Red Phoenix

CHAPTER 14 Riposte

Blake Fowler sat quietly in the antechamber outside the Oval Office, resisting an urge to pace. He glanced across the room at Admiral Philip Simpson, Chairman of the JCS, who sat conferring with an aide. He double-checked his briefing folder to make sure he had all the documents he would need for this morning’s show. Or maybe “showdown” would be a more accurate term for what he had planned.

“Dr. Fowler?” The dark-haired secretary had raised her head from her work.

“Yes.”

“The President will see you in just a couple of moments. He’s on the phone right now, but it shouldn’t take long.”

Blake nodded his thanks and sat back. This waiting was the hardest part. At least he hoped so. He was acutely aware that the next fifteen minutes or so would be the most crucial of his entire career. In fact, they could easily be the last fifteen minutes of his government career.

He’d spent the better part of a week preparing for this meeting. First, he’d had to persuade Mike Sinclair, Putnam’s deputy, to give him a chance to deliver the President’s daily national security briefing. Putnam was still away on his pre-election campaign swing, but he was due back in a couple of days, and Blake knew this would be his last opportunity to get in to see the President. Sinclair disliked Putnam as much as everybody else on the NSC staff, and he’d finally agreed — thinking that Blake, as one of the staffs rising young stars, just wanted a chance to impress the President while the adviser was away. Blake hadn’t disillusioned him. But he knew that Sinclair was going to be damned mad when he found out the truth.

Next, he’d sought out the kind of ally he’d need to persuade the President that this was more than just a quibble over words and staff procedures. Admiral Simpson had been the logical choice. He’d supported the Working Group’s original recommendations wholeheartedly. He was the nation’s senior military officer. And the admiral had a well-deserved reputation as a man who put the truth above political expediency.

But Blake had only met the admiral twice before, once at a Georgetown dinner party and once at a conference on grand strategy for the Pacific region, so he’d been surprised when Simpson agreed to see him the same day he’d asked for an appointment. He’d been even more surprised when the bull-necked little man had readily agreed to come to the Oval Office with him.

Simpson had grinned across his desk. “What’s the matter, Dr. Fowler? Haven’t you ever come across someone willing to gamble a thirty-year career in the military before?”

“Frankly, Admiral, no, I haven’t. At least not in this town.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, my friend, I’m willing to do this for two very good reasons. First, the President’s made a goddamn big strategic error in signing that sanctions bill. Someone’s got to try to do something about that, and that someone is probably me. The taxpayers should be able to count on something for the seventy-five thousand dollars a year I get paid. And second, George Putnam is a slimy son of a bitch and it’ll be a pleasure to put a stake through his heart.”

Blake smiled as he remembered Simpson’s words. He just hoped that the admiral’s optimism was justified.

The secretary’s phone buzzed softly, bringing him out of his reverie. She picked it up, listened for a moment, and hung up. Blake sat up and laid a hand on his folder.

“Dr. Fowler? Admiral Simpson? The President is ready for you now.” She got up from behind her desk to hold the door open for them. Blake could see the same blue carpet with its interwoven presidential seal, high-backed colonial chairs, marble-sided fireplace, flags, and paintings he’d seen a hundred times before in TV newscasts. But it felt different in person. The room seemed to breathe power.

As they walked into the Oval Office, the President got up from behind his desk and came to meet them.

“Phil, it’s good to see you again.” He shook hands with the admiral and turned to Blake. “And you must be Blake Fowler. Mike Sinclair’s been telling me good things about you.”

Blake heard himself mumbling something about hoping he deserved Sinclair’s praise. Then the President waved them both into chairs and settled back down behind his desk. He put his fingertips together below his chin.

“Now, gentlemen, I’m going to assume that this is more than just a routine briefing. I’ve only been here a couple of years, but I haven’t yet had the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs come in to fill me in on the latest news from Lower Freedonia.”

Blake glanced over at Admiral Simpson. The admiral nodded slightly. They’d agreed earlier that Blake should take the first stab at explaining the situation.

“Mr. President, you’re absolutely right. We’re here about the Interagency Working Group report you were shown before you signed the Korean sanctions bill.”

The President frowned. Korea was obviously still a sore spot. Blake had seen some of the private messages that had passed between the White House and the South Korean government and couldn’t really blame him.

Blake took a deep breath and pushed on. “The truth is, sir, that the document you saw had been altered.”

“Hold it right there.” The President held up a hand and glared at him. He looked at his watch. “I’ve got better things to do than listen to some goddamned staff squabbling. That’s what I pay my senior people for. If you’ve got some beef with the way your copy got rewritten, take it up with Putnam or the chief of staff. Now let’s get on with the rest of your briefing. I’ve got an important meeting in half an hour.”

Blake could feel himself flushing. They couldn’t leave without at least getting a hearing on Putnam’s treachery, could they? He fought an urge to rearrange his notes. Anyway he looked at it, his days with the administration were numbered. Better to be damned for something he’d done then for something he hadn’t. But would the admiral stick with him?

The admiral did. “With respect, Mr. President, Dr. Fowler and I aren’t here to complain about the way a few words were changed here or there.”

Simpson leaned forward in his chair. “We’re here because your national security adviser took it on himself to drastically alter the conclusions reached by the Working Group. I’ll be blunt. The recommendations you were shown bore about as much resemblance to what I and the other Joint Chiefs approved as horseshit does to roast beef. And that’s got direct consequences for this nation’s security.”

The President looked up from his desk and Blake could see the curiosity in his eyes. Curiosity and something more. “Go on.”

Blake asked him, “Did the report you saw recommend signing the Barnes bill?”

The President nodded.

“Then I think you ought to take a look at what the Departments of Defense and Commerce, the CIA, and the NSA all originally recommended.” Blake reached into his folder and pulled out several pages highlighted in yellow.

“These are from the draft we submitted to Putnam.”

The President reached over and took the papers out of Blake’s hand. He spread them out in front of him and started reading. They could see his frown growing deeper as he read. It took him just a couple of minutes to finish.

He handed them back to Blake without a word and swiveled his chair around to look out the rain-streaked window toward the White House Rose Garden. Blake and the admiral exchanged glances. Now what?

The President swung his chair back around to face them. “Okay, gentlemen. That bastard lied to me. And I signed something I shouldn’t have. I certainly wouldn’t have done it if I’d seen your analysis first. So what can we do about it?”

Blake looked back at him. “The best thing, sir, would be to push Congress to repeal the sanctions. And as soon as possible.”

The President shook his head. “Impossible. The House and Senate have gone out of regular session for the election, and the new Congress won’t assemble until early January.”

Simpson nodded his understanding. “But you could call a special session — after the election.”

“Not on your life, Admiral.” The President studied the wall behind the two men for a moment before continuing. “How do you suppose I’d look going back begging Congress to lift sanctions I could have vetoed in the first place?”

Neither Blake nor the admiral answered him, but he must have read their thoughts in their eyes.

“Yeah. I’d look like a clown. Like a regular Jerry Lewis stand-in.”

The President snorted, “Okay, maybe that’s too damned close to the truth for comfort. But I’m not going to do something that would just about kill my chances to accomplish anything else in this term. Clear?”

They nodded.

“So. Short of making myself look like a walking jackass, what are my options?”

Blake and the admiral had come prepared to answer this question. The trouble was that they didn’t have a hell of a lot to offer.

Blake got up out of his chair without thinking. His days as a student teacher had taught him to feel more comfortable talking on his feet. “Well, sir, Barnes and his legislative strategists have crafted a very tightly written bill. It doesn’t leave much at all to your discretion.”

“I’ve seen the legal analysis, Dr. Fowler. Now tell me something I don’t know.”

“Yes, sir,” Blake said patiently. The President might have heard some of what he was going to say before, but it was vital that he realize just how limited his options were.

“Essentially, the sanctions on South Korea’s exports are practically set on automatic pilot. They’re almost certain to go into place because there just aren’t any loopholes in the legislation for us to wriggle through.”

The President interrupted him with a question. “Isn’t there a possibility, however slim, that Seoul will make the political and economic reforms we’re looking for before the sanctions go into effect?”

“Anything’s possible, Mr. President. But our analysis rates that as the least likely outcome.” Blake started to pace.

“Basically, the South Korean government rests on a very narrow knife’s edge between two small, but powerful, factions. On one side they’ve got a hard-line element in their military. The current Seoul government had its origins in a military coup, so they know what can happen if the armed forces aren’t happy with what’s going on.” He turned and walked back past the President’s desk.

“Now on the other side of the equation, you’ve got a small hard-core group of radical students. Most of them aren’t communists, but they are socialists and they want things that the military and South Korea’s industrial conglomerates would find intolerable — virtual unilateral disarmament and reunification with North Korea.”

The President nodded his understanding. “So they’ve got no maneuvering room. The token reforms that the hard-liners in the military would accept won’t be enough to placate Congress or their students. And the reforms demanded by Congress won’t be acceptable to the military.”

“Yes, sir, exactly. What’s worse, they probably wouldn’t even keep the students out of the streets anyway.”

“Shit.”

“In a nutshell, Mr. President.” Blake started another circuit past the President’s desk. “The odds, then, are that South Korea’s booming economy is going to come to a crashing halt over the next couple of months as their exports dry up. That’s going to polarize the apolitical middle portion of the South Korean population. Some are going to side with the military hardliners, and some are going to break over to the left-wing students.”

He shrugged. “Where South Korea’s internal balance of power will wind up is anybody’s guess.”

“And we can’t do a damn thing to stop any of this?” The President’s question was almost plaintive.

“Not this year. Not without a special session of Congress.” Blake came to a halt. “The best we can hope for is that South Korea will muddle through until sometime next year. Then you might be able to make a good case for lifting the sanctions on humanitarian grounds. By then, people here will have seen a lot of TV pictures of unemployment lines in Seoul, and they’ll have started missing Hyundai cars and Samsung televisions.”

The President nodded slowly. “Yes. We’d still face an uphill legislative fight in Congress, but at least I’d hold the moral high ground.”

Blake glanced at Admiral Simpson.

The admiral took his cue. “There’s one thing wrong with that scenario, Mr. President.”

The President looked at Simpson. “What’s that, Phil?”

“It assumes that there will still be a South Korea left to concern ourselves with next spring.”

Simpson paused and the President arched an eyebrow. “Go ahead, Admiral. You’ve got my attention.”

“Yes, sir. You see, while all of this is going on in the South, we’ve got to worry about what’s going on up in North Korea. Kim Il-Sung and his generals are going to be rubbing their hands over the prospect of a badly weakened South Korea. And they’ve been piling up the hardware to do something about it.” The admiral handed McLaren’s latest intelligence assessment to the President and waited while he skimmed through it.

“Jesus, these people aren’t fooling around, are they.”

“No, sir, they’re not. Without our forces along the DMZ as a trip-wire deterrent, they just might be tempted to use some of those brand-new tanks, planes, and artillery pieces.”

The President kept paging through the assessment of North Korea’s order of battle. “I don’t see what we can do about it. The Barnes bill is damned specific there, too. No political reforms, no American troops. We’re going to have to pull them out.”

Blake tensed. This was the crucial moment. He spoke softly, “Not necessarily, Mr. President. At least not until you’ve had a chance to reverse the sanctions in the next Congress.”

The President’s head snapped up. He stared straight into Blake’s eyes. “Just what are you proposing, Dr. Fowler?”

Blake chose his words with great care. “Simply this, sir. Unlike the trade provisions in the bill, there is a small opening in the legislative language requiring us to pull our forces out of South Korea. An opening that you might be able to exploit to keep our protective umbrella up long enough to try convincing Congress to find alternatives.”

He stopped for a moment. The President’s eyes didn’t move away from his face. “The bill doesn’t set a specific timetable for our withdrawal, Mr. President. Instead, the language calls for a pull-out to be carried out, quote, as expeditiously as possible, unquote.”

This was it. The President leaned forward in his chair. “So how does that language give me the leeway I need, Dr. Fowler?”

“I suggest that you interpret that demand as loosely as possible, sir. After all, withdrawing more than forty thousand combat troops, support personnel, and all their equipment is going to be a logistical nightmare. It’s bound to take time — several months at the very least.”

Blake paused again and then pressed ahead. “And a discreet suggestion from you to the commander responsible for carrying out the move, General McLaren, could ensure that those months were stretched to at least a year. A lot can happen in a year, Mr. President. At the very least we’ll have bought time for the South Koreans to adjust to a very different strategic equation.”

Blake finished speaking and sat back down in his chair, surprised to find that his hands were trembling slightly. He looked up to see the President studying him closely.

“You are aware, Dr. Fowler, that you’ve just proposed that I twist the wording of a law beyond all recognition. That I tell a senior military officer to ignore its clear meaning?” the President said in a low, even tone.

“Yes, sir. I know that.”

The President turned to Admiral Simpson. “Phil, what do you think of this young man’s plan? You know that there are people in Congress who’d love the chance to crucify me if this thing leaks out.”

Blake could see the admiral weighing his answer. “Mr. President, both of us have sworn to uphold the Constitution. And both of us have sworn to defend the United States against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. What Dr. Fowler proposes seems to me to fall into a gray area between those two responsibilities.”

The admiral continued, “I can’t make this decision for you, sir. But I believe that it’s a risk worth taking.”

The President sat quietly for several minutes after the admiral had finished speaking. Then, suddenly, he looked over at Blake.

“Did you vote for me in the last election, Dr. Fowler?” he asked.

Startled, Blake never even considered lying. “No, sir, I didn’t.”

The President smiled thinly. “Hell. If you can be that honest, I guess I can trust you on this.”

He slapped a hand down on his desk. “Very well, gentlemen. I’ll take your advice. Somebody gave me bad advice, worse than bad, and I made a mistake. We’ll delay our pull-out from South Korea as long as we possibly can, and use that time to try and correct the error.”

He stared hard at them. “But I don’t want a single goddamned thing about this on paper. You understand? No memos. Nothing on disk. Got it?”

They nodded.

“Great.”

Simpson looked curiously at the President. “What about Putnam? If you take any action against the lying bastard, his congressional patrons may guess that we’re up to something they’d want to know about.”

The President smiled grimly. “Don’t worry about Mr. Putnam, gentlemen. We’ll keep him on in his old job — at least as far as he and the outside world are concerned. But I’ll be goddamned if I ever believe a word that man says from now on. He’ll attend every national security meeting, but when he speaks, I’m not listening. If I want to know something about this Korean situation, I’ll arrange a little private get-together for just the three of us. Clear?”

They nodded again.

The President turned to Blake. “You know, Dr. Fowler, while this whole troop withdrawal thing is playing out, you’re going to have a keep treating Putnam as though he were still your trusted, all-powerful, all-knowing boss. Is that going to be a problem for you?”

Blake shook his head.

“Okay, then. That’s settled.” The President picked up the phone. “June, I want you to put together some travel arrangements for a member of my staff: Blake Fowler. Yes, I want him in Seoul by tomorrow, if possible.”

He hung up and smiled again at Blake. “No need to look so surprised, Dr. Fowler. I’m making you my go-between with General McLaren on this thing. You’re going to be in it up to your neck.”

Blake couldn’t think of anything to say except, “Yes, sir. I sure as hell will be.”

The clattering, ear-splitting roar of the Cobra gunship’s rotor hammered through McLaren’s helmet as he looked out through the front windshield.

The Cobra skimmed low over rice paddies as it raced toward a jagged ridge flanking the multilane Main Supply Route. Then it climbed, following rising ground in a smooth curve to the left just fifty meters above a hillside orchard. Fallen leaves caught in the helicopter’s downdraft swirled high into the air in its wake.

McLaren kept his eyes focused on the small valley they were rushing toward at a hundred and twenty knots. Without looking, he held up his right hand, palm forward. The chopper pilot obeyed his signal and eased back on his collective, slowing the gunship as they flew by the valley’s tree-lined entrance.

McLaren studied the ground carefully, first with unaided eyes and then with a pair of binoculars as they orbited past the valley again. Nothing. Not a single radio aerial in plain view. Good, there weren’t any telltale signs that might reveal his camouflaged headquarters to an airborne enemy.

He pulled his head back into the cockpit and cut in his throat mike. “Okay, Jim. You can take us down now. I think I’m getting airsick.”

The pilot grinned at him and sketched a mock salute before pushing the stick over to send the helicopter into a long slide up the valley toward a small clearing. They settled in to land in a hail of rotor-blown dust, small pebbles, and dead grass.

McLaren slid down out of the gunship, bent low holding his helmet, and scuttled out from under the slowing rotor blades. He straightened up and strode past a headquarters detail waiting with the netting to conceal his personal chopper from prying eyes.

He returned their salutes and kept going down the path toward the tangle of tents and M577 command vehicles that marked his army’s “bare-bones” field headquarters. Bare bones, my ass, he thought, looking at the crowded vehicle park. Still, it was smaller than his predecessors’ traveling circuses. Doctrine said an army-level field HQ needed dozens of trucks, command trailers, and personnel carriers to operate properly. But McLaren knew that doctrine didn’t mean diddley-squat if it made you a big, juicy, and obvious target for an enemy airstrike or artillery barrage. He preferred to travel light.

His staff looked up when he walked into the main command tent but then bent back down to their work. He’d made it plenty clear early on in his tour that he didn’t have time for a lot of meaningless saluting and ass-kissing — especially not in the field.

His aide came up to take his helicopter crewman’s headgear. McLaren shrugged it off and took his old-fashioned steel pot in return. He didn’t like the new, plastic-armored “Fritz” helmets prescribed by Army regulations. He’d seen the studies showing they were more effective at keeping out fragments, but there was something unsettling about them nonetheless. He’d told Doug once that a man needed to have steel on his head to feel secure under an airburst. “Damn it,” he’d barked, “plastic’s only good for two things — model airplanes and some bimbo’s shopping trip.” He remembered that his aide had smiled gamely and packed McLaren’s new-style helmet away for good. Humoring him, no doubt. But what the hell, he was a general and rank should have some friggin’ privileges after all.

McLaren settled the steel pot on his head and looked back at his aide. “That fella from Washington get here yet?”

“Yes sir, about half an hour ago. I’ve got him waiting in your trailer. Do you want me to send for him?”

“Nah. Muhammad will go to the mountain this time. Keep an eye on things here for me, will you?”

McLaren climbed the steps to his command trailer and looked in through the door. The President’s highly unofficial “emissary” stood. McLaren liked the look of him. Tall, rangy, and with an open, honest face. Smart enough not to wear a suit out here, too.

He nodded his head toward the hillside rising above the camp. “Let’s take a walk.”

McLaren and Fowler hiked up through the tall grass far enough to be out of earshot of anyone else in the HQ. McLaren pulled his helmet off and turned to face Blake. “Okay, Dr. Fowler, what gives?”

Blake filled him in, speaking quickly at first but then slowing to emphasize each word as he got closer to the President’s “suggestion” that McLaren delay his planning for the congressionally mandated withdrawal from South Korea.

When he’d finished, McLaren stood silently for several minutes, looking out across the hill to the north — toward the DMZ. Then he shook his head in disbelief. “Jesus Christ, Dr. Fowler. I’ve never heard anything like that in my whole friggin’ Army career.”

Then he grinned. “But I’m damned glad I finally got the chance to.”

Fowler grinned back at him. The general had reacted just the way Admiral Simpson thought he would.

“Just one question. Are we going to let the South Korean government in on this little secret?”

“No. The President doesn’t want any leaks on this. And he doesn’t want to blow any chance that the government here just might make the reforms Congress is insisting on.”

“Okay.” McLaren settled his helmet back on his head. “You go back to Washington and tell the President that he can count on the most screwed-up evacuation planning process he’s ever seen.”

They shook hands and headed back down the hill toward the headquarters of the Eighth Army.