Last War Dance td-17 Read online

  "Okay," said the quiet man, but when his glass was filled again, he did not drink until the General had first taken a drink from it.

  "It's this whole thing," he explained apologetically. "It's been spooky since the beginning. From the bones on, it's been spooky. I mean it was bad enough having to live for so long with a man I was going to kill, but I can't tell you what those old bones did to us. Little babies! Those Indians must have been something, General."

  He drank deeply and became mellow. He had not spoken to anyone for months.

  General Van Riker listened, said that yes, the old Indians were indeed something, and suddenly snapped his fingers. "Oh, no. We forgot the seal. It's got to be sealed immediately. I was so upset over what you looked like—the blood and everything—I forgot about the seal. We've got to put it on right away. Come on."

  The quiet man steadied himself against a small table He weaved a bit and tried to focus his eyes better. It had been a long time since he had indulged himself.

  "You know, General Van Riker, you're not real military, but I like you, buddy," he said, then poured himself another half-tumbler of bourbon and drank it down in one long gulp. "One for the prairie, heh, heh."

  Van Riker smiled benignly and helped the man from the trailer.

  "One more for my baby and one more for the prairie," sang the man who had been quiet for so long. "One more for my baby and one more for the road or prairie or missile site. One more for the pyramids. You know, Van Riker, I fucking love you, baby. Not queer love or anything. You know. You're the greatest fucking guy in the world."

  Van Riker helped him up onto the giant marble base of the monument. "I'll lower the cap out of the truck," he said.

  "Yeah. Fucking do that. Good idea. Lower the cap out of the truck." And the once quiet man began to sing a tuneless chant about lowering caps out of trucks all day and old man missile, he don't do nothing, just sits in his hole awaiting a button, old man missile, he just keeps waiting along.

  "Hey, General, sweetheart, I'm a songwriter," he yelled, but he could not remember the lyrics, and besides, the metal arm extending from the truck over the plaque was sending out something. From the bottom it looked like a giant flattened barbell, and when it was over the two holes, he saw the two round caps would fit exactly. A long wire lowered from one cap.

  "Attach the wire to the bottom of one of the cylinders," yelled Van Riker.

  "One of the cylinders is full."

  "The empty one, then."

  "Sure, old buddy." And in his revelry he grabbed the wire with both hands and jumped into the empty cylinder. The wire came with him, whining from some sort of spool he could not see.

  "There's a hook at your feet," yelled Van Riker. "You've got to tie the wire on."

  "Looking for the hook, old boy, looking for the hook," sang the once quiet man to the tune of "Bringing in the Sheaves." Since there wasn't room to bend over, he had to squat and feel between his legs for the hook. The cylinder was black and cold against his cheek and back, skin-sticking cold.

  When he finally got the wire wound around the hook, he heard something up above. It was the whirring sound from the spool. The wire stretched taut, pinning him against the cold metal side, and he saw the flattened dumbbell device coming down exactly over his hole, pulled by the very wire he had tied to the hook between his feet. He was sober in an instant.

  He went for his gun to jam it between the cap and cylinder top, but by the time the gun was out of its holster, the cap had closed solidly and the stars above him were gone. He was in blackness now.

  Up above, on the plain where Sioux war parties and U.S. Cavalry had once massacred the helpless Apowas, General Douglas Van Riker climbed from the back of the van onto the marble monument.

  It now had an airtight headstone sealing off the two bodies, hopefully forever. On the far side of the flattened dumbbell was the inscription, "Wounded Elk Massacre." On the near one was, "August 17, 1873."

  The letters on the missile seal, the huge central bronze disk, read, "Here, on August 17, 1873, a unit of the United States Cavalry slaughtered fifty-five members of the Apowa Tribe. The Bureau of Indian Affairs and the nation deeply regret this crime and now, for all time, acknowledge its occurrence. February 23,1961."

  Van Riker read the inscription. More than a decade later he would be horrified by his choice camouflage. But at the time, he regarded it as so perfect that it was worth even the lives of the two men buried inside the marble monument beneath his feet.

  Van Riker heard a muffled ping beneath him. The once quiet man was trying to shoot his way out. No matter. The bullet would probably spin around the burial cylinder until it stopped in the man. He was dead. If not now, minutes from now. If not by his own bullets, then by suffocation. It was unfortunate that anyone had to die, but this was not an ordinary missile. Two deaths now could save millions of lives later.

  For this was a nuclear age, and the life of the entire planet might depend on the security precautions taken by men who controlled the nuclear weapons—of all nations. It was not a question of a better gun. It was a question of whether life would continue to exist on earth.

  Van Riker had not worked so hard to design this installation for an ordinary missile. No, this missile was the Cassandra, and because it was the Cassandra, only one living man could know where it was and what it was. The supervisor had suspected this when he had begun to realize how this missile differed from others. So out went the quiet man with the drinking problem, who had been on the wagon for a long time. Even to this detail had Van Riker planned.

  "I'm sorry, gentlemen," he said, knowing no one could hear him on the Montana prairie, "but there are millions whose lives will be saved by this. Maybe billions, because, gentlemen, this device should save us from a nuclear war." And then he thought of the layers of bodies he was standing on—bodies that had fallen there thousands of years before Christ and then in 1873 and now in 1961. Perhaps if the rest of the plan worked, there would never be another war, Van Riker thought.

  He drove the truck along the dusty dirt road for about seventy miles before he saw human life—the small Apowa Indian reservation. He left the truck in a military parking field fifty miles farther east and without even checking to see if he had taken the keys from the ignition, he caught a commercial liner for the Bahamas, where he had an estate with very efficient telephones connected directly to the Pentagon.

  By the time Van Riker felt the first warmth of the Bahamas sun, a new air attaché was arriving at the United States Embassy in Moscow. He had a meeting scheduled in the Kremlin and had specified some of the men who must be there. He had named some scientists and military men and NKVD personnel, and—to the Russians' surprise—he named a man whose identity they had thought was secret, a man whom even most of the high-level NKVD foreign-bureau staffers did not know. Valashnikov.

  Now, Valashnikov was twenty-eight years old—a good twenty years younger than all the other Russian military there, so young that in previous generations other officials would have assumed he was related to the czar. But in this generation, when they saw his smooth young face and the piercing black eyes of youth, they knew that here was probably a future chief of staff. Here was a genius. Here was a man who would, at the very least, command armies by the time he was their age. Command armies, if not the entire nation, although at this time he was only wearing the uniform of an NKVD colonel. So they were polite to Valashnikov, despite his youth and relatively low rank, for no one else in the room was less than a general.

  "Gentlemen," said the American air attaché, "my government has asked to meet with you to explain a new development in missiles, a nuclear warhead."

  The Russians nodded dully, all except the one young man. He appeared more interested in cleaning his fingernails.

  "It is essential for the effectiveness of the weapon that you know of its existence," the attaché continued.

  "In that case, we are all leaving," said Colonel Valashnikov.

  The older men lo
oked at him, shocked. As they saw him go to the door, they too began to rise, because no one wanted to be the only person left in the room.

  But Valashnikov stopped at the door, his pink cheeks beaming with the flush of victory. "So much for your weapon. We choose not to listen or believe and your weapon is nothing."

  The men in the room saw the American smile weakly.

  "But we are reasonable men," said Valashnikov. "If capitalists choose to spend their workers' wages on things which are nothing, we will be considerate." And Valashnikov returned to his seat at the table, as did all the others, realizing that Valashnikov had already won an important battle. The Americans would now have to tell them much more than they had intended if they wanted the Russians to believe it. And all this without even a threat. The boy colonel was a genius. A genius.

  Those officers who did not know Valashnikov made it a point to look at him warmly and to smile during the meeting, which was now, of course, between the American general and the

  "I am here to tell you about the Cassandra missile," said the American. And he told of a nuclear warhead made up of smaller warheads, some with their own projection devices. He talked about umbrella coverage and multiple reentry. Some Russians took notes. Others—those who had fought the great tank battles against the Nazis and did not know rocketry or nuclear warfare—listened with pretended understanding, grateful for men like Valashnikov, whose knowledge made it possible for them to ignore things like science and international politics.

  "What you are describing is stupid," said Valashnikov. "That is the dirtiest nuclear warhead I have ever heard of. It is irresponsible in the extreme. It would have, at best, only vague accuracy. You would barely hit our continent with it. After you've fired it, don't expect to be eating fish from the sea for the next five generations. If there are five generations. Absurd!"

  "Thank you," said the American general coolly. "Thank you for understanding the Cassandra. It will only be fired if you should attack first and succeed. In other words, you now know that if we lose a nuclear war, you've lost, also."

  "Idiot!" shouted Valashnikov. "I rejected a similar device two years ago, before it got off the drawing board. It's unstable, you fool. Even in the ground it's unstable."

  But the American general was not listening to him. He was headed toward the door, with a blank smile on his face. It was his turn not to listen.

  When the American was gone, Valashnikov's anger vanished and he gave a little shrug. To the chief of staff he explained that the way to handle the Cassandra was to find it and leave it where it was. "You see," he explained to the field marshal, "the weakness of the Cassandra is partly psychological, which is also its strength. Let me explain. If you believe no one will dare attack you, you become lax. If you believe you have the perfect defense, then you begin wasting your money on such things as social improvements and the like. Now if we find where it is, then ignore it, we leave them their illusion. Until we decide to attack. And of course our first strike in an attack is the Cassandra."

  "What if they have two Cassandras? Even three?" asked the field marshal who had begun his military career with a saber and now saw himself ending it as a scientific philosopher.

  Valashnikov shook his head. "It's technical, and I think our scientists would bear me out. You are not going to have two Cassandras or three. Because if two or three should go, it could—in the simplest sense—create a planetwide Dresden effect."

  "You mean the bombing in World War II where the very air burned, it was so hot?"

  "Correct," said Valashnikov. "Only here it would literally have the oxygen feeding a nuclear fire so hot and so consuming that conceivably all oxygen would be burned from the planet. All life. No. Two or three Cassandras goes beyond irresponsibility into insanity. Insane the Americans are not."

  "Don't be so sure," said the adviser on international relations. "Look at what they just did in Cuba."

  Everyone laughed. It was a good tension breaker.

  To the NKVD chief and to the chief of the foreign bureau Valashnikov explained that the Cassandra would not be all that difficult to find. At least five feet of it had to be above ground and encased, probably in marble or at least some form of rock material. Also, the Cassandra had another drawback that would be most noticeable.

  "Bronze," said one of the scientists, smiling. "Of course. Bronze. A shield of bronze twenty feet in diameter. Removable for firing."

  Valashnikov nodded. And imitating the American, he said, "Gentlemen, we have a great problem ahead of us. We must find a giant piece of marble with a bronze center, far away from any American population center. And in case we don't recognize it instantly, the center has to be perfectly round. A real problem, gentlemen. It should take us days, at least, gentlemen."

  Everyone laughed except the field marshal. "How many days?" he asked. He had seen many things go wrong, from cavalary charges to the new tank the Germans were supposed to be so afraid of that they would never attack. He still had scars from when he had escaped from the flaming turret of one of those tanks in June 1941.

  "Well, for one thing, Comrade Field Marshal, we have our own observation satellites, and they can pick up marble and bronze with ease."

  "Statues are made of marble and bronze," said the field marshal. "And there are many statues in America."

  "Yes, there are, comrade, and someone who has served with the czar would be well aware of statues and the like. And so is the NKVD. I don't think we are going to miss a marble and bronze configuration of the likes that hides the Cassandra in some desert somewhere. Besides, its construction must have taken many workers many months. Our agents will know of it."

  "What if it is not in desert? What if it is in city?"

  "I doubt they would put something as unstable as the Cassandra in a city, Comrade Field Marshal. They could not keep secret the labors of so many workers for so long."

  "I remember Americans," said the field marshal. "All the impossible things they did. Oh, yes, everybody laughs at them today, but I tell you, those soft, silly self-indulgent children become very tough and shrewd when they have to. Oh, yes. I know what you think. You think, there is field marshal who started out as sergeant in czar's cavalry. There is field marshal who brought hot chocolate to Stalin and survived and became general. There is field marshal who fought Germans with tanks and then befriended both Beria and Khruschev and became field marshal. Well, I tell you men of slide rules, I have seen Russian blood spilled by Russians. I have seen Russian blood spilled by Germans. I have seen Russian blood spilled by Chinese and Americans and by Englishmen and Finns."

  Tears were welling up in the strong swollen face of the field marshal, and some of the scientists were becoming a bit embarrassed.

  "I will see no more Russian blood spilled than I have to. I have seen enough. You, Valashnikov, young man of such confidence and assurance, you who have never cried and prayed to God… yes, prayed to God… I have seen even political commissars do it during the hard winters of the last war… You, who think that all things can be worked out in mind and on paper… You, before you do another thing, find that Cassandra missile. Find it. You will do nothing else, rise to no other rank, until you find that horror for Mother Russia. I say, Mother Russia. Mother Russia. Mother Russia. Good day, gentlemen. God bless Mother Russia."

  After the field marshal left, there was silence in the room, embarrassed silence. Finally Valashnikov spoke. "He's fallen right into their psychological trap. And to think we beat the Germans with that. Well, I don't see this taking any more than a week. Any of you see it differently?"

  None did that day. But as the week passed and then the month and then many months, many of the top officers began remembering that, like the field marshal, they too, had thought the Cassandra might pose some problems.

  And Valashnikov watched his classmates become captains, then majors, then lieutenant colonels and colonels, while he still searched for the Cassandra. One day he thought he had found it, but that turned out to be his m
ost bitter disappointment. Everything was perfect for the Cassandra, but the marble and bronze turned out to be a stupid monument to some dead savages, much like the Russians' own Tartars. It was on that day that Valashnikov noticed the first hint of a receding hairline and realized that he was not a young man any more. And he was still a colonel.

  Time passed in America, also. And what was once considered a noble monument constructed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs had become a rallying point for what many perceived as a grievous injustice to the only indigenous Americans. Especially after the best-selling book by Lynn Cosgrove, My Soul Rises from Wounded Elk.

  Shouting, "It is a good day to die," some forty men and women wearing Indian warpaint and bonnets had seized the marble and bronze monument out in the Montana prairie and the Episcopal church that had been built a few yards from it. They wanted to bring attention, their leaders said, "to the oppression of the American Indian."

  Real Apowa Indians—who had in the past ten years moved from their reservation and built the town of Wounded Elk half a mile from the monument—watched the goings-on and scratched their heads.

  Television cameras came in to surround Wounded Elk. Federal marshals moved in and formed a giant loose circle around the monument and the Episcopal church but made no effort to remove the Indians. And General Van Riker was watching on Bahamian television as half a dozen of the Indians banged away with rifle butts on the bronze shield of the Cassandra. Then some lunatic began working with a power drill. General Van Riker phoned the Pentagon and demanded to speak to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  A snotty brigadier explained to Van Riker that he had clearance only for a Max-Emergency 7 call, which did not exist except in case of nuclear war.

  "Put on the admiral," said Van Riker, "or you'll end your career in Leavenworth, making little ones out of big ones."

  "Yes," came the admiral's somnolent tones from the receiver. "What do you want, Van Riker?"

  "We've got a problem."

  "Can we talk about it Monday?"