by Tom Clancy
"Get a count," his supervisor instructed.
"Yes, sir." The analyst didn't grumble. Counting the tanks was something they always did. He'd even type them, mainly by checking the main gun. By doing this they'd be able to determine how many of the tanks regularly counted in their regimental laagers had turned their engines over and moved from one place to another. The information had importance to someone or other, though for the past ten years they'd been doing the same thing, generally to learn that whatever the faults and flaws of the Iraqi military, it did its maintenance well enough to keep the engines running. It was rather less diligent about its gunnery, which they'd learned in the Persian Gulf War, but as the analyst had already noted, you look at a tank and assume that it works. It was the only prudent course. He hunched down over the viewer and saw that a white car, probably a Mercedes from the shape, was driving up National Route 7. A more detailed look at the photos would have showed it heading toward the Sibaq' al Mansur racetrack, where he would have seen more automobiles of the same type, but he'd been told to count the tanks.
IRAQIS CLIMATIC VARIATIONS are more striking than in most places in the world. This February morning, with the sun high in the sky, it was barely above freezing, though in the summer 115 degrees Fahrenheit attracted little in the way of notice. The assembled officers, Badrayn saw, were in their winter wool uniforms, with high collars and voluminous gold braid; most of them were smoking, and all of them were worried. His host introduced the visitor to those who didn't know him. He didn't bother wishing peace unto them. They weren't in the mood for the traditional Islamic greeting. These men were surprisingly Western and totally secular in their outlook and demeanor. Like their departed leader, they gave mere lip service to their religion, though at the moment they all wondered if the teachings of eternal damnation for a sinful life were true or not, knowing that some of them would probably find out soon enough. That possibility worried them enough that they had left their offices and come to the racetrack to hear him speak.
The message Badrayn had to deliver was a simple one. This he did.
"How can we believe you?" the army chief asked when he'd finished.
"It is better for everyone this way, is it not?"
"You expect us to abandon our motherland to… him?" a corps commander demanded, disguising frustration as anger.
"What you decide to do is your concern, General. If you desire to stand and fight for what is yours, the decision is clearly yours as well. I was asked to come here and deliver a message as an honest broker. This I have done," Badrayn replied evenly. There was no sense getting excited about things like this, after all.
"With whom are we supposed to negotiate?" This was the chief of the Iraqi air force.
"You may make your reply to me, but as I have already told you, there really is nothing to negotiate. The offer is a fair one, is it not?" Generous would be a better term. In addition to saving their own skins, and the skins of those close to them, they would all emerge from their country wealthy. Their president had salted away huge sums of money, little of which had ever actually been detected and seized. They all had access to travel documents and passports from any country in the known world. In that particular area the Iraqi intelligence service, assisted by the engraving bureau of its treasury, had long since established its expertise. "You have his word before God that you will not be harassed, wherever you may go." And that was something they had to take seriously. Badrayn's sponsor was their enemy. He was as bitter and spiteful as any man on earth. But he was also a man of God, and not one to invoke His name lightly.
"When do you need your reply?" the army chief asked, more politely than the others.
"Tomorrow would be sufficient, or even the day after. Beyond that, I cannot say. My instructions," Badrayn went on, "go only that far."
"And the arrangements?"
"You may set them yourselves, within reason." Badrayn wondered how much more they could possibly expect from him, or his sponsor.
But the decision he demanded was harder than one might imagine. The patriotism of the assembled general officers was not of the usual sort. They loved their country, largely because they controlled it. They had power, genuine life-and-death power, a far greater narcotic than money, and one of the things for which a man would risk his life and his soul. One of their number, many of them thought—hoped—just might pull it off. One of them just might assume the presidency of their country successfully, and together they just might calm things down and continue as before. They'd have to open their nation up somewhat, of course. They'd have to allow U.N. and other inspectors to see everything, but with the death of their leader they'd have the chance to start anew, even though everyone would know that nothing new at all was happening. Such were the rules of the world. A promise here or there, a few remarks about democracy and elections, and their former enemies would fall all over themselves giving them and their nation a chance. A further incentive was the sheer opportunity of it. Not one of them had felt truly secure in years. Everyone knew of colleagues who had died, either at the hands of their dead leader, or under circumstances euphemistically called "mysterious" — helicopter crashes had been a favorite ploy of their fallen and beloved President. Now they had a chance to live lives of power with much greater confidence, and against that was a life of indolence in some foreign place. Each of them already had a life of every luxury a man could imagine—plus power. Each could snap his fingers and the people who jumped were not servants but soldiers….
Except for one thing. To stay would be the greatest and most dangerous gamble of their lives. Their country was now under the strictest control they could remember, and there was a reason for it. The people who'd roared their love and affection for the dead one—what did they really think? It hadn't mattered a week before, but it mattered now. The soldiers they commanded came from the same human sea. Which of them had the charisma to assume the leadership of the country? Which of them had the keys to the Ba'ath Party? Which of them could rule by the force of will? Because only then could they look into the future, if not without fear, then with a small enough quantity of it that their experience and courage could deal with the chances they would be taking. Each of them, standing at the racetrack, looked around the assembly of brother officers and wondered the same question: Which one?
That was the problem, because if there had been one of their number to do it, he would already have been dead, probably in a tragic helicopter mishap. And a dictatorship was not operated by a committee. Strong as they all felt themselves to be, each looked at the others and saw potential weakness. Private jealousies would destroy them. Jockeying and rivalries would, probably, cause such internal turmoil that the iron hand needed to control the people would weaken. And in a few months, probably, it would come apart. They had all seen it happen before, and the ultimate result was foretold in their deaths, standing before a line of their own soldiers, and a wall to their backs.
There was no ethos for these men other than power and its exercise. That sufficed for one man, but not for many. Many needed to be unified around something, whether it be the rule imposed by one superior, or a commonly held idea, but it had to be something that imposed a common outlook. No one of them' could do the former, and collectively they lacked the latter. Powerful as they each might be, they were also weak in a fundamental way, and as the officers stood there, looking around at one another, they all knew it. At base, they believed in nothing. What they enforced with weapons they could not impose with will. They could command from behind, but not lead from the front. At least most of them were intelligent enough to know it. That was why Badrayn had flown to Baghdad.
He watched their eyes and knew what they were thinking, however impassive their faces might have been. A bold man would have spoken up with confidence, and thus assumed leadership of the group. But the bold ones were long since dead, cut down by one bolder and more ruthless, only to be cut down by the unseen hand of someone more patient and more ruthless still—enough so
that he could now make a generous offer. Badrayn knew what the answer had to be, and so did they. The dead Iraqi President had left nothing behind to replace himself, but that was the way of men who believed in nothing except themselves.
THE PHONE RANG at 6:05 this time. Ryan didn't mind awakening before 7:00. It had been his custom for years, but back then he'd had to drive in to work. Now the job was an elevator ride away, and he'd expected that the time previously spent in a car could now be spent in bed. At least he'd been able to doze in the back of his official car.
"Yes?"
"Mr. President?" Jack was surprised to hear Arnie's voice. Even so, he was tempted to demand who the hell else would pick the phone up.
"What is it?"
"Trouble."
VICE PRESIDENT EDWARD J. Kealty had not slept all night, but one would not have known it from looking at him. Shaved pink, clear of eye, and straight of back, he strode into the CNN building with his wife and his aides, there to be met by a producer who whisked him into an elevator for the trip upstairs. Only the usual pleasantries were exchanged. The career politician just stared forward, as though trying to convince the stainless-steel doors that he knew what he was about. And succeeding.
The preparatory calls had been made over the previous three hours, starting with the head of the network. An old friend, the TV executive had been thunderstruck for the first time in his career. One halfway expected airplane crashes, train wrecks, violent crimes—the routine disasters and sorrows from which the media made its living—but something like this was the occurrence of a lifetime. Two hours earlier, he'd called Arnie van Datnm, another old friend, because one had to cover one's bases as a reporter; besides, there was also a love of country in him that he rarely expressed but it was there nonetheless, and the CNN president didn't have a clue where this story would go. He'd called on the network's legal correspondent, a failed trial attorney, who in turn was now on the phone with a professor friend at Georgetown University Law School. Even now, the CNN president called into the green room.
"Are you really sure, Ed?" was all he had to ask.
"I don't have a choice. I wish I didn't have to." Which was the expected answer.
"Your funeral. I'll be watching." And the line went dead. At the far end there was a form of rejoicing. It would be a hell of a story, and it was CNN's job to report the news, and that was that.
"ARNIE, IS THIS totally crazy or am I still dreaming?" They were in an upstairs sitting room.
Jack had thrown on some casual clothes. Van Damm didn't have his tie on yet, and his socks were mismatched, Ryan noticed. Worst of all, van Damm looked rattled, and he'd never seen that before. "I guess we'll just have to wait and see." Both men turned when the door opened.
"Mr. President?" A fiftyish man came in, properly dressed in a business suit. He was tall and harried-looking. Andrea followed him in. She, too, had been briefed, insofar as that was possible.
"This is Patrick Martin," Arnie said.
"Criminal Division at Justice, right?" Jack rose to shake hands and waved him to the coffee tray.
"Yes, sir. I've been working with Dan Murray on the crash investigation."
"Pat's one of our better trial lawyers. He also lectures at George Washington on constitutional law," the chief of staff explained.
"So, what do you think of all this?" the President asked, his voice still somewhere between whimsy and outright disbelief.
"I think we need to see what he has to say." The quintessential lawyer's reply.
"How long at Justice?" Jack asked next, returning to his seat.
"Twenty-three years. Four years in the FBI before that." Martin poured a cup and decided to stand.
"Here we go," van Damm observed, unmuting the TV.
"Ladies and gentlemen, with us here in our Washington bureau is Vice President Edward J. Kealty." CNN's chief political correspondent also looked as though he'd been dragged from his bed and genuinely shaken. Ryan noted that, of all the people he'd seen that day, Kealty looked the most normal. "Sir, you have something unusual to say."
"Yes, I do, Barry. I probably need to start by saying that this is the most difficult thing I've ever had to do in over thirty years of public life." Kealty's voice was quiet and restrained, speaking in the tone of an essay by Emerson, slow and clear, and painfully earnest. "As you know, President Durling asked me to resign from my post. The reason for this was a question of my conduct while a senator. Barry, it's no secret that my personal conduct has not always been as exemplary as it should have been. That's true of many people in public life, but it's no excuse, and I do not claim that it is. When Roger and I discussed the situation, we agreed that it would be best for me to resign my office, allowing him to select a new running mate for the elections later this year. It was his further intention to have John Ryan fill my post as interim Vice President.
"Barry, I was content with that. I've been in public life for a very long time, and the idea of retiring to play with my grandchildren and maybe teach a little bit actually looked pretty attractive. And so I agreed to Roger's request in the interests of—well, really for the good of the country.
"But I never actually resigned."
"Okay," the correspondent said, holding his hands up as though to catch a baseball. "I think we need to be really clear on this, sir. What exactly did happen?"
"Barry, I drove over to the State Department. You see, the Constitution specifies that when the President or Vice President resigns, the resignation is presented to the Secretary of State. I met with Secretary Hanson privately to discuss the issue. I actually had a letter of resignation prepared, but it was in the wrong form, and Brett asked me to redraft it. So I drove back, thinking that I could have it done and resubmitted the following day.
"None of us expected the events of that evening. I was badly shaken by them, as were many. In my case, as you know, well, so many of the friends with whom I'd worked for years were just snuffed out by that brutal and cowardly act. But I never actually resigned my office." Kealty looked down for a moment, biting his lip before going on. "Barry, I would have been content even with that. I gave my word to President Durling, and I had every intention of keeping it.
"But I can't. I just can't," Kealty went on. "Let me explain.
"I've known Jack Ryan for ten years. He's a fine man, a courageous man, and he's served our country honorably, but he is, unfortunately, not the man to heal our country. What he said last night, trying to speak to the American people, proves it. How can we possibly expect our government to work under these circumstances without experienced, capable people to fill the offices left vacant?"
"But he is the President—isn't he?" Barry asked, scarcely believing what he was doing and what he was hearing.
"Barry, he doesn't even know how to do a proper investigation. Look at what he said last night about the plane crash. Hardly a week has passed and already he says he knows what happened. Can anyone believe that?" Kealty asked plaintively. "Can anyone really believe that? Who has oversight over this investigation? Who's actually running it? To whom are they reporting? And to have conclusions in a week? How can the American people have confidence in that? When President Kennedy was assassinated, it took months. The investigation was run by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Why? Because we had to be sure, that's why."
"Excuse me, Mr. Vice President, but that really doesn't answer my question."
"Barry, Ryan was never Vice President, because I never resigned. The post was never vacant, and the Constitution allows only one Vice President. He never even took the oath associated with the office."
"But—"
"You think I want to do this? I don't have a choice. How can we rebuild the Congress and the executive branch with amateurs? Last night Mr. Ryan told the governors of the states to send him people with no experience in government. How can laws be drafted by people who don't know how?
"Barry, I've never committed public suicide before. It's like being one of the people, one of t
he senators at the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. I'm looking down into my open political grave, but I have to place the country first. I have to." The camera zoomed in on his face, and the anguish there was manifest. One could almost see tears in his eyes as his voice proclaimed his selfless patriotism.
"He always was good on TV," van Damm noted.
"I do have trouble believing all this," Ryan said after a moment.
"Believe it," Arnie told him. "Mr. Martin? We could use some legal guidance."
"First of all, get someone over to State and check the Secretary's office out."
"FBI?" van Damm asked.
"Yes." Martin nodded. "You won't find anything, but that's how it has to start. Next, check phone logs and notes. Next, we start interviewing people. That's going to be a problem. Secretary Hanson's dead, along with his wife, and President and Mrs. Durling, of course. Those are the people most likely to have knowledge on the facts of the issue. I would expect that we will develop very little hard evidence, and not very much useful circumstantial evidence."
"Roger told me that—"
Martin cut him off.
"Hearsay. You're telling me that someone said to you what he was told by somebody else—not much use in any court of law."
"Go on," Arnie said.
"Sir, there really is no constitutional or statutory law on this question."
"And there's no Supreme Court to rule on the issue," Ryan pointed out. To that pregnant pause, he added: "What if he's telling the truth?"
"Mr. President, whether or not he's telling the truth is really beside the point," Martin replied. "Unless we can prove that he's lying, which is unlikely, then he has a case of sorts. By the way, on the issue of the Supreme Court, assuming that you get a new Senate and make your nominations, all of the new Justices would ordinarily have to recuse themselves because you selected them. That probably leaves no legal solution possible."
