Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (13 page)

 
          
“Are
you going to mention it in the State of the Union address?”

 
          
“I
do not intend to make a State of the Union address,” Thom said.

           
“What?”
the others exclaimed,
almost in unison.

 
          
“Mr.
President, you can’t be serious,” Kercheval said, his voice almost agitated.
“Skipping the inaugural was bad enough—”

 
          
“I
did not ‘skip’ the inaugural, Ed. I just chose not to attend.”

 
          
“It
was political suicide, Mr. President.” Kercheval insisted. “It made you look
like a laughingstock in front of the entire world!”

 
          
“I
got my entire Cabinet confirmed in two weeks, and by the end of this month I’ll
have every federal judge position filled,” the President said “I don't care if
the world thought it was crazy, and
l
don’t care about political
suicide, because there is virtually no political party behind me.”

 
          
“But
not giving a speech before Congress—”

 
          
“Nothing
mandates either an inaugural at the Capitol or a speech before Congress,” the
President reminded him. “The Constitution mandates a swearing-in and an oath of
office, which l did. The Constitution mandates an annual report to Congress on
the state of the union and my legislative agenda, and that’s what I intend to
do. I will deliver my budget to Congress at the same time.

 
          
“You
think it’s political suicide—I say that it tells Congress and tells the
American people I mean business. Congress knew I was serious about forming and
running my government, and they helped me get my Cabinet confirmed in record
time. My judges will be sworn in in months, and in some cases years, before the
previous administration’s were.”

 
          
Kercheval
still looked worried. Thom stood, clasped him on the shoulder, and said seriously,
“It looks suicidal to you, Ed, because you’ve been stained by
Washington
politics, which most times bears little
resemblance to either the law or the Constitution.”

 
          
“Sir?”
Kercheval asked, letting a bit more anger seep into his voice. “Surely you’re
not
implying ... ?”

 
          
“I
don’t know
Washington
politics,” the President went on, ignoring
Kercheval’s rising anger. “All I know is the Constitution and a little bit of
the law. But you know something? That’s all I need to know. That’s why I know I
can choose not to show up for an inaugural or a State of the Union speech, and
have complete confidence that I’m doing the right thing. That kind of
confidence rubs off on others. I hope it'll rub off on you.’* He went back to
his desk, sat down, and began to type again on the computer keyboard at his
desk. “We meet with the congressional leadership this morning,” he said aloud,
without looking again at Kercheval. “First conference call is scheduled for
later this afternoon, isn't it. Ed?”

 
          
“Yes,
sir. The prime ministers of the NATO countries,” Kercheval replied, completely
taken aback by the President’s words. “It’ll be a video teleconference from the
Cabinet Room at three
p.m.
Tonight’s video teleconference is with the
Asian allies, scheduled for eight
p.m.
Tomorrow will be the second round
at ten
a.m.
with the nonaligned countries of Europe and Central and
South America.”

 
          
“Any
advance word?”

 
          
“The
general assumption is that you’re going to announce the removal of peacekeeping
forces from
Bosnia
,
Macedonia
, and Kosovo,” Kercheval replied. "That
rumor started last week. Already,
France
and
Great Britain
have announced their intention to pull out
if we pull out,
Russia
has already hinted they will pull out of Kosovo, but our formal
announcement might make them change their mind.
Germany
will likely stay in both Kosovo and
Bosnia
.”

 
          
“Why
is that?”

 
          
“It’s
right on
Germany
’s doorstep, and the Balkans have been of great German interest for
centuries,” Kercheval said. “Unfortunately, most of the historical connections
are negative ones, especially the more recent ones. The Third Reich received a
lot of support from sympathizers in the Balkans in their quest to wipe out
‘unclean’ races like Jews and Gypsies.
Germany
has continued to be a close supporter of
Croatia
— they fully sponsored
Croatia
’s admittance into the United Nations, long
before their break from
Yugoslavia
, and they have supported
Croatia
’s attempts to get land and citizen’s rights
from
Bosnia
. Besides,
Germany
sees itself as the one and only counterbalance to Russian encroachments
in the Balkans. They’ll stay.”

           
“I need to know for certain,”
President Thom said. “Let's get Minister Schramm on the line before the
teleconference. I’m committed to our plan, but I don't want to leave our allies
flat-footed.”

 
          
“Mr
President, this will simply not be taken any other way except as the
United States
withdrawing from an unwmnable situation in
the Balkans,” Kercheval said. “It will absolutely throw
U.S.
foreign policy into chaos!”

 
          
“I
disagree. Ed—”

 
          
‘Our
allies will see it as nothing but the
United States
turning tail and running away,” Kercheval
went on angrily. “We have risked too many lives over there to just turn our
backs now!”

 
          
“
Enough
.
Mr. Kercheval,” the President said. The room was instantly quiet. Everyone in
the Oval Office noticed it— that little bit of an edge to the President’s
voice, the one many people knew was under the surface but had just not been
seen before.

 
          
The
President was an ex-Army Special Forces officer, well- trained m commando tactics
and experienced in various methods of killing an enemy, and a man doesn't live
that kind of life without certain traits being indelibly ingrained into the
psyche. Thom’s political opponents saw this as an opportunity to try to portray
the upstart as a potential mad dog and had exposed his military background in
grisly, bloodcurdling detail. They had maintained, and the Pentagon finally
confirmed, that as an Army Special Forces platoon leader, Thom led over two
dozen search-and-destroy missions in Kuwait, Iraq, and—secretly—into Iran,
during Operation Desert Storm. Needless to say, the fact that
U.S.
forces had been secretly in
Iran
during the war, with
America
promising not to threaten
Iran
as long as it stayed neutral, did not sit
well with
Iran
or with many nations in the
Persian Gulf
region.

 
          
As
a first lieutenant, Thomas N. “TNT” Thom had commanded a Special Forces platoon
tasked with sneaking deep into various enemy-held territories and lazing
targets for precision-guided bombing missions. He and his men were authorized
to use any and all means necessary to get close enough to a target to shine it
with a laser or mark it with a laser frequency generator so that the target
could be hit by laser-guided bombs dropped from Army, Air Force, and Navy attack
planes or helicopters.

 
          
His
own accounts and those of his men told the story: he had pulled the trigger of
a weapon or withdrawn a blade in combat over a hundred times, and had confirmed
kills on over a hundred men. Most were from relatively short distances, less
than fifteen yards, using a silenced pistol. Some were from almost a mile away,
where the bullet reaches its target before the sound. A few had been from
knife-fighting distance, close enough so Thom could feel his victim's final
gush of breath on his hand as he drove a knife into an unprotected neck or
brain stem. This didn’t include the countless number of enemy forces killed by
the laser-guided bombs he and his team had sent to their targets—the estimated
final "‘head count” was well into triple digits.

 
          
But
rather than horrifying the voters, as the opposition candidates had hoped, it
had drawn attention to him. At first, of course, it had been the
spectacle—everyone w anted to see w hat a real-life assassin looked like. But
if they had come to see the monster, they had stayed to hear the message. The
message had soon become a campaign, w hich had become a race, w hich had become
a president. But though most had never seen the monster, they assumed it still
existed.

 
          
They
had caught a glimpse of it just now.

 
          
“I'd
like to speak with Minister Schramm after the meeting w ith the congressional
leadership, but before the videoconference,” the President said, and this time
it was an order, not a request or suggestion. “Set it up. Please.” At that, the
meeting came to an abrupt and very' uncomfortable end.

Office of the President, The Kremlin,
Russian Federation

The next morning

           
“It cannot be true,” the president
said. He took a sip of coffee, then set the cup back on its delicate china
saucer and stared off through the window of his office into the cold rain
outside. “It is amazing what a few weeks can do.”

           
“The report has not yet been
confirmed, Mr. President,” Army General Nikolai Stepashin replied, refilling
his coffee cup. “It may not be true. It may be an elaborate hoax, or a security
test, or a joke." The general, wearing a civilian suit too big for him and
a tie too small, still looked very much like the grizzled field commander that
he was. He downed the coffee, his third that morning, but craved more. “But the
information in the intercept was so crazy, and the Chancellor’s reaction so
strong, that I thought it best to pass it along.”

 
          
“Tell
me what this means,” Valentin Gennadievich Sen’kov, president of the
Russian Federation
, said. “Someone please tell me what in
hell
this means.” Sometimes, Sen’kov thought, the more he learned, the less he knew,
and he understood even less.

 
          
Fifty-two-year-old
Valentin Gennadievich Sen’kov was the leader of the Russia All-Fatherland
Party, formerly the Liberal Democratic Party under Sen’kov’s mentor and friend,
President Vitaly Velichko. But when Velichko was killed in the joint
American-Ukrainian attack on Moscow following Russia’s attempt to reunite its
former empire by force, Sen’kov, a former KGB agent and former prime minister,
had been named acting president. He had been quickly voted out of office in the
national elections that soon followed; his name and that of his party had been
so tainted by Velichko’s failure that he’d had the name of his political party
changed so the Russian people might not recognize it and associate it with past
failures. He’d held on to his seat in the Federation Council, the Russian
Parliament’s upper house, by his very fingernails.

 
          
When
the reformist government of Boris Yeltsin had failed to lift
Russia
out of its economic, political, and morale
doldrums, Sen’kov and his new Russia All-Fatherland Party had been called upon
to support the government and help restore the citizens’ confidence in it.
Yeltsin had been able to hold on to power only by bringing back Sen’kov, and
with him a few vestiges of the old Soviet-style authoritarian government.
Sen’kov had finally been back in the Kremlin, no longer an outcast, first as
foreign minister and then as prime minister. When Yeltsin, helpless in his
alcoholic haze, had been forced to resign in disgrace, Valentin Sen’kov had
been chosen by a unanimous vote of Parliament as acting president. His
election, just four months before the
U.S.
elections, had been a landslide victory for
the conservative NeoCommunist Party.