocket and handed it over to the Vice President. She followed him through the Roosevelt room to the door of the Oval Office; the huge negro agent Jimbo Hadding was behind the security desk and he glared at her, but in the absence of any orders to the contrary he let them pass. Jenner took the key card from his pocket and held it up to the lock. “Good luck, Ms. Halberstam,” he said.
She looked at him. “Marvin Halberstam is the creep who married my mother. For the record, my name is Georgia Myers.”
“I’ll remember that,” said the Vice President. He swiped the key card and the door to the Oval Office clicked open. Georgia went in and closed it behind her.
Hunter Wallace was sitting behind the great mahogany presidential desk, the metal briefcase open before him. Papers were spread out on the desk in front of him, and he was holding several in his hand and reading some numbers off the page. “SDC Wichita, confirm command three niner four five alpha, check words Disco Duck. Confirm targets Eugene and Corvallis, Newport naval facility.” Wallace looked up. “Hi, Georgie!” he said like an excited child.
“Hunter, stop!” she said. “You can’t do this!”
“Sure I can!” he giggled. “I’m the president! I can do anything I want now! They’re going to be sorry now. Sorry they went against the Apple of God’s eye! Sorry they laughed at me and refused to recognize my genius back in those days when I offered myself to be their leader, but they chose that fat old fool instead, even though they all secretly knew I was better and smarter. Now they’re going to pay. All of them. They refused to give me what was mine, and now they’re going to burn. My friends aren’t dead, you know,” he said, leaning forward, speaking in a conspiratorial whisper. “They’re here. Angela and Ron. Hugh Jenner and those cowardly generals had them murdered last night, but they’re still here! I can hear their voices whispering to me right now, telling me what to do! I’m going to kill Hugh Jenner, too. Yes, SDC Omaha, this is the President of the United States speaking. Initiate Operation Apocalypse. Yes, that is correct. No, this is not a drill. Confirm command seven one seven niner epsilon, check words Hee Haw. Confirm targets Kalispell, Whitefish military engineering center, University of Montana at Missoula.” He looked up at Georgia. “You do want me to drop a couple of extra hot shots on Missoula for you, dear, and make sure we fry that racist old man of yours to a real crispy critter?”
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In one instantaneous flash of cosmic consciousness, Georgia understood. This man was hopelessly insane, beyond all reason, and he was in the process of destroying her childhood and her blood right before her eyes. She knew what had to be done, she understood the price, and she accepted it. There seemed to be no conscious thought involved.
Hunter Wallace had an archaic personal eccentricity: instead of using a word processing or PowerPoint program, he was in the habit of correcting his speeches and making notations on hard copy documents with a large number two blue pencil. A number of these stood in a small wire canister on his desk, all of them daily sharpened to a needle-like point by his anal lesbian PA, Wanda Jankowski. Georgia picked up one of the pencils, leaned over the desk, and with all her strength rammed the point through Hunter Wallace’s left eye deep into his brain.
The president did not die immediately. He jumped up and screamed like an animal in mortal agony, blood spurting from his exploded eyeball in a fountain that soaked Georgia’s yellow blouse and leather skirt, and then he turned and ran headlong into the wall at full speed. He fell to the floor, flopped and writhing, vomiting, screaming again and again like a soul burning in hell, pissing himself and shitting in his pants. Then he quivered and died. The lich lay on the carpet, oozing blood and bodily fluids onto the great woven Presidential seal in the rug that had featured in so many movies.
There was a crash behind her as the door to the Oval Office was kicked almost off its hinges. Georgia turned and saw the huge black Secret Serviceman, Jimbo Hadding, standing in the doorway, his pistol leveled at her with both hands. He took one look at what had happened. “Bitch!” he screamed, spittle flying from his thick bubble lips.
“Nigger!” Georgia said, for the first and only time in her life. Then the bullets slammed into her.
XX
KILLING THE
RIGHT PEOPLE
(July Fourth)
The trouble with modern war is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
—Ezra Pound
On the morning of July Fourth, as the sun rose in the mountains far to the east of the Oregon shore, a coastal defense patrol found something on Sunset Beach just south of Astoria. Lying on the sand at a thirty-degree portside list, where it had been washed up onto the beach by the tide was the wreck of a Kriegsmarine Torpedo Assault Craft, TAC-109, its nylon Tricolor naval ensign on the stern yard blowing and crackling in the wind. The rear deck had been blown open where the methane fuel tank had ruptured, the twin fifty-caliber machine guns drooped downward, and the whole superstructure was riddled with holes from chain guns, twenty-millimeter guns and general automatic weapons fire sustained during the Battle of the Columbia Bar two weeks before. The vessel had been drifting for all that time, and amazingly had stayed afloat until it reached land. There was no sign of the TAC boat’s crew, although the rubber life raft and emergency gear were gone. No trace of Lieutenant Ken Rogers, Mate Holger Stromberg, or Able Seamen Ralph Hornaday and James McAdams was ever found. In this case, the sea chose not to give up its dead.
The patrol was joined by some local people from Seaside and Astoria. After ascertaining that there were no signs of life on board, they got a large tow truck and with steel cables, a winch, and a lot of muscle they dragged the shattered vessel up higher onto the beach, about two hundred yards from a larger, rusting hulk. This was the wreck of the former Catalina Island car ferry S.S. Ventura, which had remained where it ran aground in the battle of Sunset Beach many years before, during the War of Independence. The Federal Anti-Terrorist Police Organization (FATPO) had attempted a seaborne invasion of Clatsop County, Oregon, with a view to surprising Zack Hatfield’s Third Battalion of the NVA Portland Brigade, as it was then designated. The federals had been met by the NVA on the beach and bloodily repulsed. [See The Brigade,]
The burned-out remains of the Ventura had been left on the beach. Later on, after some consideration, the Republic decided to leave the shot-up wreck of TAC-109 there as well, mounted on a bed of concrete to make sure it didn’t wash away in a winter storm. To this, they added the originally scuttled and sunken but later salvaged wreck of the motor launch Nancy, which during the War of Independence had been converted to a crude torpedo boat and used during the NVA’s assault on the original aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, docked at Bremerton. This strip of coastline is today the Sunset Beach National Monument, and the Republic’s official naval war memorial, with a museum attached a little ways inland. The site attracts tens of thousands of tourists each year. Every June 30th, on the anniversary of the abortive FATPO invasion, the graduating class of the Naval Academy takes their final oath of allegiance to the Republic on the sand in front of the three burned and bullet-scarred wrecks on the beach.
* * *
Toward dawn, Bob Campbell briefly fell asleep in his chair in the Renwick Gallery garret, but he awoke about half past six to the sound of sirens and the sight of unusual vehicular activity on the White House grounds, or what he could see of them from his restricted vantage point. With his binoculars, he spotted at least one ambulance and a whole line of official black government limousines and law enforcement SUVs with red and blue LED lights flashing, entering the grounds via the wrought-iron gates on Executive Avenue. The sun was not yet up, but the sky was dull and brassy, and it promised fair to be another steam bath of an east coast summer’s day.
Something must have gone wrong, Bob thought in alarm. He flipped open his phone and checked CNN, but there was no breaking news, just the usual re-runs of talking heads from the night before, experts in suits and retired generals going on about how the gallant American champions of freedom and democracy were holding strong and destroying the evil forces of racist Northwest tyranny through a brilliant strategy of “defense in depth,” which was the official terminology for being surrounded by the NDF. Bob surveyed the scene out the window again. He couldn’t see enough of the White House through the intervening trees and concrete to figure out what was going on, and decided he had to risk a clear call to Cardinale, although he would be very circumscribed in the language he would be able to use. Bob opened his phone, dialed, heard Vinnie Skins answer, and ad-libbed in his Chicago Richie persona. “Hey, boss, it’s me. That pickup for this morning is looking a little shaky. Looks like our guy was partying all night or something. Anyway, his crib is really jumping with some pretty dubious characters, know what I mean? I dunno where the merchandise is or what kind of shape it’s in.”
“I do, unfortunately,” said Cardinale, opening the door of the small storeroom and stepping inside, phone in hand. Betsy came in after him. She was dressed for travel in jeans, runners, and a blue denim blouse.
Bob jumped up. “What’s happening?”
“Guess who got woken up this morning by the Secret Service to make an emergency house call at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue?” said Betsy. “Our own Zombie Master. They sent a limo for him. Seems the main man himself was losing his marbles, just like Belladonna said.”
“What?” exclaimed Bob. “You’re shitting me!”
“Nope, nary turd one,” said Cardinale. “The Zombie Master’s over there now, inside the building. They’ve locked him down in the kitchen, not just him but the rest of the staff as well, apparently, while the politicals figure out what to do with this incredible mess they’re going to have to spin to the public for the Fourth of July.”
“What the hell is going on?” asked Bob. “Do you know?”
“Yeah, kind of,” replied Vinnie. “Doc Shapira and I have a little more advanced verbal code than we had time to teach you, and sometimes we can conduct an almost open phone conversation for short periods of time. On certain subjects, anyway.”
“Is Georgia all right?” demanded Bob.
Cardinale looked at him. “Son, there’s no easy way to tell you this, so I’m just going to spit it out. She’s dead. So is the President of the United States. Our Beautiful Lady lived up to her other name as well; she turned out to be deadly. She
killed the president, and the Secret Service killed her.”
Bob felt the floor move beneath him, and he collapsed back into the chair. “Mother of God!” he moaned. “How the hell did that happen? She wasn’t supposed to kill him, that wasn’t the plan! I don’t get it. I would have sworn she didn’t have it in her, that Georgia was never dangerous to anybody but herself!”
“Everybody has it in them,” said Betsy.
“How? How did she do it? What in God’s name went wrong?”
“You remember you passed on that last message of hers about six this morning, right?” said Cardinale. “The one where she said we’d broke his brain? It looks like she was speaking literally. Hunter Wallace flipped his lid. That’s why they called Doc over, to try and give the presidential noggin a quick tune-up, but Shapira never even got to see him. Without his two Jewish advisors, Wallace went into kosher withdrawal or whatever the fuck happens to shabazz goyim who can’t get their daily kike fix. He got hold of the nuclear codes, and he was about to launch a full nuclear missile strike against the Northwest Republic. Somehow, our lady got to him and stopped him. She stabbed him with a letter opener or something, as near as Doc can figure, and then the bodyguards gunned her down. Hugh Jenner is now president, and apparently he has called off the nuclear attack on the Republic.”
“She did it,” said Bob in a dull voice. “She saved us.”
“She did,” said Cardinale grimly. “This is bad news, Rich, the worst news possible, but I’m going to need you focused with your head in the game now. That young woman literally saved our country from being fried into a cinder. We made her a promise, a promise we can’t keep now, at least not half of it, but by God, son, we’re going to keep the other half! I need you and Betsy to go and extract the little girl from that palace of filth on K Street and do the whole E&E just like we planned, only just with the child, not the mother. Capiche?”
“Yes, sir,” said Campbell, standing up, his heart like lead inside him. “What about you?”
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