Jack Mars - Primary Threat

A small flash of light and flame appeared from the black maw at the end of the man’s gun. The darkness came and Big Dog didn’t know if he’d really seen that light, or if this whole thing had been a dream all along.

9:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

The Situation Room

The White House

Washington, DC

“Mr. President, your thoughts?”

Clement Dixon was too old for this. That was his major thought.

He sat at the head of the table, and all eyes were on him. Over a long career in politics, he had learned to read eyes, and facial expressions, with the best of them. And what his face reading told him was this: the high-powered people looking at the white-haired gentleman presiding over this emergency meeting had all reached the same conclusion as Dixon himself.

He was too old.

He had been a Freedom Rider since the very first ride, May 1961, risking his life to help desegregate the South. He had been one of the young speakers on the streets during the Chicago Police Riot of August 1968, and had been tear-gassed in the face. He had spent thirty-three years in the House of Representatives, first sent there by the good people of Connecticut in 1972. He had served as Speaker of the House twice, once during the 1980s, then again up until just a couple of months ago.

Now, at the age of seventy-four, he suddenly found himself President of the United States. It was a role he had never wanted or imagined for himself. No, wait. Scratch that—when he was young, a teenager, early twenties, he had pictured himself one day as President.

But the America he had imagined himself President of was not this America. This was a divided place, embroiled in two publicly acknowledged foreign wars, as well as half a dozen clandestine “black operations”—operations so black, apparently, that the people overseeing them were reluctant to describe them to their superiors.

“Mr. President?”

In his youth, he had never imagined himself President of an America still utterly dependent on fossil fuels for its energy needs, where twenty percent of the population lived in poverty, and another thirty percent teetered on the verge of it, where millions of children went hungry every night, and more than a million people had nowhere to live. A place where racism was still alive and well. A place where millions of people could not afford to get sick, and people often had to decide between taking their prescription medications and eating. This was not the America he had dreamed of leading.

This was a nightmare America, and suddenly he was in charge of it. A man who had spent his whole life standing up for what he believed was right, and fighting for the highest ideals, now found himself crawling through the muck. This job offered nothing but trade-offs and gray areas, and Clement Dixon was right in the middle of it all.

He had always been a religious man. And these days he found himself thinking of how Christ had asked God to let the cup pass him by. Unlike Christ, however, his place on this cross was not pre-ordained. A series of mishaps and bad decisions had brought Clement Dixon to this place.

If President David Barrett, a good man whom Dixon had known for many years, hadn’t been murdered, then no one would have looked to Vice President Mark Baylor to take his place.

And if Baylor hadn’t been implicated by a mountain of circumstantial evidence in that murder (not enough to charge him, but more than enough to see him disgraced and banished from public life), then he wouldn’t have resigned, leaving the Presidency to the Speaker of the House.

And if Dixon himself hadn’t agreed last year to spend just one more term as Speaker, despite his advanced age…

Then he wouldn’t have found himself in this position.

Even if he’d just had the strength of will to turn the damn thing down… Just because the Line of Succession dictated that the Speaker assume the job, didn’t mean he had to accept the job . But too many people had fought for too long to see a man like Clement Dixon, the fiery standard bearer of classical liberal ideals, become President. As a practical matter, he could not walk away.

So here he was—tired, old, limping through the hallways of the West Wing (yes, limping —the new President of the United States had arthritis in his knees and a pronounced limp), overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the thing entrusted to him, and compromising his ideals at every turn.

“Mr. President? Sir?”

President Dixon was sitting in the egg-shaped Situation Room. Somehow, the room reminded him of a TV show from the 1960s—the show was called Space: 1999. It was a silly Hollywood producer’s idea of what the future must look like. Stark, empty, inhuman, and designed for maximum use of space. Everything was sleek and sterile, and exuded zero charm.

Large video screens were embedded in the walls, with a giant screen at the far end of the oblong table. The chairs were tall leather recliners like the captain on the control deck of a starship might have.

This meeting had been called at short notice—as usual, there was a crisis on. Outside of every seat at the table being taken, and a few along the walls, the room was mostly empty. The usual suspects were here, including a few overweight men in suits, along with thin and ramrod-straight military men in uniform.

Thomas Hayes, Dixon’s new Vice President, was also here, and thank heavens for that. Having come aboard straight from being governor of Pennsylvania, Thomas was accustomed to making executive decisions. He was also on the same page with Dixon about many things. Thomas helped Dixon form a unified front.

Everyone knew that Thomas Hayes had designs on the presidency himself, and that was fine. He could have it, as far as Clement Dixon was concerned. Thomas was tall, and handsome, and smart, and he projected an air of authority. Yet the most prominent thing about him was his very large nose. The national press had already started to tweak him about it.

Just wait, Thomas, Dixon thought. Wait until you’re President. The political cartoonists were drawing Clement Dixon as the absent-minded professor, a cross between Mark Twain and Albert Einstein with their shoes untied, and minus the homespun humor or penetrating intelligence.

Boy, they would sure have fun with that Hayes nose.

A tall man in a green dress uniform stood at the far head of the table, a four-star general named Richard Stark. He was thin and very fit, like the marathoner he surely was, and his face appeared to be chiseled from stone. He had the eyes of a hunter, like a lion, or a hawk. He spoke with utter confidence—in his impressions, in the information given him by his underlings, in the ability of the United States military to hammer any problem into submission, no matter how thorny or complicated. Stark was practically a caricature of himself. He seemed as if he’d never experienced a moment of uncertainty in his lifetime. What was the old saying?

Often incorrect, but never in doubt.

“Explain it again,” President Dixon said.

He could almost hear the silent groans from around the room. Dixon hated to have to hear it again. He hated the information as he understood it, and he hated that one more try ought to make him understand it completely. He didn’t want to understand it.

Stark nodded. “Yes, sir.”

He pointed with a long wooden pointer at the map on the large screen. The map showed the North Slope borough of Alaska, a vast territory at the northern edge of the state, inside the Arctic Circle, and bordering on the Arctic Ocean.

There was a red dot in the ocean just north of land’s end. The land there was marked ANWR, which Dixon well knew stood for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—he was one of the people who had fought for decades to have that sensitive region protected from oil exploration and drilling.