Crooked (22 page)

“I don’t believe it. Any of it. This is bullshit.” This was John Mitchell, attorney general.

“John, let him finish,” I told him.

“You can’t seriously—is this a training exercise? I don’t understand how we can be sitting here discussing this.”

“To think so is not unusual,” Kissinger said. “I quite understand. You do not know the world as I do. You do not picture a time of strange and mighty races that voyaged between the stars, or a tragic war that shattered and changed them and confined them to Earth. You have not seen certain tombs in the sub-Saharan regions, or certain caves in the mountains of Antarctica, or the stars above Grand Carcosa, as I have. I have a limited understanding of such matters myself but—”

“I’m leaving, Mr. President.” Mitchell was on his feet now.

“John—”

“Respectfully, I’m not a scientist or a military man but I’ve heard enough.”

“Please keep your seat, Mr. Mitchell,” Henry said, but Mitchell was already walking away, and a few others had risen to join him.

Henry barked out a three-syllable word that afterward none of us could remember and they all stopped, perplexed. He said it again, louder, then raised a hand for silence. And in the silence we began to hear something that sounded like a human voice, a panicked wail or scream that went on and on; we waited for it to take a breath, but it didn’t.

“What sort of trick is this?” Haig growled.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Henry?”

“Let them see, Mr. President,” Henry said. “Let them see who waits for them on the other side. Let them consider the strategic implications.”

A cold wind blew a spattering of droplets into the room. The wailing sound grew—not as if it were getting louder but as if it were approaching or falling toward us from a direction none of us could see.

About half the people had already risen to their feet and were moving toward the door. There was a shadow being cast in the room now—we couldn’t see where it was coming from but it, too, was growing. A big man pulled at the door handle with increasing urgency but it wouldn’t open. Somebody in a uniform retched. I stayed in my seat. So did Haig. Kissinger waited calmly in the center of the room. Both of the red telephones began, impossibly, to ring.

“Stop it!” Haig said. Kissinger didn’t answer. It didn’t seem like the sound could get much closer without its being on top of us. I forced myself not to move.

“Stop it. I’m begging you!” Haig said.

“Stop it, Henry,” I said.

The sound and the wind and all of it cut off abruptly.

“The meeting is over,” I said. “I hope you will remember this demonstration. I may brief some of you individually beyond this. All I ask of you at this time is to be aware that we are responding to nontraditional strategic exigencies. And that you follow my and Dr. Kissinger’s instructions when asked.”

They filed out, one by one, until it was just me and Henry, who was bobbing in place and trying to suppress a smile.

“Henry, what the fuck was that?”

“You know? I did not think that it would go half so well,” he said.

“Mr. President?” Gary
said. Gary was the man Strategic Air Command had assigned to follow me around. We were rehearsing. Since Kennedy’s time, the presidency had included unannounced drills to train the chief executive to respond well in the event of a nuclear war.

“‘What is it?’” I said. I was reading from note cards.

“Pinnacle, sir.”

“‘How many?’” I said.

“Multiple. A lot, sir. Well into boost phase.”

“‘Origin and targets.’ Pronto.” I liked to throw in a little improv to keep things loose. Gary was more a by-the-book man.

“Forward bases all over the Russian subcontinent, sir. A couple to the UK, the rest over the poles to us. Analysts guess they’ve emptied the silos. What are your orders, Mr. President?

“Mr. President?

“Mr. President?”

Gary was another part of being president that took some getting used to. He was pale and small and slightly stooped, the way a taller man would be, with a prominent nose. He looked a little like a goblin. He bore the rank of captain but I suspected this was honorary. He didn’t look fit for any duty other than this, but he was perfectly suited for his current job; it was as if they had tested a vast pool of candidates for discretion, tact, single-mindedness, patience, and immunity to cold, flu, jet lag, and boredom (and they probably had).

Gary’s stoop could be attributed to the forty-five-pound weight he was handcuffed to, the reason why he was required to follow me around at all times. Gary carried what we called the nuclear football. It had no resemblance to a football; the name was the only surviving element of an Eisenhower-era nuclear-response plan called Dropkick, which, given the name, was probably best forgotten.

The nuclear standoff game had changed since Eisenhower’s time. ICBMs and submarines were the order of the day as much as bombers equipped with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles. Rapid-response and defensive technologies were destabilizing the simple logic of mutual assured destruction.

Therefore, Gary was literally not allowed to be more than thirty feet away from me. Most of his time was spent posted in the corridor outside the Oval Office or sharing the backseat of a limousine with myself, Pat, and Al Haig. Only a few months into his assignment, Gary had already seen a broad cross section of Nixonian life: Gastrointestinal episodes following lengthy fund-raising dinners. Frozen, silent car rides with Pat. Unresponsive teenage children. Furious arguments with Pat. Self-administered pep talks in bathrooms, greenrooms, helicopters. Restrained, dignified weeping. Gary and I were not friends.

When the war went hot Gary would be the person to tell me there was a problem. Presumably a bad problem. The nature of this problem would be explained to me carefully and clearly, insofar as anyone understood it.

Gary himself would be passing on information from a creaky, semifunctional network of satellites called MiDAS, satellites that sat 22,326 miles over the equator. They used infrared to scan for the characteristic pattern of heat emitted by intercontinental ballistic missiles when they did their initial launch burn over the poles. Or so I was told by the RAND Corporation. This innovation would give us a full twenty-seven minutes to react to the news that most of the U.S. population was about to die in a nuclear fire. (Henry was working on something new, called Safeguard, that relied chiefly on the contents of a blunt concrete pyramid in North Dakota, the details of which he refused to disclose.)

It was common knowledge that the nuclear football contained a bulky, secure radiotelephone and a booklet with the various go codes that would activate America’s nuclear arsenal. Also an illustrated escape plan that got me to the emergency command center, a bunker equipped with hardened communication lines and a staff of relieved but stricken-looking men and women already in the throes of shared survivors’ guilt. These were the people with whom I could expect to spend either the next forty-eight hours or the next seventy years, depending. In the latter case, we would, incidentally, also be expected to repopulate the blank martyred planet Earth. There was also a mobile consolidated command center on monstrous tractor tires and an E-4B airborne operations center that would take off for an aerial view of the apocalypse.

Finally, the football contained the single integrated operational plan, the SIOP, the concentrated, distilled result of decades of strategic thinking. The twenty-seven minutes wasn’t enough for me to decide where to send thousands of nuclear warheads; instead, I would choose from a list of prepared contingency plans, depending on whether this was a limited strike, an all-out nuclear launch, or a conventional attack large enough to merit a thermonuclear reply. All expressed through coded shorthand. Birds in the Air, for instance, translated to “Multiple incoming warheads from over the North Pole, evidently the product of a bold, enthusiastic new talent in the Kremlin’s planning committee.”

In most of these scenarios, life on Earth would change radically in the subsequent hours. Millions would die, perhaps billions, depending on my moral calculations or my particular mood. The SIOP was a sort of à la carte doomsday menu.

What was on the menu? We got one good whack at them, and there were set priorities of what to hit. Easiest call: Probably we should take out their nuclear capabilities—missile silos, bombers on the ground, submarine bays; men, machines, supply caches would vanish in a flash and a boom over the horizon. Or, item number two, we could get a little more daring, target the isolated air defenses and conventional forces they had off in the mountains and wheat fields of Soviet Russia. Third, for a more robust flavor, we could include the targets nearer civilian population centers. Fourth on the priority list were Soviet command elements, if I wanted to make it personal.

And number five was simply the fuck-you zone of black humor and megadeath, civilization-busting scenarios that even classified SAC memos described as “spasm or insensate war.” Twenty-eight hundred world-class cities pretargeted for your pleasure; Europe, Russia, Asia, and the Middle East fully in play. This was the time to consider spraying Romania merely on the off chance something was there or taking out West German cities to keep the industrial base out of Russian hands. Pop quiz, hotshot. Oh, and extra credit if China’s involved.

Since his successful demonstration to the military leadership Dr. Kissinger had made it his business to extensively revise and expand the number of possible contingencies.

New codes included Surf-and-Turf Frisco-Style, which meant “Multiple unidentified infantry divisions emerge from the surf north of San Francisco, humanoids threading through the redwoods and engaging local defenses.” KC Shake-and-Bake was “Chthonic entity erupting onto major American city, toxic and/or mind-control emanations in evidence, accompanying soul desecration on massive scale.”

The nuclear football now also contained waterproof matches, the skull of a tiny hominid, a small woodwind instrument, a scroll written in imperial Aramaic. A needle and thread, a packet of salt. Two cyanide pills, one for me and one for Pat (unless Gary wanted to partake). A chip of granite from the capstone of a sub-Saharan tomb at least thirty thousand years old. An alleged piece of the True Cross (won’t know until we try it). Envelopes not unlike the ones I’d seen Arkady and Gregor shuffling long ago.

Last, a third-generation Xerox of a single typewritten page watermarked with
EYES-ONLY—BLUE OX CLEARANCE.

Of course, it wasn’t all about me. The nuclear football was just the origin point of a long chain reaction, rippling out to bunkers and hangars and submarines and ending in sealed envelopes torn, codes checked, combinations dialed. Small groups of two, three, and four men exchanging glances, turning their keys in unison. And at the far end of the chain, ignition and blastoff.

Or maybe it was about me, the president, the piece of equipment I understood least of all. The exact same person who, sixty years ago, had stayed awake for hours after bedtime, pretending to read until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, letting the desert moon shine on me until I fell asleep to silvery, light-drenched dreams. It was all part of me, faint mysterious memories that at times still surfaced of the low, garbled songs that floated up to me and the faint answer that echoed out of the lemon groves. The faces of my vanished brothers. The mysteries of what my mother saw as she stared out into the darkness from our front porch long after midnight, of why she had married at all, of why lying was as natural as breathing to her, and to me. Or why Gary and I weren’t friends, but we weren’t.

We were pulling
troops out of Vietnam; everything was about airpower now. Five months into my first term as president and we seemed to be building momentum.

The day of the Apollo 11 launch was drawing near and I waited for a portent or a warning or any information to explain the sense of foreboding hanging over this, arguably humanity’s greatest and most daring exploit. Earlier, I had toured the launch facilities, making a show of marveling at the manned missile looming and puffing smoke.

A week after that, I hosted one of the chief scientists at the White House. He was an older man but trim and polite. He wore a brown coat and kept a small, neat mustache. He peered around the Oval Office with its seal and flags. I couldn’t help but think he must have been in rooms like it in Berlin before the fall, so perhaps he was not all that impressed.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. President. It is an honor.”

His English was excellent.

“Thank you for your efforts in these historic times,” I said. I tried not to think about the last world leader who’d handed him that line. “You had a concern about the Apollo mission?”

“I do not know to whom I can speak and who not, you understand?”

“It’s just me and Haldeman here.”

“As you say, Herr Nixon. When we were—in the other place—we spoke often of this work, to go to moon. Von Braun, he always wished to do this, and with the success he brought us, he was not argued with. Of course, it never came to be.”

“Not until now.”

“That is right, and even here for a long time I do not think it likely. I do the work, of course; in my position I have little choice. But now the time is perhaps here and I wish to say perhaps we should not go. Perhaps it is best not.”

“We’re not canceling the Apollo project.” That morning my approval rating was 58 percent; disapproval was 22 percent, and those with no opinion, 20 percent. Eisenhower had done better even after having a heart attack and a stroke.

“I know. Such a coup for our people, for any nation, to be first on that strange far shore. And it is my life’s work, yes. Please do not repeat what I tell you now. In the other place—”

“The Third Reich, you mean,” snapped Haldeman.

“Yes. In the Reich, the Nazis cultivated all sorts of people. Scientists like myself, but also mystics and so-called philosophers, men without degrees, confidence men and frauds, to say it plainly. Anyone could enrapture the party officials with tales of dwarfs and Rheingold and a fabled age to come. They were given offices and budgets equal to our own.

“There was one, though. A professor of anthropology who’d been disgraced and then joined the party. He showed great interest in our work. He had, he told me, translated a great many writings of a mystic sect from the fourteenth century. He spoke of lunar travel as if it were a settled thing. He showed me maps of the dark area. He laughed at us.

“Of course I do not pay him any mind. But I spoke with the men of Apollo Eight when they returned. We have seen the Earth rise above it. We have seen it now, this dark side.” It was true. That same month, Julie had married David Eisenhower, and there was already talk from Henry of a dynasty such as had not been seen since the pharaohs.

“Then surely—” I said.

“His maps, I still have them. Kept for a joke. But they are too good. Much too good. The strange appearance, the land formations, all too similar. It is as if they had—”

“Coincidence,” I told him.

“But I wonder what we find there. What we send these men to.”

“It’s just rock. Surely you know that much better than I do. A dead world.”

“Yes, we know things. Gray rocks and fine dust. Perhaps deep down we discover ice; that is all. I know. But this moon—it becomes more curious as we look at it. We see it there, so large in proportion to our planet, as in no other pairing we know. Its own world. Not a mere asteroid, as the ones circling Mars.

“We do not know its age. It stood in the sky over America’s dawn, over the streets of Nero’s Rome, over Babylon, Carcosa, the Black Forest of my ancestors, over cities whose names are lost. Over tribesmen who scarcely spoke, over the glaciers, over the great lizards before them. Before that, over the blank seas that teemed with forms of life we do not dream of. It has lain so close to us for so long, yet it is a stranger to us. It hides its face!”

“Have you spoken to this professor lately?”

“When the Allies came he was one of those who cut their own throats rather than continue. It seems as if he was sincere after all.”

I was tired of searching the Oval Office but I had no other ideas. Kissinger warned of a major supernatural insurgency on its way, a power play of unprecedented proportions intended for mid-August.

So I took pictures down and gazed at the blank spaces, tapped on walls and floors. Stared into space; wrote in my journal. One day, a lazy warm afternoon, I’d felt absolutely certain I had gotten somewhere, located the final piece of the puzzle. I found myself in an unfamiliar suite on the third floor, opening door after door where there shouldn’t have been any. I covered dozens of yards, so much distance that surely I should have been walking across the North Lawn and straight through the fountain to Pennsylvania Avenue. And then, impossibly, I heard Eisenhower’s voice from the next room. Eisenhower, who’d died in March not knowing me, barked his military laugh and recited his familiar warning: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military. Industrial. Complex.” His voice went on, growing louder and louder, until I came awake at an executive staff meeting. It was unclear whether anyone had noticed.

In May, the tenth Apollo mission had flown only nine miles from the lunar surface. I had had the astronauts sworn to secrecy and debriefed exhaustively. Nothing stirred there. A dead world, surely. We’d prepared for so long. And on July 16, 1969, we would go to the moon.

“We are going to the moon,” I’d told everyone. “Kennedy said so, Johnson said so. I said it myself about a hundred times. America is going to the moon, and that’s that.”

Now we stared at the television, at an image of the Apollo 11 steaming and puffing on the pad.

“It is most likely a mistake. A trick of some kind,” Kissinger said. “But I admit I do not understand its nature.”

“How can the moon possibly be a trick?” I asked. “And why is this coming up only now? Is that going to be my opening move? Canceling the moon shot?”

“I think they plan this. I feel certain of it. Goad him from the start,” Kissinger said. And I began suddenly to feel ill. Had Arkady said something about this? I was drinking a lot in those days.

“Why would they want us to go to the moon? The entire world is watching us. It’s our moment of triumph. We do this, it’s almost like we’re going to another planet. We are the interplanetary world power.”

“The moon…” Kissinger said, staring into space. “What is it? What’s on it?”

“It’s—well, it’s a big dusty rock, basically. Isn’t it? Doesn’t have an atmosphere. Doesn’t have water. So, dust. Craters.”

“Craters, yes. I think I begin to see. Things flying through space. They hit the Earth, they burn up. But the moon, not so much. Things hit the moon, they stay there.”

“They’d hit it pretty hard,” I said.

“There are very tough things out there. Spores, they survive the vacuum of space. Every crater on the moon, something landed. What if something did survive? What if any number of things did?”

“But we’re still protected…aren’t we?”

“A great deal about this war depends on legal ambiguities, yes? Treaties, thrones, and dominions. Every place on Earth there is some kind of legal agreement. Even Antarctica, where no country is. But who rules the moon?”

I pressed the intercom.

“Rose? John Mitchell, please.”

“I’ll get him.”

In a few moments, Mitchell answered his phone.

“Mitchell, who’s got the moon? I mean, legally, what is it? Is it a country? Is it like international waters? Is there a legal category of unclaimed planetoid?”

“Sir. There is at present no legal treaty covering the moon.”

“Thank you.”

Kissinger looked a bit distant. “Sir, I believe this represents a serious problem.”

“We’re at eight thousand feet above lunar surface. Seven thousand. Six thousand. We are descending as per projections, velocity as expected.”

“Roger that,” came the voice from Houston’s Mission Control. Kissinger and I sat listening.

“Open the private channel,” I said.

“Mr. President?” I heard Buzz Aldrin say.

“I need your report, Buzz.”

“Everything looks clear from this altitude. We are descending normally.”

And then: “I see—but this is impossible—it appears to be a sort of a…well, a rock formation of regular outline.”

“Mr. Aldrin, is it possible to halt your descent?”

“I am relaying. I’m not sure. It’s becoming clearer. A ziggurat, I believe. Monolithic white stone. There are figures carved. Now coming into view—”

“Apollo,” Mission Control broke in, “I believe your descent has slowed?”

“Executive order, sir. I’m seeing a city now. A vast city. Carvings visible from above. This is not possible. It is enormous. Castles carved into the crater wall, eternally in shadow. Armstrong, are you all right? He’s having a fit of some kind.”

“Go on, Aldrin.”

“Five-sided symmetries, geometry—I can only call it obscene. Armstrong is speaking now…a language I don’t recognize.”

Kissinger took the phone’s receiver from my nerveless hand.

“Mission Control? We will move to the Maya contingency, yes? Confirm, please.”

“…Confirmed, Dr. Kissinger.”

The crew manning the soundstage was extraordinarily skillful, and the production was extremely convincing, and if in moments the wires were visible, this was almost never spoken of. The astronauts, on their return, performed a very creditable show of triumph and euphoria. Dr. Kissinger spoke to them privately and the matter was not touched upon again.