by John Barnes
Heather took the least risky alternative and smashed across both hands with the pistol butt. The man shouted. Looking into his eyes, she jammed the gun toward his face, wondering what she could do with a prisoner in the circumstances but not wanting to kill him. As he leaned back away from her gun, the Marine’s injured hands lost their grip. He fell backward down the gravel-covered embankment, rolling toward the creek far below. She ducked back down; a shot hit the ceiling above her head.
Yes, they’re definitely trying to take Graham alive, and they probably don’t want to kill any of the rest of us if they don’t have to. I don’t really want to kill any of them either.
Another Marine was halfway through the window behind her, leveling his weapon, as she rolled sideways; he fired, not aiming, and she came up, aimed, fired, and heard him shriek in pain; at a guess, she’d broken a bone in his arm, and he was unable to stop himself from sliding back out of the window.
Another sound penetrated her consciousness, a raspy buzzing with a sort of whining overtone; some other aircraft? They must’ve sent everything they have. A last couple of gunshots sounded in the Ranger car ahead; now it sounded like a bar brawl in there.
The door from the Ranger car slid open.
A Marine moved in. Heather tried firing her 9mm and came up with another dead round; the Marine kicked it out of her hand and presented her with a view straight into the muzzle of his own weapon. She raised her hands—
The thundering boom outside took both her and the Marine by surprise as the railroad car shook. For a moment they stared wide-eyed at each other, aware he could have been startled into killing her; then he stepped back, to give himself more distance, and looked out the window. “Fuck,” he said. She could tell he still had her in his peripheral vision, so she didn’t move, but she said, very softly, “What?”
“Don’t know. Did you all have air cover?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Because our chopper just blew up. I don’t know what hit it, but it sounds like a lawn mower engine up in the sky.”
Heather listened and heard the same rattling buzz she’d heard before; she turned cautiously to look and saw a biplane.
“The fuck?” he said, looking at it around her.
“Cropduster with an antitank rocket?” she said. “Nobody told me we had anything that would fly except the Gooney.” If we win it won’t matter and if they win I don’t want them to go looking for Quattro Larsen. “Even that wasn’t working this morning.”
“Fuck,” the Marine said. “So we’ve got your train and you’ve got us; it’s a standoff unless—”
Heather heard another, more familiar, sound, the stuttering, coughing roar that had to be the Checker Cab of the Sky. She held her breath, then made herself relax.
“That’s another plane,” he said. “Must be one of yours, can’t be one of ours.”
“If I keep my hands where you can see them, can I put them down?”
“Yeah.” He pointed his rifle away from her but kept it on his hip where he could swing it back; she put her hands down on the back of the seat in front of her. “Escalera, USMC, I’m a corporal.”
“O’Grainne, OFTA, I run it.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t.”
“I bet.” There was another, smaller explosion outside. “God, that chopper is burning like mad, someone really hit it with something.”
“Did you have friends on there?”
“Shit, we’ve been at sea forever, a carrier’s like a small town, after a while you know everyone.”
Heather waited with her captor; after a time they heard the rumble and thud of the DC-3 landing. “Smart enough to land out of sight and range,” the Marine said, with grudging approval.
“While they figure out which side is in charge,” Heather said, “don’t lose track of this: I clubbed one of your guys pretty hard and he rolled down the slope into the ravine. Make sure they find him; he’s probably still alive but he might not be in great shape.”
“Okay, thanks.”
More time went by; Heather figured that to land on the road, out of sight of the train, they must have come down a mile or more away, so this was going to take time. She just hoped there were enough—
They must have had that bullhorn in a clean box, Heather thought, missing the words because of the strangeness of hearing amplified speech again. “—Alpha Company, Second Ranger Battalion. Your aircraft has been destroyed, and we have you surrounded. We have functioning automatic weapons, and there is no escape route; we have both ends of the train under observation and can fire on any point around the train. Please release the president and his party unharmed. You will be treated in accord with the Geneva Conventions, and we intend to release you as soon as possible.”
“Shit,” Escalera said. “We’ve been out in the world so long now, with what’s gotta be growing on us, they won’t let us back on the ship till we’ve been boiled.”
TWO HOURS LATER. THE COW CREEK COUNTRY. NORTH OF GRANT’S PASS. OREGON. 2:30 P.M. PST. SATURDAY. JANUARY 4.
Sorting everything out seemed interminably long to Heather. Everett, in the car ahead of her, had been wounded, and would probably limp the rest of his days, but the medic seemed to think he’d be able to keep and use the leg. Rogers and Machado had been killed by Marine snipers; the Marines had had their ambush in place since the night before.
“How did you know we were here, and in trouble?” Heather asked.
Quattro perched on a rock beside her while they watched all the people with authority argue with each other. “This morning, Bambi and I were flying the Stearman, and this gadget, up to Olympia, to catch the big party, you know? And we were following the tracks because we thought we might see you. When what to our wondering eyes should appear, I guess you’d say, but a Marine helicopter on one side of the mountain, and a pile of logs on the tracks on the other, which we didn’t think was a good thing.
“I guess we were high enough, and it’s always so overcast, and they just weren’t listening so they didn’t hear us over the noise of their chopper’s blades—they were rotating when we passed over. So we continued on up to Olympia, I hopped over to Fort Lewis—where they still had some real avgas, can you imagine that—great stuff!
“I did some fast talking and the Second Ranger Battalion either decided they were loyal to the president or they wanted an excuse to go fight Marines. Now, the Stearman was a trainer, the trainee seat is normally the front, and it’s an open cockpit. So we put one Ranger that was supposed to be a crack shot with a shoulder-fired missile in the front seat. It turned out he was.”
“That was four men killed instantly,” Heather said, annoyed by a feeling that Quattro was in this whole thing because it was the kind of adventure he’d imagined having when he was fourteen. “Your sharpshooter must’ve hit right on a fuel tank or maybe set off some ordnance.”
“That would be my guess. It was one sweet shot.” So much for compassion. “But yeah, Bambi and the sergeant kind of thought there might be a lot of negative feelings around, so they just headed back to Fort Lewis. No reason to rub anyone’s nose in it, you know. And I kind of think she wanted to go someplace else anyway. I don’t think she’s real used to the idea of killing anyone—let alone burning several men to death.”
“I hope she doesn’t ever get used to that,” Heather said.
“That’s very reasonable,” Quattro admitted. “Want to give me a hand cleaning scunge out of the DC-3 while they make up their minds who’s riding in it? I’m one of two people that has a guaranteed seat, so I don’t need to be involved in that discussion.”
They scrubbed with rags and sticks—“jeez, I wish we had toothbrushes, except if we did, I’d want to keep them for my teeth,” Quattro said.
Heather bent to her scrubbing. “Quattro, let me ask you a dangerous question—what do you think? Is it a war or a system artifact that we’re up against?”
“I think in a
couple years I can be selling canned fish into the middle of the country, before people get iodine deficiencies. And that’s all I think. I used to think I cared about political issues. Now that I’m the freeholder of Castle Larsen, I think about feeding people, building shit, making shit work, all the people that count on me, and shit that won’t get done without me. Basically it’s down to people and shit. I prefer it that way.” He took another rag, put one end in the bleach, pulled it up and shook it, and wiped along an already-shining surface near the spark coil. “And I don’t envy you your job, Heather, but I sure as hell am glad someone is doing it.”
“I’m not so sure I’m glad it’s me.”
“Well, I’m glad it’s you. You at least kind of seem to have your head on straight.” He glanced around, and lowered his voice. “Is it just me, or does it look like our president is becoming excessively presidential? I mean, when we picked him up, he was just a little guy trying to do a big job; now I think he’s becoming a very big guy who feels entitled to a very big job. The way he was with the California legislature? Like fucking Mussolini or something. And lately when he speaks to a crowd, like in Sacramento… he’s not quite the guy that I saw in Pale Bluff.”
It was very much what Heather had been saying to herself, and she wanted to argue, but it just seemed… true. “It used to be he was right about so much, and no one listened. Now they—”
A Ranger sergeant from Fort Lewis was trotting toward them, carrying a clipboard, and Chris Manckiewicz was running beside him, comical as only a middle-aged former fat guy trying to keep up with a young athlete can be. “Looks like there’ve been some decisions,” Heather said.
The sergeant said, “Mr. Larsen, we’ve finally got a manifest together, sort of, with who’s going where. Ms. O’Grainne, you’re on, along with Mr. Manckiewicz here—”
Heather was annoyed. “So apparently the new president is so far gone into playing president that he has to have media coverage—”
“Uh,” Chris said, “I think that—”
“I don’t blame you for wanting to be with the president, Chris, but—”
“Actually,” Chris said, “it’s more of a—”
“But I’m getting seriously pissed off and worried about the way that he’s coming down with Shaunsen’s disease, and—”
“Heather.” Quattro’s voice was soft but very firm, and she stopped. “Chris gets a seat because he’s sitting next to me; he’s the copilot.”
“Oh,” Heather said, flushing.
“So I’ll be busy on the flight,” Chris said, “but I do think you’ve got some interesting things to say. How about an interview once we’re in Olympia?”
ABOUT TWO WEEKS LATER. OLYMPIA, NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. (OLYMPIA. WASHINGTON.) 1:00 P.M. PST. MONDAY. JANUARY 20.
“It’s hard to put together much of a band when all the plastic goes,” Ramirez was saying, apologetically, to Heather. “Some of the more expensive wooden clarinets with felt pads, a few all-metal brass instruments, a couple of drums where the skins are really skins, that’s about all we could do. Too many little plastic rings and gaskets in modern instruments, so that even the ones that were mostly metal or mostly wood have pads and fittings, here and there, that are gone and can’t be replaced right away.” Ramirez was the senior bandmaster from Fort Lewis, where four units had bands and three National Guard bands came for practice. He’d rounded up players and instruments from the Army, the National Guard, several different fife and drum corps, a couple of conservatories, and local high schools, and managed to get them all together to rehearse on just three weeks’ notice. He didn’t even seem to think it had been hard, saying only that “band standards tend to be patriotic numbers, anyway, we just had to work out what version of what we were playing.”
Heather had been put in charge of this silly little parade, which was officially the Inauguration of the Fiftieth President. By counting Shaunsen, the boss gets a significant-looking number—and he wanted that. I don’t know if he’s becoming more presidential, but his marketing instincts are getting sharper. Maybe that is becoming more presidential.
Ramirez would be leading and conducting the New National Band, and the only evidence he had that all his hard work mattered was Heather’s interest—which I’m faking as hard as I can, so I sure hope it works. All she knew about music was that it came out of funny-looking machines, and you didn’t want to marry the people who made it.
They decided without much fuss that the band would play whatever songs popped into Ramirez’s head along the two-mile route of the march, “America the Beautiful” as they passed the reviewing stand, “Hail to the Chief” when Graham went up to the rostrum, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” just after the Pledge of Allegiance.
“Remind everyone of the word change on that one,” Heather said.
“One indivisible nation under God,” he said. “We’ve been practicing. Nobody’s told us why.”
“Because Graham Weisbrod is a fussy old professor, and grammatically that’s closer to right, and there are a large number of people, some with guns, out there, who have doubts about whether we are really one indivisible nation, so we’re supposed to say we are. And Graham says that ‘under God’ was wedged in there in the first place, decades after the Pledge was written, because a lot of Rebs who wouldn’t admit they’d lost the war wanted to separate the ideas of ‘indivisible’ and ‘nation.’”
Ramirez glanced around first, and kept his voice low. “You’ve known President Weisbrod a long time?”
“Twenty-one years. More than half my life.”
“Do you think he’s up to the job?”
“I think he’ll do his absolute best to do it,” except of course when he’s reveling in having his ego massaged—and whatever else Allie is massaging for him.
Meow, she self-critiqued. She knew that wasn’t completely fair, and hell, a few months ago, if Graham had found a younger, intelligent girlfriend like Allie… Well, but I have to clean up the mess that this made of Arnie to keep our Genius in Chief functioning, and deal with Allie’s complete devotion to Graham’s career; used to be he had a chief of staff who would tell him when he was being an idiot, not encourage it. It seems dumb in an egotistical way, Graham, I just want to say that to you and have you listen, I just want you to consider it.
“I guess that’s all we can really ask of anyone,” the bandleader said.
His words fit her thought so well that it took her a moment to retrace the conversation. “I wish I knew for sure that Graham Weisbrod’s best would be as much as we need. I wasn’t really trying to evade your question, or not much, anyway. It’s just that there’s three questions behind it. Will Graham do his best? He always has, as long as I’ve known him.” Crossed fingers. “Will his best be good enough for the job? I wish I knew.” Crossed till the knuckles bleed. “And could anyone’s best be good enough to do the job, or is it just impossible? Only God knows that.” And You’ d better be crossing Your fingers, too.
The man nodded. “Well, tell him we all pray for him to succeed.”
“He knows, but I’ll tell him again.”
Comparatively, arranging the Rangers was easy; they knew how to march, they all knew where they were going, they’d march there. “I don’t think we can get lost,” Captain Parmenter said, grinning. “We know we’re between the band and the screaming junkpile.”
She grinned back. “Thanks for giving me a one-minute break between people with difficulties. Congratulations on the unit honor and I’m going to applaud my brains out when you receive it.”
Her next stop was at the “screaming junkpile”—the experimental coal-dust turbine car from Evergreen State that was going to be carrying the mayor, the governor, and the base commander from Lewis. Its best feature was also its worst; the experiment with putting a damped hydraulic into a double-bowed axle, so that the whole thing could run on steel-rimmed wheels, seemed to be working, but with only a greased axle for a bearing, it made a horrendous grinding squeal. At le
ast it would keep people from noticing any mistakes by the band. Actually it could easily keep people from noticing a fire engine, an air raid, and Rainier erupting.
The two engineering professors in charge of it were warming it up, so it was hard to hear each other over the whoosh and howl of its exhaust, but she figured they knew that they were supposed to follow the Rangers and not drop back where their foul blue exhaust might annoy the president, who would be riding with General McIntyre, the new Secretary of the Armed Forces, in a ceremonial coach, pulled from a museum, in which an early governor of Washington had once ridden.
And if Allie is in there with them, I’m going to rip her hair off to use for wadding when I ram her puny tits down her throat. The least he could do is make a First Lady of her; they should be thinking about how it looks to have the Chief of Staff be the presidential skank. Whoa, that thought came naturally. Guess I’ll have to keep working on those professionalism and civility issues. Maybe HR will offer a seminar or something.
Behind Graham Weisbrod and Norm McIntyre, there would be a wagon with the rest of the Cabinet-To-Be, mostly politicians with a scattering of professors and businesspeople, all from Washington and Oregon.
Heather made sure the new Cabinet were all there, ready to “walk and wave.” Heather told them that as far as she was concerned, it would be fine if Commerce and Future held hands during the parade; made sure Education’s backup wheelchair would stay within easy reach; and reassured Treasury and Foreign Relations that this wasn’t too much like a circus coming to town. Not too much. Actually I’m afraid it may not be enough.
Wonder if anyone will even notice that Graham Weisbrod reorganized and renamed half the jobs in the Cabinet? Let alone that he should have waited for Congress to do that, that it’s their prerogative.
After the Cabinet, there was the agglomeration of volunteer organizations and units whose positions Heather had allocated by rolling dice, which she privately thought of as the Department of Everything Else: everyone who just wanted to be in the first inaugural parade ever held in the new national capital. There were Boy Scout troops, fragmentary high-school bands, and the GLBT Small Apple Growers (it had become clearer once she realized that it was the farm, not the apple, that was small); several unions, veterans’ associations, and the Daughters of the World Wars; antique machinery buffs driving steam combines and highwheels, a diving salvage company that was pledging to be the “first back in the water,” and the “Portland to Reno Reconstituted Pony Express, Orphans Preferred.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to speculate about how you reconstituted a pony.
