Hiro tries to keep himself from rolling his eyes. Chuck seems to notice.

"Okay, okay, so that's not much. But TROKK was a thriving country, for a while. There's a lot of people who'd like to see something like that rise again. I mean, the only thing that forced us out - the only way those maniacs were able to seize power -was just totally, you know - " He doesn't seem to have words for it. "How could you have expected something like that?"

"How were you forced out? Was there a civil war?"

"There were some uprisings, early on. And there were remote parts of Kodiak where we never had a firm grip on power. But there was never a civil war per se. See, the Americans liked our government. The Americans had all the weapons, the equipment, the infrastructure. The Orthos were just a bunch of hairy guys running around in the woods."

"Orthos?"

"Russian Orthodox. At first they were a tiny minority. Mostly Indians - you know, Tlingits and Aleuts who'd been converted by the Russians hundreds of years ago. But when things got crazy in Russia, they started to pour across the Dateline in all kinds of different boats."

"And they didn't want a constitutional democracy."

"No. No way."

"What did they want? A tsar?"

"No. Those tsar guys - the traditionalists - stayed in Russia. The Orthos who came to TROKK were total rejects. They had been forced out by the mainline Russian Orthodox church."

"Why?"

"Yeretic. That's how Russians say 'heretic.' The Orthos who came to TROKK were a new sect - all Pentecostals. They were tied in somehow with the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates. We had missionaries from Texas coming up all the goddamn time to meet with them. They were always speaking in tongues. The mainline Russian Orthodox church thought it was the work of the devil."

"So how many of these Pentecostal Russian Orthodox people came over to TROKK?"

"Jeez, a hell of a lot of them. At least fifty thousand."

"How many Americans were in TROKK?"

"Close to a hundred thousand."

"Then how exactly did the Orthos manage to take the place over?"

"Well, one morning we woke up and there was an Airstream parked in the middle of Government Square in New Washington, right in the middle of all the bagos where we had set up the government. The Orthos had towed it there during the night, then took the wheels off so it couldn't be moved. We figured it was a protest action. We told them to move it out of there. They refused and issued a proclamation, in Russian. When we got this damn thing translated, it turned out to be an order for us to pack up and leave and turn over power to the Orthos.

"Well, this was ridiculous. So we went up to this Airstream to move it out of there, and Gurov's waiting for us with this nasty grin on his face."

"Gurov?"

"Yeah. One of the Refus who came over the Dateline from the Soviet Union. Former KGB general turned religious fanatic. He was kind of like the Minister of Defense for the government that the Orthos set up. So Gurov opens the side door of the Airstream and lets us get a load of what's inside."

"What was inside?"

"Well, mostly it was a bunch of equipment, you know, a portable generator, electrical wiring, a control panel, and so forth. But in the middle of the trailer, there's this big black cone sitting on the floor. About the shape of an ice cream cone, except it's about five feet long and it's smooth and black. And I asked what the hell is that thing. And Gurov says, that thing is a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb we scavenged from a ballistic missile. A city-buster. Any more questions?"

"So you capitulated."

"Couldn't do much else."

"Do you know how the Orthos came to be in possession of a hydrogen bomb?"

Chuck Wrightson clearly knows. He sucks in his deepest breath of the evening, lets it out, shakes his head, staring off over Hiro's shoulder. He takes a couple of nice long swigs from his glass of beer.

"There was a Soviet nuclear-missile submarine. The commander was named Ovchinnikov. He was religiously faithful, but he wasn't a fanatic like the Orthos. I mean, if he had been a fanatic they wouldn't have given him command of a nuclear-missile submarine, right?"

"Supposedly."

"You had to be psychologically stable. Whatever that means. Anyway, after things fell apart in Russia, he found himself in possession of this very dangerous weapon. He made up his mind that he was going to offload all of the crew and then scuttle it in the Marianas Trench. Bury all those weapons forever.

"But, somehow, he was persuaded to use this submarine to help a bunch of the Orthos escape to Alaska. They, and a lot of other Refus, had started flocking to the Bering coast. And the conditions in some of these Refu camps were pretty desperate. It's not like a lot of food can be grown in that area, you know. These people were dying by the thousands. They just stood on the beaches, starving to death, waiting for a ship to come.

"So Ovchinnikov let himself be persuaded to use his submarine - which is very large and very fast - to evacuate some of these poor Refus to TROKK.

"But, naturally, he was paranoid about the idea of letting a whole bunch of unknown quantities onto his ship. These nuke-sub commanders are real security freaks, for obvious reasons. So they set up a very strict system. All the Refus who were going to get on the ship had to pass through metal detectors, had to be inspected. Then they were under armed guard all the way across to Alaska.

"Well, the Stern Orthos have this guy named Raven - "

"I'm familiar with him."

"Well, Raven got onto that nuclear submarine."

"Oh, my God."

"He got over to the Siberian coast somehow - probably surfed across in his fucking kayak."

"Surfed?"

"That's how the Aleuts get between islands."

"Raven's an Aleut?"

"Yeah. An Aleut whale killer. You know what an Aleut is?"

"Yeah. My Dad knew one in Japan," Hiro says. A bunch of Dad's old prison-camp tales are beginning to stir in Hiro's memory, working their way up out of deep, deep storage.

"The Aleuts just paddle out in their kayaks and catch a wave. They can outrun a steamship, you know."

"Didn't know that."

"Anyway, Raven went to one of these Refu camps and passed himself off as a Siberian tribesman. You can't tell some of those Siberians apart from our Indians. The Orthos apparently had some confederates in these camps who bumped Raven up to the head of the line, so he got to be on the submarine."

"But you said there was a metal detector."

"Didn't help. He uses glass knives. Chips them out of plate glass. It's the sharpest blade in the universe, you know."

"Didn't know that either."

"Yeah. The edge is only a single molecule wide. Doctors use them for eye surgery - they can cut your cornea and not leave a scar. There's Indians who make a living doing that, you know. Chipping out eye scalpels."

"Well, you learn something new every day. That kind of a knife would be sharp enough to go through bulletproof fabric, I guess," Hiro says.

Chuck Wrightson shrugs. "I lost track of the number of people Raven snuffed who were wearing bulletproof fabric."

Hiro says, "I thought he must be carrying some kind of high-tech laser knife or something."

"Think again. Glass knife. He had one on board the submarine. Either smuggled it on board with him, or else found a chunk of glass on the submarine and chipped it out himself."

"And?"

Chuck gets his thousand-yard stare again, takes another slug of beer. "On a sub, you know, there's no place for things to drain to. The survivors claimed that the blood was knee-deep all through the submarine. Raven just killed everyone. Everyone except the Orthos, a skeleton crew, and some other Refus who were able to barricade themselves in little compartments around the ship. The survivors say," Chuck says, taking another swig, "that it was quite a night."