Tiger's Claw: A Novel (10 page)

“Very good,” Phoenix said. Now that everyone had their assignments they filed out of the Situation Room, leaving Phoenix alone with Ann Page. “So what do you think, Ann?” Phoenix asked.

“I think I don’t like Kevich implying you were acting out of fear of the Chinese,” she said.

“I meant about the Poseidon incident,” Phoenix said. “Herbert speaks his mind, which is why I have him in the Cabinet. Everyone here is supposed to speak their minds with me, not just you.”

“So he thinks he can admonish and even accuse the president of the United States just because he’s forgotten more about Russia and China than we’ve ever known? I don’t think so,” Ann said perturbedly.

“Let’s get back to the Poseidon loss, shall we?” Phoenix asked. “I’m about to tell Premier Zhou that I’m going to send in a number of warships right into the middle of his own private lake, and I don’t want any of his ships or planes nearby while they’re there. Herbert’s right: he’s not going to like it.
I
wouldn’t like it if he told me he was going to send a bunch of warships into the Gulf of Mexico, and I wasn’t allowed to at least monitor their activities, if not be directly involved. I would allow it, but I’d reserve the right to keep close watch on what they’re doing. Do you think I should allow China to monitor us, like Herbert suggests?”

“Hell no,” Ann said. “We lost a sophisticated surveillance aircraft and several Navy personnel near a Chinese warship and aircraft. The plane was unarmed, on a peaceful surveillance mission, and it was flying in international airspace and went down in international waters. I don’t buy the argument that the South China Sea is China’s private lake. We’re going to conduct a search-and-rescue operation, and then a recovery-and-investigation operation, and we don’t want anyone—especially China—interfering. Period. End of sentence. And the definition of ‘interfering’ is whatever
we
say it is,
whenever
we say it.”

Ken Phoenix thought for a moment, then smiled and nodded. “I agree completely, Ann,” he said. “Herbert is the geopolitical guru around here, but we’re going to put geopolitics aside until we rescue our sailors and find out what the hell happened. If anyone gets in the way, we’re pushing back. All the other relationships with China don’t matter until our rescue and investigation operations are concluded.”

“Sounds good to me, Mr. President,” Ann said. “I’ll get together with my staff and get ready for a morning press briefing.” In the extreme drawdown of the federal government, the vice president acted as chief of staff and press secretary as well as performing her other constitutionally mandated duties; despite the extra workload, Ann Page made doing the extra tasks look easy. “I expect my phone will be ringing off the hook when I get back to the office. You want me to do a few morning shows too?”

“Not until we have more information, Ann,” Phoenix said. “I don’t want you in front of forty million viewers saying nothing more than ‘we don’t know anything yet.’ Give a statement to the press corps—nothing about our suspicions about the Chinese fighters or aircraft carrier, of course—and that’s all for now.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Ann said. They discussed a few other important matters over coffee, then they headed back to their offices to continue their day that had started so early with the iconic “phone call in the middle of the night.” But before Ann departed, Phoenix called out to her: “One more thing, Ann.”

Page stopped at the door. “Yes, Mr. President?”

“It’s a ‘Ken’ question, Ann,” the president said. He paused, thought for a moment, then spread his hands. “How do you think I’m doing, Ann?” he asked.

“Doing . . . what, sir?”

“Doing . . . the job. Being president. How am I doing?”

Ann rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Excuse me, sir, but what kind of question is that?”

“Don’t give me that ‘sir’ crap, Ann,” Phoenix said. “I didn’t pick you to lay the extreme protocol formality stuff on me when we’re in private—I know you’re not bred for it, which is why I chose you to run with me in a last-second primary and general election blitzkrieg campaign. We lucked out and won, in the narrowest of margins ever recorded.

“But sometimes I feel like I’m spinning my wheels,” Phoenix went on. “The economy is still in the tank and there seems to be no end in sight. I’ve cut the budget and tax rates down to bare bones, but it doesn’t seem to be affecting anything very much. At the same time, China and Russia are pushing forward with reclaiming old empires and challenging us everywhere.” He paused for a moment, his brow furrowing, lost in thought; then: “Ann, am I presiding over a failed republic? Is the United States . . . done?”

“Done? What do you mean?”

“I mean . . . I mean, we just lost an airplane over the South China Sea, and my most knowledgeable adviser tells me to ‘be careful’ in deploying search-and-rescue forces in the area,” Phoenix said. “Years ago, the United States moved where it wanted, when it wanted, and we never considered other nations’ concerns, especially in a crisis situation. Now, even with an absolutely critical and sensitive emergency event such as this, we seem to be hamstrung by caution. We’re afraid of offending China. Our own sailors are down, perhaps by hostile intent, but we’re still afraid of offending the People’s Republic of China. Why? Is this right? How did we get to this point?”

“First of all, Ken, Herbert is an academic and an administrator,” Ann said a bit testily, stepping back into the Situation Room with the president. “We hired him because he has an encyclopedic mind, speaks both Russian and Mandarin along with six other languages, and can organize everything from individuals to entire cabinet-level departments better than anyone we’ve ever seen. But he’s just a bureaucrat. He lacks vision. He needs guidance and direction.

“You, on the other hand, are a
doer
, a man with leadership qualities and a vision for the future,” Ann went on. “You decided that the best way to fix the economy was to cut taxes, cut the size of government, reorganize the military, and stimulate growth, reinvestment, and hiring by cutting rules and regulations that were squeezing businesses. You made a decision, charted a course, moved forward, and pushed your ideas through Congress in record time.

“But along with vision comes introspection and even a large measure of self-doubt, and sometimes that worries me more about you than anything else,” Ann said earnestly. “The presidents I’m most familiar with—Thorn, Martindale, and Gardner—may privately have had doubts, but they never expressed or showed them. You, on the other hand, wear them on your damned chest like a general’s ribbons.

“The people of this country, and of the entire world for that matter, don’t need or especially expect peace, prosperity, or comfort from their leaders, Ken. They need and expect
leadership.
They want our leaders to
do
something,
take a stand, fight for what they believe in, and make arguments about why what they have planned is the right thing to do. So you keep on doing what you do best: lead. You focused in on exactly what the issue here is: search for and rescue our sailors and find out what happened. Kevich advises you to be careful and lectures you about China, but you keep returning to the matter at hand. You’re doing it right. Stop worrying.”

“A lot of people—a lot of
nations
—will get hurt if I screw up things with China,” Phoenix said. “The economy will really melt down if China decides it doesn’t want to invest in us anymore.”

“Let’s worry about that after we get our sailors back,” Ann said. “Besides, my economic advisers and the commentators I trust are telling me the economy is doing better than you think. If you want, let me worry about the critics of your economic plan. I listen to dozens of politicians whine and complain about austerity measures, but I also hear thousands of small businessmen cheering about lower taxes and freedom from Washington bureaucracy. Unfortunately, the politicians and the whiners are usually the ones who get the press.

“About Russia and China: they’re going to do whatever they’re going to do, and there’s precious little we can do about that except keep the lines of communication as open as possible, hope for the best, and prepare for the worst,” Ann went on. “It so happens that their economies are on an upswing while ours is in the crapper. That is not going to last very long. Russia’s surging economy and foreign policy is based on energy exports and bullying their neighbors into not cooperating with the West—when oil is back to thirty dollars a barrel, Russia runs out of cash. China’s surging economy and seemingly stable government is based on cheap exports, a shadow currency and economy, and suppressing dissent. As soon as exports fall, the true market value of China’s currency is revealed, and the unemployed and poor agrarian segments of the population start to rise up against the government, China is on the skids.”

“You’re starting to sound like Herbert,” Phoenix said with a wry smile.

“I’m not an analyst, Ken,” Ann said. “But I agree with Herbert: unless there’s a loose cannon in Beijing or in the Chinese military, I don’t think China is a threat to us. I think Beijing will be perfectly happy to wait to see if we collapse on our own instead of choosing to take us on, especially at sea. They can afford to wait, even for fifty years. What’s fifty years to a country that’s been around for three
thousand
years?”

Phoenix thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I disagree, Ann,” he said. “I’ve felt for several years that something is stirring in Beijing and Moscow. The Chinese invasion of Somalia and the deployment of antiship ballistic missiles all over Southeast Asia confirmed it, and now this suspicious event over the South China Sea reinforces it. Beijing may not want to pick a fight, but I think they’d like to show the world that they are ready to take more of an active role in the world, including militarily. I think if they’re waiting for the collapse of the United States, they’d be happy to do whatever they could, short of all-out war, to hasten our demise.”

The vice president nodded noncommittally. “No argument from me, Ken,” she said. “I’m tired of being surprised by the Russians and Chinese. The Chinese invasion of Somalia, the antisatellite missile strikes from submerged subs, and the quick proliferation of DF-21D missiles all over the Pacific and Indian Oceans were all real eye-openers. We were caught completely flat-footed. Now we lose a surveillance plane near a Chinese carrier battle group, and again we’re hunting for answers. It’s not a happy place to be.” She looked at the president carefully. “What are you thinking about, Ken?” she asked.

“I’m thinking about breaking the damned bank and beefing up the military, especially the Navy and Air Force,” Phoenix said. “I can’t do anything about the economy more than what we’re doing already—doing everything we can to help businesses invest, government standing out of the way so businesses can grow. If we’re going to invest in anything in this era of reduced government and reduced taxes, it’s defense. I want to rebuild the military. I want to stop the reductions in military spending and show the world that even if the United States is back on its heels in its budget, we will still push ahead with a strong military force.”

“You know you’re going to get hammered in the press, Ken,” the vice president said. “You campaigned on an antispending platform and put together a massive austerity program, promising to balance the budget in eight years—then you want to propose spending more money on defense? That’s not going to fly.”

“Politically, it’ll be a train wreck,” Phoenix said. “But no one in the media is looking at what we’re looking at in China and Russia: they are surging, and we’re lagging. I’m tired of worrying about what we should be doing out there—I want to do something about it.”

“But face the facts, Ken—there’s
no
money. Zero,
” Ann said. “Everyone knows there’s no money for new weapons systems, aircraft carriers, next-generation bombers, or space. All that is out the window. Deal with it. We have Armstrong Space Station with antisatellite and antiballistic missile weapons installed, but everyone is thinking it’s a huge boondoggle and can’t wait for it to reenter and burn up in the atmosphere. No one on Main Street, and especially Congress, will give you money for a high-tech military that might take ten years to put together. No one believes that anymore.”

“I’m going to find a way to do it, Ann,” Phoenix said determinedly. “I don’t know how, but I’ll find it. A change in strategy, closing bases, reducing duplication, maybe even doing away with a branch of the service—I’m going to find a way to modernize our military without going back in debt to do it.”

“Doing away with a branch of the service?” Ann asked incredulously. “Where in the world did that come from, Ken?”

“I’ve thought about this for a long time, Ann,” Phoenix said. “Each branch of the service spends . . . what, a hundred fifty billion a year? The Navy maybe a little more? But if you combined the duplicated major budget categories of the two services that operate the most aircraft, maybe we could save as much as half that amount, or more.”

Ann shook her head in wonderment. “We gotta sit down and talk this over sometime soon, Mr. President—maybe over a glass or two of Scotch,” she said. “I think I’m going to need a little alcohol to wrap my head around the monumental challenge of passing a bill through Congress that will pull the plug on the Navy or Air Force. Let’s find our sailors and find out what happened to our plane, and then we’ll work on doing away with a branch of the service. Good morning, Mr. President.” And she departed, shaking her head with a wry smile.