Winter Warning

by Jerome Charyn

  Then he heard a strange report that couldn’t have come from a pistol. It was a riotous beating of wings, as a great scatter of birds flew over his head. Isaac marveled at the pattern, like a series of geometric wheels. The whitetails were frozen for a moment, as if the crack in the air had bewitched them, and then they woke out of their dream and bolted into the forest in one beautiful, whirling line, led by that crooked crown.

  Isaac couldn’t abandon the window. He was as transfixed as the whitetails had been, mesmerized by that powerful commotion. He was almost surly when his Seabee chef tackled him.

  “Mr. President, you’ll have to move your ass.”

  He followed Charles deeper into the sun room as his picture window shattered in a burst of gunfire that sounded like a dull shiver of tin. Both men crept behind a couch. Cushions flew into the air in a second burst of fire, and feathers from the wounded cushions floated across the sun room in a blinding haze. Charles wore a tin plug in his ear.

  “Tango One,” he whispered into his chest, “this is the Dancer . . .”

  Isaac didn’t hear the crackling spit of a radio. Charles removed his ear plug.

  “Mr. President, we can’t raise the dead. All the channels have been scrambled—as a precaution, sir. We’re under attack.”

  Pepito—the sage of Medellin—had been right. Sidel was a damn sitting duck. Some money-laundering son of a bitch of a banker would win all the marbles, millions perhaps in a fanciful lottery over the president’s last breath. Isaac shouldn’t have complained about that spindly lone wolf. The attackers, whoever they were, had driven the wolf onto Isaac’s lawn—that wolf was a warning sign, so was the herd’s late arrival. The whitetails were having their last lick.

  It was some kind of bewildering Armageddon. Circuits had been cut. There were flashes of brilliant light. For a moment he thought the compound was ablaze. And then the fire vanished with the same stubborn, irrational pull, and he tumbled into a world of silence, broken by an occasional cry and the sullen crack of a pistol. Separated from the Secret Service, Isaac was a commander in chief suddenly adrift. Ramona Dazzle must have been rejoicing that POTUS was hidden somewhere in the ether. Had she installed Bull Latham in the Oval Office as president pro tem, with his own nuclear football and “biscuit,” the little plastic card that carried all the codes of destruction? He and the Bull were the only ones who had the football and the biscuit. Isaac had lost sight of his own military aide and football. But nothing could be launched without him, not yet. Isaac still had his biscuit. And he still had his Glock.

  “Charles,” he said to his Seabee, “let’s shoot it out with the cocksuckers. We’ll join the razzia.”

  “What’s a razzia, Mr. President?”

  “A raid, a romp, a surprise attack. The Bedouins would arrive in the middle of a dust storm, steal another tribe’s horses and drinking water, and disappear into the dust—a perfect razzia.”

  But when Isaac tried to get up with his Glock and move toward the sun porch, the Seabee tackled him again.

  “I could have you court-martialed,” Isaac said.

  “Maybe so. But I have one mission, sir, and that’s to keep you alive. You can’t move from Aspen. We’re in lockdown.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s protocol once we have unfriendly fire. No one can get in or out of Cactus until our boys fine-comb the facility.”

  “That could take a year,” Isaac said with a growl. He inspected the scars around Charles’ eyes, souvenirs from Nam. “You’re not really a chef, are you? Who the hell placed you here?”

  Charles must have had some Seabee code of honor. Isaac had to stare at him for five minutes flat until Charles finally relented.

  “Captain Sarah Rogers, sir. She kind of oversees this mountain from some office in Quantico.”

  “You tricked me, Charles. All that jazz about the Polo Grounds. You’re with Navy Intel.”

  “Yes and no,” Charles said. “I am the chef attached to Aspen. But Cap’n Sarah put me on special assignment—to watch over your dumb ass. Forgive my informality. Those were Cap’n Sarah’s exact words.”

  “And how come I never met this hidden sleuth from Quantico?”

  “Sleuth, sir? She considers herself the landlord of Camp David, and you’re her prize tenant. She don’t like to interfere.”

  “That’s lovely of her,” Isaac muttered. He’d send this captain of intelligence to the coal mines once the razzia was over. Meanwhile he sat there while Charles crawled into the kitchen and returned with a thermos of coffee and egg salad sandwiches on Italian whole wheat bread imported from a bakery on Long Island. Isaac felt ridiculous having a picnic in the midst of an assault on the mountain. But he ate his sandwich dutifully, drank his mug of coffee with low-fat milk. The president, with his doomsday codes on a little card, was everybody’s child. He was pampered, protected, bullied, buffeted around. Charles had tackled him twice.

  The Seabee began to sniff around him. “I can smell the snow, sir. The storm should be coming.”

  “That’s ridiculous—a farmer’s tale. I haven’t seen one fucking snowflake.”

  “She’ll come,” Charles said. And within ten minutes the air outside Isaac’s shattered window was clotted with flakes, as if Charles himself had summoned the snow, like a mass of ragged white dots in a modernist painting. And then the dots whirled faster and faster.

  Charles didn’t have time to play the farmer-philosopher. “The storm will blow right through the cabin like a choo-choo train and wreck everything in sight. You sit where you are, sir—don’t move.”

  Charles stacked the furniture in a great pile, and then he took the drapes from the picture window, battened them down, and stapled them to the valence above the window and to the wall. He built his own cluster of sandbags with all the blankets, sheets, and pillows he could find, wedging this cluster close to the battened drapes until he had his own little fort.

  The little fort didn’t last. The snarling wind tore into the drapes, and chairs flew across the sun room like murderous missiles. Charles thrust a blanket over Isaac, and covered him with pillows, while he swatted at the flying chairs like Willie Mays—with a broom. Then the wind died down. Isaac crept out from under the blanket, and realized that he sat in a blinding white tomb of snow. The cabin had become a burial ground for the living. Charles had to brush him off with the broom.

  They survived the storm, engulfed in that white glare, while Isaac suffered the humiliation of being utterly out of the loop on a mountain that was no longer his. He’d almost forgotten the razzia when Bull Latham burst through the door in a bulletproof vest and a snow cap that covered his ears. Behind him was his aide, carrying the football. Isaac could hear the crackle of flashbulbs, see a cornucopia of television cameras. The press rarely set foot inside the citadel of Camp David, but the Bull had come as Isaac’s savior, and the Bull had to shine. With him was a luscious lady officer with hazel eyes, dark curls, and steel-tipped boots. The Big Guy didn’t have to guess who it was—Cap’n Sarah of Navy Intel.

  “Lo, Bull,” he said. “I hope your rescue will be on all the networks. Did you enjoy sitting in the catbird seat? How many pictures did you take with Barbara Walters inside the Oval Office?”

  The Bull’s lower lip was trembling. He would have liked to hurl Isaac down the stairs at Aspen and into the arms of the press corps. “I never went near the Oval Office.”

  “Come on, didn’t Ramona ask you to stage a coup d’état in front of the television cameras?”

  Isaac had a curious affliction—he loved to taunt his vice president. But the Bull had to bite down hard on his lip and swallow his own venom. He couldn’t afford a wrestling match in front of reporters from all over the planet. It was Miss Steel Toes who answered him, protecting her eyes from all that glare.

  “Forgive me, Mr. President, but don’t be such a prick. We’ve had a very rough day. It wasn’t that easy to neutralize the mountain. The unfriendlies seemed to come out of nowhere. We had
little warning. Not a single one of them should have been able to infiltrate the facility. I’m Captain Sarah Rogers, sir.”

  “Ah,” Isaac said, “I know. You’re my landlady on the mountain.”

  The Big Guy was beginning to enjoy himself. He liked this young captain with the curly hair.

  “Was there any collateral damage?” he asked.

  “Very little, sir. These mothers were professionals, mercs of some kind. A couple of our guys had superficial wounds. I suspect we’re dealing with a paramilitary unit that had some training right on the mountain.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Beats the shit out of me,” Sarah said. “But we did have some suspicion. The supply orders from the electrical shop didn’t sound right, sir—power plugs strong enough to break every circuit at the facility, and enough high-voltage wire to wrap itself around the Great Wall of China. I couldn’t interrogate the chief electrician; he’d already scattered, and he didn’t leave much of a forwarding address. Some dude must have paid him a whole lot of cash.”

  Suddenly Isaac was involved in his first caper as commander in chief. He felt much more comfortable as the nation’s policeman-president, though Teddy Roosevelt had also been a police commissioner, and Isaac had inherited his desk at police headquarters in Manhattan.

  “Did we take any prisoners?”

  “That’s the problem, Mr. President. The mercs were in and out with the storm. They didn’t leave many footprints in the snow.”

  The Big Guy had been right. A perfect razzia. Phantoms with their own flair.

  “Do you think they were trying to kidnap me, put out my lights?”

  “I’m not sure,” Sarah said. “I had my Marines stationed on Aspen’s perimeter once I discovered that the chief electrician was compromised.”

  “The fuckers still shot out my picture window and scared away the whitetails.”

  “Mr. President,” the Bull said, “that could have all been for show. They proved their point—that they could infiltrate the mountain despite all our damn security details. They weren’t after the football, or they would have swiped your biscuit. And even then, I can override any order once you’re outside the safety zone. I agree with Sarah. They’ve been here before, on this mountain. And this hit was a trial run.”

  “Or a kite,” Isaac said. “Hey, Big Balls, we can get to you anytime and anywhere.”

  Sarah and the Bull wanted to know about the two visitors Isaac had—Ariel Moss and Motke Katz—just before the attack on the mountain. But Isaac wasn’t prepared to discuss the Sons of Rossiya and that bankers’ lottery on his life, not while he was at Shangri-La. Ari and Motke must have gotten off the mountain, or else they were lying in some grave.

  There was a great deal of clamor on Isaac’s patio; reporters hovered around like beetles in fur-lined coats.

  “Isaac,” the Bull said, “sooner or later you’ll have to talk to the press, and it might as well be now.”

  “What do they know?”

  “Not that much,” Sarah said. “No one alerted them about your ride up the mountain on Marine One. And it’s pretty isolated up here. Some locals might have heard the gunfire. But they’ve heard gunfire before. They figured it was a Marine drill.”

  “Then why is the press parked on my porch?”

  “That’s Ramona’s mischief,” the Bull said. “She started making a few calls. I stopped her in time. You can make up your own song, Mr. President. The attackers didn’t even leave any of their shell casings.”

  “A surgical strike,” Isaac said, “and the only thing that’s missing is a motive.”

  Isaac went outside onto the patio in his windbreaker. He stood with the Bull and the beautiful captain; the wind nearly knocked him off the rails. He was still wearing his slippers. He had bits of glass in his scalp, like hard, biting dandruff. He mentioned a power shortage in the blizzard, a president who was cut off from the rest of the world.

  “Sir,” one of the reporters asked, “what if there had been a nuclear attack?”

  “We’re still covered,” Isaac said. “The Bull has his own biscuit—all the nuclear codes and keys.”

  Then he saw them; the whitetails had come back, the entire mob, led by that stag with its crown of thorns. They must have been hungry, starving, to risk this avalanche of human animals on their lawn, and satisfy their craving for salt. Isaac wanted to approach the stag in his slippers, touch its antlers, and he dreamt up his own little ballet while he was with the press. It was well past the mating season, and this stag should have shed its antlers, but it still had its crown of thorns, as if to defy all the gods of winter. And in his dream Isaac did touch the different branches of bone. The antlers had a slight envelope of fuzz, with a greenish tint. And then he was jostled out of his dream, as one of the cameramen approached the mob of whitetails at the salt lick.

  “Don’t,” Isaac cried, “don’t.” But the cameraman didn’t heed Isaac. The stag seemed to charge the cameraman with its antlers; the snowstorm must have maddened it a little. Isaac hopped about and hurled his slipper at the cameraman—it struck the side of his head. The cameraman toppled into the snow with all his cargo. And the mob of whitetails, with the stag in the lead, bounded back into the forest. Isaac watched their leaps in midair, and the beauty of it just about broke his heart.

  That’s what the press picked up, not a razzia that few people noticed, or a president who was out of touch with a nation during a blizzard, but a president who tossed his slipper at a rogue cameraman about to interrupt the feeding ritual of winter whitetails.

  6

  The Night Hawk wandered across Maryland and returned to the White House as if it were part of a funeral procession. The Big Guy barely breathed a word. He sat in his king’s chair, reliving the raid on the mountain moment by moment and recovering nothing at all—some army of werewolves might as well have been behind that razzia. He didn’t come into the cockpit once to schmooze. But he whispered to Colonel Oliver just before he disembarked. “Need you, Stef. I’d like you to spend the night.”

  The colonel hadn’t been with his little boy in five fucking days, couldn’t even phone Max during the lockdown at Cactus, find out if Max had any problems at school.

  So he was in a rotten mood until he looked outside his cockpit and saw Maximilian standing on the South Lawn. He wouldn’t even have to pilot the Night Hawk to Quantico and bed her down. His second in command was also on the lawn in full gear. The Big Guy must have arranged the switch. As uncomfortable as he was in the White House, Isaac was still a master of detail, a strategist in hibernation.

  Stef climbed down, saluted his second in command, and watched the Night Hawk float back into the sky like a ghostly gondola.

  The Secret Service let him and Max through the gate without a call sign. He was the president’s pilot, Colonel Stefan Oliver, commander of Marine Squadron One, and didn’t require any identification marks. He wove through the labyrinth of the West Wing, shunned the elevator, and hiked up to the attic with his boy. Stef was prince of the third floor, a kind of heir apparent, even though he wasn’t Isaac’s actual heir. The Big Guy had an estranged wife and a daughter who hadn’t visited him at the White House yet.

  The attic had its own peculiar feel, filled with ironing boards and maids’ paraphernalia. It also had its own tiny kitchen. And there were usually no other guests; Ramona liked to park her favorite cousins on the second floor, in one of the historic bedrooms. But Stef didn’t want to be surrounded by the stink of history. He preferred the randomness of the attic, where he had his own separate suite.

  He scooped up Max and carried him on his shoulder across the threshold like some abandoned bride. The boy was so damn thin. He’d mourn his mother for the rest of his days.

  “Problems at school?”

  “No, Pa.”

  “Has Karina been strict with you, huh?”

  Karina was their live-in maid.

  “Missed you, Pa,” the boy said, looking at Stef with skeletal
eyes. “All that snow. I dreamed you were lost.”

  Max was as wise as a witch doctor. Stef had felt disoriented during the lockdown, helpless and abandoned in a nondescript cabin at Camp David, without the least bit of connection, not even to the gunfire outside his own walls. And now his button mike crackled.

  “Tango One to Rio, the Citizen would like to see you.”

  “Jesus, Tango One, I’m with my little boy.”

  “Citizen says you should bring him along to the meet. He’s in the dollhouse.”

  The “dollhouse” was the beauty salon on the second floor, the Cosmetology Room that seemed to be Isaac’s favorite haunt in the entire residence. He didn’t have to deal with Ramona in the dollhouse.

  “Copy that,” the colonel said, unloosening the button mike while he combed the boy’s hair.

  But Max was excited, almost feverish. “Pa, am I gonna wrestle with the Big Guy again?”

  The boy loved Isaac, worshipped him. They often played together like a pair of orphans. That was the secret of Sidel. No matter what mantle he happened to wear at the time—president, mayor, or police chief—he still behaved like an orphan, with an essential sadness in his eyes.

  They went down one flight, past the Secret Service, and into the Cosmetology Room, and it startled Stef. Captain Rogers sat in one of the salon chairs, like some cosmic beautician in an officer’s blouse. She was still flirting with him, right in front of the Big Guy.

  “You’ve both met, I believe—on the mountain,” Isaac said.

  “Yeah,” Sarah said. “He’s almost as handsome as his little boy—what’s your name, son?”

  “Maximilian,” Max said. “I go to a special school. I can’t spell or recite poetry. And I stutter sometimes.”

  “Well, Lincoln’s little boy, Tad, was also a stutterer,” Isaac said. “And he ruled the White House.”

  “Perhaps Maximilian doesn’t care to rule,” Sarah sang in a gentle voice, and it troubled Stef, the way she seemed to caress the boy with her hazel eyes. Isaac could sense the discomfort in his helicopter pilot. He hugged Max and delivered him to a pair of Secret Service men, whose assignment was to play hide and seek with the boy on the second floor. Stef was still pissed off. He didn’t want his privileges with the boy usurped by Isaac’s ruffians. But he kept his mouth shut. Sidel, it seems, had absconded with Sarah, plucked her out of Quantico, and made her his liaison to the White House. The admirals at Navy Intel must have been ripping mad, but they couldn’t go to war with the commander in chief. If a single one of them complained to the Secretary of Defense, all these cloak-and-dagger admirals might lose their perks.