Warren Murphy: The Color of Fear

"That hasn't been decided. But they're our prisoners."

Page frowned tightly. "Mah orders are to put down this unfortunate uprising."

"That's a right troubling notion, Ah'd say."

"To you and me both, suh."

"Especially what with the true enemy so nigh and all," the Confederate soldier said, looking north to Petersburg with grim mien.

Captain Page gave this dilemma some thought. "What time are them infernal carpetbaggers due?"

"High noon."

"What say we gather up these Yanks and repair to the Crater to await developments?" he asked carefully.

"Will your men follow you?"

"Will yours?" countered Page.

"They be Virginians, as are yours."

"Then let us be about our marching, suh. "

Captain Page returned to his waiting tank column and explained the situation. "These fine soldiers were clearly provoked into defending themselves and their honor," he related. "Moreover, they were ambushed while asleep, taking their last rest before meeting the siege army that you all know-if you read your morning paper or watch the TV-is due to descend upon Old Dominion like so many greedy locusts.

"The place where they were cut down is known to one and all, Ah am sure. It is the spot where the malevolent moles under the command of Colonel Henry Pleasants-an ill-named rogue if ever one was spawned-dug the cowardly tunnel under the finest soldiers of the Confederacy and set a powder keg to light. The resulting blast reverberates to this day, for Ah know personally that some of you men had kinfolk maimed or lost in that unholy blast."

A hateful murmur raced through the unit.

"That awful hour was the darkest of the Siege of Petersburg," Captain Page continued, "and even though the doughty forces of Major General William Mahone repelled the Federal advance that followed, it shall never be forgotten. And now a new siege is about to be laid on that fair and shining city. Ah cannot but assume that the Union devils who wrought this modern calumny were inspired in their villainy, if not in league with, the very foe whose name you all know and which Ah will not sully the pure Virginia air by repeating. To that end, Ah am prepared to pledge this unit in common cause with our grayback brethren."

Utter silence attended this statement.

"Of course, Ah cannot demand that you boys follow me into this new cause. So Ah will give you the opportunity to consider this weighty matter."

When they were done, Captain Page said, "Ah aim to stand by mah fellow Virginians until this matter is understood and the true culprits brought to book. What say you, men?"

There were no objections.

The Union captives, bound and hangdog, were loaded aboard the National Guard trucks and tanks, to which Confederate soldiers clung, waving their service caps and beaming in victory.

"On to the Crater!" shouted Captain Page.

A yipping rebel war whoop drowned out the firing of the engines, and what history would later call the Unified Confederate Disunion Alliance rolled south down the section of Interstate 95 called the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike entirely unopposed.

When word of this revolt reached the governor of Virginia, he knew exactly what to do. He called the President of the United States.

After he was fully briefed, the President of the United States knew exactly what to do, too. He thanked the governor of Virginia and buzzed his wife, the First Lady.

"There's trouble brewing in Virginia," he said when the First Lady entered.

"I heard. Can't you federalize the Virginia National Guard or something? This is ridiculous."

"I do that, and I'll be lynched the next time I go home to Little Rock." The President was going through his desk drawers. "You seen that T-shirt of mine? The one that says Smith College?"

"Why do you have to go running to that Smith person every time there's a crisis?"

"How many times do I have tell you," the President said testily, "that subject is off limits."

The First Lady glared at the President. "What will you trade for that T-shirt?"

"The golden opportunity to serve out your term as First Lady," the President said glumly. "Because if this nation is facing a new Civil War, we'll both be run out of this office by the Fourth of July."

The First Lady snapped out of her glare as if stung by a hornet. "I'll leak it to the press that you're going for a jog," she said hastily. "That way the cameras will be sure to televise the shirt."

The door to the Oval Office shut behind her as the President stood up to look out the latticed window that faced the South Lawn. It was the same view his predecessors going back to Abraham Lincoln-the most tormented Chief Executive in US. history-had enjoyed. Not even the imperfect, object-distorting glass had changed.

But the burden on the man who held the office had. Lincoln had had a young nation to hold together. That was burden enough in the nineteenth century. Here in the twentieth, more often than not the President had a fractious family of nations to watch over, as well as domestic concerns.

But in over one hundred years the essential mission had not changed. Hold the union together. For Lincoln it had been a matter of the North and the South. How simple that seemed today. For while modern America might be unified, it was still fractured along a thousand invisible fault lines. The great Democratic experiment was imperiled by forces that had insinuated themselves into its very cultural and political fabric.

Thirty years before, a great President-destined to be martyred as was Lincoln-had come to a terrible realization. America was doomed. Its laws and leaders were no longer sufficient to hold it together. A tide of lawlessness was sweeping the land. The institutions of government could not hold it in check because the threats all came from within.

Crooked courts and judges and lawyers had all but shredded the Constitution. It was no longer the shield it was intended to be. It was in truth a hindrance to the survival of the greatest nation in human history. Something had to be done. Something drastic.

The long-dead President had considered martial law, repealing the Constitution and sacrificing his own Presidency on the same granite altar of national salvation that had cost Lincoln his life a century before.

Instead, he chose another option.

In secret he created CURE. It was an organization headed by one handpicked man. The letters were no bureaucratic acronym. CURE was simply a harsh remedy for an ailing nation. Bitter medicine, true. But if it worked, the union might endure to the turn of the century and perhaps beyond.

Officially CURE did not even exist. To admit to the existence of CURE was to admit America didn't work. Its mandate was to right the ship of state by extraconstitutional means. Domestic spying. Wiretapping. Even framing of criminals outside the law who could not be gotten within it. No option was too extreme. The utter survival of the nation had been at stake.

Over time the mission expanded even as the nation's ills worsened. In time assassination was sanctioned as a means of last resort. Nothing seemed to be enough. But like a keel CURE kept the ship of state from being swamped by domestic storm. The general public never dreamed it existed. Congress never suspected. Successive Presidents came and went, each sworn never to reveal the secret-except to the man who followed him. Each was shown the red hot-line telephone-kept in the Lincoln Bedroom-that connected with the faceless man who headed CURE.

A man named Smith. The same man handpicked so long ago.

As the President gazed out past the magnolia tree planted by old Andrew Jackson and maimed by a suicidal pilot only months before, toward the cold finger of the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial beyond it, he bitterly cursed the still unexplained accident that had severed the hot line to Smith, wherever he was. It had been a hell of a lot easier to just pick up that phone than to put on a Smith College T-shirt and go jogging for the cameras in the hope that Harold Smith would be watching his TV and get the message.