The president stood with his back to Krantz, staring at a large pull-down map of the United States. The map showed the boundaries of every county, colored in shades from bright crimson to deep blue. He was staring at the middle of the country.
Krantz cleared his throat. “Mr. President?” Twenty-five years he’d known Tambor, but he no longer called him by his first name. Now that he was the “leader of the free world,” as they used to call the job, Tambor demanded that everyone kowtow to him, even his old friends. Underlings retreated into their offices at his approach and never dared to look him in the eye as he swept past, lest they incur his cold wrath. Sidney Krantz and Tambor had known each other far too long for him to adopt that level of servility, but he did call him Mr. President.
“Hey Sid, thanks for dropping by on short notice.”
Krantz thought, What else can you do when you’re called to the White House? He waited every day in his Old Executive office for such calls. “No problem, Mr. President.”
“I heard you were up in the village last weekend. Did you see our mutual friend Robert?”
The president meant Greenwich Village, in New York City. The president is keeping tabs on my travels, thought Krantz. That’s good to know. Robert was Robert Waylen, an old friend to both of them. Waylen was now professor emeritus of American History at Columbia University, but he had been famous decades before as a radical anti-war activist and some said, a terrorist bomber. Krantz responded breezily, in the spirit of conversation-opening small talk. “I did see Robert. He sends his greetings. He’s sorry that he can’t see you anymore. He said he misses your old conversations.”
“How is he doing? I hear that his health is failing.”
Krantz wondered how much the president really knew about Waylen these days, to ask that question. If the president had even an inkling about a certain videotape in Waylen’s possession, both of them could wind up in public parks like Vince Foster, or wrapped in chains at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. Was the question about Waylen’s health sincere, or something more, a hint of suspicion or a hope that Waylen would soon be departing for the great beyond? “He doesn’t look too well. He’s lost a lot of weight and he doesn’t get out much anymore. He walks his little dachshunds, and that’s about all he can manage.”
Robert Waylen lived alone in a posh three-story brownstone on West 11th Street. Jamal Tambor had been a student at Columbia when he came into Waylen and Krantz’s orbit. Now Waylen was in his seventies and battling cancer, while Jamal Tambor had just celebrated his fiftieth birthday in the White House, in nearly perfect health. Tambor could thank his Malaysian mother for his youthful demeanor, good looks and overall fitness. He had been born in California, but raised mainly in South Asia, while his father worked a series of jobs as an engineer. Only a rapidly receding hairline and a few lines around his eyes and his mouth betrayed the age of America’s first mixed-race president. He was in decent health, even considering his pack-a-day cigarette habit. At least smoking kept him thin. He wasn’t as cute as he had been when Krantz had first known him at Columbia, but he was still a very handsome man.
The president dropped his discussion of their old acquaintance and turned to current affairs. “Sidney, we need to finish our recovery operations in the earthquake zone before summer, or the Northwest campaign will have to be pushed back until next year. And if we can’t bring the Northwest back into the fold this year…well, we may lose it for good. The Chinese are not waiting. We can either be their partners, or watch them make their own arrangements. The Northwest may even formally secede, and frankly, we won’t be able to prevent it.”
“Well,” Krantz responded, choosing his words carefully, “the Chinese Navy is already there. Officially, the Chinese naval vessels are only visiting Seattle and Vancouver. There’s nothing permanent about their presence, nothing official—”
“But how long can we maintain that fiction? Friendly naval port visits don’t last for months on end and stretch from one fleet to another.” The president turned from the wall map, sighed, and slid down into his black leather recliner. Krantz took the matching leather wing chair across from him. The president opened a silver case from the side table, extracted a long cigarette and lit it with a matching silver lighter. He snapped the lighter shut and took a deep drag. He was never photographed smoking: this was another reason for the private reading room, with its special ventilation system. Maybe the main reason.
“The Chinese aren’t asking for my permission, no matter what we pretend. It’s Hong Kong all over again, only this time, China is playing the role of Great Britain and we’re the old Mandarins. Sidney, we have to regain actual control of all forty-five states this year, and to do that, we’ll need help from the Chinese. And not only from the Chinese… It won’t be popular, but there’s no other way. We need international help.
“But we have to start in the East. If we can’t reestablish permanent control of the earthquake zone, we won’t regain control of the Deep South. And if we can’t regain control of the Deep South, we can kiss the Northwest goodbye—for good.” His voice rose. Normally melodic and controlled in public appearances and on television, it cracked when he was under pressure. “And then the United States won’t even be a continental power anymore. We’ll have lost our only remaining Pacific ports—and on my watch!” He took a deep drag from his cigarette, then laid his head back on the recliner and closed his eyes. “And that…cannot happen,” he said in a whisper, before exhaling a long stream of smoke. “Not on my watch.”
Sidney Krantz replied in a soothing voice. “The Republic of Texas is going to do what it wants. But I’m still confident we won’t lose Washington and Oregon.”
“Sidney, if the Chinese get permanent bases and trade concessions in Long Beach and Corpus Christi, that’s out of my hands. That’s Aztlan. We lost the Southwest with the new constitution. It was a fair trade to get the new constitution, and now it’s settled business. And I agree, what’s left of Texas is a special case. The Texas partition was part of the Aztlan treaty, so our options are rather limited there. But now President Yao is making direct overtures to General Mirabeau for port visits in Louisiana. Louisiana might become a new gas station for the Chinese navy.”
“You know,” replied the president’s adviser, “You can never trust the military, none of them. Mirabeau’s the worst: he’s a religious fanatic and a fascist.”
“Be that as it may, at least for now he runs the Deep South, that so-called ‘emergency zone’ of his. And at least he can feed his people.” The president paused, turning away from Krantz to look over at the wall map. “On the other hand, what if Mirabeau were to be…removed?” He took another pull on his cigarette, and then stabbed it out in a glass ashtray on his side table.
“What do you mean, ‘removed’?” asked Krantz. He knew, they both knew, that General Mirabeau was polling much higher than the president was. “We can’t fire him, we can’t retire him, and we can’t just replace him with another general. He’d ignore your orders, and that would be even worse than pretending that he’s still part of your National Command Authority. It would just clarify our…impotence if we tried to fire him and he refused to go.”
“I’m not talking about his resignation, or his replacement. I’m talking about something more permanent.”
“Something like…an accident? Or an illness?” Slow-acting poisons that mimicked debilitating diseases were a hobby of Sidney Krantz. It wouldn’t be the first time that this special knowledge had been called upon to quietly eliminate a rival.
President Tambor paused, staring at the wall map while drumming his fingers idly on the arms of the black leather recliner. “That might be our best option, if we could arrange it. If we had operatives close to him…but we don’t. Otherwise, I was thinking about a truly permanent solution. Maybe even a kinetic solution.”
“Not now, Mr. President. Later perhaps, but not now. Exercising a kinetic option at this point would be almost as bad as calling for his resign
ation and being publicly rebuffed. It would cement the perception that we’re not in control down there if we had to do that.”
“Even if we black-flagged it?” Tambor asked.
“Even then. Who could we blame for it? It would take time to create a plausible anti-Mirabeau group to blame it on. If we did it now, it would point straight back to us. Nobody would believe that we weren’t behind it if Mirabeau was suddenly taken out. Certainly we couldn’t drop a missile on him like he was some garden-variety domestic terrorist.”
The president sighed. “Well then, in that case I think our only option is to sway the general back over to our side. We need to convince him that we’re going to win back complete control of the Union, and that if he wants to retain his position as the el supremo of the Deep South, he needs to get on board with us. Openly and publicly. He needs to come to the White House for a photo op. Or to Camp David, if he’d be more comfortable there. Kiss the presidential ring, as it were. Now, we can send him offers and overtures to that effect, but in the end, the only way to convince him to get aboard will be for us to wrap up the Mid South, and do it quickly. Why would he feel a need to obey Washington, when we can’t even pacify the earthquake zone? Once all of Tennessee and Kentucky are back under our control, he’ll see the light.”
“I agree, that’s our best course.”
“So we need a victory. We need Tennessee to be a success. A visible success. But Sidney, I’m gathering that things are not going so well down there.”
“They’re getting better. We’re gaining traction; we finally have the right man in charge of rural pacification. He knows how to get results, and he’s not hamstrung by old-fashioned moral qualms.”
“Do you mean Robert Bullard?”
“Yes, he’s the one.”
Quietly the president said, “You know, he’ll have to be eliminated when this is over. Along with every trace of his rural pacification program.” He whispered this, as if he didn’t fully trust the soundproofing of his “private study.”
“Of course.” Krantz had selected Robert Bullard from a small pool of potential directors of rural pacification. This was a classified position atop a classified directorate. The rural pacification program was a black operation from start to finish. Rural pacification was Krantz’s solution to the Mid-South insurgency, and it was wholeheartedly embraced by the president…but never formally in writing. All of the funding was covert; officially, it did not exist.
Robert Bullard, the former Southwest Region Director of Homeland Security, was already under informal non-judicial house arrest when Krantz had discovered his dossier. To call Bullard an unsavory character was to sugarcoat his life history. The man was a thug, ruled only by his lust for power, wealth and young women. But he had a proven track record as an effective leader of other groups of thugs. He knew how to get things done when nobody particularly cared how. In short, Robert Bullard was the perfect man to crack the whip in the rebel areas of Tennessee and Kentucky. Once the mission was complete, he would be tossed out like the garbage he was. Bullard’s group was in effect a cutout, a circuit breaker between the foreign mercenary units and the White House. If the foreign units were successful, the president would take the credit. If they were not, then Bullard’s rural pacification group would be made the scapegoats and take the blame.
“You know what’s ironic?” asked Krantz. “Bullard thinks he’s first in line to be the director of our new Department of Internal Security, or whatever we finally name it. He thinks rural pacification is his audition. He really does. I’ve got him convinced.”
“Then he’s a fool. Every trace of rural pacification has to disappear when this is over, starting with him. Even with our influence over the media, using the foreign troops…it’s still controversial. It’s unpopular. Not even using them to suppress the racists in Tennessee.”
“But it works,” Krantz replied. “Our own soldiers couldn’t get the job done—they were much too soft. Foreign troops don’t bring all of that sentimental baggage with them. And Tennessee is the perfect test bed for using international peacekeepers in the United States. Especially the North American Legion. The Legion troops are practically Americans already—North Americans, anyway. Most of them were living here for years before the NAL units were even formed. It’s perfect: they’re gainfully employed, they’re serving our country, they’re earning full citizenship, and they’re demonstrating how well the North American Union can work.”
“But they’re not all from the North American Legion,” the president observed. “There are Pakistanis, Kazaks, Nigerians, Albanians…”
“That’s different. Those are just contract battalions. They come in, get a specific job done, and get out.”
“What do you mean, ‘get out?’ We’re giving them free land and citizenship, aren’t we? That’s how we’re paying them, correct? In homestead acreage and citizenship?”
The president was well versed in the details, Krantz had to admit. Free land in America was the only ‘currency’ remaining that could entice and motivate the foreign contract mercenaries. That, and fast-tracked citizenship for themselves and their families. But the president was supposed to keep his distance from these pacification operations in the South, in order to maintain plausible deniability in case things went badly wrong. “I meant that the foreign contract battalions will be out of the Mid South,” said Krantz. “They’ll be sent out West after Tennessee and Kentucky are fully pacified. The North American Legion will handle the long-term occupation of the Mid South, and then the resettlement of the evacuated regions.”
“How can we ever pacify Tennessee if we can’t get food in or get the power turned back on?” asked President Tambor. “It’s been a year! The plan was evacuate, relocate and reconstruct, and we’re still stuck on evacuate.”
“It’s not our fault. Nobody can blame us for the damned earthquakes. The transportation infrastructure is still in ruins. It’s especially bad in West Tennessee because of all of the infrastructure damage. It’s systemic, it’s pervasive. And it would be hard enough to fix it all if they weren’t still shooting at us, but they are. On the other hand, there are certain benefits to not getting enough food relief in. At least, not to the insurgent areas.”
Tambor asked, “Advantages? Explain what you mean.”
“Well, it’s the old carrot and stick. As the counties on the edges of the earthquake zone are pacified, we fix the bridges, we open the feeding centers, and we reconnect the power grid. This increases local cooperation, county by county.”
“But some counties are still cut off. No bridges, and no electrical power.”
“That’s absolutely correct, especially in West Tennessee—but that’s not all bad for us. Think about it: outside of Memphis, most of those counties always voted the straight ticket against our party. The fewer of those racist rednecks that are left, the better it is for us. We’ll resettle those areas with the North American Legion troops and their families. When it’s done, Tennessee will never vote against us again. It’ll be as blue as Massachusetts.”
The president said, “Never let a good emergency go to waste, right?”
“Exactly,” Krantz agreed.
“And the death rates are still high in West Tennessee?”
“Long-term starvation tends to do that,” Krantz replied flatly. “Especially when people are freezing cold and sick. But we have a ready explanation that covers us: we can’t bring in food where the people are shooting at us. So it’s their own fault if they’re starving, and even the media see it the same way. Eventually, they’ll be too hungry to fight. Screw ’em—they’re just Bible-thumping racist reactionaries anyway. We all saw what they did to the African-American refugees coming out of Memphis. That was genocide—so to hell with them.”
The president’s eyes narrowed. “My God Sidney, this is almost like the Ukraine in the 1930s.” The corners of his mouth subtly turned upward, to form the icy smile that only his closest confidants recognized as an expression of true j
oy. His broad public smiles and easy television tears were as false and calculated as any masks of wood or plastic. This was the real Jamal Tambor, a sphinx with the political brain of a chess grandmaster and the cold heart of a crocodile. Only a handful of people had ever seen this private side of the president, and Sidney Krantz was one of them.
“You do know your history, Mr. President. I wouldn’t say that it was exactly the same but…yes, there are parallels. Hunger can be an effective weapon. And as you know, we have established dozens of feeding centers in the relocation areas to draw them out of the evacuation zones. The problem is that too many of the local people are still holding out. They won’t leave their homes, even without electric power. So thousands of them are staying in place and resisting our relocation and reconstruction efforts. But that’s all right: there are less of them every month. It’s winter. They’ll either come into the FEMA relocation centers or they’ll starve.”
“I’m not seeing any starvation on television.”
“No, of course not. The earthquake-damaged areas are under emergency law, and that means the media are kept out. It’s a fairly simple matter to control the news flow, to spin it our way, because this time the insurgents really are shooting at our troops. If it’s too dangerous for our troops, it’s too dangerous for reporters.”
“Our troops?” the president corrected. “Don’t you mean the NAL troops, and the foreign contract battalions?”
“Well, you know what I mean. Technically, they’re ‘our troops,’ even if they’re not American citizens—yet.”
“But using starvation as a weapon…Sidney, if it ever gets out…”
“Don’t worry, it won’t. Back when Stalin was starving them by the millions in the Ukraine, the New York Times even won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting how great things were there. And the Times is still on our side. They hate those inbred snake-handlers down South just as much as we do. And what the New York Times reports, the rest of the media are happy to parrot. Don’t worry, it’ll never get out. The major media are behind us. There’s nothing in writing about this food policy. We have perfect excuses; we’re covered in every direction. It’s all because of the earthquakes, and the rebels who are shooting at our troops. I just don’t see a down side for us.”
Foreign Enemies and Traitors Page 3