World War III

“Wolves, I ‘spect. Storm’s got ‘em running in circles. Better give ‘em a shot to skedaddle.” He went to the fireplace and took down a high-powered rifle from the rack. “I’ll get Jude in. She’ll bark herself hoarse with a hunting pack in the vicinity.” He took a frayed parka from the peg beside the door, zipped it up and chambered a round in the rifle. “Be back in a jif.” The Pathfinder leader fired at nearly point-blank range as the man came out of the cabin. He’d been flattened against the side of the cabin beside the door, four or five feet out of range of the dog’s reach on its chain. The Husky was in a rage, up on its hind legs, straining against the tether, jumping, barking, its teeth flashing. The animal wasn’t so excited that he was there, the Pathfinder guessed, as that he was there with a weapon. When the door opened, the Russian darted to one side, leveling the submachine gun about waist-high and fired half a clip into the stranger, which nearly cut him in half. He never saw the man’s face. Another Pathfinder killed the dog as the leader and three others rushed inside. An old woman in a green robe turned toward him as he crashed in. Her expression was sudden surprise, not fright, and she began to raise a hand to her head when one of the others shot her. It was a quick burst.

She was dead before she hit the floor.

In less than ten minutes the bodies were buried in a large drift behind the cabin and the bloodied snow shoveled away.

“Pathfinder patrol,” the leader said in terse Russian into his hand radio. He sat in the same seat Arnold Jones had occupied fifteen minutes earlier. “Objective secure.”

“Casualties?” It was the voice of Colonel Vorashin.

“Two noncombatants. Instructions?”

There was a pause, then: “Hold until contact.”

THE WHITE HOUSE 0859 HRS

The view from the Truman Balcony of the Rose Garden was one of crystalline bleakness; a glaze of frozen sleet encrusted all the trees, and they reflected the morning’s gray, overcast light dully. President Thomas McKenna sat alone in his favorite easy chair with a cup of coffee balanced on one of its arms.

Sections of the day’s New York Times and Washington Post were strewn over a small side table from a stack of unread newspapers. McKenna chuckled at the political cartoon in the Post — a masked caricature of him wearing a battered white hat and empty six-gun holsters, sitting on a crate marked WHEAT and facing an angry Russian bear. The caption read: “No, no. I’m Kemosabe, you’re the Indian.” Thomas Kyle McKenna was a forty-seven-year old man who found humor where he could these days.

As the forty-first president, he was neither generally beloved nor universally despised, depending upon whom you asked. Unlike his immediate predecessor he was exceptionally healthy, which was probably his single attribute that friend and foe could agree on without a congressional committee to verify. Not that it wasn’t discussed. But Thomas McKenna’s state of health wasn’t so much an issue, he thought glibly, as was his state of mind. As vice-president for twenty-one months, he’d dropped out of sight, politically, as if he’d fallen down a very deep well. When President Daniel Churchill Thorpe died suddenly of a heart attack (Thorpe had been a vigorous sixty-six. While his death was certainly sudden, it was a monumental shock to the nation when it was eventually disclosed that this was his third attack in seventeen years), McKenna was hoisted out of the well and reexamined in the severe light of day.

Nobody could prevent him from becoming president, though there were several party bosses who prayed that option was somehow available.