by Allen Drury
“Bill—” Senator Munson said, closing a hand tightly on the arm of the ex-President; the ex-President uttered a peculiar sound.
Not moving, looking carefully vague as they continued to glance at Bob Leffingwell, they saw the new Undersecretary of State, managing to look reasonably casual but revealing to the trained eye a considerable agitation, approach and hand him a folded sheet of paper. They saw him open it, scan it rapidly, turn pale. Quickly he glanced around to see who might have noticed, caught their eyes and with a sudden, savage forward movement of his head that said as clearly as words, “Follow me!” began to push his way as rapidly as possible through the amiably resisting crowd to the platform. Automatically and without question they began to do the same.
“My friends,” the President went on, not at first noticing the little eddies of increasingly vigorous protest that began to accompany their desperate progress toward his side, “three capitals we have yet to hear from, and of these the most important, of course, is Moscow. But there is no reason for alarm in that: I’ve given them quite a mouthful to digest and it may take them a little while!” Again there was a burst of amusement and approval. “But,” he said, more solemnly, “I have no doubt what their answer will be. If honor and decency and cooperation have any place at all in human affairs, then their response can only be as disinterested and farsighted as I like to think your President has been. I am very confident that before many more hours have passed—” he paused, his attention distracted finally by the commotion on the floor. “Wait a minute,” he said in a pleased tone. “Don’t I recognize those distinguished gentlemen coming my way? Of course I do! It’s the distinguished ex-President of the United States—and the Senate Majority Leader—and the new Secretary of State. Let them through, ladies and gentlemen, please! I want them beside me on this historic night.”
And obedient to his words, there was a murmur of recognition, a wave of good-natured cheering and applause, a stepping aside and making way. But as they came nearer the platform the applause suddenly died, for it became apparent to all who could see them that these were desperately worried men.
“What is it?” the President asked uncertainly. “Let them through there, hurry it up! What is it, Bob? Senator? Mr. President?”
Senator Munson and William Abbott could only shake their heads and gesture to the Secretary of State as they clambered to the platform, assisted by a hundred helping hands. And he could only hold up the folded piece of paper.
“Bring it here!” the President said sharply. “Gentlemen—” he reached out and pulled Bill Abbott and Bob Munson to his left side, Bob Leffingwell to his right. “Now, Bob,” he said as a sudden agitated hush descended, into which his order, puzzled and concerned, rang clear, “put it on the lectern here and let’s see what it is.”
For several minutes after the Secretary of State complied, the silence, increasingly worried, beginning to be frightened, held the room. It could be seen that all four men read, reread and read again, that all were obviously dismayed by what they read, that for just a moment, glancing quickly at one another, they looked completely horrified and even, momentarily, afraid. But the realization of where they were and who they were swiftly reasserted itself, so that when the President finally spoke, it was in a voice that managed to be reasonably steady, though obviously carrying a great emotion.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said quietly, “I’m afraid I must return at once to the White House. Mr. President—Senator—Bob—come with me. Please go on dancing and enjoying yourselves, ladies and gentlemen. There will be an announcement in due course.”
“Of what?” some woman screamed as the Secret Service swiftly formed a flying wedge and rushed them to the waiting limousines. “My God, of what?”
But nobody knew; and within a minute’s time, at the Center, at the Museum, at the Washington Hilton and the Sheraton-Park, the babbling crowds were pushing hysterically toward the cloakrooms, claiming their coats, whistling up their cars, scurrying out and away as quickly as possible. The instant rumor, of course, was war; and though no home would be safe in such an event, home was where they wanted to be.
Within fifteen minutes all four ballrooms stood empty and desolate. Desolate was the watching nation, too, and desolate the world; and desolate the heart of the man who now sat in the White House Situation Room, head in hands, looking suddenly much older as he read the dispatches and intelligence reports that were pouring in.
WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCES MASSIVE SOVIET ASSAULT ON U.S. WORLDWIDE POSITIONS.
U.S. TROOP WITHDRAWAL IN GOROTOLAND TURNS INTO ROUT AS COMMUNIST TANKS, MIGS LEAD OFFENSIVE. MORE THAN 100 AMERICANS BELIEVED KILLED BY REBEL FORCES, AT LEAST 500 CAPTIVE AS PRINCE OBI SEIZES COUNTRY, PRINCE TERRY FLEES TO EXILE IN ENGLAND.…
LABAIYA FORCES IN PANAMA SEIZE CANAL AND COUNTRY AFTER SOVIETS LAND PLANES, TROOPS, SUPPLIES. RETREATING AMERICAN FORCES CORNERED ON SEACOAST. U.S. FLEET RESCUE TRY BARRED BY RUSS BLOCKADE.…
NOME, POINT BARROW IN ALASKA OCCUPIED FOR TWO HOURS BY SOVIET PARATROOPS AS MOSCOW DENOUNCES “INSUFFERABLE AMERICAN INTERFERENCE WITH FREEDOM OF SEAS.” INVADERS WITHDRAW AFTER “UNARMED” RED TRAWLERS UNVEIL MISSILES, SINK BULK OF U.S. FISHING FLEET. MANY CREWMEN FEARED CAPTURED OR DEAD.…
SOVIET NAVAL FORCES STREAMING THROUGH BOSPHORUS, MALAY STRAITS, NORTH ATLANTIC AS U.S. FLEETS SAIL OUT.…
TASHIKOV ASKS UN SECURITY COUNCIL MEETING, INVITES PRESIDENT TO MOSCOW CONFERENCE “IMMEDIATELY, TO SETTLE OUTSTANDING DIFFERENCES, ELIMINATE IMPERIALIST U.S. AGGRESSION AND ESTABLISH GENUINE PEACE.… ”
WAR FEAR GROWS AS STUNNED NATION AWAITS WORD FROM PRESIDENT JASON.
***
BOOK TWO
1
Stunned nation, stunned world; and stunned President, too, awaiting as desperately as anyone the word … any word. But there is no word.
Only the awful confusions and terrors of the catastrophic end of a policy destroyed forever by the harsh realities of a world many wishful Americans had always pretended did not exist.
But here it is.
And here he is.
And where is the Word?
Somewhere around 2 a.m. he became conscious of a hand on his shoulder, a pressure not unkind but firm enough to get his attention. He looked up with exhausted eyes into the equally exhausted eyes of his predecessor.
“Mr. President,” William Abbott said, “come away for a little. We’ve got the picture. It isn’t going to change. Let’s go to the office and do some thinking. They’ll let us know if anything new develops.” The slightest reminiscent smile came into his eyes before they became somber again. “They’re very good about that, here in the Situation Room. They let a man know.”
“Yes,” he said in a voice too tired to respond to even that small humor. “You’re right, Bill. Thank you. Are the others—” and for the first time in an hour he turned away from the huge clutter of paper that covered the desk at which he had been sitting.
“They’re here,” Bill Abbott said, gesturing. And there they were, standing together around the teletype machines, exhausted also but still staring as if hypnotized at the words that came incessantly, inexorably, implacably clattering over: Roger P. Croy, George Henry Wattersill, Robert A. Leffingwell and Ewan MacDonald MacDonald, the new Secretary of Defense; Senator Strickland, Senator Munson, Senator Danta, Senator Hamilton, Senator Smith; Senator Tom August, chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative J. B. “Jawbone” Swarthman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; and an added starter, who had come in sometime at somebody’s suggestion, he did not know whose, Representative Harold Knox of Illinois, pale, strained and looking a lot older.
In a week or two, no doubt, he would have all the paraphernalia of crisis to assist him, National Security adviser, National Security Council, National Security Agency, CIA, armed forces intelligence, Special Action Group—but not now. His enemies, sophisticated and shrewd in the ways of the world’s most open society, had struck too fast to allow him all those comfo
rtable and sometimes helpful cushions. Now all he had were thirteen hastily assembled men to help him decide, quite possibly, the fate of America. He hoped with a bone-weary, self-lacerating bitterness that their ideas were better than his, which had not, in recent hours, proved to be noticeably successful.
His eyes returned for a moment to Bill Abbott’s and he said in a low voice,
“Sometime, if there ever is time again, maybe you can forgive me for—”
“Nonsense,” the ex-President interrupted impatiently. “Nonsense. Nothing to apologize for. You acted as you thought best. We all have to, in this house. No time, now or ever, to apologize to me. Come, Mr. President, let’s go in the office and get busy on the best way to get out of this mess. That’s what we’ve got to do now.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Yes, we must.” He stood up, feeling the movement in every inch of bone and ounce of flesh; straightened his shoulders, lifted his head, surveyed them all. Automatically they turned to him, intent, expectant, obedient, waiting to be told—waiting to be led.
“Gentlemen,” he said, his voice getting stronger through the tiredness because it had to, there was no other voice to do it, “please come in the Oval Office with me and let’s talk this out a bit. Captain,” he said to one of the military aides, hurrying by with still more papers, still more reports, “ask the kitchen to send some coffee and something to eat up to the office for us, will you please?”
“Yes, sir!” the officer said, tossing his papers on the desk and jumping to a phone.
“You know,” he said with a small attempt at wryness as they entered the big, silent room where Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Jackson looked gravely down from their safe harbors in history, “you may not believe this, but this will be the first time I’ve tried out that desk. I was going to save it until 9 a.m. today when I thought—” the wryness cracked and for just a second, alarming them all, his voice wavered, “when I thought regular business would begin.”
He walked slowly over and stood for a moment, one hand on the chair, looking down at the gleaming expanse, utterly empty of documents, pictures, souvenirs, ash trays and ideas.
“Please be seated,” he said finally, sitting himself. When they had complied, drawing up chairs and sofas into a semi-circle in front of the desk, he looked slowly from face to face, uttered a tired sigh and asked quietly, “Well, what shall I do? Go to war?”
“Oh, Mr. President—” Tom August began in his alarmed, uncertain and diffident way. But Bill Abbott forestalled him.
“That is an alternative,” he said crisply.
“But unthinkable!” Roger P. Croy exclaimed with an almost frantic distaste. “Absolutely unthinkable!”
“Is it, Ewan?” Bill Abbott asked. “You’ve been getting all those briefings at the Pentagon these last few weeks. How unthinkable is it?”
“Well,” Ewan MacDonald MacDonald said slowly in the gentle burr that still lingered, an elusive ghost of Dee-side childhood, after fifty-one years of citizenship and commercial success in the United States, “I wouldn’t want to think about it too much.”
“Nor I,” Bill Abbott agreed. “But it could be done, I think, if it were done fast, surgically and with limited and specific targets—if, in short, we operated exactly as they have. I know we have strength enough for that.”
“Although,” Bob Munson remarked, and he could not entirely keep the bitterness out of his voice, “thanks to the combined efforts of some people in this country who should have known better over the past few years, we haven’t been left the wherewithal to do much more.”
“I expect,” William Abbott said soberly, “that there are going to be recriminations enough without us starting them here. The basic fact is that a lot of determined people for one reason or another managed to carry the day in the media, the Congress and sometimes in the White House, and so they were able to force a steady reduction of our military strength. I have an idea,” he added with a certain grim satisfaction, “that they’re scared silly tonight just like the rest of us.”
“Now that it’s too damned late,” Hal Knox said bitterly. “Now that they’ve left us to pick up the pieces.”
“Me,” the President said quietly, startling them a bit for he had listened so silently that they had almost forgotten he was there. “Left me to pick up the pieces.”
“Well, pick them up, then!” Hal snapped, so frightened and angry and upset that he momentarily forgot all protocol and respect. “It’s what you wanted, and you’ve got it, so do something!”
“Well, now,” Bob Munson said in a conversational tone into the shocked little silence that followed, “Bill and I called you to come over here because we thought there should be a little bit of Orrin around to help us out tonight. You’re the man of the house now, so we asked you. We didn’t invite you over here to insult the President of the United States, or to act like a schoolboy. So if you can’t contribute something constructive, don’t say anything. All right?”
Hal’s face was a study, first paling, then flushing. But finally, in a choked voice, the little bit of Orrin came through.
“Yes, sir,” he said, very low. “I’m sorry, Mr. President.”
The President sighed and managed a small smile.
“That’s all right. We’re all under great strain. I’ll probably be lucky if you’re the only one who jumps on me before we’re through.… I still haven’t received an answer to my question, gentlemen: shall we go to war?”
Again a silence fell as they contemplated the word and all its implications.
“I’m inclined to agree with the Vice President,” Bob Leffingwell said finally. “It is unthinkable.”
“Why,” Cullee Hamilton wondered, in a musing not a combative tone, “is it always so unthinkable for us and so thinkable for them? Why do they always take the gambles and why are we always afraid to?”
“Because we’ve permitted them to find out that we won’t gamble,” Stanley Danta suggested quietly. “Isn’t that really it?”
“And it isn’t so much a matter of armed force, either,” Lafe Smith remarked gloomily. “It’s a matter of will. They know they’ve paralyzed the will of America.”
“Americans have paralyzed the will of America,” Bob Munson said in a bleak voice. “Our friends in the media and our friends in the colleges and our friends in the clergy and our friends in the drama and our friends—”
“And our friends in the Congress and our friends in the White House, just as you said a minute ago,” Roger P. Croy interrupted sharply. “And they acted the way they did because of our friends in the country. You have a President and Vice President here who have just been elected by our friends in the country, and we were elected overwhelmingly, too. And it was on a policy of peace, isn’t that right? It isn’t our fault that we’ve been betrayed by those we trusted to help us make peace, is it?”
“The betrayal isn’t your fault, Mr. Vice President,” William Abbott said slowly. “But maybe the trust is.”
“I had to trust them,” the President said with his first show of anger. “What else could I do? I believed they wanted peace as much as I did.”
“Their peace,” Cullee said, “giving them control of the world, on their terms. Lafe and I saw it every day at the UN. Hell, any foo—anyone could have seen it. If he had been brave enough to see it.”
“And face the consequences of seeing it,” Warren Strickland said. “That was the next step.”
“It does seem to me,” George Wattersill said abruptly, “that it is a great thing for men who have led the United States Congress for years to be so high and mighty about it, particularly when one of them actually sat at this desk and had the power—”
“For six months,” Bill Abbott interrupted coldly. “And with what I had, which wasn’t very damned much after being overruled in Congress all these years when I tried to argue for a bigger defense, I used the power. Don’t talk to me, Georgie boy.”
“Well,” George Wattersill replied with a frustr
ated anger, “I still think—”
“I still think,” the President interrupted in a tired voice, “that you were right a few minutes ago, Mr. President, when you called for an end to recriminations. So let’s proceed, shall we? What do we do?”
“I’ve told you what I would do,” Bill Abbott said, not yielding very much. “I would take out their so-called fishing fleet up there at once. No discussions, no talk, no messages to Tashikov or anything. Our bombers and subs should be on the way right this minute, without any warning or by-your-leave to anybody. Then I would immediately cancel all withdrawal orders in Gorotoland, Panama, the Med, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and everywhere else on God’s green earth. I would instantly reinstate all U-2 and satellite surveillance. Basically, I would dig in and stay where I am.… Except,” he observed softly, “that you aren’t there any more, are you? You’re already in retreat, so how can you turn around? I think you can if you move right this minute. But the longer we sit here and talk, the more the moment passes in which you can do anything at all—the more you approach a condition in which you will have only two alternatives, both absolute. One is, not the essentially limited response that I have just described, but all-out war to the death on both sides. And the other,” he concluded even more softly, “is the imminent, if not the immediate, surrender of the United States of America.” He stared at the man who had succeeded him. “Tough choices, Mr. President. But you did, as the youngster of the crowd pointed out, ask for them.”
For a moment there threatened to be a long and uncomfortable silence as Ted Jason returned his stare from haunted and unhappy eyes. But Jawbone Swarthman broke in with that voluble verve that had long ago, in his maiden speech to Congress, won him his nickname. The press noted then that Franklin Roosevelt, having been belabored by everything else, had now been belabored by the jawbone of an ass.