“No, Arnie, I won’t!” Brightling insisted.
“Carol, you will. And you will do it convincingly, in such a way as to make the more moderate environmental groups see the logic of the situation. If, that is, you like working here.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No, Carol, I am not threatening you. I am explaining to you how the rules work here. Because you have to play by the rules, just like I do, and just like everyone else does. If you work here you must be loyal to the President. If you are not loyal, then you cannot work here. You knew those rules when you came onboard, and you knew you had to live by them. Okay, now it’s time for a gut check. Carol, will you live by the rules or won’t you?”
Her face was red under the makeup. She hadn’t learned to conceal her anger, the chief of staff saw, and that was too bad. You couldn’t afford to get angry over minor bullshit items, not at this level of government. And this was a minor bullshit item. When you found something as valuable as several billion barrels of oil in a place that belonged to you, you drilled into the ground to get it out. It was as simple as that—and it was simpler still if the oil companies promised not to hurt anything as a result. It would remain that simple as long as the voters drove automobiles. “Well, Carol?” he asked.
“Yes, Arnie, I know the rules, and I will live by the rules,” she confirmed at last.
“Good. I want you to prepare a statement this afternoon for release next week. I want to see it today. The usual stuff, the science of it, the safety of the engineering measures, that sort of thing. Thanks for coming over, Carol,” he said in dismissal.
Dr. Brightling stood and moved to the door. She hesitated there, wanting to turn and tell Arnie what he could do with his statement . . . but she kept moving into the corridor in the West Wing, turned north, and went down the stairs for the street level. Two Secret Service agents noted the look on her face and wondered what had rained on her parade that morning—or maybe had turned a hail-storm loose on it. She walked across the street with an unusually stiff gait, then up the steps into the OEOB. In her office, she turned on her Gateway computer and called up her word-processing program, wanting to put her fist through the glass screen rather than type on the keyboard.
To be ordered around by that man! Who didn’t know anything about science, and didn’t care about environmental policy. All Arnie cared about was politics, and politics was the most artificial damned thing in the world!
But then, finally, she calmed down, took a deep breath, and began drafting her defense of something that, after all, would never happen, would it?
No, she told herself. It would never happen.
CHAPTER 12
WILD CARDS
The theme park had learned well from its more famous model. It had taken care to hire away a dozen senior executives, their lavish salary increases paid for by the park’s Persian Gulf financial backers, who had already exceeded their fiscal expectations and looked forward to recouping their total investment in less than six years instead of the programmed eight and a half.
Those investments had been considerable, since they determined not merely to emulate the American corporation, but to exceed it in every respect. The castle in their park was made of stone, not mere fiberglass. The main street was actually three thoroughfares, each adapted to three separate national themes. The circular railroad was of standard gauge and used two real steam locomotives, and there was talk of extending the line to the international airport, which the Spanish authorities had been so kind as to modernize in order to support the theme park—as well they might: the park provided twenty-eight thousand full-time and ten thousand more part-time or seasonal jobs. The ride attractions were spectacular, most of them custom designed and built in Switzerland, and some of them adventurous enough to make a fighter pilot go pale. In addition, it had a Science World section, with a moonwalk attraction that had impressed NASA, an underwater walk-through mega-aquarium, and pavilions from every major industry in Europe—the one from Airbus Industrie was particularly impressive, allowing children (and adults) to pilot simulated versions of its aircraft.
There were characters in costumes—gnomes, trolls, and all manner of mythical creatures from European history, plus Roman legionnaires to fight barbarians—and the usual marketing areas where guests could buy replicas of everything the park had to offer.
One of the smartest things the investors had done was to build their theme park in Spain rather than France. The climate here, while hotter, was also sunny and dry most of the year, which made for full-year-round operations. Guests flew in from all over Europe, or took the trains, or came down on bus tours to stay at the large, comfortable hotels, which were designed for three different levels of expense and grandeur, from one that might have been decorated by César Ritz down to several with more basic amenities. Guests at all of them shared the same physical environment, warm and dry, and could take time off to bathe in the many pools surrounded by white-sand beaches, or to play on one of the two existing golf courses—three more were under construction, and one of them would soon be part of the European Professional Tour. There was also a busy casino, something no other theme park had tried. All in all, Worldpark, as it was called, had been an instant and sensational success, and it rarely had fewer than ten thousand guests, and frequently more than fifty thousand.
A thoroughly modern facility, it was controlled by six regional and one master command center, and every attraction, ride, and food outlet was monitored by computers and TV cameras.
Mike Dennis was the operations director. He’d been hired away from Orlando, and while he missed the friendly managerial atmosphere there, the building and then running of Worldpark had been the challenge he’d waited for all his life. A man with three kids, this was his baby, Dennis told himself, looking out the battlements of the tower. His office and command center was in the castle keep, the tall tower in the twelfth-century fortress they’d built. Maybe the Duke of Aquitaine had enjoyed a place like this, but he’d used only swords and spears, not computers and helicopters, and as wealthy as his grace had been back in the twelfth century, he hadn’t handled money in this quantity—Worldpark took in ten million dollars in cash alone on a good day, and far more than that from plastic. Every day a cash truck with a heavy police escort left the park for the nearest bank.
Like its model in Florida, Worldpark was a multistory structure. Under the main concourses was a subterranean city where the support services operated, and the cast members changed into costumes and ate their lunches, and where he was able to get people and things from place to place quickly and unseen by the guests in the sunlight. Running it was the equivalent of being mayor of a not-so-small city—harder, actually, since he had to make sure that everything worked all the time, and that the cost of operations was always less than the city’s income. That he did his job well, actually about 2.1 percent better than his own pre-opening projections, meant that he had a sizable salary, and that he’d earned the $1,000,000 bonus that had been delivered to him only five weeks earlier. Now, if only his kids could get used to the local schools. . . .
Even as an object of hatred, it was breathtaking. It was a city, Andre saw, the construction of which had cost billions. He’d lived through the indoctrination process in the local “Worldpark University,” learned the absurd ethos of the place, learned to smile at everything and everybody. He’d been assigned, fortuitously, to the security department, the notional Worldpark Policia, which meant that he wore a light blue shirt and dark blue trousers with a vertical blue stripe, carried a whistle and a portable radio, and spent most of his time telling people where the restrooms were, because Worldpark needed a police force about as much as a ship needed wheels. He’d gotten this job because he was fluent in three languages, French, Spanish, and English, and thus could be helpful to the majority of the visitors—“guests”—to this new Spanish city, all of whom needed to urinate from time to time, and most of whom, evidently, lacked the wit to notice the hu
ndreds of signs (graphic rather than lettered) that told them where to go when the need became overwhelming.
Esteban, Andre saw, was in his usual place, selling his helium-filled balloons. Bread and circuses, they both thought. The vast sums expended to build this place—and for what purpose? To give the children of the poor and working classes a brief few hours of laughter before they returned to their dreary homes? To seduce their parents into spending their money for mere amusement? Really, the purpose of the place was to enrich further the Arab investors who’d been persuaded to spend so much of their oil money here, building this fantasy city. Breathtaking, perhaps, but still an object of contempt, this icon of the unreal, this opiate for the masses of workers who had not the sense to see it for what it was. Well, that was the task of the revolutionary elite.
Andre walked about, seemingly in an aimless way, but actually in accordance with plans, both his and the park’s. He was being paid to look around and make arrangements while he smiled and told parents where their little darlings could relieve themselves.
“This will do it,” Noonan said, walking into the morning meeting.
“What’s ‘this’?” Clark asked.
Noonan held up a computer floppy disk. “It’s just a hundred lines of code, not counting the installation stuff. The cells—the phone cells, I mean—all use the same computer program to operate. When we get to a place, I just insert this in their drives and upload the software. Unless you dial in the right prefix to make a call—7-7-7, to be exact—the cell will respond that the number you’re calling is busy. So, we can block any cellular calls into our subjects from some helpful soul outside and also prevent them from getting out.”
“How many spare copies do you have?” Stanley asked.
“Thirty,” Noonan answered. “We can get the local cops to install them. I have instructions printed up in six languages.” Not bad, eh? Noonan wanted to say. He’d gone through a contact at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, to get it. Pretty good for just over a week’s effort. “It’s called Cellcop, and it’ll work anywhere in the world.”
“Good one, Tim.” Clark made a note. “Okay, how are the teams?”
“Sam Houston’s down with a sprained knee,” Peter Covington told Clark. “Hurt it coming down a zip-line. He can still deploy, but he won’t be running for a few days.”
“Team-2’s fully mission-capable, John,” Chavez announced. “George Tomlinson is a little slowed down with his Achilles tendon, but no big deal.”
Clark grunted and nodded, making a further note. Training was so hard here that the occasional injury was inevitable—and John well remembered the aphorism that drills were supposed to be bloodless combat, and combat supposed to be bloody drills. It was fundamentally a good thing that his troops worked as hard in practice as they did in the real thing—it said a lot for their morale, and just as much for their professionalism, that they took every aspect of life in Rainbow that seriously. Since Sam Houston was a long-rifleman, he really was about seventy percent mission-capable, and George Tomlinson, strained tendon and all, was still doing his morning runs, gutting it out as an elite trooper should.
“Intel?” John turned to Bill Tawney.
“Nothing special to report,” the Secret Intelligence Service officer replied. “We know that there are terrorists still alive, and the various police forces are still doing their investigations to dig them out, but it’s not an easy job, and nothing promising appears to be underway, but . . .” But one couldn’t predict a break in a case. Everyone around the table knew that. This very evening someone of the class of Carlos himself could be pulled over for running a stop sign and be recognized by some rookie cop and snapped up, but you couldn’t plan for random events. There were still over a hundred known terrorists living somewhere in Europe probably, just like Ernst Model and Hans Fürchtner, but they’d learned a not-very-hard lesson about keeping a low profile, adopting a simple disguise, and keeping out of trouble. They had to make some greater or lesser mistake to be noticed, and the ones who made dumb mistakes were long since dead or imprisoned.
“How about cooperation with the local police agencies?” Alistair Stanley asked.
“We keep speaking with them, and the Bern and Vienna missions have been very good press for us. Wherever something happens, we can expect to be summoned swiftly.”
“Mobility?” John asked next.
“That’s me, I guess,” Lieutenant Colonel Malloy responded. “It’s working out well with the 1st Special Operations Wing. They’re letting me keep the Night Hawk for the time being, and I’ve got enough time on the British Puma that I’m current in it. If we have to go, I’m ready to go. I can get MC-130 tanker support if I need it for a long deployment, but as a practical matter I can be just about anywhere in Europe in eight hours in my Sikorsky, with or without tanker support. Operational side, I’m comfortable with things. The troops here are as good as any I’ve seen, and we work well together. The only thing that worries me is the lack of a medical team.”
“We’ve thought about that. Dr. Bellow is our doc, and you’re up to speed on trauma, right, doc?” Clark asked.
“Fairly well, but I’m not as good as a real trauma surgeon. Also, when we deploy, we can get local paramedics to help out from police and fire services on the scene.”
“We did it better at Fort Bragg,” Malloy observed. “I know all our shooters are trained in emergency-response care, but a properly trained medical corpsman is a nice thing to have around. Doctor Bellow’s only got two hands,” the pilot noted. “And he can only be in one place at a time.”
“When we deploy,” Stanley said, “we do a routine call-up to the nearest local casualty hospital. So far we’ve had good cooperation.”
“Okay, guys, but I’m the one who has to transport the wounded. I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I think we could do it a little better. I recommend a drill for that. We should practice it regularly.”
That wasn’t a bad idea, Clark thought. “Duly noted, Malloy. Al, let’s do that in the next few days.”
“Agreed,” Stanley responded with a nod.
“The hard part is simulating injuries,” Dr. Bellow told them. “There’s just no substitute for the real thing, but we can’t put our people in the emergency room. It’s too time-wasteful, and they won’t see the right kind of injuries there.”
“We’ve had this problem for years,” Peter Covington said. “You can teach the procedures, but practical experience is too difficult to come by—”
“Yeah, unless we move the outfit to Detroit,” Chavez quipped. “Look, guys, we all know the right first-aid stuff, and Doctor Bellow is a doc. There’s only so much we have time to train for, and the primary mission is paramount, isn’t it? We get there and do the job, and that minimizes the number of wounds, doesn’t it?” Except to the bad guys, he didn’t add, and nobody really cared about them, and you couldn’t treat three 10-mm bullets in the head, even at Walter Reed. “I like the idea of training to evac wounded. Fine, we can do that, and practice first-aid stuff, but can we realistically go farther than that? I don’t see how.”
“Comments?” Clark asked. He didn’t see much past that, either.
“Chavez is correct . . . but you’re never fully prepared or fully trained,” Malloy pointed out. “No matter how much you work, the bad guys always find a way to dump something new on you. Anyway, in Delta we deploy with a full medical-response team, trained corpsmen—experts, used to trauma care. Maybe we can’t afford to do that here, but that’s how we did it at Fort Bragg.”
“We’ll just have to depend on local support for that,” Clark said, closing the issue. “This place can’t afford to grow that much. I don’t have the funding.”
And that’s the magic word in this business, Malloy didn’t have to add. The meeting broke up a few minutes later, and with it the working day ended. Dan Malloy had grown accustomed to the local tradition of closing out a day at the club, where the beer was good and the c
ompany cordial. Ten minutes later, he was hoisting a jar with Chavez. This little greaser, he thought, really had his shit together.
“That call you made in Vienna was pretty good, Ding.”
“Thanks, Dan.” Chavez took a sip. “Didn’t have much of a choice, though. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.”
“Yep, that’s a fact,” the Marine agreed.
“You think we’re thin on the medical side . . . so do I, but so far that hasn’t been a problem.”
“So far you’ve been lucky, my boy.”
“Yeah, I know. We haven’t been up against any crazy ones yet.”
“They’re out there, the real sociopathic personalities, the ones who don’t care a rat’s ass about anything at all. Well, truth is, I haven’t seen any of them either except on TV. I keep coming back to the Ma’alot thing, in Israel twenty-plus years ago. Those fuckers wasted little kids just to show how tough they were—and remember what happened a while back with the President’s little girl. She was damned lucky that FBI guy was there. I wouldn’t mind buying that guy a beer.”
“Good shooting,” Chavez agreed. “Better yet, good timing. I read up on how he handled it—talking to them and all, being patient, waiting to make his move, then taking it when he got it.”
“He lectured at Bragg, but I was traveling that day. Saw the tape. The boys said he can shoot a pistol as well as anybody on the team—but better yet, he was smart.”