The War Cloud

31

Koz was sitting on the gold sofa when Sachs emerged from the bathroom into the NCA commander’s compartment occupied by first-class passengers on a commercial 747. Her hair was wet and slicked back, and he had to admit she did more for the flightsuit that Captain Li had given her than Captain Li herself. Then he was ashamed for even thinking about his commander-in-chief in that way and pushed the thought out of his mind.

“Feeling better?” he asked her. He was sure he had heard her throw up in the bathroom. It was a natural reaction to her stress-inducing meeting with the National Command Authority, although he wasn’t sure she’d admit to something seemingly unpresidential.

“Much.” She sat down in the high-back leather chair at the desk and warily eyed the stack of executive orders he had brought her to sign, along with a steaming mug of hot tea. “Did you make this, Colonel? Or did Doctor Nordquist?”

It was almost funny, but he didn’t dare crack a smile. “Captain Li did, ma’am.”

“OK, I guess I have to trust her now — and you.” Sachs took a sip, exhaled and looked around the compartment. “I just noticed there are no windows in here.”

“Flash effects from nukes, ma’am. They can burn your eyes out. What windows we do have on the plane are made from the same stuff you’ll find in your home microwave door.”

“Of course,” she said with a frown.

At first Koz thought she felt embarrassed by her technical ignorance. Or maybe she thought his microwave remark was as patronizing as Marshall’s coffee order options. But then he decided she was simply sad.

She asked, “Where are we going?”

“We’re following a pre-designated route to avoid enemy detection. We should be out of U.S. airspace shortly.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want us straying from U.S. airspace. We can’t leave.”

Koz muffled his real reaction, namely to lecture her on the realities of airspace and nuclear cloud bursts. But she would probably le soon enough.

Sachs leaned forward and looked at the stack of Presidential Emergency Action Documents on her desk. “More proclamations?”

“You gotta sign them while you can,” Koz said.

Sachs stared at the first one, an order freezing wages, prices and rent. Then she signed with a flourish and said, “And I thought you were all Republicans,” she quipped.

Koz cracked a smile. He was beginning to enjoy having her around, especially when everything else about the world right now felt so rotten.

“This one,” he said, “is guaranteed to warm a liberal’s heart.”

He pushed another classified document across the desk for her to sign. It was a draft bill authorizing the IRS to collect money via a national sales tax of 30 percent. It even waived interest penalties against taxpayers who filed late returns “due to reasonable cause and not due to willful neglect.”

“I’m not a liberal or conservative, Colonel, I’m an American,” she said, signing the order. “And nuclear war seems as reasonable a cause as any for these extreme — and temporary — measures. Anything else?”

Koz slid a thick binder across the desk to her. “The latest National Strategic Target List,” he explained. “It ranks more than forty thousand places and things in China, the Far East and elsewhere deemed worthy of destruction.”

He watched as Sachs tentatively ran her finger down the list, pausing at a target and moving on. He could tell she couldn’t do it, couldn’t let her finger rest on any single item, knowing thousands of human beings would die if she did.

She said, “I guess I had forgotten that the United States has considered China its No. 1 enemy since the end of the Cold War.”

“Until 9/11,” Koz said. “General Marshall made his career at the Pentagon with his quadrennial reports stating that the war on terror in the Middle East had distracted America from containing the real threat in China. By the way, for every target you don’t pick, you might as well put your finger on a map of the United States, because that’s who will suffer instead.”

“Thanks for the information, Colonel.”

“You wanted presidential authority,” he reminded her, and pushed a second operations manual at her, this one thicker than the first. “Now you have it.”

“And what’s this?” Sachs asked, looking overwhelmed.

“The Single Integrated Operational Plan,” he explained. “The plan for destroying the places and things on the target list.”

Sachs thumbed through the pages slowly. “This says that even after we and our enemies exhaust all our nuclear warheads and destroy the planet, America still has a secret reserve of nukes for after Armageddon.”

“That’s right,” said Koz. “The winner will be the one who can continue the fighting and inflict still more damage.”

“But there will be nothing left to destroy! There will be no America left for our bombers or subs to return to.”

Koz said, “They could land or dock at foreign airstrips and ports. As you’ll see, secret treaties with foreign allies would enable our government to political entity even if the United States itself were destroyed.”

“Sure, it just wouldn’t have any people,” Sachs said. “Doesn’t thinking about this all day drive Marshall insane?”

“You have to be a little insane to dream up these nightmares in the first place.”

“So why do we do it?”

“It’s an insane planet.”

She picked up her mug of tea and curiously looked at the decal on the side, which depicted an F-16 fighter jet and the tag line: Air Force: When it Absolutely, Positively Has to be Destroyed Overnight.

Koz asked, “Something wrong?”

“It’s just that nothing today is playing out like the likeliest scenario detailed in this report.” She tapped her finger for emphasis on a graphic of the Taiwan Strait, the 112-mile strait of water between China and the island of Taiwan. “This says the Chinese would attack Taiwan before they ever risked attacking a U.S. target, let alone our seat of government. It also says with 99-percent probability that such an attack would take the form of a thousand land-based cruise and ballistic missiles in China blasting over the strait to knock out Taiwan’s defense shields, followed by invasion before our fighter jets and carrier groups could arrive on the scene. Even then, China wouldn’t strike the United States itself.”

She was good, Koz thought. He tested her further. “So what exactly are the Chinese supposed to be doing?”

“According to Brad Marshall?” She didn’t even have to glance at the report. “First, they’re supposed to be hitting us at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, hoping to strike before our F-15E fighters get in the air and knock out our best staging area for combat patrols. Second, they’re supposed to blind us in the theater of war by knocking out our overhead communication and imaging satellites. Third, if necessary, they might launch their new anti-ship ballistic missiles at our carrier groups plowing toward Taiwan. But they’ve done none of those things yet.”

“No, they haven’t, Madame President,” he told her. “But General Zhang has proven to be irrational in the past, and it sure looks like the Chinese hit D.C. and accomplished an unimaginable regime change in the United States. A regime change that put you in charge, Madame President, and your actions or lack thereof can only stoke speculation.”

“Meaning I’m a Chinese sleeper of some kind?” she asked him.

He knew the idea was ridiculous, but had to push. She had enough doubters already in the ranks of the military, and she couldn’t afford having her authority questioned. “It was you, after all, and not the Central Locator that found a way for you to get out of Washington before the blast, ma’am. That’s a fact.”

“I am not an agent of any foreign power, Colonel,” she said firmly, her brown eyes on fire with rage. “How can I prove it to any of you?”

“With this, actually.” He reached into his pocket and removed an authenticator card with the presidential seal on it. “This secret code card will establish your identity as president to military commanders if you’re ever caught away from secure communications facilities.” He paused, and then gave her his warmest smile. “I know you’re not a plant. But you might have to prove it to others. That card will help.”

“Thank you,” she said and slipped the card inside her flight suit’s outside pocket.

Koz wasn’t satisfied. “Not a secure location.”

Sachs started to unzip the top of her flight suit.

Koz tried to keep a straight face as he watched her stuff it inside her flight suit. It was certainly the first time he was aware of an authenticator card occupying that kind of space, except maybe for the time when former President Bill Clinton lost his while in office and the worry was that one of his women stole off with it.

She asked, “How’s this?”

“Better,” he nodded when Captain Li opened the door in time to see Sachs adjust her bosoms.

Koz leaped to his feet in embarrassment, as if he had been caught in some sordid act. “Captain.”

“Excuse me,” said Li without batting an eyelash. The iron-rod discipline of the USAF had taken over. “NORAD reports a massive wave of Chinese missiles heading our way.”

“Trajectory?” Koz demanded.

Li was grim. “They’re silo killers.”