by Tom Clancy
For their part, the American trade delegation was just boarding their plane. They were seen off by a minor consular official who spoke plastic words from plastic lips, received by the Americans through plastic ears. Then they boarded their USAF aircraft, which started up at once and began rolling toward the runway.
“So, how do we evaluate this adventure, Cliff?” Mark Gant asked.
“Can you spell ’disaster’ ?” Rutledge asked in return.
“That bad?”
The Assistant Secretary of State for Policy nodded soberly. Well, it wasn’t his fault, was it? That stupid Italian clergyman gets in the way of a bullet, and then the widow of that other minister-person had to pray for him in public, knowing that the local government would object. And, of course, CNN had to be there for both events to stir the pot at home ... How was a diplomat supposed to make peace happen if people kept making things worse instead of better?
“That bad, Mark. China may never get a decent trade agreement if this crap keeps going on.”
“All they have to do is change their own policies a little,” Gant offered.
“You sound like the President.”
“Cliffy, if you want to join a club, you have to abide by the club rules. Is that so hard to understand?”
“You don’t treat great nations like the dentist nobody likes who wants to join the country club.”
“Why is the principle different?”
“Do you really think the United States can govern its foreign policy by principle?” Rutledge asked in exasperation. So much so, in fact, that he’d let his mind slip a gear.
“The President does, Cliff, and so does your Secretary of State,” Gant pointed out.
“Well, if we want a trade agreement with China, we have to consider their point of view.”
“You know, Cliff, if you’d been in the State Department back in 1938, maybe Hitler could have killed all the Jews without all that much of a fuss,” Gant observed lightly.
It had the desired effect. Rutledge turned and started to object: “Wait a minute—”
“It was just his internal policy, Cliff, wasn’t it? So what, they go to a different church—gas ’em. Who cares?”
“Now look, Mark—”
“You look, Cliff. A country has to stand for certain things, because if you don’t, who the fuck are you, okay? We’re in the club—hell, we pretty much run the club. Why, Cliff? Because people know what we stand for. We’re not perfect. You know it. I know it. They all know it. But they also know what we will and won’t do, and so, we can be trusted by our friends, and by our enemies, too, and so the world makes a little sense, at least in our parts of it. And that is why we’re respected, Cliff.”
“And all the weapons don’t matter, and all the commercial power we have, what about them?” the diplomat demanded.
“How do you think we got them, Cliffy?” Gant demanded, using the diminutive of Rutledge’s name again, just to bait him. “We are what we are because people from all over the world came to America to work and live out their dreams. They worked hard. My grandfather came over from Russia because he didn’t like getting fucked over by the czar, and he worked, and he got his kids educated, and they got their kids educated, and so now I’m pretty damned rich, but I haven’t forgotten what Grandpa told me when I was little either. He told me this was the best place the world ever saw to be a Jew. Why, Cliff? Because the dead white European men who broke us away from England and wrote the Constitution had some good ideas and they lived up to them, for the most part. That’s who we are, Cliff. And that means we have to be what we are, and that means we have to stand for certain things, and the world has to see us do it.”
“But we have so many flaws ourselves,” Rutledge protested.
“Of course we do! Cliff, we don’t have to be perfect to be the best around, and we never stop trying to be better. My dad, when he was in college, he marched in Mississippi, and got his ass kicked a couple of times, but you know, it all worked out, and so now we have a black guy in the Vice Presidency. From what I hear, maybe he’s good enough to take one more step up someday. Jesus, Cliff, how can you represent America to other nations if you don’t get it?”
Diplomacy is business, Rutledge wanted to reply. And I know how to do the business. But why bother trying to explain things to this Chicago Jew? So, he rocked his seat back and tried to look dozy. Gant took the cue and stood for a seventy-foot walk. The Air Force sergeants who pretended to be stewardesses aboard served breakfast, and the coffee was pretty decent. He found himself in the rear of the aircraft looking at all the reporters, and that felt a little bit like enemy territory, but not, on reflection, as much as it did sitting next to that diplo-jerk.
The morning sun that lit up Beijing had done the same to Siberia even earlier in the day.
“I see our engineers are as good as ever,” Bondarenko observed. As he watched, earthmoving machines were carving a path over a hundred meters wide through the primeval forests of pine and spruce. This road would serve both the gold strike and the oil fields. And this wasn’t the only one. Two additional routes were being worked by a total of twelve crews. Over a third of the Russian Army’s available engineers were on these projects, and that was a lot of troops, along with more than half of the heavy equipment in the olive-green paint the Russian army had used for seventy years.
“This is a ‘Hero Project,’ ” Colonel Aliyev said. And he was right. The “Hero Project” idea had been created by the Soviet Union to indicate something of such great national importance that it would draw the youth of the nation in patriotic zeal—and besides, it was a good way to meet girls and see a little more of the world. This one was moving even faster than that, because Moscow had assigned the military to it, and the military was no longer worrying itself about an invasion from (or into) NATO. For all its faults, the Russian army still had access to a lot of human and material resources. Plus. there was real money in this project. Wages were very high for the civilians. Moscow wanted both of these resource areas brought on line—and quickly. And so the goldfield workers had been helicoptered in with light equipment, with which they’d built a larger landing area, which allowed still heavier equipment to be air-dropped, and with that a small, rough airstrip had been built. That had allowed Russian air force cargo aircraft to lift in truly heavy equipment, which was now roughing in a proper air-landing strip for when the crew extending the railroad got close enough to deliver the cement and rebar to create a real commercial-quality airport. Buildings were going up. Some of the first things that had been sent in were the components of a sawmill, and one thing you didn’t have to import into this region was wood. Large swaths were being cleared, and the trees cut down to clear them were almost instantly transformed into lumber for building. First, the sawmill workers set up their own rough cabins. Now, administrative buildings were going up, and in four months, they expected to have dormitories for over a thousand of the miners who were already lining up for the highly paid job of digging this gold out of the ground. The Russian government had decided that the workers here would have the option of being paid in gold coin at world-price, and that was something few Russian citizens wanted to walk away from. And so expert miners were filling out their application forms in anticipation of the flights into the new strike. Bondarenko wished them luck. There were enough mosquitoes there to carry off a small child and suck him dry of blood like mini-vampires. Even for gold coin, it was not a place he’d want to work.
The oil field was ultimately more important to his country, the general knew. Already, ships were fighting their way through the late-spring ice, shepherded by navy icebreakers like the Yamal and Rossiya, to deliver the drilling equipment needed to commence proper exploration for later production. But Bondarenko had been well briefed on this subject. This oil field was no pipe dream. It was the economic salvation of his country, a way to inject huge quantities of hard currency into Russia, money to buy the things it needed to smash its way into the twenty-first centu
ry, money to pay the workers who’d striven so hard and so long for the prosperity they and their country deserved.
And it was Bondarenko’s job to guard it. Meanwhile, army engineers were furiously at work building harbor facilities so that the cargo ships would be able to land what cargo they had. The use of amphibious-warfare ships, so that the Russian navy could land the cargo on the beaches as though it were battle gear, had been examined but discarded. In many cases, the cargo to be landed was larger than the main battle tanks of the Russian army, a fact which had both surprised and impressed the commanding general of the Far East Military District.
One consequence of all this was that most of Bondarenko’s engineers had been stripped away for one project or another, leaving him with a few battalions organically attached to his fighting formations. And he had uses of his own for those engineers, the general grumbled. There were several places on the Chinese border where a couple of regiments could put together some very useful obstacles against invading mechanized forces. But they’d be visible, and too obviously intended to be used against Chinese forces, Moscow had told him, not caring, evidently, that the only way they could be used against the People’s Liberation Army was if that army decided to come north and liberate Russia!
What was it about politicians? Bondarenko thought. Even the ones in America were the same, so he’d been told by American officers he’d met. Politicians didn’t really care much about what something did, but they cared a great deal about what it appeared to do. In that sense, all politicians of whatever political tilt all over the world were communists, Bondarenko thought with an amused grunt, more interested in show than reality.
“When will they be finished?” the general-colonel asked.
“They’ve made amazing progress,” Colonel Aliyev replied. “The routes will be fully roughed in—oh, another month or six weeks, depending on weather. The finishing work will take much longer.”
“You know what worries me?”
“What is that, Comrade General?” the operations officer asked.
“We’ve built an invasion route. For the first time, the Chinese could jump across the border and make good time to the north Siberian coast.” Before, the natural obstacles—mainly the wooded nature of the terrain—would have made that task difficult to the point of impossibility. But now there was a way to get there, and a reason to go there as well. Siberia now truly was something it had often been thought to be, a treasure house of cosmic proportions. Treasure house, Bondarenko thought. And I am the keeper of the keys. He walked back to his helicopter to complete his tour of the route being carved out by army engineers.
CHAPTER 36
SORGE Reports
President Ryan awoke just before six in the morning. The Secret Service preferred that he keep the shades closed, thus blocking the windows, but Ryan had never wanted to sleep in a coffin, even a large one, and so when he awoke momentarily at such times as 3:53 he preferred to see some sort of light outside the window, even if only the taillights of a patrolling police car or a lonely taxi-cab. Over the years, he’d become accustomed to waking early. That surprised him. As a boy, he’d always preferred to sleep late, especially on weekends. But Cathy had been the other way, like most doctors, and especially most surgeons: early to rise, and get to the hospital, so that when you worked on a patient you had all day to see how he or she tolerated the procedure.
So, maybe he’d picked it up from her, and in some sort of perverse one-upmanship he’d come to open his eyes even earlier. Or maybe it was a more recently acquired habit in this damned place, Jack thought, as he slid off the bed and padded off to the bathroom as another damned day started, this one like so many others, too damned early. What the hell was the matter? the President wondered. Why was it that he didn’t need sleep as much anymore? Hell, sleep was one of the very few pure pleasures given to man on earth, and all he wanted was just a little more of it ...
But he couldn’t have it. It was just short of six in the morning, Jack told himself as he looked out the window. Milkmen were up, as were paperboys. Mailmen were in their sorting rooms, and in other places people who had worked through the night were ending their working days. That included a lot of people right here in the White House: protective troops in the Secret Service, domestic staff, some people Ryan knew by sight but not by name, which fact shamed him somewhat. They were his people, after all, and he was supposed to know about them, know their names well enough to speak them when he saw the owners thereof—but there were just too many of them for him to know. Then there were the uniformed people in the White House Military Office—called Wham-o by insiders—who supplemented the Office of Signals. There was, in fact, a small army of men and women who existed only to serve John Patrick Ryan—and through him the country as a whole, or that was the theory. What the hell, he thought, looking out the window. It was light enough to see. The streetlights were clicking off as their photoelectric sensors told them the sun was coming up. Jack pulled on his old Naval Academy robe, stepped into his slippers—he’d only gotten them recently; at home he just walked around barefoot, but a President couldn’t do that in front of the troops, could he?—and moved quietly into the corridor.
There must have been some sort of bug or motion sensor close to the bedroom door, Jack thought. He never managed to surprise anyone when he came out into the upstairs corridor unexpectedly. The heads always seemed to be looking in his direction and there was the instant morning race to see who could greet him first.
The first this time was one of the senior Secret Service troops, head of the night crew. Andrea Price-O’Day was still at her home in Maryland, probably dressed and ready to head out the door—what shitty hours these people worked on his behalf, Jack reminded himself—for the hour-long drive into D.C. And with luck she’d make it home—when? Tonight? That depended on his schedule for today, and he couldn’t remember offhand what he had happening.
“Coffee, Boss?” one of the younger agents asked.
“Sounds like a winner, Charlie.” Ryan followed him, yawning. He ended up in the Secret Service guard post for this floor, a walk-in closet, really, with a TV and a coffeepot—probably stocked by the kitchen staff—and some munchies to help the people get through the night.
“When did you come on duty?” POTUS asked.
“Eleven, sir,” Charlie Malone answered.
“Boring duty?”
“Could be worse. At least I’m not working the bad-check detail in Omaha anymore.”
“Oh, yeah,” agreed Joe Hilton, another one of the young agents on the deathwatch.
“I bet you played ball,” Jack observed.
Hilton nodded. “Outside linebacker, sir. Florida State University. Not big enough for the pros, though.”
Only about two-twenty, and it’s all lean meat, Jack thought. Young Special Agent Hilton looked like a fundamental force of nature.
“Better off playing baseball. You make a good living, work fifteen years, maybe more, and you’re healthy at the end of it.”
“Well, maybe I’ll train my boy to be an outfielder,” Hilton said.
“How old?” Ryan asked, vaguely remembering that Hilton was a recent father. His wife was a lawyer at the Justice Department, wasn’t she?
“Three months. Sleeping through the night now, Mr. President. Good of you to ask.”
I wish they’d just call me Jack. I’m not God, am I? But that was about as likely as his calling his commanding general Bobby-Ray back when he’d been Second Lieutenant John P. Ryan, USMC.
“Anything interesting happen during the night?”
“Sir, CNN covered the departure of our diplomats from Beijing, but that just showed the airplane taking off.”
“I think they just send the cameras down halfway hoping the airplane’ll blow up so that they’ll have tape of it—you know, like when the chopper comes to lift me out of here.” Ryan sipped his coffee. These junior Secret Service agents were probably a little uneasy to have “The Boss,” as he was known
within the Service, talking with them as if he and they were normal people. If so, Jack thought, tough shit. He wasn’t going to turn into Louis XIV just to make them happy. Besides, he wasn’t as good-looking as Leonardo DiCaprio, at least according to Sally, who thought that young actor was the cat’s ass.
Just then, a messenger arrived with the day’s copies of the morning’s Early Bird. Jack took one along with the coffee and headed back to read it over. A few editorials bemoaning the recall of the trade delegation—maybe it was the lingering liberalism in the media, the reason they were not, never had been, and probably never would be entirely comfortable with the amateur statesman in the White House. Privately, Ryan knew, they called him other things, some rather less polite, but the average Joe out there, Arnie van Damm told Jack once a week or so, still liked him a lot. Ryan’s approval rating was still very high, and the reason for it, it seemed, was that Jack was perceived as a regular guy who’d gotten lucky—if they called this luck, POTUS thought with a stifled grunt.
He returned to reading the news articles, wandering back to the breakfast room, as he did so, where, he saw, people were hustling to get things set up—notified, doubtless, by the Secret Service that SWORDSMAN was up and needed to be fed. Yet more of the His Majesty Effect, Ryan groused. But he was hungry, and food was food, and so he wandered in, picked what he wanted off the buffet, and flipped the TV on to see what was happening in the world as he attacked his eggs Benedict. He’d have to devour them quickly, before Cathy appeared to yell at him about the cholesterol intake. All around him, to a radius of thirty miles or so, the government was coming to consciousness, or what passed for it, dressing, getting in their cars, and heading in, just as he was, but not as comfortably.
“Morning, Dad,” Sally said, coming in next and walking to the TV, which she switched to MTV without asking. It was a long way since that bright afternoon in London when he’d been shot, Jack thought. He’d been “daddy” then.