Trigger Point

by Matthew Glass

  ‘Mr President, there’s a video on the net.’

  THEY SAT AROUND the screen in the Oval Office. The president’s key aides had joined him. Moss pulled up a website plastered with anti-American slogans. He paused with his hand on the remote.

  ‘This is um …’ He took a deep breath. ‘If anyone’s squeamish, I’ve got to warn you, this is the time to leave.’

  ‘Run the clip,’ said the president quietly.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  It started with someone ranting incomprehensibly in the glare of a spotlight in a shack. The picture, which must have been uploaded via a satellite connection, faded in and out a couple of times. Then the camera and the light turned and there was an American airman surrounded by five men. His face was bloodied and one eye was badly puffed, and he stood hunched, in pain, held up by the men around him. They didn’t wear masks or make any effort to conceal their identities. One of them held up the dog tags they had ripped off their prisoner and shook them defiantly at the camera. One of them yelled at him. Then two of them pushed him to his knees.

  Tom Knowles knew he didn’t want to see what was about to come next.

  It started.

  ‘Oh, my …’ whispered Roberta Devlin, and she turned away.

  ‘That’s their style,’ said Hale. ‘They like to do it with clubs.’

  Gary Rose got to his feet and stumbled out, hand pressed against his mouth.

  The body of the airman lay on the ground now. Its legs twitched.

  One of the men smashed the broken skull again, and again.

  The president closed his eyes. His mind was numb.

  33

  TOM KNOWLES HAD never seen a man killed before, not for real, not by any method. What he knew of killing came from what he had seen in films.

  He couldn’t get the images out of his head. Especially the legs, the twitching legs. They were still twitching at the end. Somehow that was almost worse than the bloody, pulped skull. The convulsive twitch of those legs, like the kicking of some animal.

  Normally, the senior staff in the West Wing were a kind of surrogate family for the president. Ed Abrahams, Roberta Devlin and Gary Rose understood that on nights when the chief didn’t have any engagements the job often involved staying on and watching football with him in his study or a film in the White House cinema. It was semi-work as well. They talked about stuff and that often helped him come to decisions. Taking issues out of their usual context could help you see them in a different way.

  But he didn’t feel like company tonight. He went up to the residence floor and ate dinner alone in his study. He looked over some papers he had taken up with him. He couldn’t concentrate. He turned on the TV but couldn’t find anything to watch. He left it on, surfing channels, watching the images moving on the screen. They couldn’t take away the images in his head.

  He felt stunningly lonely. He truly felt there was no one who could share this burden. As commander in chief, he had sent that poor man to his terrible death. Jungle Peace was his and his alone. And he had wanted that raid, he had wanted it done quick. He thought of his own son, Steve, his only child. Steve and his wife and twin daughters were occasional visitors to the White House. He was hoping to see them in another couple of weeks for Thanksgiving. Last year the twins had stood alongside him as he pardoned the traditional Thanksgiving turkey in the Rose Garden until the bird turned its head and gobbled at them and the two little girls took off and ran like hell.

  He smiled for a moment, thinking about it, then the smile faded off his lips.

  He got up and went into the hall. He had given the room traditionally used as the president’s bedroom to Sarah, and used the west bedroom as his own. He knocked on her door and opened it. She wasn’t there. He looked in her study. Empty.

  ‘Tom,’ said Sarah.

  He turned. She was in the hall behind him. He could see from her face that she had heard.

  ‘I’ve just got back,’ she said. ‘I had … It doesn’t matter. I had to give a speech.’

  He nodded.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You want to talk?’

  He smiled. He didn’t hear that from her very often.

  ‘Do you?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s okay.’

  She took his hand. ‘Come on,’ she said. She took him into her study.

  He followed, letting her lead him.

  ‘You want a drink?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Bourbon?’

  He nodded again.

  She went out and got him one.

  ‘You’re not having anything?’ he said.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head and sat down on the sofa beside him. She was in a blue pant suit with a mauve shirt. Her hair was honey blonde. When he first met her it had been that color naturally. Now it needed a little help. She looked good. Sometimes he forgot what a good-looking woman she was.

  She watched him.

  He took a sip of the bourbon and closed his eyes.

  ‘You didn’t see that video, I hope,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t watch it. It’s a horrible thing.’ He looked at her. ‘They’re evil, Sarah. I know it’s an old-fashioned word, but I don’t know another one for it. You don’t have to believe in God to know they’re going straight to hell.’ He sighed. ‘I’m only trying to do what’s right out there. I’ve got no other motive.’

  ‘It’s a good thing you’re doing there, Tom.’

  ‘I don’t know if that’s going to make much difference to that poor man’s family. I don’t know what I’m going to say when I speak to them.’

  ‘You’ll find the words.’

  ‘There aren’t any.’

  ‘You’ll find them, Tom.’

  He took another sip of his bourbon. ‘Harley Gauss was his name. Twenty-six years old. Captain Harley Gauss.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘You know, there are some things that … Something like this changes everything.’

  Sarah watched him.

  He leaned back and shook his head. ‘You know, this presidency …’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Suddenly I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  ‘Tom, an atrocity like this … it looms a lot bigger than it is. Right now it seems like the worst thing that’s ever happened.’

  ‘I know that. I realize that.’ He paused, frowning. ‘I was thinking before. It’s hardly more than a month since we launched Jungle Peace. You can’t believe it. You think back and …’ He stopped again, smiling disbelievingly. ‘It’s like a different age. We were launching a simple mission to root out a bunch of evil guys. The country backed me seventy per cent. The economy looked strong, the markets were sound. I was looking at a sixty-seat majority in the Senate and an unchallenged renomination. And now…’ He laughed bitterly. ‘God, Sarah, it’s like it’s all in ruins. In a month. One lousy month. I don’t know how the hell it happened.’

  She watched him.

  ‘I’ve got no idea. And it’s not over. They’ve still got two of our guys. We could have two more videos. Or it could turn into some kind of drawn-out hostage situation.’

  ‘It won’t.’

  ‘Won’t it? Neither you nor I nor anyone knows that. I don’t think our people have the first idea about how to find them. And we’ve got men on the ground now. In the jungle. We could lose more. What happens then? Those damn military guys told me it was going to be done clean, from the air, and the first time I ask them to do something we’ve got two Apaches down and two dead and more missing. I can just see it getting dirtier and dirtier on the ground now. It was never meant to be like that.’

  ‘Tom, you’re imagining the worst scenario. It’ll come back under control. What’s to say the military don’t get them back and finish the job like they said they’d do?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’ He worked at his temples with his fingertips. He took a deep breath and let it out slow. ‘Then there’s the markets and the banks and who knows what the Chinese a
re doing?’

  Sarah looked at him uncomprehendingly. She didn’t know the truth about the rumored approach to Zhang that he had made the morning Fidelian failed.

  ‘Who knows what the hell to do? I’ve got Strickland and Opitz running around doing all kinds of things but I can’t say I really understand if it’s going to work and I don’t think they do either. Looks to me like they think up one thing after the next to deal with whatever happens to come up that particular day. You know, there hasn’t been a day until this last week when I wondered what I was doing here. I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, but when I won the election, I thought I was going to feel like an impostor. Like a fraud. When I first started, I mean. I thought I’d arrive at the White House after the inauguration and the next morning I’d sit down to work in the Oval Office and I’d be thinking, I shouldn’t be here. It should be Dwight Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan, not me.’

  Sarah smiled.

  ‘But I didn’t, Sarah. What I’m saying is I didn’t feel like that. By the time I got here, after the transition, I felt fine. I felt like this was my place. And I’ve felt like it every single day until this last week. And now I’m not sure. I don’t know if I belong here. It sure doesn’t feel like it. Feels like the country deserves something better.’

  ‘Tom,’ said Sarah. She took his hand.

  ‘And now I’ve got the Veterans’ Day speech on Sunday. What a time for it, huh?’ He shook his head. ‘You know, George W Bush said some of the nights in this office are long and lonely. That was about the only thing I ever heard him say that I thought would be worth remembering. And after two years, I thought I knew what he meant. But actually I don’t think I did. Not until this week. I’ve had a few of those nights in the last week. I think tonight’s going to be another one. I think tonight’s going to be the worst one yet.’

  He gazed at her. Sarah smiled. Whatever they had been through, whatever had become of their marriage, there was still an understanding, a certain deep familiarity that they shared that neither of them shared with anyone else. Sarah herself didn’t know why she was still with him. She shouldn’t have been, but she was. It wasn’t as simple as it looked to some people who presumed to comment from the outside.

  She drew him to her. She held him for a moment, and then leaned back and looked him in the eyes.

  ‘You’re a good president, Tom Knowles.’

  He shook his head. ‘The jury’s out on that.’

  ‘No, it’s not. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have doubts. You’re a good president. You’ll do the right things. You’ll get us through this. I believe it. The country believes it. Listen to me. You’re a good president.’

  ‘But not a good husband, huh?’

  Sarah looked at him sadly. ‘Oh, Tom,’ she said.

  34

  THAT VETERANS’ DAY weekend, the country was in a kind of shock. The markets, of course, were closed. For a brief respite of forty-eight hours, the financial catastrophe wasn’t the thing on everyone’s mind. Instead, it was the horrendous death of one man called Harley Gauss – one man who suddenly seemed to be everyone’s son, or father, or brother.

  Tom Knowles had spoken to the families of fallen soldiers before. He had met them, had stood beside them at funerals with flag-draped coffins. As Nevada governor and as president. Men who had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Colombia, the Philippines. But not one of them had died like Harley Gauss.

  He spoke to them on Saturday morning, less than twenty-four hours after the events. First there was a call to a pair of grieving parents in Roseville, California, the mother and father of Jack Duffey, the pilot who had died on impact in Uganda. He assured them their son had died in a good cause. He expressed his admiration for his bravery, commitment, loyalty and patriotism. He gave thanks on behalf of the entire country for his sacrifice. He told them it was only fine young men and women like their son who kept safe the freedom and liberty that other Americans enjoyed. He listened to them say the things they needed to say, listened as the pain came out. They talked. Those were the easy calls, he had learned, the ones where the relatives talked. The hard ones were the calls where the relatives were silent, and you found yourself talking into a vacuum, sounding more grotesque and platitudinous with each word you uttered. He told the parents he would bring their boy back and there was a place for him in Arlington, among heroes, if that was where they wanted him to rest. They thanked him at the end. That always got him, the way people thanked him at the end.

  Then there was the second call. This one was to a young widow in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

  The words were harder to say. As he spoke he kept seeing that video, seeing those twitching legs. He wondered if she had seen it too but didn’t dare to ask. He could only hope that she hadn’t. She didn’t speak, just emitted a flat, toneless, ‘yes, sir’. Nothing else came back, nothing but a sense of great emptiness, a great, disbelieving emptiness on the other end of the phone.

  ‘Mrs Gauss, Cindy, we will get the people who did this thing. Ma’am, we will bring these people to justice.’ He had tears in his eyes.

  He didn’t know what to say next. That her husband had died quick? He hadn’t. That he had served his country well and honorably? He had said that already. That no one deserved to be clubbed to death in the middle of the jungle by a gang of barbarian killers? Yes, but what kind of comfort was that?

  ‘Ma’am, we will bring him back to Arlington. We will bring him back to Arlington and lay him to rest.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He didn’t know what else to say. But it wasn’t enough.

  ‘Cindy, have you got people looking after you? They taking care of you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I’m going to get my private secretary to give you a number. You need to speak to me, you call that number. You call me direct.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘We’re going to bring him back, Cindy.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

  AFTER THE CALLS, Knowles held a Saturday StratCom in the Oval Office. There was general agreement that they had to go on the offensive. The week that had started with an apparent deal to save Fidelian on the eve of the election had turned into an unalloyed catastrophe – financially, politically, and now militarily. Through the week their tone had become defensive. They had to change that or there would be a collapse of confidence in the administration. If the president was seen to be acting calmly and strongly on each of these fronts, with robust purpose and clear intent, the American people would come back in behind him. Horrible as it was, the killing of Harley Gauss gave him an opportunity to do that. The crisis in the markets looked like incompetence. The Midterm Massacre, as the press had termed the November 6 elections, looked like fragility. But a bare four days after the election, the killing of Harley Gauss had made that term unusable. With the brutal murder of a disarmed airman, America felt itself under attack. When the country was under attack, people wanted to support their president. They didn’t want to hear partisan bickering and watch people taking shots at the commander in chief. Ed Abrahams argued that they could stretch that support to include the president’s handling of the financial crisis if they could craft the right lines. But they had to seize the moment. It was time to lead.

  Ruiz-Kellerman, with results of polling from the previous day – this was even before the Harley Gauss video appeared – said there was a strong appetite to see the president taking more direct control. People were sick of seeing Ron Strickland and Susan Opitz. They hadn’t voted for either of those two people. They had voted for Thomas Paxton Knowles. They wanted to see the man they had put in the White House.

  Knowles spoke to Jack Harris, the chairman of the Republican Party, and to the congressional majority leaders. They gave him the same message.

  The Veterans’ Day speech that he would be giving the following day gave him the perfect platform. It would need to be completely rewritten. Through the day, Josh Bentner and another speechwriter worked o
n the address. They struggled to combine references to the president’s handling of the financial crisis with the almost sacred solemnity required on this tragic Veterans’ Day. At around 2pm Bentner showed a first draft to Ed Abrahams.

  ‘What are you doing?’ demanded Abrahams. ‘He doesn’t need to say a word about the markets. All he needs to do is show that he’s a statesman. He needs to show that he can feel our pain and lift us up. For Christ’s sake, Josh! What’s wrong with you? Poetry, not prose! He’s the commander in fucking chief, not an economics professor! Make him look like it.’

  The next morning Knowles flew to New York for the Veterans’ Day event. Sarah accompanied him. This year, the hundredth anniversary of the original Armistice Day in 1918 when the guns of World War One fell silent, he had chosen to make his speech at the docks in New York City from which so many of the two million Americans who sailed to Europe in the last year of that conflict, and of the hundred thousand who never returned, embarked on their voyage. It was a bright November Sunday in Manhattan, and the sun glinted on the medals of the veterans sitting in front of him, medals from Georgia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, even a few on the chests of snowy-headed veterans of World War Two, the dwindling remnant of their generation. As Knowles read the speech, with the events of the previous two days present in everyone’s mind, and the knowledge that two American servicemen were at that moment in the custody of the same people who had already killed one of their comrades, the poignancy was almost unbearable. On more than one occasion there was a hoarseness in his throat. In the audience he could see old men putting handkerchiefs to their eyes. And young men too.

  The final words were too sentimental perhaps. At another time, he would have had Bentner tone them down. But this time, he felt they were right. He really felt they were true. So did everyone who worked on the speech. When the time came to speak to them, the emotion in his voice was real.

  ‘Each year, on this day, we remember. And when we remember, the pain of loss – whether it is a day ago, or a century ago – reminds us why we are here. The hurt we feel lights the path through the shadow to what we must do. America is never stronger, never brighter, never more of a beacon to the world than when the darkness in the world tries to snuff that beacon out. It will never be extinguished. We burn the more strongly and more passionately. We rise up to do the good work.’ He paused. ‘God bless this country. God bless America.’