The General's President (7 page)

"After graduating, Haugen was employed briefly with the Koochiching County, Minnesota, Electric Co-op, which supplied electricity to farm settlements. In 1954 he opened a television repair shop in Duluth, Minnesota, and began spare-time research that, by 1957, had led to several profitable patents in electronics.

"In 1957 he founded Haugen Electronics, Inc., to manufacture and market products based on his patents. He, a cousin, and his father-in-law were reportedly the sole shareholders. By 1961, when he changed the firm's name to Duluth Technologies, Inc., it was reputedly worth two million dollars. It has grown vastly since then, with factories in several locations, and is said to remain family owned.

"The Haugens have two grown children—a son Karl and a daughter Liisa—and seven grandchildren.

"Reportedly, Arne Haugen is a voracious and rapid reader who is respectably informed on a wide variety of subjects. Apparently he will be by far the best linguist ever to occupy the White House. Both he and Mrs. Haugen are said to have studied one language after another for years, and to be at least modestly proficient in about a dozen of them, including Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Swedish, Tagalog and, not surprisingly, Norwegian and Finnish. Spoken Chinese is reportedly a recent project. Nothing was said about Arabic and Hebrew.

"The president is said to be very healthy, still strong and active, and to have a good sense of humor. All of which he will need. He is also said to be nonpolitical, which will certainly be unusual in a president.

"In a time of domestic troubles unequalled since the War Between the States, the nation will watch this new leader with what undoubtedly will be unprecedented interest and attention, and the interest of the rest of the world will hardly be less."

***

Party Secretary Boris Alexeevich Kulish sat presiding over the morning meeting of the Politburo. Copies of the previous day's intelligence summary, printed late the night before, were routinely set at each man's place before the members arrived. Normally its review was the first piece of business. This morning though, it lay so far unexamined, except for what it had to say about the new American president.

In the Soviet hierarchy, listening to the BBC, the Voice of America, and Deutsche Welle, are regular, albeit illegal, practices. The night previous, the Politburo members had listened with particular interest for what they could learn about Arne Eino Haugen.

Not that they believed what they heard. In a subculture where lies in politics are essential not only to success but survival, under a philosophy which states unequivocally that lying is an important tool to be used without hesitation, it is assumed that anything is likely to be a lie.

GRU agents in America would even now be gathering more details on Arne Eino Haugen. Meanwhile, all that the Politburo knew with any confidence was that Haugen was a capitalist-industrialist and a technologist. Obviously his reported background as a poor country boy and laborer had to be felse—an artifact manufactured by publicists for public consumption. Very probably, claims of his skill as a technologist, and his youthful experience as a parachute trooper in the Great Patriotic War, were also lies.

And most important, his inexperience in government, at any executive level, was proof that he was a Pentagon puppet.

So now the American president not only had dictatorial authority; America also had a president who might prove effective in using that authority.

It was not at all clear what would ensue, but it could hardly be favorable to Soviet interests. Heretofore, their own greatest advantage over the Americans had been the sometimes unbelievable discoordination and incredible security weaknesses of American government; but now, under Pentagon control, presumably these would be much reduced. The GRU would have to intensify its efforts to monitor and analyze the activities of the American government.

Meanwhile, just now the Politburo had a war and its own serious internal problems to see to, and it was no time to generate unpredictable major complications. Thus it would be well not to move, just then, to capitalize on American social unrest; that could spark unpredictable responses.

Of course, if the new government in Washington should begin a serious anti-Soviet program, perhaps to divert the American people's attention from their troubles at home, that would be something else.

***

Dave Fiori touched a key, and the flashing light on his phone turned steady white, the beeper stilling. "What is it, Millie?"

"It's Mr. Haugen for you on line three."

"Thanks."

The chief. Everybody's chief now!
Fiori touched the button marked 3, and his phone screen lit up. Haugen's face looked through at him, Haugen's voice talking to him from the speaker.

"Dave, I guess you know what's happened back here."

"Right, Mr. President." He grinned. "I'm not sure whether it calls for congratulations or condolences though."

"I'm not either. But it changes some things. I want you to get together with Laura and Morrie and make the final selection of GPC target communities, and then activate the release program, but only for the U.S. Same basic timetable as the original, but set to start tomorrow."

Fiori nodded. It had first been scheduled to start four days ago, then postponed until the civil scene got sorted out.

"Any questions?" Haugen asked.

"Nope. I'm glad it's on again."

"Me too. Have fun with it. I've got a ton of stuff to do here, and I've never given a state-of-the-nation address before. Gotta get at it. So long."

The screen went blank, and the light on the key pad blinked out. Fiori unfolded from the chair and left his office, long legs scissoring down the hall and across a heatable skywalk that led to the new assembly plant.

There was no need to go there. He just wanted to look once more before calling Laura and Morrie. He liked looking at it. Simply, it excited him.

In the plant, from a catwalk, he peered out across the assembly line. It was cleaner than it needed to be; the manufacturing conditions necessary for the GPC were not especially demanding. Men and women there wore white coveralls; the place was nearly spotless, and thoroughly and softly lit without noticeable shadows. Silent circulators cycled the air, removing dust electrically.

The activity here was not intense; the chief wasn't big on intensity, just on production and quality. He preferred things calm and businesslike. Thick ceramic housings—head-high cylinders with one end open—lay on low electric jack trucks along one side, then ranged trackless down an assembly line on the other side in a sequence of increasing metamorphosis. They looked like maroon culvert sections with bases. On feeder lines that ribbed the space, workers assembled modules which other workers installed in the housings.

None of them knew what they were making, though they thought they did. Not even the U.S. Patent Office knew what they really were. The designs and models had them in miniature as part of something else entirely.

A nearby warehouse stood half full of the devices, ready for freight cars. And assembly lines were being installed in new buildings at International Falls, and at Fort Frances, Ontario.

Phase Two, to be financed by Phase One, would produce small, lightweight units in several sizes.

As he turned and started back for his office, Dave Fiori had both a sense of exhilaration and a nervous stomach.
This time
, he told himself,
it's really on. This time we're going to do it.

EIGHT

The Chamber of the House of Representatives contained almost a hundred senators and more than four hundred representatives, plus media people and guests—all the room would hold. One of them was Senator Robert Morrows, and for the moment he was hardly aware of the crowd around him. His attention had turned inward, and backward in time.

It had been hard to do anything the last week and a half. The word of the week was
futility
. For a couple of days it had seemed that the country was starting its death throes, and government had been frantic. But since Donnelly's resignation, it was as if everything in Washington had gone suddenly on
hold
—everything but the media and hopefully the Pentagon. And even the media were notably less frenetic than usual. Except in the area of emergency relief—especially food distribution—almost no one in civilian government was doing more than the absolute minimum, if that. A sort of lethargy—a waiting to see what would happen next—hung over everything. Congress was getting very little input from the agencies, and none at all from the White House. But then, Congress wasn't doing much with what it did get.

It had been a time for talking in corridors in small groups, mostly talk with little heat or any other energy. What heat there'd been was over Donnelly's use of the Emergency Powers Act to appoint his successor without congressional approval, but it was a heat that hadn't spread. Donnelly was under psychiatric care at Bethesda, and somebody had been needed fast. And as Grosberg and Kreiner had pointed out, under the circumstances they'd undoubtedly have approved the appointment without debate. This was no time for campaigning for favorite candidates, and according to Blake, the White House legislative affairs assistant, the option had been Cromwell. In fact, Blake admitted, Cromwell had recommended Haugen.

They'd find out soon enough whether the goddess Serendipity was with them, or whether Murphy's law applied.

The rumor was that Chief Justice Fechner had been so angry with the whole situation that he'd refused to swear the new president in, or attend the swearing in. So Justice Killian had done the honors. Who swore a president in was a matter of tradition, not law.

Months before the violence began, Morrows had had this recurring sinking feeling that the country was going to founder and fail. The exchange of all-out bombing raids between Iran and Iraq, that had resulted in crude oil prices of $67 a barrel, had been the trigger. Followed by wage and price controls, rationing of gasoline and fuel oil, demonstrations when work was accelerated on nuclear power plants, and violent counter-demonstrations against the antinukes...

Most of the Congress, on both sides of the aisle, had felt as he did—that the country was going down. That's why, with the collapse of Wall Street and the banks, it had been possible to so quickly ram the Emergency Powers Act through the resistive minority in each house. Just hours ahead of the first major street fighting. Some said it had triggered the fighting, but hardly anyone in Congress really believed that. There'd been some ugly riots before that.

Meanwhile here he was, Robert Jesse Morrows, Bachelor of Political Science
magna cum laude
from Cal State Northridge, junior United States senator from California, ex-state senator, ex-state assemblyman, attending a state-of-the-nation address by a president who'd never been elected to anything and apparently had no training in government or politics.

He was probably a Pentagon front, a false face for military dictatorship. Which might be what was needed. If it hadn't been for martial law, this building would be a looted, burnt-out shell right now. But sooner or later, if the country was to mean anything, if democracy and freedoms were to persist here—maybe if they were to persist anywhere—the United States would have to return to representative democracy.

Benjamin Franklin had said it after the Constitutional Convention, and Lincoln, generations later: Democracy was an experiment; there'd been no assurance it would persist, or any real instruction manual on how to keep it running decently. But what a damned shame if it should end.

Two men walked out onto the dais. The bald-headed one was Kenneth Lynch, Irish-born Speaker of the House. The bandylegged Jewish leprechaun was Senate president pro tem Louis Grosberg. Grosberg was eighty-one, but he'd aged well, standing straight and moving briskly, his shock of white hair semi-erect above bushy black brows.

Then Haugen walked out. From his seat close to the dais, Morrows examined him. The President of the United States was heavy-set, and looked solid and strong in his precisely fitted dark blue suit. He stood perhaps five feet eight. His hair had long since thinned, but there was enough of it, showing enough yellow amid the white, to mark him as a genetic blond. The skin beneath it was tanned: His mouth was wide, the broad face square rather than round, the cheekbones prominent. Thin-rimmed glasses perched on a blunt nose. Haugen had never been close to handsome, Morrows decided, but he emanated a sense of power that grew only partly from thick shoulders, chest, and neck. And a sense of relaxed self-control that aligned well with the impression of physical strength.

If people wanted a strong man with an aura of stability and judgment, the senator told himself, Haugen might be the one. Morrows glanced at his watch: 6:30 P.M. and thirteen seconds. Apparently the new president was also punctual.

He was looking down at the lectern, arranging cards or papers there. Morrows caught himself wishing this Arne Haugen well, at least for the time being. His arranging finished, the president scanned the audience, then seemed to choose someone among them to direct himself to.

"My name," he began, "is Arne Haugen. And to my surprise, as much as yours, I find myself President of the United States. I want to thank Congress for letting me speak here. This talk, however, is to the whole nation, and not to the Congress alone.

"This will not be the usual kind of inaugural address. Because while ordinarily a president takes office well-known to the people, in this case you do not know me. So while I'll be telling you how I intend to operate as president, I'll also use part of our time together to let you know something about me.

"I won't cover everything you might like me to tonight, but I promise to speak to you frequently as things develop. More frequently than has been usual for presidents.

"To begin with, let me point out that the emergency is not an emergency of violence. We were in a crashing emergency, in serious danger as a country, before the recent violence broke out. The violence was simply an offshoot of what came before, a sign of how bad things had gotten. And of course, as is commonly the case, violence made them worse.