by Tom Clancy
“I know Gus Lorenz,” Dean James said with a smile. “We interned together at Peter Brent Brigham.” Which Harvard had since consolidated into Brigham and Women’s.
“Brilliant guy,” Alexandre agreed in his best Creole drawl. It was generally thought that Gus’s work on Lassa and Q fever put him in the running for a Nobel Prize. “And a great doc.”
“So, why don’t you want to work with him in Atlanta? Gus tells me he wants you pretty bad.”
“Dean James—”
“Dave,” the Dean said.
“Alex,” the colonel responded. There was something to be said for civilian life, after all. Alexandre thought of the dean as a three-star equivalent. Maybe four stars. Johns Hopkins carried a lot of prestige. “Dave, I’ve worked in a lab damned near all my life. I want to treat patients again. CDC would just be more of the same. Much as I like Gus—we did a lot of work together in Brazil back in 1987; we get along just fine,” he assured the dean. “I am tired of looking at slides and printouts all the time.” And for the same reason he’d turned down one hell of an offer from Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, to head up one of their new labs. Infectious diseases were a coming thing in medicine, and both men hoped that it wasn’t too late. Why the hell, James wondered, hadn’t this guy made general-officer rank? Maybe politics, the dean thought. The Army had that problem, too, just as Hopkins did. But their loss ...
“I talked about you with Gus last night.”
“Oh?” Not that it was surprising. At this level of medicine everyone knew everyone else.
“He says just hire you on the spot—”
“Good of him,” Alexandre chuckled.
“—before Harry Tuttle at Yale gets you for his lab.”
“You know Harry?” Yep, and everybody knew what everybody else was doing, too.
“Classmates here,” the dean explained. “We both dated Wendy. He won. You know, Alex, there isn’t much for me to ask you.”
“I hope that’s good.”
“It is. We can start you off as an associate professor working under Ralph Forster. You’ll have a lot of lab work—good team to work with. Ralph has put a good shop together in the last ten years. But we’re starting to get a lot of clinical referrals. Ralph’s getting a little old to travel so much, so you can expect to get around the world some. You’ll also be in charge of the clinical side in, oh, six months to get your feet good and wet ...?”
The retired colonel nodded thoughtfully. “That’s just about right. I need to relearn a few things. Hell, when does learning ever stop?”
“When you become an administrator, if you’re not careful.”
“Yeah, well, now you know why I hung up the green suit. They wanted me to command up a hospital, you know, punch the ticket. Damn it, I know I’m good in a lab, okay? I’m very good in a lab. But I signed on to treat people once in a while—and to teach some, naturally, but I like to see sick people and send them home healthy. Once upon a time somebody in Chicago told me that’s what the job was.”
If this was a selling job, Dean James thought, then he’d taken lessons from Olivier. Yale could offer him about the same post, but this one would keep Alexandre close to Fort Detrick, and ninety minutes’ flying time to Atlanta, and close to the Chesapeake Bay—in the resume, it said Alexandre liked to fish. Well, that figured, growing up in the Louisiana bayous. In sum total, that was Yale’s bad luck. Professor Harold Tuttle was as good as they came, maybe a shade better than Ralph Forster, but in five years or so Ralph would retire, and Alexandre here had the look of a star. More than anything else, Dean James was in the business of recruiting future stars. In another reality, he would have been the G.M. for a winning baseball team. So, that was settled. James closed the folder on his desk.
“Doctor, welcome to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.”
“Thank you, sir.”
4
OJT
THE REST OF THE DAY WAS a blur. Even while living through it, Ryan knew that he’d never really remember more than snippets. His first experience with computers had been as a student at Boston College. Before the age of personal computing, he’d used the dumbest of dumb terminals—a teletype—to communicate with a mainframe somewhere, along with other BC students, and more still from other local schools. That had been called “time-sharing,” just one more term from a bygone age when computers had cost a million or so dollars for performance that now could be duplicated in the average man’s watch. But the term still applied to the American presidency, Jack learned, where the ability to pursue a single thought through from beginning to end was the rarest of luxuries, and work consisted of following various intellectual threads from one separate meeting to the next, like keeping track of a whole group of continuing TV series from episode to episode, trying not to confuse one with another, and knowing that avoiding that error was totally impossible.
After dismissing Murray and Price, it had begun in earnest.
Ryan’s introduction began with a national-security briefing delivered by one of the national intelligence officers assigned to the White House staff. Here, over a period of twenty-six minutes, he learned what he already knew because of the job he’d held until the previous day. But he had to sit through it anyway, if for no other reason than to get a feel for the man who would be one of his daily briefing team. They were all different. Each one had an individual perspective, and Ryan had to understand the nuances peculiar to the separate voices he’d be hearing.
“So, nothing on the horizon for now?” Jack asked.
“Nothing we see at the National Security Council, Mr. President. You know the potential trouble spots as well as I do, of course, and those change on a day-to-day basis.” The man hedged with the grace of someone who’d been dancing to this particular brand of music for years. Ryan’s face didn’t change, only because he’d seen it before. A real intelligence officer didn’t fear death, didn’t fear finding his wife in bed with his best friend, didn’t fear any of the normal vicissitudes of life. A national intelligence officer did fear being found wrong on anything he said in his official capacity. To avoid that was simple, however: you never took a real stand on any single thing. It was a disease not limited to elected officials, after all. Only the President had to take a stand, and it was his good fortune to have such trained experts to supply him with the information he needed, wasn’t it?
“Let me tell you something,” Ryan said after a few seconds of reflection.
“What is that, sir?” the NIO asked cautiously.
“I don’t just want to hear what you know. I also want to hear what you and your people think. You are responsible for what you know, but I’ll take the heat for acting on what you think. I’ve been there and done that, okay?”
“Of course, Mr. President.” The man allowed himself a smile that masked his terror at the prospect. “I’ll pass that along to my people.”
“Thank you.” Ryan dismissed the man, knowing then and there that he needed a National Security Advisor he could trust, and wondering where he’d get one.
The door opened as though by magic to let the NIO out—a Secret Service agent had done that, having watched through the spy hole for most of the briefing. The next in was a DOD briefing team.
The senior man was a two-star who handed over a plastic card.
“Mr. President, you need to put this in your wallet.”
Jack nodded, knowing what it was before his hands touched the orange plastic. It looked like a credit card, but on it was a series of number groups....
“Which one?” Ryan asked.
“You decide, sir.”
Ryan did so, reading off the third such group twice. There were two commissioned officers with the general, a colonel and a major, both of whom wrote down the number group he’d selected and read it back to him twice. President Ryan now had the ability to order the release of strategic nuclear weapons.
“Why is this necessary?” he asked. “We trashed the last ballistic weapons last year.”
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“Mr. President, we still have cruise missiles which can be armed with W-80 warheads, plus B-61 gravity bombs assigned to our bomber fleet. We need your authorization to enable the Permissible Action Links—the PALs—and the idea is that we enable them as early as possible, just in case ”
Ryan completed the sentence: “I get taken out early.”
You’re really important now, Jack, a nasty little voice told him. Now you can initiate a nuclear attack. “I hate those goddamned things. Always have.”
“You aren’t supposed to like them, sir,” the general sympathized. “Now, as you know, the Marines have the VMH-1 helicopter squadron that’s always ready to get you out of here and to a place of safety at a moment’s notice, and ...”
Ryan listened to the rest while his mind wondered if he should do what Jimmy Carter had done at this point: Okay, let’s see, then. Tell them I want them to pick me up NOW. Which presidential command had turned into a major embarrassment for a lot of Marines. But he couldn’t do that now, could he? It would get out that Ryan was a paranoid fool, not someone who wanted to see if the system really worked the way people said it would. Besides, today VMH-1 would definitely be spun up, wouldn’t it?
The fourth member of the briefing team was an Army warrant officer in civilian clothes who carried a quite ordinary-looking briefcase known as “the football,” inside of which was a binder, inside of which was the attack plan—actually a whole set of them ...
“Let me see it.” Ryan pointed. The warrant hesitated, then unlocked the case and handed over the navy blue binder, which Ryan flipped open.
“Sir, we haven’t changed it since—”
The first section, Jack saw, was labeled MAJOR ATTACK OPTION. It showed a map of Japan, many of whose cities were marked with multicolored dots. The legend at the bottom showed what the dots meant in terms of delivered megatonnage; probably another page would quantify the predicted deaths. Ryan opened the binder rings and removed the whole section. “I want these pages burned. I want this MAO eliminated immediately.” That merely meant that it would be filed away in some drawer in Pentagon War Plans, and also in Omaha. Things like this never died.
“Sir, we have not yet confirmed that the Japanese have destroyed all of their launchers, nor have we confirmed the neutralization of their weapons. You see—”
“General, that’s an order,” Ryan said quietly. “I can give them, you know.”
The man’s back braced to attention. “Yes, Mr. President.”
Ryan flipped through the rest of the binder. Despite his previous job, what he found was a revelation. Jack had always avoided too-intimate knowledge of the damned things. He’d never expected them to be used. After the terrorist incident in Denver and all the horror that had swept the surface of the planet in its aftermath, statesmen across continents and political beliefs had indulged themselves in a collective think about the weapons under their control. Even during the shooting war with Japan just ended, Ryan had known that somewhere, some team of experts had concocted a plan for a nuclear retaliatory strike, but he’d concentrated his efforts at making it unnecessary, and it was a source of considerable pride to the new President that he’d never even contemplated implementing the plan whose summary was still in his left hand. LONG RIFLE, he saw, was the code name. Why did the names have to be like that, virile and exciting, as though for something that one could be proud of?
“What’s this one? LIGHT SWITCH ...?”
“Mr. President,” the general answered, “that’s a method of using an EMP attack. Electromagnetic pulse. If you explode a device at very high altitude, there’s nothing—no air, actually—to absorb the initial energy of the detonation and convert it into mechanical energy—no shock wave, that is. As a result all the energy goes out in its original electromagnetic form. The resulting energy surge is murder on power and telephone lines. We always had a bunch of weapons fused for high-altitude burst in our SIOPs for the Soviet Union. Their telephone system was so primitive that it would have been easy to destroy. It’s a cheap mission-kill, won’t really hurt anybody on the ground.”
“I see.” Ryan closed the binder and handed it back to the warrant officer, who immediately locked the now-lighter document away. “I take it there’s nothing going on which is likely to require a nuclear strike of any kind?”
“Correct, Mr. President.”
“So, what’s the point of having this man sitting outside my office all the time?”
“You can’t predict all possible contingencies, can you, sir?” the general asked. It must have been difficult for him to deliver the line with a straight face, Ryan realized, as soon as the shock went away.
“I guess not,” a chastised President replied.
THE WHITE HOUSE Protocol Office was headed by a lady named Judy Simmons, who’d been seconded to the White House staff from the State Department four months earlier. Her office in the basement of the building had been busy since just after midnight, when she’d arrived from her home in Burke, Virginia. Her thankless job was to prepare arrangements for what would be the largest state funeral in American history, a task on which over a hundred staff members had already kibitzed, and it was not yet lunchtime.
The list of all the dead still had to be compiled, but from careful examination of the videotapes it was largely known who was in the chamber, and there was biographical information on all of them—married or single, religion, etc.—from which to make the necessary, if preliminary, plans. Whatever was finally decided, Jack would be the master of the grim ceremony, and had to be kept informed of every step of the planning. A funeral for thousands, Ryan thought, most of whom he hadn’t known, for most of whose as yet unrecovered bodies waited wives and husbands and children.
“National Cathedral,” he saw, turning the page. The approximate numbers of religious affiliations had been compiled. That would determine the clergy to take the various functions in the ecumenical religious service.
“That’s where such ceremonies are usually carried out, Mr. President,” a very harried official confirmed. “There will not be room for all of the remains”—she didn’t say that one White House staffer had suggested an outdoor memorial service at RFK Stadium in order to accommodate all the victims “but there will be room for the President and Mrs. Durling, plus a representative sampling of the congressional victims. We’ve contacted eleven foreign governments on the question of the diplomats who were present. We also have a preliminary list of foreign-government representatives who will be coming in to attend the ceremony.” She handed over that sheet as well.
Ryan scanned it briefly. It meant that after the memorial service he’d be meeting “informally” with numerous chiefs of state to conduct “informal” business. He’d need a briefing page for each meeting, and in addition to whatever they all might ask or want, every one would be checking him out. Jack knew how that worked. All over the world, presidents, prime ministers, and a few lingering dictators would now be reading briefing documents of their own—who was this John Patrick Ryan, and what can we expect of him? He wondered if they had a better idea of the answer than he did. Probably not. Their NIOs wouldn’t be all that different from his, after all. And so a raft of them would come over on government jets, partly to show respect for President Durling and the American government, partly to eyeball the new American President, partly for domestic political consumption at home, and partly because it was expected that they should do so. And so this event, horrific as it was for uncounted thousands, was just one more mechanical exercise in the world of politics. Jack wanted to cry out in rage, but what else was there to do? The dead were dead, and all his grief could not bring them back, and the business of his country and others would go on.
“Have Scott Adler go over this, will you?” Somebody would have to determine how much time he should spend with the official visitors, and Ryan wasn’t qualified to do that.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“What sort of speeches will I have to deliver?” Jack
asked.
“We have our people working on that for you. You should have preliminary drafts by tomorrow afternoon,” Mrs. Simmons replied.
President Ryan nodded and slid the papers into his out-pile. When the Chief of Protocol left, a secretary came in he didn’t know this lady’s name—with a pile of telegrams, the leftovers from Eighth and I that he hadn’t gotten to, plus another sheet of paper that showed his activities for the day, prepared without his input or assistance. He was about to grumble about that when she spoke.
“We have over ten thousand telegrams and e-mails from—well, from citizens,” she told him.
“Saying what?”
“Mainly that they’re praying for you.”
“Oh.” Somehow that came as a surprise, and a humbling one at that. But would God listen?
Jack went back to reading the official messages, and the first day went on.
THE COUNTRY HAD essentially come to a halt, even as its new President struggled to come to terms with his new job. Banks and financial markets were closed, as were schools and many businesses. All the television networks had moved their broadcast headquarters to the various Washington bureaus in a haphazard process that had them all working together. A gang of cameras sited around the Hill kept up a continuous feed of recovery operations, while reporters had to keep talking, lest the airwaves be filled with silence. Around eleven that morning, a crane removed the remains of the 747’s tail, which was deposited on a large flatbed trailer for transport to a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. That would be the site for what was called the “crash investigation,” for want of a better term, and cameras tracked the vehicle as it threaded its way along the streets. Two of the engines went out shortly thereafter in much the same way.
