thousand meters, cruising lazily through a sky just starting to turn blue again after three days of darkness.
Men and women cautiously came out into the streets, blinking at the brightening sky and the glinting silvery planes circling gently above. They were obviously not warplanes, not the sleek angry falcons painted in camouflage grays and browns that hurled deadly eggs at the ground. These were fat clumsy cargo carriers, their unpainted aluminum gleaming cheerfully against the clearing sky.
The powder that the planes spewed from their cargo hatches was so radioactive that every crewman in the squadron died within two weeks. So did most of the living creatures in Jerusalem: men, women, children, pets, rats, insects, even trees curled their brown leaves and died.
Moslem and Jew alike bled at the pores and died in convulsive agonies. Citizens of the city, refugees who had fled there for safety, tourists trapped by the war, news reporters camping in the hotels, foreigners on duty in Jerusalem—they all died. Two and a half million of them.
After the cease-fire had been declared.
The medical help rushed into the city by the Americans and Europeans saved a pitiful few. Cole Alexander was among those who survived. He was young enough and strong enough to pull through a terrible ordeal of radiation sickness, although it left his hair dead white and triggered a form of leukemia that the doctors said could be "controlled" but never cured. It also left him sterile.
His mother did not survive. Cole watched her die, inch by excruciating inch, over the next seven weeks. She finally gave up the fight when the news came that her husband.
Cole's father, had been vaporized in the nuclear bombing of Tel Aviv. The American consulate there had been practically at ground zero.
The Final War led to the Athens Peace
Conference, and that's where I suppose I'll
have to begin the official history of the
Peacekeepers. With the impressive figure of
Harold Red Eagle, of course.
ATHENS
Year 1
HE was a very large man, very grave, and so respected in his own land that not even the ultraconservatives ever had the nerve to make jokes about his name.
Harold Red Eagle was considerably over two meters tall.
In his young manhood, when he had made a national reputation for himself as a lineman for the Los Angeles Raiders, he had weighed nearly 130 kilos. Even so, he could chase down the fleetest of running backs. And once Red Eagle got his hands on a ball carrier, the man went down. No one broke his tackles.
The Raiders had been known to be a hell-raising team of undisciplined egotists. Red Eagle changed that. He spoke barely a word, and he certainly gave no speeches. He neither exhorted his teammates to self-sacrifice nor berated them for their macho antics. He merely set an example, off the field and especially on it, that no man could ignore or resist. He made the Raiders not only into champions, but hallowed heroes.
Football was merely a means to an end for Harold Red Eagle. For an impoverished son of the proud Comanche people, college football was the key to an education.
Professional football paid for law school and provided the glory that established him in a lucrative practice in his native Oklahoma.
When he retired from his athletic career, the governor of the state appointed him to the bench. (A rather neat pun there, don't you think?) A few years later he became the youngest federal judge ever to serve that district. A canny President nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and during the Senate confirmation hearings not a word was spoken against this Amerind, whose massive dignity could strike even TV talk-show hosts into reverent awe.
Harold Red Eagle was appointed by the next President (a political opponent of the previous one) to be part of the American delegation to the Athens Peace Conference. It was there that the first step toward the International Peacekeeping Force was made.
The moment was dramatic. Representatives of