Swan Song Read Free Page B

to join you in the Airborne Center, if I may.”
    “Yes. Of course. I want you with me.”
    “And,” Hannan continued, “there’ll be an Air Force officer aboard with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. Do you know your codes?”
    “I know them.” Those particular codes were among the first things he’d learned after taking office. An iron band of tension gripped the back of his neck. “But… I won’t have to use them, will I, Hans?” he asked, almost pleadingly.
    “Most likely not. But if you do-if you do-I want you to remember that by then the America we love will be dead, and no invader has ever, or will ever, set foot on American earth.” He reached out and squeezed the president’s shoulder in a grandfatherly gesture. “Right?”
    “The point of no return,” the president said, his eyes glazed and distant.
    “What?”
    “We’re about to cross the point of no return. Maybe we already have. Maybe it’s way too late to turn back. God help us, Hans; we’re flying in the dark, and we don’t know where the hell we’re going.”
    “We’ll figure it out when we get there. We always have before.”
    “Hans?” The president’s voice was as soft as a child’s. “If… if you were God… would you destroy this world?”
    Hannan didn’t respond for a moment. Then, “I suppose… I’d wait and watch. If I were God, I mean.”
    “Wait and watch for what?”
    “To find out who wins. The good guys or the bad guys.”
    “Is there a difference anymore?”
    Hannan paused. He started to answer, and then he realized he could not. “I’ll get the elevator,” he said, and he walked out of the Situations Room.
    The president unclasped his hands. The overhead lights sparkled on the cuff links he always wore, embossed with the seal of the president of the United States.
    “I’m A-OK,” he said to himself. “All systems go.”
    Something broke inside him, and he almost cried. He wanted to go home, but home was a long, long way from this chair.
    “Sir?” Hannan called him.
    Moving as slowly and stiffly as an elderly man, the president stood up and went out to face the future.

Two - [The Point of No Return]
    11:19 P.M. Eastern Daylight
    Time New York City
    Whack!
    She felt somebody kick the side of her cardboard box, and she stirred and hugged her canvas bag closer. She was tired and wanted to rest. A girl needs her beauty sleep, she thought, and she closed her eyes again.
    “I said get outta there!”
    Hands grabbed her ankles and hauled her roughly out of the box onto the pavement. As she came out she shouted in indignation and started kicking wildly. “You bastard sonofa-bitching bastard lemme alone you bastard!”
    “Shit, lookit that!” said one of the two figures standing above her, outlined in red neon from the sign of a Vietnamese takeout restaurant across West Thirty-sixth Street. “He’s a woman!”
    The other man, who’d grabbed her ankles above her dirty sneakers and hauled her out, growled in a darker, meaner voice, “Woman or not, I’m gonna stomp her ass.”
    She sat up, the canvas bag holding her worldly belongings clutched close to her chest. In the red wash of neon, her square-jawed, sturdy face was deeply lined and streaked with street grime. Her eyes, sunken in violet-tinged hollows, were a pale, watery blue and glinted with both fear and anger. On her head she wore a blue cap that she’d found the day before in a split-open garbage bag. Her outfit consisted of a dirty gray printed short-sleeved blouse and a baggy pair of brown men’s trousers with patched knees. She was a big-boned, fleshy woman, and her stomach and hips strained against the coarse material of her trousers; her clothes, as well as the canvas duffel bag she carried, had come from a kindly minister at the Salvation Army. Under the cap, her gray-streaked brown hair hung untidily around her shoulders, parts of it chopped off here and there where she’d taken scissors to it. Stuffed into her canvas bag was a