‘Admiral, good to see you,’ said Culver. ‘Pull up a pew, and let’s get started, shall we. The President’s not one for standing on ceremony.’
‘So I’ve learned,’ replied Ritchie, who still insisted on the formalities. A little like Jed, in fact.
As everyone distributed themselves around the room, Kipper’s secretary wheeled in a trolley bearing coffee pots and plates of cookies.
‘Thanks, Ronnie,’ said Kip.
In a nod to his constant reading of presidential history, Kip referred to the informal working group as his ‘Garage Cabinet’, riffing off Andrew Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet. They met in this form once a month. If Kip could’ve pulled it off, they would have met in greasy Levi’s in a garage with a fully stocked beer fridge. His Chief of Staff, ever the crusher of dreams, killed that one off but allowed the name to stand. Andrew Jackson might have had Culver shot for such a thing, whereas Kip merely sighed and agreed. A sign of the times.
Full Cabinet meetings were scheduled as frequently, but Jed programmed them to run two weeks out from the small meetings. It meant he had to endure constant grumbling from the other Cabinet secretaries, who felt themselves locked out of the more important decision-making group, but bottom line, this was a much more efficient arrangement. They had everybody at the table - in this case a coffee table - whom Jed thought necessary to deal with the most pressing problems and rolling crises.
When everybody had found their places, settled themselves into chairs, and in most cases poured themselves a coffee and grabbed a cookie - peanut butter and chocolate chip, a specialty of the First Lady - Chief of Staff Culver got the meeting under way.
‘Thanks, everyone. It’s not much fun travelling through this weather, I know. And I know you’re all up to your eyeballs in work. You’ll have seen on your agenda papers that we have just a couple of things to get through today, but it’d be good to shake these out before we take them to the Cabinet in a fortnight. The President’s not looking to lock down a caucus position today. But we’ve been kicking some of these issues around for a couple of months now, and the time is coming to deal with them so we can move on to our next end-of-the-world crisis. Mr President?’
‘Thanks, Jed,’ said Kipper, examining his fingernails. The presidency had not entirely removed the calluses or the stains of engineering work from his hands. He had a single sheet of paper with the meeting agenda sitting in front of him, held down by a mug of coffee and covered in crumbs from one of his wife’s cookies. ‘What Jed said … Miserable weather, and it’s only getting worse. Gonna be a snowed-in Christmas, I reckon.’
Kipper brushed the crumbs away, folded his arms to hide his hands, and leaned forward over the large teak desk, looking like a student worrying over a term paper.
‘So, let’s get it done. Two items today are related, I think. The budget deficit and Texas. So I think we should deal with the other item first - the prisoners from New York.’
Jed could see Paul McAuley consciously subdivide his attention, the Treasury man listening closely enough to be able to follow any discussion about the captured enemy aliens in Manhattan, while leaving most of his thoughts swirling madly around the Gordian knot of the budget deficit. Sarah Humboldt, naturally, sat forward, putting aside her coffee and fetching a sheaf of documents from the tote bag she had carried into the room with her. The National Security Advisor nodded slowly, but his expression remained masked.
‘Jed tells me we have just under four-and-a-half thousand people in detention on the East Coast,’ the President continued. ‘Most of them women and children, relatives of the jihadists who fought for that asshole Baumer.’
‘I believe his formal title is “the Emir”,’ deadpanned Barney Tench.
‘Okay, that asshole the Emir … Anyway, we have thousands of displaced people, and about three hundred of his former soldiers, or fighters, or whatever you want to call them.’
‘“Assholes” works for me,’ said Tench.
Because of Kipper’s almost pathological informality, anybody in the room could probably get away with talking like that. But only Barney, his oldest living friend, felt comfortable enough to do so. The President answered his interruption with a lopsided grin, before carrying on.
‘Question is, as it’s always been, what are we going to do with them? I don’t want to force repatriations on women and kids, when we’d be sending most of them back to a radiated wasteland. Thank you, Israel. On the other hand, having tried to take something by force, these people shouldn’t be rewarded by being given what they tried to take. In this case, the right to settle. So, suggestions?’
Jed had one, but it involved putting them all on a garbage scow and towing it out into the mid Atlantic at the height of hurricane season. Perhaps if he’d been working for Mad Jack Blackstone he’d have put it forward, but having tried a few times in this forum, he knew it wouldn’t float. So to speak. Instead, he picked a few pieces of lint from the cuffs of his trousers.
The silence in the room ballooned into significance. Sarah Humboldt, as the ICE boss, had responsibility for the matter, but Sarah was a lifelong bureaucrat, more comfortable implementing policy than developing it. Nonetheless, she obviously felt the weight of expectation fall upon her. Clearing her throat, she began to sort through the stack of papers she was carrying. If she was looking for something specific, it remained lost in there and she grew flustered at her inability to find it. Kip interrupted her embarrassment with a gentle question.
‘Sarah, why don’t you just tell me what you think? Don’t give me options. I don’t need to run through every scenario your guys have come up with. You’ve been working this area your whole life, so just tell me what you think.’
Secretary Humboldt looked horrified. But with an observable effort of will, she put aside the briefing notes. ‘Well, sir …’
That was as far as she progressed for a few seconds, as she groped wordlessly for the right thing to say.
‘Come on, Sarah,’ urged Kip. ‘You’ve been out to the detention camps. You sat in on a lot of interviews. What’s your gut feeling?’
Humboldt frowned. All of her training, all of her professional experience, had taught her to divorce her feelings from her judgment.
‘Mr President, most of them are just little people. They’ve been carried along by events. This is the women and children I’m talking about. Most of them have lost their men in the fighting. They’re alone in the world except for each other. If you’re asking could they be integrated, I believe the answer is yes.’
Culver kept his face neutral, concentrating on taking handwritten notes as Humboldt spoke. Kip had made it clear that he didn’t care for his Chief of Staff monstering the Cabinet secretaries. When Jed spoke, he did so in such a way that Ms Humboldt could not have known he thought she was a fucking mad woman.
‘Madam Secretary, would it be the case that you would differentiate between the women and children and the captured fighters?’
Everyone in the room was interested in the answer. The President waited on her eagerly. Admiral Ritchie bored into her with his unwavering gaze. Even Secretary McAuley gave the impression of concentrating wholly on what she said next, deficits at least set aside for now. It didn’t ease Humboldt’s discomfort.
‘All of the enemy combatants were initially debriefed by the military. I don’t have access to the raw transcripts or interview recordings, just executive summaries. Some of the prisoners, the surviving leadership cadre, as I understand it, have been separated out and remain under military control. The lower ranks - if that’s an appropriate description - can probably be roughly sorted into two groups. True believers and, well, soldiers of fortune, I suppose. Opportunists. Like the pirate bands they were fighting with, but nominally motivated by religious conviction. Most of the second group, I believe, were less interested in Baumer’s jihad than they were in securing land and life for themselves and their families. They’re not true believers. If we were serious about taking them up into the broader
migration program’ - she said that very carefully, watching to see if Culver would react - ‘I would recommend that only this latter cohort, the opportunists if you will, those without strong ideological attachment to Baumer, be accepted, and then with certain caveats.’
Thank God for that at least, thought Jed. Caveats he could work with. Especially big, ass-kicking caveats that effectively guaranteed most of these punks a trip back to sea on his garbage scow.
‘What sort of restrictions would we be looking at?’ he asked.
A deep crease formed in the middle of Humboldt’s brow. ‘I don’t believe it would be good policy to maintain the integrity of the original cohort,’ she said, lapsing into bureaucratese.
When she failed to explain any further, Kipper prompted, ‘So, what, you’re talking about breaking them up?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Not family groups, of course. But I think we would find that integrating them into existing communities would be a smoother process if they weren’t allowed to cluster.’
This time a querying frown from the President caused her to hurry on with an explanation. ‘They’re less likely to cause trouble, much more likely to settle in, if we bed them down well away from any bad influences. And from each other. They’re not ideologues. For the most part, they’re young widows with quite young children, often three or four of them, to look after. And no men, of course, to provide for them. I think they could be settled if we placed them within compatible communities.’
‘Such as?’ Jed asked, his scepticism leaking through.
At this, Humboldt shrugged briefly. ‘Many of the Indian nationals we’ve taken in to work on the railway programs came from that country’s Muslim community. After the war with Pakistan, they weren’t entirely welcome in their homeland anymore. But they’ve had no trouble fitting in here. Most are observant in their faith, but not politicised by it. There are enough of them now that we could salt most of our East Coast detainees through their population without ghettoising them.’
‘And the fighters?’ Kipper quizzed, saving Jed the effort. ‘The men?’
Culver was certain he saw Humboldt flick her eyes quickly over at Admiral Ritchie.
‘It’s not within the purview of my department, Mr President. But we have been turning this matter over for a while now, both in this working group and the wider Cabinet, and there have been a couple of position papers drawn up that might be of help.’
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement head started rifling through the thick wad of papers she’d extracted from her tote bag. She kept her head down, studiously avoiding eye contact with Culver, who knew nothing of any so-called position papers. Retrieving what she wanted, she passed copies around the room. Ritchie, he noted, didn’t need to scan the document even for a moment. He gave the impression of being familiar with it.
‘The fighters are a more difficult question,’ said Humboldt. ‘Especially if we accept the settlement of the non-combatants. Many of the fighters, nearly two-thirds of them, have relatives among the women and children we are holding. We cannot separate them, in law or in conscience.’
The hell we can’t, thought Jed.
Kipper was nodding slowly, feeding himself small chunks of cookie that he broke off the mother lode like a kid trying to make a treat last a little longer. Jed could not be sure he was nodding in agreement with Ms Humboldt; he may simply have been acknowledging her. The President liked people to know he was listening to them. The Chief of Staff, on the other hand, was having trouble constraining himself. He didn’t like where this was going, and he felt himself blind-sided by whatever arrangement Humboldt and Ritchie had come to before the meeting. Jed was going to have to reassess his reading of the National Security Advisor. It appeared that Ritchie was more practised at the dark arts of politics than he had imagined when lobbying Kipper on the admiral’s behalf.
‘ICE sought input from all the major stakeholders on this question …’
But not from me, thought Culver.
‘… and as you would imagine, their responses varied considerably. Defense and the NIA argued strongly in favour of continued detention. Treasury’ - she spared a glance for McAuley at this point - ‘has been updating its forward estimates for funding a number of scenarios. And we at ICE, of course, are in constant contact with Reconstruction about their needs for various skill sets that remain under-subscribed.’
Barney Tench appeared to be nonplussed by the inclusion of his department in Sarah’s magic circle. But as Jed examined his shorthand notes of what she’d just said, he suppressed a sour grin of admiration. Humboldt had drawn the other players in the room into whatever gambit she was about to make, simply by stating the fucking obvious. Of course Reconstruction and Treasury were in constant contact with Immigration and Customs Enforcement about labour shortfalls and funding requirements - that didn’t mean they were on board for every program Humboldt wanted to push. As tempted as he was to interrupt, the Chief of Staff thought it best to let her play her hand.
‘It would be possible,’ she continued, ‘to include most of the problematic cohort, the fighters with family ties to our non-combatant detainees, as part of the general intake into this year’s frontier militia forces.’
At this, Jed had reached the limit of his forbearance.
‘Seriously? You seriously want to integrate these nutjobs into our military forces?’
‘The frontier militias aren’t part of the regular military,’ corrected James Ritchie.
The unexpected intervention drew Culver up short, and he cursed himself for making such an undergraduate mistake. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But you’re splitting hairs. No, the frontier militias are not part of the armed forces. You know that, I know that, but such fine gradations of meaning are well beyond most people. And it’s most people who’ll go apeshit at the mere suggestion of letting these guys out of their cage, handing them a gun, and sending them off into the wilderness.’
‘He has a point,’ said Kip.
The President wasn’t nearly as worked up as Jed, but you could see he was puzzled by the suggestion. That was a relief. To Culver’s dismay, though, Ritchie took up the role of explaining Humboldt’s idea, confirming any suspicions about his prior knowledge of it.
‘The frontier militias’ chain of command runs up through Reconstruction, not Defense. They’re an armed force, but an irregular one. The duties can vary from securing the boundaries of small settlements, just like a garrison force, to riding shotgun on reclamation crews in the big cities, or scouting wilderness in the Declared Zones. It’s dangerous work. Very dangerous. And a lot of it is done in small teams, thousands of miles away from civilisation. If we were to take in a small number of these fighters, break them up, and scatter them through the militia, making sure they were posted well out into the badlands, and impose, say, a ten-year probationary period, we could sell it as both punishment and redemption. Their families would become, well … our hostages, to be brutally frank. If their men gave us any trouble, we’d just toss them all on Jed’s garbage scow and wave them off at the dock. For lesser infringements, we’d cancel home leave, maybe transfer the women and children to some more godforsaken hole - that sort of thing.’
The sleet slapping against the window behind the presidential desk had thickened up into a serious dump of snow. Gusting, contrary winds whipped fractal patterns through the white haze and rattled the old wooden window in its frame. Kipper frowned and searched around in his desk drawer for some notepaper. As he ripped out a piece, folded it, and folded it again a few times, he turned his back on them to jam the makeshift wedge into the window and muffle the rattling, talking while he did so.
‘Is there any reason any of these guys would agree to this?’ he asked. ‘I imagine you’d be planning to break them up completely so that you only had one of Baumer’s fighters attached to any particular unit. But really, how’s it going to work in practice? Ten years? That’s a hell of a long time. A hell of an incentive to cut and run the first chance yo
u had.’
Having fixed the window, he returned to his desk and a cup of coffee that had gone cold. Kipper grimaced when he tried it.
Ritchie continued. ‘The majority of our existing frontier militia, the lower ranks anyway, are made up of migrants, Mr President. It’s a fast track into the settlement programs and citizenship for most of them. They’re willing to take the risks - and they are very real risks - for the payoff. Now, returning to the situation at hand. If, say, for the sake of argument, we accepted only those fighters who had family connections among the civilian detainees, it would be a matter of little or no trouble to hold over them the fact that we control their access to their loved ones. Maybe ten years is too long. Five might be better. The point is, we control them and we control access to what they want. Their families. It’s just a matter of striking the right balance between punishment and reward. Maybe they get to come back for a week every six months, maybe two weeks every twelve. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, to some extent. To all intents and purposes, they’d still be our captives. But their jail would be the frontier.’
Silence, pregnant with possibilities, not all of them good, seemed to press down on the Oval Office. Barney Tench looked every bit as shocked as Jed had felt a few minutes earlier. McAuley was frowning furiously.
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