The General's President Read Online Free PDF Page B

their lunch wrappers. They'd eaten supper beneath their lean-to then, while dusk darkened the forest, and the snow deepened inch by inch.
    They spent the night there, a damp, cold, smoky night huddled together on the fir boughs, dozing and waking, the smaller lean-to reflecting heat toward them from the fire. Every now and then, one of them would put more branchwood on. The snow had slowed, and sometime in the night it stopped.
    When daylight came, they'd tipped the boat, dumping off most of the six inches of wet snow. Then they'd brushed it clean, more or less, and Haugen finished his repairs, fingers red and clumsy with cold, while Cromwell watched, feeling useless. Then, together they'd launched the boat, and with a little persistence, gotten the motor started.
    They'd gone about a mile when they'd sighted the launch out hunting them, Carlson at the wheel. He hadn't been worried, Carlson told Cromwell later. If he'd had any doubt that Haugen could handle whatever came up, he'd never have let them go out without a guide.
    ***
    A president select! And himself responsible for the selection! Apparently it was constitutional; it was if the Emergency Powers Act was. It felt un-American though. But then, so did the troubles.
    Cromwell shrugged off the strangeness in the situation, buzzed his secretary, and told her to get Arne Haugen on the phone, at Duluth Technologies in Duluth, Minnesota.

FOUR
    Arne and Lois Haugen deliberately avoided watching the news at breakfast. She considered it a poor way to start a day, and he tended to agree. And he didn't often turn on the set in his office at all. But things now seemed so damned critical that, when he arrived at work that morning, he turned on CNN. A commercial was showing, and while waiting through it, he got a cup of black coffee from the coffee station beside his drafting table.
    With the cup in his hand, he paused to look out the window. The main management-manufacturing complex of Duluth Technologies stood near the brink of the Superior Plateau, and his large thermal window looked northeastward across the north end of the city. Beyond lay Lake Superior, ice-blue in the sunlight, stretching to a distant horizon and disappearing. A single freighter steamed outbound, a bulk carrier. From its small size and its black smoke plume, it was one of the ancient coal burners renovated when Persian Gulf oil had stopped flowing a year ago.
    Carrying wheat, probably, he thought. Other shipping was way down. Fewer and fewer ships had been in and out of the harbor in recent months.
    Times were very bad in Duluth. They'd been bad for decades as the iron mines played out, then had gradually improved. More recently they'd crashed, and hard times had taken on new meaning. But there'd been no riots here, and hardly any demonstrations.
    Ordinarily he took the TV news with more than a grain of salt; if ten homes were lost to a forest fire somewhere, they'd give the impression that a town had burned up. But last night they'd shown aerial views of fires and fighting in half a dozen cities, and mentioned a dozen others; it had been a sobering, even a frightening thing to watch. For the first time in his life, it was really real to Arne Haugen that the United States of America could go down the tubes.
    Now, from his chair, he watched film of a small battle in the Sierra Nevada of California. Troops against a paramilitary outfit. The newscaster called them "survivalists," but survivalists weren't likely to be challenging the army. Whatever they were, they'd been surrounded on the crest of a forested ridge by elements of the 7th Light Infantry Division, late the day before. The firefight wasn't intense, as firefights went, but Haugen could recognize bursts of automatic rifle fire, the staccato racketing of occasional machine guns, the thump of mortars, now and then the slam of rockets. From both adversaries; the paras had a lot more than deer rifles up there.
    It occurred to Haugen that, while much of the