Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (11 page)

           
“Major,” the woman replied.
"Major Ivana Vasilyev, deputy chief of the general’s staff.” She shifted
over to the general’s seat, then produced another bottle of Jim Beam and a
glass. "May I pour you something more to drink?”

           
"No. But you may help yourself.
I assume you are officially off duty now.”

 
          
"I
am never really off-duty, but the colonel-general has dismissed me for the
night.” Instead, she put the bottle and the glass away, then turned to face
him. "Is there anything else I can offer you, Mr. Kazakov?” Pavel let his
eyes roam across her body, and she reciprocated. Vasilyev smiled invitingly.
"Anything at all?”

 
          
Kazakov
chuckled, shaking his head. "The old bastard wants something from me,
doesn’t he, Major?”

 
          
Vasilyev
unbuttoned her tunic, revealing the swell of round, firm breasts beneath her
white uniform blouse. "My orders were to escort you home and see to it
that any wishes you have are taken care of immediately, Mr. Kazakov,” she said.
She removed her neck tab and unbuttoned her blouse, and Kazakov noticed she
wore a very unmilitary sheer black lace brassiere. “The general is interested
in your ideas and suggestions, and he has ordered me to act as his liaison. I
have been ordered to provide you with anything you wish—data, information,
resources, assistance—anything;’ She knelt before him on the rich blue
carpeting, reached out to him, and began to stroke him through his pants. “If
he wants something specific from you, he has not told me what it is.”

 
          
“So
he orders you to undress before a strange man in his car, and you do it without
question?”

 
          
“This
was my idea, Mr. Kazakov,” she said, with a mischievous smile. ‘The general
gives me a great deal of latitude in how I might carry out his orders.”

 
          
Kazakov
smiled, reached to her, and expertly removed the front clasp from her brassiere
with one hand. “I see,” he said.

 
          
She
smiled in return, closed her eyes as his hands explored her breasts, and then
said as she reached for his zipper, “I consider this one of the perquisites of
my duties.”

The White House Oval Office,
Washington
,
D.C.

The next morning

 
          
“Mr.
President, I know you meant to shake things up in
Washington
—but I’m afraid this bombshell is surely
going to explode in your face when it gets out.”

 
          
President
Thomas Thom stopped typing into his computer and swiveled around to face his
newly ratified Secretary of Defense, Robert G. Goff, who had marched into the
Oval Office almost at a trot. Along with Goff was the Secretary of State,
Edward F. Kercheval; the Vice President, Lester R. Busick, and Douglas R.
Morgan, the Director of Central Intelligence. “Read the final draft of the
executive order, did you, Bob?”

 
          
Goff
held up his copy of the document in question as if it were covered in blood.
“Read it? I’ve done nothing else but go over it for the past eighteen hours.
I’ve been up all night, and I’ve kept most of my staff up all night, too,
trying to find out if this is legal, feasible, or even
right.
This is
completely astounding, Thomas.”

           
Robert Goff was known throughout
Washington
as a straight-talking, no-nonsense man. A
retired U.S. Army veteran, three-term congressman from Arizona, and
acknowledged military expert, at age fifty-one Goff was one of the new lions in
Washington, not afraid to stir things up. But the President’s plan made even
him gape in astonishment. Next to Goff was the head of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Air Force General Richard W. Venti. Tall, thin, and young-looking for a
four-star general, Venti was a veteran fighter pilot and the former commander
of U.S. Air Forces in
Europe
before being appointed to the Joint Chiefs
of Staff Unlike Goff, Venti preferred to keep his emotions and his thoughts to
himself.

 
          
Noticeably
absent from the meeting was the President’s Special Advisor on National
Security Affairs, known as the National Security Advisor—because President
Thomas N. Thorn hadn’t appointed one. It was part of a major shakeup in the
Executive Branch, a drastic downsizing that was designed to make Cabinet
officials more responsive and responsible, both to the public and to the
President. So far in the new Thom administration, over three hundred White
House and executive branch personnel slots had been eliminated simply because
the President and his staff had refused to fill them. The functions of several
White House offices, such as Drug Control Policy, Management and Budget, and
several political liaison offices, would be reassigned to other departments or
simply eliminated.

 
          
“I
know we talked about what we might do to change things in the Department of
Defense and in the entire government,” Goff went on excitedly, “but...
this?
You can’t possibly seriously intend to actually implement any of this.”

 
          
“I
am going to do all of it, and I’m going to finish it by the end of this year,”
the President said with a confident smile.

 
          
“Changing
priorities as far as peacekeeping deployments— I don’t think you’ll get too
much opposition,” Goff said. “Another few rounds of base realignments, with no
closures—I think that will sell, too.” He motioned to the draft speech and the
President’s staff’s attached comments. “But this ..

           
“Bob, remember when we first talked
about the possibility of doing this?” Thom asked, his ever-present smile warm
with the memories. Robert Goff had been one of Jeffersonian Party candidate
Thomas Thom’s earliest and strongest supporters, giving up his seat in Congress
during the campaign to help Thom. They had been close friends ever since.

 
          
“Of
course I remember,” Goff said, smiling in spite of himself. Thomas Thom had
this irritating way of disarming almost any agitated situation or person. “But
we were young and stupid and naive as hell back then.”

 
          
“It
was less than a year ago, funny man,” Thom said with a smile. “We were in
Abilene
,
Texas
, at one of the first Jeffersonian Party rallies. It was cold, and I
think it had snowed the night before. You and three of your volunteers had to
stay in the same room at the Holiday Inn because we barely had enough money to
keep going for another month; Amelia and I had three of the kids licking stamps
for the mailers while they were watching cartoons. We didn’t even place in the
Iowa
caucuses, and we barely qualified for the
ballot in the
New Hampshire
primary, so we decided to work on the Super Tuesday states. You hoped
that a hundred folks would show. Our podium at the open house at the Army post
was a real honest-to-goodness soapbox—”

 
          
“A
bunch of cases of laundry detergent from the mess hall, covered over with a
tablecloth.”

 
          
Thom
nodded. “But two thousand folks showed up, and we had to stand on top of a bus
and use one of those big loudspeakers they use on firing ranges to make ourselves
heard.”

           
“I remember, Thomas,” Goff said
“That was the beginning. The turning point. What a day. We ended up winning
New Hampshire
without hardly setting foot in the state.”

           
“But remember w hen we took that
tour of the base, and we Saw all those hundreds of Ml Abrams tanks lined up in
the marshaling area?” Thom went on. “Rows and rows and rows of them, as far as
you could see, like furrows in a freshly plowed field. And they told us that
none
of those tanks had ever fired a shot in anger. They had second- and
third-generation tanks there that had
never even left the base
except
for training exercises. We saw artillery pieces, armored personnel carriers, mobile
bridges, tents, vans, support vehicles, Humvees, rocket launchers, even radar
systems and air defense missile batteries—all had not been used since Desert
Storm, if they had ever been used at all.”

 
          
“I
know, Thomas,” Goff said. “But we’ve been at peace since Desert Storm. It
doesn’t mean they won’t
ever
be used...

 
          
“We
talked about what an incredible waste of resources it all represented,” Thom
went on. “Unemployment in the
United States
is at an all-time low and has been for
years. Companies are begging for qualified, trainable workers. Yet we are
spending billions of dollars on weapon systems that may never be used in
combat, weapons that were designed to fight
yesterday's
wars. Someone
has to operate that equipment, train others to use it, maintain it, train the
maintainers, and someone has to keep track of all the stuff they need to operate
and maintain it. It was a huge infrastructure, a massive investment in manpower
and resources, and for what? What purpose did it serve? We said it was
senseless, and we wondered what we could do about it. Well, this is what we’re
going to do about it.” The President looked at General Venti. “What are your
final thoughts, General?”

 
          
Venti
thought about his response for a moment, then: “We can argue the merits of the
numbers, sir,” he replied. ‘The Army spends five point three billion dollars a
year on readiness and training for weapon systems that have never been used in
war. The Navy spends ten billion dollars a year manning, equipping, and
maintaining a fleet of nuclear attack submarines that have never fired a shot
in combat. We spend another twenty billion dollars maintaining a nuclear
deterrence force, and we hope to God we never have to use
it,
despite
the threat from
China
and possibly
Russia
.”

 
          
“It’s
the emotional factor that’ll be hard to counter, Mr. President,” Goff
interjected. “There are still lots of World War
Two
,
Korea
, and
Vietnam
vets out there who will see this plan as a
betrayal of trust. Your political opponents will use that. Several previous
administrations made such drastic budget cuts that what you are about to do is
inevitable, but you will still be blamed for it.

 
          
“There
is still a great threat out there, Mr. President,” Goff went on. “
China
has already attacked American territory
with nuclear weapons, and we think they will again. Although every prediction
model and every analyst thinks it’s unlikely, former empires such as
Japan
,
Germany
, and
Russia
could rise up and threaten American
interests. Nonaligned, theocratic, and rogue nations could threaten American
interests at any time with attacks ranging from simple kidnappings to
cyberforce to nuclear weapons. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
has increased tenfold since the breakup of the
Soviet Union
.”

 
          
“I
want to hear from the general. Bob,” the President said. He nodded, urging him
to speak. Goff looked frustrated and a bit angry, but held his comments.

 
          
“Frankly,
sir, I think it’s about time we start thinking about Fighting future wars on
our
terms.” the Air Force general said. “In a time of relative peace, this is the
time to prepare for twenty-first- and even twenty-second century wars. We must
do away with the old equipment, the old tactics, and the old fears and
prejudices.

 
          
“This
nation also somehow got sidetracked in its thinking about the role of the
military,” Venti concluded. “The military has always been a place to send kids
that lacked discipline, but in more recent years the military has become a sort
of extension of the welfare state. Fighting and possibly dying for your country
took a back seat to learning a trade, getting an education. and providing
someplace cool to go after high school. We are spending millions of dollars a
year to recruit kids to join, but they’re joining for all the wrong reasons.
The problem is not that we lack well-qualified recruits—the problem is, the
military became too big, too bloated. We had a military looking for a reason
for existence. We were dreaming up missions for the military that had little to
do with national security and everything to do with political posturing. I
think it’s time we stop that.”