“Jesus fucking Christ!” Hennessey said. Then he said it a couple of more times, his voice trailing off with each repetition.
“What do we do?” Clyde asked. On the other end he could hear Hennessey yelling to someone: “Get me all the statistics on the Antonov transport ship and have them ready. It’s a big Soviet plane.” Then: “Clyde, I’m still here. I’m thinking.” Then he said nothing for thirty seconds. Then he said to someone else, “Tell the pilot to plot a hypothetical great circle route from Nishnabotna to Baghdad. It’s got to refuel somewhere. Move!”
“Could you shoot them down over the ocean somewhere?” Clyde asked. Then he bit his tongue, remembering the Russian crew he had helped out of the cornfield last spring.
“If the President ordered it,” Hennessey said. “But I don’t imagine our Soviet allies would be too keen.”
Clyde said, “Don’t you need some sort of passport check and export permit on international flights?”
“I’ll check on that.” Hennessey shouted more orders at someone; Clyde got the impression that there was an endless queue of FBI agents in the aisle of the plane, standing there waiting for their turn to be barked at. Hennessey continued: “I’m looking out the window at your weather, or rather the weather that’s going to be hitting you in a few hours, and looks to me like it sucks. Am I right?”
“It’s been icing down for about an hour. Temperature is dropping like a stone. Now it’s turning to snow.”
“So if they were stalled long enough by the local red tape, they might get snowed in.”
“If it comes down to that,” Clyde said, “I can just pull my car across the runway and stop them from taking off.”
Hennessey pondered that one for a while. Fazoul didn’t have to ponder it for very long; he was already shaking his head no.
“Clyde,” Hennessey said, “I think that making these guys feel trapped is not what we want to do. See, something kind of funny has happened in the last twenty-four hours.”
“Funny?”
“Yeah, if you like sick humor. Suddenly everyone woke up. People in D.C. are actually taking this botulin thing seriously all of a sudden. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to requisition this damn plane. But now it’s too late.”
“What do you mean, too late?”
“Clyde, they already made the damn toxin. And it’s sitting there on the edge of fucking Iowa, practically in the suburbs of Chicago, directly upwind of the Loop, if you know what I mean. Let me put it this way: if they had made the stuff in Iraq and were trying to ship it into the U.S., we would do anything to stop them, right?”
“Yeah, I suppose we would.”
“Well, it’s already here. We would like nothing better than to get the shit out of our country. And that’s what they want, too. My girl Betsy figured it all out.”
“Betsy?”
“One of my people here. She finally put it all together. The Iraqis want to lob this shit into Israel.”
“How do you figure?”
“If they use it on us, Bush will go nuts and just kick the shit out of them. On the other hand, if they use it on the Israelis, then the Israelis go nuts and bomb Baghdad and bring down our whole coalition—th eArab countries pull out and line up on Baghdad’s side. So your Iraqis, as it turns out, are currently engaged in trying to do exactly what most people in our government would like them to do.”
“You want to let them go?” Clyde exclaimed. Fazoul stiffened and went into the next room to listen in on another extension.
“As far as I personally am concerned,” Hennessey said. “If they get snowed in by natural causes, we can get some G-men on the ground there and deal with the situation in a calm and controlled fashion. That might work. But kamikaze sheriffs pulling station wagons across runways is bad. It’ll get them excited, and for all we know, they’ve got that container packed in a blanket of high explosive that’ll send it right up into the prevailing winds of this big goddamn storm, which is headed straight for Chicago.