Hicks shook his head, uncertain. McClennan took the answer for a negative. "So he calls them as he sees them. No way out. What if they aren't here to destroy the Earth, just to confuse us, set us back, keep us from competing . . . You know, like we might have done to the Japanese, if we'd known what they'd put us through, in the twentieth century ... ?"

"The aliens are doing a good job of that, certainly."

"Right." McClennan stood again.

"What are you going to do?"

The ex-national security advisor stared blankly at the window. His look reminded Hicks of the expression on Mrs. Crockerman's face. Bleak, close to despair, beyond tears.

"I'll work in the background to save his ass," McClennan said. "So will Rotterjack. Damn us all, we're dedicated to that man." He raised his fist. "By the time we're done, that son of a bitch Ormandy won't know what happened. He is going to be one dead albatross."

Chapter 28

28

With three hours until his flight to Las Vegas, Arthur decided there would be time to take a taxi to Harry's house in the Cheviot Hills.

The cab took him up the San Diego Freeway and through a brightly decorated but impoverished Los Angeles barrio.

"D'ya hear what the President said, man?" the driver asked, glancing over the seat at Arthur.

"Yes," Arthur said.

"Isn't that something, what he said? Scared the piss out of me. Wonder how much of it is true, or whether, you know, he's gone off his nut."

"I don't know," Arthur replied. He felt strangely exhilarated. Everything was coming into focus now. He could actually see the problem laid out before him as if on a road map. His weariness and resignation had vanished. Now he was enriched by a deep, convicted fury, his distance and objectivity scorched away. The air through the cab window was sweet and intoxicating.

Lieutenant Colonel Albert Rogers finished listening to the recording of the broadcast and sat in the back of the trailer for several minutes, numb. He felt betrayed. What the President had said could not possibly be true. The men at the Furnace had not yet heard the speech, but there was no way he was going to keep it from them. How could he soften it for them?

"The bastard's surrendered," he murmured. "He's just left us here."

Rogers stood in the rear door of the trailer and looked at the cinder cone, dark and nondescript in the full morning light. "I can take a nuke right up inside that son of a bitch," he said quietly. "I can carry it in and stand over it until it goes off."

Not without the President's authority.

Actually, that wasn't entirely true.