turning and turning. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned to see his President, who motioned him to the circular staircase to the upper level. Again they chased two Air Force communicators off their seats.
“Thinking over the newest SORGE?”
“Yep.” EAGLE nodded.
“Any ideas?”
The head moved in a different plane now. “No. Sorry, Jack, but it just isn’t there. Maybe you need a new SecState.”
Ryan grunted. “No, just different enemies. The only thing I see is to tell them we know what they’re up to, and that they’d better stop.”
“And when they tell us to shove it up our collective ass, then what?”
“You know what we need right now?” SWORDSMAN asked.
“Oh, yeah, a couple hundred Minuteman or Trident missiles would work just fine to show them the light. Unfortunately ...”
“Unfortunately, we did away with them to make the world a safer place. Oops,” Ryan concluded.
“Well, we have the bombs and the aircraft to deliver them, and—”
“No!” Ryan hissed. “No, God damn it, I will not initiate a nuclear war in order to stop a conventional one. How many people do you want me to kill?”
“Easy, Jack. It’s my job to present options, remember? Not to advocate them—not that one anyway.” He paused. “What did you think of Auschwitz?”
“It’s the stuff of nightmares—wait a minute, your parents, right?”
“My father—Belzec in his case, and he lucked out and survived.”
“Does he talk about it?”
“Never. Not a single word, even to his rabbi. Maybe a pshrink. He went to one for a few years, but I never knew what for.”
“I can’t let anything like that happen again. To stop that—yeah, to stop that,” Ryan speculated aloud, “yeah, I might drop a B-83.”
“You know the lingo?”
“A little. I got briefed in a long time ago, the names for the hardware stuck in my mind. Funny thing, I’ve never had nightmares about that. Well, I’ve never read into the SIOP—Single Integrated Operation Plan, the cookbook for ending the world. I think I’d eat a gun before I did that.”
“A whole lot of presidents had to think those things over,” Adler pointed out.
“Before my time, Scott, and they never expected them to happen anyway. They all figured they’d smart their way through it. ’Til Bob Fowler came along and damned near stumbled into calling in the codes. That was some wild Sunday night,” Ryan said, remembering.
“Yeah, I know the story. You kept your head screwed on straight. Not many others did.”
“Yeah. And look where it got me,” POTUS observed with a grim chuckle. He looked out a window. They were over land now, probably Labrador, lots of green and lakes, and few straight lines to show the hand of man on the land. “What do we do, Scott?”
“We try to warn them off. They’ll do things we can see with satellites, and then we can call them on it. Our last play will be to tell them that Russia is an American ally now, and messing with Ivan means messing with Uncle Sam. If that doesn’t stop them, nothing else will.”
“Offer some danegeld to buy them off?” the President wondered.
“A waste of time. I don’t think it would work, but I’d be for-damned sure they’d see it as a sign of weakness and be encouraged by it. No, they respect strength, and we have to show them that. Then they’ll react one way or another.”
“They’re going to go,” Jack thought.
“Coin toss. Hope it comes up tails, buddy.”
“Yeah.” Ryan checked his watch. “Early morning in Beijing.”
“They’ll be waking up and heading in for work,” Adler agreed. “What exactly can you tell me about this SORGE source?”
“Mary Pat hasn’t told me much, probably best that way. One of the things I learned at Langley. You can know too much sometimes. Better not to know their faces, and especially their names.”
“In case something bad happens?”
“When it does, it’s pretty bad. Don’t want to think what these people would do. Their version of the Miranda warning is, ‘You can scream all you want. We don’t mind.’ ”
“Funny,” SecState thought.
“Actually it’s not all that effective as an interrogation technique. They end up telling you exactly what you want to hear, and you end up dictating it to them instead of getting what they really know.”
“What about the appeals process?” Scott asked, with a yawn. Finally, belatedly, he was getting sleepy.
“In China? That’s when the shooter asks if you prefer the left ear or the right ear.” Ryan stopped himself. Why was he making bad jokes on this subject?
The busy place in