by Jack Mars
Luke stared out the window at the vastness of blue ocean around them. They’d been flying for hours, and they had hours more to go. It occurred to him that in Korea, it was already August 18. August 18 was zero hour.
He looked across the aisle from him. Trudy had been asleep for a long while, curled into a ball. Now she was awake again, looking out her window. He glanced in the back. Ed and Swann were both dozing.
“Why do you suppose,” he said, “the Koreans didn’t tell us they had this prisoner?”
Trudy shrugged. “A lot of reasons. They’ve only had the guy a day. The North Koreans are always crying wolf, like you said before. There’s always a big attack coming, which never comes. And the South Koreans are trying to get out of our shadow a little bit. They had that rape case two years ago, and my understanding was that intel sharing dropped away to nothing after that. It’s barely come back since.”
Luke remembered the case. Three drunk Marines had raped an eleven-year-old girl while on leave from their base. Months of massive protests had followed the case. The South Koreans demanded the soldiers be turned over to the local authorities.
Instead, the Americans sent them home to be tried in a military court. They were all doing twenty years in Leavenworth. That didn’t satisfy the South Koreans, who probably wanted to drop the soldiers into hell with the worst, most violent criminals their society had to offer.
He and Trudy lapsed into silence. The plane bounced over some turbulence. For a couple of seconds, the ride felt like a rollercoaster. Luke barely noticed it. He stared at Trudy for a long minute. She was just gazing out that window, her eyes far away.
“A lot of water out there,” Luke said.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“It’s a big world.”
She sighed, her entire chest heaving. She turned to him. “I need to disappear.”
He nodded. “For a little while, probably.”
“Will you help me? I’m going to need a new identity. A place where I can live, and hold a job. I need a whole new life.”
“I’ll help you. I know a lot about that kind of thing.”
She took another deep breath. Her voice shook. “I may never see my parents or my brother again.”
Luke almost went to her. But he didn’t. He didn’t know why he held back, except that what was between them didn’t seem to be part of this team. Ed and Swann were not involved, and he didn’t want to put them in the middle of it.
“That’s not how these things go, Trudy.”
“Okay,” she said. “So tell me how they go.”
He thought for a minute about the people he had known who were in hiding. He thought about the bittersweet meetings they would have with their loved ones, in out of the way places, under false names, under cover of darkness. He’d like to tell her something positive, so…
“You will see your family. At first, maybe not for a year. And never as often as you like. But once you learn the ropes, you can see them from time to time. They can travel outside the United States. We have Swann make sure they’re not being monitored. They’re eating in a café in Rome one day. A woman with blonde hair and sunglasses is passing by on the street and sits with them at their table. They have a nice long meal, maybe drinks. Maybe it lasts an hour. Then the woman gets up and walks away.”
Trudy shook her head. “Gee, Stone, that sounds romantic.”
“It’s better than the alternative, which, by the way, is always available to you.”
“Prison?” she said.
Luke shrugged. “They can visit you every week.”
She almost laughed. “I don’t know which would be worse. Never seeing them, or seeing them all the time.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
05:45 p.m.
United States Naval Observatory – Washington, DC
“How are we doing?” Susan said.
She and Pierre sat in the study together, holding hands. They hadn’t watched any of the TV coverage of the simulated news conference they had given earlier. Pierre was willing to turn it on, but Susan couldn’t bear it.
Kat stood in front of them, wielding her tablet. She had just come into the room.
Kat nodded. “Things look good. Our early telephone polling suggests the response has been very favorable.”
“Give us the highlights,” Susan said.
“Well, overall, the speech has a seventy-one percent favorability rating, with just sixteen percent unfavorable, and thirteen percent undecided. Your physical appearance had far and away the highest rating.”
“We asked questions about my physical appearance?” Susan said.
Kat nodded. “The wisdom nowadays is that appearance sways opinion. We’ve always known it, since Kennedy beat Nixon in that first televised debate. Now we measure it. People like to look at beautiful people. And they like beautiful people more than they like unattractive people. Human nature, I guess.”
“So hit me with it,” Susan said.
“Okay. A full ninety-three percent of respondents said your appearance was attractive or very attractive. Five percent couldn’t decide, probably people with vision impairments. And then, you know, a handful of haters rated you unattractive or very unattractive.”
“I’m not sure what show they were watching,” Pierre said.
“I’m not, either,” Kat said. “But the strength of that rating seems to have driven the results in other areas. In terms of the content of the speech, sixty-eight percent of those polled said they agreed with the message of your speech, twenty-one percent disagreed, and eleven percent were undecided. Our pollsters tell me those are much higher positives than they would have expected.”
“A lot of Americans still don’t like gay people,” Pierre said.
“That’s right,” Kat said. “Even with the attractiveness factor, we would expect to see agreement with the content at below fifty percent, neck and neck with disagreement, and with a significant number of people on the fence. One caveat is that the pollsters feel that the surprising positive effect will wear off with time.”
“What else?” Susan said.
“Your overall favorability rating is back over fifty percent for the first time in a month, and the pollsters suggest that during the next twenty-four hours, it may climb over sixty percent. That’s not bad. The key will be to sustain it. These numbers tend to peak within a few days after the event, then gradually drift downward again. But the good news is the leak seems to have backfired.”
“What’s the response on TV?” Susan said.
“Also somewhat surprising. Martin Binkle has been on FOX for the past half hour, defending you. He’s taking the libertarian tack that no one has the right to infringe on the personal liberties of another. You’re the President, but you also have a private life, and you’re entitled to it. Amazingly, much of the conservative chatter-sphere is falling into line behind him.”
Susan almost laughed. Martin Binkle was on television defending her. Would wonders never cease? All she had asked was for positive coverage on his websites. Now he was going the extra mile. It was as if the world had been turned inside out and stood on its head.
“What else?”
“Well, Michael Parowski’s office has requested a sit-down between you and Michael. He tried to come back here earlier this afternoon, but was stopped at the gatehouse. He hasn’t been able to get on the grounds.”
Susan shrugged. “Michael is done. I’m happy to meet with him, but not today. In the meantime, I want to relaunch the search for Vice President. And I mean from scratch.”
Kat looked up from her tablet. Susan watched her closely. Was she the slightest bit disappointed that Michael wasn’t coming on board?
Susan went on: “We didn’t look terribly hard at women last time, supposedly because it would overload the ticket. But you know what? We had male Presidents and Vice Presidents for two hundred years, and nobody ever worried about that overload.”
Kat nodded, suppressed a slight smile. “Okay, Susan, I’ll
have a broad list of possibles in twenty-four hours, with complete vitaes, and vetted for skeletons and security risks.”
Susan nodded. “Thank you. That sounds good.”
Just then, the door opened and a Secret Serviceman let Kurt Kimball in. Kurt looked like he still hadn’t gotten any sleep. His shirt, normally tight to his broad chest, was rumpled and saggy. The beginnings of a beard were growing along the bottom of his face. It was startling to see hair growing anywhere on that cue ball head of his. The tiny slip in discipline gave Susan the impression of a man in the grips of a sudden and unexpected downward slide.
“We just got word from the Pentagon,” he said, without any introduction. “Maybe ninety minutes ago, the Chinese captured one of our submarines in the South China Sea. That carrier strike force we have en route? They’re demanding that we turn it around.”
* * *
“General, what in God’s name was that submarine doing there?”
The Situation Room was packed, as usual. Susan sat in her customary spot, at one head of the conference table. Big Haley Lawrence, her incoming Defense Secretary, sat on her right hand, and Kat Lopez hovered behind her. At the far end of the table, Kurt Kimball stood. Behind him was a large flat-screen, with a map of the South China Sea.
General Walters looked just a bit uncomfortable. Haley Lawrence had asked the question, and Walters’s normal condescending calm was starting to show cracks. Susan noted this, but didn’t feel strongly about it either way. Maybe Michael Parowski was right—maybe the general had been bowling her over a little bit. And maybe it was a gender thing.
“Haley,” General Walters said, deliberately not calling him by his title. “You’re new, so let me give you a little bit of background. We have an extensive naval surveillance program throughout the world. Submarines track the ships of other countries as part of that program. We do it to the Chinese and the Russians. We do it to the Iranians. We do it to the Indians. Hell, we even do it to the French and the Israelis.”
“I’m aware of the surveillance program, General. And I’ve spent much of the past twenty-four hours reading classified intelligence reports. Kurt, where was that sub intercepted?”
At the end of the table, Kurt indicated a spot on the map. A red pin appeared between a large island shaded the color of China, and the country of Vietnam. The region was a kidney-shaped gulf, almost entirely surrounded by Chinese landmass.
“About thirty nautical miles west-northwest of Hainan Island, and a hundred miles east of Halong Bay. Eighteen miles outside of what we would call Chinese territorial waters, but a very deep penetration inside what the Chinese would consider their sphere of influence.”
“And the name and class of the sub?” Lawrence said.
“USS Lewiston,” Kurt said. “Los Angeles class nuclear sub, what we used to call a hunter-killer. Capable of running silently. Armed with torpedoes and surface to air missiles.”
Haley Lawrence addressed the general again. “So the Lewiston, a hunter-killer sub, was trailing a Chinese destroyer, very close to the Chinese mainland. Would you call that a provocation, General?”
General Walters cleared his throat. Even his aides were starting to look worried.
“I would call it part of routine surveillance activities.”
Haley lifted a sheaf of paperwork from the table in front of him. “Yet nowhere in this stack of intelligence reports is there any mention of the USS Lewiston, its whereabouts, or its activities.”
“Uh, the Lewiston’s activities are top secret,” Walters said.
“These are classified reports, General. And I am the Secretary of Defense.”
“I beg your pardon, sir. You are not the Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of Defense is the title of a person who has been confirmed by a vote in the United States Senate. You are the current nominee for Secretary of Defense.”
Haley Lawrence smiled. He seemed almost ready to laugh. “General,” he said, “do you suppose there’s any doubt that I will be confirmed by a majority vote in a Senate dominated by Republicans? And after I am confirmed, do you suppose I’ll have forgotten your reluctance to bring me up to speed as quickly as possible?”
The general shrugged. It was a strangely ineffectual gesture, coming from a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Top secret activities are a higher clearance level than classified.”
“So let me get this straight,” Haley said, changing the subject. “We have submarine activities that are simultaneously top secret and routine, and those activities aren’t included in briefings provided to the Secretary of Defense?”
Susan watched as General Walters searched for an answer that made any logical sense. None seemed forthcoming. She had to admit she was enjoying this show the tiniest amount. She should have hired Haley a month ago.
“You’re not currently the Secretary of Defense,” the general said finally. “You’re a professor at Stanford University. We don’t have top secret clearances for college professors.”
Haley Lawrence shook his large head. He seemed to dismiss the general for the time being. “Kurt, if you don’t mind, where is that naval strike force?”
A new red pin appeared on the map. Kurt indicated it. “Our lead strike force is now located about a hundred nautical miles northeast of the Paracel Islands. We have a second strike force just entering the region. Our latest data has them passing between Taiwan and the Philippines as we speak.”
“Too far from the Lewiston to help them?” Haley said.
“Nowhere near the Lewiston,” Kurt said. “As a practical matter, the Lewiston and its men are well out of our reach. Our intelligence suggests most of the men have already been taken aboard a Chinese tanker, leaving just a skeleton crew to pilot the Lewiston . We believe the Lewiston will be escorted to the Chinese harbor of Beihai.”
“Where the Chinese will pull it apart and reverse-engineer it,” Haley said.
Kurt seemed to almost cringe. “Los Angeles class subs have been in use for quite some time. It’s not our most advanced system. That said, you never want technology to fall intact into the hands of your enemies.”
Susan stepped in. She was beginning to see how she could work with Haley. He was detail-oriented to an extreme. She was a big picture person. His job was to pick apart the details. Hers was to get a clear sense of what the implications were.
“Kurt, what is your assessment of the overall situation?” she said.
“Well, it’s not ideal. Technically, even though its actions could be considered provocative, the Lewiston was in international waters, and had every right to be there. The strike force that the Chinese want us to turn around is clearly in international waters. If the Chinese are able to blackmail us into leaving the South China Sea, it sets a bad precedent. Nearly half the shipping trade in the world passes through there at some point in its journey, so it’s critically important that the South China Sea not become a Chinese lake. As for the sub, the Lewiston’s men are protected by numerous treaties, to which China is a signatory. They must be treated as guests, and not as prisoners. We can insist on their release, and we will be in the right. It’s simply illegal for China to use them as a bargaining chip, or to imply that any harm might come to them.”
“So what do you suggest we do with that strike force?” Susan said.
“I think it’s clear,” Kurt said. “The strike force continues deeper into the South China Sea, as allowed under international law. If the force comes under fire, they destroy any and all attackers. If Lewiston crew members are harmed in any way, it’s a clear act of aggression by China, and grounds for a full-scale military intervention.”
Susan took a deep breath. They were inching closer and closer to war.
“Haley?” she said.
He nodded. “That sounds about right. I would add that we increase exercises by bomber and fighter squadrons in that region, filing flight paths ahead of time with the Chinese, so there are no surprise interactions. We want to show them that we’re the biggest kid on
the block.”
“General?”
General Walters was playing with a pen on the table in front of him. He looked up and stared directly at Susan. His eyes were so bloodshot that they seemed to glow red. No one was getting any sleep, Susan realized, and that was becoming a problem. Executive function eroded with lack of sleep.
Walters shook his head. “I say we start bombing Chinese container ships.”
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
11:02 a.m. Korea Time, August 18 (10:02 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, August 17)
Headquarters of the National Intelligence Service – Seoul, South Korea
The headquarters, in a suburb south of the city proper, were sprawling. The place probably didn’t employ as many people as the Pentagon, but the grounds seemed larger. Buildings fanned out from the central building like spokes on a wheel.
They were met at the airstrip and brought by limousine to the main building. Luke, Ed, and Swann were all still dressed like they were on summer vacation. Trudy was dressed in Swann’s cast-off clothing—she looked like something out of a story about a young homeless waif who steals her clothes from people’s backyard clotheslines.
None of them spoke. Although they had all dozed on and off, the twelve-hour flight would take the vinegar out of anyone.
A young woman in a blue military uniform walked them down several gleaming corridors to a security checkpoint. A man in a pin-striped suit stood at the checkpoint with four guards. He had salt and pepper hair, and was just a touch overweight. Paunchy, even. Nevertheless, he was very handsome, in a middle-aged sort of way.
He was also very short.
His sharp eyes and stern face followed Luke’s movements the whole way down the hall. He didn’t smile.
Luke watched him as well.
“Stone?” the man said.
“Park?”
The man shook his head. “Stone, what are you wearing?”
Luke looked down at his own cut-off shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers. “You know?” he said. “I was thinking I might go to the beach while I was here.”