her.” He looked over to see Andrea standing in the doorway, always the watchful protector of her President.
“She’s a good troop,” Jackson agreed.
“How’s your dad doing?”
“Not too bad. Some TV ministry agency wants him and Gerry Patterson to do some more salt-and-pepper shows on Sunday mornings. He’s thinking about it. The money could dress up the church some.”
“They were impressive together.”
“Yeah, Gerry didn’t do bad for a white boy—and he’s actually a pretty good guy, Pap says. I’m not sure of this TV-ministry stuff, though. Too easy to go Hollywood and start playing to the audience instead of being a shepherd to your flock.”
“Your father’s a pretty impressive gent, Robby.”
Jackson looked up. “I’m glad you think so. He raised us pretty good, and it was pretty tough on him after Mom died. But he can be a real sundowner. Gets all pissy when he sees me drink a beer. But, what the hell, it’s his job to yell at people, I suppose.”
“Tell him that Jesus played bartender once. It was his first public miracle.”
“I’ve pointed that out, and then he says, if Jesus wants to do it, that’s okay for Jesus, boy, but you ain’t Jesus.” The Vice President had a good chuckle. “Eat, Jack.”
“Yes, Mom.”
This food isn’t half bad,” Al Gregory said, two miles away in the wardroom of USS Gettysburg.
“Well, no women and no booze on a ship of war,” Captain Blandy pointed out. “Not this one yet, anyway. You have to have some diversion. So, how are the missiles?”
“The software is fully loaded, and I e-mailed the upgrade like you said. So all the other Aegis ships ought to have it.”
“Just heard this morning that the Aegis office in the Pentagon is having a bit of a conniption fit over this. They didn’t approve the software.”
“Tell ’em to take it up with Tony Bretano,” Gregory suggested.
“Explain to me again, what exactly did you upgrade?”
“The seeker software on the missile warhead. I cut down the lines of code so it can recycle more quickly. And I reprogrammed the nutation rate on the laser on the fusing system so that I can handle a higher rate of closure. It should obviate the problem the Patriots had with the Scuds back in ’91—I helped with that software fix, too, back then, but this one’s about half an order of magnitude faster.”
“Without a hardware fix?” the skipper asked.
“It would be better to increase the range of the laser, yes, but you can get away without it—at least it worked okay on the computer simulations.”
“Hope to hell we don’t need to prove it.”
“Oh, yeah, Captain. A nuke headed for a city is a bad thing.”
“Amen.”
There were five thousand of them now, with more coming, summoned by the cell phones that they all seemed to have. Some even had portable computers tied into cellular phones so that they could tap into the Internet site out here in the open. It was a clear night, with no rain to wreck a computer. The leaders of the crowd—they now thought of it as a demonstration—huddled around them to see more, and then relayed it to their friends. The first big student uprising in Tiananmen Square had been fueled by faxes. This one had taken a leap forward in technology. Mainly they milled around, talking excitedly with one another, and summoning more help. The first such demonstration had failed, but they’d all been toddlers then and their memory of it was sketchy at best. They were all old and educated enough to know what needed changing, but not yet old and experienced enough to know that change in their society was impossible. And they didn’t know what a dangerous combination that could be.
The ground below was dark and unlit. Even their night-vision goggles didn’t help much, showing only rough terrain features, mainly the tops of hills and ridges. There were few lights below. There were some houses and other buildings, but at this time of night few people were awake, and all of the lights were turned off.
The only moving light sources they could see were the rotor tips of the helicopters, heated by air friction to the point that they would be painful to touch, and hot enough to glow in the infrared spectrum that the night goggles could detect. Mainly the troops were lulled into stuporous lassitude by the unchanging vibration of the aircraft, and the semi-dreaming state that came with it helped to pass the time.
That was not true of Clark, who sat