by Tom Clancy
"The question is being investigated by the FBI, which is the government's principal investigative agency. Whatever the facts are, they haveio be established before anyone can make a judgment. But I think we all know what is going to happen. Ed Kealty resigned, and you all know why. Out of respect for the constitutional process, I have directed the FBI to look into the matter, but my own legal advice is absolutely clear. Mr. Kealty can talk all he wants. I have a job to do here. Next question?" Jack asked confidently.
"Mr. President" — Ryan nodded fractionally at hearing the Miami Herald say that—"In your speech the other night, you said that you're not a politician, but you are in a political job. The American people want to know your views on a lot of issues."
"That makes good sense. Like what?" Jack asked.
"Abortion, for one," the Herald reporter, a very liberated woman, asked. "What exactly is your position?"
"I don't like it," Ryan answered, speaking the truth before thinking about it. "I'm Catholic, as you probably know, and on that moral issue I think my Church is correct. However, Roe v. Wade is the law of the land until such time as the Supreme Court might reconsider the ruling, and the President isn't allowed to ignore the rulings of the federal courts. That puts me in a somewhat uncomfortable position, but as President I have to execute my office in accordance with the law. I swore an oath to do that." Not bad, Jack, Ryan thought.
"So you do not support the right of a woman to choose?" the Herald asked, smelling the blood.
"Choose what?" Ryan asked, still comfortable. "You know, somebody once tried to kill my wife while she was pregnant with our son, and soon thereafter I watched my oldest child lying near death in a hospital. I think life is a very precious commodity. I've learned that lesson the hard way. I'd hope that people would think about that before deciding to have an abortion."
"That doesn't answer the question, sir."
"I can't stop people from doing it. Like it or not, it's the law. The President may not break the law." Wasn't this obvious?
"But in your appointments for the Supreme Court, will you use abortion as a litmus-test issue? Would you like to have Roe v. Wade overturned?" Ryan scarcely noticed the cameras changing focus, and the reporters concentrating on their scribbled notes.
"I don't like Roe v. Wade, as I said. I think it was a mistake. I'll tell you why. The Supreme Court interjected itself into what should have been a legislative matter. The Constitution doesn't address this issue, and on issues where the Constitution is mute, we have state and federal legislatures to write our laws." This civics lesson was going well. "Now, for the nominations I have to make to the Supreme Court, I will look for the best judges I can find. That's something we will be addressing shortly. The Constitution is sort of the Bible for the United States of America, and the justices of the Supreme Court are the— theologians, I guess, who decide what it means. They aren't supposed to write a new one. They're supposed to figure out what it means. When a change in the Constitution is needed, we have a mechanism to change it, which we've used more than twenty times."
"So, you will select only strict-constructionists who are likely to overturn Roe."
It was like hitting a wall. Ryan paused noticeably before answering. "I hope to pick the best judges I can find. I will not interrogate them on single issues."
The Boston Globe leaped to his feet. "Mr. President, what about where the life of the mother is in danger, the Catholic Church—"
"The answer to that is obvious. The life of the mother is the paramount consideration."
"But the Church used to say—"
"I don't speak for the Catholic Church. As I said earlier, I cannot violate the law."
"But you want the law changed," the Globe pointed out.
"Yes, I think it would be better for everybody if the matter was returned to the state legislatures. In that way the people's elected representatives can write the laws in accordance with the will of their electorates."
"But then," the San Francisco Examiner pointed out, "we'd have a hodgepodge of laws across the country, and in some areas abortion would be illegal."
"Only if the electorate wants it that way. That's how democracy works."
"But what about poor women?"
"It's not for me to say," Ryan replied, feeling the beginnings of anger, and wondering how he'd ever gotten into this mess.
"So, do you support a constitutional amendment against abortion?" the Atlanta Constitution demanded.
"No, I don't think that's a constitutional question. I think it is properly a legislative question."
"So," the New York Times summarized, "you are personally against abortion on moral and religious grounds, but you will not interfere with women's rights; you plan to appoint conservative justices to the new Supreme Court who will probably overturn Roe, but you don't support a constitutional amendment to outlaw freedom of choice." The reporter smiled. "Exactly what do you believe in on this issue, sir?"
Ryan shook his head, pursed his lips, and bit off his first version of an answer to the impertinence. "I thought I just made that clear. Shall we go on to something else?"
"Thank you, Mr. President!" a senior reporter called loudly, so advised by the frantic gestures of Arnold van Damm. Ryan left the podium puzzled, walked around the corner, then another until he was out of sight. The chief of staff grabbed the President by the arm, and nearly pushed him against the wall, and this time the Secret Service didn't move a muscle.
"Way to go, Jack, you just pissed off the entire country!"
"What do you mean?" the President replied, thinking, Huh?
"I mean you don't pump gas in your car when you're smoking a cigarette, God damn it! Jesus! Don't you know what you just did?" Arnie could see that he didn't. "The pro-choice people now think you're going to take their rights away. The pro-life people think you don't care about their issue. It was just perfect, Jack. You alienated the whole fucking country in five minutes!" Van Damm stormed off, leaving his President outside the Cabinet Room, afraid that he'd really lose his temper if he said anything more.
"What's he talking about?" Ryan asked. The Secret Service agents around him didn't say anything. It wasn't their place—politics—and besides, they were split on the issue as much as the country was.
IT WAS LIKE taking candy from a baby. And after the initial shock, the baby cried pretty loud.
"BUFFALO Six, this is GUIDON Six, over." Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Masterman—"Duke" to his peers— stood atop "Mad Max II," his M1A2 Abrams command tank, microphone in one hand, and binoculars in the other. Before him, spread over about ten square miles in the Negev Training Area, were the Merkava tanks and infantry carriers of the Israeli army's 7th Armored Brigade, all with yellow lights blinking and purple smoke rising from their turrets. The smoke was an Israeli innovation. When tanks were hit in battle, they burned, and when the MILES gear receptors recorded a laser «hit» they set off the marker. But the idea had been for the Israelis to count coup that way on the OpFor. Only four of Masterman's tanks and six of his M3 Bradley Scout tracks were similarly "dead."
"GUIDON, BUFFALO," came the return call from Colonel Scan Magruder, commander of the 10th «Buffalo» Armored Cavalry Regiment.
"I think this one's about concluded, Colonel, over. The fire sack is full."
"Roger that, Duke. Come on down for the AAR. We're going to have one really pissed Israeli in a few minutes." Just as well the radio link was encrypted.
"On the way, sir." Masterman stepped down off the turret as his HMMVW pulled up. His tank crew started back up, heading down toward the squadron laager.
It didn't get much better than this. Masterman felt like a football player allowed to play every day. He commanded 1st «Guidon» Squadron of the 10th ACR. It would have been called a battalion, but the Cav was different, to the yellow facings on their shoulder straps and the red-and-white unit guidons, and if you weren't Cav, you weren't shit.
"Kickin' some more ass, sir?" his driver asked as his boss lit
up a Cuban cigar.
"Lambs to the slaughter, Perkins." Masterman sipped some water from a plastic bottle. A hundred feet over his head, some Israeli F-16 fighters roared past, showing outrage at what had happened below them. Probably a few of them had run afoul of the administrative SAM "launches." Masterman had been especially careful today siting his Stinger-Avenger vehicles, and sure enough, they'd come in just as he'd expected. Tough.
The local "Star Wars Room" was a virtual twin to the original one at Fort Irwin. A somewhat smaller main display screen, and nicer seats, and you could smoke in this one. He entered the building, snaking the dust off his chocolate-chip cammies and striding like Patton into Bas-togne. The Israelis were waiting.
Intellectually, they had to know how useful the exercise had been to them. Emotionally, it was something else. The Israeli 7th Armored was as proud an outfit as any in the world. Practically alone, it had stopped an entire Syrian tank corps on the Golan Heights back in 1973, and their current CO had been a lieutenant then who'd taken command of a headless company and fought brilliantly.
Not accustomed to failure, he'd just seen the brigade in which he'd practically grown up annihilated, in thirty brutal minutes.
"General," Masterman said, extending his hand to the chastened brigadier. The Israeli hesitated before taking it.
"Not personal, sir, just business," said Lieutenant Colonel Nick Sarto, who commanded the 2nd «Bighorn» Squadron, and who had just played hammer to Master-man's anvil. With the Israeli 7th in the middle.
"Gentlemen, shall we begin?" called the senior observer-controller. As a sop to the Israeli Army, the OC team here was a fifty-fifty mix of experienced American and Israeli officers, and it was hard to determine which group was the more embarrassed.
There was, first, a quick-time replay of the theoretical engagement. The Israeli vehicles in blue marched into the shallow valley to meet GUIDON'S reconnaissance screen, which leapfrogged back rapidly, but not toward the prepared defense positions of the rest of the squadron, instead leading them away at an angle. Thinking it a trap, the Israeli 7th had maneuvered west, so as to loop around and envelop their enemies, only to walk into a solid wall of dug-in tanks, and then to have Bighorn come in from the east much faster than expected—so fast that Doug M ills's 3rd «Dakota» Squadron, the regimental reserve, never had a chance to come into play for the pursuit phase. It was the same old lesson. The Israeli commander had guessed at his enemy's positions instead of sending his reconnaissance screen to find out.
The Israeli brigadier watched the replay, and it seemed that he deflated like a balloon. The Americans didn't laugh. They'd all been there before, though it was far nicer to be on the winning side.
"Your reconnaissance screen wasn't far forward enough, Benny," the senior Israeli OC said diplomatically.
"Arabs don't fight that way!" Benjamin Eitan replied.
"They're supposed to, sir," Masterman pointed out. "This is standard Soviet doctrine, and that's who trained 'em all, remember. Pull 'em into the fire sack and slam the back door. Hell, General, that's exactly what you did with your Centurions back in 73.1 read your book on the engagement," the American added. It defused the mood at once. One of the other things the American officers had to exercise here was diplomacy. General Eitan looked sideways and managed something approaching a smile.
"I did, didn't I?"
"Sure as hell. You clobbered that Syrian regiment in forty minutes, as I recall."
"And you, at 73 Easting?" Eitan responded, grateful for the compliment, even though he knew it was a deliberate effort to calm his temper.
It was no accident that Magruder, Masterman, Sarto, and Mills were here. All four had participated in a vicious combat action in the Persian Gulf War, where three troops of the 2nd «Dragoon» Cav had stumbled into an elite Iraqi brigade force under very adverse weather conditions—too bad for the regimental aircraft to participate, even to warn of the enemy's presence—and wiped it out over a period of a few hours. The Israelis knew it, and therefore couldn't complain that the Americans were book soldiers playing theoretical games.
Nor was the result of this «battle» unusual. Eitan was new, only a month in command, and he would learn, as other Israeli officers had learned, that the American training model was more unforgiving than real combat. It was a hard lesson for the Israelis, so hard that nobody really learned it until he'd visited the Negev Training Area, the NTA, and had his head handed to him. If the Israelis had a weakness, it was pride, Colonel Magruder knew. The OpFor's job here, as in California, was to strip that away. A commander's pride got his soldiers dead.
"Okay," the senior American OC said. "What can we learn from this?"
Don't fuck with the Buffalo Soldiers, all three squadron commanders thought, but didn't say. Marion Diggs had reestablished the regiment's gritty reputation in his command tour before moving on to command Fort Irwin. Though the word was still percolating down through the Israeli Defense Forces, the troopers of the 10th had adopted a confident strut when they went out shopping, and for all the grief they caused the Israeli military on the playing fields of the NTA, they were immensely popular. The 10th ACR, along with two squadrons of F-16 fighters, was America's commitment to Israeli security, all the more so that they trained the Jewish state's ground forces to a level of readiness they hadn't known since the Israeli army had nearly lost its soul in the hills and towns of Lebanon. Eitan would learn, and learn fast. By the end of the training rotation he'd give them trouble. Maybe, the three squadron commanders thought. They weren't in the business of giving freebies.
"I REMEMBER WHEN you told me how delightful democracy was, Mr. President," Golovko said chirpily, as he walked through the door.
"You must have caught me on TV this morning," Ryan managed to reply.
"I remember when such comments would have gotten such people shot." Behind the Russian, Andrea Price heard the comment and wondered how this guy had the chutzpah to twist the President's tail.
"Well, we don't do that here," Jack responded, taking his seat. "That will be all for now, Andrea. Sergey and I are old friends." This was to be a private conversation, not even a secretary present to take notes, though hidden microphones would copy down every word for later transcription. The Russian knew that. The American knew that he knew that, but the symbolism of no other people in the room was a compliment to the visitor, another fact which the American knew the Russian to know as well. Jack wondered how many sets of interlocking wheels he was supposed to keep track of, just for an informal meeting with a foreign representative. When the door closed behind the agent, Golovko spoke on.
"Thank you."
"Hell, we are old friends, aren't we?"
Golovko smiled. "What a superb enemy you were."
"And now…?"
"How is your family adjusting?"
"About as well as I am," Jack admitted, then shifted gears. "You had three hours at the embassy to get caught up." Golovko nodded; as usual, Ryan was well briefed for this meeting, covert though it was. The Russian embassy was only a few blocks-up Sixteenth Street, and he'd walked down to the White House, a simple way to avoid notice in a town where official people traveled in official cars. "I didn't expect things in Iraq to fall so quickly."
"Neither did we. But that's not why you came over, Sergey Nikolay'ch. China?"
"I presume your satellite photos are as clear as ours on the issue. Their military is at an unusually high state of readiness."
"Our people are divided on that," Ryan said. "They might be building up to put some more pressure on Taiwan. They've been building their navy up."
"Their navy isn't ready for combat operations yet. Their army still is, and their rocket forces. Neither is going to cross the Formosa Strait, Mr. President." That made the reason for his trip clear enough. Jack paused to look out the window at the
Washington Monument, surrounded as it was by a circle of flagpoles, rather like a garland. What was it George had said about avoiding entangling foreign allia
nces? But it had been a far simpler world back then, two months to cross the Atlantic, not six or seven hours….
"If you are asking what I think you are, yes—or should I say, no." "Could you clarify?" "America would not look kindly upon an attack by China against Russia. Such a conflict would have very adverse effects upon world stability, and would also impede your progress to full democratic status. America wants to see Russia become a prosperous democracy. We were enemies long enough. We should be friends, and America wants her friends safe and peaceful."
"They hate us, they covet what we have," Golovko went on, not satisfied with America's statement.
"Sergey, the time for nations to steal what they cannot earn is past. It's history, and not to be repeated."
"And if they move on us anyway?"
"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it, Sergey," the President answered. "The idea is to prevent such actions. If it appears that they are really thinking about a move, we'll counsel them to reconsider. We are keeping an eye on things."
"I don't think you understand them." Another push, Ryan saw. They really were worked up about this.
"Do you think anyone does? Do you think they themselves know what they want?" The two intelligence officers—that was how both men would always think of themselves—shared a look of professional amusement.
"That is the problem," Golovko admitted. "I try to explain to my President that it is difficult to predict the behavior of undecided people. They have capabilities, but so do we, and the calculus of the matter appears different from both sides—and then the personalities come into play. Ivan Emmetovich, those are old men with old ideas. Their personalities are the major consideration here."
"And history, and culture, and economics, and trade— and I haven't had the chance to look them in the eye yet. I'm weak on that part of the world," Jack reminded his guest. "I spent most of my life trying to figure you people out."
"So you will stand with us?"
Ryan shook his head. "It's too early and too speculative to go that far. We will do everything in our power, however, to prevent a possible conflict between the PRC and Russia. If it happens, you'll go nuclear. I know it. You know it. I think they know it."
