Tomahawk (17 page)

“Help you cut that?”

“Thanks, Sparky. Watch out, it's—Shit! Ow, God, that's hot.”

The party started to roll. Running back and forth to get the goodies out on deck, he could have told the players apart just from what they wore and how they stood. The Navy guys were in slacks and dress shirts, and they stood alertly against the walls, as if on watch. A couple were even wearing shiny black Corfams. The students were in suit jackets or dresses, and they talked about Abscam or the Sandinista government. The Catholic Worker people looked smaller by contrast, more careworn, and they had terrible posture. They were mostly beer drinkers. Dan saw Haneghen on the balcony with Burdette. That would be an interesting theological discussion…. Westerhouse was saying to Deborah, “Yeah, but isn't it rewarding failure, to keep subsidizing that kind of behavior? What happens when their kids have kids?” Dan hurried past before the return salvo was in the air. He finished the second glass
of rose and decided he really wanted a shot of Cutty on ice. He looked into the bedroom. Three of the Navy wives were sitting there comparing private schools with public ones. Thank God he'd changed the sheets.

But everything was perking; the nuts and chip levels were dropping. He checked the bathtub and submerged another case under ice slush. Then he circulated, beaming benevolently as fragments of conversation hurtled past.

“The last episode of
M
*A*S*H…”

“The emergency jobs bill…”

“But the assembled U.S. bishops have denounced their deployment, testing, and manufacture. If you call yourself a practicing Catholic …”

“Did you read the analysis? The way I read it, there's no survivable basing mode short of putting it to sea for forty billion dollars.”

“I knew Rita Lavelle. My brother worked for her, and he said there was no way she couldn't have known.”

“We're providing them with the latest technology. LM-twenty-five hundred gas turbines, Mark forty-six torpedoes, new sonars. They'll be a counterweight to the Russians.”

“She and two other nuns stayed with us at the house last summer. We'll be going to El Salvador to help with the clinic.”

‘Only a matter of time before something happens in Beirut.”

“The way around that is, you go the frozen-embryo route, select the best, and pay them to …”

“Put in for the midlevel Naval War College course.”

Colonel and Mrs. Evans loomed up, Jeannette smiling like Edwina Mountbatten among the untouchables. Evans beckoned to him and he bent. “This Haneghen… where'd you meet these people?” the deputy murmured. “They're dangerous.”

“I don't think they're
dangerous,
sir. They're just friends of friends.”

“We're often judged by our friends, Dan.”

“Yes, sir…. Can I get you another glass of wine, Mrs. Evans?”

Damn, he thought. He refreshed his scotch and carried
the glasses back into the living room. Every chair was occupied and now it was getting hard to slide among talking people…. Where had he left his drink? He got another.

He was washing down some chips with another scotch when the roar took a dip in volume. He turned.

Edward Szerenci was taking off his coat. His teeth flashed as his students converged, calling out, bringing drinks or food. He accepted a Heineken and a slice.

“Hey! Dan!” He whipped his head around at a familiar voice. Then he and Larry Prince were pounding each other's backs.

Larry was an Academy classmate. They'd run into each other again in the scratch battle group that had faced down
Kirov
and her escorts in the Gulf of Mexico. Prince had been carried as missing, presumed dead, when his ship had taken a missile in her bridge. Actually, he'd been blown overboard and had drifted for twelve hours before being picked up by Vietnamese shrimpers and taken into Pascagoula. He'd written an article about it for
Shipmate.
They caught up on their classmates, who was where. Prince told him he'd run into Ritter Mingo, who was making a name for himself running anti-Nicaraguan operations out of the White House staff.

One of Dan's neighbors in the building came up after awhile, cutting her eyes at Prince, and Dan caught the message and introduced them. Then he excused himself, thinking she wouldn't make much headway with Larry, but she was welcome to try.

Sometime later, he straightened from his slump against the wall, almost spilling his drink.

Apparently, Szerenci had been talking about nuclear strategy with one of his students. Donavan must have overheard them. Now she stood at the heart of Szerenci's coterie, face-to-face with him, and Dan saw her head lift and her cheeks go that familiar shade of white. His heart sank as he heard her say, “A hundred megadeaths. Does that mean what I think it does?”

“A hundred million deaths. Those are the numbers for a major countervalue strike.”

With deceptive softness, Donavan asked, “Of those megadeaths, how many are under four years old?”

“How many?”

“That's right. How many of these enemies of yours are little children?”

Szerenci said dryly, “From age zero to four would be around six to eight percent, if we assume a standard population model.”

“And planning their deaths is what you call ‘defense.' “

“No, that's what we call ‘deterrence.'“ Szerenci glanced around the room; for a moment, Dan thought he was looking for chalk. “If it's not too horrible to contemplate, then it's not a credible deterrent, is it?”

“So it's more like a threat than a working weapon?”

“The weapons have to work. Or it isn't a threat.”

“Uh, has everybody gotten pizza?” Dan said. He said to Kerry in an undertone, “Look, not now, it's a party.”

“That's all right, Dan,” said Szerenci. “She may be savable. So, Kelly—”

“Kerry.”

“Kerry, you don't like the idea of nuclear deterrence. What do
you
think we do faced with a hundred-and-twenty division-equivalent Warsaw Pact threat on a six-front attack?”

“Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies, do good to those that hate you, pray for those who calumniate you, so that you may be Children of God.' I believe in those methods, in Paul and Gandhi and Christ, not your analysis.”

“You don't seem to understand what analysts do. We don't determine policy. We try to make policy choices subject to rational analysis.”

“What if the policy itself is irrational?”

Szerenci smiled. “I suppose, then, we try to make it more efficiently irrational. But I don't think it's an irrational policy.”

“Can anyone win a nuclear war?”

“Under certain circumstances, we can envision a counterforce strategy that would lead to war termination on favorable terms.”

“With how many dead?”

Szerenci shrugged. “Is it a decapitation scenario?
Counterforce? Countervalue? RAND or SAI models?”

“Are you saying you don't know?”

“I'm saying the models are squishy and our numerical values are shaky. After all, we have only two pieces of hard data on the graph—Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

“Give me a rough guess. Ten million?”

“Prompt effects, not counting fallout, disease, and famine? Sure.”

“A hundred million?”

“Conceivable.”

“A billion?”

Szerenci said, “There's been some work on nuclear winter that suggests it might be everyone on earth.”

Nobody said anything. Then Kerry said softly, “And you say this is rational?”

Szerenci swirled his glass. “But let me add one thing. When we play these scenarios, the heuristics are interesting. It's very difficult to get the teams to initiate a nuclear conflict. The control-team practically has to push the button for them. Not only does deterrence work in reality; it works even in the game room.”

“So we keep building weapons, and impoverishing ourselves. And not only that; we realize it's fiitile.”

“It's not futile. It preserves the status quo.”

“Which stinks. Instead of walling off our enemies' with arms, what if we used those billions of dollars to give everyone a job and a home?”

“Are you really willing to gamble our survival on the benevolence of our opponents?”

“You're reasoning backward. Our weapons make our enemies.”

“You should read Lenin,” said Sandy. Her cheeks were flushed, and she sipped wine, casting a flat glance at Dan. He could read it: You prefer
this
fruitcake to me?

“And Hitler,” said Szerenci. “Of course, according to you, the Allies should simply have submitted to him. The Israelis have learned their lesson—about trusting in nonviolence.”

“Do you think we defeated Hitler? We
became
Hitler. We fund wars around the world. We're the world's biggest weapons supplier, and out of the top fifteen countries
we sell to, twelve of them are dictatorships.”

“It's better to fight a war on someone else's territory.” “You can't isolate war and hatred and ship it somewhere else. Go to the ghetto at night. When you put your faith in violence, violence becomes your faith. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, ‘The United States is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.' “

“You don't ensure national security with mottoes and pious quotations, Miss Donavan. So far, that's been the level of your reasoning,” said Szerenci. “We're facing an ideology that states plainly its ultimate goal is our destruction.”

“If we devoted those resources to the poor, communism would stop being a threat. No one would be attracted to it.”

“There was poverty long before the Cold War.” “And there will always be, no matter how much ‘progress' we make, because the progress is not in God's direction. Whoever has two shirts has to give one to someone without clothing. That's the only ‘strategy' that will actually give us peace.”

Dan looked around quickly. Everyone was staring, mute, glasses and plates balanced on knees or held suspended. As his eyes followed theirs back to her, he saw her cheeks were flushed now; a strand of dark hair fell across her forehead. She held herself erect, intent on battle, nostrils flared as she caught her breath. To him, in that moment, she had never looked more beautiful.

Kerry said, “You, Professor, are part of the machine. These students respect you. Your bosses do, too. What if you told them what we needed was not more arms, but more love?”

“They'd get another analyst.” “And if all the analysts told them that?” “Then they'd do without us, because we'd be wrong.” “But it wouldn't be as
efficient,
would it?” “And we might lose,” said Szerenci, and for the first time, anger darkened his face. “I grew up in a country that lost a war. There's nothing worse.” “How about losing your soul?” Dan stood in the kitchen alcove, wanting to step in but
knowing he couldn't. It was a duel, a
mano a mano.
Listening to them parry and thrust, he thought, Is it possible—can both of two diametrically opposed viewpoints be true? Because when Szerenci spoke, rationally, with a sardonic disdain, he recognized truth. And when Kerry answered, passionately, with the spirit of love, he knew that was the truth, too. A deeper one, one he'd suspected all his life. But he'd always looked away. Because to follow it meant throwing away everything he'd worked so hard for: his commission, his profession, his career.

Evans was right. These people
were
dangerous. Because he was starting to wonder if they were right. And he realized something else, looking across the smoky room as Szerenci turned away and Kerry met one by One the skeptical objections of his students.

He realized he was in love.

III

HAMMERS AND
BLOOD

11

 

 

 

The snow whirled down, heavy, devoid of light, cutting them off from the world as they stood together on a back street west of Howard University. As she studied the newspaper, Dan watched snowflakes landing on her hair, on the tatty knitted beret she'd found at a yard sale for a quarter. One fell on her eyelash and clung, till she raised a glove and brushed it off.