Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (70 page)

 
          
“How
did you know that?” Patrick asked. “And why in hell did you accept early
retirement? You haven’t done anything wrong—in fact, after that rescue in
Russia
, you’re a genuine hero. I’m the one who
screwed the pooch. You didn’t punch out because of me. did you?”

 
          
“With
all due respect, old buddy,” Hal said, with a broad smile, “I don’t do shit for
no one unless they give me some serious money or some serious humma-humma, if
you catch my drift. But if I was going to trash my career for anyone, it would
be for you. How’s that?”

 
          
“Sounds
like bullshit to me. What is going on, Hal? How did you know where I was? How
did you know what happened to me? I just found out ten minutes ago.”

 
          
“My
new employer knows everything. Patrick,” Hal said. “He wants to talk with you,
too.”

 
          
Patrick’s
warning antennae were tingling like crazy. Having trusted friends like Marcia
and Hal together helped, but this strong feeling of caution couldn’t be
ignored. “You know this guy, Hal?” he asked. “Did you check him out first?”

 
          
“No.”

 
          
“
No?
You stepped into a car with a guy you don't know and you didn’t check him out
first?”

 
          
“I
said I didn’t check him out. and I’ve never met him—I know
of
him. But
you
definitely
know him.”

 
          
Patrick
looked at Hal suspiciously, but with a gleam of interest in his eyes now. Hal
noticed it, stepped aside, and let him peek inside. He saw Chris Wohl inside,
also in civilian clothes, looking moody and inconvenienced as always, and he
wondered if the Marine Corps veteran had retired also. Then he looked in the
very front of the passenger compartment—and his chin dropped open in sheer
surprise.

 
          
“C’mon
in, General McLanahan,” the man said, with a broad smile. “We need to talk.”

The Oval Office, The White House,
Washington
,
D.C.

Several minutes later

 
          
“The
Joint Chiefs are meeting right now at the Pentagon,” Secretary of Defense
Robert Goff said, as he was ushered into the Oval Office. “They’ll be ready
with some recommendations for you shortly. It’s pretty clear what happened:
someone in
Russia
leaked the information about the downed bomber to the world press. The
State Department tells me several world leaders have already called our
embassies asking for an explanation. The press is going nuts. Every bit of
information they’ve ever had about Dreamland is being trotted out and fitted
together with the information the Russians are publicizing, and it’s all coming
together. Dreamland has been blown wide open.”

 
          
President
Thomas Thom put down the papers he was looking at, motioned to the sofa, and
nodded. Goff took his usual place on the sofa; the President continued to pace
the floor, looking thoughtful if not concerned. “It’ll still be a classified installation,”
the President said. “Only now, everyone will know it’s classified.”

 
          
“If
I didn't know you better, Thomas. I'd say you were just trying to make a
funny,” Goff said. He knew, of course, that he wasn't. “Thomas?” Goff prompted,
the concern evident in his voice. “What are we going to do?”

 
          
“Admit
to it. of course,” Thom replied. “Admit that it was our bomber, our aircraft,
on a spy mission inside
Russia
. We were trying to rescue a spy that had
valuable information for us. We're going to do exactly what I told Sen'kov I'd
do—go in front of the American people, in front of the world, and admit
everything.”

 
          
“I
disagree. I think we shouldn't say anything,” Goff said. “The Russians trumped
us. Anything we say now will sound like we're making excuses.”

 
          
“We're
not making excuses—we’re offering explanations,” the President said. “We can't
deny any of it. Bob. We knew we were working off borrowed time anyway.
Expecting the Russians to sit on the intelligence bonanza of the decade was too
much to hope for. We had to face the music eventually. I’m surprised the
Russians waited this long.”

 
          
“Then
why in hell didn't we do something more?” Goff snapped.

 
          
“Because
our objective always was to get our men and women back home,” the President
said. “The Russians had their hands on two American aviators from a top-secret
weapons research facility. They could have had the other bomber, too—they
almost did. They could have sent a hundred planes after them. We made them
hesitate with a half-baked threat that shouldn’t have worked but did. All we
needed was Enough hesitation to get our people clear. I expected Sen’kov to
renege on the deal the next morning. Nobody won, but the important thing was,
we
didn't lose."
He punctuated the last sentence with an angry glare.

 
          
“Congress
is going to roast us,” Goff said. “The media is going to chew on us for weeks,
maybe months.”

 
          
“It
doesn’t matter.”

 
          
“Doesn’t
matter?” Goff asked incredulously. “Don’t you get it. Thomas? Don’t you understand?
Congress, the American people, the world will think we are completely inept.
They’ll think we don’t care about our allies, that we’re afraid, that we can’t
protect ourselves. If we can’t protect our own people, how can we protect our
friends and allies?”

 
          
“Our
job is not to protect the rest of the world. Bob.” Thom said. “We are not the
defenders of freedom. We are one nation among hundreds of other nations around
the planet.”

 
          
“Are
you joking. Thomas?” Goff asked. “You are the president of the
United States
. You
are
the leader of the free
world. This office is the center of hope, freedom, and democracy for billions
of people around the globe—

 
          
“I
don’t buy any of that, Robert—I never did. and you know it,” the President
said. “This office stands for one thing and one thing only: the executive
branch of the
United States
, one of three branches of the American
government. The Constitution specifies exactly what this office is and what my
responsibilities are, and I'm quite certain the Constitution does not authorize
me to be the leader of the free world, defender of liberty,
truth,
justice,
or of anything else except to faithfully uphold and defend the Constitution. I
am the president, that’s it.”

 
          
“It’s
not a Constitutional thing, Thomas. It's .. . it’s symbolic,” Goff said
uncomfortably, irritated that he had to explain this concept to his friend.
“The president of the
United States
is a symbol of democracy and freedom. It’s
not legislated or conferred upon you—you’ve got it because people have come to
believe it.”

 
          
“So
I don’t have a choice? That’s nonsense. I have a choice, and I choose not to be
a symbol of something like that.” But it was obvious he wanted to change the
subject—and besides, he didn’t like arguing with his friend.

 
          
Thom
motioned to the reports on the EB-1C aircraft coming in from intelligence
analysts and experts. “All this stuff about how our country has been
compromised by the Russians revealing information on the bomber? It’s all
nonsense. These analysts put all that gloom-and-doom stuff in their report
simply because if they underestimated the impact of the news, they’d be judged
unreliable in their estimates. They’d rather be known for predicting the worst
and hoping for the best than the other way around. The information reveals
nothing
.
Robert. It s a sensational episode that in the end affects nothing.”

 
          
Robert
Goff stared disbelievingly at his old friend, then shook his head. “What’s
happened to you, Thomas?” he breathed.

 
          
“I
was wondering the same about you, Robert,” Thom said, angry that he had decided
not to engage his friend in a halfphilosophical, half-personal argument, but
that Goff had come back wanting more anyway. “I thought we both believed in the
same things—smaller government, fewer foreign entanglements, less reliance on
military power.
America
first, foremost, and always—that was our vision. The office—yours and
mine—seems to have diverted your attention.”

 
          
Goff
ignored Thom’s observations. He chuckled and gave him a wry smile. “I remember
when you got back from Desert Storm, when I brought Amelia to
Dover
to be there when you got off that plane
with your unit. There you were, with your ‘chocolate chip’ battle dress
uniform, beret, desert combat boots, still with your web gear on like you were
getting ready to go into battle again. You looked like John Wayne and Superman
rolled into one. You had several dozen confirmed kills to your credit, and
regular folks treated you like the second coming of Elvis—twenty years earlier,
they would have spit on you if they even
thought
you were military. You
cried when those people cheered for you. You cried when the band started
playing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ and the crowds broke through the barricades and
surrounded you.” Thom had stopped his pacing and was staring off into space as
if reliving that moment.

 
          
“You
were proud of your men and the Army,” Goff went on. “You went back and thanked
every one of your men for their service You got down on your knees on the
tarmac and thanked the ones who didn’t come back. You were a proud man,
Thomas.”

 
          
“I’m
still proud of our soldiers,” he shot back, almost defensively. “I’m proud
enough of them that I refuse to send them away from home just so they can be
‘trip wires’ or so we can maintain a ‘presence’ in some foreign country.
Soldiers are meant to fight and kill to defend their country, not to fight and
die for someone else's country, or for the latest slogan or jingle or buzzword,
or so we can police a country whose people want nothing more than to kill one
another, or because the media saturates our senses with scenes of downtrodden
people supposedly in need of liberation. I won't follow the pattern of past
leaders and send troops overseas just because we
can,
or because someone
believes we should because we’re the leaders of the free world,”

 
          
Goff’s
half-smile was vanishing rapidly. “Now you’ve turned into a cynical
reactionary. It’s like you hate everything you were back then, and you’re
driven to see it all destroyed.”

 
          
“Not
destroyed—changed,” Thom said. “Changed into what it was meant to be. Changed
into what the Founding Fathers wanted it to be.”

 
          
“That
was then, Thomas,” Goff argued. “That was the eighteenth-century world, where
time was as much a barrier as a mountain range or an ocean. Now information
travels at the speed of light into almost every home on the planet. The world
is a far more dangerous place than ever before, and we need every advantage we
can take.”

 
          
“You
can’t convince me, Robert;” Thom said. “I’m not going to change my philosophy
of how to run this government simply because a military plane gets shot down,
an espionage operation is uncovered and exposed, or some country thinks they
can get away with invading and occupying a smaller, weaker nation.”

 
          
“
‘Think they can get away with it,' Thomas?” Goff asked. “Thomas, they’ve
already
‘gotten away with it.’ It’s a done deal.
Russia
has sent over twenty thousand troops into
the Balkans in the past two weeks alone. None of those nations can do or say
anything against them. How are we going to deal with
Russia
now? They’ve taken over
Macedonia
, they are staging massive resupply missions
and setting up huge hardware and ammunition depots in
Bulgaria
and
Serbia
, and they’re conducting cross-border raids
into
Albania
that look suspiciously like another invasion operation—the Germans are
virtually stepping aside, letting them cruise anywhere in the Balkans. We’ve
implicated them in mass murder, surprise attacks, and even genocide. Someone
has to stop them.”