Luke Stone 03 - Situation Room

by Jack Mars

  “Meanwhile, the Chinese want us to allow them to build their little islands in the South China Sea, then they want to claim the entire area as Chinese territorial waters. If we get tied up in a war with the North Koreans, they probably hope we won’t have the stomach to open a second front.”

  Luke thought back to that general in the Situation Room. He seemed to have plenty of stomach for it. He seemed like a guy who’d be disappointed if it somehow didn’t happen. But that didn’t necessarily mean Trudy’s scenario about China was wrong. It might mean the Chinese were wrong in their assessment of American willingness to fight.

  “A war on the Korean peninsula would be bad,” Luke said.

  Trudy nodded. “More than bad. An apocalypse. I have a breakdown of the total conventional military hardware they have lined up on the border, most of it targeting Seoul, but a lot of it targeting American bases and positions in the South. It’s staggering. Want to hear it?”

  Luke slid open his window shade again. Bright sunlight streamed in. He looked out. There was nothing but sky everywhere. They were high above a white cloudbank.

  He shook his head. “Not really.”

  “Okay,” Trudy said. “Suffice to say that it’s large, and it’s devastating. We would of course gain the upper hand within a day or two, and we could probably destroy their entire antiquated air force in a few hours. Most of it wouldn’t even get off the ground. But here’s the bad part.”

  Luke looked at Trudy again. He wasn’t sure what the point of all this was. He didn’t want to hear the bad part.

  “The North Korean rocket corps still communicate by runners and couriers. They move under cover of darkness. It’s very low-tech. What this means is they can deliver the order to commence firing in a way that’s impossible for our intercept software to detect. An attack could start, and the first thing our people in South Korea would notice is thousands of incoming missiles, mortars, and artillery rounds.”

  An image flashed in Luke’s mind of Li Quiangguo in a dusty warehouse, sitting quietly at a computer with no internet access, putting lists of cyber targets on CD-ROM. It was a low tech approach, with no way for a technologically superior opponent to intercept it.

  He shook that thought away for the moment.

  “That sounds like fun, Trudy,” he said. “We’ll be there in about twelve hours.”

  “Let’s hope they delay the attack until we leave,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  01:05 p.m.

  United States Naval Observatory – Washington, DC

  Kat Lopez felt stupid. She wasn’t young anymore, but she felt young, and incompetent, and thrown into the deep end, way over her head.

  “Thirty seconds, Susan,” a male voice from the control booth said. “Watch for my light. When the light goes red, you are live.”

  Kat stood at the back of the small amphitheater in the New White House, watching the action unfold.

  Susan and Pierre were up on the stage at the front, dressed to the nines. Susan wore a blue dress. Her hair was done in a coif on top of her head. Her makeup screamed Hollywood. She was glittering, she was beautiful. Her look was a radical departure from the deliberately dour, serious, conservative image the public relations handlers had been building for her these past months.

  Pierre stood next to her in an expensive, dark blue three-piece suit. He looked somewhat presidential himself. On the other hand, he was standing next to Susan, which also made him look invisible.

  The room itself was packed. It had at most a hundred seats. It had a gradual slope, upward from the front, as though it doubled as a movie theater. Every seat was taken. Every space along the back wall was taken. All of it was a fake.

  At 9:30 this morning, a little more than an hour after the photos of Pierre first hit the airwaves, a TV producer had rolled up in a black limousine. He was a young guy, thin, with a crazy nest of black hair and a long goatee. Two young guys and a young woman climbed out of the limo with him. Clearly, they were not from politics.

  “Michael Parowksi’s access to this building has been rescinded,” Susan told her five minutes later. “He left in a car with Dutch Evans this morning, but if he tries to come back here, he can’t come in. His name popped up on a security watch list. I’m sure it’s a computer glitch. We’ll have to get it worked out before tomorrow. Okay?”

  Kat looked into Susan’s eyes and saw the lie there. A good liar was one thing Susan was not.

  “Okay, Susan.”

  “Also, Dutch Evans himself. Brent Staples. Bill Ackland. Any of that crew who was here this morning. They’re barred from the building.”

  Kat nodded. “What’s going on?”

  Susan smiled. “We’re going to change the narrative. Or die trying.”

  Actors and actresses had begun appearing moments later, dressed in various styles, of varying ages, all of them carrying wardrobe satchels. They had access to the building, but not the new Vice President?

  “How do we look?” Susan said now, from the stage. To Kat’s eyes, she looked stunning. The two of them looked like a red carpet couple. Throughout the amphitheater, the actors and actresses had transformed themselves in something that looked very much like the Washington, DC, press corps.

  “You both look beautiful,” the voice from the booth said. It was the weird TV producer speaking. He had an informal style that was jarring in this environment. “Calm. Steady. At the helm. This is your world. The rest of us are just visiting. Ten seconds. Camelot, part two. Pedal to the metal. Own this moment.”

  Kat took a deep breath.

  She was pulling for Susan, she really was. Susan had grown on her these past couple of months. She would almost say she… loved Susan.

  The thing that Susan didn’t know was Dutch Evans was behind Kat being hired here. She and Dutch went back a long way. She had dated him for more than a year after she arrived here in Washington. Yes, Dutch was married, so they weren’t really “dating.” It was just how you moved up in this town. Kat knew it instinctively when she hit the ground here. And move up was what she had done. She and Dutch hadn’t been together in a long time, but he still took care of her, and she took care of him.

  Kat had been dropped in here as a spy. That was the painful truth. And Kat didn’t want it to be the truth anymore. What Dutch and Brent did today was beyond the pale. It was ugly, it was unfair, it was…

  “Five seconds,” the producer’s voice said. “Good luck, kids.”

  There was the slightest pause.

  Near the podium, Susan and Pierre whispered some last words to each other.

  A new voice came on. “We are live in four… three…”

  Susan smiled. For a split second, the smile looked sickly, like death itself. Then it changed. Then it was gone altogether.

  “Two…”

  “Calm,” the producer said. “Rock solid. Like gods.”

  The look on Susan’s face became a look of authority.

  “One.”

  Susan stepped up to the podium. Now her eyes were somehow both stern and soft. As she had been her entire life, she was the most beautiful woman in the room. But there was more to it. She wasn’t just beautiful. She was substantial. There was a weight to her that Kat didn’t remember her having when she was Vice President.

  And Kat realized: Susan had grown and matured. She really had guided this country when it was at its most vulnerable. She really had stood up to terrorists. She really had given the American people something to believe in. She was a leader.

  Kat hated Dutch in that moment. Hated him. He was a string-puller and a manipulator and a behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealer. She knew that about him. But what did he think he was doing this time? He would destroy two people’s lives, and add more turmoil to the country, because he felt he couldn’t control Susan? Because he wanted to install Michael Parowski instead? How dare he do that? Dutch wasn’t the king maker, and he wasn’t the king.

  Susan was surrounded by bulletproof glass panels. Four S
ecret Service agents stood on the stage with her. The crowd of fake reporters, or whatever they were supposed to be, cheered and clapped for her.

  “My fellow Americans, you already know the story,” Susan said, utterly without preamble.

  “You already know what’s going on here.”

  A few people in the crowd murmured their assent.

  “You know what happened this morning, and why it happened.”

  “Yes, we do!” someone shouted.

  “I was attacked,” Susan said. “They attacked me, by attacking my husband, Pierre. Now, until a moment ago, I was planning to come up here and defend Pierre. I was going to tell you that Pierre Michaud, through his technology businesses, has done more for this country, and for our shared future, than the next hundred people combined.

  “I was going to tell you that this man”—she pointed an arm back toward Pierre, who stood behind her and to the right—“employs more than a hundred thousand people in the United States alone. And I was going to tell you that he has contributed more than a billion dollars to clean water, basic healthcare, and peace initiatives in the Third World. Three million people, mostly women and their children, have benefited from his work.”

  The crowd continued to clap and cheer. They didn’t go crazy for Pierre, they just gave him long, sustained applause. You could feel the meaning of it. They respected him. He had done a lot for people. It was true.

  “But you know what?” Susan said. “I’m not going to tell you any of that.”

  Now a ripple of laughter went through the room. She wasn’t going to tell them what she had already told them.

  “Pierre doesn’t need me to defend him. You know who he is, and what he’s done.”

  She paused now, waiting until she had quiet.

  “This is what I am going to tell you. They attacked me, and they attacked Pierre, because they want you to judge us. And they want you to judge us because they want to weaken this country and destroy our resolve at a difficult time. They want us to be fractured and in disarray. They want us to lose faith.”

  Now a murmur of anger seemed to rise in the room. Susan raised a hand to quell it.

  “But we’re not going to lose faith. We’re going to stand together, despite our differences. Listen, if your neighbor has a different view on abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, any of those things, you are still both Americans. Neither one of you is more patriotic than the other. Neither loves their country any more than the other one. Differences of opinion don’t mean that we can’t stand together.

  “And I want to tell you this. Together, you and I will succeed in building a better country, and a better world, through understanding and love. And what is love? It’s acceptance. It’s commitment. It’s allowing a person to grow and change. That's what real love amounts to—letting a person be what he really is.

  “I believe that this is a country where we accept each other, and we love each other. I met Pierre more than twenty years ago. He is among the greatest men I have ever met. He is a wonderful father to our children. He is smart, he works hard, he does the right thing. He is my best friend in this world. I love him more than I have ever loved another person. And he happens to be gay. I don’t have a problem with that, and I don’t see why you should.”

  The crowd erupted into cheers.

  Susan pointed at someone in the audience. “Do you have a problem with it?”

  The person shook their head.

  Susan picked another one. “Do you?... Do you?”

  Now Susan shook her head. “Of course you don’t. You know that we need to live together, and we need to work together, to continue to make this the greatest country on Earth. Is it any of my business what you do in the privacy of your home, if you’re not hurting anyone?”

  The crowd gave her a resounding “NO!”

  Kat smiled. She had no idea how this little dog-and-pony show was going to play in the so-called flyover territory, the middle of the country where people tended to be more conservative, but it was sure to be a winner on the coasts.

  “America is more than just a country,” Susan said. “It’s an idea. It’s a promise.”

  The crowd clapped and cheered at each new applause line, and now Kat found herself clapping along.

  “And the promise is if I’m a good person, if I work hard, there’s going to be a place for me.”

  Kat, almost swept up in the enthusiasm that she herself knew was manufactured, could see how clever the move was. Don’t deny what’s undeniable. Don’t defend what isn’t to be defended. Appeal to their better angels instead. Remind them that they loved you in the past, and make them love you again.

  She was asking the American people to accept her arrangement with Pierre. She was asking millions of people to step outside their comfort zone for her. It was bold, it was daring, and it was strange. It just might work.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  2:01 a.m. Indochina Time, August 18 (3:01 p.m. Eastern Time, August 17)

  South China Sea

  “We’ve got problems.”

  The submarine lurked a hundred feet below the surface.

  It was the USS Lewiston, a Los Angeles class fast-attack sub, moving alone, deep inside the South China Sea. Its captain, Commander Patrick Vitale, stood in the close confines of the control room. He was listening to his situation deteriorate.

  He had been awakened only five minutes before by the Messenger of the Watch, a young kid whose name he hadn’t caught yet. They had been stalking a Chinese destroyer for the better part of a day, cruising silently in its wake. The wake, or baffles, was the area right behind the ship—where the motion of the water confuses the ship’s sonar.

  In this case, maybe not enough.

  Vitale looked at his Officer of the Watch, a man named Chipman. Chipman still carried scars on his face where he must have had severe acne as a teenager.

  “What are we hearing, Chip?”

  “We’ve picked up at least three ships in the vicinity. We’ve got the destroyer on our nose. Nothing’s changed there. But in the past ten minutes, we’ve picked up two more.”

  “Bearing and distance?”

  “Port side. We’re listening, but we’re running silent, so we can’t ping them. The data we have is limited. We don’t know their headings or distances. But they just appeared there, both at once.”

  “What are they?” Vitale said.

  “At a guess? A battle cruiser and a sub. Which means a carrier probably isn’t too far behind them.”

  Vitale felt his shoulders sag before he caught himself, and stood tall again. The men would pick up on the slightest body language change from him.

  “Any chance they’re friendlies?”

  Chipman did a quick head shake. “No. We’re on a limb out here, all by ourselves.”

  Vitale stood quietly for a moment, processing the information—or rather, the lack of information. No one in the control room said a word. Stalking that destroyer meant the Lewiston had to be as quiet as possible. And that meant they were using passive sonar, which gave them the bearings and sizes of nearby ships, but no idea of their heading or speed. They were blind down here, and hiding. And suddenly, it seemed like someone knew exactly where they were.

  “I don’t like it, Cap,” Chipman said. “That’s why I sent for you.”

  Vitale took a deep breath. The men sat at their stations, their backs to him, silent, waiting, the control arrays spread out in front of them. The scene took on an almost surreal tone. These men were hanging on his next words. Behind him, most of the crew were asleep in their berths. There were 134 men aboard this sub.

  “Take us up to periscope depth,” Vitale said.

  “Captain?” Chipman said.

  “You heard me. We need to see who’s here.”

  “We’ll be naked up there.”

  Vitale nodded. “I know it. But I have a hunch we’re already naked.”

  Chipman nodded. “Quiet in Control,” he said to the men in the room. “
Helm, take us to periscope depth.”

  The control room was tense as the sub ascended. Vitale could feel it. The men were afraid. He wasn’t immune to it himself. They thought they had been hunting that destroyer, but now it looked very possible she was leading them on the whole time. And her friends had just joined the party.

  In a few moments, they reached periscope depth, about sixty feet from the surface. At this depth, they were vulnerable. Aircraft could spot them from the sky. Worse, they were about to become even more vulnerable. The Chinese had technology almost as sophisticated as the United States these days. Once the periscope broke the surface, the Lewiston was going to become visible on radar. If they wanted to remain hidden, the periscope could only stay up there for a few second.

  Well, hell.

  “Up periscope,” Vitale said. “We’ll make it quick.”

  After a few minutes, the periscope reached the service.

  Then:

  “Large ship off port. Large ship dead ahead.”

  And a few seconds later, “Radio transmission coming in.”

  Vitale gritted his teeth. He knew it. The periscope had a radio antenna on top of it, and the bad guys were waiting for it to appear.

  “What’s the transmission?”

  There was a delay while the radio man listened to his headset.

  “Submarine, this is the Chinese Navy. We have you targeted and locked on. Surface and prepare for boarding.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  10:24 a.m. August 17 (4:24 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time, August 17)

  Over the Pacific Ocean

  It was crazy going all this way just to interrogate a prisoner.