kids just plain love you.”
Charles Pemberton, son and grandson of ushers at the White House, poured three drinks, just a light one for himself, and handed the glasses over with the grace of a neurosurgeon.
“Sit down and relax, Charlie. I have a question for you.”
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“Where did you ride it out? Where did you stay when that H-bomb was coming down on Washington?”
“I didn’t go to the shelter in the East Wing, figured that was best for the womenfolk. I—well, sir, I took the elevator up to the roof and figured I’d just watch.”
“Arnie, there sits a brave man,” Jack said, saluting with his glass.
“Where were you, Mr. President?” Pemberton asked, breaking the etiquette rules because of pure curiosity.
“I was on the ship that shot the damned thing down, watching our boys do their job. That reminds me, this Gregory guy, the scientist that Tony Bretano got involved. We look after him, Arnie. He’s one of the people who saved the day.”
“Duly noted, Mr. President.” Van Damm took a big pull on his glass. “What else?”
“I don’t have a what-else right now,” SWORDSMAN admitted.
Neither did anyone in Beijing, where it was now eight in the morning, and the ministers were filing into their conference room like sleepwalkers, and the question on everyone’s lips was “What happened?”
Premier Xu called the meeting to order and ordered the Defense Minister to make his report, which he did in the monotone voice of a phone recording.
“You ordered the launch?” Foreign Minister Shen asked, aghast.
“What else was I to do? General Xun told me his base was under attack. They were trying to take our assets away—we spoke of this possibility, did we not?”
“We spoke of it, yes,” Qian agreed. “But to do such a thing without our approval? That was a political action without reflection, Luo. What new dangers have you brought on us?”
“And what resulted from it?” Fang asked next.
“Evidently, the warhead either malfunctioned or was somehow intercepted and destroyed by the Americans. The only missile that launched successfully was targeted on Washington. The city was not, I regret to say, destroyed.”
“You regret to say—you regret to say?” Fang’s voice spoke more loudly than anyone at the table could ever remember. “You fool! If you had succeeded, we would be facing national death now! You regret?”
At about that time in Washington, a mid-level CIA bureaucrat had an idea. They were feeding live and taped coverage from the Siberian battlefield over the Internet, because independent news coverage wasn’t getting into the People’s Republic. “Why not,” he asked his supervisor, “send them CNN as well?” That decision was made instantaneously, though it was possibly illegal, maybe a violation of copyright laws. But on this occasion, common sense took precedence over bureaucratic caution. CNN, they decided quickly, could bill them later.
And so, an hour and twenty minutes after the event, http://www.darkstarfeed.cia.gov/siberiabattle/realtime.rambegan to cover the coverage of the near-destruction of Washington, D.C. The news that a nuclear war had been begun but aborted stunned the students in Tiananmen Square. The collective realization that they themselves might be the targets of a retaliatory strike did not put fear so much as rage into their young hearts. There were about ten thousand of them now, many with their portable laptop computers, and many of those hooked into cell phones for Internet access. From overhead you could tell their positions just by the tiny knots of pressed-together bodies. Then the leaders of the demonstration got together and started talking fast among themselves. They knew they had to do something, they just didn’t know exactly what. For all they knew, they might well all be facing death.
The ardor was increased by the commentators CNN had hurriedly rushed into their studios in Atlanta and New York, many of whom opined that the only likely action for America was to reply in kind to the Chinese attack, and when the reporter acting as moderator asked what “in kind” meant, the reply was predictable.
For the students, the question now was not so much life and death as saving their nation—the thirteen hundred million citizens whose lives had been made forfeit by the mad-men of the Politburo. The Council of Ministers Building was not all that far away, and the crowd started heading that way.
By this time, there was a police presence in the Square of Heavenly Peace. The morning watch replaced the night team and saw the mass of young people—to their considerable surprise, since this had not been a part of their