The General's President (30 page)

During the brief flight, he was thinking about the president's Warsaw speech of the afternoon before, and feeling mostly good about it. Although he was curious, and a little edgy, about the technological breakthrough the president had mentioned. The TV news the evening before had referred to it as "the president's Christmas surprise," seeming not to know quite how to treat it.

The only thing Cromwell could think of was that the NSA had something going he didn't know about. Which was hard to imagine. But in World War Two the Manhattan Project had been so secret, President Truman hadn't known about it till after the first successful test in New Mexico.

He hoped it was good, whatever it was.

In a Pentagon corridor, on his way to his office, he ran into a grim and harried-looking Trenary. "Good morning, Ewell," Cromwell said.

The Air Force Chief of Staff stopped so abruptly that Cromwell stopped too. "How'd you like to attend a Joint Chiefs meeting this morning?" Trenary asked. The way he said it was more a challenge than a question or invitation.

It took Cromwell by surprise. "It's not okay for the vice president to meddle in the affairs of the Joint Chiefs."

"Meddle shit! I've got some questions I want to ask you." The tone was accusatory now. "And the others are going to want to hear what you've got to say!" He started to leave.

"Just a second. Aren't you going to clear this with Pelham?"

"Pelham's home with the flu. Come on!"

Trenary started off again, and Cromwell, shrugging, followed. His good mood of a minute earlier was gone; Trenary could do that to him.
When something's bothering the Air Force Chief of Staff
, Cromwell told himself,
it's got to bother everybody.
Only Carmody seemed immune to the man. Despite Trenary's acknowledged talent for making good decisions, Cromwell wondered, not for the first time, how the abrasive little sonofabitch had made it up the chain of command.

Carmody was in the conference room ahead of them, reading, and glancing up, eyed Cromwell quizzically as he entered. Cromwell went to his old seat, Admiral Pelham's now, and sitting, began to read through the daily defense intelligence summary. Two minutes later, Hanke and Dudak walked in, paused when they saw who was in the chairman's place, then took their own. Something was bothering them, too; Cromwell recognized the signs. Chances were it was the same thing that was bothering Trenary; or Trenary himself.

When he'd finished reading through the intelligence summary, Cromwell looked up. Trenary was already done, looking impatient. Then Hanke looked up, and Dudak.
What the hell
, thought Cromwell,
why not?
He picked up the gavel and rapped the plate with it.

"All right, gentlemen. Ewell invited me here. He said he has some questions you'd want to hear the answers to. Ewell, let's have 'em."

Trenary glowered. "I presume you listened to the president's speech yesterday."

"That's right. I don't suppose there were too many people who didn't."

"And you didn't see anything wrong with it."

Cromwell knew what this had to be about, but he'd let Trenary get it off. "What did you see wrong with it?" he countered.

"Jesus Christ, Jumper! He can't get away with throwing out stuff about major new technological developments! To be released within the next few weeks, for chrissake! No one can get away with saying something like that unless they're able to produce it."

Dudak entered in. "You don't know of any secret new development, do you Jumper?"

"No, Howdy, I don't. But he's gotten pretty thick with the chief of research over at NSA."

"Shit, Jumper!" Trenary spat it out. "The NSA doesn't have anything like that going. We'd have gotten wind of it if they did."

"Not necessarily."

"Something else, Jumper," Dudak put in. "Assume that NSA does have something going, some new development that somehow we haven't heard about. There's a matter of tool-up time, the time it takes to build plants, get into production, things like that. He made it sound like it's going to make an immediate difference. He can't get up in a couple of months and say, 'All right, we've got a workable system to generate clean, cheap nuclear power without radioactive waste. In three or four years we'll open our first fusion power plant.' Or whatever. It just won't wash."

As soon as Dudak had finished, Trenary jumped in. "And he's got the State Department completely demoralized. Do you know he fired the Ambassador to Poland yesterday? Gave him till Tuesday to get out of the country! And had Jaruzelski critique and approve his speech in advance! Jaruzelski! A goddamn Kremlin stooge! And he said he'd had a private audience with the Pope about Jaruzelski. Now when the hell could he have done that? You know damn well he hadn't been out of the country till this trip. He's hardly been out of the White House, for chrissake!"

Trenary glared at Cromwell. "And the way he's stirred things up over at CIA headquarters! Blackburn committed fucking suicide! Did you know that? Jesus Christ, Jumper! The man is turning into a disaster!"

"Okay, Ewell," Cromwell said patiently. "Let's look at some of that garbage. Jaruzelski's no Kremlin stooge; a Kremlin stooge would never have let the president read that speech on television. Something would have gone wrong—a technical failure of some kind." He paused. "How do you know the State Department is all that demoralized?"

"I was talking to Coulter yesterday, at supper."

Of course
, Cromwell thought.
The two of them lived in the same posh apartment building, probably ate together in the restaurant there.

"And I'll tell you something else," Cromwell said. "He did see the Pope. Two weeks ago, when he supposedly went to Nevada. I helped him set it up. He was out of town less than forty hours. He wanted to check out Jaruzelski and get a papal briefing on Poland."

Trenary's mouth opened and closed, then opened again.
"The Pope! What in hell does the Pope have to do with the United States government?! That goddamn pompous..."

Carmody's voice snapped like high voltage arcing. "Ewell, shut up!" Trenary stopped in mid-sentence, staring at the normally cheerful marine commandant, and Carmody's voice quieted. "I've had about enough of you. Let somebody sane talk for a while."

Cromwell smiled grimly. Carmody probably didn't go to church except at Easter—well, maybe Christmas—but apparently he felt some loyalty to it. "That's right, Ewell," he said, "let someone else have the floor. You're overwrought.

"Hank, you haven't said anything yet."

General Hanke spoke mildly. "What bothers me has already been brought up: the president's promise of a new technology in the immediate future. I honestly can't envision what that could be, and frankly I find it very hard to believe. The morning papers featured it, and they're skeptical too."

Cromwell hadn't read a paper, nor the clipping sheets yet. The television commentators hadn't sounded skeptical yesterday though. Interested, puzzled, but not skeptical.

"Thanks, Hank," Cromwell said. "Ewell, I need to point something out to you. This is a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not an encounter session for somebody who can't control his emotions. If you need professional help, get it."

His eyes sought for Trenary's and failed to reach them. Trenary seemed to have gone blank, deflated.

"Now, is there anything else you guys need to talk about here this morning?"

***

Their business took only thirty minutes more this day, and as they dispersed to their individual offices, Cromwell looked at the situation that had come up. He felt ill at ease about Trenary—about the man's fitness for command. He'd have to talk with the surgeon general about him.

Meanwhile he wished he'd thought to ask Trenary where he'd gotten his information about the CIA and Blackburn. But Trenary, in his overreactive way, had made valid points. While as for himself—perhaps he'd underreacted.

No
, he said inwardly,
don't go into that self-questioning bullshit. You'd noticed it and you'd filed it; that's all you can do. That and ask the president about it when he gets back.

Cromwell sat down at his desk. He'd just reached for his IN basket when it hit him, the point that somehow he'd overlooked before. The others had too, perhaps because they hadn't looked beyond the seeming unlikelihood that there'd really been a big breakthrough.
If the United States, say the NSA, had some revolutionary new technology in the wings, ready for release—if there really was such a thing... The president had said he was going to release it all over the world! China, Japan, Poland! The Soviets would have it inside of a month—hell, inside a week—if he did that!

And the media were sure to pick up on it. Someone there would.

***

Senator Brosnan had hardly ever seen things come apart quite so swiftly. This was the group that had drafted and unanimously backed the Emergency Powers Bill. Two days ago, ten of the fourteen on the committee had been in favor of leaving the emergency powers in place. One had been undecided. Of the other three, none had been anti-Haugen; more than anything else, they'd been influenced—worn down—by the arguing of lobbyists.

Then, early yesterday afternoon, the president had talked to the Polish parliament, and the world had watched and listened. The lobbyists, seeing an opening, had begun screaming before the afternoon was over, and by supper, the State Department had been leaking complaints like a sieve. It could almost have been scripted.

What the new status was in committee remained to be seen; its members still were straggling in. Those already there were discussing the matter.

"So you're unhappy with the speech," said Kreiner. "I don't mind telling you, Morrie, I wasn't overjoyed by it. But that doesn't change the continuing need for emergency powers."

"It's not as simple as that," Bender retorted. "We don't have the powers by themselves. We have the combination of the powers and the man—Haugen. They're starting to look like a deadly combination. I wouldn't be surprised if the president's getting senile."

Margaret Bushnell's red eyebrows arched. "Bullshit," she said. "Delusions of grandeur maybe, but no way is that man senile. Look at the way he's operated until yesterday! Morrie, he can whip you in memory, mental computations, or rassling." She grinned at his facial response. "And that's pretty damn good," she added, "because you're not half bad yourself—-at the first two anyway."

Brosnan grinned. She'd known how to defuse the congressman from Illinois. Self-conscious at being five-foot three and 110 pounds, he compensated by being cocky and aggressive. And when, on occasion, someone put him down, he either got truculent or very quiet. But Margaret's added sentence took the sting out of it and made truculence too awkward.

"It looks to me," Morrows was saying, "as if the president's hit a slump. He's been batting .400; then yesterday he went one for five and dropped a fly ball. That's not too bad, as long as he breaks out of it."

"Spare us the sports analogies," said Cerotti. "How the hell is he going to pull a technological breakthrough out of his hat? Who the hell writes his..."

Keith Huan of Hawaii was three-quarters Polynesian, a large brown man with a short thick neck and enormous chest. Almost without raising his voice, he stopped Cerotti in mid-sentence. "Has it occurred to you," he said reasonably, "that he may have one? A breakthrough? And that when he gets back, he may show it to us? Wouldn't you feel a little foolish then if we'd hurried Harmer-Van Dora out of committee and it got rammed through a floor vote?"

Brosnan looked at the clock. Almost time to call the meeting to order. He could already see the direction things would go: No action today, and hopefully no action until they could question the president.

The biggest trouble spot just now was the business lobbies. The Warsaw speech was just a stick for them to wave, or maybe poke at the president's face with. As for Foggy Bottom, let them be upset over there. Coulter was arrogant and had long since used up the congressional good will he'd started with. He suspected Coulter was seeing his last days as Secretary of State.

Being a senator had never been easy, and sometimes it was more interesting than he liked. Actually, there'd been a lot more agreement during the emergency than he'd ever seen here before; probably the most since World War Two.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Mark heard a car and hurried to the living room window to look out into the frosty dusk. Rafe's. He drove up faster than usual, hit brakes and light switch, and skidded to a stop. The door popped open, Rafe jumped out, it slammed, and he started for the house at a trot.

"Is it Rafe, Mark?" Tris called from the kitchen.

Shit man!
Mark felt a thrill run through him.
Rafe's contact must have the stuff!

Rafe took the porch steps at a bound and burst in, grinning hugely. "He's got it!" he shouted. "He called me and he's got it! The suitcase from Allah! We can pick it up tomorrow, or tonight if we want!"

He closed the door behind him then. Phil and Tris came in from the kitchen, Mary a step behind, all talking excitedly. "The suitcase from Allah!" said Tris, and turned to her husband. "See! I said it was an Arab."

"That's a figure of speech," Mark said. "I'll bet it's not an Arab. The Arabs like revenge too much not to carry it out themselves. It's probably KGB."

Raphael Dietrich laughed. "I'll never tell." He sobered then, just a little. "We've got to decide some things now. You want to eat first or what?"

"Talk, Rafe," Mary said. "I'm too excited to eat."

"Yeah!" Phil and Tris said the word together.

An unexpected chill ran through Mark: this was it. Tomorrow—the day after at the latest—they'd be dropping the world's third atom bomb. "I'll go with that," he said. "Talk first, eat later."

They took seats, Tris and Phil leaning forward on the old sofa, Mary and Mark in overstuffeds, Rafe sitting backward on a wooden chair. "Okay," Rafe said. "It's a long drive. If you want to drop it tomorrow, we need to go get it tonight. I know where the place is, so Mark and I can go together in the pickup and trade driving. The two of us will load the thing. If we leave right after supper, we can be back by one or two in the morning.