Trigger Point

by Matthew Glass

  Now she waited for the president of the Council to open the debate.

  As proposer of the resolution, Ellman spoke first. Her speech was relatively brief. Minds around the table had been made up, she knew, and nothing she said now was going to change them. The crimes of the LRA were well known. She gave a succinct overview of the LRA’s murderous record and the failed attempts by the Ugandan government to eradicate it. Without naming them explicity, she concluded with a last reminder to China and Russia of how they would be seen if they blocked the resolution.

  The Russian ambassador, Evgeny Stepsin, didn’t speak in the debate. The Chinese ambassador, Liu Ziyang, made remarks about the gravity of the decision and the risks attached to the internationalization of any conflict, no matter how localized it seemed. Ellman listened carefully to his words. It was always hard to read the nuances through translation, when not only the subtlety of meaning might be lost but the words were detached from the expression and body language that accompanied them. She knew Liu wasn’t going to vote in favor. She tried to decipher whether he was using his apparent objection to ‘internationalization’, as he called it, in order to rationalize an abstention. Or was he trying to justify a veto? The Chinese ambassador was a small, energetic man with rimless spectacles. By the time he concluded Ellman still didn’t know which way China was going to go.

  Speaking in French, the Ivory Coast ambassador, the Council’s president for the month, called for the vote.

  First he asked those in favor of the resolution to raise their hands. Ellman did so and looked at the other ambassadors. She counted them off. Argentina, France, India, Ireland, Ivory Coast, Spain, Thailand, Tunisia and, sitting right beside her, the United Kingdom.

  Ten votes, including hers, out of seventeen. She let out her breath. She had a majority. That was the first hurdle.

  The translation of the Ivory Coast ambassador’s voice came through her earpiece, calling on those voting against the resolution.

  Chad, Bolivia and Serbia immediately voted no. Then Brazil. Then Malaysia.

  She looked at Liu Ziyang across the stenographers’ table in the middle of the horseshoe. Further around the table sat the big bulk of Evgeny Stepsin.

  Neither Liu nor Stepsin made a move.

  ‘Abstentions?’ said the voice of the translator in her earphone.

  Silently, the two men raised their hands.

  THE SESSION BROKE up. The Ugandan ambassador, who had been watching from the spectator seats in the chamber, headed straight for her.

  He grabbed her hand in both of his and wouldn’t let it go. He was a large man in a grey double-breasted suit that made him look even larger, and he was genuinely choked up. He tried to tell her how much this meant to Uganda but all he managed to say was that he couldn’t express how much it meant. Ellman nodded. ‘We’re going to do what we can,’ she said. He thanked her again. There were tears in his eyes.

  ‘We depend on you, Madam Ambassador,’ he said, still holding her hand in his big, soft mitts.

  ‘You can depend on us,’ she said.

  The Kenyan ambassador joined them. Marion managed to extricate her hand from the Ugandan ambassador’s grip. They talked for a few minutes about the implications of the vote. Ellman couldn’t give them a timetable for action. That would be worked out over the coming days.

  Out of the corner of her eye she noticed the Sudanese ambassador deep in conversation with Liu.

  China had spent a decade building up its position in Africa, and nowhere more dominantly than in Sudan. The strong opinion in the State Department was that if the US was going to do this thing, it would have to be done in coalition. France and Britain had already told her they were prepared to consider sending limited contingents. Participation from developing countries would be even more important. No matter how small the contributions, no matter how symbolic, they were needed. China would simply lose too much face if the US went in alone.

  The Kenyan and Ugandan ambassadors were still speaking to her. Ellman nodded, only half listening. She looked at Liu again. The Chinese ambassador glanced at her from behind his rimless glasses and turned away.

  3

  THE MAN HOLDING the laser pointer was a short, barrel-chested admiral called Pete Pressler, head of the US Africa Command. In front of him in the White House Situation Room sat the president, the most senior members of the administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a dozen other military officers and presidential aides.

  The red dot of the pointer moved across a map and stopped on a town called Lodwar in northern Kenya.

  ‘That’s the closest we can get to the Uganda border with a runway with the spec we need,’ said Pressler. ‘Gives us coverage of southern Sudan and northwest Congo if we need it as well. We’ll pilot the drones out of Creech air force base in Nevada. Operations will be coordinated from the Abraham Lincoln, which will be my command post.’

  ‘Offshore?’

  ‘Exactly, Mr President. Off the Kenyan coast. We’ll have the entire carrier strike group in theater. We’ll refuel Lodwar by air. The storage capacity they have on the ground isn’t worth jack so we’ll put tanks in first thing. Operationally, our primary weapon will be unmanned aircraft. Other than that, we’ll use Apaches or F-35s if we think they’re needed, special forces if we’ve got a high value target and we decide we want to take him alive or can’t get to him any other way. Otherwise, it’ll be air power.’

  The president stretched out in his chair and locked his hands behind his head. ‘How does this work with the drones? It’s jungle up there, right?’

  Pressler nodded. ‘Infrared, Mr President. Goes right through the tree canopy. We’ll blanket the place with unmanned vehicles. Day, night. Anything moves in there, in the open, under the trees, we’ll pick it up.’

  ‘What if it’s an animal?’ asked Gary Rose, the national security advisor.

  ‘It’s the patterns we’ll be looking for. The numbers involved, the way the groups move. If we have a single individual and we pick him up on infrared, we’re not going to go after that. Could be anything, and if it’s a fighter, well, this time he gets away. But when you start to see a group moving in the pattern that human groups move, then you know you’re dealing with something.’

  ‘What if they’re gorillas?’ asked Roberta Devlin, Knowles’ chief of staff. She was a small, intense woman with probing blue-green eyes. ‘Don’t they move in groups?’

  ‘I believe they do have gorillas in that area, ma’am.’

  ‘If we blow the hell out of a clan of gorillas we’ll take more flak than if we massacred a whole town of Afghans.’

  ‘I don’t believe the US military ever massacred a town of Afghans,’ said Mortlock Hale, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had held a number of commands in Afghanistan and didn’t appreciate the insinuation.

  ‘We can live with some dead gorillas,’ said the president. ‘Admiral, this doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a very thorough process.’

  ‘It’s not an invasion, Mr President. We’re not aiming to conquer this territory, only to cleanse it.’

  ‘Mr President, if I may,’ said General Hale. ‘Insurgencies normally depend on support from the local population. Not this one. The population dreads them and they run a mile if they know they’re coming. Normal counter-insurgency strategy, which is about choking off support from the local population, isn’t what we need. We’re going to beat these guys with a two-pronged strategy: Interdict and Attrit. By using the air power Admiral Pressler has described, we interdict the enemy’s routes out of the jungle to replenish their supplies and their escape routes out of Uganda into Sudan and Congo. Meanwhile, as they’re bottled up, we pick them off – that’s the attrition – and destroy whatever supplies they’ve got, which further reduces their ability to survive. At a certain point we’ll see them trying to break out through our interdiction. We’ll encourage defection by dropping leaflets and other communication modalities to show them they’ve got no chance of outlas
ting us. Hopefully that’ll help detach the weakly committed and get them out of the jungle. The fanatics, we’re going to have to kill.’

  The president glanced at Gary Rose.

  ‘Sounds about as clean as you can do it,’ said the national security advisor.

  ‘John?’ said the president to the defense secretary.

  ‘I’m good with this. It’s a solid plan that makes the best of our capabilities.’ John Oakley was a bear of a man, an ex-undersecretary of the army in the second Bush administration. Tom Knowles had known him all the way back when they were together at law school and highly respected him. Oakley was a strong advocate of unmanned force and had steered the defense budget into a massive expansion of unmanned technology. Uganda was an opportunity to prove the worth of his strategy in a topography unlike Afghanistan or Georgia.

  ‘What if some of these guys manage to break out, say, to Sudan?’ asked Devlin.

  Oakley shrugged. ‘You mean if we’re in hot pursuit? We go after them. If we land a few bombs in southern Sudan, what are they going to do?’

  ‘The UN resolution only refers to Uganda,’ said the secretary of state, Bob Livingstone.

  Oakley shrugged again.

  ‘There are Chinese military in Sudan.’

  ‘Not that they admit to. Anyway, like I said, what are they going to do? Shoot down a couple of drones. Who cares?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Livingstone. ‘Are you saying this is all going to be done with unmanned vehicles? Do we really believe that’s how it’s going to work?’

  The president glanced at the military men.

  ‘We think it’s feasible,’ said Pressler. ‘Seventeen years in Afghanistan has taught us a hell of a lot about use of unmanned weaponry.’

  ‘Not enough to get us out of there.’

  ‘I’m not saying that’s all we’ll use. As I mentioned, when there is a need, we’ll project manned air power. I’ll have plenty of that in theater.’

  ‘Mr President,’ said the secretary of state, ‘the plan that General Hale and Admiral Pressler are presenting is, if I understand it, a plan for the United States acting alone. Have we made that decision?’

  ‘Mr Secretary,’ said Hale, ‘there are no other potential partners who have anywhere near our depth of experience in the use of unmanned attack vehicles, with the possible exception of the Israelis, and their experience is largely limited to urban environments. And of course this is a judgment for the president, but I don’t think we would want the Israelis involved here.’

  ‘We can do this ourselves,’ said Oakley.

  ‘I know we can, but–’

  ‘We’re going to learn a lot from this. We’re going to extend our experience with unmanned vehicles into a whole new type of terrain. That alone would make the operation worthwhile.’

  ‘So you can guarantee me with this plan of yours there won’t be any casualties,’ said the president.

  ‘There’ll be a hell of a lot of LRA casualties,’ replied Pressler.

  The president smiled. ‘But our guys?’

  Pressler was serious now. ‘No one can guarantee there won’t be any, sir. But I can guarantee you that the risk is low, the total number of Americans in harm’s way is small, enemy arms are very unsophisticated, and whatever we can do with unmanned vehicles, we’ll do. This is about the lowest risk operation I’ve ever had the privilege of planning. I don’t aim on losing anybody.’

  ‘How long before you can be on the ground?’

  ‘We have a liaison team ready to go into Nairobi as soon as they get the word. We can do the setup in Lodwar in a couple of weeks as long as the Kenyans cooperate. By that time the Lincoln strike group will be in theater and we’re ready to roll.’

  ‘Two weeks?’

  Pressler nodded.

  ‘How long before you get results?’ asked one of the other men in the room. Ed Abrahams was the president’s senior political advisor and strategist, a corpulent fifty-three-year-old Californian who had been memorably described as having the brain of Einstein in the body of Moby Dick.

  ‘We’ll start to gather information immediately.’

  ‘Results,’ said Abrahams.

  ‘Body count, Admiral,’ said the president. ‘I think you’ll find that’s what Ed means.’

  ‘It’s hard to say. As soon as we can. We find a group, we’ll take them out.’

  ‘Within weeks?’

  ‘Definitely. I would hope so.’

  Abrahams glanced at the president. His place in these meetings was more to listen than to speak, but Knowles always understood the point when he did intervene. There was nothing Ed Abrahams saw, heard or read that he didn’t put through a political filter. The congressional midterm elections were on November 6, eight weeks away. Thirty-three Senate seats were up for grabs, of which four were potentially winnable by Republican candidates. Any two of those seats would give the Republicans sixty votes in the Senate, making the president’s program pretty much unstoppable. A strong performance in the midterms would also go a long way to guaranteeing his unopposed renomination in two years’ time.

  Abrahams and the president had discussed the Uganda intervention exhaustively over the previous few days. Politically, at one level, it was a risk. Tom Knowles had had a good first two years in office, the economy was continuing to grow, and he looked set to achieve the gains he needed in Congress on that record alone. If they launched this operation and something went wrong, that could only be jeopardized. In that respect, they would be better waiting until after the midterm elections. On the other hand, launching the operation would boost his immediate popularity, and a few notable successes in the field before the elections would make him even more popular. And waiting until after the elections, after it had taken so long to get to this point, might make him look as if he was vacillating and give ammunition to his critics. The Republican right was always ready to take shots at him, midterms or no midterms, and the Democrats, who would normally be in favor of deliberation, would turn instantly into ardent supporters of action if that meant they could paint him as a procrastinator. Besides, he wanted to get going. The pressure to unleash a response suited him down to the ground.

  ‘So you can do this in a risk-free way,’ said Abrahams.

  ‘Sir, nothing’s totally risk-free,’ replied Pressler.

  ‘Ah, I think what we can say,’ said General Hale, ‘is that for the first period we can restrict ourselves pretty much entirely to unmanned sorties. Do you agree, Admiral Pressler?’

  Pressler looked at him blankly. He was a field commander and lacked the political antennae that Hale had developed in Washington. ‘That’s the aim, but as the commander in theater I would–’

  ‘Of course,’ said Hale. ‘But I think we could agree that for any non-emergent intervention requiring manned force, presidential approval would be required. I think that could be one of the rules of engagement, at least in the first period.’

  ‘That sounds very sensible, General,’ said Abrahams.

  Hale gazed meaningfully at Pressler. The admiral may have lacked political antennae, but he knew enough to understand what that look meant. He kept quiet.

  ‘You got a name for this operation, Admiral?’ asked Walt Stephenson, the vice-president.

  Pressler turned to him. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘We need a good name. That’s half the battle.’

  Oakley grinned. ‘We’ve got a few ideas.’

  ‘Okay, this is sounding pretty good,’ said the president. ‘Roberta, are we looking okay in Congress?’

  Knowles’ chief of staff nodded. Congress would be voting to authorize the intervention in the next couple of days. The numbers handily gave them the vote. There was strong support in the country and most members of Congress, so close to an election, weren’t about to oppose it.

  ‘Good. Admiral Pressler, I understand I’m going to see more detailed plans in the next few days.’

  ‘Yes, sir. My staff–’

  ‘Mr President,’ s
aid the secretary of state, ‘I do want to come back to the question of whether we do this alone.’

  ‘I thought we just agreed we would,’ said Oakley. ‘What are the Brits going to do? Give us a communications unit? Great, we could really use one.’

  The president smiled. ‘John, let Bob have his say. Bob, what is it?’

  ‘We need to do this as a coalition,’ said Livingstone.

  He paused, glancing at Gary Rose. The national security advisor, a man of medium height with short dark hair and an elongated nose, was watching him, head tilted slightly, arms folded. Livingstone knew that Rose was a lot closer to the president than he was. It was an open secret that Rose had wanted to be secretary of state and Knowles had originally considered giving him the position, but decided that he needed to use the appointment to build support for the administration amongst right-leaning Democrats. Knowles had even privately mooted nominating a Democrat for the post until a strong backlash from the Republican congressional leadership persuaded him to shut that option down. Senator Bob Livingstone, an affable, chubby Missourian in his late sixties with silky white hair, was the next best choice. A longserving member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he was about the most moderate Republican in the Senate, someone a person like Mitch Moynihan would hardly recognize as belonging to the same party. Livingstone accepted the nomination in the expectation that he would be the president’s lead source of foreign policy. But the reality had turned out somewhat differently. Livingstone soon realized that the president had appointed him for political reasons and had appointed Rose because he actually wanted his advice. The secretary of state hadn’t proven strong enough to overcome the president’s reliance on the other man. Anything he sent to the president was passed directly to the national security advisor to be read.

  Livingstone looked back at the president. ‘We got the vote in the Security Council, but there’s a lot of resistance. China’s losing face. They’re heavily involved in Sudan and across the entire Central African region, and now we’re coming in there to do this thing and one way of reading it is that implicitly we’re saying, you should have done this yourselves, you could have offered to do it, and now we’re going to come and do it for you.’