“I got my entire Cabinet confirmed in two weeks, and by the end of this month I’ll have every federal judge position filled,” the President said “I don't care if the world thought it was crazy, and l don’t care about political suicide, because there is virtually no political party behind me.”
“But not giving a speech before Congress—”
“Nothing mandates either an inaugural at the Capitol or a speech before Congress,” the President reminded him. “The Constitution mandates a swearing-in and an oath of office, which l did. The Constitution mandates an annual report to Congress on the state of the union and my legislative agenda, and that’s what I intend to do. I will deliver my budget to Congress at the same time.
“You think it’s political suicide—I say that it tells Congress and tells the American people I mean business. Congress knew I was serious about forming and running my government, and they helped me get my Cabinet confirmed in record time. My judges will be sworn in in months, and in some cases years, before the previous administration’s were.”
Kercheval still looked worried. Thom stood, clasped him on the shoulder, and said seriously, “It looks suicidal to you, Ed, because you’ve been stained by Washington politics, which most times bears little resemblance to either the law or the Constitution.”
“Sir?” Kercheval asked, letting a bit more anger seep into his voice. “Surely you’re not implying ... ?”
“I don’t know Washington politics,” the President went on, ignoring Kercheval’s rising anger. “All I know is the Constitution and a little bit of the law. But you know something? That’s all I need to know. That’s why I know I can choose not to show up for an inaugural or a State of the Union speech, and have complete confidence that I’m doing the right thing. That kind of confidence rubs off on others. I hope it'll rub off on you.’* He went back to his desk, sat down, and began to type again on the computer keyboard at his desk. “We meet with the congressional leadership this morning,” he said aloud, without looking again at Kercheval. “First conference call is scheduled for later this afternoon, isn't it. Ed?”
“Yes, sir. The prime ministers of the NATO countries,” Kercheval replied, completely taken aback by the President’s words. “It’ll be a video teleconference from the Cabinet Room at three p.m. Tonight’s video teleconference is with the Asian allies, scheduled for eight p.m. Tomorrow will be the second round at ten a.m. with the nonaligned countries of Europe and Central and South America.”
“Any advance word?”
“The general assumption is that you’re going to announce the removal of peacekeeping forces from Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo,” Kercheval replied. "That rumor started last week. Already, France and Great Britain have announced their intention to pull out if we pull out, Russia has already hinted they will pull out of Kosovo, but our formal announcement might make them change their mind. Germany will likely stay in both Kosovo and Bosnia.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s right on Germany’s doorstep, and the Balkans have been of great German interest for centuries,” Kercheval said. “Unfortunately, most of the historical connections are negative ones, especially the more recent ones. The Third Reich received a lot of support from sympathizers in the Balkans in their quest to wipe out ‘unclean’ races like Jews and Gypsies. Germany has continued to be a close supporter of Croatia— they fully sponsored Croatia’s admittance into the United Nations, long before their break from Yugoslavia, and they have supported Croatia’s attempts to get land and citizen’s rights from Bosnia. Besides, Germany sees itself as the one and only counterbalance to Russian encroachments in the Balkans. They’ll stay.”
“I need to know for certain,” President Thom said. “Let's get Minister Schramm on the line before the teleconference. I’m committed to our plan, but I don't want to leave our allies flat-footed.”
“Mr President, this will simply not be taken any other way except as the United States withdrawing from an unwmnable situation in the Balkans,” Kercheval said. “It will absolutely throw U.S. foreign policy into chaos!”
“I disagree. Ed—”
‘Our allies will see it as nothing but the United States turning tail and running away,” Kercheval went on angrily. “We have risked too many lives over there to just turn our backs now!”
“Enough. Mr. Kercheval,” the President said. The room was instantly quiet. Everyone in the Oval Office noticed it— that little bit of an edge to the President’s voice, the one many people knew was under the surface but had just not been seen before.
The President was an ex-Army Special Forces officer, well- trained m commando tactics and experienced in various methods of killing an enemy, and a man doesn't live that kind of life without certain traits being indelibly ingrained into the psyche. Thom’s political opponents saw this as an opportunity to try to portray the upstart as a potential mad dog and had exposed his military background in grisly, bloodcurdling detail. They had maintained, and the Pentagon finally confirmed, that as an Army Special Forces platoon leader, Thom led over two dozen search-and-destroy missions in Kuwait, Iraq, and—secretly—into Iran, during Operation Desert Storm. Needless to say, the fact that U.S. forces had been secretly in Iran during the war, with America promising not to threaten Iran as long as it stayed neutral, did not sit well with Iran or with many nations in the Persian Gulf region.
As a first lieutenant, Thomas N. “TNT” Thom had commanded a Special Forces platoon tasked with sneaking deep into various enemy-held territories and lazing targets for precision-guided bombing missions. He and his men were authorized to use any and all means necessary to get close enough to a target to shine it with a laser or mark it with a laser frequency generator so that the target could be hit by laser-guided bombs dropped from Army, Air Force, and Navy attack planes or helicopters.
His own accounts and those of his men told the story: he had pulled the trigger of a weapon or withdrawn a blade in combat over a hundred times, and had confirmed kills on over a hundred men. Most were from relatively short distances, less than fifteen yards, using a silenced pistol. Some were from almost a mile away, where the bullet reaches its target before the sound. A few had been from knife-fighting distance, close enough so Thom could feel his victim's final gush of breath on his hand as he drove a knife into an unprotected neck or brain stem. This didn’t include the countless number of enemy forces killed by the laser-guided bombs he and his team had sent to their targets—the estimated final "‘head count” was well into triple digits.
But rather than horrifying the voters, as the opposition candidates had hoped, it had drawn attention to him. At first, of course, it had been the spectacle—everyone w anted to see w hat a real-life assassin looked like. But if they had come to see the monster, they had stayed to hear the message. The message had soon become a campaign, w hich had become a race, w hich had become a president. But though most had never seen the monster, they assumed it still existed.
They had caught a glimpse of it just now.
“I'd like to speak with Minister Schramm after the meeting w ith the congressional leadership, but before the videoconference,” the President said, and this time it was an order, not a request or suggestion. “Set it up. Please.” At that, the meeting came to an abrupt and very' uncomfortable end.
Office of the President, The Kremlin, Russian Federation
The next morning
“It cannot be true,” the president said. He took a sip of coffee, then set the cup back on its delicate china saucer and stared off through the window of his office into the cold rain outside. “It is amazing what a few weeks can do.”
“The report has not yet been confirmed, Mr. President,” Army General Nikolai Stepashin replied, refilling his coffee cup. “It may not be true. It may be an elaborate hoax, or a security test, or a joke." The general, wearing a civilian suit too big for him and a tie too small, still looked very much like the grizzled field commander that he was. He downed the coffee, his third that mo
rning, but craved more. “But the information in the intercept was so crazy, and the Chancellor’s reaction so strong, that I thought it best to pass it along.”
“Tell me what this means,” Valentin Gennadievich Sen’kov, president of the Russian Federation, said. “Someone please tell me what in hell this means.” Sometimes, Sen’kov thought, the more he learned, the less he knew, and he understood even less.
Fifty-two-year-old Valentin Gennadievich Sen’kov was the leader of the Russia All-Fatherland Party, formerly the Liberal Democratic Party under Sen’kov’s mentor and friend, President Vitaly Velichko. But when Velichko was killed in the joint American-Ukrainian attack on Moscow following Russia’s attempt to reunite its former empire by force, Sen’kov, a former KGB agent and former prime minister, had been named acting president. He had been quickly voted out of office in the national elections that soon followed; his name and that of his party had been so tainted by Velichko’s failure that he’d had the name of his political party changed so the Russian people might not recognize it and associate it with past failures. He’d held on to his seat in the Federation Council, the Russian Parliament’s upper house, by his very fingernails.
When the reformist government of Boris Yeltsin had failed to lift Russia out of its economic, political, and morale doldrums, Sen’kov and his new Russia All-Fatherland Party had been called upon to support the government and help restore the citizens’ confidence in it. Yeltsin had been able to hold on to power only by bringing back Sen’kov, and with him a few vestiges of the old Soviet-style authoritarian government. Sen’kov had finally been back in the Kremlin, no longer an outcast, first as foreign minister and then as prime minister. When Yeltsin, helpless in his alcoholic haze, had been forced to resign in disgrace, Valentin Sen’kov had been chosen by a unanimous vote of Parliament as acting president. His election, just four months before the U.S. elections, had been a landslide victory for the conservative NeoCommunist Party.
Sen’kov seemed to take over where Velichko had left off, but this time the Russian people had responded positively to his political views and actions. Sen’kov immediately crushed the rebellion in Chechnya; he pledged to modernize Russia’s nuclear arsenal; and he resigned his nation from membership in the Council of Europe, the judicial body formed to resolve conflicts between European nations, because the Council had denounced Russia’s actions in Chechnya but refused to speak out against the NATO bombing of Bosnia or Serbia. His brand of quiet toughness and conservative, nationalistic ideals resonated well with the Russian people, who were growing tired of seeing their country become nothing more than a very large third-world nation. In the national elections that soon followed, the Russia All-Fatherland Party under Valentin Sen’kov had captured a huge majority in both the Federation Council and the Duma, and he had been elected the new president.
“What is happening? What are they trying to do?” Sen’kov asked himself. “The Americans are actually going to leave Kosovo, leave Bosnia, leave the Balkans, leave NATO, leave Europe?”
“Sir, what it means, if true, is that the United States is imploding—literally as well as figuratively,” Stepashin said. Stepashin was the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service. He looked at the other members of the president’s Cabinet there for the impromptu meeting: retired Rocket Forces General Viktor Trubnikov, minister of defense; Ivan Filippov, the foreign minister; Sergey Yejsk, aide to the president on national security affairs and secretary' of the Security Council; and Colonel-General Valeriy Zhurbenko, the first deputy minister of defense and chief of the general staff. “For years, ever since their president’s foreign policy debacles, domestic stagnation—and personal indiscretions—the Americans have been like frightened children.”
“Is the tap in the German chancellor’s office reliable?” President Sen’kov asked.
“As reliable as any microwave tap set up over a week ago,” Stepashin replied noncommittally. “The Germans will undoubtedly find it and shut our tap down. They may already have discovered it and are feeding us crap, just so they can watch us have these early-morning meetings and chase our tails around for a day or two. We may spend a few weeks having to sift through mountains of data and thousands of pages of transcribed phone conversations and find out it is all garbage.” He thought for a moment, then added, “But usually when a tap is discovered, the chancellor and most of the members of the Cabinet retreat to alternate locations or go on a foreign trip until their offices can be swept. No one has left Bonn, except for the vice chancellor, and he had a meeting scheduled in Brazil for weeks. In fact, the Cabinet has had two unscheduled meetings since President Thom’s call last night. I believe the information to be factual.”
“What are you talking about. General?” National Security Advisor Yejsk asked. 'The United States is the most powerful nation on Earth. Their economy is strong, their people are happy, it’s a good place to live and invest and emulate. Like Disneyland.” He chuckled, then added, “Apparently not like EuroDisney, though.”
“Nikki is right,” Foreign Minister Ivan Filippov said. “Besides, it’s a societal and anthropological fact: the wealthier the nation, the more they tend to withdraw.”
“The United States is not going to withdraw from anything,” Minister of Defense Trubnikov said. “Withdrawing from peacekeeping duties in Kosovo and Bosnia—what the hell, we were all considering it, even before the death of Gregor Kazakov. Great Britain and Italy were looking for a graceful way out; the rest of NATO, the French, and the nonaligned nations will not remain behind if the others pull out.”
‘That leaves Russia and Germany,” President Sen’kov said. “The question is, do we want to be in the Balkans? Sergey? What do you think?”
“We have discussed this many times, sir,” National Security Advisor Sergey Yejsk replied. “Despite your predecessor’s talk of unity between Slavic peoples, we have virtually nothing in common with the Serbs or any interest in the civil wars or the breakup of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs are nothing but murderous animals—they invented the word ‘vendetta,' not the Sicilians. The Red Army proportionally lost more soldiers to Yugoslav guerrillas than we did to the Nazis. Marshal Tito was the biggest thorn in Stalin’s side since that smug pig Churchill. We stood behind the Serbs because that stupid bigoted shit Milosevic opposed the Americans and NATO.” He paused, then said, “We should get out of the Balkans, too, Mr, President.”
“We should stay,” Trubnikov said immediately. “The Americans will not leave the Balkans. Macedonia, Slovenia, Bulgaria—they want to make them members of NATO. If we leave, NATO will swarm into Eastern Europe. They’ll be knocking on the Kremlin doors before we know it.”
“Always the alarmist, eh, Viktor?” Foreign Minister Filippov said with a smile. “We should stay in the Balkans simply because the Americans are leaving. We milk the public relations value for all it’s worth, then depart when we can sell that to the world, too. We are staying to keep the warring factions apart; now we’re leaving because we have restored peace and stability to the Balkans.”
“The problem is, getting out before our forces lose any more soldiers like Gregor Kazakov,” Yejsk added. “If we sustain heavy guerrilla losses and then depart, we look like cowards.”
“Russia will not flee either Chechnya or the Balkans,” Sen’kov said resolutely. “I like the public relations idea best of all. If it is true, and the Americans leave the Balkans, it will be seen as a sign of weakness. We can exploit that. But remaining in the Balkans might be a waste of resources at best and dangerous at worst. After a few months, maybe a year, we depart.'’ He turned to General Zhurbenko. “What about you, Colonel- General? You have been rather quiet. These are your men we are talking about.”
“I met with Pavel Gregorievich Kazakov, the night the caskets returned to Moscow,” he said solemnly. “He was angry because you did not attend the return.”
“Pavel Gregorievich,” Sen’kov muttered bitterly. “A chip off the old block, except his piece flew in an entirely differe
nt direction. We did a profile of the families of the dead soldiers that could attend the service. General. I was advised that it would be politically unpopular for me to attend. The analysis proved correct: Gregor's wife virtually spat on the flag, in front of the other families. It was a very ugly scene. It only heightened whatever power Pavel Gregorievich has in this country.”
“I spoke with him at length, and so did my aide,” Zhurbenko said. A few of the president’s advisors smiled at that— they were well familiar with some of Major Ivana Vasilev’s unique talents and appetites. “Pavel Gregorievich doesn’t want power, he wants wealth.”
“And he is getting it. I suppose—a hundred drug overdoses a day in Moscow, because of uncontrollable heroin imports by scum like Kazakov,” Stepashin said acidly. “A mother will sell her baby for a gram of heroin and a hypodermic syringe. Yet Kazakov jets around the world, to his homes in Kazakhstan, Vietnam, and Venezuela, raking in money as fast as he can. He does not deserve to bear Gregor Mikhailievich’s name.”
“Did he threaten you? Did he threaten the president?” National Security Advisor Yejsk asked.
“No. He made us an offer,” Zhurbenko replied in a quiet voice. “A truly remarkable, unbelievable offer.” He had agonized over the decision to tell the president and the Security Council about Kazakov’s incredible proposals. He had harbored ideas about trying to manipulate events himself, but decided that was impossible. But if he had the full support of the government as well as the military, it might actually work.
“He says he can sell two and a half billion rubles’ worth of oil per day with a pipeline from the Black Sea to Albania.” He looked around at the stunned faces in the president’s office. “The plans for the pipeline exist, but it has not yet started because of all the political and domestic unrest in southern Europe, primarily Macedonia and Albania. But if the unrest ceased, or if the various governments turned in Russia’s favor, the pipeline project might be accelerated.”
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