Arc Light (68 page)

“What are you talking about?” the President said slowly in a tone both confused and challenging. He looked at his people and said, “What is he talking about?” Nobody ventured a comment, and they looked as if they might as well have been seated on hot griddles as they tried not to fidget with their pads and papers or books filled with the latest printouts.

“Mr. President,” the chairman of the independent “Fed” said, “our estimates are rough—plus or minus five or even ten percent—but we're looking at, this month, a drop in Gross Domestic Product of between twenty-five and thirty-five percent on an annualized basis. Now we haven't dealt as a country with anything like this since the Great Depression, and this one could very well be worse. Our estimates put the Index of Leading Economic Indicators somewhere in the twenties. Anything under fifty is a recession, and the twenties is uncharted territory.”

The President looked as if he suddenly saw a speeding bus
bearing down on him, and he began to shake his head. “No, no.” He looked again at his own economic advisers whose jobs hung now by a thread. “You people told me that the war damage from the nuclear strikes and contamination might—
might
—give us a slight negative growth, like one or two percent, but this is totally unexpected. Totally
unbelievable!”

“The problem with the numbers we've been using,” the Fed chairman said, “that you, we, everybody has been using, is that they look only at the physical damage to the country's plant and equipment and the human losses. That ignores the psychological damage. Sir”—he leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table as he stared down at his clasped hands,—“nobody is working. Oh, we've got reasonably good production coming out of the critical armaments industries, but it's the butter side of the ‘guns and butter' equation that is the problem. The emergency census figures had a huge blind spot. They only looked at the disaster sites, and meanwhile the populations of our major cities just up and fled, abandoning their homes, their jobs, everything. They're living in the country with relatives, or in inns and motels off of their savings.” He shook his head. “It's as if the population of our country has just made one mass suicidal economic decision. You see, sir, consumption has remained more or less steady, but incomes are plummeting. The shortfall is made up by disinvestment, by people spending their savings. We need those savings, sir, to invest in the reconstruction of our damaged areas.”

“But I don't understand. Why? Why is this happening?”

“Fear, sir. Fear of an all-out nuclear war, or, what do you call it, ‘general' war. Fear of the Bastion.”

The President buried his head in his hands and grabbed his scalp as if stricken by a sudden migraine. “What's the bottom line?” he asked dejectedly, ignoring now his ashen advisers.

“The bottom line, sir, is that if we don't get people back to work soon—September, October at the latest—the situation is going to be irreversible. Businesses already laboring under the new taxes will fail, increasing unemployment and decreasing tax revenue. The budget deficit will mushroom, shooting interest rates up as Treasury's borrowings chase money at ever higher rates of interest. That will push even greater numbers of businesses and individuals into bankruptcy. Banks will fail, and up the deficit will go again as depositors are bailed out.”

The President raised his head and sighed. “What can we do? What can
I
do?”

“Talk the people into going back to work. Use the ‘Bully Pulpit' and get them back to their jobs.”

“If they're scared shitless of another round of nuclear exchanges, what do I tell them? That it's impossible? Go on home, and if I'm wrong they won't be around to vote against me next election anyway?”

“You could alter your war aims,” the Fed chairman said. He shrugged and raised his hands. “It's not my place, obviously, but tensions seem to me to be growing, not easing. Chemical weapons, radioactive fallout—anything seems possible now, the whole Pandora's box. If you were to back off the demands that the Russians have found most objectionable, then maybe people would trickle back in before it's too late.”

The President's eyes drifted, and slowly his head began to shake. “I'm between a rock and a hard place, but I can't back off on the war just to see if people go back to work.” He was gazing off into space, his voice barely penetrating from the depths.

“Why don't we just win it quickly?” Lambert asked, and everyone turned to him. “If it's a timing thing, if we've got a couple of months, let's just pour it on and get it over with.”

There was silence for the next few moments.

“Could we actually do it in that time frame?” the Fed chairman asked.

“How quickly could we go if we pulled out all the stops?” the President asked. “If we cut some corners and took some risks, could we finish it up by the end of September?”

“Well, we've discussed the ‘quick-win' strategy at the staff level, sir,” Lambert said. The “Karelian Variant,” Lambert remembered the planners had called it. “It would entail substantial risk, and the Joint Chiefs unanimously rejected even recommending it to you, but if it worked we could win by the end of August even, if we get a couple of breaks,” he said, going out on a limb.

The President looked over at the chairman of the Federal Reserve and cocked his head. The chairman shrugged. “Well,” the President said, placing his hands palm down on the table, “I'll take to the ‘Bully Pulpit' and do what I can. I'll try to calm everybody down and get them back into the cities. I'll set up a team of people to study and work on the problem—it'll get my highest priority. And Greg,” he said, turning to look at Lambert, “I want a full NSC meeting in four hours and a complete briefing on this ‘quick-win' strategy.”

As they filed out of the room, all Lambert could think was how angry General Thomas was going to be when Lambert informed him he had told the President about their high-risk contingency plan, the Karelian Variant.

“Who's next?” Chandler asked as he and the other two officers, the captain who commanded Alpha Company and his lieutenant who commanded 2nd Platoon, walked toward the next of the widely spaced M-1A1 main battle tanks.

“Two-three,” the lieutenant said. “That's Adams in command, Martinez is loader, Hartley's the gunner, and Ross drives.”

As they strode purposefully toward the tank, the captain and the junior officer to Chandler's left both matching Chandler's pace and in step, Chandler's eyes strayed over the irregularly patched camo netting of the massive vehicle. The dark green matched the green of the trees that filled the woods across the rolling hills in the distance. If it wasn't for the thick barrel of the main gun, whose muzzle extended from the net and pointed toward the treeline, together with the open hatches and two machine guns left free to fire on top, it would be difficult to tell that it was anything more than a natural protuberance, even at close range. It would, however, still be warmer than the soil; it would glow on the sunny summer day in the perpetual darkness of enemy gunners' thermal sights.

“How's it going, trooper?” Chandler asked the thick-necked, muscular sergeant who protruded from the top of the vehicle he commanded, shirtless but wearing his tanker's helmet with the three chevrons mounted on front.

“Afternoon, M-m-m-major,” the man said, stiffening as the three officers stepped up to the treads. He looked ill at ease.

“I cain't git the thing unstuck,” a skinny soldier said, poking his head and sweat-soaked T-shirt out of the loader's hatch and dropping the heavy wrench he carried onto the flat deck of the turret with a clank as he saluted awkwardly with greasy hands.

Chandler returned his salute, and the sergeant looked down from his commander's hatch and kicked with his foot. “Hey, get on up here. We g-g-got comp'ny.”

“Say c'mon, ma-a-n. I ain't finished my dessert yet,” Chandler heard from the tank.

“It's the M-m-major,” the sergeant whispered, staring down and kicking again.

“Yeah, right. And is General Thomas hisself out there too?”

“Git on up here, Martinez!” the second man yelled.

“You t-too Ross,” the vehicle commander bent over and shouted down into the tank.

Finally, the other two crewmen popped up, each saluting in surprise as they saw the entourage. One carefully put his plastic cup and
spoon on the turret and pulled his Walkman headphones from his ears, the strident tones of loud music the only sound audible in the silence.

“You men getting all you need?” Chandler asked.

“Yes, sir” came from all of them at once, and Chandler smiled. This was his first “walk-around” through Alpha Company. These men had been on perimeter his first full tour around the battalion while on the road and, during his second, off on a “parade,” a drive through the center of one of the smaller villages the allies were not permanently occupying in order to put the fear of God in the natives.

“Any w-w-word on when we might get some f-f-fuel, sir?” Adams asked. “We barely got enough t-to keep the batteries charged.”

“Supposed to get some tomorrow, as a matter of fact. Then we'll be off on down the road.”

“You'd th-think we could take some from that pipeline down there,” Adams said, and everyone turned to watch as the American civilian workers laid a pipe roughly parallel to the line along which they had advanced. The pipe, everyone knew, was one of several massive projects to run fuel from refineries in Romania and Italy directly to the front. Even with the effort, however, the gas-guzzling mechanized armies of the West were barely averting disaster, so great was their need for POL—petroleum, oil, and lubricants. Chandler, like the other field commanders, had taken to issuing chits of paper to free-lance Eastern European drivers who filled their decrepit tanker trucks full of low-octane fuel in the West and somehow negotiated the war-torn roads of Ukraine to sell their loads at outrageous profits. He had no idea whether the army would honor the chits, but he didn't feel too bad about the horse-trading given the problems the fuel's impurities regularly caused in his tanks' high-tech turbines.

“How long till we see some action, Major?” the skinny kid from the loader's hatch asked. “I thought we were supposed to be halfway to Kiev by now.”

“Don't know. According to the last map I saw at brigade,” Chandler said, pointing off to the southwest, “the Russians are about forty miles that way”—he turned to the northeast—“and about thirty miles that way. But we're still headed that way,” he said, pointing to the northwest, “and we got a way to go before we can expect any contact.”

“That's the way to M-m-moscow, i'n't it, sir?”

“It's up that way somewhere.” Chandler nodded, slapping his hand on the fender. “Okay, you men carry on. If you need anything, just let me know.”

They all grinned from ear to ear for some reason at his comment, but they saluted respectfully and Chandler and the others turned to head off to the next tank. After walking a short distance, the lieutenant whispered, “Adams has a little stuttering problem, but it's not usually that bad. He was just a little nervous, I guess. He's really fine on the radio.”

“Hey, Major, sir!” they heard shouted from the tank. “How ‘bout some beer?” The crew broke out laughing. “When we get to Moscow!” Chandler shouted, turning around.

Off to the right in the distance behind the tank, a small black disk rose up above the treeline, the treetops behind it smudged in the heat of its exhaust before it fell gently back to the nape of the earth. Behind it, barely visible almost a mile away, hovered a helicopter, peeking out around the side of a hill.

“Holy . . . !” the company commander said just as a hollow, thudding boom crashed into the opposite side of the tank, forcing Adams and Hartley to grab hold of the hatches.

Blue fire shot thirty feet straight out of the hatches on the turret and the driver's hatch in front as the crashing wall of noise and lick of heat broke fiercely across Chandler. Hartley was shot clear out of the tank and did a somersault in the air, to land limply headfirst on the ground in front, tangled in the shredded netting. The driver lay draped over the glacis half out of his hatch as the fire from inside began to consume him. The third man had just disappeared somewhere under the netting. It was Adams who commanded the attention of the stunned officers.

He was screaming in a pitch so high that his voice sounded like the cry of an animal as he crawled out of his hatch, each lung full of air and shriek ending with a shuddering quiver like a child's sob. The man looked insane with pain as he slid off the turret, his body, the very skin of his naked torso, ablaze in a white fire tinged with yellow—a human torch.

The lieutenant screamed, “Adams!” and bolted for the burning tank from which a popping, crackling noise began to sound ominously. The captain leapt out to tackle the young man from behind.
“No!”
the senior officer shouted as he rode the kicking platoon leader to the ground. Several jets of white smoke began to shoot from seams in the rear deck of the tank as Adams flopped to the ground but then rose quickly to stumble away, slapping at his chest and head as if being attacked by a swarm of bees.

The rear deck of the tank blew sky high in a fountain of pure flame. Chandler's head wobbled as he tried to regain his balance and realized then that he was lying on his back propped up on his elbows. The heat burned at his exposed skin and the violence of the roar
scraped painfully at his eardrums as his eyes were forced closed by the heat of the fire from the tank's ammunition, which cooked off through the rear deck's blow-out panels a hundred feet into the air.