by Tom Clancy
“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.”
“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.
Various “experts” helped fill the silence, speculating on what had happened and how. This was difficult for everyone involved, as there had been few leaks as yet those who were trying to find out what had happened were too busy to talk with reporters on or off the record, and though the journalists couldn’t say it, their most fertile source of leaks lay in ruin before thirty-four cameras. That gave the experts little to say. Witnesses were interviewed for their recollections—there was no tape of the inbound aircraft at all, much to the surprise of everyone. The tail number of the aircraft was known—it could hardly be missed, painted as it was on the wreckage of the aircraft, and that was as easily checked by reporters as by federal authorities. The ownership of the aircraft by Japan Airlines was immediately confirmed, along with the very day the aircraft had rolled out of the Boeing plant near Seattle. Officials of that company submitted to interviews, and along the way it was determined that the 747-400 (PIP) aircraft weighed just over two hundred tons empty, a number doubled with the mass of fuel, passengers, and baggage it could pull into the air. A pilot with United Airlines who was familiar with the aircraft explained to two of the networks how a pilot could approach Washington and then execute the death dive, while a Delta colleague did the same with the others. Both airmen were mistaken in some of the particulars, none of them important.
“But the Secret Service is armed with antiaircraft missiles, isn’t it?” one anchor asked.
“If you’ve got an eighteen-wheeler heading for you at sixty miles an hour, and you shoot out one of the tires on the trailer, that doesn’t stop the truck, does it?” the pilot answered, noting the look of concentrated intelligence on the face of a highly paid journalist who understood little more than what appeared on his TelePrompTer. “Three hundred tons of aircraft doesn’t just stop, okay?”
“So, there was no way to stop it?” the anchor asked with a twisted face.
“None at all.” The pilot could see that the reporter didn’t understand, but he couldn’t come up with anything to clarify matters further.
The director, in his cont
rol room off of Nebraska Avenue, changed cameras to follow a pair of Guardsmen bringing another body down the steps. An assistant director was keeping an eye on that set of cameras, trying to maintain a running tally of the number of bodies removed. It was now known that the bodies of President and Mrs. Durling had been recovered and were at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for autopsy—required by law for wrongful death—and disposition. At network headquarters in New York, every foot of videotape of or about Durling was being organized and spliced for presentation throughout the day. Political colleagues were being sought out and interviewed. Psychologists were taken on to explain how the Durling children could deal with the trauma, and then expanded their horizons to talk about the impact of the event on the country as a whole, and how people could deal with it. About the only thing not examined on the television news was the spiritual aspect; that many of the victims had believed in God and attended church from time to time was not worthy of air time, though the presence of many people in churches was deemed newsworthy enough for three minutes on one network—and then, because each was constantly monitoring the others for ideas, that segment was copied by the others over the next few hours.
IT ALL CAME down to this, really, Jack knew. The numbers only added individual examples, identical to this one in magnitude and horror. He’d avoided it for as much of the day as had been possible, but finally his cowardice had run out.
The Durling kids hovered between the numbness of denial, and terror of a world destroyed before their eyes as they’d watched their father on TV. They’d never see Mom and Dad again. The bodies were far too damaged for the caskets to be open. No last good-byes, no words, just the traumatic removal of the foundation that held up their young lives. And how were children supposed to understand that Mom and Dad weren’t just Mom and Dad, but were had been—something else to someone else, and for that reason, their deaths had been necessary to someone who hadn’t known or cared about the kids?
