by Tom Clancy
“They are difficult to measure, these Americans ... ,” Daryaei mused.
“Their military might is formidable. Their political will is unpredictable, as someone we both ... knew found out to his misfortune. It is a mistake to underestimate them. America is like a sleeping lion, to be treated with care and respect.”
“How does one defeat a lion?”
That one caught Badrayn short for a second or two. Once on a trip to Tanzania he’d been advising the government on how to deal with insurgents—he’d gone into the bush for a day, driving with a colonel in that country’s intelligence service. There he’d spotted a lion, an old one which had nonetheless managed a kill all by himself. Perhaps the wildebeest had been crippled. Then there came into view a troop of hyenas, and seeing that, the Tanzanian colonel had stopped the Soviet-made Zil jeep and handed binoculars to Badrayn, and told him to observe and so learn a lesson about insurgents and their capacities. It was something he’d never forgotten. The lion, he remembered, was a large one, perhaps old, perhaps slowed down from his prime, but still powerful and forbidding to behold, even from two hundred meters away, a creature of undeniable magnificence. The hyenas were smaller, doglike creatures, with their broken-back gait, an odd canter that must have been very efficient. They gathered first in a little group, twenty meters from the lion, which was trying to feed on his kill. And then the hyenas had moved, forming a circle around the lion, and whichever one was directly behind the powerful cat would move in to nip at the hindquarters, and the lion would turn and roar and dart a few meters, and that hyena would withdraw quickly—but even as that happened, another one would advance behind the lion for another nip. Individually, the hyenas would have had no more chance against this king of the grasslands than a man with a knife would have against a soldier armed with a machine gun, but try though he might, the lion could not protect his kill—nor even himself—and in just five minutes the lion was on the defensive, unable even to run properly, because there was always a hyena behind him, nipping at his balls, forcing the lion to run in a way that was pathetically comical, dragging his bottom on the grass as he tried to maneuver. And finally the lion just went away, without a roar, without a backward glance, while the hyenas took the kill, cackling in their odd, laughing barks, as though finding amusement in their usurpation of the greater animal’s labor. And so the mighty had been vanquished by the lesser. The lion would get older, and weaker, and someday would be unable to defeat a real hyena attack aimed at his own flesh. Sooner or later, his Tanzanian friend had told him, the hyenas got them all. Badrayn looked at his host’s eyes again.
“It can be done.”
20
NEW ADMINISTRATIONS
THERE WERE THIRTY OF them in the East Room—all men, much to his surprise—with their wives. As Jack walked into the reception his eyes scanned the faces. Some pleased him. Some did not. Those who did were as scared as he was. It was the confident, smiling ones who worried the President.
What was the right thing to do with them? Even Arnie didn’t know the answer, though he had run through several approaches. Be very strong and intimidate them? Sure, Ryan thought, and tomorrow the papers would say he was trying to be King Jack I. Take it easy? Then he’d be called a wimp who was unable to take his proper leadership position. Ryan was learning to fear the media. It hadn’t been all that bad before. As a worker bee, he’d been largely ignored. Even as Durling’s National Security Advisor, he’d been thought of as a ventriloquist’s dummy. But now the situation was very different, and there was not a single thing he could say that could not, and would not, be twisted into whatever the particular listener wanted to say himself. Washington had long since lost the capacity for objectivity. Everything was politics, and politics was ideology, and ideology came down to personal prejudices rather than the quest for truth. Where had all these people been educated that the truth didn’t matter to them?
Ryan’s problem was that he really didn’t have a political philosophy per se. He believed in things that worked, that produced the promised results and fixed whatever was broken. Whether those things adhered to one political slant or another was less important than the effects they had. Good ideas worked, even though some of them might seem crazy. Bad ideas didn’t, even though some of them seemed sensible as hell. But Washington didn’t think that way. Ideologies were facts in this city, and if the ideologies didn’t work, people would deny it; and if the ones with which they disagreed did work, those who’d been opposed would never admit it, because admitting error was more hateful to them than any form of personal misconduct. They’d sooner deny God than deny their ideas. Politics had to be the only arena known to man in which people took great action without caring much for the real-world consequences, and to which the real world was far less important than whatever fantasy, right, left, or center, they’d brought to this city of marble and lawyers.
Jack looked at the faces, wondering what political baggage they’d brought along with their hanging bags. Maybe it was a weakness that he didn’t understand how that all worked, but for his part, he had lived a life in which mistakes got real people killed—and in Cathy’s case, made people blind. For Jack, the victims were people with real names and faces. For Cathy, they were those whose faces she had touched in an operating room. For political figures, they were abstractions far more distant than their closely held ideas.
“Like being in a zoo,” Caroline Ryan, FLOTUS, SURGEON, observed to her husband, behind a charming smile. She’d raced home—the helicopter helped—just in time to change into a new white slinky dress and a gold necklace that Jack had bought her for Christmas ... a few weeks, he remembered, before the terrorists had tried to kill her on the Route 50 bridge in Annapolis.
“With golden bars,” her husband, POTUS, SWORDSMAN, replied, fronting a smile of his own that was as fake as a three-dollar bill.
“So what are we?” she asked as the assembled senators-designate applauded their entrance. “Lion and lioness? Bull and cow? Peacock and peahen? Or two lab bunnies waiting to have shampoo poured in our eyes?”
“Depends on who’s doing the beholding, baby.” Ryan was holding his wife’s hand, and together they walked to the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Washington.” Ryan had to pause for another round of applause. That was something else he’d have to learn. People applauded the President for damned near anything. Just as well that his bathroom had a door. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some three-by-five cards, the way Presidents always kept their speaking points. The cards had been prepared by Callie Weston, and the hand-printing was large enough that he didn’t need his reading glasses. Even so he’d come to expect a headache. He had one every day from all the reading.
“Our country has needs, and they’re not small ones. You’re here for the same reason I am. You’ve been appointed to fill in. You have jobs which many of you never expected, and which some of you may not have wanted.” This was vain flattery, but the sort they wanted to hear—more accurately, which they wanted to be seen to hear on the C-SPAN cameras in the corners of the room. There were perhaps three people in the room who were not career politicians, and one of those was a governor who’d done the me-you dance with his lieutenant governor and so come to Washington to fill out the term of a senator from another party. That was a curveball which the papers had only started writing about. The polarity of the Senate would change as a result of the 747 crash, because the control of thirty-two of America’s state houses hadn’t quite been in line with the makeup of the Congress.
“That’s good,” Ryan told them. “There is a long and honorable tradition of citizens in service to their nation that goes back at least as far as Cincinnatus, the Roman citizen who more than once answered his country’s call, then returned to his farm and his family and his work. One of our great cities is named in memory of that gentleman,” Jack added, nodding to a new senator from Ohio—his home was in Dayton, which was close enough.
“You would
not be here if you didn’t understand what many of those needs are. But my real message for you, today, is that we must work together. We do not have the time and our country does not have the time for us to bicker and fight.” He had to pause for applause again. Annoyed by the delay, Ryan managed to look up with an appreciative smile and nod.
“Senators, you will find me an easy man to work with. My door is always open, I know how to answer a phone, and the street goes both ways. I will discuss any issue. I will listen to any point of view. There are no rules other than the Constitution which I have sworn to preserve, protect, and defend.
“The people out where you come from, out there beyond Interstate 495, expect all of us to get the job done. They don’t expect us to get reelected. They expect us to work for them to the best of our ability. We work for them. They don’t work for us. We have the duty to perform for them. Robert E. Lee once said that ‘duty’ is the most sublime word in our language. It’s even more sublime and even more important now, because none of us has been elected to our offices. We represent the people of a democracy, but in every case we have come here in a way that simply wasn’t supposed to happen. How much greater, then, is our personal duty to fulfill our roles in the best possible manner?” More applause.
“There is no higher trust than that which fate has conferred on us. We are not medieval noblemen blessed by birth with high station and great power. We are the servants, not the masters, to those whose consent gives us what power we have. We live in the tradition of giants. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, and so many other members of your house of the Congress must be your models. ‘How stands the Union?’ Webster is said to ask from his grave. We will determine that. The Union is in our hands. Lincoln called America the last and best hope of mankind, and in the past twenty years America has given truth to that judgment by our sixteenth President. America is still an experiment, a collective idea, a set of rules called the Constitution to which all of us, within and without the Beltway, give allegiance. What makes us special is that brief document. America isn’t a strip of dirt and rock between two oceans. America is an idea and a set of rules we all follow. That’s what makes us different, and in holding true to that, we in this room can make sure that the country we pass on to our successors will be the same one entrusted to us, maybe even a little bit improved. And now”—Ryan turned to the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Judicial Circuit, the nation’s most senior appellate judge, up from Richmond—“ it’s time for you to join the team.”
Judge William Staunton came to the microphone. Every senatorial spouse held a Bible, and every senatorial appointee placed his left hand on it, raising the other.
“I—state your name ...”
As Ryan watched, the new senators were duly sworn. At least it looked solemn enough. The oaths were spoken. A few of the new legislators kissed the Bibles, either from personal religious conviction or because they were close to the cameras. Then they kissed their wives, most of whom beamed. There was a collective intake of breath, and then they all looked around at one another, and the White House staff came into the room with drinks just after the cameras were turned off, because now the real work started. Ryan got himself a glass of Perrier and walked into the middle of the room, smiling despite his fatigue and his unease at performing political duties.
THE PHOTOS CAME in one more time. Security at Khartoum airport had not improved, and this time three American intelligence officers were snapping photos of the people walking down the stairs. Everyone around was surprised that no newspeople had yet twigged to the story. A stream of official cars—probably the entire complement for this poor nation—ferried the visitors away. When the process was complete, the 737 airliner went back east, and the spooks drove off to the embassy. Two others of their number were camped out at the dwellings assigned to the Iraqi generals—this tidbit had come from the station chief’s contact in the Sudanese Foreign Ministry. When those photos had been taken, the additional officers also drove back, and in the embassy darkroom the frames were processed, blown up, and faxed off via satellite. At Langley, Bert Vasco identified every face, assisted by a pair of CIA desk officers and a set of mug shots in the CIA files.
“That’s it,” the State Department officer pronounced. “That’s the whole military leadership. But not one civilian out of the Ba’ath Party.”
“So we know who the sacrificial goats are.” That observation came from Ed Foley.
“Yep,” Mary Pat answered with a nod. “And it gives a chance for the senior surviving officers to arrest them, ‘process’ them, and show loyalty to the new regime. Shit,” she concluded. “Too fast.” Her station chief in Riyadh was all dressed up with no place to go. The same was true of some Saudi diplomats who’d hastily put together a program of fiscal incentives for the notional new Iraqi regime. It would now be unnecessary.
Ed Foley, the new DCI-designate, shook his head in admiration. “I didn’t think they had it in ’em. Killing our friend, sure, but coaxing the leadership out this fast and this smooth, who would’ve thunk it?”
“You got me there, Mr. Foley,” Vasco agreed. “Somebody must have brokered the deal—but who?”
“Get buzzin’, worker bees,” Ed Foley told the desk officers, with a wry smile. “Everything you can develop, ASAP.”
IT LOOKED LIKE some sort of awful stew, the darkened human blood and the red-brown nephritic mush of monkey kidneys, just sitting there, marinating in flat, shallow glass trays under dim lights shielded to keep ultraviolet light from harming the viruses. There wasn’t much to do at this point except to monitor the environmental conditions, and simple analog instruments did that. Moudi and the director walked in, wearing their protective garb, to check the sealed culturing chambers for themselves. Two-thirds of Jean Baptiste’s blood was now deep-frozen in case something went wrong with their first effort at reproducing the Ebola Mayinga virus. They also checked the room’s multi-stage ventilation systems, because now the building was truly a factory of death. The precautions were double-sided. As in this room they strove to give the virus a healthy place to multiply, just outside the door the army medical corpsmen were spraying every square millimeter to make sure that it was the only such place—and so the virus had to be isolated and protected from the disinfectant as well. Thus the air drawn into the culture chambers had to be carefully filtered, lest in their effort to stay alive the people in the building killed that which might kill them if they made another sort of mistake.
“So you really think this version might be airborne?”
“As you know, the Ebola Zaire Mayinga strain is named for a nurse who became infected despite all conventional protective measures. Patient Two”—he had decided it was easier not to speak her name—“was a skilled nurse with Ebola experience; she did not give any injections; and she didn’t know how she might have contracted the virus. Therefore, yes, I believe this is possible.”
“That would be very useful, Moudi,” the director whispered, so faintly that the junior physician had trouble hearing it. He heard it even so. The thought alone was loud enough. “We can test for it,” the older man added.
That would be easier on him, Moudi thought. At least he wouldn’t know those people by name. He wondered if he was right about the virus. Might Patient Two have made a mistake and forgotten it? But, no, he had examined her body for punctures, as had Sister Marin Magdalena, and it wasn’t as though she might have licked secretions from the young Benedict Mkusa, was it? So what did that have to mean? It meant that the Mayinga strain survived for a brief period of time in air, and that meant they had a potential weapon such as man had never before encountered, worse than nuclear weapons, worse than chemical weapons. They had a weapon which could reproduce itself and be spread by its own victims, one to another and another until the disease outbreak burned out in due course. It would burn out. All the outbreaks did. It had to burn out, didn’t it?
Didn’t it?
Moudi’s hand ca
me up to rub his chin, a contemplative gesture stopped short by the plastic mask. He didn’t know the answer to that one. In Zaire and the few other African countries afflicted by this odious disease, the outbreaks, frightening though they were, all did burn out—despite the ideal environmental conditions which protected and sustained the virus strands. But on the other side of that equation was the primitive nature of Zaire, the horrible roads and the absence of efficient transport. The disease killed people before they could get far. Ebola wiped out villages, but did little more. But nobody really knew what would happen in an advanced country. Theoretically, one could infect an aircraft, say an international flight into Kennedy. The travelers would leave one aircraft and fan out into others. Maybe they’d be able to spread the disease through coughs and sneezes immediately, or maybe not. It didn’t matter, really. Many of them would fly again in a few days, wondering if they had the flu, and then they’d be able to communicate the virus, and so infect more.
The question of how an epidemic spread was one of time and opportunity more than anything else. The more rapidly it got out from the focal center, and the more rapid the instrumentalities of travel, the farther a disease could spread laterally through a population. There were mathematical models, but they were all theoretical, dependent on a multitude of individual variables, each of which could affect the entire threat equation by at least one order of magnitude. To say the epidemic would die out in time was correct. The question was how fast? That would determine the number of people infected before protective measures took effect. One percent invasion of a society, or ten percent, or fifty percent? America wasn’t a provincial society. Everyone interacted with everyone else. A truly airborne virus with a three-day incubation period ... there was no model for that known to Moudi. The deadliest recent Zaireian outbreak in Kikwit had claimed fewer than three hundred lives, but it had started with one unfortunate woodcutter, then his family, then their neighbors. The trick, then, if you wanted to create a much wider outbreak, was to increase the number of index cases. If you could do that, the initial blossoming of Ebola Zaire Mayinga America could be so large as to invalidate conventional control measures. It would spread not from one man and one family, but from hundreds of individuals and families—or thousands? Then the next generational leap could involve hundreds of thousands. About this time, the Americans would realize that something evil was afoot, but there would be time for one more generational leap, and that would be an order of magnitude greater still, perhaps into the millions. At that point, medical facilities would be overwhelmed ...
