“Well, Carolyn. Gentlemen,” Justice began after everyone had stood up and shaken hands and sat back down, and the newspaper and TV cameras had been shooed out. “Time we got after our adversaries, who have ceased to fear us as they should, and our friends, who have ceased to obey us as they should.”
Justice looked around, grinning. He got no reaction but stunned silence. Fine, he thought. “Admiral, how many carrier battle groups I got?”
Admiral Austin looked across at Admiral Marc Mitchell, the Chief of Naval Operations, who cleared his throat. “Ten, Mr. President, nine really, because Enterprise is in dry dock. Plus the training carrier.”
“How many we got in reserve? Including escort and support ships?”
Mitchell leaned forward. He had never expected to be asked the question, but every senior naval officer knew the answer. “We could reactivate Ranger, Independence, Constellation, and America. They’re all conventionally powered but very capable ships. We have plenty of cruisers and destroyers mothballed way before the end of their useful lives, including Spruance, Kidd, and Virginia classes. We have plenty of support ships in the reserve fleet.”
“Aircraft?”
“F-14s, older F-18 C and D versions, plenty of other variants.”
“How long?”
“Four to six months, plus training. Maybe a little longer for the older carriers.”
“What about ballistic-missile submarines?”
Admiral Mitchell smiled. “Well,” he said cautiously.
“Don’t be coy, Admiral,” the president said sharply. “The peoples’ business awaits.”
“We retain, in the Ohio class boats, the ability to obliterate the world.”
“But not to save it,” the president said dryly. “I want my carrier battle groups.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” the admiral said with enthusiasm.
“And my battleships. Get ’em out of mothballs and to sea.”
Admiral Mitchell frowned. “The Iowa is being cannibalized for parts, since her number-two turret blew up. We could have New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Missouri active in four months.”
The president nodded approval. “General Dassault?” General Frank Dassault was the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. “What I got for air wings?”
“Thirteen fighter wings, down from twenty-four ten years ago. Seven in reserve. Twelve only B-2 bombers; twenty B-1s, all in reserve. The last B-52s are parked at Davis Monthan, in the Arizona desert.”
“What do I need?” Justice asked.
Dassault squirmed. “Depends on the mission, sir.”
“The mission is to defend ourselves and our friends, and if need be, chastise our enemies. With certain effect. The need is to be what we once were but that my predecessors pissed away: to be the world’s only superpower.”
Daussault went for it. “I’d like twenty-four fighter wings, all active, plus my twelve reserve. I’d like advanced cruise missiles for my available bombers. Tankers, AWACS, JSTARS—”
“Give me a plan,” the president said with an upraised palm. Today was not for details. “General Brown?” Harrison Brown was Chief of Staff of the Army.
“Well, since this seems to be wish-list day, I would like to get back to the force levels I had for Desert Storm. You may remember, Mr. President, that at the time of the land battle, two-thirds of all American active-duty soldiers and nearly all the Marine Corps were in theater. General Schwarzkopf had at his disposal eighteen divisions plus fifty-seven reserve component brigades. Today I have ten active divisions, many under strength, and forty-two reserve component brigades.”
“Would you activate reserves, if you could?”
“We have some very fine units in the reserves, performing specialty functions like communications, command and control, medical, logistics, the like. But the heavy hitters, infantry, armor, artillery, have to be regulars because the training cycle is so intense. Also, infantry grunts have to be young and physically strong, tankers and artillerymen have to handle heavy ammo and break track. Many reserve units are manned by people not as hard-bellied as they once were.”
“How long to make up eight regular divisions?”
“I’d want do a little staff work, but we have many fine officers and senior NCOs who are in the reserve, involuntarily, because of the cutbacks. They could be cadre for the returning units. There’s a lot of equipment, most of it only ten or so years old, garaged and maintained by the National Guard. Getting the foot soldiers through Basic and Advanced Infantry Training, or Armor, or Artillery—maybe five months if I had everything I needed.”
The president nodded and took notes. “That leaves you, General Jones.”
General Jackie Robinson Jones, the only black among the chiefs, was Commandant of the Marine Corps. “I have one-hundred seventy thousand marines, Mr. President. Three active Marine Air-Ground Task Forces—divisions, if you will, with their air—and one reserve. I’d like another twenty thousand marines to rebuild the Fourth Division as an active force, and redesignate the Fourth, now in reserve, as the Fifth.”
“Why not just reactivate the existing Forth?”
Jones glanced over at the Army Chief, General Brown. “Same reason as the army, Mr. President. Lots of good officers and NCOs, but we need young men to hump the ruck.”
The president seemed pleased as he wrote on his yellow pad.
The vice president, supposedly the senior authority in the administration on foreign policy, had received no advance notice of any of this. He sat in stupefied silence. The Secretary of Defense cleared her throat and spoke softly. “Mr. President, where are we going to get the money for all this? And what do you intend to do with such a massive force? Surely the Russians, with whom we have Conventional Force Reduction Agreements, and the Chinese, with whom we have problems, will become alarmed.”
The president put down his pen and looked at the attractive black woman he had allowed, with great reluctance, to become Secretary of Defense. “Carolyn, I’ll take your questions in reverse order. The Russians and the Chinese should be alarmed, even terrified. So also the Iraqis, Iranis, and North Koreans. We were the world’s only superpower before my two predecessors forgot their responsibilities and gave that great might away.
“We’re a great and upstanding Christian nation, and Jesus said many times he came not in peace but with a sword. I want that sword.”
But you’re not Jesus, Carolyn White thought darkly.
“Edward the Black Prince of England,” the president continued, “while campaigning in the southwest of France in the fourteenth century once attacked a town; I don’t remember the name. As was customary at the time, he sent an emissary to Rome to get the Pope’s blessing as a crusade, because many in that part of France were members of a heresy called the Albigensians, or Cathars. The Pope blessed the crusade. Edward’s commander asked the prince how he was supposed to tell the heretics from the faithful, and Edward replied, ‘Kill them all; let God sort the Godly from the ungodly.’”
The president immediately rose. The chiefs and their aids struggled to their feet. “As to the second part of your question, Madame Secretary, getting the money is your job and mine. But I swear to you all, I will have my legions to do the Lord’s work.”
The secretary, admirals, generals, and staff stood in stunned silence as the president marched from the Cabinet Room. The vice president kept his seat, color rising in his cheeks.
6
August 1972, Paris
RUPERT JUSTICE TOLLIVER met Madame Binh in a dreary concrete apartment building in a working-class block of the Eleventh Arrondissement. Van Trinh had arranged the meeting, saying that Tolliver was a prominent and influential preacher from the great state of Texas. Madame Binh had heard of Texas; to most Vietnamese not well traveled, Texas was America.
The small apartment was crowded with young people, mostly Vietnamese, Cambodian or Laotian, but some French, other Europeans and Americans. Madame Binh chain-smoked Gauloise Bleu unfiltered cigarettes that smelled to
Tolliver like dirty socks. Many of the others smoked hand-rolled cigarettes that smelled like a prairie grass fire. Tolliver realized it must be marijuana, a substance he had heard much about but never before encountered. He accepted a joint from Van, inhaled deeply, and choked on the harsh smoke. Justice had never smoked cigarettes, but he took another hit on the joint before passing it on, and immediately felt a sense of tranquillity.
Madame Binh held court, answering questions with terse blasts of French or Vietnamese. Van sat by Justice and whispered translations of the Vietnamese. The Americans were demoralized and beaten. Vietnam and especially the southerners of the Vietcong had suffered horribly but would win because they had to. The Americans couldn’t win because they didn’t have to, and their own people had lost the dau tranh, the political struggle.
Tolliver thought it all rote and commonplace. Madame Binh seemed nothing more than the peasant she claimed to be, although Tolliver knew she had been educated in Paris. Justice was ready to leave when he felt a tug on his sleeve. A Latin-looking man, short, thin and dark, pressed his face close. “No me recuerdas, gringo?” he whispered.
Tolliver started. “You’re the Cuban policeman. Caballero?”
“Carvahal. You made a fine target on that day; Fidel was most impressed.”
Justice stood and shook the little man off. “I’ve not forgotten.”
“Nor should you,” Ramon Carvahal said evenly. “I am glad you still see the light of our global cause.”
“I only see you laughing, along with the brothers Castro, as I rolled in the dust, the bullet ringing in my ears.” Justice turned to Van. “Let’s go. I need some air.”
Justice had not noticed that the framed posters adorning the walls of the drab apartment all had tiny holes in their protective glass. The proceedings were being filmed by North Vietnamese Military Intelligence, South Vietnamese Central Intelligence, the KGB, the French Sûreté, and the Cuban Servicio Nacional de Informaciones.
The American CIA had its own sources and couldn’t be bothered. Besides, they had never trusted Kissinger, or Nixon.
The camera teams all knew each other, or at least recognized each other. Everything was cool as long as the local police prefect captain got his “pour boire.” Everybody paid the same, except of course for the Sûreté that paid no one.
The Sûreté therefore received the least desirable peephole.
Security for Madame Binh and her entourage was provided by officers of the Compagnie Republicaine de Securité—the CRS, France’s elite riot police—in plain clothes. Their costs were offset by a grant from the American CIA. There you have it.
France considers itself the cradle of modern European democracy. It is also the most efficient police state in the world.
7
April 2001
“DAMMIT, ZEKE,” THE president thundered. “Our defense budget is less than three percent of Gross Domestic product. That’s less than Sweden spends, and they haven’t fought anybody since the seventeenth century. This country needs its troops and tanks and airplanes and ships to do its duty around the world.” Tolliver paced the Oval Office like a caged tiger. “Read those damn congressmen their history: the North could have bought and freed every nigger slave in Maryland for the cost of the Battle of First Manassas; bought and freed every damn one of them throughout the Confederacy for the costs of Shiloh and Fredericksburg, and there were twenty other battles in the War Between the States of the same or greater size. Peace is not won by chanting and wearing flowers in our hair, Zeke. It is won by intimidation, by credible, and if need be, deliverable force!”
Ezekiel Archer sighed. “It’s still two hundred fifty billion we don’t have in the budget.”
The president whirled, pointing his finger like a pistol. “Find it. Squeeze the medical frauds, the teachers’ lobby. Beat it out of business welfare; the ag programs. It’s there, Zeke, and you and I both know it. We played the game well enough from the other side down in Austin.”
Archer rose. “I’ll get right on it, Mr. President.”
“Results!” the president shouted. Then, more softly, “Results, Zeke.”
CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS TOOK more than two months. The Democrats railed against the increases in military spending, especially as they were to be funded, dollar for dollar, by the reduction of social programs. The administration made no secret of that. Squeeze, Justice said, and he meant it.
The Republicans seemed bemused, caught off guard. They were on record for stronger defense, modernization, new high-tech gear, better education and training, but to blow the force back up to the Cold War level? It was a hard sell, but Carolyn White, Admiral Austin, and the chiefs sold it, or almost did. They were a few votes short in both houses, and they knew it.
Two days before the House scheduled its vote, the president addressed the nation.
The speech was long, and dealt with threats few knew about, or perhaps had thought about. The Koreas, central Asia, the Caucuses, the oil-rich Caspian Sea, the Balkans, China and Russia themselves and in their conflict with each other. Iran and Iraq, Syria and the Lebanon. As long as it was the speech was fiery and eloquent, and kept its share of the TV audience through its full hour and ten minutes.
As he got ready to close, the president mopped his brow and took a sip of water. He then laid his worn family Bible on the podium but didn’t open it. Just let it lay there in plain view. “My fellow Americans,” he said, his voice hoarse and soft from the long oration. “This is the first year of the third Millennium, a time of great portents. I want to remind you of one tiny verse of scripture, from the Revelation of St. John the Divine. It’s the last book of the Bible and speaks of last days. I’m here to tell you that we must be strong if we’re to continue into the new millennium free of the scourges of the earth that are not the monsters Saint John saw through the vision of the Lamb of God, Lord Jesus, but the tyrants, great and small, the modern Atillas, the modern Genghis Khans, who will feel free to threaten even the United States of America if we do not show them our might and our will to use it.”
The president was interrupted by gentle applause that gained courage and then swelled and lasted two minutes until Justice put up his hands to quell it. “Let me finish.” He laid his hand on the Bible but still did not open it. “Let me finish with a Revelation from the Divine: Chapter six, verse eight.”
The chamber was deadly silent; a few coughs as when a symphony orchestra pauses between movements.
“Listen, my brothers and sisters, but a moment more,” Justice said softly. “Revelation six-eight. ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and the name of him that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’”
The joint session of Congress was quiet, and then applause began from the Republican side, and gradually, the senators and congressmen got to their feet, all of them, and cheered.
The New York Times and the Washington Post railed against the speech and the policy. All four major television networks denounced the buildup. Even the Wall Street Journal expressed skepticism. The foreign press from London, Paris, and Berlin to Moscow, Tokyo, and Beijing all protested American bullying and recklessness in the strongest possible terms.
The House voted, then the Senate, and the president got his money. That was just as well, as he had already begun bringing ships and planes and tanks out of mothballs using discretionary funds.
After he signed the appropriations bills, Justice had a drink with Zeke Archer in the Oval Office. “In three to six months, Zeke,” the president said, raising his glass, “I’ll have my legions.”
8
ALFRED THAYER CONVOKED a conference of the Republican old guard at his summer home in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. No member of the administration was invited or even informed; not even the vice president, who was known to share Thayer’s alarm about Tolliver’s almost uncanny seizure of the national initiative. Six of the most powerful Republican governors and one Democratic were flown in, all by private jets owned by the most
loyal corporations. In most cases the chief executive officers came with them. Committee chairs from both the House and Senate came in anonymous rented minivans with dark tinted glass. No active-duty military men were invited, but many retired admirals and generals were.
Security was tight around the estate, provided by a private service retained by the Capital National Bank. All the arrivals were timed between three and five A.M. The sleepy conferees were given rooms in the vast house, and time to rest before breakfast was served in the Great Hall at exactly eight A.M.
“We’re at the brink of a national crisis,” Thayer began as second cups of coffee were served. “To quote Lenin, ‘What is to be done?’”
“It’s not all bad,” said the Chairman of Lockheed-Martin. “We’ve weakened the military far too much, and reconstruction will produce much-needed jobs, especially in key states like California and Texas.”
“The Joint Chiefs support the buildup,” said a retired admiral, once Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “We’ve all studied history; deterrence is always cheaper in blood and treasure than war.”
Senator Lodge, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, spoke softly. “My concern is, and surely ours should be, what’s he going to do with such an enhanced military capacity?”
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