Warriors

CHAPTER 5

President Tom McCloskey stared at the live feed from the East China Sea. He was, he knew in some secret part of him, in a state of shock. Hell, all of them were in shock — McCloskey himself; his close friend since Annapolis, Vice President David Rosow; his beautiful new and wildly popular secretary of state, Kim Oakley Case; the always reliable secretary of defense, Anson Beard; and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Charlie Moore.

And all the rest of the crisis team; every one of them had been staring at the Situation Room screens for over an hour.

What they were seeing up there was real-time terror. Innocent American lives were being threatened half a world away, and there was not one damn thing he or anybody else in the White House or over at State, CIA, or the Pentagon could do about it. Not one damn thing.

“Shit,” he whispered under his breath. “Shit.”

China and her increasingly bellicose surrogate, North Korea, as of forty-eight hours ago, were staging joint naval war games in the East China Sea. North Korea had made a big show of it for the press, trotting out their latest warships. According to his most recent CIA naval intelligence briefing, and some help from British intelligence, it was clear that China had long been planning to use the North Korean navy as a pawn in this little game of their own. Test American resolve.

But how?

Nobody at CIA, State, the Pentagon, or any other intelligence agency had prepared him for this. This was a goddamn nightmare, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. The whole country was coming unglued over a few inadvertent remarks he’d made at the G7 summit in Prague the week before. Jesus Christ. The media, no friends of his in the run-up to the damn election, were all over him for a couple of misstatements he’d made to Putin about China.

The joint press event was over and done with and he’d assumed the mikes were dead. Reasonable assumption.

They weren’t.

What he’d said was innocent enough. The once-powerful Putin, now increasingly in danger of becoming China’s bitch, was playing hardball with the United States over China’s currency manipulations. And McCloskey hadn’t come this far to be backed into a corner by the Russian’s trumped-up tough-guy act, and he was planning to draw a line in the sand and call the Russian’s bluff. But he wasn’t going to tell Putin that, no sir. He was going to sow a few seeds of disinformation and let the Kremlin show its cards. His own wife had told him what a shrewd idea it was, f’crissakes.

So what he said to the Russian was “Prime Minister, just give me a little wiggle room here. Just enough to get through the All-Asia Conference next month. After that, I can show a lot more flexibility. Trust me.”

And for that, a few offhand comments taken completely out of context, he was paying a steep price. Using up a lot of political capital to hold his fragile coalition together. Had the Senate whip and the Speaker of the House breathing down his neck, wanting him to issue a clarifying statement.

Hell, he had Tom Friedman and the New York Times questioning his fitness for office. The Washington Post! The Post ran a goddamn editorial in the most recent Sunday edition headlined “Is He Losing It?” Well, so be it. Politics at this level was a game for those who could take the heat, stay in the kitchen, and keep their heads in the fucking oven.

And now this!

At 0441 hours GMT, a North Korean fast-attack warship had deliberately rammed and disabled a small and lightly armed U.S. Navy surveillance vessel now taking on water in the disputed international region of the East China Sea. It was a moonless night, there was fog, but there was no conceivable excuse for the USN captain’s behavior.

In a state of relatively minor duress, he had folded his cards and surrendered his vessel to the North Koreans, for God’s sake. Was the U.S. skipper insane?

The U.S. boat was CIA, of course, but the captain of the North Korean vessel didn’t know that. All he knew was that his claim of territorial incursion and his demand to board (backed up by overwhelming firepower) had been granted by the U.S. skipper.

Now, the president of the United States and his team watched as four young able-bodied American seamen, bound and blindfolded, were kneeling side by side with their backs against a steel bulkhead on the foredeck of their vessel.

The American skipper and his crew were being held at gunpoint up on the bridge. God knew what was going up there, McCloskey thought, feeling a sense of impotent rage come close to overwhelming him.

An oddly tall and lean Korean officer was screaming at the four captives, bending down, getting right up into their faces.

“What’s that bastard saying?” McCloskey said to the State Department translator.

He told him.

“Son of a bitch,” the president muttered.

“He’s got a gun!” someone at the table said.

The NK navy officer stepped in front of one of the Americans and stuck a large black automatic pistol up under his chin. The officer was red-faced and screaming at the sailor now, venting all his pent-up hatred and anger on the helpless sailor.

Everyone in the room saw the blindfolded youth working his mouth and knew instantly what would happen next.

“Don’t do it, boy!” General Charles Moore, chairman of the Joint Chiefs said to the screen. “Don’t give that bastard any excuse, son! None, no way, never.”

“Oh, Christ,” McCloskey said, “no, no, no.”

The sailor spat, catching the hysterical officer square in the face.

The Korean officer recoiled in anger, using the sleeve of his uniform to wipe away the saliva.

He suddenly raised his arm and drove the pistol into the sailor’s face, smashing his nose into a red pulp.

“Sonofabitch!” the president said, leaning forward, his face twisted in anger.

Further enraged by the sight of blood, the North Korean officer put the barrel of his automatic between the young American’s eyes… and pulled the trigger.

The dead sailor slumped forward, facedown on the cold wet deck.

“Tell me I’m not seeing this,” the president said, unable to tear his eyes away from the screen.

“He’s going to execute all four,” General Moore said in a steady voice that sounded oddly detached.

And, as they all watched in abject horror, that is exactly what he did. Head shots, at close range.

A pin could drop.

“Turn that damn thing off,” the president said.

“Off, Mr. President?”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

An ashen-faced aide made a throat-cutting motion, and the monitors all went black at once.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” McCloskey said, propping his polished cowboy boots on an empty chair and firing up a Marlboro.

No one said a word.

“It’s a bitch, ain’t it?” the president said to no one in particular. “Four of our boys dead. The goddamn NKs in possession of one of our CIA shit-buckets chock-full of classified information. Damn it to hell. Somebody give me a good reason not to turn North Korea into a goddamn NK-Mart parking lot. China, too, if they dick around with our navy anymore. I’m serious. I’ll tell you all one thing. I’d like to know what Admiral Wainwright has to say about all this. Tony? What the hell am I going to do now?”

A palpable pall of shocked silence hung over the room.

“Tony?” the president repeated, swiveling around, searching all the faces in the room.

Finally, someone had the guts to speak up. Secretary of State Kim Case, which surprised no one.

“Mr. President?” the slim, attractive blonde said.

“Yeah, Kim, what is it?”

“Admiral Wainwright is dead, sir. He died in the terrorist attack on the Dreadnought in Tripoli last May.”

The president was very quiet for a long time before he looked up, staring at the secretary, his face a stone mask.

“I know that, Kim. What I said was, I’d like to know what he thought. And I would like to know that, I really would. But he’s dead. Isn’t he?”

“Yes, Mr. President. He is.”

A stunned silence descended.

No one said a word. What more was there to say?

Emily Young, the president’s lovely young personal secretary, could be heard sobbing quietly in dark corner of the room. Emily didn’t think she could take much more of this. She loved the old cowboy. Actually was in love with him. It killed her to see the boss like this, a wounded stag. And all of them, the press, with their goddamn knives out… and, like a mule in a hailstorm, he just had to stand there and take it.

She heard the president say, “Emily, for crissakes, will you stop bawling? What the hell is wrong with everybody?”

There was no answer.

The president stood, looked around at all the upturned faces, and said, “Well, thank you everyone. We’ll reconvene in one hour.”

After they filed out, he sat back down again, gazing absently into the middle distance, smoking his Marlboro down to a bright orange coal. He’d never felt so lost and alone in his life.

The White House Sous-Chef looked beat.

It was almost midnight on a Friday night and, for Chef Tommy Chow, it had already been a very long week. First thing Monday morning, Matt Lauer and the whole damn Today show crew had shown up early for a live broadcast and wanted breakfast. Then the lavish state dinner for the prime minister of England, the Rose Garden luncheon the First Lady held annually for the Daughters of the American Revolution, and on and on, no rest for the weary.

And now he’d gotten a last-minute call from the ranking West Wing staffer saying the president had invited a few of his closest cabinet members for an impromptu breakfast in the morning. Talk about China and North Korea, Tommy imagined. Hell, that’s all they ever talked about lately.

“Go home, Tommy,” one of his guys said. “You look exhausted. We can finish the prep by ourselves.”

“No. I insist. You guys head out. I promised the boss man I’d take care of this breakfast thing and I’m going to do it. Seriously, get the hell out of here and go home to your families, okay? I got no family. Not here in Washington anyway. Leave the graveyard shift to me. Okay?”

“You got it, boss. Have it your way,” the pastry chef said, and they all bolted for the exits.

Chow waited until the last one had left before he began prepping tomorrow’s cabinet breakfast. Huevos rancheros, the presidential favorite, home fries, frijoles refritos with melted Monterey Jack, rashers of bacon and jalapeño-flavored sausage patties, honey biscuits, and hot sauce. Tex-Mex, they called it. Hardly his idea of haute cuisine, but they didn’t care for that much upstairs anymore.

A rueful smile flitted across Chow’s face as he stirred what he privately referred to as his “secret sauce” into the president’s eggs.

The graveyard shift, he mouthed silently.

Truer words would never be spoken.

Not in this White House, anyway.