Wind gusted at the little car, swerving it and frightening him. He took a harder grip on the wheel.
Across the sky of Dingley Falls fire was blown in squalls. Up on her widow's walk still at 2:00 A.M., Ramona Dingley in her white cotton nightshirt leaned on her cane. She watched in horror as hundreds of trees burned, the trees of her past, her town's trees. At some point in her vigil she thought of the government base near Bredforet Pond that Polly and Luke had found out. Might it be consumed in this conflagration? But the young people had proof now; she would leave that work to them. As the blaze brightened, she could think only of Dingley Falls itself. Fire might destroy Dingley Falls. Three hundred years it had lasted, and now—under her protectorship—it might fall back to nothing. She, the last of the governors bearing the name Dingley, might be the one to lose the town. After all the lives that had built it; had lived and given birth and died in it; and all those still young who could wed its past to the future.
Tears squeezed from the old woman's eyes. She shifted her hands on two metallic canes that helped her support the useless legs and useless, sickly weight. Tendons and veins stood out on her hands.
"You!" she said, her head tilted back to the bleeding sky. "Listen to me!" Wind stirred the short-cropped hair atop the hawk's face. "Not going to my knees. Never get up. But standing is hard and I'll do it.
Here's a prayer. Don't say You knew You'd hear that word breathed by such a Thomas as I. I stand here to ask You. You save this town.
Look what You've been doing here! To what purpose? Don't burn it.
No bribe. Of what use an old soul like mine? Wouldn't give You my best years. Won't insult You by offering the dregs. I just stand here to ask You. Don't burn this town. Absurd, ain't it, me come to You?
Here I am. Your serve."
She lost any sense of time there atop the white tall house. Her arms shook, rattling the canes. Spasms in her back jumped like current through her body. Her hands were numb now but still held to the cold steel handles. Then for an instant the air was still.
And then there came a rushing wind that blew over the sky like the foaming sea, and the wind parted the clouds. She heard the thunder, she saw the great arm of lightning point down at earth.
Rain teemed out of the opened sky. And Ramona Dingley, shivering as water splashed down her face, lifted her head. "You!" she said.
"Quite a trick, you ask me. Preposterous to believe You did it, of course." She smiled, her hand sliding from a cane. "But won't deny I'm impressed." She slipped down into the wheelchair and whispered, "Think You could ask Sammy to come up here?"
Inflamed by air, fire jumped up at the raining sky like little men furious at the gods, shaking their fists in vain. Water fell to earth despite fire and air. Thundering its arrival, rain washed over Dingley Falls. Rain filled the Rampage, tumbled down the Falls, lifted the old bridge like a reckless lover, and swept it away.
Rain fell like the tears of God's mercy.
Rain in unending ranks of seraphic soldiery seized each particle of the Archangel's weaponry and with iridescent wings beat pestilence back into the unresistant earth.
Rain saved the town, and the faces of those who fought the fire lifted, smiling like the faces of the faithful turned up to praise Creation.
CONCERNING DICTION
That Thursday afternoon in a Hertz rental car, the intelligence officers Thom, Dick, and Harry had cruised east along a Connecticut Interstate near a little private airport north of a little resort town called Dingley Falls. Once they discovered the low, leafy entrance to a dirt road dug some years ago down from the Interstate, down into woods to the south, it was not that hard to locate the secret base of Operation Archangel. Their rented Mercury Marquis bounced like a rodeo ride, spun its wheels, lurched against trees, as they approached the secluded compound.
It was CIA assistant underdirector John Dick who smelled first the dogs, and then Dr. Svatopluk. Ants crawled all over a hand in which were clutched crumbs of what Dick thought must have been a sort of strudel. The Washingtonians identified the chief of staff by reading a plastic name tag pinned to Svatopluk's lab coat.
Inside a shiny building, where mums and marijuana twined around the door, the stench was worse, and the three civil servants did not attempt even a rough body count of all the young male bodies stretched in white on the plywood floors, helter-skelter, yet cozily near one another, some accidentally embracing. There was no need to confirm death, for the bloated limbs and bulging red eyeballs had already done that. The spies (who'd read a lot of spy stories but had always had cold war desk jobs themselves and had consequently never had a chance to see any action) stepped back at the sight and fled at the smell. Willy-nilly they gagged and, fearful of a radioactive plague for all they knew, raced, bumping, back to the airport motel where the Hertz girl expressed horror at what they had done in two hours' time to a beautiful Mercury Marquis with less than a thousand miles on it.
Thom, Dick, and Harry rushed into showers to scald off the chance of contamination. Their teenaged desk clerk, just on his way to a lunch break in the broom closet with the Hertz girl, thought he had walked into a trap of mad raping homosexual killers when three naked middle-aged men rushed him and offered him cash for his clothes. Their own were wrapped in the plastic shower curtain. The enterprising teenager charged them (on American Express) $50 each for what he could dig up, happily warning that it wouldn't be much.
Miserable in a booth at the motel's Round-Up Restaurant, the three espionage executives sat shamefaced in ill-fitting and unwashed blue jeans, T-shirts, white socks, and (their own) expensive leather loafers. They were without their shorts and feeling very vulnerable. Brooding to and from the salad bar, they tried to come up with a game plan. Since, an hour after exposure, they appeared to show no signs of dropping dead from what was apparently a major flaw in Dr. Svatopluk's experiment, maybe they could still pull this mess out of the fire, or at least save their own balls from the shredder.
"Gentlemen, we have a problem," said Thom, sawing at his T-bone steak.
"Maybe Wolton and Eagerly killed them all," said Dick, swizzling his Scotch.
"Maybe they killed Wolton and Eagerly at the same time, don't forget that," said Harry, beating catsup onto his potatoes. "So I say, we go back, hold our noses, flip over the bodies, and check out the faces for Dan and Bucky. Because if they're out there somewhere and blow the lid off this thing, man, somebody's going to have to bend over and take the fall, and I for one am not about to take it in the shorts because the CIA's got caught again with its pants down."
"Go back? Are you kidding?" said Thom and Dick. But the problem wasn't going to disappear on its own. There was no New Left left to blame. Maybe they could dump it on black radicals, but after Watergate it would be a ballbuster to come up with a scenario that the press would buy. No, if it came out, their best bet was the old standby, a solitary act of an isolated psychopath. But where would a psychopathic Svatopluk have gotten all that government property?
Because the computer had said he even had a navy cook and an army janitor. They ordered another round of drinks and three hot fudge sundaes and waited for help.
At last, at midnight the doors swung open and a man stepped inside. He was as hard-eyed and as bald as an American eagle. A little pudgy in the pot and splotchy on the hands and droopy by the jowls, but otherwise sound as a dollar. A big man in a Boy Scout scoutmaster's uniform.
Commander Hector Brickhart was a man of action, not thought.
Urgently summoned, he had left his scout troop in mid-trip of their first shot at Mother Nature. Without taking time to change, he had hitched a ride from Alaska through a pal in SAC, had been flown into Boston, and had flown himself in a borrowed monoplane to the private airport north of Dingley Falls. He had been humping hard, he said, hotter than hell, to save the face of the nation by destroying this dumb base. "Now hear this, you three stooges. You're in here boozing on your fat butts, dressed up like a fairy chorus line of greasy hoods, b
ut you don't know fuck about shit."
Impatiently, Brickhart heard the Washingtonians elaborate on the situation regarding Operation Archangel. In brief, there were bodies all over the base. They wanted them covered up. He told them, "Listen, boys, you're not thinking straight. If you look up your own asshole, there's just one thing you're going to see. Now forget trying to pin this on somebody else. This single-nut theory is junk and so's a feminist uprising. One thing you fellows never have understood is, if something's full of shit somewhere, and somebody's stuck in it balls deep, and that somebody's the U.S. of A., then you don't throw some fancy cover on top of him. You pull him out by the fanny! And that's what I'm here to help you bastards do." The commander would not, he said, hold a grudge against his country when the chips were down, even if that country had pensioned him off and disregarded every word of advice he'd ever given it since 1935, when he'd said, no bones about it, assassinate that goddamn Austrian paperhanger fast.
Okay, so there was a leak as big as a bull's pizzle in the Seventh Division Immuno-Deficiency Research Team, DIRT, and might as well shoot from the hip and call a spade a spade—DIRT was nothing but a goddamn germ warfare plant.
Well, said Thom, Dick, and Harry, it might be inappropriate to offer what were necessarily conjectures about the Svatopluk experiments; however, it could not be denied that whatever they were, any leakage about them could well be designed to embarrass the government at a most delicate juncture in current negotiations to agree on the language of a treaty, one of whose provisos was to condemn all forms of biological antipersonnel software. And so the less said about the Svatopluk experiments the better. Brickhart replied that their agencies should have kept that in mind before they left a trail up to Svatopluk's ballpark as wide open as an old whore's twat, and that personally he was surprised that a goddamn television camera wasn't sneaking in between his legs right this minute.
Brickhart outlined an offensive to which, after huddled conversation through the wee hours, the desperate civil servants agreed. At dawn on Friday, three army transport trucks (one carrying a dozen trained men perfectly equipped and outfitted to avoid infection) miraculously appeared on the Interstate north of Dingley Falls and rendezvoused with the Mercury Marquis at a rest stop. Roll out! waved Brickhart. Forward they bounced down the bumpy road to pick up the ball science had dropped. There at the compound, the gas-masked soldiers quickly, methodically, expensively, fumigated the area, collected all the bodies, zipped them up in surplus bags, and trucked them out. Back at the rest stop, the corpses were packed into a supply van to transport them to the Boston naval base where Brickhart had some pals. And from there they would be flown in a surplus plane out into the Atlantic to meet en masse legitimate deaths, when their plane would "crash" on its way to a military conference on Martha's Vineyard. "Happens all the time," Hector Brickhart had said, in reference to planes lost at sea. "Well, not that often," said Thom, Dick, and Harry, who thought he meant multiple assassinations of American citizens by government agencies.
The three desk men stood beside the van as the plastic bags were carried by. A soldier unzipped enough so that they could check the faces for the features of Wolton and Eagerly. They found neither.
Except for one token black (the cook) and one token Jew (the chief of staff), all the faces, behind the twists of death, were young, bland, and hybridized Anglo-Saxon, the purest strain that of the Tennesseean janitor. The cook's bag was carried like a baby up to the van by Brickhart himself. "I knew this boy," he sighed, and showed the spies the wizened chocolate face of a man at least as old as he was. "Cook on my first ship. Isn't that something? In the Pacific.
Used to fry my steak just right. Lukewarm! Had an ensign on that cruise, one of those Ivy League nervous nellies, and every time I'd swab some bread around in that steak blood, that ensign would turn puke green and couldn't eat another bite. Sometimes, just to get at him, I'd take a big chew and let the juice run out of the sides of my mouth. You know? This little black fellow here always got a real kick out of it. The Japs got a lot of us on that cruise." And the commander zipped up the bag. It was tossed into the van.
The borrowed soldiers did not question the fact that they were evacuating victims of a "freak chemical accident," then dismantling the contaminated base—that made sense to them. What they did question was their sergeant's taking orders from a weirdo in a Boy Scout uniform and from his three weirdo underlings who were identically dressed as the late James Dean. Commander Brickhart understood their unease and told them, "Boys, your sarge here knows that your CO wouldn't have sent you off in this goddamn heat to this goddamn hole if he didn't know I either had a pretty damn good reason for asking, or else I'd gone out of my goddamn mind. So you do right by me and I'll do right by you. I know you're going to want to do your best, and you're going to want to do it fast! Fall out!" Because the commander had always said that while a British soldier would do his duty because he believed in duty, and a German soldier would do his because he believed in obedience, an American soldier did his duty if and when you persuaded him that the particular duty you wanted him to do was, according to his individual lights, worth doing, or that the particular officer he was doing it for was, in his personal judgment, somebody worth doing things for. His men, he was proud to say, had always liked him.
Taking apart the prefabricated base took much less time than it would have if things had been properly assembled in the first place.
Walls came down at a tap. Despite heat and humidity, the shirtless soldiers worked with enthusiasm. Demolition had its peculiar carnal delights. Hastily they wasted a superfluity of scientific equipment for which Thomas Svatopluk (buying for the government) had been extraordinarily overcharged. Then they razed the lab and leveled the living quarters and wrecked the rec room. Into the trucks went the portables like the color TV, collapsible pool table, and Coke machine. What wouldn't fit into the trucks and wouldn't burn was lugged over to the big, murky pond nearby and chucked in. It all sank to the dark floor of the pond, like accidental offerings thrown to the monster down in the far depths, with its monstrous, single, round glittering eye of glass and the tentacles of arms and legs that waved loosely from its green metal body. Like household objects buried with Egyptian dead, typewriters, latrines, electric razors, and chess sets waited in the pond silt to accompany Wolton and Eagerly and their pilot into the Other World.
By the time the soldiers had destroyed the compound, the sun had seeped away, and, so said Hector Brickhart, a big white lit of a moon bobbed over their heads. The scientists' bodies were already on their way to accidental death in the gray Atlantic. The demolition team was dismissed with ribald good wishes for the evening. Now beneath the moon stood Brickhart with the exhausted Thom, Dick, and Harry. They stood ringed by a circle of the base's gasoline barrels, which they had collected and positioned along the perimeter of the compound. The barrels were stamped ALAS-ORE OIL Co. And at the base's center was raised a pyre of plywood and five years' worth of back copies of Playboy magazine. On top of these Commander Brickhart placed the chief of staff's framed diplomas (B.S. from Fairleigh Dickinson, Ph.D. from Rutgers University, M.D. from Harvard Medical School), along with a framed photograph of a younger Svatopluk, wiry-haired and blotto-eyed, in a line of scientists honored to shake hands with the fairy tale president, John Kennedy.
Finally, with a sprinkle of gasoline from a coffee can, the naval commander offered a short blessing, which the representatives of the secret services, who did not speak the language, heard with discomfort. "Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out. That runt Svatopluk had a set of balls, I'll give him that. They weren't my shape of balls, but that's what makes the world go 'round. He stuck to his guns, the damn little kike, and my hat's off to him. He told me straight to my face, too, that maybe we didn't see eye to eye but he could appreciate my point of view."
(Dr. Svatopluk had said, "I don't make the mistake of assuming
that because you are a bigot, a racist, and a war monger that you are ipso facto, if you know what I mean, a complete idiot, which may not be the case.")
"Still, the little prick never would slip me any of the stuff he was making up here in this two-bit operation of his. Otherwise we might be lighting matches on the fannies of slopes in Hanoi right this minute. But maybe not. Because, boys, I'll tell you what it is. This goddamn country never has had the balls to stick by its guns. I say let's shoot for the title if we're shooting for the title, and stop pretending the other guy pulled us into the ring and then got himself KO'd on our gloves when we stuck them out just to keep him from clobbering the referee. I say let's stop needing every country in the world to think we're better than they are and stop trying to make them say so by being just like us, or by God, if that's the way we feel, let's say so, and let's make them ours! But let's cut the crap. I say at our age, it's time we stopped feeling as goddamn guilty as a virgin preacher that just fucked his first married parishioner. Because let's face it, we've fucked a hell of a lot including the British and the Indians and the Spanish and the Mexes and, God bless us, the Germans and those s.o.b. Japs, and screwed up bad when we stopped there and didn't go after the Russians, too. Because this is the world, and we got to make up our mind. It comes down to one thing. And that's all. And it's not any ideological crap or any economic crap either. It's when you get up on your back legs and you look the other guy straight in the face, which of you has got the biggest dick! That's right! That's the whole history of the world right there, and if you don't believe it, boys, don't start any fights. A lot of people think I'm a nut, but that's just because I plow the shit off the runway. I'm an American. I want to win! So let America ask herself, Are we going to do the fucking? Or are we going to be the one that gets fucked?
Michael Malone Page 54