The General's President (9 page)

He raised his hand in a half wave, half salute, then turned and left the dais, accompanied by Grosberg and Lynch. Secret Service men, who'd been standing quietly at the sides of the dais, preceded and followed them. In the audience, a few people were getting to their feet, but most still sat, sorting out what they'd heard. There was a growing buzz of quiet voices.

Morrows looked around, then within.
Well
, he thought,
I don't know how I'll feel about this tomorrow, but right now I feel better than 1 did when I got here.

NINE

Excerpt from a sermon by Reverend Delbert Coombs, of the Stalwart in God Church of the Apocalypse.

Do you believe, do you really believe, that you can fend off the wrath of God at this late day by changing your earthly ruler? No way! Man has been too long on the road to hell! It started with Eve accepting the forbidden fruit from the serpent in the Garden of Eden. But that was just the first step.

In
Revelations
, Jesus showed his beloved John how the world would end and be renewed. And in Chapter Six of Revelations, John tells us: "And behold, a white horse, and its rider had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out aconquering and to conquer." My friends, that showed John how man started out to rule other men. Man went out aconquering, and that was a long step on the road to eternal damnation.

Then Chapter Six goes on to say: "And out came another horse, bright red; its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that men should slay one another; and he was given a great sword." My friends, that was when men began to kill each other, especially in wars. We were really on our way to hell then!

And then John was shown a third horse, and he described it like this: "And behold, a black horse, and its rider had a balance in his hand; and I heard what seemed to be a voice saying, 'A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius.' A denarius was worth about twenty cents. And the balance the third rider carried wasn't the scale of justice, my friends, it was a scale of injustice. It was a scale used for selling things.
That's
when people had to start
paying
for their food, and if there'd been any hope before, that finished it off.

And there was a fourth horse shown to John. For John wrote: "And behold, a pale horse, and its rider's name was Death, and Hades followed him; and they were given power over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth."

Now friends, we all know who Death is, but you might ask who is Hades? Hades is the ruler of the grave, and he is also the ruler of wealth, the king of riches! Though people don't generally realize it, it's Hades they are bargaining with when they undertake to become wealthy!

And
Revelations
says that Death and Hades were given power to kill with the sword, and with famine and pestilence,
and by wild beasts!
Now what do you suppose those wild beasts will be, that will descend upon us in our time? In just a few years from now?

Friends, John was a simple man who lived nearly two thousand years ago. He'd never seen machinery. What the angel of God showed to John were
tanks!
Army tanks! And John saw them and figured they had to be some kind of wild beast. Just like you or I would have figured in that time, if we'd been with John and saw what he saw.

So you can see there's no use trying to change what's going to happen to the world. It's too late for that now. It's been too late for a long long time. Your only hope—YOUR ONLY HOPE—is to be
washed in the blood of the lamb!
Confess God and repent of your sins, and thou shalt spend eternity with the angels!

Or don't, and spend eternity in hell, being tortured by the devil forever.

***

In the early morning of his fifth day in office, Arne Haugen awoke with a sense of urgency and a muffled cry, wakening Lois.

"Is anything the matter?" she asked.

"Not as far as I know; nothing that wasn't the matter yesterday."

It still wasn't daylight out; the bedroom was lit as much by the small night light low on one wall as by the faint dawn filtering through curtains. He peered at his bedside clock: 0553; the alarm had been set for 0700. "Go back to sleep if you'd like," he suggested. "It's not six yet."

She responded by turning on her other side. She'd spent a long day supervising the unpacking and placement of household and personal things flown from Duluth, while establishing a working relationship with the huge household staff. Her husband got out of bed and padded to his bathroom in jockey shorts; he'd never worn pajamas one night in his life.

He went through his morning toilet routine more or less on automatic. His mind was buzzing. Something was wrong, all right: So damn much to do was what was wrong. He was off his own turf, outside his own area of expertise, and the machinery was unfamiliar.

On the first day he'd given Milstead his first order: For the time being, keep operating as if the president was out of the country somewhere.

His second order had been to remove the handsome, tradition-rich
Resolute
desk into storage and fit the Oval Office with a desk designed to accommodate a computer and accessories. And to move in a file cabinet of his own. And a coffee station.

Meanwhile he'd worked in a small adjacent room. He'd spent much of two days preparing his inaugural speech; nothing was more important at that time than saying the right things to the nation and the Congress, as best he could define the right things. And it helped him sort things out.

He'd also nominated Cromwell his vice president. Cromwell had been more than unhappy about that, but Haugen had promised to find someone else as soon as he had a chance to. Then, he said, Cromwell would be welcome to resign as V.P. He'd had Milstead send Cromwell's nomination to Congress for approval. There wasn't the kind of urgency that called for bypassing them, and it was politic to refer it to them.

After his speech, Haugen had spent the rest of the day getting oriented on White House staff operations, as they'd been handled under Donnelly. He'd willingly accepted Milstead's offer to remain; in fact he'd asked all of Donnelly's staff to stay on awhile. He himself had no political staff, nor any friends with operating experience at anything approaching this level of government. No people of his own had spent the usual months getting informed on how things were done in the Office of the President, developing their own concepts on it, in preparation for taking over. Nor was he willing to strip his Duluth offices of people he relied upon there, bringing them to Washington for training.

When he began to make changes in operating procedures, and he could already see things he'd probably change, Donnelly's people would have to adjust. No doubt he'd end up replacing some of them. But for now their experience was essential, and he'd let them operate pretty much as they were used to.

The day after that he'd spent from 0900 till 1700, including a working lunch, getting briefed by six of his cabinet secretaries or acting secretaries—State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, Interior, and Agriculture. They were holdovers too. They'd given him written summaries of their departmental operations, and after supper he'd read until midnight. Today he was scheduled for a National Security Council meeting at 1000. Then, after lunch, more cabinet secretaries.

While dressing, he played with possible strategies for keeping things manageable and him on top of them. At 0614 he left his bedroom, wearing slacks, shirt, and loafers, and started for his office. Two waiting Secret Service men got up from their chairs when he entered the Stair Hall, replied to his brisk "Good morning," and fell in beside him.

The corridor to the Executive Wing took him past the White House press area. When the shooting began and martial law was declared, it had been vacated on the stated basis that the fewer extraneous people there were in the White House, the less confusion and distractions there would be, and security would be easier to maintain. At this gray and silent hour, the sense of vacancy in the corridor was profound.

The Oval Office, by contrast, seemed friendly. He left the ceiling light dark, turning on only his desk lamp. Somehow the room seemed more intimate that way. Then he began quietly to dictate tentative operating policies and guidelines, the Haugen version, for the Office of the President. When his secretary came in at eight, he'd give her the tape to type. He'd have her give the written version to Milstead, with a request for his comments.

And he'd ask for her comments too; a secretary is likely to know things about an operation that the boss might never notice.

He worked fast. By 0640 he'd done as much on that as he was prepared to, and started diagraming cabinet departments as he remembered them from his briefings. At 0700 the black pencil flow chart of existing State Department operations, as he understood them, was taking on a scattering of red lines—changes were beginning to grow out of the president's creative mind. And on a ruled yellow pad, a list of questions was taking form.

Then the First Serving Man came in. Apparently, Haugen decided, the domestic staff had a system for knowing when the president was up and about.

"Sir?"

"What is it, Jerry?"

"Yesterday the First Lady said to ask you where you'd like breakfast served. President and Mrs. Donnelly usually took breakfast in the family sitting room to the morning news, but you can have it served anywhere you'd like."

"For today, right here will be fine. Mrs. Haugen is sleeping in this morning. I'd like a two egg omelet, with mushrooms, ripe olives, and Mozzarella. And two slices of diet whole wheat toast, well buttered. No potatoes for breakfast. Orange juice and a battery of vitamins. Any problems with that?"

"I'm sure there won't be, sir. Would eight o'clock be about right? I can have it here by seven-thirty if you'd like."

"Eight o'clock is fine today; I don't have any appointments till ten. But as a general rule—Hm-m. I'd better talk with Mrs. Haugen about that. She's my head of household."

"Yes sir." Jerry left, and Haugen continued to modify, on paper and conditionally, the Departments of State and Treasury. He didn't take what he was doing very seriously at this point. As much as anything it was to exercise the knowledge he'd gotten in yesterday's briefings, make it really his, and identify gaps in his understanding.

His secretary arrived at almost the same time as the omelet, and so did the daily intelligence summary from the CIA. It shared his attention with breakfast. Some of the information wasn't too meaningful to him yet; he lacked contexts for it. As he chewed and read, he promised himself more relaxed breakfasts, once he got his feet more firmly on the ground.

When he'd finished eating, he buzzed his secretary, who came in while he stacked his dishes on the tray. "Ms. Martinelli," he said, "I'd like an appointment with Senator Harley Borden for seven this evening, if possible. And one with Senator Kanazawa for tomorrow morning at 11 A.M. And phone Professor Dell Krzinsky"—he spelled the name for her—"of Penn State University; ask him to call me at nine this evening. If any of them ask what it's about, tell them I'm looking for advice."

She left, and he continued reading the summary, scarcely noticing when Jerry took away the dishes. It wasn't as long as he'd half expected, and he absorbed it rapidly. The Iranian army had executed some of the top people in the Iraqi government and military, but beyond that, the feared post-conquest bloodbath wasn't taking place, at least not by the Iranian military. Some militant Iraqi Shiites had killed some government officials, but that seemed to be an evening of old scores, not the beginning of any wide-scale sectarian massacre.

Haugen shook his head. The Iranians had been nothing if not persistent. The war had been going on since—when?—about 1980, with occasional periods of vigorous activity and longer spells of logistical regrouping. At times it had seemed it would peter out and die. Then, under the leadership of the Ayatollah Jalal, Iran had reorganized both its government and its military. And when they'd struck again, their manpower predominance had been decisive.

More worrisome, a Soviet army group was on manuevers in the Caucausus. Another had moved into the Afghan SSR—what had earlier been known as Afghanistan—and encamped between Herat and Tir Pol, which the map showed within one hundred miles of the Iranian border. It was believed—or hoped—that these were only posturings to intimidate Iran, in case the victorious Ayatollah had designs on Kuwait. The Soviets had condemned Iran as "anti-revolutionary"—certainly a weird view of Iran—and considered it an enemy of the USSR.

He'd nearly finished the intelligence report when his phone buzzed. He touched the blinking key. "What is it, Ms. Martinelli?"

"Father Schwanze is here, Mr. President. He was President Donnelly's White House chaplain, and he'd like to see you if you have a moment."

Haugen wondered what that was about; the White House organization chart showed no chaplain.

"Send him in," he said.

The man who entered was perhaps a decade younger than Haugen, but frail, and wore clerical garb—a suit not quite black and certainly not new, with clerical collar.

"Good morning, Mr. President," he said. His voice was more robust than his body. "I'm Father Albert Schwanze. President Donnelly felt a need for a White House chaplain. I'd been his parish priest back in Colorado, and he arranged for me to be assigned here. I was away on sick leave when he resigned, and I've come to get my things. Unless of course you'd like me to stay."

His gaze was direct, his manner confident, and despite the name, the man seemed somehow Irish to Haugen.

"Although, from your origins," Schwanze continued, "I imagine you're Lutheran."

"Thank you, Father," Haugen said. "I hadn't thought about a chaplain; hadn't realized that was part of the establishment here."

"It hasn't been; President Donnelly was an exception."

"Hmm. Thank you for bringing the subject up. I have a friend..."

He didn't finish, changed directions. "I suppose you have friends here among the staff."