Charon's Landing Read Online Free Page A

thousand warheads and I’m prone to PMS. That seems to back them off.”
    The President smiled tiredly. “What’s the latest from the native rights groups?”
    The rights of Alaska’s native people had become a hot topic as well. Connie shifted in her seat, resting her knife and fork on the china plate still heaped with congealed eggs and soggy bacon. “They’re relatively quiet so far. Because they lack the international exposure of the big environmental groups, the native advocates are keeping a low profile to see how far the administration is willing to back up this initiative. Though I just heard Amnesty International is threatening to call the entire Inuit population political prisoners of the United States if we continue to infringe on their rights to the land.”
    “Jesus Christ!” exclaimed the President. “You call that a low profile?”
    “Compared to what this group called PEAL has done, that’s nothing.”
    “PEAL?” He cocked a bushy eyebrow. “I’ve never heard of them. Are they another environmental group?”
    “More like eco-terrorists.” Connie lifted an expandable briefcase from the floor and set it on the table. After rummaging through the detritus cluttering the case, she slid a manila file over to the President. “This is the dossier INTERPOL has compiled of crimes that PEAL has been directly or indirectly linked to in Europe. And this is just from the last year.”
    As the President leafed through the summary reports of bombings, protests, and assaults, Connie Van Buren gave him a brief rundown on the organization. “PEAL is the acronym for Planetary Environment Action League. It was founded four years ago by a Dutch science professor who had fallen from grace with mainstream academia. Jan Veorhoven is a classic study of the charismatic leader. He’s young, not yet forty, good-looking, from a wealthy family with name recognition in his native Amsterdam, and possesses above-average intelligence.”
    Connie spoke as if reciting the material arrayed before the President. It was obvious that she’d been over the file many times before.
    “Until this year, PEAL had remained inconsequential. They printed pamphlets and Veorhoven lectured at rallies all over Western Europe, but the group was relatively small, about one hundred active members. Many in the environmental movement saw PEAL as too radical for even their tastes.
    “Veorhoven espouses a kind of pseudo-religious communing with nature, where the rights of man are second to those of the earth. He flew to Bangladesh after a monsoon that killed eleven thousand villagers and denounced those who survived for cheating nature of her just dues. Last December, after some nonradioactive cooling water escaped from a French reactor, PEAL was thrust to prominence when Veorhoven challenged the director of the plant to drink some of it. It was a media stunt of epic proportions because the director is hyperallergenic and can tolerate only distilled water, a fact Veorhoven was aware of.
    “Beginning this year, PEAL became the ‘in’ group to join among the professional protesters. Their ranks have soared, as has their budget. In March, they bought a mothballed survey ship and renamed her
Hope
. They opened satellite offices in London, Paris, New York, Washington, and San Francisco. And they started getting violent.
    “Members of the group have been arrested in Mozambique with enough explosives to destroy the Cabora Bassa dam. In Brazil, they’ve taken responsibility for demolishing about ten million dollars’ worth of heavy equipment used in forest clearing. In Washington State, a PEAL activist is facing manslaughter charges after the steel spike he put into a tree caused a chainsaw to kick back and kill the logger operating it. Your own Secretary of the Interior had a sack full of dead spotted owls left on his doorstep. The bag had the PEAL logo on it. Nothing is beyond them.
    “They’ve destroyed gas stations in Germany, Holland, and