Executive orders - Tom Clancy [249]
One of her speeches could make Pee-Wee Herman look presidential, the chief of staff agreed. And that was the greatest danger of all. To win, Ryan just had to appear presidential, whether he really was or not-and he wasn't, of course, as Kealty kept reminding himself. How could he be?
I never said he was stupid, Kealty admitted. He had to be objective. This wasn't a game anymore. It was even more than life.
It's gotta happen soon, Ed.
I know. But he had to have something bigger to shoot, Kealty told himself. It was a curious metaphor for someone who'd advocated gun control all of his political life.
* * *
26 - BLOOMS
THE FARM HAD COME with a barn. It mainly served as a garage now. Ernie Brown had been in the construction business, and had earned a good deal of money, first in the late 1970s as a union plumber, then he'd established his own business in the 1980s to partake in the California building boom. Though a pair of divorces had depleted his funds, the selling of the business had been well timed, and he'd taken the money and run, and bought a sizable parcel of land in an area not yet chic enough to have its property values driven up by Hollywood types. What had resulted was almost a full section-a square mile-of privacy. Actually more than that, because the neighboring ranches were dormant at this time of year, the pastures frozen, and the cattle in pens comfortably eating silage. You could go several days without seeing so much as another car on the road, or so it seemed out in Big Sky Country. School buses, they told themselves, didn't count.
A five-ton flatbed truck also had been conveyed with the ranch-a diesel, conveniently enough-along with a buried two-thousand-gallon fuel tank right by the barn. The family that had sold off the ranch and barn and house to the newcomer from California hadn't known that they were giving over title to a bomb factory. The first order of business for Ernie and Pete was to get the old truck started up. That proved to be a forty-minute exercise, because it wasn't just a case of a dead battery, but Pete Holbrook was a competent mechanic, and in due course the truck's engine roared to unmuffled life and showed every sign of remaining with the living. The truck was not licensed, but that wasn't terribly unusual in this area of huge holdings, and their drive of forty miles north to the farm-supplies store was untroubled.
It could hardly have been a better portent of spring for the store. Planting season was coming (there were a lot of wheat farmers around), and here was the first major customer for the virtual mountain of fertilizer just trucked in from the distributor's warehouse in Helena. The men bought four tons, not an unusual quantity, which a propane-powered forklift deposited on the flatbed of the truck, and they paid cash for it, then drove off with a handshake and a smile.
This is going to be hard work, Holbrook observed, halfway back.
That's right, and we're going to do it all ourselves. Brown turned. Or do you want to bring in somebody who might be an informer?
I hear you, Ernie, Pete replied, as a state police car went the other way. The cop didn't even turn his head, chilling though the moment was for the two Mountain Men. How much more?
Brown had done the calculations a dozen times. One more truckload. It's a shame this stuff is so bulky. They'd make the second purchase tomorrow, at a store thirty miles southwest of the ranch. This evening would be busy enough, unloading all this crap inside the barn. A good workout. Why didn't the goddamn farm have a forklift? Holbrook wondered. At least when they refilled the fuel tank, the local oil company would do it. That was some consolation.
IT WAS COLD on the Chinese coast, and that made things easier for the satellites to see a series of thermal blooms at two naval bases. Actually,