by Tom Clancy
“You finished, or do I have to get a box of Kleenex for you?” For one brief moment the President looked ready to punch van Damm. Arnie plunged on. “Those agents died because they chose jobs they thought were important. Soldiers do the same thing. What’s with you, anyway, Ryan? How the hell do you think a country happens? You think it’s just nice thoughts? You weren’t always that stupid. You were a Marine once. You did other stuff for CIA. You had balls then. You have a job. You didn’t get drafted, remember? You volunteered for this, whether you admit it or not. You knew it was possible this would happen. And so now you’re here. You want to run away, fine—run away. But don’t tell me it isn’t worth it. Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter. If people died to protect your family, don’t you fucking dare tell me it doesn’t matter!” Van Damm stormed out of the office, without even bothering to close the door behind him.
Ryan didn’t know what to do right then. He sat down behind his desk. There were the usual piles of paper, neatly arrayed by a staff that never slept. Here was China. Here was the Middle East. Here was India. Here was advance information on the leading economic indicators. Here were political projections for the 161 House seats to be decided in two days. Here was a report on the terrorist incident. Here was a list of the names of the dead agents, and under each was a list of wives and husbands, parents and children, and in the case of Don Russell, grandchildren. He knew all the faces, but Jack had to admit that he hadn’t remembered all the names. They’d died to protect his child, and he didn’t even know all the names. Worst of all, he’d allowed himself to be carted away, to indulge himself in yet more artificial comfort—and forget. But here it all was, on his desk, waiting for him, and it wouldn’t go away. And he couldn’t run away, either. He stood and walked out the door, heading left for the chief of staff’s corner office, passing Secret Service agents who’d heard the exchange, probably traded looks, certainly developed their own thoughts, and now concealed them.
“Arnie?”
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“I’m sorry.”
“OKAY, HONEY,” HE groaned. He’d go to see the doctor tomorrow morning. It hadn’t gotten better at all. If anything, it had gotten worse. The headaches were punishing, and that despite two extra-strength Tylenol every four hours. If only he could sleep it off, but that was proving hard. Only exhaustion allowed him an hour here and an hour there. Just getting up to use the bathroom required a few minutes of concentrated effort, enough that his wife offered to help, but, no, a man didn’t need an escort for that. On the other hand, she was right. He did need to see a doctor. Would have been smarter to do it yesterday, he thought. Then he might have felt better now.
IT HAD BEEN easy for Plumber, at least on the procedural side. The tape-storage vault was the size of a respectable public library, and finding things was easy. There, on the fifth shelf, were three boxed Beta-format cassettes. Plumber took them down, removed the tapes from the boxes, and replaced them with blanks. The three tapes he placed in his briefcase. He was home twenty minutes later. There, for his own convenience, he had a commercial-type Betamax, and he ran the tapes of the first interview, just to make sure, just to confirm the fact that the tapes were undamaged. And they were. These would have to be sent to a secure place.
Next, John Plumber drafted his three-minute commentary piece for the next day’s evening news broadcast. It would be a mildly critical piece on the Ryan presidency. He spent an hour on it, since, unlike the current crop of TV reporters, he liked to achieve a certain elegance in his language, a task which came easily to him, as his grammar was correct. This he printed up and read over because he both edited and detected errors more easily on paper than on a computer monitor. Satisfied, he copied the piece over to disk, which would later be used at the studio to generate copy for the TelePrompTer. Next, he composed another commentary piece of the same overall length (it turned out to be four words shorter), and that he printed also. Plumber spent rather more time with this one. If it were to be his professional swan song, then it had to be done properly, and this reporter, who had drafted quite a few obituaries for others, both admired and not, wanted his own to be just right. Satisfied with the final copy, he printed that up as well, tucking the pages into his briefcase, with the cassettes. This one he would not copy to disk.
“I GUESS THEY’RE finished,” the chief master sergeant said.
The take from the Predator showed the tank columns heading back to their laagers, hatches open on the turrets, crewmen visible, mainly smoking. The exercise had gone well for the newly constituted UIR army, and even now they were conducting their road movement in good order.
Major Sabah spent so much time looking over this man’s shoulder that they really should have spoken on a more informal basis, he thought. It was all routine. Too routine. He’d expected—hoped—that his country’s new neighbor would require much more time to integrate its military forces, but the commonality of weapons and doctrine had worked in their favor. Radio messages copied down here and at STORM TRACK suggested that the exercise was concluded. The TV coverage from the UAV confirmed it, however, and confirmation was important.
“That’s funny ...” the sergeant observed, to his own surprise.
“What is that?” Sabah asked.
“Excuse me, sir.” The NCO stood and walked over to a corner cabinet, from which he extracted a map, and brought it back to his workstation. “There’s no road there. Look, sir.” He unfolded the map, matched the coordinates with those on the screen—the Predator had its own Global Positioning Satellite navigation system and automatically told its operators where it was—and tapped the right section on the paper. “See?”
The Kuwaiti officer looked back and forth from map to screen. On the latter, there was a road, now. But that was easily explained. A column of a hundred tanks would convert almost any surface into a hard-packed highway of sorts, and that had happened here.
But there hadn’t been a road there before. The tanks had made it over the last few hours.
“That’s a change, Major. The Iraqi army was always road-bound before.”
Sabah nodded. It was so obvious that he hadn’t seen it. Though native to the desert, and supposedly schooled in traveling there, the Iraqi army in 1991 had connived at its own destruction by sticking close to roads, because its officers always seemed to get lost when moving cross-country. Not as mad as it sounded—the desert was essentially as featureless as the sea—it had made their movements predictable, never a good thing in a war, and given advancing allied forces free rein to approach from unexpected directions.
That had just changed.
“You suppose they have GPS, too?” the chief master sergeant asked.
“We couldn’t expect them to stay stupid forever, could we?”
PRESIDENT RYAN KISSED his wife on the way to the elevator. The kids weren’t up yet. One sort of work lay ahead. Another sort lay behind. Today there wasn’t time for both, though some efforts would be made. Ben Goodley was waiting on the helicopter.
“Here’s the notes from Adler on his Tehran trip.” The National Security Advisor passed them over. “Also the write-up from Beijing. The working group is getting together at ten to go over that situation. The SNIE team will be meeting at Langley later today, too.”
“Thanks.” Jack strapped into his scat and started reading. Arnie and Callie came aboard and took their seats forward of his.
“Any ideas, Mr. President?” Goodley asked.
“Ben, you’re supposed to tell me, remember?”
“How about I tell you that it doesn’t make much sense?”
“I already know that part. You guard the phones and faxes today. Scott should be in Taipei now. Whatever comes from him, fast-track it to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
The helicopter lurched aloft. Ryan hardly noticed that. His mind was on the job, crummy though it was. Price and Raman were with him. There would be more agents on the 747, and more still waiting even now in Nashville. The preside
ncy of John Patrick Ryan went on, whether he liked it or not.
THIS COUNTRY MIGHT be small, might be unimportant, might be a pariah in the international community—not because of anything it had done, except perhaps to prosper, but because of its larger and less prosperous neighbor to the west—but it did have an elected government, and that was supposed to count for something in the community of nations, especially those with popularly elected governments themselves. The People’s Republic had come to exist by force of arms—well, most countries did, SecState reminded himself—and had immediately thereafter slaughtered millions of its own citizens (nobody knew how many; nobody was terribly interested in finding out), launched into a revolutionary development program (“the Great Leap Forward”), which had turned out more disastrously than was the norm even for Marxist nations; and launched yet another internal “reform” effort (“the Cultural Revolution”) which had come after something called the “Hundred Flowers” campaign, whose real purpose had been to smoke out potential dissidents for later elimination at the hands of students whose revolutionary enthusiasm had indeed been revolutionary toward Chinese culture—they’d come close to destroying it entirely, in favor of The Little Red Book. Then had come more reform, the supposed changeover from Marxism to something else, another student revolution—this one against the existing political system—arrogantly cut down with tanks and machine guns on global television. Despite all that, the rest of the world was entirely willing to let the People’s Republic crush their cousins on Taiwan.
This was called realpolitik, Scott Adler thought. Something similar had resulted in an event called the Holocaust, an event his father had survived, with a number tattooed on his forearm to prove it. Even his own country officially had a one-China policy, though the unspoken codicil was that the PRC would not attack the ROC—and if it did, then America might just react. Or might not.
Adler was a career diplomat, a graduate of Cornell and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He loved his country. He was often an instrument of his country’s policy, and now found himself to be his country’s very voice of international affairs. But what he often had to say was not terribly just, and at moments like this, he wondered if he might himself be doing the same things that had been done sixty years earlier by other Fletcher grads, well-educated and well-meaning, who, after it was all over, wondered how the hell they’d been so blind as not to have seen it coming.
“We have fragments—and actually some rather large pieces from the missile that were lodged in the wing. It is definitely of PRC origin,” the ROC Defense Minister said. “We will allow your technical people to look them over and make your own tests to confirm matters.”
“Thank you. I will discuss that with my government.”
“So.” This was the Foreign Minister. “They allow a direct flight from Beijing to Taipei. They do not object privately to the dispatch of an aircraft carrier. They disclaim any responsibility for the Airbus incident. I confess I see no rationale for this behavior.”
“I am gratified that they express interest only in the restoration of regional stability.”
“How good of them,” Defense said. “After they deliberately upset it.”
“This has caused us great economic harm. Again, foreign investors get nervous, and with the flight of their capital, we face some minor embarrassments. Was that their plan, do you suppose?”
“Minister, if that were the case, why did they ask me to fly here directly?”
“Some manner of subterfuge, obviously,” the Foreign Minister answered, before Defense could say anything.
“But if so, what for?” Adler wanted to know. Hell, they were Chinese. Maybe they could figure it out.
“We are secure here. We know that, even if foreign investors do not. Even so, the situation is not an entirely happy one. It is rather like living in a castle with a moat. Across the moat is a lion. The lion would kill and eat us if he had the chance. He cannot leap the moat, and he knows that, but he keeps trying to do so, even with that knowledge. I hope you can understand our concern.”
“I do, sir,” SecState assured him. “If the PRC reduces the level of its activity, will you do the same?” Even if they couldn’t figure out what the PRC was up to, perhaps they could de-stress the situation anyway.
“In principle, yes. Exactly how, is a technical question for my colleague here. You will not find us unreasonable.”
And the entire trip had been staged for that simple statement. Now Adler had to fly back to Beijing to deliver it. Matchmaker, matchmaker ...
HOPKINS HAD ITS own day-care center, staffed by permanent people and always some students from the university doing lab work for their child-care major. Sally walked in, looked around and was pleased by the multicolored environment. Behind her were four agents, all male, because there weren’t any unassigned women. One carried a FAG bag. Nearby was a trio of plainclothes officers of the Baltimore City Police, who exchanged credentials with the USSS to confirm identity, and so another day started for SURGEON and SANDBOX. Katie had enjoyed the helicopter ride. Today she’d make some new friends, but tonight, her mother knew, she’d ask where Miss Marlene was. How did one explain death to a not-yet-three-year-old?
THE CROWD APPLAUDED with something more than the usual warmth. Ryan could feel it. Here he was, not yet three days after an attempt on the life of his youngest daughter, doing his job for them, showing strength and courage and all that other bullshit, POTUS thought. He’d led off with a prayer for the fallen agents, and Nashville was the Bible Belt, where such things were taken seriously. The rest of the speech had actually been pretty good, the President thought, covered things he really believed in. Common sense. Honesty. Duty. It was just that hearing his own voice speaking words written by somebody else made it seem hollow, and it was hard to keep his mind from wandering so early in the morning.
“Thank you, and God bless America,” he concluded. The crowd stood and cheered. The band struck up. Ryan turned away from the armored podium to shake hands again with the local officials, and made his way off the stage, waving as he did so. Arnie was waiting behind the curtain.
“For a phony, you still do pretty good.” Ryan didn’t have time to respond to that before Andrea came up.
“FLASH-traffic waiting for you on the bird, sir. From Mr. Adler.”
“Okay, let’s roll. Stay close,” he told his principal agent on the way out the back.
“Always,” Price assured him.
“Mr. President!” a reporter shouted. There were a bunch of them. He was the loudest this morning. He was one of the NBC team. Ryan turned and stopped. “Will you press Congress for a new gun-control law?”
“What for?”
“The attack on your daughter was—”
Ryan held his hand up. “Okay. As I understand it, the weapons used were of a type already illegal. I don’t see how a new law would accomplish much, unfortunately.”
“But gun-control advocates say—”
“I know what they say. And now they’re using an attack on my little girl, and the deaths of five superb Americans, to advance a political agenda of their own. What do you think of that?” the President asked, turning away.
“WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?”
He described his symptoms. His family physician was an old friend. They even played golf together. It wasn’t hard. At the end of every year, the Cobra representative had plenty of demonstrator clubs in nearly mint condition. Most were donated to youth programs or sold to country clubs as rental sticks. But some he could give to his friends, not to mention some Greg Norman autographs.
“Well, you have a temperature, one hundred and three, and that’s a little high. Your BP’s one hundred over sixty-five, and that’s a little low for you. Your color’s rotten—”
“I know, I feel sick.”
“You are sick, but I wouldn’t worry about it. Probably a flu bug you picked up in some bar, and all the air travel doesn’t help much, either—and I’ve
been telling you for years about cutting back on the booze. What happened is you picked something up, and other factors worsened it. Started Friday, right?”
“Thursday night, maybe Friday morning.”
“Played a round anyway?”
“Ended up with a snowman for my trouble,” he admitted, meaning a score of 80.
“I’d settle for that myself, healthy and stone-sober.” The doctor had a handicap of twenty. “You’re over fifty and you can’t wallow with the pigs at night and expect to soar with the eagles in the morning. Complete rest. A lot of liquids-non-alcoholic. Stay on the Tylenol.”
“No prescription?”
The doc shook his head. “Antibiotics don’t work on viral infections. Your immune system has to handle those, and it will if you let it. But while you’re here, I want to draw some blood. You’re overdue for a cholesterol check. I’ll send my nurse in. You have somebody here to drive you home?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to drive myself.”
“Good. Give it a few days. Cobra can do without you, and the golf courses will still be there when you feel better.”
“Thanks.” He felt better already. You always did when the doc told you that you weren’t going to die.
“HERE YOU GO.” Goodley handed the paper over. Few office buildings, even secure government ones, had the communications facilities that were shoehorned into the upper-level lounge area of the VC-25, whose call sign was Air Force One. “Not bad news at all,” Ben added.
SWORDSMAN skimmed it once, then sat down to read it more slowly. “Okay, fine, he thinks he can defuse the situation,” Ryan noted. “But he still doesn’t know what the goddamned situation is.”
“Better than nothing.”
“Does the working group have this?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
