spending too much time online, but to be fair, she thought I was spending too much time being drunk. I guess I’m an alcoholic. I guess I might have to do something about that now. I think I’ll start by finishing this.” And he swallows the last of his scotch.
Veronica has been divorced—twice—and has always been keenly aware that she herself was the primary agent of domestic ruin. When she thinks about how badly she behaved, how badly she used Robert and François, she feels ashamed and angry at herself, and so she is naturally glad to offer sympathy and solidarity to the wronged man beside her. Any opportunity to atone, no matter how small.
“I’m so sorry. What a terrible bomb to have dropped on you.”
“What did you say?” asks the girl across the aisle, leaning toward them again. The deep brown eyes behind those glasses never seem to blink. “Are we going to drop a nuclear bomb on them?”
She sounds more curious than afraid, but at this her mother exhales a sharp, panicked breath.
Gregg leans toward the child again, smiling in a way that is both kindly and wry, and Veronica suddenly wishes she were twenty years younger. She might’ve been good for a fellow like him. “I don’t know what the military options are, so I couldn’t say for sure. But—”
Before he can finish, the cabin fills with a nerve-shredding sonic howl.
An airplane slashes past, then two more flying in tandem. One is so near off the port wing that Veronica catches a glimpse of the man in the cockpit, helmeted, face cupped in some kind of breathing apparatus. These aircraft bear scant resemblance to the 777 carrying them east—these are immense iron falcons, the gray hue of bullet tips, of lead. The force of their passing causes the whole airliner to shudder. Passengers scream, grab each other. The punishing sound of the bombers crossing their path can be felt intestinally, in the bowels. Then they’re gone, having raked long contrails across the bright blue.
A shocked, shaken silence follows.
Veronica D’Arcy looks at Gregg Holder and sees he has smashed his plastic cup, made a fist, and broken it into flinders. He notices what he’s done at the same time and laughs and puts the wreckage on the armrest.
Then he turns back to the little girl and finishes his sentence as if there had been no interruption. “But I’d say all signs point to ‘yes.’”
SANDY SLATE IN COACH
“B-1s,” her love says to her, in a relaxed, almost pleased tone of voice. He has a sip of beer, smacks his lips. “Lancers. They used to carry a fully nuclear payload, but black Jesus did away with them. There’s still enough firepower on board to cook every dog in Pyongyang. Which is funny, because usually if you want cooked dog in North Korea, you have to make reservations.”
“They should’ve risen up,” Sandy says. “Why didn’t they rise up when they had a chance? Did they want work camps? Did they want to starve?”
“That’s the difference between the Western mind-set and the Oriental worldview,” Bobby says. “There, individualism is viewed as aberrant.” In a murmur he adds, “There’s a certain ant-colony quality to their thinking.”
“Excuse me,” says the Jew in the middle aisle, sitting next to the Asian girl. He couldn’t be any more Jewish if he had the beard and his hair in ringlets and the prayer shawl over his shoulders. “Could you lower your voice, please? My seatmate is upset.”
Bobby had lowered his voice, but even when he’s trying to be quiet, he has a tendency to boom. This wouldn’t be the first time it’s got them in trouble.
Bobby says, “She shouldn’t be. Come tomorrow morning, South Korea will finally be able to stop worrying about the psychopaths on the other side of the DMZ. Families will be reunited. Well. Some families. Cookie-cutter bombs don’t discriminate between military and civilian populations.”
Bobby speaks with the casual certainty of a man who has spent twenty years producing news segments for a broadcasting company that owns something like seventy local TV stations and specializes in distributing content free of mainstream media bias. He’s been to Iraq, to Afghanistan. He went to Liberia during the Ebola outbreak to do a piece investigating an ISIS plot to weaponize the virus. Nothing scares Bobby. Nothing rattles him.
Sandy was an unwed pregnant mother who’d been cast out by her parents and was sleeping in the supply room of a gas station between shifts on the day Bobby