The White Plague (22 page)

He put aside the Brazilian suggestion, although it had excited the media. An interesting distraction, perhaps, but the magnitude of such a move made Bergen shudder.

As he had been expecting, the red telephone’s light came on and its chime sounded. Bergen returned to his chair and lifted the phone from its cradle.

Prescott surprised him immediately.

“That was a damn smart move going public that way, Hab!”

Familiarity! Something was cooking, as the Americans were fond of saying.

“I’m glad you think so, Adam. I must confess I was a bit uncertain of your reaction.”

The President produced a mild chuckle. “My old mother used to say that when things start to stick to the bottom of the pot, you give it a brisk stir.”

Cooking, indeed
, Bergen thought. He said: “I had something on that order in my mind.”

“Knew you did. I told Charlie that was what you were doing. Tell me, Hab, what’s your reading on this Admiral Francis Delacourt?”

Bergen recognized the tone. Prescott was getting right to the point. Barrier Command’s chief was an obvious question mark. A lot of power sitting out there on its own in Iceland. The secretary-general did not envy Delacourt, especially now with Prescott probably gunning for him.

“He seems to be doing a pretty good job, Adam.”

“Pretty good?”

“Something bothering you, Adam?” That was an advantage of the familiar, Bergen thought. You could ask the loaded question without any resort to diplomatic niceties.

“He’s French back there somewhere, isn’t he?” Prescott asked.

“His family came from Quebec, yes.”

“I hear he’s a historian.”

Bergen recalled Delacourt’s statement accepting the Barrier Command post. There had been a pedantic tone in it:
“It’s the same problem the Romans had but with modern tools.”

“My sources say he’s quite a respectable historian, Adam,” Bergen agreed.

“Patton was a historian,” Prescott said.

Patton? Oh, yes, the World War II tank commander.
And there had been something at the time about Patton admiring the Romans.

“Quite a few military leaders have had that hobby,” Bergen said. .

“Bothers me,” Prescott said. “Is he going to have delusions of grandeur, too?”

Too?
Bergen wondered. Was that how Prescott thought of Patton?

“I’ve seen no signs of that,” Bergen said.

“I think we should keep an eye on him,” Prescott said, and then the kicker: “The Russians have just been talking to us about him. He worries them, too. And by the way, Hab, I had the devil’s own time smoothing them down. They were really upset by your off-the-record briefing today.”

“It’s good to have you on my side, Adam.”

“Depend on it, Hab. Well, ‘nuff said. Why don’t you get out the admiral’s general orders and have another look at them?”

“I’ll do that, Adam. Anything special I should look for?”

“Damn! You talk just like an American sometimes,” Prescott said. “I’ve nothing special there, nothing in mind at the moment. I just think we should start making sure he has to second-guess us, not the other way around.”

“I’ll make it a point to give his performance my special attention,” Bergen said.

“You do that, Hab. And while you’re at it, you might look into the rumor that Delacourt’s boys have sunk a few coffin ships with all their occupants aboard.”

“Ahhh, I hadn’t heard that rumor, Adam. New?”

“It just surfaced. Well, good talking to you, Hab. Long as we stay clean we may get in that golf game yet.”

They broke the connection.

Bergen got out his copy of Delacourt’s general orders and read them over twice. They were pretty direct.

“If you make physical contact with any person from the Proscribed Areas, your own people will kill you or drive you onto the shore, where the inhabitants likely will do the job for us.”

That paragraph, for instance. There was no mistaking its meaning.

Bergen sat back and thought about Delacourt. It was pretty clear that the admiral thought of his problem as deer-stalking in the coves and inlets of those rocky coasts.

A game?

If so, death was the price of failure.

“… the same problem the Romans had but with modern tools.”

Tools? Was that how Delacourt thought of battleships and all the rest of it? Tools? All of that firepower. Then again, perhaps he was right. Caesar had probably thought in a similar way.

And what did the coffin ships have to do with Prescott’s concerns?

Bergen did not want to think about the coffin ships, but there was no avoiding it now. Did it matter in the larger sense if Delacourt’s people sank some of those ships with occupants aboard? Morally, yes, it mattered, but… the ships themselves were a necessity. God alone knew what the Madman might learn. He had to be obeyed. The Irish must all go back to Ireland, the Libyans back to Libya and the British back to their little island.

It was utter madness.

The reports made Bergen sick. Mobs hunting the poor refugees – French mobs, Spanish mobs, German mobs, Canadian mobs, American mobs, Mexican mobs, Japanese mobs… Even in China and Australia and probably everywhere else. The anguish and terror were so awful that blame had to be lodged somewhere.

Television coverage of the wrenching embarcations had brought tears to Bergen’s eyes. He knew there were instances of brave defiance around the world, babies, women and children being hidden… but the hysteria and savagery – suicides, murders, lynchings – those were the dominant pattern.

And we thought we were civilized.

Coffin ships – every female aboard being sent home to certain death. And there were stories – rapes, torture… The floating prisons were forced to anchor offshore at their destinations; passengers driven ashore in small boats by gunfire.

The secretary-general shuddered.

The many suicides were understandable.

Perhaps sinking the ships was a mercy.

Sighing, Bergen turned on the single low swinglamp at the side of his desk and centered it over his blotter. Methodically, he took a notepad and wrote a brief order to an aide. Delacourt’s behavior would have to be scrutinized.

When he had finished the order, he put both palms flat on the blotter and forced himself to think about the priorities. The Saudis and Israel – number one. Ring of fire or a cobalt moat? He feared there would be no pulling of rabbits out of hats here. Whatever they did, it would be a monumental mess. Another Kissinger comment came unbidden to Bergen’s mind:

“The difficulties in the Middle East occurred not because the parties don’t understand each other, but in some respects, because they understand each other only too well.”

Cobalt radioactivity would be sure to spread. The American experts admitted it. If it destroyed the usefulness of Saudi oil, would the Soviets pick up the slack as they had hinted?

Bergen was tempted to laugh hysterically and say: “Tune in tomorrow at this same time!”

No vapid American soap opera had ever contemplated such monumental disaster.

A trembling anger overcame him then. Why should the secretary-general have sole responsibility for such terrible decisions? It was too much! He had to admit then that, in all honesty, he did not have sole responsibility. Decision-making worked on a different system nowadays.

Abruptly, he turned to the red phone and lifted it out of the open drawer onto the desk, keying the sophisticated scrambler equipment as he did this.

A United States Navy communications officer answered on the first ring. He identified himself as Lieutenant Commander Avery.

“May I speak to the President?” Bergen asked.

“One moment, sir. He’s at Camp David.”

The President’s voice sounded alert and curious. “Something new come up, Hab?”

Still familiarity. Good.

“Adam, I forgot to ask whether the Russians discussed your cobalt suggestion when they called.”

“Oh, glad you brought that up.” Prescott did not sound at all glad. “There’s a big argument between them and the Chinese over it. The Chinese favor our suggestion.”

“If we decide on the cobalt, Adam, could we announce at the same time that air transport from all over the world is standing by to remove the Israelis to Brazil in an orderly manner?”

“That’s quite a mouthful, Hab.”

“But could we do it?”

“You could say it but it might not be true.”

“We must do our best. The Jews have suffered too much. We can’t abandon them.”

“The way we did with the Greeks, the Cypriots and some others.”

“Those others did not have atomic weapons.”

“That sounds rather cold-blooded,” Prescott said.

“I don’t mean it that way. We have to address these emergencies by a priority system, which we both understand very well. Will you do your part in this, Adam?”

“Shared responsibility,” Prescott said.

“That’s what I had in mind, Adam.”

“I’ll do my best, Hab.”

As the President returned his phone to the cradle in the lounge of the main lodge at Camp David, he looked at Charlie Turkwood, who stood at the fireplace, back to the flames.

“That son-of-a-bitch Bergen just called in his counter,” Prescott said. “And it’s a doozy.”

The past is dead.

– Arab proverb

T
HE METAL
bed of the lorry was chilling beneath John’s bare skin. He curled himself into a tight ball, his arms hugged around his chest, but the lorry’s movement jostled him and a cold wind blew through the canvas cover over the bed. They had stripped him bare on the float at Kinsale, parceling out his clothes and the contents of his pack, arguing over who would get the six French chocolate bars.

Kevin O’Donnell had appeared uninterested in all of this, but he had kept the money and the Belgian pistol.

“Why’re you doing this?” John had demanded.

“Because we’re kindly men,” Kevin O’Donnell had said. “We kill anyone we catch within five hundred meters of the shore.”

“Even if we come in from the sea?”

“Well, me and the boys were disappointed in you, Yank. We were expecting some folks from another coffin ship, maybe a pretty woman or two.”

One of the men stripping John said: “Not many women surviving the trip anymore.”

They finished with him, removing even his shoes and socks. He stood, hugging himself, bare and shivering on the cold float.

“Just be happy we’re sparing you, Yank,” Kevin O’Donnell had said. “Up y’ go, Yank. Into the lorry with him, boys. And this time, bring some of the good stuff back wi’ you.”

Three guards had entered the back of the lorry with John. He caught the name of only one, Muiris Cohn, a small man with a face that appeared compressed from top to bottom, the closely set eyes too near the nose, the nose too close to the mouth and the chin almost touching his lower lip.

While the three guards occupied a bench on one side, John was forced to stay on the chilled bed. When he complained of the cold, Cohn nudged him roughly with a heavy boot and said: “Now, y’ heard Kevin! You’re alive and it’s more than you deserve.”

To John, the trip drew itself out into an interminable frigid torture, which he endured by promising himself he would live and, if his story was believed, he would work his way into whatever the Irish were doing to solve the plague problem. There, he would sabotage that effort.

The lorry went first up a steep hill, rolling John toward the back. His captors dragged him forward again, wedging him near their feet.

“Which way we going?” one of them asked the others.

“I heard them say the road through Belgooly is safest,” Cohn said.

“That means they’ve restored Fivemilebridge,” the questioner said. He was silent for a moment, then: “How long’ll we be stopping in Cork?”

“Now, Gilly,” Cohn said, “the times you’ve made this trip and you still asking such a question!”

“I’ve a thirst the River Lee itself and it running full in the spring could not wet,” the questioner said.

“And you’ll have to wait until we rid ourselves of this lout,” Cohn said. He kicked John in the shoulder. “We’ll get as wet as the seas themselves on the way back. It’s either that or answer to Kevin himself, which I’ll not be doing, him in the mad mood as you could see.”

John, sensing a faint warmth from his captors’ feet, wriggled closer, but Cohn felt the movement in the darkness and thrust him away with one foot, sneering: “Keep your stinking self away from us, Yank. I’ll be bathing for a week just to get the smell of you off me feet.”

John found himself wedged against a metal support post for the bench on his side of the lorry’s bed. The sharp edge of the post cut into his back, but it was a different pain from the cold. He focused on this new pain, clinging to it. The darkness, the cold, the pain began to work on him. He had thought O’Neill safely buried deep within, obscured and hidden away forever. But his nakedness, the dark and cold bed of the lorry, these were not a place he had ever imagined. He could feel a terrible inner warfare waiting to occur. And he began to hear the lunatic sound of that inner voice – John Roe O’Neill clamoring for his revenge.

“You’ll have it,” he muttered.

The sound of his voice was almost covered by the grinding rumble of the lorry as it climbed a hill. Cohn heard him, though, and asked:

“Did y’ say something, Yank?”

When John did not answer, Cohn kicked him. “I’ll have an answer from you, damn your evil soul!”

“It’s cold,” John said.

“Ahhh, that’s fine now,” Cohn said. “We wouldn’t want you to enter our world comfortable like.”

Cohn’s companions laughed.

“It’s the way we all enter Ireland, y’ know,” Cohn said. “Naked as plucked chickens and them ready for the pot. You’ve no mind for the pot you’re in now, you Yankee devil.”

They fell silent then and John lapsed back into the arena of his inner war. He could feel the presence of O’Neill. It was a single eye like a beam of light glaring from within his head. No warmth in it. Cold… cold… as cold as the metal upon which his body lay.