Vulcan's Forge

Washington, D.C. Present Day

The only thing that the President really enjoyed about his new job was his chair in the Oval Office. It had a high back and soft seat and was made of the most supple leather he had ever felt. Often he would sit in that chair after all of the staff had gone home and remember his simpler youth. He had achieved the most powerful office on the planet, fulfilling his lifelong ambition but sometimes he thought the price had been too high. The college sweetheart he had married had been turned into an emotionless automaton by the pressures of her husband’s career. The vast network of friends he had built during the years had become sycophants groveling for favors and his once perfect health had deteriorated so he felt ten years older than his sixty-two.

He would sit some nights with all the lights off so the network watchdogs across the street wouldn’t think the President was burning the midnight oil, and he would think about his younger days growing up outside of Cincinnati. He missed guzzling beer with his hot-rodding friends, shooting trick pool to impress overly made-up, plump girls, and saying whatever came to mind when someone pissed him off.

A perfect example of why he longed for that puerile freedom was seated opposite him in full African splendor, robes and headband and sandals. He was the ambassador to one of the new central African nations. A tall man with sarcastic eyes and a complacent attitude about nearly everything that they had discussed.

The ambassador was saying, with a dismissive wave of his hand, that the intelligence gathered by the Red Cross, the United Nations and the CIA was all false; that his government was not involved in any type of tribal genocide through starvation or the intentional spread of disease. He insisted that his government was committed to all tribes under their care and all the people suffered, not just the smaller, less politically influential tribes.

Bullshit, the President wanted to shout and slap the smug smile off the ambassador’s face. But convention stopped him.

Instead he would have to spout some platitude such as, “We haven’t seen your situation in just that fashion, but it bears further investigation.”

A glow under the lip of his desk caught the President’s eye — the situation light, a signal from his chief of staff. In the six months of his term, this was the only time other than routine weekly tests that the light had been switched on. The last time the light had been used officially was during the Soviet coup in August of 1991.

The President stood up quickly, his professional smile masking his consternation. He extended his right hand and the ambassador knew that he was being dismissed.

“We haven’t seen your situation in just that fashion, but it bears further investigation. Thank you, Mr. Ambassador.”

“Thank you, Mr. President, for being so generous with your time,” the ambassador replied sourly. He’d been promised another half hour.

They shook hands briefly. The ambassador turned in a whirl of robes and left the Oval Office.

The President sat back down and had time to rub his temples for a second before the other door to the Oval Office opened. Expecting the angular figure of his chief of staff, Catherine Smith, the President was surprised to see Richard Henna.

Dick Henna was the new director of the FBI, one of the only important presidential appointees that Congress had so far approved. As always, self-serving political squabbling in the House was holding up the work of the federal government and costing the taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

Henna was a career snoop who had managed never to step on the wrong toes. He had plodded his way through thirty years in the bureau, never grabbing headlines but always garnering respect. He had an exemplary family life, a modest slice of suburbia to call home, and absolutely no skeletons in any closet. Knowing of his reputation, the opposition party in Congress had not bothered with any serious investigation into his past.

The President, who liked Henna for his unshakable integrity, smiled when he saw the director enter his office. The smile faded when he realized that Henna, never a neat man, looked terrible. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot. The jowled lines of his face were blurred behind thick stubble. His suit was rumpled, his shirt looked as if it had been slept in, and his tie was cocked off and stained.

“You look like you could use some coffee, Dick.” The President tried to put cheer into his voice, to penetrate the air of gloom that had permeated his office. His effort was as effective as a candle in a dark forest.

“I could use something a bit stronger, sir.”

The President nodded toward the Regency table which acted as a bar, and Henna helped himself to a triple Scotch.

Henna slumped into the seat opposite the President, the one formerly occupied by the African ambassador. Settling his attaché case on his lap, Henna opened it and withdrew a thin, violet file. The file was stamped PEO. President’s Eyes Only.

“What’s going on, Dick?” The President had never seen Henna so morose.

“Sir,” Henna started shakily, “this morning, just after midnight, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration ship Ocean Seeker was reported missing about two hundred miles north of Hawaii. Search planes have been dispatched and found only debris in the water. A nearby freighter is assisting in the search, but so far it doesn’t look promising.”

The President had gone slightly pale; his fingers clenched. He had not obtained this office by being overly emotional and his mind was clear and sharp. “That’s a terrible tragedy, Dick, but I don’t see how it concerns you or the FBI.”

Henna would have been surprised had the President not asked that question. He handed the file across the desk and took a sip of Scotch. “Please read the top sheet.”

The President opened the file and began to read. Seconds later, the blood drained from his patrician’s face and tension lines around his eyes tightened so that he squinted at the paper.

Before he finished reading, Henna spoke. “That was brought to my attention two days ago, after it was proven to be Ohnishi’s handwriting and not written under duress. When I received it, I checked with the coast guard and the navy. They didn’t have any scheduled traffic to or from the islands, so I figured we had a little breathing room.” Henna’s voice broke. “I didn’t check with NOAA, I forgot all about them. I had been warned that any government ship steaming outward from Hawaii would be destroyed. I had a goddamn warning. Those people didn’t have to die.”

The President looked up. Pain and guilt and failure were etched into Henna’s face. “Take it easy, Dick. How many people know about this?”

“Three besides the two of us — a mailroom clerk; my deputy director, Marge Doyle; and a handwriting analyst.”

The President glanced at his watch. “I’ve got lunch with the speaker of the house and if I cancel it. . I don’t want to think about the consequences. The rest of my day is booked solid. We’ll keep things normal here in Washington, but I’ll have all naval traffic to and from Hawaii suspended, just like this letter demands. I’m not about to give in to Ohnishi, but we need the time. I’m also going to put the military at Pearl Harbor on full alert. They’ve been on standby ever since the rioting started two weeks ago, but I think it prudent to up their readiness status. Let’s meet tonight at nine in the Situation Room to discuss the situation and our possible responses. Use the tunnel from the Treasury Building so you don’t arouse suspicion.”

“Yes, sir. Is there anything you want me to do in the meantime?” Henna was regaining his composure.

“I assume you’ve already started a full background check on Takahiro Ohnishi.” Henna nodded. “Find out what he’s all about. We’re all well aware of his racial views, but this is an outrage. Also, I want to know where he got the capability to destroy one of our ships. Someone is supplying him with arms and I want it stopped.”

“Yes, sir,” Henna replied, and left the office.

The President touched the intercom button on his desk. Joy Craig, his personal secretary, answered instantly.

“Joy, set up a meeting in the Situation Room for nine o’clock tonight. Call in the chairman of the joint chiefs; the directors of the CIA, NSA, and NOAA; the secretary of state and the secretary of defense.”

Most of those men were only acting heads, until their confirmation, but this crisis warranted trusting them as if they were already sworn into their respected offices.

The President sank back into his chair, his face blank, and stared at the gold braid-trimmed American flag near the office door. In his lap, his hands trembled.

The rain looked like Christmas tinsel in the headlights of the taxi parked outside an Arlington, Virginia, brownstone. The passenger gave the driver a crisp fifty and told him to keep the change. The back door opened, and in the glow of the domelight, the man grabbed the handles of his two soft leather bags and exited the cab.

Philip Mercer had always believed that international airports were a type of stateless limbo, sovereign nations allied only to each other with no allegiance to their host countries. His flight had touched down at Dulles an hour and a half earlier, yet he only now felt that he’d returned to the United States. Although the cool rain soothed his dried sinuses, Mercer still groaned as he inevitably tried the wrong key on the Baldwin lock of the front door. He no longer wondered why he always tried the wrong key when his arms were full, yet chose the right one when they were empty.

Home at last, Mercer thought, as he stepped into the foyer of his house, then chuckled. In the five years he had lived here, this was the first time that he had ever thought of the brownstone as home.

“Must be settling down,” he chided himself mildly.

From the outside, the brownstone was as innocuous as the fifteen others on his side of the block. Yet once through the door, any similarity to the other 1940s-constructed row houses ended. Mercer had gutted the three-story building and completely redesigned the interior. From a thirty-foot-high entry that took up the front third of the seventy-five-foot-deep building, Mercer could see up to the second-floor library, and further up to his master bedroom. An ornate curved staircase salvaged from a nineteenth-century rectory connected the three levels.

All of the furniture was in place, yet the house still lacked many of the personal items that would make it a home. Tables and shelves were empty of mementos and the walls were barren of pictures. The design of the house showed much of the character of its sole occupant, but many of his subtleties lay hidden in cardboard boxes.

Mercer dropped his bags near the front door and walked across the little used formal living room toward the back of the house. Passing an oak-paneled billiard room and the kitchen, he went into his home office and slid his slim briefcase across the wide leather-topped desk.

He used the back stairs to climb to the second floor and on the landing he swore under his breath. The television in the rec room was on, the volume barely a mutter. The lights around the mahogany bar had been muted to an amber glow. Snores rose from a blanketed lump on the couch. Mercer walked behind the bar and placed a Clapton disc into the player. With a wicked smile, he pressed play and turned the stereo to maximum volume.

The Carver speakers rattled the bottles and glasses behind the bar. Harry White woke with a sudden jerk.

Mercer turned off the stereo and laughed.

“I said you could use my house when I was away, you bastard, not move in.”

Harry looked at Mercer with owl eyes, his withered face still scrunched up with sleep. He peered around at the overflowing ashtray on the coffee table, the plates of congealed food, and the two empty Jack Daniel’s bottles.

“Welcome back, Mercer. I didn’t expect you till tomorrow.” Harry’s voice sounded like a rock crusher with a thrown gear.

“Obviously not.” Mercer smirked. “Nice party?”

Harry ran his fingers through his gray crew cut. “I don’t really remember.”

Mercer laughed again, an infectious laugh that, despite what must have been a powerful hangover, made Harry smile.

Mercer pulled two Heinekens from the circa-1950 lock-levered refrigerator next to the stereo rack and opened them with the brass puller tucked under the ornately carved backbar. He drained one in four long gulps and started to sip the second.

“How was the trip?” Harry asked, lighting a cigarette.

“Good, but exhausting. I did seven lectures in six days all over South Africa, plus met with a couple of top engineers from one of the Rand mining firms.” Rain rattled the darkened windows.

Philip Mercer was a mine engineer and consultant. According to those in the industry, he was the best in the world. His ideas and advice were sought by nearly every corporation in the business. The fees he charged were astronomical, but the companies never balked at the bills because their return on his input always paid off.

Over the years, dozens of firms had tried to hire Mercer exclusively, but he respectfully declined, always replying the same way: “My answer is also my reason, no thank you.” He liked the freedom to say “no” whenever he wished. His abilities and independent status gave him latitude to live his life by his own eccentric standards and to tell the occasional executive to shove it when the need arose.

Of course that freedom had been hard won. He had started out working for the United States Geological Survey just after receiving his Ph.D. For two years, he did mostly routine inspections of mining facilities which were cooperating with the USGS as seismic centers. The work was dull, repetitive and pointless. Mercer began to feel that his sharp intellect was being blunted by the ponderous weight of the federal bureaucracy. Fearing some kind of brain atrophy, he quit.

Recognizing that the independent streak which more or less dominated his personality would never allow him to work for any one organization for an extended period, Mercer decided to go into business for himself. He saw himself as a hired gun to help out in difficult situations but many others in the industry saw him as an unwanted interloper. It took seven months and countless phone calls to former instructors at Penn State and the Colorado School of Mines before he landed his first consulting job, confirming assay reports on a sizable Alaskan gold strike for a Swiss investment consortium. The three-month job paid twice what his annual government salary had been, and he never looked back from that point. The next job had been in Namibia and the mine had been for uranium. Within a few years he had built up the reputation he now enjoyed and commanded the fees to which he had grown accustomed.

Ironically, he had just accepted a temporary position at the USGS as a private sector consultant to liaise with major American mining concerns for the smooth implementation of the President’s new environmental bill and discuss this plan for possible adoption by some foreign companies. His career was coming full circle in a way, but this time through the government’s grist mill, he’d be walking away in two months with no strings attached.

“You look like shit,” Harry observed.

Mercer glanced down at his wrinkled Hugo Boss suit and clammy-feeling shirt. Two days of dark beard shadowed the decisive line of his jaw. “You spend twenty hours on an airliner and see how you look.”

Harry swung his leg off the couch and grabbed a flesh-colored piece of plastic from the floor. With three deft movements that his nearly eighty-year-old hands didn’t seem capable of, he strapped the prosthetic leg on just below his knee and flexed the articulating ankle.

“Much better.” He tugged down the cuff of his pants, stood and walked casually over to the bar without the slightest trace of a limp.

Mercer poured him a whiskey. “I’ve seen you do that a hundred times and it still gives me the creeps.”

“You have no respect for the ‘physically challenged’—I think that is the new politically correct term.”

“You’re a decrepit old man who probably had his leg shot off by a jealous husband as you leapt from his wife’s boudoir.”

The two men had met the night Mercer moved into the area. Harry was a fixture at the neighborhood bar, Tiny’s, a place Mercer discovered to be a sublime distraction from unpacking ten years of eclectic junk collected from all over the world. The unlikely pair became best friends that night. In the five subsequent years, Harry, no matter how drunk, had never told Mercer how he’d lost the leg and Mercer had enough respect to never pry.

“You’re just jealous that your body doesn’t make a good conversation piece in bed.”

“Harry, I don’t pick up women at the exit to circus freak tents,” Mercer retorted.

Harry conceded the point and asked for another drink.

If anyone had been listening, the next hour’s conversation would have seemed as if it were between bitter enemies. The sarcastic remarks and biting jokes sometimes got downright vicious, but both men enjoyed this verbal jousting, which was often the main source of entertainment at Tiny’s.

A little after midnight, age and whiskey forced Harry to a tactful retreat to the couch, where he promptly fell asleep. Mercer, despite the jet lag and beer, still felt refreshed and knew any attempt to sleep would be futile. He decided to get some office work done.

His home office was all rich leather and oiled woods, forest green carpet and polished brass. Other than the bar it was the only truly finished room in the brownstone. He knew that the decor was somewhat cliché, but he liked it just the same. The numerous prints on the walls were of heavy mining equipment: walking drag-lines, huge dump trucks, and skeletal drilling derricks that towered eight stories. Each print was signed with a thanks from the president or owner of some company that Mercer had helped. On the credenza, discreetly lighted from below, was a large chunk of opaque blue stone. Mercer’s hand caressed it as he walked to his desk.

He had phoned his secretary at the USGS from Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and had asked her to fax all of his memos and messages to his house, knowing that insomnia always followed an international flight. There were at least fifty sheets of paper in the tray of the fax machine.

The majority could be ignored for at least a few days; only a couple had any urgency at all. Working through the pile quickly, he almost missed the significance of one sheet, from the deputy director of operations at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. It was an invitation, dated six days earlier, to work aboard the NOAA research vessel Ocean Seeker in an investigation of an unknown geologic phenomenon off the coast of Hawaii. The deputy director had requested Mercer’s presence because of the paper he had written two years earlier on the use of geothermic vents as possible energy sources and rich mining areas.

Mercer had heard of the tragic loss of the ship with all hands. It had made the newspapers even in South Africa.

The invitation itself was not the cause of his racing heart or shallow breathing. At the bottom of the invitation was a list of the specialists already assigned to the survey. The first name was Dr. Tish Talbot, marine biologist.

Mercer had never met Tish, but her father was a good friend, a man to whom Mercer owed his life following a plane crash in the Alaska Range. Mercer had been returning from his first private consulting job when his plane had suddenly lost power. The pilot had been killed landing in a rock-strewn field and Mercer had broken a leg, a wrist, and a bunch of ribs. Jack Talbot, a grizzled tool pusher on the North Slope fields at Prudhoe Bay, had been camping near the crash site on a one-week leave. Talbot had reached Mercer within ten minutes of the crash and tended him overnight until he could signal a rescue copter with a flare salvaged from the wrecked plane.

The two men had seen each other infrequently in the years since then, but their friendship lasted. And now, Jack’s only daughter was dead, a victim of a terrible accident. Mercer empathized with his friend, feeling hollow inside when he imagined the pain that Jack must now be facing. Mercer had known such pain, losing his parents when he was only a boy, but no parent ever thinks that they will outlast their child. Many say that that is the worst kind of agony.

Mercer turned off his desk lamp. He left Harry on the couch in the rec room, not wanting to kick his friend out at two in the morning. Mercer’s huge bed didn’t really look inviting, but he made the effort anyway. His sleep was fitful.