Tom Clancy - Executive Orders

"Arnie?"

"Yes, Mr. President?"

"I'm sorry."

"OKAY, HONEY," HE groaned. He'd go to see the doctor tomorrow morning. It hadn't gotten better at all. If anything, it had gotten worse. The headaches were punishing, and that despite two extra-strength Tylenol every four hours. If only he could sleep it off, but that was proving hard.

Only exhaustion allowed him an hour here and an hour there. Just getting up to use the bathroom required a few minutes of concentrated effort, enough that his wife offered to help, but, no, a man didn't need an escort for that. On the other hand, she was right. He did need to see a doctor. Would have been smarter to do it yesterday, he thought. Then he might have felt better now.

IT HAD BEEN easy for Plumber, at least on the procedural side. The tape-storage vault was the size of a respectable public library, and finding things was easy. There, on the fifth shelf, were three boxed Beta-format cassettes. Plumber took them down, removed the tapes from the boxes, and replaced them with blanks. The three tapes he placed in his briefcase. He was home twenty minutes later. There, for his own convenience, he had a commercial-type Betamax, and he ran the tapes of the first interview, just to make sure, just to confirm the fact that the tapes were undamaged. And they were. These would have to be sent to a secure place.

Next, John Plumber drafted his three-minute commentary piece for the next day's evening news broadcast. It would be a mildly critical piece on the Ryan presidency. He spent an hour on it, since, unlike the current crop of TV reporters, he liked to achieve a certain elegance in his language, a task which came easily to him, as his grammar was correct. This he printed up and read over because he both edited and detected errors more easily on paper than on a computer monitor. Satisfied, he copied the piece over to disk, which would later be used at the studio to generate copy for the TelePrompTer. Next, he composed another commentary piece of the same overall length (it turned out to be four words shorter), and that he printed also. Plumber spent rather more time with this one. If it were to be his professional swan song, then it had to be done properly, and this reporter, who had drafted quite a few obituaries for others, both admired and not, wanted his own to be just right. Satisfied with the final copy, he printed that up as well, tucking the pages into his briefcase, with the cassettes. This one he would not copy to disk.

"GUESS THEY'RE finished," the chief master sergeant said. The take from the Predator showed the tank columns heading back to their laagers, hatches open on the turrets, crewmen visible, mainly smoking. The exercise had gone well for the newly constituted UIR army, and even now they were conducting their road movement in good order.

Major Sabah spent so much time looking over this man's shoulder that they really should have spoken on a more informal basis, he thought. It was all routine. Too routine. He'd expected—hoped—that his country's new neighbor would require much more time to integrate its military forces, but the commonality of weapons and doctrine had worked in their favor. Radio messages copied down here and at STORM TRACK suggested that the exercise was concluded. The TV coverage from the UAV confirmed it, however, and confirmation was important.

"That's funny…" the sergeant observed, to his own surprise.

"What is that?" Sabah asked.

"Excuse me, sir." The NCO stood and walked over to a corner cabinet, from which he extracted a map, and brought it back to his workstation. "There's no road there. Look, sir." He unfolded the map, matched the coordinates with those on the screen—the Predator had its own Global Positioning Satellite navigation system and automatically told its operators where it was—and tapped the right section on the paper. "See?"

The Kuwaiti officer looked back and forth from map to screen. On the latter, there was a road, now. But that was easily explained. A column of a hundred tanks would convert almost any surface into a hard-packed highway of sorts, and that had happened here.

But there hadn't been a road there before. The tanks had made it over the last few hours.

"That's a change, Major. The Iraqi army was always road-bound before."

Sabah nodded. It was so obvious that he hadn't seen it. Though native to the desert, and supposedly schooled in traveling there, the Iraqi army in 1991 had connived at its own destruction by sticking close to roads, because its officers always seemed to get lost when moving cross- country. Not as mad as it sounded—the desert was essentially as featureless as the sea—it had made their movements predictable, never a good thing in a war, and given advancing allied forces free rein to approach from unexpected directions.

That had just changed.

"You suppose they have GPS, too?" the chief master sergeant asked.

"We couldn't expect them to stay stupid forever, could we?"

PRESIDENT RYAN KISSED his wife on the way to the elevator. The kids weren't up yet. One sort of work lay ahead. Another sort lay behind. Today there wasn't time for both, though some efforts would be made. Ben Goodley was waiting on the helicopter.

"Here's the notes from Adler on his Tehran trip." The National Security Advisor passed them over. "Also the write-up from Beijing. The working group is getting together at ten to go over that situation. The SNIE team will be meeting at Langley later today, too."

"Thanks." Jack strapped into his seat and started reading. Arnie and Gallic came aboard and took their seats forward of his.

"Any ideas, Mr. President?" Goodley asked.

"Ben, you're supposed to tell me, remember?"

"How about I tell you that it doesn't make much sense?"

"I already know that part. You guard the phones and faxes today. Scott should be in Taipei now. Whatever comes from him, fast-track it to me."

"Yes, sir."

The helicopter lurched aloft. Ryan hardly noticed that. His mind was on the job, crummy though it was. Price and Raman were with him. There would be more agents on the 747, and more still waiting even now in Nashville. The presidency of John Patrick Ryan went on, whether he liked it or not.

THIS COUNTRY MIGHT be small, might be unimportant, might be a pariah in the international community—not because of anything it had done, except perhaps to prosper, but because of its larger and less prosperous neighbor to the west—but it did have an elected government, and that was supposed to count for something in the community of nations, especially those with popularly elected governments themselves. The People's Republic had come to exist by force of arms—well, most countries did, Sec-State reminded himself—and had immediately thereafter slaughtered millions of its own citizens (nobody knew how many; nobody was terribly interested in finding out), launched into a revolutionary development program ("the Great Leap Forward"), which had turned out more disastrously than was the norm even for Marxist nations; and launched yet another internal «reform» effort ("the Cultural Revolution") which had come after something called the "Hundred Flowers" campaign, whose real purpose had been to smoke out potential dissidents for later elimination at the hands of students whose revolutionary enthusiasm had indeed been revolutionary toward Chinese culture—they'd come close to destroying it entirely, in favor of The Little Red Book. Then had come more reform, the supposed changeover from Marxism to something else, another student revolution—this one against the existing political system—arrogantly cut down with tanks and machine guns on global television. Despite all that, the rest of the world was entirely willing to let the People's Republic crush their cousins on Taiwan.

This was called realpolitik, Scott Adler thought. Something similar had resulted in an event called the Holocaust, an event his father had survived, with a number tattooed on his forearm to prove it. Even his own country officially had a one-China policy, though the unspoken codicil was that the PRC would not attack the ROC—and if it did, then America might just react. Or might not.