The White Plague (55 page)

“And maybe you should’ve been more careful.”

Ruckerman searched in his mind for a way to divert the conversation, then: “How were you chosen as my pilot?”

“I volunteered.”

“Why?”

“I have an uncle in Ireland, a real oddball. Never married. Rich enough to pay off the national debt.” McCrae grinned. “And I’m his only living relative.”

“Is he still… I mean, alive?”

“He has a ham radio. Ham operators have been passing along his messages. Uncle Mac’s got himself a private estate over there. And this’ll get you. He’s reviving the religion of Druidism – tree worship, the whole magilla.”

“He sounds crazy.”

“Not crazy, just weird.”

“And you’re his only heir? How can you be sure of that or that inheritance will… Things have changed, you know.”

McCrae shrugged. “Uncle Mac and I are look-alikes. He was always pretty fond of me. Things being the way they are, what better thing do I have on my plate than to go over and look after my own interests?”

“Well, I wish you luck.”

“You, too, Will. You’re gonna need it.”

“I still don’t understand what made you suspect a… bomb?”

“I know things about Turkwood that most people don’t even whisper.”

“You know him?”

“From before the plague and since then… by phone. That’s what worries me, Will. I know things he might want erased. You, though, I can’t figure why he might want you out unless it’s just another write-off.”

Ruckerman tried to swallow in a dry throat, remembering how cautious Saddler had been. Not a word of what he carried in his case, the special search program from DA, none of that must get to Turkwood. That had been the reason for the ridiculous charade at the quarantine station. Accidental contamination!

“You okay?” McCrae asked. “You look sorta peaked.”

“This is insane,” Ruckerman muttered. “It’s vital that I get to England! And you must get to Ireland, find out if they really have O’Neill. My God! If it’s O’Neill and he could be persuaded to talk!”

“If,” McCrae said. “If they really have O’Neill and if the son-of-a-bitch is still alive. I dunno, Will. If I were in Ireland and I had that guy in my hands…”

“They know how important it would be to preserve him!”

“Do they? And what difference does it make to them? What’ve they got to lose?”

McCrae released his harness. “I’m going back for another look around. Same drill. Don’t touch anything, Will.”

“Mister McCrae?”

“Call me Mac.”

“Yes, well, Mac…” Ruckerman shook his head. “No, it’s too wild.”

“Nothing’s too wild. What’s making you nervous?”

“Both Doctor Saddler and the President were very anxious that… ahhh, this trip be kept secret from Turkwood, that is, until…”

“Secret? Why?”

“I, uh, don’t know.”

“You do know but you’re not saying. Christ! I’ve got myself another hot cargo!”

“I’m sorry, Mac, but this is all probably just our active imaginations. These are times for…”

“These are times for active imaginations.” He stared at the instrument panel. Presently, he touched a white button above the throttle console. A red light went on above the button. “That could be because we’re going too fast,” he muttered. He disengaged the autopilot, grasped the throttles and eased them back.

Ruckerman watched the airspeed indicator crawl back into the green band, stopping at 120.

Again, McCrae touched the white button. Again, the red light flashed.

“Could be a circuit malfunction,” McCrae said.

“What’re you doing?” Ruckerman asked.

McCrae pushed the throttles forward, checked their course and restored the autopilot. They were out over open ocean, only a thinly scattered cloud cover underneath. The sun was bright, throwing white sparkles off the waves.

“There’s a little barometric switch gadget that’s been used a few times,” McCrae said. “My friends once said Turkwood likes it. It’s attached to a wad of plastic explosive and the whole thing’s seated in a landing gear compartment. It’s armed when you lower the gear and, if you go below a set altitude, kapowie!”

“What… what set altitude?”

“Maybe a couple hundred meters. Right down there when you’re on final, the field in front of you and not a damn thing you can do about it. No time to jump out with a parachute, provided you even have a parachute, which we don’t. Right down there where you’re sure to smear yourself all over the landscape. Real helmet-funeral stuff.”

“Helmet funeral?”

“They recover just about enough of your body to fill a standard flight helmet.”

“What evidence do you have that…”

“That little red light there. Emergency confirmation circuit. Green says gear’s up and seated, or down and seated, whichever shows on this indicator up here.” McCrae pointed to another switch above his right knee. A green “gear up” light glowed above the switch. “When I test, the light says gear’s not up, but we’re flying as though everything’s in order.”

“Could there be some other explanation?”

“Circuit malfunction. But Jesus! A whole platoon of mechanics checked out this bird.”

Ruckerman thought about this for a moment. He took a deep breath and shook his head. “It’s paranoid!”

“With Turkwood? That’s the safest way to go.”

Ruckerman felt anger taking over. It was an emotion he loathed. The mind did not work clearly with any strong emotion. Rational thought – the world’s only future lay in rational thought. Science failed when rational thought failed. The anger continued to mount.

“What the hell can we do about it?” he demanded. “How can we be sure your suspicions are even…”

“Let me think about it, Will.” McCrae checked his instruments and the autopilot, confirmed their position and leaned back in his seat. He closed his eyes.

Ruckerman watched him, embarrassed by the angry outburst.
A patsy!
McCrae’s suspicions were all fantasy. The computer program, the summations of other projects, all of the material back there in that bag… and O’Neill possibly in Ireland! God! He might even get a chance to interview the man personally. What could be more important than that? The President might do many things to stay in power and keep his world in order, but he certainly would not jeopardize the efforts to find a plague cure.

Slowly, Ruckerman grew aware of a strange sound. He looked at McCrae. The man was snoring! The bastard was asleep! How could he sleep after… after…

McCrae snorted and sat upright, opening his eyes. “They’ve got lakes in England,” he said. “A high lake… or maybe even a high field.” He reached down to his left, fingered through a series of charts there and extracted one, opening it in front of him. He scanned it, his lips working. “Yeah. Yeah, a nice high one right up there above Aberfeldy.” He restored the chart to its place beside him, “We fake engine trouble and… swoosh.”

“How far will we be from Huddersfield?” Ruckerman asked.

“Don’t worry, Will,” McCrae said. “You’re a VIP. They’ll wheel you around in a limousine. Me, I’m small potatoes and few in the hill. I gotta find a way to get back to Ireland and then to Uncle Mac’s place.”

McCrae turned and grinned at Ruckerman, a wide toothy expression in that lantern-jawed face. “Besides, I’m captain of this here ship. I say where she goes.”

Ruckerman scowled at him, then turned away. Insane suspicions! But a few more hours’ delay… What did it really matter? Just as long as McCrae was satisfied. The selfish bastard! Harebrained! Another thought crept into Ruckerman’s mind. He turned toward McCrae.

“Granting that there’s an explosive device on this plane, what if it’s set to go off after a certain time?”

“Then we feed the fishes,” McCrae said.

Up the long ladder
And down the short rope –
To hell with King Billy,
To hell with the Pope!

– Songs of the New Ireland

J
OHN SAT
in the far back of the armored car with only a slit in the steel beside him through which he could see the passing countryside, everything green upon green in the morning light. It was cold outside and the steel chilled his skin when he touched it. The seat was not padded. Father Michael and the boy occupied the seat in front of him, the boy curled up asleep with his head against the priest. The driver and an armed guard in front were a taciturn pair, ruddy-faced youths in military green, dark-haired both of them, with an oddly cynical alertness in their manner, as though they listened to some unseen speaker who warned them of terrible things to come.

Another armored car went in front about a hundred meters away, and two more followed, all three fully manned. There was a rocket launcher on the car in the van.

There had been no sign of Herity since that last glimpse of him heading off for Kilmainham Jail, and Father Michael nor any of the others could or would say where he had gone.

Father Michael leaned forward, dislodging the boy beside him and arousing a sleepy moan from him. The priest spoke to the driver, the words not audible to John, but the driver’s answer carried clearly to the rear.

“We go by the way that’s reasonably safe, Father. The long way is often the shortest these days.”

Father Michael nodded and leaned back.

The armored car bounced and jerked in the rough spots. The road went winding up through hills, giving an occasional glimpse down through lanes of conifers toward the Irish Sea with houses and smoking chimneys – touches of glistening ice wherever John could see fresh water in the breaks. It was scenery of such ordinary splendor that it produced a sense of electric disturbance in John, stirring O’Neill-Within to cavernous whimpers, small cries and always that awful scream waiting there in the caves of his mind. The view down to the sea should not appear untouched. There should be signs on the land that the old Ireland had vanished. Otherwise… what was the purpose?

The driver turned to his companion and said something. John heard only the two words at the end, spoken louder as the rumblings of the armored car increased on a steepening climb. “. . . but now…”

Those two words at the end of a statement, the recurrence of those same two words and nothing spoken after them, struck John as a verbal mark of the new Ireland. This thought soothed O’Neill-Within and left John alone to reflect.

“. . . but now…”

A more descriptive expression of the times might not be found.
Nothing
came after now. Men had thought once they could solve any problem, scientific or otherwise, if they set about it with scrupulous persistence and good will, with a patience that cared nothing for time. At least, that was the scientific way to think. But now…

What could he do at the Killaloe Facility? Were Doheny’s darkest fears to be proved true? That could not be! He thought about his departure from Doheny that morning. It had been dark before dawn, cold in the office. The light over Doheny’s desk had been a yellow island in the gloom. Doheny had been busy signing a stack of papers, passing them to an old man who waited beside him – a stoop-shouldered old fellow who took the papers in a knobby-knuckled hand, straightening them on the desk before departing with them. Not a word spoken between the two men the whole time.

John had busied himself moving around the office, looking at the photographs on the walls, peering closely at them in the dim light. He stopped at one, caught by the mystery of a partly defaced sign on a brick wall. He tried to make out the wording.

“IF   Y   HAVE   FORMA    AB   UT   MURD   EX-P   OS   NS,   IN   MIDATI   N,   OR   TER   ORIS   ,    IN   CO   P   ETE   CONF ENCE   CAL BE AST 65 155.”

Seeing John’s attention on the photograph, Doheny said: “I keep that as a reminder. It was mostly useless, words instead of actions. Nothing but words and very little action. The message is there, though, and the rulers in Ulster put great store by it. The thing is an interesting comparison with our present problem. When the missing parts are restored, the sign reads:

“If you have information about murder, explosions, intimidation, or of terrorism, in complete confidence, call Belfast 65-155.”

John turned and looked down at Doheny, feeling a surge of turmoil at the man’s words. Terrorism!

“The Madman sent us a message with missing parts,” Doheny said. He nodded at the photograph. “That sign was in Derry. Belfast was the central point for gathering intelligence.”

John spoke slowly while staring at the photograph. Terrorism. “Intelligence about men like Joseph Herity?”

“And about the Prods, too. There was little to choose between them if you were a target for the bullets and the bombs.”

John turned slowly, reluctantly. Doheny gazed up at him benignly, a glint of cynical humor in the dark eyes. The man appeared so like a fuzzy-haired doll there under the yellow light, the morning painting gray on the window behind him.

“We had something close to sixty thousand souls there then,” Doheny said. “Now… I’d say no more than four or five thousand men living in and around. A city dies without its women.”

John cleared his throat but did not speak.

“Trade it is that keeps a city going,” Doheny said. “But trade’s a dependency of the home. A city…” He flicked a glance at the photograph behind John. “A city is a place for artisans, for shopkeepers, deliverymen and the like. But women are at the heart of a city’s trade. Men alone are forced back onto the land, grubbing their food from the dirt and rediscovering what it means to be a husbandman. Strange word, that.”

John looked at the top of the windowframe, unable to meet Doheny’s stabbing gaze.

“That color photograph to the right of the sign is of the same sign from across the river,” Doheny said. “That little white spot there, you can’t read it from that far away even if it’s complete.”

John turned and looked at the photograph, a study of the old city of Derry, its rock walls chipped and scarred by the conflicts of centuries… dirty brown rocks rising above the River Foyle… and low to one side, the little white rectangle with its black lettering.

“The men who’re still there won’t leave,” Doheny said. “But there’s no meaning to the wage packet anymore. They’ll be gone soon enough. It’s the wage packet, y’ know, John. The foundation of the family presence, source of housing, food, clothing, entertainment. Now, I ask you straight, John, how many sources of wage do you suppose could be found today in Derry?”