by Tom Clancy
“Callie, this is just wonderful!” The President beamed at the weary staff member, who had the literary elegance of a poet. Fowler amazed everyone in sight by giving the young lady — she was still on the sunny side of thirty — a hug that left tears in Callie Weston's eyes. “Get yourself some rest, and enjoy Rome.”
“A pleasure, Mr. President.”
The aircraft came to a stop at the appointed place. The mobile stairs came immediately into place. A section of red carpet was rolled in place to lead from the stairs to the longer carpet that led in turn to the podium. The President and Prime Minister of Italy moved to their appointed places, along with the US Ambassador, and the usual hangers-on, including some exhausted protocol officers who'd had to plan this ceremony literally on the fly. The door of the aircraft was opened by an Air Force sergeant. Secret Service agents looked outside suspiciously for any sign of trouble, and caught glances from other agents of the advance team. When the President appeared, the Italian Air Force band played its arrival fanfare, different from the traditional American “Ruffles and Flourishes.”
The President made his way down the steps alone, walking from reality to immortality, he reflected. Reporters noticed that his stride was bouncy and relaxed, and envied him the comfortable quarters where he could sleep in regal solitude. Sleep was the only sure cure for jetlag, and clearly the President had enjoyed a restful flight. The Brooks Brothers suit was newly pressed — Air Force One has all manner of amenities — his shoes positively sparkled, and his grooming was perfection itself. Fowler made his way to the US Ambassador and his wife, who conducted him to the Italian president. The band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Next came the traditional review of the assembled troops, and a brief arrival speech that only hinted at the eloquence that would soon follow. In all, it took twenty minutes before Fowler got into his car, along with the Ambassador, Dr. Elliot, and his personal bodyguards.
“First one of those I've ever enjoyed,” was Fowler's evaluation of the ceremony. There was general agreement that the Italians had handled it with elegance.
“ Elizabeth, I want you to stay close. There are a few aspects to the agreement that we need to go over. I need to see Brent, too. How's he doing?” Fowler asked the Ambassador.
“Tired but pretty happy with himself,” Ambassador Coates replied. “The last negotiation session lasted over twenty hours.”
“What's the local press saying?” E. E. asked.
“They're euphoric. They all are. This is a great day for the whole world.” It's happening on my turf, and I'll be there to see it! Jed Coates said to himself. Not often you get to see history made.
“Well, that was nice.”
The National Military Command Center — NMCC — is located in the D-Ring of the Pentagon near the River Entrance. One of the few such installations in government which actually looks like its Hollywood renditions, it is an arena roughly the size and proportions of a basketball court and two stories in height. NMCC is in essence the central telephone switchboard for the United States military. It is not the only one — the nearest alternate is at Fort Ritchie in the Maryland hills — since it is far too easy to destroy, but it is the most conveniently located of its type. It's a regular stop for VIPs who want to see the sexier parts of the Pentagon, much to the annoyance of the staff for whom it's merely the place where they work.
Adjoining the NMCC is a smaller room in which one can see a set of IBM PC/AT personal computers — old ones with 5.25-inch floppy drives — that constitute the Hot Line, the direct communications link between the American and Soviet presidents. The NMCC “node” for the link was not the only one, but it was the primary down-link. That fact was not widely known in America, but it had been purposefully made known to the Soviets. Some form of direct communications between the two countries would be necessary even during an ongoing nuclear war, and letting the Soviets know that the only readily usable down-link was here might serve, some “experts” had judged three decades earlier, as a life-insurance policy for the area.
That, Captain James Rosselli, USN, thought, was just so much theoretician-generated horseshit. That no one had ever seriously questioned it was another example of all the horseshit that lay and stank within Washington in general and the Pentagon in particular. With all the nonsense that took place within the confines of Interstate 495, the Washington Beltway, it was just one more bit of data accepted as gospel, despite the fact that it didn't make a whole lot of sense. To “Rosey” Rosselli, Washington, D.C. was about 300 square miles surrounded by reality. He wondered if the laws of physics even applied inside the Beltway. He'd long since given up on the laws of logic.
Joint duty, Rosey grunted to himself. The most recent effort of Congress to reform the military — something it was singularly unable to do for itself, he groused — had prescribed that uniformed officers who aspired to flag rank — and which of them didn't? — had to spend some of their time in close association with peers from the other uniformed services. Rosselli had never been told how hanging around with a field-artilleryman might make him a better submarine driver, but then no one else had evidently wondered about that. It was simply accepted as an article of faith that cross-pollination was good for something, and so the best and brightest officers were taken away from their professional specialties and dropped into things which they knew not the first thing about. Not that they'd ever learn how to do their new jobs, of course, but they might learn just enough to be dangerous, plus losing currency in what they were supposed to do. That was Congress's idea of military reform.
“Coffee, Cap'n?” an Army corporal asked.
“Better make it decaf,” Rosey replied. If my disposition gets any worse, I might start hurting people.
Work here was career-enhancing. Rosselli knew that, and he also knew that being here was partly his fault. He'd majored in sub and minored in spook throughout his career. He'd already had a tour at the Navy's intelligence headquarters at Suitland, Maryland, near Andrews Air Force Base. At least this was a better commute — he'd gotten official housing at Boiling Air Force Base, and the trip to the Pentagon was a relatively simple hop across I-295/395 to his reserved parking place, another perk that came with duty in the NMCC, and one worth shedding blood for.
Once duty here had been relatively exciting. He remembered when the Soviets had splashed the Korean Airlines 747 and other incidents, and it must have been wonderfully chaotic during the Iraq war — that is, when the senior watch officer wasn't answering endless calls of “what's happening?” to anyone who'd managed to get the direct-line number. But now?
Now, as he had just watched on his desk TV, the President was about to defuse the world's biggest remaining diplomatic bomb, and soon Rosselli's work would mostly involve taking calls about collisions at sea, or crashed airplanes, or some dumbass soldier who'd gotten himself run over by a tank. Such things were serious, but not matters of great professional interest. So here he was. His paperwork was finished. That was something Jim Rosselli was good at — he'd learned how to shuffle papers in the Navy, and here he had a superb staff to help him with it — and the rest of the day was mainly involved with sitting and waiting for something to happen. The problem was that Rosselli was a do-er, not a wait-er, and who wanted a disaster to happen anyway?
“Gonna be a quiet day.” This was Rosselli's XO, an Air Force F-15 pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Barnes.
“I think you're right, Rocky.” Just what I wanted to hear! Rosselli checked his watch. It was a twelve-hour shift, with five hours left to go. “Hell, it's getting to be a pretty quiet world.”
“Ain't it the truth.” Barnes turned back to the display screen. Well, I got my two MiGs over the Persian Gulf. At least it hasn't been a complete waste of time.
Rosselli stood and decided to walk around. The duty watch officers thought this was to look at what they were doing, to make sure they were doing something. One senior civilian ostentatiously continued doing the Post crossword. It was his “lunch”
break and he preferred eating here to the mostly empty cafeterias. Here he could watch TV. Rosselli next wandered over to the left into the Hot Line room, and he was lucky for a change. A message was announced by the dinging of a little bell. The actual message received looked like random garbage, but the encryption machine changed that into cleartext Russian which a Marine translated:
"So you think you know the real meaning of fear?
Yeah, you think you do know, but I doubt it.
When you sit in a shelter with bombs falling all over.
And the houses around you are burning like torches,
I agree that you experience horror and fright.
For such moments are dreadful, for as long as they last,
But the all-clear sounds — then it's okay—
You take a deep breath, the stress has passed by,
But real fear is a stone deep down in your chest.
You hear me? A stone. That's what it is, no more."
“Ilya Selvinskiy,” the Marine lieutenant said.
“Hmph?”
“Ilya Selvinskiy, Russian poet, did some famous work during the Second World War. I know this one, Sprakh, the title is 'Fear.' It's very good.” The young officer grinned. “My opposite number is pretty literate. So…” TRANSMISSION RECEIVED. THE REST OF THE POEM IS EVEN BETTER, ALEKSEY, the lieutenant typed, STAND BY FOR REPLY.
“What do you send back?” Rosselli asked.
“Today… maybe a little Emily Dickinson. She was a morbid bitch, always talking about death and stuff. No, better yet — Edgar Allan Poe. They really like him over there. Hmmm, which one…?” The lieutenant opened a desk drawer and pulled out a volume.
“Don't you do it in advance?” Rosselli asked.
The Marine grinned up at his boss. “No, sir, that's cheating. We used to do it that way, but we changed things about two years ago, when things lightened up. Now it's sort of a game. He picks a poem, and I have to respond with a corresponding passage from an American poet. It helps pass the time, Cap'n. Good for language skills on both sides. Translating poetry is a bitch — good exercise.” The Soviet side transmitted its messages in Russian, and the Americans in English, necessitating skilled translators at both ends.
“Much real business on the line?”
“Captain, I've never seen much more than test messages. Oh, when we have the SecState flying over, sometimes we check weather data. We even chatted a little about hockey when their national team came over to play with the NHL guys last August, but mainly it's duller than dirt, and that's why we trade poetry passages. Weren't for that, we'd all go nuts. Shame we can't talk like on CB or something, but the rules are the rules.”
“Guess so. They say anything about the treaty stuff in Rome?”
“Not a word. We don't do that, sir.”
“I see.” Rosselli watched the lieutenant pick a stanza from “Annabel Lee.” He was surprised. Rosey had expected something from “The Raven.” Nevermore…
The arrival day was one of rest and ceremony — and mystery. The treaty terms had still not been leaked, and news agencies, knowing that something “historic” had happened, were frantic to discover exactly what it was. To no avail. The chiefs of state of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, the United States of America, and their host, Italy, arrayed themselves around a massive 15th Century table, punctuated with their chief diplomats and representatives of the Vatican and the Greek Orthodox church. In deference to the Saudis, toasts were offered in water or orange juice, which was the only discordant note of the evening. Soviet President Andrey Il'ych Narmonov was particularly effusive. His country's participation in the treaty was a matter of great importance, and the inclusion of the Russian Orthodox Church on the Commission for Christian Shrines would have major political import in Moscow. The dinner lasted three hours, after which the guests departed in view of the cameras on the far side of the avenue, and once more the newsies were thunderstruck by the fellowship. A jovial Fowler and Narmonov traveled together to the former's hotel and availed themselves for only the second time of the opportunity to discuss matters of bilateral interest.
“You have fallen behind in your deactivation of your missile forces,” Fowler observed after pleasantries were dispensed with. He eased the blow by handing over a glass of wine.
“Thank you, Mr. President. As we told your people last week, our disposal facility has proven inadequate. We can't dismantle the damned things fast enough, and our nature-lovers in parliament are objecting to our method of neutralizing the propellant stocks.”
Fowler smiled in sympathy. “I know the problem, Mr. President.” The environmental movement had taken off in the Soviet Union the previous spring, with the Russian parliament passing a new set of laws modeled on — but much tougher than — American statutes. The amazing part was that the central Soviet government were abiding by the laws, but Fowler couldn't say that. The environmental nightmare inflicted on that country by more than seventy years of Marxism would take a generation of tough laws to fix. “Will this affect the deadline for fulfilling the treaty requirements?”
“You have my word, Robert,” Narmonov said solemnly. The missiles will be destroyed by 1st March even if I must blow them up myself."
“That is good enough for me, Andrey.”
The reduction treaty, a carryover from the previous administration, mandated a 50 percent reduction in intercontinental launchers by the coming spring. All of America 's Minuteman-II missiles had been tagged for destruction, and the U.S. side of the treaty obligations was fully on track. As had been done under the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the surplus missiles were dismantled to their component stages, which were either crushed or otherwise destroyed before witnesses. The news had covered the first few destructions, then grown tired of it. The missile silos, also under inspection, were stripped of their electronic equipment and, in the case of American structures, fifteen had already been declared surplus and sold — in four cases, farmers had purchased them and converted them to real silos. A Japanese conglomerate that had large holdings in North Dakota had further purchased a command bunker and made it into a wine cellar for the hunting lodge its executives used each fall.
American inspectors on the Soviet side reported that the Russians were trying mightily, but that the plant built for dismantlement of the Russian missiles had been poorly designed, as a result of which the Soviets were 30 percent behind schedule. Fully a hundred missiles were sitting on trailers outside the plant, the silos they'd left already destroyed by explosives. Though the Soviets had in each case removed and burned the guidance package in front of American inspectors, there were lingering intelligence evaluations that it was all a sham — the erector trailers, some argued, could elevate and fire the missiles. Suspicion of the Soviets was too hard a habit to break for some in the U.S. intelligence community, as was doubtless true of the Russians as well, Fowler thought.
“This treaty is a major step forward, Robert,” Narmonov said, after a sip from his wine glass — now that they were alone they could relax like gentlemen, the Russian thought with a sly grin. “You and your people are to be congratulated.”
“Your help was crucial to its success, Andrey,” Fowler replied graciously. It was a lie, but a politic one which both men understood. In fact it was not a lie, but neither man knew that.
“One less trouble spot for us to worry about. How blind we were!”
“That is true, my friend, but it is behind us. How are your people dealing with Germany?”
“The army is not happy, as you might imagine—”
“Neither is mine.” Fowler interrupted gently with his pronouncement. “Soldiers are like dogs. Useful, of course, but they must know who the master is. Like dogs, they can be forgetful, and must be reminded from time to time.”
Narmonov nodded thoughtfully as the translation came across. It was amazing how arrogant this man was. Just what his intelligence briefings had told him, the Soviet president noted. And patronizin
g, too. Well, the American had the luxury of a firm political system, Andrey Il'ych told himself. It allowed Fowler to be so sure of himself while he, Narmonov, had to struggle every day with a system not yet set in stone. Or even wood, the Russian thought bleakly. What a luxury indeed to be able to look on soldiers as dogs to be cowed. Didn't he know that dogs had teeth? So strange the Americans were. Throughout Communist rule in the Soviet Union, they had fretted about the political muscle of the Red Army — when in fact it had had none at all after Stalin's elimination of Tukhachevskiy. But now they discounted all such stories while the dissolution of the iron hand of Marxism-Leninism was allowing soldiers to think in ways that would have ended in execution only a few years earlier. Well, this was no time to disabuse the American of his illusions, was it?
“Tell me, Robert, this treaty idea — where exactly did it come from?” Narmonov asked. He knew the truth and wanted to see Fowler's abilities as a liar.
“Many places, as with all such ideas,” the President replied lightly. “The moving force was Charles Alden — poor bastard. When the Israelis had that terrible incident, he activated his plan immediately and — well, it worked, didn't it?”
The Russian nodded again, and made his mental notes. Fowler lied with skill, evading the substance of the question to give a truthful but evasive answer. Khrushchev was right, as he'd already known. Politicians all the world over are not terribly different. It was something to remember about Fowler. He didn't like sharing credit, and was not above lying in the face of a peer, even over something so small as this. Narmonov was vaguely disappointed. Not that he'd expected anything else, but Fowler could have shown grace and humanity. He'd stood to lose nothing by it, after all. Instead he was as petty as any local Party apparatchik. Tell me, Robert, Narmonov asked behind a poker face that would have stood him well in Las Vegas, what sort of man are you?
“It is late, my friend,” Narmonov observed. “Tomorrow afternoon, then?”