by Norton, Doug
McDonnell, the silent scribe, kept his head down.
Dottie Branson’s voice startled them: “Mr. President, it’s time for your meeting with the Wisconsin Cheese Queen, accompanied by Senators Presley and Robbins and Representative Bays, in the Roosevelt Room.”
Martin looked as if she had just pulled him back into his body, and he was surprised to find himself standing.
Griffith’s face turned even redder, then his shoulders shook. Unable to suppress it, he began to guffaw. Suddenly they were laughing until tears came.
Griffith regained control. “If it’s not one damn thing, it’s another, isn’t it, Mr. President?”
“That’s right, Bruce. Sorry to end this discussion, but now I have to do something really important!”
As Rick walked toward the Roosevelt Room, Dottie moved to his side. She whispered, “I made that up, Mr. President. It sounded to me like you gladiators needed to break.” She turned and walked rapidly toward her desk.
Martin had just settled in his private office when Guarini’s head and shoulders leaned in. He saw that his friend’s once starched collar had wilted and knew his own had, too.
“So, Bart, she fooled you, too!”
“Yeah, and thank heaven I didn’t open my big mouth when I realized that wasn’t on your schedule!
“Something else I held my tongue about was that timeline for Kim. When did you decide that?”
“Last night.”
Guarini was silent, waiting for more. When nothing came, he said, “Have you told Eric and John?”
“No. I guess I’d better do that!” Rick flashed his disarming grin.
“Yeah, you should.
“So now what’s your take on the vice president?”
“Bart, I believe he’s a patriot like you and me but sees things through a different lens. We’ve stopped him encouraging impeachment talk, but he’ll start again if Kim doesn’t give it up and step down soon.
“And I think—and that’s why I gave the timeline—it will stiffen Ming’s resolve knowing there is one and that military planning to remove Kim is underway.”
“How’s Ming going to know that?”
“Because you, Bart, will orchestrate the necessary leaks.”
“Am I leaking nuclear?”
“No, you are not.”
The chief of staff bit his tongue. Rick was threatening military action when the only effective military action was something he refused even to discuss. Eric was going to love that, not to mention Premier Kato when he got wind of it! And what about the fear he didn’t dare name, even to himself?
About to unburden himself, he realized his friend’s brittleness, knew he couldn’t imagine the pressure Rick felt, and said instead, “OK, boss,” with as much spirit as he could muster.
***
“It saddens me that the Arabs are incompetent,” said Kim, belching gently after swallowing a last bite of sashimi prepared by his excellent Japanese chef. “Too bad for them! As for us, we are accomplishing our objectives. I met President Martin and frightened him with the strength and determination of our beloved Korean people. Then I made him lose face at the UN. He has made threats, but they have only strengthened the ardor of our people to defend our homeland. And those same threats have thrown the fools in the south into confusion and terrified the Japanese. Our elder cousins to the north are a disappointment because they have supported the illegal blockade, but I know they cannot afford to let the American pirates prevail.”
Supping with Kim were his youngest son, designated to succeed him in the indefinite future, and Field Marshal Young-san Ho, head of Kim’s military. Gazing at Young-san with the menacing inscrutability of a python, Kim said, “Tell me, Comrade Field Marshal, what is the state of your preparations?”
Young-san, who had attained his rank by always having the right answer for Kim, said, “Dear Leader, our soldiers have sworn to become human bombs and bullets, to hurl themselves against the enemy. Our pilots have pledged to shoot down ten for every loss to them. Our brave sailors are ready to put to sea in swarms of fast attack boats and submarines. We are ready!”
“And our missile strike forces?”
“Also ready, Dear Leader! At your command they will destroy Seoul, Pusan, Osaka, Sasebo, Yokohama, and Tokyo.”
Kim’s eyes grew opaque as he looked inward at firestorms and shock waves and ruined cities blazing. I have the powers of a god. Even my father could not have done what I can! He felt a rush of achievement.
“Thank you, Comrade Field Marshal. Remain alert! The call may come at any time.”
Chapter 45
Ming Liu patrolled his garden, hoe ready. I enjoy caring for this plot so much! he thought, savoring the smell of earth wet from a summer shower. I wish I could pluck China’s problems as easily as weeds! Kim is pushing Martin closer to the worst for us, a nuclear attack. He’s a fool, and like most fools he leaves it to others to deal with the consequences of his follies. My duty to protect China won’t even leave me in peace to tend my vegetables for an hour!
He threw down the hoe, startling the aide who hovered at the edge of the plot. His mind recycled conversations with Kim—telephone conversations because he refused to come to Beijing. Kim had turned aside both compliments and threats. He would not leave the DPRK for a retirement of honor and luxury in China.
Ming stooped and cupped a ripening tomato in both hands, then picked up the hoe and resumed patrolling.
Throughout their conversations Kim was cheerfully confident. He knew he occupied Martin’s every waking moment, which gave him face after so many years of being ignored by American presidents. He feared nothing from American power but a nuclear attack, and he was absolutely certain—in fact he was gleeful about it—that he had shaped American public opinion so as to prevent it.
Kim boasted about the videos he was using to control Americans’ perceptions. He was especially pleased with his latest. It featured two Korean children playing a haunting duet of “You Were Born to be Loved” on violin and piano, standing near the altar of a Christian church. The genius of this one, Kim bragged, was that the video would also appeal to South Koreans because the song was popular there and was in fact written by a South Korean.
There! Ming slashed so hard the handle vibrated. Kim deceived me about the second bomb! He was willing to let his elder cousin, who protected him, lose face. Kim gambles with the very existence of life on the Korean peninsula, betting the Americans won’t retaliate a hundred-fold, as they could in a single, cataclysmic instant. Only a crazy man would risk that!
Of course, we do have agents high up in the DPRK. But they are Korean after all, taught by a lifetime of conditioning to venerate Kim. So there are limits to what they will do for China. And they lack commitment; mostly they are working for us to ensure themselves a safe haven, should Kim turn on them for some imagined transgression.
There are too many questions: Can I have Kim assassinated? Could I control what happened if I did? Could China seize the DPRK’s nuclear bombs and end its capacity to build others? Would China have to deploy half its army to keep millions of starving, brutish North Koreans from crossing our border?
Those are huge unknowns carrying big risks—big for me if I order certain measures taken and big for China. I don’t want to gamble at those stakes!
The worst of it was Martin’s demeanor when I gave him the bad news! He was defeated, resigned to the failure of his diplomacy and ready to use force to remove Kim. He even asked whether I had the means to “surgically remove”—meaning assassinate—Kim. Of course I gave a rambling non-reply, but Martin’s response was alarming: “Then I am now left only with terrible means to protect my country and must use them soon.”
China is caught between a desperate man and a crazy one! Ming stood stock-still, gazing across his plot with unseeing eyes.
Still, I doubt Martin would order an invasion to remove Kim, much less a nuclear strike. So much of his life, and his entire presidency before Six-thirteen, ha
s been about how dialogue and the glue of common humanity could defuse even deep hatreds. I don’t believe that, but I think Rick Martin probably does.
And Huang Bo told me that a significant minority of Americans, including an influential part of Martin’s political base, angrily reject attacking North Korea: War is not the answer. Find another way. We don’t have to kill Korean children to protect American children.
Ming snorted. Fine sentiments, artfully planted and nurtured by Kim, but having no place in the real world—except America, where Huang is certain they are deeply felt by groups that Martin can’t ignore.
The English have a saying: the leopard cannot change its spots. I hope they are right!
Chapter 46
Dottie Branson knew her boss was deeply tired, bone tired, working until his brain was mush, sleeping fitfully if at all. She fought off the urge to check on him in his hideaway, rising and then returning to her desk. Rick had absorbed so many blows on Six-thirteen and since. But worst of all must be his knowing that every arriving minute could carry news of another bomb.
Rick tilted his chair back and put his feet on the small desk. He wanted a cigarette but not enough to walk outside. He fiddled with his notepad, doodling, then wrote “Kim” and underlined it twice.
Kim is the key. He’s the one who controls these weapons. But let’s say I could make him vanish by snapping my fingers; wouldn’t someone else just grab power and continue to kill Americans and threaten America? Plus Japan and South Korea? Not if I could convince that person that giving up those nuclear bombs was in his personal interest. But I haven’t been able to convince Kim, so how could I convince someone like Kim, his son or his top general? Probably only if he knew I would make him vanish, too. But there’s no magic wand. The ways I have to make people vanish are all violent—seize them or kill them. All my life I’ve rejected the politics of violence. Now . . .
Anyway, how could I negotiate directly with Kim after Baltimore? I’d be impeached! And besides, after I placated Kim, if I placated him, who’d be next? What if Iran’s Supreme Leader calculates the same odds—or has a vision—and gives Hezbollah a nuke with our address?
His left arm and hand wrapped over his skull, fingers rubbing his aching right temple, a pretzel of anguish.
About the only thing Americans agree on is that I’m wrong. The Left shrieks that we’re veering toward genocide in North Korea; the Right thunders that my indecision and squeamishness will be the end of America. And in less than two weeks Griffith will be back on the impeachment warpath, if he ever stopped!
Rick rubbed eyes dry and itchy with fatigue. Despair stalked him, a jackal just beyond the campfire’s light.
I’m going in circles. I don’t have the time, with two clocks ticking, one marking the days until another city is bombed, another counting the days until the House votes to impeach me!
He felt pounding in his temples.
Needing space, Rick left his cubbyhole and slouched into the Oval Office. Last night, after Ming’s awful call, I sent for Bart and the NSC. We gathered here and paced and drank too much coffee and re-plowed the same ground.
Again, we considered the military options; again most quickly proved doubtful or impossible. Not only is assassination against our principles, we haven’t got a quick, sure means to kill just Kim. Conventional air and missile attacks are more likely to lead Kim to nuke South Korea and Japan than to scuttle into exile—and he’d try even harder to nuke us again.
Invasion is a non-starter: Gwon won’t help, and fighting without his army, we’d be outnumbered and take heavy casualties; invasion would lead to DPRK attacks, probably nuclear, against South Korea, Japan, and any U.S. base or city Kim could reach, and it might bring in China. Then I’d have a bloody shambles, like Truman’s war that killed or wounded over four million, devastated the entire peninsula, and ended back where it began, without regime change.
That leaves nuclear.
With a grimace, Rick moved behind his desk and chair and stood, hands in pockets and shoulders slumped, looking glumly out the thick window to the small patio and nearby trees.
Eric and Mac say that if we hit key targets simultaneously Kim won’t be able to launch nukes. Afterward, the DPRK would no longer be a functioning society; half to three-quarters of its population would be dead or dying. All urban areas would be radioactive no-go zones like Las Vegas. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of survivors, including some fatally irradiated, would surge across the borders into China, Russia, and South Korea.
That vision had sickened Rick and his advisors. And no one knew what the simultaneous detonation of nearly two dozen nuclear warheads would do to the planet. By unspoken agreement they rejected that option.
Over desperate hours, what emerged was a plan to use a weapon that no longer existed. If European war had broken out in the late sixties, America had a nuclear answer to waves of Soviet tanks racing across Germany: a warhead that produced a huge, momentary pulse of radiation, killing tank crews. Enhanced Radiation Warheads produced relatively little fallout and less blast and heat than other nuclear weapons. After the Cold War, the first President Bush had them dismantled, but the components were stored at the Pantex facility. Several could be assembled within weeks, and Martin had ordered it.
Such a weapon—called the neutron bomb—could be used to ravage a North Korean army or city without creating cross-border fallout or global ecological damage.
Rick rose on his toes, flexing tense muscles.
Nuke one target. Would that cause Kim to flee? Motivate a coup by some hastily formed opposition group? Convince Ming to remove Kim by force? Induce Gwon to cooperate?
Or would it cause Kim to launch his nuclear missiles?
Turning, Rick gazed across the Oval Office, thinking about the annihilating weapons he had ordered to be prepared. Morally how, if at all, does this differ from the Nazis’ Final Solution? How am I different from Himmler if I sign a bombing order that kills tens of thousands of civilians?
Rick felt a giant vise squeezing his chest, a finger of pain tracing his neck and jaw. He pushed a thought away. Not now, God . . . no time.
Is there no other way? Rick asked the bust of George Washington. The only feasible military option is so awful; why not continue working diplomacy and internal security, with faith that they will succeed? After all, we stopped the bombers cold at Baltimore. We defeated them there. If we did it once, we can do it again! And diplomacy is working. The UN has condemned North Korea and demanded that it dismantle its nuclear weapons.
Rick glanced at the presidential flag flanking his desk, the eagle’s fierce gaze.
But . . . with that second bomb this became about more than defending. Right now the country’s on its back. We’re seeing the dissolution of our social contract. No longer believing their government—their president—will protect them, Americans are withdrawing into enclaves and arming themselves. All but the most disadvantaged have fled our cities, leaving them to looters. Our economy is collapsing. Anyone who looks Korean is attacked on the street, or at the least gets cursed.
At this point there’s no gradual path to recovery. We can’t reverse the disintegration without an act as dramatic and game changing as the bombs that drove us there.
And now I’m back to the neutron bomb.
Rick sat down heavily at the presidential desk, drummed his fingers on it.
But I don’t have to do what others say is necessary and right if I think it’s wrong. I can stick to what I believe is right. Let them impeach me!
His lips twisted. Yeah, but then the country would get Bruce Griffith. He’d probably go for the full nuclear strike package. So, because I’m morally offended at the options facing me, I open the way for Bruce to choose the most morally offensive of all? Where’s the morality in that? Besides, I don’t want to be a failed president! And what about Ella’s belief that duty must sometimes override morality? Is she right, or is that thinking like a guard at Auschwitz?
How ma
ny times did I say it during the campaign? Must have been hundreds. With stern face and firm tone: “I will do whatever is necessary to protect the American people!”
Now I’m face to face with myself. I know what I said, but I don’t know what I believed. When you scrape off the campaign gloss, what did I mean by “whatever is necessary”? Anything? No matter how repugnant? What did I mean then? What did others believe I meant? Am I now bound by those words?
He picked up a letter opener and, unconsciously, held it like a dagger.
I didn’t think about what those words meant; what they might require. They were just a check-off, like my pledge to always level with the American people. The price of entry. Pay to play. Saying certain things was as necessary as having campaign funds. Lacking either one, I’m out. Any presidential candidate would be out.
So there are huge mitigating circumstances. Like someone who is pressured into signing a contract without understanding it. Like a home buyer taken in by a predatory lender. When I said those words, I didn’t really mean “whatever.” My listeners, if questioned, would have said they didn’t expect it to be literally anything. Circumstances have changed since I said that. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. No, I don’t feel bound by those words to nuke North Korea!
Rick poured coffee and scuffed back to his private office. Placing the mug on a coaster with the presidential seal, he dropped into his chair.
But the price of not doing whatever it takes is so huge, and it’s paid in deaths and mutilations and cancers and orphans and fear—deep, deep fear that’s destroying us right now!
It’s not that I’m running out of options. It’s time I’m running out of!
What am I going to do before one of those clocks ticks zero? His stomach cramped.