Michael Walsh - Early Warning

The new SecDef was Shalika Johnson, the former governor of Tyler ’s home state, Louisiana. There were plenty of folks who thought Johnson was simply an affirmative-action appointment by a floundering president looking to shore up his minority base, but Seelye had already learned the hard way that Ms. Johnson was one of the toughest human beings in Washington, which was saying something. If the country were ever really to go on a war footing, she would be the fiercest, most uncompromising warrior since Scipio Africanus. He dreaded having to have the Devlin discussion with her, when and if the time came.

“He’s in the air.”

“Where is he going?”

Seelye hesitated. “He…he didn’t say sir?”

“The fuck you mean, ‘he didn’t say’?” At the other end of the line, Seelye could feel the temperature rising inside the White House.

“He was supposed to return to Fort Meade, but-”

Tyler exploded. He hadn’t yelled at anyone all day, and it felt good. “God fucking damn it, I don’t give a rat’s fucking rear end what he was supposed to do. I’m in the goddamned fight of my life with this phony from Rhode Island, even my bought-and-paid-for pollsters and TV pundits are telling me there’s no way I can win, and after all I’ve done for this goddamned country, and if something goes tits up in New York, well, this job won’t be worth a plugged nickel. And neither will yours, General. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly, sir, yes.” Seelye was used to dealing with Tyler, had even come to almost like him, and he reached for the right words to say. The last thing he wanted to see was Angela Hassett-untested, untried, a creature of the media and mostly of Jake Sinclair, who was probably fucking her or was thinking about fucking her-in the Oval Office. Especially since her one qualification for the office was that she was not Jeb Tyler. “Devlin has an instinct for these things, Mr. President. He’s probably on his way to New York right now. That’s where I’d head if I were him. Teterboro, most likely-no commercial traffic.” Seelye paused, the telephone equivalent of a shrug. “Anyway, you know his deal. He does what he wants, when he wants.”

“I know it,” said Tyler evenly, “but I still don’t like it.”

“It’s the only deal we have.”

“It’s the only deal you have,” Tyler reminded him. “And he can pull the plug on it any time he wants. So you’d better make damn sure that, whatever he’s up to, it goes smoothly.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” said Seelye.

“Now make sure he gets wherever he’s going, on the double.”

“Er…sir?” Seelye got his question in just before Tyler hung up on him.

“Yes, General?”

“It’s not just him, sir. It’s her, too.”

“Who?”

“The woman he’s taken as his partner in Branch 4 operations. You remember, the Iranian. You authorized it, at the meeting at the Willard Hotel.”

“I don’t remember anything about an Iranian.” That part was probably true. Tyler only remembered things that were important and, of course, grudges. “Who is she?”

“We don’t know, exactly. Only Devlin knows who she is. That was part of the deal. We haven’t even been able to vet her, and here she is-”

Tyler didn’t feel like arguing. The U.S. Government was so endemically riddled with moles, sleeper agents, old Soviet illegals, and various other burrowed and semi-dormant creatures that one more wouldn’t make any difference; it was a miracle the Republic had lasted this long, what with all the enemies, foreign and domestic. And, these days, it was impossible to tell them apart…

“Whatever. Defend your country, General Seelye.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you sir.”

Once again, the President of the United States was alone.

Tyler leaned back in his chair. He’d only been president for three years, but it already seemed like a lifetime, and as he looked back on that much younger man who had sought, and won, the office, he hardly recognized him. From the outside, running a presidential campaign might look hard, and of course it was, but it was nothing compared to actually having the job itself. All the political bullshit went out the window the minute you walked into the Oval Office for the first time and, unless you were really stupid or arrogant or both, that’s where it stayed, fertilizing the Rose Garden until either you were ready to leave or the voters sickened of you and threw you out.

If anything happened, he could pretty much kiss his reelection chances good-bye. Even if the country rallied round the flag, there was just enough time from now to the election to make them forget. Maybe. Unless it was really horrific, in which case a century wouldn’t be enough. The patriotic shock would turn to outrage, and the second term of a Tyler presidency would be toast. He had to figure out an angle…of political survival.

Instinctively, Tyler reached for his bourbon, then remembered he’d finished it. But when he brought the glass to his lips, he saw to his astonishment that it was a fresh one, as if delivered by a ghost. Manuel must have brought it to him while he was on the blower with Seelye. Nothing like a man you could trust, even here in the White House.

Fort Meade, Maryland

General Armond “Army” Seelye put down the secure phone to the White House and typed out an encrypted message to Devlin: FRANCIS X. BYRNE, CHIEF OF NY CTU. He’d gotten his orders, which was the easy part. Executing them was something else.

Whatever was going on in New York was plenty troubling. Not that it was exactly a surprise. The Chinese, the Russians, and all sorts of other “frenemies” were constantly engaged in a relentless probing of America’s cyber-defenses, so much so that the President had recently appointed a “cyber-czar” to war-game possible responses to a takedown of, say, the electrical grid. Not that they were going to stop there. Over the past few years, the number and the severity of the probes had been growing exponentially, which told him plenty. For one thing, it meant that the Chinese were no longer afraid of the Americans, and why should they be? They were holding a huge amount of American paper, notes they could call in any time they wanted to wreck the currency or take down the economy. Not even Emanuel Skorzeny at his most powerful could take on the once-almighty dollar.

For another, they had millions of men under arms and, in the coming years, that number would only swell. One of the unintended side effects of the Peoples Republic ’s one-child policy and the preference of Chinese families for boys was the creation of a lopsided generation in which males outnumbered females in a ratio 1.25 to 1. That was a lot of horny, frustrated boys, more than a quarter of whom were born losers who never would get any girl at all. The English used to deal with this by having one boy inherit the estate, the second son join the army, and the third take the cloth, but the Chinese had no cloth, and so droves of young males were heading into the army every day; if they couldn’t fuck they could damn sure fight.

Worse, it told Seelye that even countries like Bulgaria and Israel and the lesser ’stans of the old Soviet Union had no fear of the American eagle, either. Al-Qaeda had taught Americans that a handful of zealots armed mostly with the element of surprise, ruthlessness of will, and the sheeplike nature of modern boobus Americanus could easily overpower a crew and turn the morning flight to Los Angeles into a guided missile; all it took was the audacity of a bunch of dopes who thought they were ticketed for paradise instead of a fiery inferno or a farmer’s field. Everyone, it seemed, felt free to poke the old lion.

But even a czar wouldn’t be able to pry anything out of the NYPD if they didn’t want to give it up. New York City was its own country, and just as unafraid of Washington as everybody else.