Code Word: Paternity, A Presidential Thriller (12 page)

Guarini winced
and thought, here it comes!

Griffith
leaned forward, his forearms resting on
the table. “That’s exactly the key, Aaron, and I think we can deal with it
quickly!

“We have no choice but to treat North Korea as
if this entire murderous attack was their doing. In fact, we don’t have any
evidence that it wasn’t! We don’t think Kim would dare, but that’s just an
assumption. The only
evidence
we have
is that a North Korean nuke destroyed Las
Vegas. That’s what you should tell the world, Mr.
President! Let Kim try to save his skin by implicating others—if he can.”

He’s
wrong, but I’ll tell him privately,
thought Martin. “Bruce, you’ve put forward a bold, intriguing approach there.
Put the squeeze on Kim and see if he throws someone under the bus.”

Martin looked to Easterly, thinking he’d
save Battista for the closing argument that would make his case. “Eric, let me
hear your thoughts on that.”

“Mr. President, we have to be pragmatic.
During our recent Principals meeting, the vice president urged that same
approach, but he also spoke to a larger issue: deterrence. Among ourselves we
should acknowledge that nuclear deterrence has failed. If it’s not restored,
governments with nuclear weapons may conclude there’s little risk in providing
nukes to terrorists. If we don’t restore deterrence, Las Vegas could represent not only a disaster
in its own right, but the first step in the destruction of our country!”

“And how should
we do that?” said the president, eyebrows raised.

“By hitting back hard at North Korea,
Mr. President. And there’s where we have to be practical. We have to act within
our means. I don’t believe that invading North Korea and defeating the
regime in a conventional war is within our means. It would take longer and kill
more people than the public would tolerate.”

 
Well, Eric, neither do I,
thought
Martin,
and besides that’s not what I
want to do. Still, I’m surprised and pleased that you’ve gone on record about
that right now. That should slow Bruce down!

“Eric, is it
left to us alone, using force, to restore deterrence?”

Easterly looked dubious. “I don’t see any
other country doing it on our behalf!”

“How about the
rest of you—any ideas?” Martin’s outstretched arms invited comment.

After their
silence, his voice lashed them, his face hard.

“Aren’t any of you capable of moving
beyond the old ways of thinking? Can’t you see that this is about more than
defending the United States?

“Look, every government on the planet is
put at risk by this failure of deterrence! Every government is thinking of
enemies who might do this to
them
!
The Russians have the Chechens, and probably the Georgians and the Ukrainians,
too. Ming Liu has to worry about the Uighurs and maybe the Tibetans, plus the
Indians and the Paks. The Paks and the Indians have each other to fret over,
plus their own extremist groups who might do a bombing that implicates their
government. The Brits, French, and Germans are concerned about their
unassimilated and disaffected Islamic populations. The Israelis have Hezbollah,
Fatah, and others to fear.

“Las
Vegas is a horror and a disaster, but also an
opportunity! Now is the time, if there is ever going to be such a time, to
strengthen the Nonproliferation Treaty, to reduce the number of nuclear
weapons, to use an IAEA with more staff and teeth to lock down nuclear
materials all over the world!”

Martin’s fervent eyes swept their faces like
a searchlight. “I ask you: if not
now
,
when? If not
us
, who?”

Face still shining, Martin looked around,
seeing careful neutrality in most expressions, surprise in a few, and anger in
one.
Now I’ve set the tone. All right,
Anne; let’s see you hit one out of the park!

“Sorry to run
on. Anne, how about you?”

Battista’s shrewdness warred briefly with
her spirit. Her spirit won.

“Mr. President, thank you for directing
our attention toward a higher goal than we—at least I—had considered. I think
we could do a lot diplomatically. But there is still, as Eric said, the matter
of practicality. The program you laid out is probably the work of years. Right
now we have a pressing need to protect ourselves, guided by Paternity.”

Martin was surprised at his anger.
Dammit! I pulled the car out of the ditch
and she drove it right back in there! Once again this group has shown itself to
be unimaginative and unproductive. I’ve had enough of them for one day!

The president’s face was set in hard,
flat lines that warned against resistance. “Anne, I understand that by the
usual diplomatic practice what I outlined could take years. But now’s not the
time for business as usual! I have in mind a series of summits, beginning soon,
without the normal lengthy dance of agenda-making and precooked outcomes.

“As for Paternity . . . I want this group
to get on with that. I’ll leave you to it, but with this charge: as you work
the details, keep the larger goal I‘ve described very much in mind!”

He headed upstairs to the Oval Office.

Guarini’s gaze took in the unsettled,
uncertain group at the table.
Now what?
Where’s Rick going with this?

Nodding to Dorn, Guarini
left them.

Chapter
22

The CH-47 Chinook hung from its twin
rotors above I-95, twenty miles north of Philadelphia.
 
Secretary of Homeland Security Sara Zimmer
squinted in the sun’s glare and dropped the visor of her flight helmet. Now she
saw something she would never have believed could become commonplace in America: the
sudden envelopment of a mile of highway by army and FBI to screen every vehicle
and person, like fish in a net. Most would be released, but some would be kept.
It was called Operation Sudden Touch, and she owned it.

State police cruisers blocked all la
nes
. Twisting in her chair to gain a view out the
side door around the load master’s green-clad bulk, Zimmer saw, flanking the
highway, soldiers training machine
guns at the
bottled-up
cars and trucks.

Zimmer keyed her helmet
mike. “Captain, how many of these ops have you done?”

“Couple of dozen, ma’am,”
said the pilot.

“Ever see anybody try to
boogie?”

“Nope. Would you? Lookit
all those Eleven Bravos and Hummers.”

Zimmer clicked her mike
twice in acknowledgement and sighed.
Would
the gunners take down someone who bolted? Probably not, if that was all
they did, scamper. She would “suggest” to General Harper they drop the flanking
machine guns—a deterrent that wasn’t necessary and an accident waiting to
happen.

Continuing her scan, she
saw
soldiers expertly
sifting the vehicles and their occupants, working from both ends toward the
middle of the jam. Sprinkled among them were FBI, identified by black
windbreakers with big yellow letters.

While their comrades worked the cars,
pickups, and SUVs, other soldiers directed drivers to clear paths into the
median strip or onto the shoulder for the large trucks. Troops and agents
inspected the big rigs with dogs and tools ranging from long-handled mirrors to
radiation detectors and forklifts.

After about half an hour, Sara noticed
civilians under guard inside an area marked by parked Humvees
.
They were, she thought, people who
didn’t have their identity cards, or were wanted by police. The FBI would take
them into custody. Illegals or those with warrants outstanding would enter the
criminal justice system; the others would be released after
establishing their identities as citizens or properly documented
aliens.

Cleared vehicles and occupants were
released at each end of the locked-down highway. Those cars fortunate enough to
be among the first inspected were on their way in less than forty-five minutes,
but those toward the middle were stuck for hours. As for the truckers, smaller
trucks with all in order were on their way in about an hour, but Zimmer knew
the eighteen-wheelers were typically motionless for three to four hours.

I’ve
seen enough.

“OK, Captain, I’ve used up my daily
ration of fresh air. Gotta go back to the bottomless inbox. Drop me at hotel
sierra one, please.”

“Yes ma’am.”

The Chinook’s nose dipped and the pilot
accelerated toward her personal Blackhawk chopper, waiting on a softball field
five miles away. From her wheelchair just aft of the flight deck, Sara Zimmer
gazed over the pilot’s shoulder and cycled her eyes across the instruments. She
drank in nostalgic odors: jet fuel, oil, hot metal. There wasn’t much challenge
flying the “trash hauler,” as the attack pilots called the lumbering Chinook,
and Zimmer was pretty sure these pilots wanted attack birds, as she had. She’d
felt prouder the day she qualified as an Apache pilot than the day she’d pinned
on her wings. Then one night the tail rotor failed on the Apache that Zimmer
was flinging through valleys and over treetops. The crash left her a
paraplegic. She sealed off her devastation at that sudden end to the focal
point of her life. Shit happens. You go on—in her case to law school and the
DOJ.

Her wheelchair clamped in place at the
special desk in her Blackhawk, Zimmer opened her briefcase, but paused rather
than diving into papers as she intended.
No
wonder so many people are scared and angry about this,
she thought.
It really
is
spooky police-state, Nazi-occupation stuff. I just saw about a thousand
lives ominously disrupted, dozens of kids frightened, and a whole bunch of
freight delivery schedules screwed up. About the best you can say is that it’s
the least bad option. It really sucks. The soldiers hate it. The ACLU is
running ads quoting George Orwell.

She knew that Sudden T
ouch operations
happened around a hundred times a
day, nationwide. The president had proposed authorizing legislation at the same
time he ended the nationwide transportation lockdown. The National Security
Emergency Powers Act required everyone sixteen and older to carry state or
federal government-issued biometric ID and authorized the Sudden Touch program,
including the military’s role in it. This legislation was to sunset in twelve
months, but even with that provision, Congress was debating fiercely. President
Martin launched Sudden Touch under his authority as commander-in-chief,
pledging to stop the program if Congress failed to pass authorizing legislation
within a month.

She remembered the first lawsuit had
gotten to the Supreme Court in five days and been adjudicated in three. The
justices, as frightened as other citizens and mindful of presidential
responsibility for national security, ruled for the government while making
clear that the door was open for other challenges. Several were on the way.

Zimmer recalled the attorney general’s
worried, almost shocked face when they debated using the army and her own
poker-faced insistence hiding her private concerns. She was glad the ACLU was
crying foul, even though she believed that “N-SEPA,” as it was called, was
necessary right now.
It was ‘we can’t
beat them by becoming like them’ versus ‘we can’t beat them if they destroy our
society,’
she thought.
I agree with
the first statement but right now am more persuaded by the second. After we’re
safer, we can roll back things like Sudden Touch. If we can’t achieve that—if I
can’t achieve that—and we continue to
lose cities, we’ll become a mob, with the survivalists in charge. If that
happens, Sudden Touch will seem like the good old days!

***

The president looked up to see John Dorn
about to rap on the doorjamb.

“That’s OK, John, come in.”

Rick was in his small private office, connected
to the Oval Office by a short corridor, not ten feet long, and
done in Ella’s selection of bright
southwestern hues
that kept it from feeling claustrophobic. He saw Dorn’s agitation and felt what
Ella called “rabbit energy,” an aura of urgency and uncertainty tinged with
readiness for flight.

“What’s on your
mind?”

Dorn’s words tumbled out: “Mr. President,
you’ve got to go to the country very soon with a response to North Korea’s
role in the attack! If you don’t, it will leak. There are tens of thousands of
Americans dead, thousands more dying from radiation—and one of our cities is
rubble. You’ve got to tell the country what you know and what you’re going to
do before Paternity leaks and this gets out there ahead of us!”

Dorn’s lips made a thin, angry line while
his eyes flitted between Martin’s and a point over his shoulder.

Well,
if he feels so strongly,
thought Rick,
I’d better take this
seriously, even though he’s wrong.

 
“John, I know that. But I have to get it
right. This is probably the most critical decision any president has ever
faced. North Korea
isn’t going anywhere. It’s not as if we have to act before they escape. I need
to be sure I make the right decision.”

Dorn gulped his anger, choked it down,
and said, “Mr. President, you
do
have
to act before opinion gets away! You have to announce this and you have to say
what you are going to do about it. We have to get out in front of—“

Martin stood, his action cutting Dorn off
and conveying the ancient message of defending territory. The
room rang with their collision: Martin by nature utterly
self-confident, Dorn
a man of historical trends and political analyses
and facts on the ground.

 
“John, you’re speaking as if this is just
another issue to be managed politically. It isn’t! This isn’t a decision to be
made solely by me, within the next few hours or days. Millions of lives will be
affected, and I will not take sole responsibility for deciding what to do going
forward. Congress and the people of this country have to have a say in it. I
will
decide on a plan, but I will
not
decide in a vacuum!

“Please, have a seat.” Martin waved to
the chair, sitting himself.

“Eight months ago I won a presidential
election. In that campaign I pledged my administration would lay out the facts,
level with the American people in a crisis, and not rush to decisions. We beat
Glenna Rogers for reelection because she didn’t face facts on the ground in Iraq and
because she made decisions hurriedly, without preparing the public.

“I’m not going
to operate that way!” Martin’s face radiated enthusiasm.

“We could have prevented this, you know!
If we nuclear powers and the UN had been serious about preventing the spread of
nuclear weapons, this wouldn’t have happened . . . but we refused to see the
threat. Well, now that threat is plain and it’s huge! This could happen again,
to any country. I believe the world is frightened enough to join us if we lead
in finally locking down all the loose nukes and making deep cuts.”

Bracing his shoulders, Dorn tried to
speak, but Martin surged up and over his attempt like a wrestler going for the
pin. Dorn’s left hand squeezed his notebook hard enough to whiten his
fingernails.

 
“Despite what Anne and Scott think, there’s
opportunity around Korea!
This could be the opening for regime change, not by blowing up North Korea, but
by forcing Kim and his cronies into exile or even arresting them and putting
them on trial at The Hague. Unification is a big carrot for the ordinary people
of Korea.
Yes, the elites are wary of it, but with the right preparation, the south may
be able to open the border and reunify peacefully. The United States and others could provide financial
and trade support to enable the south to absorb the north into a single,
democratic country, the way Germany
went.

“John, as we study this and get input,
the wisest course of action will become clear. Perhaps, in the end, we must
nuke them. But as long as I am president, that is our last option, not our
first!”

His own anger and astonishment jolted
Dorn like electricity.
This
isn’t
a panel discussion, or a campaign speech!
he
thought.
Don’t you
get
it? Television and Internet show soldiers
burying our dead in mass graves. We have to use the army for internal security.
The stock market had a meltdown. Factories are limping because one hundred
percent of arriving cargo has to be inspected. Layoffs are rolling through America.
There’s panicked buying and hoarding.

But Dorn deployed none of those facts in
rebuttal; his anger obliterated caution. Instead, in a voice choked with
frustration and fear, he uttered a single sentence: “Mr. President, that is
either the wisest decision—or the most foolish—any president ever made!”

The words hung heavily in the air, kept
aloft by both men’s desire to preserve their relationship and by mutual shock
that their disagreement was so profound. The room felt hot, stuffy, thick with
unreleased anger.

Martin’s eyes
popped, then narrowed to slits. Rick acknowledged his outrage—
how dare he!
—then sent it away. He
leaned back.

 
“John, I know you feel strongly about this,
and I appreciate that you’ve come to me. Candid discussions will continue in
the NSC; that’s what it was created for. I want to hear all views in those
meetings, especially yours. I promise you I’ll think hard about what you’ve
said today.”

Martin rose and, impelled by his instinct
to smooth disagreement, held out his hand, as if they were fellow senators
after a contentious committee meeting. Dorn, feeling his head whirling at
Martin’s sweeping, unmoored vision, took it, without meeting his eyes.

 
“Thank you, Mr. President.”

Alone, Rick sat down and exhaled heavily.
His national security advisor had come very close to calling him a fool. Bart
had warned against giving the post to an outsider. Was Dorn, like Griffith, a loose cannon?
Disloyal?

Or
could he be right?