WE NEED YOU
BACK
Roger spends the next
week in a state of numbed shock. His apartment here is like a small
hotel room—a hotel with security, air-conditioning, and windows
that only open onto an interior atrium. He pays little attention to
his surroundings. It’s not as if he has a home to return
to.
Roger stops shaving.
Stops changing his socks. Stops looking in mirrors or combing his
hair. He smokes a lot, orders cheap bourbon from the commissary,
and drinks himself into an amnesic stupor each night. He is,
frankly, a mess. Self-destructive. Everything disintegrated under
him at once: his job, the people he held in high regard, his
family, his life. All the time he can’t get one thing out of his
head: the expression on Gorman’s face as he stands there, in front
of the submarine, rotting from the inside out with radiation
sickness, dead and not yet knowing it. It’s why he’s stopped
looking in mirrors.
On the fourth day
he’s slumped in a chair watching taped I Love
Lucy reruns on the boob tube when the door to his suite
opens quietly. Someone comes in. He doesn’t look round until the
colonel walks across the screen and unplugs the TV set at the wall,
then sits down in the chair next to him. The colonel has bags of
dark skin under his eyes; his jacket is rumpled, and his collar is
unbuttoned.
“You’ve got to stop
this, Roger,” he says quietly. “You look like shit.”
“Yeah, well. You
too.”
The colonel passes
him a slim manila folder. Without wanting to, Roger slides out the
single sheet of paper within.
“So it was them.”
“Yeah.” A moment’s
silence. “For what it’s worth, we haven’t lost yet. We may yet pull
your wife and son out alive. Or be able to go back
home.”
“Your family too, I
suppose.” Roger’s touched by the colonel’s consideration, the pious
hope that Andrea and Jason will be alright, even through his shell
of misery. He realizes his glass is empty. Instead of refilling it
he puts it down on the carpet beside his feet. “Why?”
The colonel removes
the sheet of paper from his numb fingers. “Probably someone spotted
you in the King David and traced you back to us. The Mukhabarat had
agents everywhere, and if they were in league with the KGB . . .”
He shrugs. “Things escalated rapidly. Then the president cracked
that joke over a hot mike that was supposed to be switched off . .
. Have you been checking in with the desk summaries this
week?”
Roger looks at him
blankly. “Should I?”
“Oh, things are still
happening.” The colonel leans back and stretches his feet out.
“From what we can tell of the situation on the other side, not
everyone’s dead yet. Ligachev’s screaming blue murder over the hot
line, accusing us of genocide: but he’s still talking. Europe is a
mess, and nobody knows what’s going on in the Middle East—even the
Blackbirds aren’t making it back out again.”
“The thing at
Tikrit.”
“Yeah. It’s bad news,
Roger. We need you back.”
“Bad
news?”
“The worst.” The
colonel jams his hands between his knees, stares at the floor like
a bashful child. “Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti spent years trying to
get his hands on elder technology. It looks like he finally
succeeded in stabilizing the gate into Sothoth. Whole villages
disappeared, marsh Arabs, wiped out in the swamps of eastern Iraq.
Reports of yellow rain, people’s skin melting right off their
bones. The Iranians got itchy and finally went nuclear. Trouble is,
they did so two hours before that
speech. Some asshole in Plotsk launched half the Uralskaye SS-20
grid—they went to launch on warning eight months ago—burning south,
praise Jesus. Scratch the Middle East, period—everything from the
Nile to the Khyber Pass is toast. We’re still waiting for the
callback on Moscow, but SAC has put the whole Peacemaker force on
airborne alert. So far we’ve lost the Eastern Seaboard as far south
as northern Virginia, and they’ve lost the Donbass Basin and
Vladivostok. Things are a mess; nobody can even agree whether we’re
fighting the commies or something else. But the box at
Chernobyl—Project Koschei—the doors are open, Roger. We orbited a
Keyhole-11 over it, and there are tracks, leading west. The PLUTO
strike didn’t stop it—and nobody knows what the fuck is going on in
WarPac country. Or France, or Germany, or Japan, or
England.”
The colonel makes a
grab for Roger’s Wild Turkey, rubs the neck clean, and swallows
from the bottle. He looks at Roger with a wild expression on his
face. “Koschei is loose, Roger. They fucking woke the thing. And now they can’t control it. Can
you believe that?”
“I can believe
that.”
“I want you back
behind a desk tomorrow morning, Roger. We need to know what this
Thulu creature is capable of. We need to know what to do to stop
it. Forget Iraq; Iraq is a smoking hole in the map. But K-Thulu is
heading toward the Atlantic coast. What are we going to do if it
doesn’t stop?”