Separation of Power (10 page)

The room fell deathly silent. All of them had sat through enough intelligence briefings to know the level of carnage just one of the bombs could cause. Each of the three individually was more than sufficient to level Tel Aviv.

“Mr. President, none of us are happy about this. Least of all the leaders of my country.” Freidman paused for a second before continuing. “I have been sent here by my prime minister to inform you that we will not allow these weapons to be deployed.” Freidman’s tone was calm but determined. Though he had been sent to Washington to get the Americans to do Israel’s dirty work, there was no mistaking the resolve of his people. If the Americans failed to act, Israel would.

President Hayes nodded slowly. He had already deduced as much. There was no way Israel would let a megalomaniac like Saddam join the nuclear club. President Hayes wasn’t about to allow it, and he was more than five thousand miles away. The Israelis were separated by only five hundred miles.

Finally, President Hayes asked, “When are you heading back to Israel?”

“I leave this evening.”

Hayes drummed his fingers on the table while he thought of the next step. “Mr. Freidman, I appreciate you making the trip. Could you wait outside for a minute while I have a word with my advisors?”

Freidman collected the photos and placed them back in his briefcase. When he had left the room Hayes took off his suit coat and began pacing. He thought about taking his new director designate of
the CIA to task for allowing him to be blindsided, and then decided it wasn’t fair, and in the end probably counterproductive. Instead he said, “Around the horn. I want to hear opinions on what we just heard. Starting with you, Valerie.” The president stopped and looked at his chief of staff.

“I think before we do anything we need to confirm that this is really the case.”

“Oh, it’s for real,” moaned General Flood. The bear-size warrior had his elbows on the table and his face buried in his hands. “They would never send Ben Freidman all the way to Washington if it wasn’t. Besides, we know how eager Saddam is to get his hands on one of these things. He’s just found a way with the help of the North Koreans to cut a few years out of the process.”

“Michael?” asked Hayes.

The national security advisor replied, “We need to make sure this time line is correct, and then we need to get a guarantee from the Israelis that they will not act before we have time to come up with a solution.”

“General?”

Flood lifted his face from his hands. “I hate to say it, Mr. President, but we need to level this facility, and my guess is Tomahawks aren’t going to do the job. We are going to have to put planes over Baghdad. We might lose some people, but they are definitely going to lose people. I mean they put the damn thing under a hospital for a reason. They don’t think we have the stomach for it.” Flood was extremely concerned. He had been warning everyone who would listen about
the problem of nuclear proliferation for years. He leaned forward and looked at the president’s chief of staff. “I’m telling you right now, Valerie, I know how your mind works. You’re ten steps ahead of the rest of us. You’re thinking of the political fallout this will create. You’re imagining the reporters standing in front of the hospital while they pull the twisted bodies of children from the rubble. Well, let me replace it with some different pictures. Imagine an entire U.S. Navy carrier battle group patrolling the Persian Gulf. Now blink your eyes and they’re gone. Over seven thousand men and women vaporized. Imagine a nuclear warhead exploding over the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. Now imagine the entire world economy plunged into a depression because those oil fields are rendered useless for the next hundred years due to radioactivity.”

Flood paused just long enough to catch his breath. “That’s just for starters. Now imagine Saddam throwing two of these things at Israel, figuring he can wipe them off the map before they have the chance to retaliate. There’s only one problem with that plan. The Israelis aren’t stupid. They keep their nukes spread out in secure underground hardened bunkers. Some of those weapons will survive, and whoever is left won’t hesitate to return the favor to Saddam. We’ll have a full-scale nuclear war in the Middle East. The initial blasts will kill millions. God only knows how many more will die from the fallout, but it won’t be pretty. The region will shut down, oil production will screech to a halt, and the economic tidal wave will make the Great Depression look like a hiccup.”

The president had stopped pacing halfway through the general’s rant. Looking at the military’s top officer, Hayes was slightly unsettled by the fact that he agreed with everything the man had just said. So much so that a brief shiver ran down his spine. Finally looking to Kennedy he asked, “Irene?”

Kennedy also agreed with everything that had been said so far. “They want us to take care of the problem for them.”

“You mean Israel?”

“Yes.” Kennedy folded her arms across her chest. “But make no mistake about it—if we don’t act, they will.”

“Shit.” The president walked back to his chair and sat. He tried to decide on a course of action. Leveling a hospital with God only knows how many innocent civilians inside was not a pleasant thought, but taking no action at all, and being confronted with one of the scenarios that General Flood had described, was horrific.

For the first time in his presidency he was honestly scared. He would have to call the Israeli prime minister at some point, but that could wait for a day. The list of people he would have to tell domestically was long, but due to secrecy concerns, most of them would have to wait until the last possible moment. The best move right now was to delegate and manage.

As if he were pulled out of a trance, the president lifted his head and said, “Irene, I want you to take Freidman back to Langley and debrief him personally. Get as much information as you can from him, and
then as quietly as possible try to confirm it. But, before you bring any of your people in on this, I want you to call me and tell me what you’ve learned.”

Pointing at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the president said, “General, put your best people on this, and give me some options. I want to be prepared to move at a moment’s notice if needed.”

“Whoa,” cautioned Valerie Jones. “Let’s slow down a bit. Don’t you think we should explore some diplomatic options? We’ve made a lot of progress with the North Koreans lately. Maybe we could put some pressure on them to pull their people out. I mean, hell, we have an awfully big aid package we can hold over their heads.” Jones stopped when the president started shaking his head.

“We’re not going to call North Korea, we’re not going to call Saddam, the Jordanians or the Saudis, and we most definitely are not going to call the U.N. If Saddam gets the slightest whiff that we’re on to him, it’s over. He’ll move those bombs, and we’re back to square one.” The president shook his head. “No. We’ve given him enough chances. He’s been told to stop pursuing weapons of mass destruction, and he has ignored the international community at every turn. This time he gets no warning. Those bombs have to be taken out.”

C
ongressman Albert Rudin walked through the men’s locker room of the Congressional Country Club with a white towel thrown over his shoulder and a pair of shower sandals on his feet. Rudin grew up in the days where swimming at the YMCA required literally nothing. Swimsuits were not just optional, they were forbidden. A towel was for drying oneself, not wearing. Consequently the sixty-eight-year-old politician from Stamford, Connecticut, was not shy about parading through the locker room buck naked. Gravity had taken its toll over the years, and his skin hung loose from his bony runner’s body. It was not a pretty sight.

Rudin normally worked out at the congressional gym on the Hill, but today he wanted to talk to one of his colleagues from the Senate, and he wanted to do so in private. That was why he had requested that his friend meet him in the steam room of the golf club. The locker room was a virtual ghost town from November to March every year, and that was what Rudin wanted. A recent string of events in his life had caused him to reassess who his allies were. Rudin opened the door to the steam room and stood there for approximately five seconds. His purpose was to
let enough steam out and make sure no one was lurking in the room.

Finally satisfied that he was alone, he entered the room and laid his towel down on the tile bench. With great deliberation he began kneading his loose skin as if he were working some lethal poison from his pores. Representative Albert Rudin was a cranky, crass old politician who was having a very bad year. The worst he could remember in a long time, and it was all the fault of a centrist president who had turned his back on the base of his party. Albert Rudin had been a loyal soldier to the Democratic Party for over thirty years, and this just wasn’t fair. All he was trying to do was his job.

Rudin was the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. It had been his one request for all of his hard work. It was not much to ask for. The House Intelligence Committee wasn’t one of Washington’s glory jobs. Most of their meetings were conducted behind closed doors, and rarely were cameras ever allowed in the hearing room. If Rudin had been greedy like the others he would have asked to sit on the Appropriations or Judicial committees. But he hadn’t. He had simply asked to run the Intelligence Committee. All he wanted to do was serve his party. It was Albert Rudin’s goal in life to see the CIA shut down and dismantled. In his mind there was no bigger waste in the federal budget than the black hole that was known as Langley.

They spent billions a year on gathering intelligence, and what did the government get in return? Nothing. The vaunted CIA had failed to predict the
two most significant events of the last twenty years: the fall of the Soviet Union and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Rudin sometimes felt like he was losing his mind. It seemed that the more vociferously he pointed out Langley’s failures, the more people shunned him. It drove him nuts. It was right there for all to see. The CIA had been feeding them grossly overestimated reports on the Soviet economy and military preparedness for years, and in Rudin’s keen mind there was only one reason for them to do so. The CIA and the Pentagon were conspiring against their own government. They didn’t want their budgets cut so they went out and grossly exaggerated the strength of the Evil Empire.

Rudin wiped a thick layer of sweat from his face and cleared his throat with a rumbling hack. Turning to the far corner, he deposited his spit with a well-aimed shot.
It was probably that damn Reagan’s fault,
Rudin thought. Reagan was to blame for most things in Rudin’s mind. If there was ever a face that could be put on evil it would be that of Ronald Reagan. Rudin had little doubt that the former president had directed the CIA and the Joint Chiefs to inflate the Soviet Union’s numbers so they could get the budget increases they were after. After Reagan it had been his successor Bush, a former director of the CIA, who had decided to cozy up to Saddam Hussein. The maniacal leader went from being a trusted ally to enemy number one overnight. It was just another example of how duplicitous and incompetent the CIA was.

Rudin was right. He knew it in his deepest being. The others were wrong. Even members of his party
had turned their back on him and it was all because of that damn Thomas Stansfield and President Hayes. At least Stansfield was dead, but that didn’t solve his problems. Now he had Kennedy to deal with. He had to figure out some way to stop her. She couldn’t be allowed to take over at the CIA. They needed someone who would go in there and tear the roof off, exposing all of the vermin to the light of day. Rudin would take great pleasure in watching them scurry for cover. He needed someone he could trust as director. He needed someone who would cooperate with his committee when he held hearings. He needed someone who would clean house.

Kennedy was not the answer, but his hands were tied. Just weeks earlier, he had received the most vicious ass-chewing of his life at the hands of President Hayes. The rest of the party leadership had been present for the event. In Rudin’s mind it had all been unwarranted. All he had been trying to do was stop Thomas Stansfield from turning the reins of power at the CIA over to Irene Kennedy. The only thing that would accomplish would be to replace one liar with another, and Rudin had been lied to enough. Thomas Stansfield was probably the most adept liar Washington had ever seen. He had been lying to Rudin’s committee for the better part of two decades, and Rudin now thanked God every morning that Stansfield was finally dead.

That, however, didn’t help the fact that the president had announced Dr. Kennedy as his successor. Rudin had tried to prevent that. During Stansfield’s final days, Rudin had met with Senator Hank Clark,
the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Secretary of State Charles Midleton. Midleton was a good fellow Democrat who shared Rudin’s concerns about the CIA. It was an agency run amok, an agency that was continually getting in the way of diplomatic relations and negotiations. It was in Midleton’s best interest to replace Stansfield with someone who was not so loyal to the CIA. This common bond against the CIA was why they had asked to meet with Senator Clark. Clark was a Republican after all, and in charge of the very committee that would have to confirm or block Kennedy’s nomination. He was their trump card in torpedoing her career. Clark was really the only Republican that Rudin could count as a friend, the only one who he could actually tolerate.

Rudin felt that they could reason with Clark. Show him why it was in his best interest, in the Republicans’ best interest to kill Kennedy’s nomination before it ever got to his committee. Clark had been sympathetic, but ultimately uncooperative, and that left Rudin and Midleton to stop the changing of the guard. Rudin’s first move was to call Kennedy before his committee in an attempt to catch her in a lie. At the same time Secretary of State Midleton began to use his significant resources and clout to undermine the support for Kennedy.