Trigger Point

by Matthew Glass

  35

  AT THE WHITE HOUSE that night, after flying back from New York, Knowles watched the Sunday night football game with Ed Abrahams over a beer. The St Louis Rams were playing the Philadelphia Eagles. He ordered up a couple of pizzas.

  St Louis was having it easy. 23 to 6 in the third quarter. The Eagles defense was a shambles.

  He glanced at Ed. ‘We hear anything from Susan about when she’s talking to that Chinese finance minister?’

  It felt that it was long ago that they had made the decision to have the Treasury secretary talk to her Chinese counterpart, but it was only two days previously.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Abrahams. ‘First thing.’

  ‘You think they’ll make a statement?’

  ‘They’ll probably hold on a few days. I wouldn’t expect it right away. By the way, Gary tells me it might be Liang, the Chinese premier, who makes it. Zhang uses him to say things he’d rather not say himself. Doesn’t matter anyway. Everyone knows he’s Zhang’s mouthpiece so the effect would be the same. Once they say something, we can draw a line under it. They can say it was a commercial decision. They can say they didn’t interfere one way or the other. Whatever lie they like. The markets will know they’ve got the message.’

  ‘They’d better say something.’

  ‘Zhang’s made his point now, whatever the hell that was. He doesn’t want to see the markets in a real crisis any more than we do.’

  Knowles took a sip on his beer and swallowed it thoughtfully, reflecting on the last couple of days. The reaction to his speech today had been just what he wanted. The commentators were saying it was strong, statesmanlike, leaderly. Dean Moss had been briefing hard to talk that angle up.

  He turned to Abrahams. ‘You know, Ed, I agree with your strategy. This is the time to stop being defensive, be strong, show our own agenda. But that’s just talk. Stuff’s got to happen. If we don’t get our guys back soon, it’s going to be hard.’ Knowles paused. ‘We’re going to have hell if we don’t have them back for Thanksgiving.’

  Abrahams grimaced. ‘Let’s not set any deadlines. We’ll crucify ourselves.’

  ‘You think we should replace Pressler?’

  Abrahams looked at Knowles in surprise. ‘Replacing a commander in the field isn’t a small thing. The military’ll go postal.’

  ‘Yeah. Hale is just as fucking bad. Maybe I should replace him as well.’ Knowles watched the screen. St Louis threw another touchdown pass. ‘You see that? You ever seen a defense like that? It’s a Swiss cheese it’s got so many holes.’

  ‘Tom. This is okay. You’re at the halfway point of your first term. You have plenty of time to deal with this stuff.’

  Knowles looked at him.

  ‘Plenty of time.’

  ‘You think I should cancel the CSS?’

  ‘And do what?’ said Abrahams.

  The Caribbean Storm Summit was a meeting of the thirty-four Caribbean countries due to take place the following week to discuss action on hurricane activity, which was getting steadily more severe with climate change. Ostensibly its objective was to develop provisions for mutual emergency help. In reality it was a forum at which everyone else extracted funds from the US for storm recovery projects.

  ‘Walt could go,’ said Knowles. ‘I’m not sure I should be out of Washington.’

  ‘That doesn’t fit with the image you presented today.’

  ‘That image said I was going to deal with the problems here, not go off to Cancun to hand out a couple of billion dollars to our wonderful neighbors.’

  ‘I disagree. That image said I’m the president and I’m still leading this country and damn anyone who doesn’t think so, I’m still in charge. The CSS is part of being president.’ Abrahams sat his big bulk forward. ‘Tom, we get this stuff dealt with, we put it behind us. In two years, all people will remember is the way you dealt with it. Picked up the ball, ran with it, slam dunk.’ Abrahams slapped one hand against the other. ‘Every president has to do this. You have to show you can deal with it. That’s what makes you the Chief. That’s what makes you the man. It makes you more re-electable, not less.’

  Knowles was silent for a moment. ‘Ed, you don’t feel the responsibility like I do. You weren’t the one who sent those guys into Uganda.’

  ‘Tom, I know that.’

  Knowles gazed into his beer. ‘Nothing else I’ve done haunts me like that.’ He looked at Abrahams. ‘I feel sick just thinking about it. It was like watching some kind of animal being killed. Who’d even kill an animal like that? What kind of people would even kill an animal like that?’

  ‘That’s why what we’re doing is right.’

  ‘I know that. Doesn’t make it easier. And now we’ve got hostages. I think hostages, I think Jimmy Carter. I think one-term president and you spend the rest of your life fucking monitoring elections.’

  ‘Tom, it’s all about how you handle it. It’s not hostages as such, it’s how you deal with it. Look at the history. The Teheran hostages killed Carter, but the Beirut hostages didn’t touch Ronald Reagan. Right? And why did it kill Carter? Because he let it define him. Because he locked himself away in the Oval Office and turned into a hostage himself. Ronald Reagan just kept on smiling and taking his afternoon naps and allowed the most unscrupulous things to happen to get our people back. Now, canceling the CSS, sitting here in the White House worrying about it – because God knows there’s nothing more you can do – that’s how you turn yourself into Jimmy Carter.’

  Knowles took another swig of his beer, thinking about it.

  ‘Tom, I’m not saying the stuff that’s happened in the last week is good. We sure could use more than forty-nine senators. But it’s happened. In a four-year term some bad things are bound to happen. True, we could have had better timing. But the one thing you do have now is the chance to show you’re a strong president. And that’s a good thing. So out of this very bad stuff comes at least one thing that’s good.’ Abrahams paused, watching the president. ‘Tom, this right now is the defining week of your presidency. When historians look back on your first term, they’re going to see that this was the moment you showed what you were made of. You looked right into Zhang’s eyes and you faced him down. You gave comfort to the nation after the brutal killing of one of its soldiers and made sure the others were returned. You dealt with a financial crisis and turned it into a platform for growth. This is the week. A week from now, Zhang’s made his statement, the markets are settled, Fidelian turns out to be just one bad bank, with a bit of luck we’ll have our two guys back, and you’re the hero.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  Abrahams smiled. ‘Why not? Who could have said how bad this week was going to be?’

  Knowles laughed.

  ‘Just don’t expect anything from Zhang right away.’

  SUSAN OPITZ SPOKE to the Chinese finance minister the following morning. There was no statement from the Chinese president or his deputy that day. Or the day after. The markets remained uncertain, volatile, prey to disinformation and rumor that sent stocks of individual companies down and up and down again. The whereabouts of the missing airmen remained unknown. On Wednesday the president went to the CSS and pledged annual storm relief funds of two billion for the region. The press attacked him for the sum being either too much or too little.

  There was still no statement from Zhang, but there was news from another source. Defense intelligence had received a report, of uncertain reliability, that the two missing Apache airmen were alive and had been transported across the Ugandan border into Sudan.

  No one outside the highest levels of the Pentagon and the White House was being informed until the report was checked further. Everyone else was outside the loop, including the State Department.

  36

  MARION ELLMAN GAZED out the window at the towering rectangular face of the UN building across the street from her office as she listened to Bob Livingstone on the phone. Deputy Secretary of State Doug Havering was sitting with Livingstone
in Washington. Steve Haskell was in Beijing, and Tomasina Rollins, the US ambassador to South Africa, was on the line in Johannesburg.

  Livingstone wanted to form a view of the next step in dealing with the South African seizure of power by the ANC, given that the British appeared determined to introduce a Security Council resolution calling for sanctions before the end of the year. He spent the first minutes of the call outlining what he knew of the latest developments from the White House. Susan Opitz had made the call to her Chinese counterpart, he told them, and a statement from Zhang or another high official in the Chinese regime was awaited. In the mind of the White House, there was no connection between that demand and the South Africa question. He personally doubted that the Chinese government agreed.

  He asked for Rollins’ view of what was happening in South Africa.

  Tomasina Rollins was a hugely experienced ex-assistant secretary of state for Africa, one of the few US ambassadors who knew her country as well as anyone in the State Department or CIA. Her view was that the South African president, Membathi Mthwesa, had been assured by China that they would veto the British resolution. The conundrum for the US would follow from that. The British, she had heard, were planning to pull their embassy out of South Africa and impose their own sanctions if the resolution failed. The US would have to decide whether they were going to do the same.

  ‘If we use sanctions they’ll really have to hurt. Cosmetic stuff will just feed into the South Africa-as-victim line that Mthwesa’s pushing, which will boost his position. Are we prepared to get really tough? And will it work even if we are? Frankly I think our friends in Beijing will happily take any exports from South Africa that we don’t want. We’d be handing Mthwesa something to hit us with in return for virtually zero impact on the ground.’

  The shape of the arrangement being proposed by the Chinese, as far as Rollins was aware, was a restoration of the constitution with elections engineered so as to guarantee the ANC’s victory, after which China would use its diplomatic efforts to support the government in saying that the elections had been free and fair and the constitution had genuinely been restored. Tied up with that was a big Chinese trade and aid package and an understanding that if the west didn’t accept the arrangement and treated the ANC government as a pariah, China would make good any economic impact that resulted.

  Within the ANC itself there were a number of groupings that opposed the Chinese arrangement. One faction didn’t want to see South Africa as a one-party state and would prefer to see the ANC contest elections even if they might lose them. This was the smallest group since most of the activists who thought like this had been driven out of the party over the last couple of years. A somewhat larger group feared that an arrangement with the Chinese would make President Mthwesa untouchable within the party. They wanted the ANC to rule but they didn’t want Mthwesa as president for life. And finally, the largest opposition group within the ANC had nothing against seeing the country become a one-party state, even if Mthwesa would be there for the next twenty years, but as a matter of pragmatism they didn’t want to see South Africa as some kind of pariah client state of China. They saw that as a poisoned chalice, and if that was the only alternative, they would take their chances with elections. They also saw a serious risk of significant disturbances if Mthwesa got his way. Rollins believed that if the ANC went for the China protector arrangement, with the ANC installed as the only party of government, and if KwaZulu Natal refused to accept it, then something approaching a civil war really could break out. It wasn’t clear that the top leadership of the ANC was prepared to fight such a conflict and this was likely the only thing still holding Mthwesa’s key supporters back from agreeing to the deal.

  ‘That’s our best lever,’ Rollins said. ‘Hollow gestures like cosmetic sanctions that actually strengthen Mthwesa’s position internally are not in our interest. Breaking off relations and taking ourselves out of the picture … if that’s even under consideration, that would be insane. Our best shot is to help strengthen the pragmatic group in the ANC and try to help them find a way out. A statement of concern in the Security Council will be fine. A vetoed resolution that amounts to an ultimatum would be a disaster. I would judge that it will strengthen Mthwesa enough for him to say yes to the Chinese.’

  ‘We need to get the Brits to hold back on this resolution,’ said Marion, who had already come to this conclusion after speaking to Rollins a couple of days earlier.

  Havering laughed.

  ‘Doug, it’s poorly timed and it’s going to fail. If we’ve got people in the ANC who are on our side, like Tomasina says, we need to do what we can to strengthen their position. We need to be very firm that we’re not going to accept this situation but equally firm that we’re going to help South Africa find its own way out of it.’

  ‘Mthwesa’s never going to go for that,’ said Havering.

  Ellman tried to suppress her frustration. The Chinese wanted time to craft a deal that enough of the ANC would accept. The US could use that same time to make sure that didn’t happen, working to craft a different deal. In the first instance it might take the shape of some kind of power-sharing arrangement with the opposition rather than elections, which would stand as an interim solution for a year or two. The US could offer a support package to sweeten it.

  ‘Doug,’ she said, ‘this isn’t for Mthwesa. This is to give something for the internal opposition within the ANC. This just needs a little patience. We need to give them a weapon and give them enough strength to use it.’

  ‘I don’t see us going to the president and saying the Brits are putting down this resolution and we’re going to abstain.’

  ‘I didn’t say we abstain. We need to get the Brits to hold fire. Bob, do you agree with that? Let’s try to get them to hold fire or put down something that’s less confrontational, and let’s work on an approach that might give the ANC opposition a way out.’

  ‘This president is not going to abstain on a resolution that is so clear cut about democracy,’ said Havering before Livingstone could reply.

  ‘Doug,’ said Marion in exasperation, ‘what I just said is we talk to the Brits and try to get them to hold off.’

  ‘The president won’t want you to do that. He’s expecting a resolution. And right now, he’s not in any mood to try to stop it. In fact, he wants it.’

  Ellman frowned, trying to understand. ‘What are you telling me?’

  ‘He’s seen a paper.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Rose asked for one.’

  ‘And you’ve already given him one?’

  ‘The president’s not happy with China right now. Do you understand, Marion? He’s not happy.’

  ‘And this is going to make them behave more congenially?’

  ‘Marion,’ said Livingstone, ‘there’s nothing to stop us putting down an alternative strategy.’

  Nothing, thought Marion. And nothing to stop them trying to get the president to consider it after they had apparently given him an opposite strategy already.

  There was silence on the phone. Ellman didn’t trust Doug Havering. He had obviously made up his mind that Bob Livingstone was a living husk and now it seemed that he was openly working around him with the White House. And Bob was just as much at fault for letting him.

  ‘Look,’ said Livingstone, ‘let’s find out how serious the Brits are about this and what they’re planning to do when the resolution fails. I’ll talk to London.’ He waited, listening to hear if anyone had anything else to say. ‘That’s a first step.’

  ‘Mr Secretary,’ said Marion, ‘can I have two minutes with you after this call?’

  SHE WAITED UNTIL the others called off.

  ‘Marion, go ahead,’ said Livingstone.

  ‘Bob, this isn’t going to work.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘This. This idea of supporting a resolution the Chinese are going to veto and then getting left in a position where we have to decide what to do when the Brits pull out of
South Africa.’

  Livingstone sighed. ‘Marion, I thought you feel strongly about the South Africa situation. I thought you wanted a resolution.’

  ‘I want a result. I want to see South Africa restored to democracy. If a resolution doesn’t get us there, forget it. We need to work with forces in the ANC regime who want a restoration. We need to strengthen them against Mthwesa. Does a resolution do that? It doesn’t. All it does is strengthen Mthwesa and make things worse. And it gets the Chinese pissed. We haven’t even got a statement from them over Fidelian yet. Do you think this is how we’re going to get it? We can’t keep slapping them in the face.’

  Livingstone was silent for a moment.

  ‘Marion, it would be very bad if they didn’t say anything. The consensus at the National Security Council last week was that we would understand that as an admission of guilt on Zhang’s part.’

  ‘That would be a poor interpretation without something else to evidence it.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘Bob, is that what Opitz said to their finance minister? That we’d interpret it as an admission of guilt if they didn’t make a statement?’

  ‘I don’t know. I gave my input to the draft of what she was going to say. She was getting input from the White House as well. I wasn’t there when she spoke.’

  ‘Have you seen a transcript?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know, Bob, if they think that’s our attitude, they won’t do it.’

  ‘That’s what I told them. I said it to Susan. If there’s any way, shape or form they can interpret this request as a threat, you can forget it. Better not to speak to them at all.’