Code Word: Paternity, A Presidential Thriller

by Norton, Doug

  Dorn looked up to safe, noncommittal expressions.

  What the hell, thought Griffith. I’m not going to be intimidated. Somebody has to take the lead; why shouldn’t it be me?

  Looking at Martin, the vice president said, “This option probably won’t work, but it does some things for us. First, it shows we want to avoid using force. Second, it gives us an opening gambit with the Chinese, who are certainly going to play in any deal that involves regime change.”

  Rick grimaced. He wanted to sideline Griffith, but here the man was emerging as first among equals, or at least making a play for it.

  Guarini sensed this and, if he could have reached Battista’s shin, he would have nudged her. Since he couldn’t, he said, “Anne, how do you think the Chinese would react—would they help?”

  “Well, I don’t think this will work, because surely Kim anticipated discovery and made up his mind to tough it out. But that’s no reason not to try, particularly since it helps us avoid a rush-to-war charge. As for the Chinese . . . I’m sure Ming Liu’s position will be driven by the succession question: who will rule if not Kim?”

  “And what do you say to him, Anne? What’s the successor government we have in mind for North Korea?”

  “Huge issue, Mr. President, and I’ll admit I haven’t reached a conclusion yet. Some options that have occurred to me are rule of some sort under a UN mandate leading to self-government, unification with the south, or a Chinese protectorate.”

  Throwing a warning glance at Griffith, Martin said, “Anne, at first glance the most attractive is unification. How do you think that would play with President Ming?”

  “He wouldn’t like it, Mr. President, although I can perhaps see him eventually deciding it’s his least bad choice. But our problem in working with the Chinese is that they don’t want any change. Kim is just fine with them; he gives them a client state on their border, a communist buffer that reduces the visibility and influence of the capitalist economy booming in the ROK. Not that Ming is completely happy with Kim—he doesn’t like it at all that Kim has nuclear weapons. But pragmatically, Kim’s DPRK is better for Ming than anything else available.”

  “Well, a new world began on June thirteenth, and surely Ming will come to see that the old solutions won’t work anymore!”

  “Mr. President, if I may?” Martin made a go-ahead gesture to Aaron Hendricks.

  “I wonder whether we’re putting the cart before the horse. We haven’t asked the key question: is the United States going to hold North Korea as responsible for the bombing as we do those who carried it out?”

  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 Am
erica: 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 lanes. 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 Touch 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.