by Dale Brown
"One hundred fifty million doll ars ... per day," was all Zhurbenko could murmur.
"Instead of pumping oil, refining it, shipping it to the greedy West, and taking our rightful place as the world's greatest nation," Kazakov said, draining his glass, "we are welcoming our heroes home in caskets draped with the flag of a dying, gutless government. No wonder my mother wanted that flag off her husband's casket. It is a disgrace. Tell that to the president when you see him."
They fell silent for several minutes after that, with Zhurbenko exchanging only a few whispered words with his aide and Kazakov sipping on a couple more shots of whiskey
until the bottle was empty. The limousine soon pulled up before an apartment building about ten blocks from the Kremlin, with unmarked security cars parked
at each corner and across from the entrance. A security guard and a receptionist could be seen through the thick front windows.
Zhurbenko easily maneuvered around Kazakov and exited the limousine. "My driver will take you wherever you would like to go, Pavel," the commander of the Russian Federation's ground forces said. He extended a hand, and Kazakov took it. "Again, my deepest condolences for your loss. I will visit your mother in the morning, if she will see me."
"I will see to it that she receives you, Colonel-General." "Good." He placed his left hand over Pavel's right, pulling the young man closer as if speaking in confidence. "And we must keep in touch, Pavel. Your ideas have much merit. I would like to hear more."
"Perhaps, General."
The limousine drove off and had gone for a couple blocks before Pavel realized the general's aide was still in the car. "So," Kazakov said, "what is your name ... Colonel?"
"Major," the woman replied. "Major Ivana Vasilyev, deputy chief of the general's staff." She shifted over to the general's seat, then produced another bottle of Jim Beam and a glass. "May I pour you something more to drink?"
"No. But you may help yourself. I assume you are officially off duty now."
"I am never really off-duty, but the colonel-general has dismissed me for the night." Instead, she put the bottle and the glass away, then turned to face him. "Is there anything else I can offer you, Mr. Kazakov?" Pavel let his eyes roam across her body, and she reciprocated. Vasilyev smiled invitingly. "Anything at all?"
Kazakov chuckled, shaking his head. "The old bastard wants something from me, doesn't he, Major?"
Vasilyev unbuttoned her tunic, revealing the swell of round, firm breasts beneath her white uniform blouse. "My orders were to escort you home and see to it that any wishes you have are taken care of immediately, Mr. Kazakov," she said. She removed her neck tab and unbuttoned her blouse, and Kazakov
noticed she wore a very unmilitary sheer black lace brassiere. "The general is interested in your ideas and suggestions, and he has ordered me to act as his liaison. I have been ordered to provide you with anything you wish-4ata, information, resources, assistance-anything." She knelt before him on the rich blue carpeting, reached out to him, and began to stroke him through his pants. "If he wants something specific from you, he has not told me what itis."
"So he orders you to undress before a strange man in his car, and you do it without question?"
"This was my idea, Mr. Kazakov," she said, with a mischievous smile. "The general gives me a great deal of latitude in how I might carry out his orders."
Kazakov smiled, reached to her, and expertly removed the front clasp from her brassiere with one hand. "I see," he said. She smiled in return, closed her eyes as his hands explored
her breasts, and then said as she reached for his zipper, "I consider this one of the perquisites of my duties."
The White House Oval Office, Washington, 3D.C. The next morning
"Mr. President, I know you meant to shake things up in Washington-but I'm afraid this bombshell is surely going to explode in your face when it gets out."
President Thomas Thorn stopped typing into his computer and swiveled around to face his newly ratified Secretary of Defense, Robert G. Goff, who had marched into the Oval Office almost at a trot. Along with Goff was the Secretary of State, Edward F. Kercheval; the Vice President, Lester R. Busick, and Douglas R. Morgan, the Director of Central Intelligence. "Read the final draft of the executive order, did you, Bob?"
Goff held up his copy of the document in question as if it were covered in blood. "Read it? I've done nothing else but go over it for the past eighteen hours. I've been up all night, and I've kept most of my staff up all night, too, trying to find out
if this is legal, feasible, or even right. This is completely astounding, Thomas."
Robert Goff was known throughout Washington as a straight-talking, no-nonsense man. A retired U.S. Army veteran, three-term congressman from Arizona, and acknowledged military expert, at age fifty-one Goff was one of the new lions
in Washington, not afraid to stir things up. But the President's plan made even him gape in astonishment. Next to Goff was the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard W. Venti. Tall, thin, and young-looking for a four-star general, Venti was a veteran fighter pilot and the former commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe before being appointed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Unlike Goff, Venti preferred to keep his emotions and his thoughts to himself.
Noticeably absent from the meeting was the President's Special Advisor on National Security Affairs, known as the National Security Advisor-because President Thomas N. Thorn hadn't appointed one. It was part of a major shakeup in the Executive Branch, a drastic downsizing that was designed to make Cabinet officials more responsive and responsible, both to the public and to the President. So far in the new Thorn administration, over three hundred White House and executive branch personnel slots had been eliminated simply because the President and his staff had refused to fill them. The functions of several White House offices, such as Drug Control Policy, Management and Budget, and several political liaison offices, would be reassigned to other departments or simply eliminated.
"I know we talked about what we might do to change things in the Department of Defense and in the entire government," Goff went on excitedly, "but ... this? You can't possibly seriously intend to actually implement any of this."
"I am going to do all of it, and I'm going to finish it by the end of this year," the President said with a confident smile. "Changing priorities as far as peacekeeping deployments-
I don't think you'll get too much opposition," Goff said. "Another few rounds of base realignments, with no closures-I think that will sell, too." He motioned to the draft speech and the President's staff's attached comments. "But this . - ."
"Bob, remember when we first talked about the possibility of doing this?" Thorn asked, his ever-present smile warm with the memories. Robert Goff had been one of Jeffersonian Party candidate Thomas Thorn's earliest and strongest supporters, giving up his seat in Congress during the campaign to help Thorn. They had been close friends ever since.
"Of course I remember," Goff said, smiling in spite of himself. Thomas Thorn had this irritating way of disarming almost any agitated situation or person. "But we were young and stupid and naive as hell back then."
"It was less than a year ago, funny man," Thorn said with a smile. "We were in Abilene, Texas, at one of the first Jeffersonian Party rallies. It was cold, and I think it had snowed the night before. You and three of your volunteers had to stay in the same room at the Holiday Inn because we barely had enough money to keep going for another month; Amelia and I had three of the kids licking stamps for the mailers while they were watching cartoons. We didn't even place in the Iowa caucuses, and we barely qualified for the ballot in the New Hampshire primary, so we decided to work on the Super Tuesday states. You hoped that a hundred folks would show. Our podium at the open house at the Army post was a real honest-to-goodness soapbox-"
"A bunch of cases of laundry detergent from the mess hall, covered over with a tablecloth."
Thorn nodded. "But two thousand folks showed up, and we had to s
tand on top of a bus and use one of those big loudspeakers they use on firing ranges to make ourselves heard."
"I remember, Thomas," Goff said. "That was the beginning. The turning point. What a day. We ended up winning New Hampshire without hardly setting foot in the state."
"But remember when we took that tour-of the base, and we saw all those hundreds of M I Abrams tanks lined up in the marshaling area?" Thorn went on. "Rows and rows and rows of them, as far as you could see, like furrows in a freshly plowed field. And they told us that none of those tanks had ever fired a shot in anger. They had second- and third-generation tanks there that had never even left the base except for training exercises. We saw artillery pieces, armored personnel carriers,
mobile bridges, tents, vans, support vehicles, Humvees, rocket launchers, even radar systems and air defense missile batteries-all had not been used
since Desert Storm, if they had ever been used at all."
"I know, Thomas," Goff said. "But we've been at peace since Desert Storm. It doesn't mean they won't ever be used. . . ." "We talked about what an incredible waste of resources it all
represented," Thorn went on. "Unemployment in the United States is at an all-time low and has been for years. Companies are begging for qualified, trainable workers. Yet we are spending billions of dollars on weapon systems that may never be used in combat, weapons that were designed to fight yesterday wars. Someone has to operate that equipment, train others to use it, maintain it, train the maintainers, and someone has to keep track of all the stuff they need to operate and maintain it. It was a huge infrastructure, a massive investment in manpower and resources, and for what? What purpose did it serve? We said it was senseless, and we wondered what we could do about it. Well, this is what we're going to do about it." The President looked at General Venti. "What are your final thoughts, General?"
Venti thought about his response for a moment, then: "We can argue the merits of the numbers, sir," he replied. "The Army spends five point three billion dollars a year on readiness and training for weapon systems that have never been used in war. The Navy spends ten billion dollars a year manning, equipping, and maintaining a fleet of nuclear attack submarines that have never fired a shot in combat. We spend another twenty billion dollars maintaining a nuclear deterrence force, and we hope to God we never have to use it, despite the threat from China and possibly Russia."
"It's the emotional factor that'll be hard to counter, Mr. President," Goff inteijected. "There are still lots of World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam vets out there who will see this plan as a betrayal of trust. Your political opponents will use that. Several previous administrations made such drastic budget cuts that what you are about to do is inevitable, but you will still be blamed for it.
"There is still a great threat out there, Mr. President," Goff
went on. "China has already attacked American territory with nuclear weapons, and we think they will again. Although every prediction model and every analyst thinks it's unlikely, former empires such as Japan, Germany, and Russia could rise up and threaten American interests. Nonaligned, theocratic, and rogue nations could threaten American interests at any time with attacks ranging from simple kidnappings to cyberforce to nuclear weapons. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has increased tenfold since the breakup of the Soviet Union."
"I want to hear from the general, Bob," the President said. He nodded, urging him to speak. Goff looked frustrated and a bit angry, but held his comments.
"Frankly, sir, I think it's about time we start thinking about fighting future wars on our terms," the Air Force general said. "In a time of relative peace, this is the time to prepare for twenty-first- and even twenty-second century wars. We must do away with the old equipment, the old tactics, and the old fears and prejudices.
"This nation also somehow got sidetracked in its thinking about the role of the military," Venti concluded. "The military has always been a place to send kids that lacked discipline, but in more recent years the military has become a sort of extension of the welfare state. Fighting and possibly dying for your country took a back seat to learning a trade, getting an education, and providing someplace cool to go after high school. We are spending millions of dollars a year to recruit kids to join, but they're joining for all the wrong reasons. The problem is not that we lack well-qualified recruits-the problem is, the military became too big, too bloated. We had a military looking for a reason for existence. We were dreaming up missions for the military that had little to do with national security and everything to do with political posturing. I think it's time we stop that."
"Spoken like a true Air Force officer, one whose career and retirement are secure," the President said, with an inquisitive smile.
"And the Air Force makes out pretty well in the new plan,
I've noticed," Goff added. "The Air Force and Navy should be thrilled about their new status."
"I'm speaking as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, not just as an Air Force officer, sir," Vend said to Goff. "I think the plan is a good beginning. It signals a positive change in military strategy for the twenty-first century.
It's a change that I feel is badly needed. I'm completely behind the President."
"But what will your men say when the changes happen? What will your sister services say?"
"The true soldiers will do what they're told," Venti said honestly. "The rest will squawk. They'll call you a traitor. They'll call for your resignation, perhaps try to impeach you. That's when you need to show them the strength of your convictions. Will the public outcry be louder than what your heart is telling your head? If you can listen to your heart while the storm of public and world opinion is beating down on you, everything will turn out okay. That's your dilemma, sir, not mine." Venti sighed, looked away for a moment, then added, "And as for my career and retirement: they may be secure, but I'll still be forever known as the man who presided over the biggest shakeup in U.S. military history since the draft."
"At least you're okay with this," Thorn said. Venti looked sternly at his commander-in-chief, even after the President gave him a wink. To the Secretary of State, Edward Kercheval, the President went on, "Okay, Ed, I know you've been waiting for a crack at me. Fire away."
"You know how I feel about this plan, sir," Kercheval said ominously. Unlike Goff and most others in Thorn's administration, Edward Kercheval, former ambassador to Russia in the Martindale administration and a career State Department employee, was not a close friend of the President's. But the President insisted on open dialogue and direct communication between the Cabinet officers and the Oval Office, and Kercheval had made it clear early on that he would take every opportunity to do so. "I'm afraid this plan will undermine our entire foreign policy structure. Hundreds, if not thousands, of programs, agreements, letters of understanding and memoranda on hundreds of issues and topics, from diplomatic agreements to aviation to intelligence listening posts to food
shipments, rely in part on security guarantees put in place decades ago. Your plan threatens to destroy all of those protocols."
"And we're bound to abide by these agreements," the President asked, "even if I feel they're harmful to the nation?" "Those agreements are contracts, Mr. President," Kercheval
said. "Unilaterally breaching a contract carries consequenceslegal action, loss of prestige, loss of credit, loss of mutual cooperation, loss of trust. Maybe even more dire consequences."
"So I'm stuck with agreements and commitments I never negotiated, I don't understand, and no one in Washington can explain."
"With all due respect, Mr. President, your job, and ours, is to make yourself familiar with all those treaties and agreements," Kercheval insisted. "That's why wd have a govemment and a bureaucracy-to help keep track of all there is to know about government. Simply implementing your program isn't the proper way to do it. The best way is to renegotiate the treaties and agreements you find objectionable. You don't just knock over the first domino in the row, because then they'l
l all fall over, one by one, and you may not be able to stop it once it starts. You take your time and remove one domino at a time, or you stack them differently, or you reinforce them so when another hits it, from any direction, it will still stand."
"You forgot the other way, Ed: you get up off your chair, away from the table, and stay home," the President said. "Then none of the other kids on the block will want to come
over to your house and play," Kercheval suggested, reluctantly playing along with the awkward simile.
"I think they will," the President said. "Because when some other bully comes along and knocks down those dominos, and they're not strong enough to stop it from happening, they'll come back to us."
"So you want to play foreign policy blackmail with the rest of the world, sir?" Kercheval asked. "My way or the highway? That doesn't sound like responsible government to me, sir. With all due respect." It was obvious Kercheval accorded very little respect at all when he said, "With all due respect."
"Responsible government starts with someone taking the
responsibility, and that's what I'm going to do," the President said. "I made a promise to the American people to protect and defend the Constitution.