Arc Light (65 page)

Lambert began shaking his head, the whole concept seeming ridiculous to him. More people, strangers in his government and those of his allies, seemed to know him and treat him with greater deference than before, but he had just assumed that to be because of his heightened importance during the war. But Rosen was right, Lambert realized, about one thing: he had been out of it since the nuclear attack and didn't know what was going on aboveground. He was curious. “Come on, Greg. Surely you must know how it's being played?” His voice was low, playfully conspiratorial. “You're a bright guy. You've been in the business for a while.”

Lambert resented the implication that he was somehow cultivating his public image, and he glared back at Rosen.

“You really don't know, do you?” Rosen sat back. “Well, I'll be damned. Paul was right,” he said, shaking his head. “Okay, let me lay it out for you. And I mean no disrespect, but this is what your press boils down to.” He held up one hand as if he were placing block letters in the air in front of Lambert. “ ‘Former jock.' ” He looked down at Lambert. “Basketball, right?” Lambert nodded, and Rosen's hands went back up in the air. “ ‘Former basketball player turned Harvard scholar.' Risen to become national security adviser at, what, thirty-eight? Tries desperately to stop President Livingston from foolish act that leads to the war in which his wife perishes. Not caring about risk, he delivers supplies into radioactive capital on off chance of finding her and, tragically, he does. Despite being distraught, young aide doesn't bow to pressure, thinks of country first, and bravely testifies to end nation's constitutional crisis.”

“Are you finished?” Lambert asked, barely managing to hide his disgust.

Rosen sighed. “Come on, Greg,” he said apologetically. “I'm sorry if I offended you. But I'm just doing my job. And my job is to cut through the bullshit.”

Greg laughed and looked up at the ceiling.

“You think that's funny? You think that I'm nothing
but
bullshit? Well, you're right. I live in bullshit. I wade knee-deep through it every waking hour. But you know the scary thing? So does the President, son, so does the President. You think everything is crisp and neat and clean like your morning briefings—just the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But I'm here to tell you that ninety percent of what the President hears on any given day is bullshit. ‘The tax credit for steel plant expansion will lower the per unit cost of the navy's new ships significantly, Mr. President,' only come to find out new ships are mostly made of aluminum, not steel. ‘There were some minor bidding irregularities in mining leases for that lot, but it's nothing that should raise any eyebrows,' and then the sweetheart deals in the Bureau of Land Management's ‘Coppergate' blow up in our faces. ‘There has been price gouging, war profiteering in our materials costs and we've got to put a federal cap on magnesium prices,' only to find out from the magnesium mining companies after issuing the price controls that the fabricators who gave us those figures are making a two hundred and thirty percent profit that makes us look like dupes, at best, or criminal coconspirators at worst.”

“So what are you saying, Sol? I've got to go give a briefing.”

“I'm saying, cutting through all the bullshit, that you're a big tall good-looking guy with strong favorables! Did you know you were the number one choice among the crackpots and retirees who wrote in to replace Secretary Moore over at the State Department? And the Democratic National Committee flagged you when your name kept coming up unsolicited in focus groups the DNC put together to float Paul's new Cabinet nominees before sending them to the Senate.” Rosen stared intently at Lambert now. “I want you to go on that tour with the President, stick by his side like a leech. Figure out where every camera is and position yourself so that you show up right behind or to the side, but never in front, of the President. Speak up if the President calls you to the mike—I don't care what you say. Just be there, Greg.”

Lambert huffed and tried to think of a way out.

“Greg, I want this,” Rosen said. “I want this, and so does the President.”

The blackened, twisted wreckage of the city slid by underneath the Coast Guard helicopter as President Costanzo and Lambert, both strapped tightly into their seats, facing each other on either side of the large open side door, stared down in horror. Every tree was blackened, every house was burned and broken, the highways and major streets were jammed with cars charred deep brown on the side facing the naval shipyard but brightly painted their various colors on the sheltered side.

“And you say people made it out of there?” the President shouted over the noise.

The helmeted crew chief nodded in exaggerated motion as the minicam, held high by the standing cameraman, pointed down to take the whole picture in: the President asking questions, shaking his head, pointing at particularly devastated churches or schools for Lambert to look at, all the while the blackened landscape streaming by.

“Three thirty at the latest”
was all that kept running through Lambert's mind.
“When do you have to make the network feed for the evening news?”
Rosen had asked before they boarded, before they cut a visit to a burn unit from the itinerary so that the reporter from the television pool could make his deadline.
“No loss,”
Rosen had said to the President's advance man.
“The pictures wouldn't have been worth a shit. Nobody wants to see that at dinnertime.”

The helicopter heeled over and headed inland, and Lambert watched as the trees became greener, the occasional house stood with only windows broken, and the roads were clear. Passing a set of roadblocks clearly visible along several twisting roads into the town, life suddenly appeared. The trees were all bent over away from the sea as if by some great hurricane, but in open spaces passed one after the other by the speeding helicopter Lambert saw large groups of people living like squatters in a variety of army and Red Cross tents or in lean-tos and other crude shelters. Lambert wondered why they hadn't gone farther away, instead of just to the other side of the barricades.
There isn't anything left,
he thought.
Why stay?
But he knew the answer. This was home—not the house in which they lived, but the place.

The helicopter settled slowly toward the earth, sinking to a large, open area on the edge of one of the camps. The President took the opportunity as the cameraman changed batteries to look at the three-by-five cards he had taken from his jacket pocket, flipping them one after the other in a rapid review. He waved Rosen over and held up a card, shouting, “How do you pronounce this guy's name?”

“Ree-show!” Rosen replied.

“And he's, what, the new mayor?”

“County Clerk!” Rosen yelled, and the President nodded. “He's a Democrat!”

The helicopter settled in, and Lambert looked at his watch.
Jesus, I've got so much to do,
he thought testily.

“Let's go, Greg,” the President said slapping his leg as the whine from the rotors began to die down.

Lambert followed the President out, Rosen giving way so that Lambert would be right behind Costanzo. There was polite applause for the warm-up speaker by the people gathered to greet the President, but Lambert also saw a sprinkling of signs at the fringes of the crowd on which were scrawled
FOOD, SHELTER, CLOTHING, MEDICINE!
and
AMERICA FIRST!

They walked toward a small platform on which stood a row of chairs and, in front, a podium. As the helicopter's engines fell silent, Lambert heard the speaker's rousing voice, the Southern accent deep.

“ . . . because we are
all
citizens of the
U
-nited States, the ger-
reatest
nation on the face of the earth!” There was applause and a couple of cheers, but Lambert thought the large crowd to be surprisingly dispirited—nothing like the roars that he had heard during his earlier forays into Presidential campaigns as a volunteer.

The President noticed it too. “Thank God the election isn't
this
November,” he turned and said with a smile to Lambert and Rosen as they approached the edge of the podium. They all waited for the local politician's introduction.

“And now, without further ado,” he said, and there was a sprinkling of applause and some laughter, “the
Pres
-ident of the
U
-nited States, Mr. Paul Co-stan-zo!” As the audience applauded, a band struck up and Lambert looked across the platform to see what looked to be a high school band, very few of its small number wearing any semblance of their uniform—many, in fact, standing there with no instrument at all—as they croaked out a truly wretched rendition of “Hail to the Chief.”

Lambert sat beside the “master of ceremonies,” a grinning, cherubic man so brimming with enthusiasm that he resumed his applause, joined rhythmic clapping that was slowly developing in the crowd of several thousand.

The President spoke. There was intermittent applause, and Lambert dutifully joined in. But he heard nothing, his mind in a daze. Finally, the man next to him rose during one of the extended periods of applause and joined the President at the podium.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” the South Carolinian said, “for
those most gracious words.” The man turned and looked back, straight at Lambert.

“Now, I wonder if we might be able to coax a word or two from your Mr. Lambert?” the cherub said, half turning to look at Lambert as the cheers rose up again.
Shit!
Lambert thought as he glanced at the President, who motioned him to the podium with a wave of his hand. He instantly felt the heat of a full-blown blush assault his face, and as County Clerk Ree-show stood back from the podium applauding as fast as his pudgy hands could manage, Lambert rose and walked up to the microphone, which he had to raise so that it didn't press into the middle of his chest. The cameraman already had the camera on his shoulder and back to his eye, and the red light was blazing. The roving cameraman did not focus in on any narrow band of the crowd this time, but had walked back all the way to the stage itself and panned the full width of the still cheering throng.

Lambert just stood there, letting the crowd's cheers die in their own time. The President and the MC took their seats behind him. As the crowd grew quiet, Lambert felt himself all alone at the podium. In front of him were the faces of thousands of people, many of them dirty and etched with deep lines that he imagined must be the result of a loss, of grief. It touched a chord, a common experience, a shared feeling.

“I have never been to Charleston before,” he began, his voice coming back to him through the speakers much louder than he expected. “I have probably never met any of you before. I'm not a politician. I've never run for or been elected to any office in my life.”

He swallowed the lump that was forming in his throat as the words he was about to speak formed in his head. “Until the night of June eleventh, I was, like all of you, just going about my life, living it from day to day without. . . without appreciating just what it was that I had.” Even his sigh was audible over the speakers. “Unlike some of you, however”—he felt his eyes water, and he fought against the tears—“I had the distinct privilege of saying good-bye to my wife. I was able to put my arms around her, to kiss her, and to say ‘I love you' one last time. I had that privilege because of my job, of course, because I was informed of the emergency while at dinner with her. But I have, I must tell you,” he said, air coming into his lungs raggedly, “I have felt some guilt about that. I felt that guilt because I know that many people, many of you, did not have that opportunity. Maybe it was your spouse at work on the night shift, or your parents away in another part of town, or your children, God forbid, asleep in their beds while you were away. Maybe your last words with your spouse were in argument, or your last act a scolding
of your child, or maybe you had forgotten to call your parents for too long.”

Lambert looked up to see men and women hugging, lonely figures sobbing into hands clasped over their mouths and faces, all staring up at him in rapt attention.

“But you see, we all have our private agonies. We all have our crosses to bear. I keep telling myself—every time I awaken and I look over at the cot in my windowless underground office to see that my wife is not there beside me, as she was in my dreams—I keep telling myself that it will pass, that I will get over it if I just fill my days and nights with more work, more activity, more meetings and phone calls and reports. But the cruel truth is, it will not pass. I have lost someone who is—was—so clearly more precious than I ever knew during the time that I had her.

“I know, standing here today after having seen what happened to your city, that each of you understands that loss, and I take a special strength from knowing that. I only hope that you can take strength from hearing these words, from knowing that, in tens of millions of hearts and tens of millions of souls in every part of this country and across the sea in the country of our enemy, there are others out there who struggle day and night with the same burden. I only hope that you take strength from hearing that you are not alone—you are not alone. Thank you.”

Lambert stepped away from the podium to dead silence. His head was hung and he saw only the shoes of the people seated behind him as they rose. He looked up to see the arms of President Costanzo reach out to give him a gentle bear hug as the first tentative applause rose up from the crowd. The clerk and the other men and women from Charleston on the podium gathered around, and hands patted him on the shoulders, a woman touching his head softly.