The War Cloud (3 page)

“You ever been wounded while serving your country?” Kozlowski asked her. “That’s what it means.”

“I won’t lose it.” She put on her gold earrings and spoke to him from the closet mirror. “It’s not like it’s actually worth anything.”

No, thought Kozlowski, just a couple of lives. But it was no use arguing with Sherry. She was 27 and wouldn’t understand, he concluded as he watched her grab her Gucci soft leather briefcase and walk out the door, off to more important things like personal advancement.

Kozlowski walked over to the open closet and looked at his blue uniform where the missing medal belonged. Sherry was right. It was just clothing, bland at that, with some cheap ribbons and medals.

Cheap like his bosses. Cheap like the promises they made and the company they kept.

Everything he grew up to believe in—the armed forces, the presidency, even the United States—no longer seemed mythic, but quaint and kindergarten. There were no rules anymore. The current occupant of the White House was yet another empty suit, and he wondered if America was even capable of producing a leader worth following into battle anymore.

He unbuckled the holster sitting on the closet shelf and removed his sidearm, a.38 standard-issue automatic pistol. He felt its weight in his hand.

Almost ten years of his life had passed in two overseas wars, he realized. Just like that. What could I have been by now? A general like Brad Marshall? Certainly a father if Mary hadn’t left him. They could have had three or four kids by now. He could be sledding or having snowball fights this morning instead of sitting here, feeling old, used-up, worthless.

He pointed the gun to his head and put his finger on the trigger.

U
.S. President Peter Rhinehart paced beneath George Washington on the wall of the Oval Office. He had fifteen minutes before his final meeting with Deborah Sachs, and he still needed to work on his delivery of his State of the Union address.

“And let us not live in the past,” he recited, stressing the word “past” like it was bad. “But look forward to the future.”

Meaning his own political future, he thought, when the ivory desk phone rang. The LED display flashed:
Chairman, JCS. Line Secure. Top Secret
. It was General Robert Sherman, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling from the Pentagon.

Annoyed, Rhinehart picked up. “What is it, Bob?”

“Mr. President, we have a situation.”

Rhinehart’s morning intelligence briefing had spelled out a number of situations, so he could only guess.

“The SS-20?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m about to address the American people, dammit, and our friend General Marshall is breathing down my neck in the polls,” the President huffed. “I don’t have time for any false—”

“Mr. President, NEST teams have confirmed there is a stolen Soviet SS-20 nuclear warhead somewhere in Washington. Now the Russians say they have evidence that the Chinese planted it, and that it is set to detonate in five minutes.”

“Five minutes?” Rhinehart frowned. “What do the Chinese have to say?”

“The Chinese say that if anybody’s planted a nuke in Washington, it’s the Russians.”

“Goddammit,” groaned Rhinehart. “Every major elected official in America has got to be in Washington. How imminent is the threat?”

As if on cue, a military aide burst through the door carrying a black briefcase — the “football” containing nuclear authorization codes. Rhinehart stared at the attaché, speechless.

“I’ll brief you after you’re secure in the bunker,” Sherman pleaded with him on the phone. “Mr. President, we have no time.”

Rhinehart hung up and walked out of the Oval Office, the football and military aide close behind. He brushed past the White House military operator at the switchboard on the way out.

“The vice president just arrived,” the operator reported.

“Tell him he’s leaving,” Rhinehart replied. “Get my chopper to airlift himndrews.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Call Jack and Stan and have them meet me downstairs,” the President continued. “Alert conference.”

“Situation Room?”

“No. The bunker.”

The military operator hit a button on his communications console, sounding an alarm.

T
he Westchester School in Bedford, New York, was a public charter school, one of America’s finest. Sachs sent Jennifer here because she didn’t want to compromise herself as a champion of public education by enrolling her daughter in a private school. But she couldn’t find an acceptable public school in Washington. So Aunt Dina and the Westchester Middle School seemed to be the answer, even if Jennifer called all public schools, local or charter, “government schools.” Only now, Sachs wondered if she had sacrificed her relationship with her daughter on the altar of her idealism.

The verdict was waiting for inside. A sullen Jennifer, arms folded across her chest, sat in the office of Principal Mel Boyle. The school clock said 11:44, a few minutes faster than her own watch, so Sachs was running eight minutes late. Eight minutes of hell from the look on Jennifer’s face.

“So why aren’t you in Washington, putting other children first?” Jennifer asked without looking up.

“Shhh,” Sachs replied with a smile. “Mom’s playing hooky.”

Principal Melanie Boyle, a Barbie blonde in slacks and heels, walked in. “Nice to see you again, Madame Secretary.”

“Principal Boyle,” Sachs said, greeting her.

“Doctor Boyle,” the principal corrected her. “Everybody’s gathering in the gymnasium. We so appreciate your visit, although I wish it were under better circumstances.”

Sachs didn’t know if Boyle meant her impending job execution or if she was referring to Jennifer. “Is there a problem?”

Boyle slid a file across her desk. Sachs could see the big fat “F” circled in red. “This is Jennifer’s U.S. Constitution final,” Boyle explained. “Not only could she not name all of the current members of the president’s Cabinet, she couldn’t even name one. Not even the Secretary of Education.”

Boyle raised a perfectly waxed eyebrow.

Sachs studied the exam for a minute and then put it down.

“Well, I’d probably miss that one, too, if the answer wasn’t me,” she said. “But you know all the rest, Jennifer. What’s going on?”

“Globalization,” Jennifer said with all seriousness. “The U.S. Constitution is obsolete. To quote Socrates, I’m not a New Yorker or an American, but a citizen of the world.”

If Principal Boyle wasn’t just as serious as Jennifer, Sachs would have burst out laughing. But she kept a straight face and addressed her daughter. “Maybe, darling. But most of the world’s democracies have constitutions based on oursunless you want to live in a police state, and condemn the rest of humanity to the same fate, you’d better learn which way is up.”

“What planet are you from, Mom?” Jennifer made a dramatic, sweeping gesture with her hand, the back of which still bore an admission stamp from some event. “Look around you. Have you seen this government school? This IS a police state. My Bill of Rights didn’t keep the government from sucking in your tax dollars, nor Ms. Boyle from opening my private locker and going through my diary, or kicking me out of the school dance last Friday.”

“School dance?” Sachs repeated, looking at Jennifer. “You never told me about a dance. Did you go with—”

“She was wearing thong underwear,” Boyle declared, cutting her off. “Highly visible underwear, I might add.”

Sachs stared at her 13-year-old daughter, trying to process this ambush of zingers from Boyle. “You were wearing a thong?”

“Well, duh.” Jennifer was non-apologetic. “Everybody at the dance could see my thong after Ms. Vice Squad here lifted up my skirt.”

Sachs stared at Boyle. “You looked under my daughter’s skirt?”

“Whatever,” said Jennifer. “Can we get going already?”

“We should move along,” Boyle helpfully agreed, clearly looking to delay the inevitable, ugly parent-teacher conference with Sachs. “Everybody’s in the gymnasium.”

Sachs looked at both of them, not sure whom she was more furious at. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s not keep them waiting. I’ll deal with you later, ladies. Both of you.”

P
resident Rhinehart and his military attaché hurried down a long sub-basement corridor beneath the East Wing. At the end of the corridor stood a Marine guarding a steel door. Rhinehart slid a security card through an electronic key slot next to the door. The red light turned off. A green light flashed on. There was a beep and a loud click. The vault opened.

Inside the bunker, the White House Chief of Staff, National Security Adviser and assorted military aides were arguing around the conference table. They rose in unison when the president entered and looked around.

Rhinehart said, “Where’s Bald Eagle?”

“The Central Locator said all eighteen designated presidential successors were due in town for the speech,” said Stan Black, his Chief of Staff. “So I sent the Secretary of Defense to a base inspection in California.”

As he spoke, the Marine stepped inside and closed the vault door behind him with a definitive thud, sealing them all inside.

“Lucky for him,” Rhinehart mumbled.

Jack Natori, his National Security Adviser, said, “We’ve got the Pentagon on speaker, Mr. President.”

Rhinehart said, “What the hell is going on, Bob?”

General Sherman’s voice boomed on speaker. “NEST teams picked up trace uranium in the Metro railyards where a security guard was found de this morning by D.C. police,” Sherman said. “It matches the SS-20 core profile. We think the SS-20 or, more likely, its warhead, came into Baltimore on a freighter and then was offloaded to the train to D.C.”

“Where is it now?”

“God knows. Probably in some van cruising the streets as we try to get a lock on its location.”

Rhinehart took a breath. This was real. “What else are we doing about it, Bob?”

“Everything, including preparing for a detonation,” Sherman said. “Army and Air Force choppers at the Pentagon heliport are airlifting 44 selected personnel. The civilians will go to Mount Weather to establish a new government. The military officers are heading to Raven Rock to conduct the war.”

“That’ll take thirty minutes,” Rhinehart said. “I thought we only had five.”

Natori checked his watch. “Four minutes now.”

Rhinehart said, “The vice president is taking my chopper to Andrews right now.”

Natori shook his head. “He’ll barely get off the ground before we disappear in a mushroom cloud.”

The military attaché then placed the football on the table, dialed the combination and removed a binder–Federal Emergency Plan D.

Rhinehart stared at it for a long, hard moment. He forgot what the D actually stood for, but it always made him think of “Doomsday.” He had reached this point in emergency drills only twice before as president. As seriously as he had taken the drills, neither experience had prepared him for what he was feeling now.

The State of the Union is shit,
he thought. It wasn’t him anymore, nor his administration, nor the coming election, nor even his wife and children. It was about America and her survival—her military, government and economy. Her future was in peril right now, and if this was his last act as president, he would do anything necessary to secure the fate of the free world.

“Guess we should call FEMA and go through the presidential succession bullshit,” he finally said. “Which button am I supposed to push?”

A fresh-faced Army colonel showed him on a console. “This one, Mr. President.”

S
achs could hear the noise of the gymnasium from a distance as she walked with Jennifer down the long, dim hallway. It did feel like a prison, dammit. Jennifer quickened her pace so that Sachs had to catch up with her. Boyle fell a few, safe steps behind.

“So you gonna kick Doctor Boyle’s ass?” Jennifer asked her.

“Later,” Sachs said. “But it’s your ass that started all this.”

Jennifer seemed even more sullen. “So that’s why you came?”

“Of course not,” Sachs said. “You think I’d miss a chance to—”

“Give a speech?”

“See my daughter.” said nothing. Their footsteps echoed loudly down the empty corridor. Judge Jennifer had found her mother guilty and would condemn her for her sins for the rest of her life.

Sachs tried again. “So how’s Aunt Dina treating you?”

“She took off for the Bahamas with her French racing boyfriend,” Jennifer said. “I’m alone at the house with old Carla her housekeeper.”

“What?” Sachs said, feeling she was arriving just in time to save her daughter.

“Dad was much cooler,” Jennifer said. “You sure she’s his sister?”

Sachs said, “Well, you won’t have to stay with her much longer.”

“I heard. You’re getting canned. Hope that doesn’t mean I have to put up with The Wuss.”

The Wuss was Raleigh Westcott, a man Sachs briefly dated after her husband and Jennifer’s father Richard had died in the 9/11 attacks. All Sachs could say was, “You know they don’t make them like your Daddy.”

“Well, I’m not waiting for Superman anymore,” Jennifer said. “Why can’t you hook up with someone like Brad Marshall?”

Brad Marshall? thought Sachs. Where did that come from? Sachs knew Marshall, like most Americans did, from TV. The general’s six-foot-four-inch frame, short blond hair, blue eyes and telegenic face generated trust and fan mail. His cool, reassuring voice instilled confidence. He was the legend who personally destroyed four of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in a renegade attempt to assassinate the Iraqi leader. He was the only man on earth the President of the United States feared to face in the coming elections.

Sachs said, “You mean the Great American Pretender?”