Читать книгу Jackknife - William W. Johnstone - Страница 15

“Accordingly, American aircraft carriers and other elements will be traveling to the Persian Gulf as quickly as possible in order to peacefully secure the region.”

Nate Sawyer called from the living room, “Mom, where’s the Persian Gulf?”

“Oh, I don’t know, it’s over in the Middle East somewhere,” Allison Sawyer told her son. She was folding laundry on the kitchen table in their little apartment and not paying much attention to the TV. She knew the President was on, talking about that crisis overseas. There was always a crisis somewhere overseas, it seemed like.

“Where’s the Middle East?”

“You know, Iraq and Iran and Israel, all those places. Don’t they teach you this stuff in school?”

Nate grinned. “I know all those countries you just said start with I. Wanna hear me say the alphabet?”

“You’ve been saying the alphabet since before you even started to school.”

“I could read before I started to school.”

Allison wasn’t so distracted by the laundry that she failed to hear the pride in her son’s voice. She smiled at him and said, “You sure could, champ.”

And she could take some pride in that, too, since she was the one who’d read to him every day since he was a baby. She was convinced that was why he had learned to read by the time he was four and now read at a higher level than any of the other kids in his third-grade class. She knew she wasn’t supposed to make too much of a fuss about that; the teacher had told her so. Doing that might foster a sense of elitism in Nate and ultimately damage the self-esteem of the other kids in the class, and you couldn’t have that. The whole public education system was geared toward leveling the playing field and making all the kids as much alike as possible.

But facts were facts, and Allison’s kid was smart. She wanted to make sure he knew it, too.

Maybe that way he wouldn’t make the same sort of dumb mistakes that his mom had made, like marrying a self-centered asshole—

“Are we gonna have a war?”

“What?” Allison set aside the laundry she was folding and walked into the living room. Maybe she ought to pay more attention to what the President was talking about, she thought.

“The President said there was gonna be a war between Israel and Iran. Are we gonna be in it?”

Allison sat down on the edge of the sofa beside Nate. “Surely that’s not what she said.”

“Uh-huh! Just listen.”

The camera, steady as a rock, showed the President sitting behind her desk in the Oval Office. She had some papers in front of her, but she wasn’t reading from them. Instead she gazed into the camera with an earnest, worried expression on her face.

“…deeply regret that Israel was forced to take this action by Iran’s continued refusal to allow United Nations inspectors in its nuclear facilities. I spoke to the Prime Minister of Israel a short time ago, and he personally assured me that it was imperative action be taken now, without delay. According to information received by the Israeli intelligence services, Iran was less than a week away from launching a missile carrying a nuclear warhead at Tel Aviv.”

“See?” Nate said. “A nuclear warhead.”

“That doesn’t mean there’s going to be a war,” Allison told him.

But if it was true, it meant that Israel and Iran had come damned close to a war. And it might happen yet if Iran tried any sort of payback for the Israeli air attack. Allison didn’t keep up with politics all that much—Nate and her job kept her too busy for that—but there was such a bombardment of news and information all the time now that you couldn’t help but be aware of what was going on in this crazy world. Today especially, TV and radio had been full of stuff about what was going on in the Middle East. As usual for that region, things seemed to be teetering on the brink of Armageddon.

“Maybe you should go on to bed,” Allison suggested. “You’re already up past your bedtime.”

“No! I wanna watch the rest of this.”

“You don’t really care about somebody making a speech, even the President.”

“Well…there might be somethin’ good on afterwards.”

Not likely, Allison thought. All the talking heads would have to yammer for another hour about everything the President had said. Politicians and military experts from both parties would be interviewed. The ones from the President’s party would agree with everything she said; the ones from the opposition party would disagree. And none of them would see that if the situation had been exactly the same—hell, if the words of the speech had been exactly the same—and only the party affiliation had been reversed, then their reactions would have been exactly the opposite. That was what Allison hated about politics and why she didn’t bother to vote anymore.

“I don’t think there’s going to be anything else good on tonight,” she told Nate. “You go on to your room. I’ll be in to read a story to you in a few minutes.”

“I can read to myself, you know.”

“I know you can.” She put an arm around his shoulders and hugged him to her. “But I still like to do it. Let me do it for a while longer, okay?”

“Okay.” He trudged off toward his room. He didn’t have far to go because the apartment was so small.

Allison leaned back against the sofa cushions and watched the last few minutes of the President’s speech. It was full of flowery rhetoric about respecting the rights of sovereign nations and abiding by the rule of law and not allowing ourselves to descend once more into barbarism. All that stuff meant that the President didn’t want to go to war. Everybody knew that. The woman’s antiwar credentials went way back. And everybody had seen what had happened in Iraq as soon as she took office, too. She had cut and run, choosing sure defeat over possible progress someday. Allison couldn’t really fault her for that; that war had been poorly run, from what little Allison could see from her civilian standpoint.

That was just it, she thought as the President signed off with the usual “Good night, and bless the United States of America.” She, Allison Sawyer, was a civilian. All this stuff going on didn’t have anything to do with her. She worried about her son, and her job, and coming up with enough money to pay all the bills at the end of the month…with maybe a little left over for an occasional treat. Christmas was coming up after all. It was only a few days until Thanksgiving, and then it would be less than a month until Christmas, and Allison hadn’t even started her shopping yet.

But luckily, there was a new MegaMart, one of those giant UltraMegaMarts, only a few miles away, on the Interstate between Fort Worth and Denton, and it was about to have its grand opening on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. There would be a lot of sales and specials—there always was on what was traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year—but the prices would be even better at the UltraMegaMart on that day. Allison tuned out the talking heads on TV and started thinking about what she might be able to get Nate for Christmas. There would be a huge mob there, of course, but she might have to brave it anyway.

She would do whatever was necessary to make this a good Christmas for her son.