The Threat

by David Poyer

  For the first time, Dan wished he’d worn his lapel decoration. Knight’s gaze moved as slowly as he did and, when it settled, was hard to meet directly. His grip, complete with a gold VMI ring the size of a handball, was hearty, but his manner warned this might not be a pleasant call.

  In his inner office, settled on a sofa so close Dan smelled lime aftershave, Knight didn’t want to discuss the issue items Dan had brought with him. He wanted to talk budget. Specifically, the line items the president’s budget reduced. Dan said he wasn’t on the budget side. The general asked if the president had any idea how hard he was stressing the services. Dan said he presumed De Bari was getting that word during the lunch he had every week with Jack Weatherfield, the secretary of defense, and General Stahl, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  This didn’t seem to be what Knight wanted to hear. He lit a cigar, toasting the cut end with a chrome lighter in the shape of a Maxim gun. Almost as an afterthought, offered one. Dan shook his head.

  “Now, correct me if I’m wrong, Lenson. Let’s not make this on any kind of record, all right? But you’re military staff over there, that right? What—an O-6?”

  “O-5, sir.”

  “Army? Guard?”

  “Navy, sir.”

  “Well, you’re uniformed service. Academy too, I see.”

  “Yes, sir.” Dan wondered if he should quit wearing the ring, since he wasn’t supposed to be in uniform.

  “We’re getting concerned over here. It started with this ‘no further discrimination’ bullshit, which wasn’t the way to get on our good side. And it’s gone downhill from there.”

  One of De Bari’s first acts on taking office had been to end the services’ exclusion of gays. And part of his platform, responding to the recession, had been what he called a “tailored” cutback of 10 percent per year in military expenditures, down to a 40 percent reduction in the Pentagon’s budget by the end of his term.

  Knight said, “This guy’s tuned to the moon, if he thinks what he’s doing is enhancing our national security. Pulling back from Germany, the Horn of Africa, now Korea. Korea! It’s quieted down some now, but now Pyongyang’s out from under the inspection regime, God knows what they’re up to. This is all between us, by the way.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’ve got civilian appointees without the faintest idea what they’re doing. No prior military. Well, you know what I mean. Working with them every day. What do you hear over there? What kind of atmosphere readings are you getting?”

  Dan didn’t like this question. He wondered if the appointees Knight was talking about included Blair. She couldn’t drive a tank or assemble a bomb. But he didn’t know anyone in uniform, from flag rank down, who could drill as deep into a manpower issue as she could. He cleared his throat and shifted on the sofa. “If you mean, is this a military-oriented administration, I guess the answer’s ‘not very.’ But it’s still early.”

  “I’ve been over there twice talking to Garn Sebold and what’s her name, the Asian woman. I understand campaign promises. But once the election’s over, you expect some movement toward reality. The fact of the matter: We have defensive boundaries around the world. A lot of guys, some I knew, gave their lives to put them there. We keep backpedaling like this … it’s like you live in the projects and you put a sign on your door, ‘Break in my house, rape my wife, and steal my shit.’”

  Dan didn’t believe a three-star couldn’t remember the name of the national security adviser. It was a put-down, though subtle enough it couldn’t be quoted against him. “Well, sir, like everywhere, I’d say some are professional, others less so.”

  Knight shook his head, scowling. “I’d rather have them over there than over here. But cutting our readiness, manning, the procurement accounts—that’s a no-go. Let me tell you a little story.

  “Back in ’32, ’33, this country was in a worse depression than anyone remembers now. FDR wanted to cut the Army budget to practically zero. Douglas MacArthur was the chief of staff back then. He went to Roosevelt’s office and put his resignation on the table. He said that when we lost the next war, and an American boy was dying in the mud with a bayonet in his belly, he wanted him to die cursing Franklin Roosevelt, not Douglas MacArthur.”

  Dan wasn’t sure whether this was a historical reflection, a message he was supposed to take back, or just the general blowing off steam. As far as he could see, he was pointing the finger in the wrong direction. “General, I know this administration’s committed to reductions in defense. It was in their platform from the start. But what actually gets appropriated isn’t an executive branch call. Congress sizes the accounts.”

  Knight picked something off his lip. He examined it, then put it carefully in the ashtray. “We’ve been talking to our friends on the Hill. Sonny doesn’t think any further reduction’s wise. Neither does Strom or Mike.”

  Dan rubbed his eyes. The cigar smoke stung at close range. “Then it seems like the appropriate steps are being taken, sir. Maybe I’m oversimplifying here, but that’s my understanding of the process.”

  The dull green irises came to rest on him like twenty-pound weights. “I don’t need you to tell me the process, Commander.”

  Dan said, “Sir, nobody over here, or over there, can stop the president from putting in whatever budget he comes up with. If he thinks it’s what the country needs.”

  Knight watched cigar smoke rise, silent. He seemed on the cusp of saying something else. But got up abruptly instead and walked Dan to the door. A handshake, briefer than the first, and he was on his way.

  * * *

  The car idled, crept forward, idled again. A Metro cop stood with hat pushed back and hands in his pockets. A marine guard bent to glance inside the Bentley ahead, then straightened and waved them on. Dan saw it had diplomatic plates.

  He was in blues, and it felt good to be back in them, but the marine still wanted to see his ID. He also managed an appreciative glance at Blair’s legs. Dan couldn’t blame him. She looked great in a short black cocktail dress. She knew what her legs looked like, and occasionally used a strategic glimpse of thigh to fluster and confuse.

  The vice president’s residence was a white Victorian with mansards. Dan thought it looked like a battleship, with its porch as a prow and the cupolaed turret as the bridge. More marines directed them where to park on a clipped lawn. Dan held Blair’s door. It wasn’t Halloween yet, but mist eddied from the porch as they approached, and creepy music. A skeleton twinkled with electric lights.

  “Good evening, how are you, thanks for coming … Oh, Blair, thanks for coming. And who’s this? Mr. Titus?”

  “Dan, meet Geraldo B. Edwards. And Mrs. Edwards. Dan Lenson, Mr. Vice, currently serving on the NSC staff.”

  The vice president was short and peppery, with gray hair brushed straight back like Spiro Agnew’s. A former Disney executive, then junior senator from Florida, Geraldo B. Edwards had cratered on Super Tuesday after a bitter nomination fight. De Bari had picked him at the convention to balance the ticket. The office of the vice president was in the Old Executive, but Dan had never seen him there. Early in the term, Edwards, appearing on The Capital Gang with Al Hunt, had challenged the president’s decision to reduce troop levels in NATO. Since the First Commandment of the vice presidency was “Do not publicly disagree with the president,” Edwards hadn’t spent much time around the Eighteen Acres since. The president kept him on the road with trade delegations, fundraising, and foreign funerals. The word was that Edwards was “out of the loop,” and there was no more scathing dismissal. The second lady was padded, powdered, and pleasant, and said absolutely nothing as she shook his hand with a slow, sweet smile that plainly conveyed Inside my head I’m far away.

  The house seemed empty, though guests were still arriving. They looked down into a tented annex set up in the garden, facing a back lawn and a wooded ravine. The guests were already deep into the drinks and buffet. Most were elderly or middle-aged. Many seemed to be foreigners,
judging by the dashikis and thobes and saris among the black ties and long dresses. Dan even saw one tiny woman in a kimono.

  “See anyone you know?” he asked Blair. She was fiddling with her earrings, a wrinkle between her eyebrows indicating mild annoyance.

  “I’m more interested in those I don’t know. Is that Milton Obote?”

  Dan wasn’t sure who that was. But the intellectual-looking officer by the garden exit was certainly the new deputy CNO for training, Admiral Contardi. Dan remembered briefing him in the cramped flag officer’s quarter of USS Cochrane before a strike into the littoral of Africa.

  In the foyer, shaking hands with the vice president, Mrs. Clayton sparkled like a garnet set in gold. Behind her Dan recognized Alicejames “Mokey” Revell, the secretary of state, a political general who’d served four presidents with steadily decreasing competence. So he’d be Dina White’s boss … “Big Jack” Weatherfield, the secretary of defense, the only African American in the cabinet. He was a former trial lawyer and, according to the whispering gallery, a left-handed nephew of one of the Dulles brothers, Allen or John Foster. There was an aging columnist whose picture Dan had seen in the papers since his childhood. A laughing woman surrounded by admiring men; he recognized her as a hot star.

  “Halle Berry,” Blair whispered. She had a gaga smile he’d never seen before, and he realized she was starstruck. It made him grin. Who’d have thought?

  She started to move, towing him behind her like an energetic tugboat with a balky barge. She introduced him to senators, floor assistants, the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, the SecDef general counsel. He strained to remember names, but didn’t obsess. He remembered when he’d hated parties. This wasn’t so bad. When she excused herself to use the ladies’ room he stood absently swirling the ice-melt in his glass, watching Berry and wondering if he should go over and make pleasant.

  “Why, is it Daniel V? I think it is. Is that you?”

  He took a tighter grip on his OJ and tonic. He’d wondered when and where he’d run into her again. “Sandy. What a pleasant surprise.”

  Sandy Cottrell had been in his postgraduate class at George Washington. There’d been something there, but not romance, despite Cottrell’s frictioning his crotch with her bare toes on the dais of the Ways and Means Committee hearing room. With her flushed cheeks—she sweated even when it was cold out—her over-the-edge manner, her spacy laugh, he’d always suspected she was on something stronger than the hand-rolled cigarettes she chain-smoked.

  A decade had not been unkind. But she’d gone glossy, as if sealed over with some transparent lacquer. Her blond hair was expensively cut. Her perfume was even stronger than it had been years before. She wore a diamond-studded Rolex and was smoking, but now it was a filter tip.

  He gestured at it. “What’s this? You used to smoke that ragweed stuff—”

  “Douwe Egberts. But smoking hand rolls isn’t good for the image.”

  “You never worried about your image before.”

  “You’ve got to be the most unobservant son of a bitch I’ve ever met,” Cottrell deadpanned. He saw that, as usual, she gave the impression of being three sheets to the wind.

  “Whatever happened to you and Professor F?” he asked her, trying to crack through the gloss.

  “I know you thought I was fucking him for the grade. But that actually turned out okay. We even still like each other.”

  “I never thought you were fucking him for a grade, Sandy.”

  “What did you think I was fucking him for?”

  “So, what are you doing now?”

  “I’m in Congress,” she told him. “Remember the guy I used to type for? The guy who tried to put rubber in the asphalt? He got caught buying ad space for a citizens’ committee that didn’t exist. They had to come up with somebody fast, from a district that breeds more farmers than lawyers. Who better than his campaign committee chair? And the name’s not Cottrell anymore. It’s Treherne. That’s my man, over there talking to the guy in the sheet. He had a million to spare. The rest is mystery.”

  Her gaze shifted and Dan realized Blair was back. The two women traded evaluating looks. He said hastily, “Blair, this is an old friend of mine, Sandy Cottrell, I mean Sandy Treherne, recently elected to Congress from Tennessee. My wife—also undersecretary of defense for manpower and personnel.”

  “Oh, yes. I’d heard … I won’t ask you what the difference between manpower and personnel is, if you won’t ask me if I ever bonked your husband,” Sandy said.

  Dan had thought absolute zero impossible, but Blair’s smile proved him wrong. “I’m so glad to meet you, Mrs. Treherne. Tennessee? What district?”

  “Seventeenth.”

  “Then you’re one of Newt’s new hires.”

  “Oh, Sandy,” Dan said. “KISS, Garth Brooks, Metallica, and the Contract with America?”

  “It’s the same me,” she said, putting her empty glass on a passing tray and snagging a full one in the same motion. Dan concluded she wasn’t with AA anymore. “What people who aren’t in politics don’t realize is that it’s like casting an actor. You fit the role, you sell the donors, you get hired. I look at people like Zoelke and Mulholland and Dwayne Harrow and your old sugar pop, Bankey Talmadge,” she said, fluttering her lashes at Blair, “and I figure, why not little ole me? Dan, you never said what you’re doing.” She fingered the lapel of his blues as if she were thinking of buying it. “I see you’re still in the Navy. You an admiral yet?”

  “A commander.”

  “Shit, you were one of those when we used to get blitzed after class at Mister Henry’s, weren’t you? Aren’t you supposed to get promoted once in a while?”

  “I was a lieutenant commander then. A full commander now.”

  “Yeah, you were always full. Of something.”

  “I’ll let the two of you catch up,” Blair said, with the no-tone that meant somebody would be doing some explaining after the party.

  “Cute girl,” Treherne sneered after her retreating back, loud enough that even in the party noise Dan knew Blair must have heard.

  “She’s my wife.”

  “Yeah, you said. Where are you working now?”

  Dan told her he was on the National Security Council staff. Treherne looked incredulous. “God help us. You’re at the White House, and I’m in Congress?”

  He smiled. “That’s how I feel.”

  “I wonder if everybody here does.”

  Dan wondered too. How many of those at the apex quailed at where they’d arrived, and what power they wielded. Others, though, probably didn’t. For some reason Knight’s scowl came to mind. The lieutenant general he’d met that afternoon. The disdainful assumption that he knew better than his civilian masters, better than the voters … no, that didn’t seem to signal much self-doubt.

  But wasn’t his own flaw the opposite? To distrust himself, and what he was told to do? Wasn’t that the key to his fatal ability to complicate the simple equations of command and obedience, to bring chaos out of order?

  The emperor Vespasian moved stiffly past holding a Scotch. Or at least it appeared to be his broad face, wide, bony head, and iron gray buzz cut. The rest was clad in Army green. Dan recognized General Ulrich Stahl, chairman of the Joint Chiefs but rumored by the columnists unlikely to be asked to stay for a second term. He’d briefed Stahl once too. A small gray woman followed the stately general, tottering slightly. It was often shocking to see the spouses of senior military men. On the other hand, maybe that was a positive. At least they’d stayed with their first wives.

  Treherne’s Salem-flavored breath in his ear brought him back. “So what are you doing over there? At the NSC?”

  He told Sandy about counterdrug and threat reduction. “They’re serious about reducing the number of loose nukes. If you can vote in favor of that sometime, I wish you would.”

  Past her Dan saw another familiar visage sharpen out of the blur; Knight himself, as if conjured by his recollection. The OPSDEP w
as on an intersecting course with Stahl, moving steadily through the crowd toward the chairman.

  Treherne’s cheeks hollowed around a fresh filter tip; her eyes searched over his shoulder as more guests handed wraps to servants and joined the receiving line stretching ever longer in front of the Edwardses. “Let’s see. Threat reduction. That’s where we pay the commies to say they destroyed what they said they didn’t have in the first place, right? Cut checks to their army, keep them in shape for the next time they decide to fuck with us?”

  “I guess we’re not on the same side on that one.”

  “I don’t know about you, but the people I represent want to keep some of what they earned.”

  Dan said, “We buy weapons for security against a threat. Why not spend a hundredth that much to reduce it? Too many people seem to be looking around for the next enemy so they can keep everything the way it is. I see a window instead. Nobody knows how long it’ll be open. Maybe now’s the time to say, ‘Let’s get these things off our backs.’”

  She cocked her head, interested, or maybe just acting it. “What are you talking about?”

  “Put the genie back in his bottle. Isn’t that what Reagan tried to do? One on one with Gorby? We made having nukes the mark of a superpower. Why don’t we make not needing them the mark of a postnuclear superpower?”

  “You’re so cute when you get serious.” She took his arm and he felt the soft pressure of her breast. “So cute I could be on your side. But give me a reason, Dan—because I absolutely cannot afford to do something for nothing. A PAC check. A swing bloc. A hot issue, if that’s all you’ve got. If you can’t … then hasta la banana. It is that cutthroat where I live. If I don’t claw and scheme every minute I’m awake, I won’t keep playing.”

  He had to admit she’d always been up front about exactly what she thought or wanted. Unless, of course, that too was one of her games. Did she play it with the older man who was weaving between couples toward them, smiling fawningly at her?