and a little troubling,” the CIA chief answered from the cheap seats at the far end of the table. “He doesn’t appear to ever have had any interest in anything African, other than a liqueur called Amarula.”
“Well, what was he saying with his eyes then?” Reynolds asked the NSC director.
“Four words, sir: ‘fire mountain’ and ‘cow curd.’”
“‘Cud. Cow cud,’” said a bony woman to the NSC director’s right.
“Cow cud? Cow curd? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Reynolds demanded.
No one answered.
Reynolds couldn’t believe this shit. “That’s it? Fire mountain. Cow curd, or cud?”
An uneasy silence followed before Vice President Andrew Percy said, “It’s possible, Mr. President, that he’s just jerking their chain.”
“Or ours,” Reynolds volleyed. Goddamn code breakers could hear The Bells of St. Mary’s in a conch shell.
The president rose to his full height. “Why didn’t we know about these sulfates until North Korea decided it was time to tell us?” Reynolds still couldn’t get over that.
“Mr. President, we did know about them,” said Debra Abrams, the White House national security adviser. She nodded at the CIA chief.
“That’s correct, Mr. President,” the director concurred. “We’ve been debriefing a North Korean defector from their U.N. mission.”
“Then why am I the last to know what he’s been telling us?”
“Verification, sir. We considered the information to be so outlandish that we thought we might be dealing with a double agent. We had to verify everything from sources in situ.”
“And have you?”
“Yes, sir. Those rockets are real.”
“And they’ll really bring on years of winter? Worldwide calamity?”
“That’s right, sir,” Abrams answered.
Reynolds groaned. He couldn’t believe he was enduring this political migraine because of sulfates. Of all the goddamn things. Hadn’t he played around with them with a kiddy chemistry set when he was nine years old? Here he’d worried for years about the North’s nuclear capabilities, and now they were threatening to bring down the planet with stuff that you could buy in toy stores and hobby shops. Like being attacked with a garden hoe, till you found out that the hoe was about to chop down the sky.
“What about a preemptive strike? Is that viable?” he asked.
“We’d lose Tokyo and Seoul immediately,” Abrams said. “The Supreme Leader, as he insists on being called, made it clear many times that the instant the North Koreans detect an attack from the U.S. or NATO, they’re unloading their silos on those two cities. And if he does that, you can presume that he’ll launch those sulfate rockets, too.”
Reynolds sat down and massaged his brow. “What about wiggle room? Do we have any?”
“We tell him that we’ll give him food aid, that we’ve always been concerned about the welfare of the North Korean people, and that—”
“The usual palaver,” Reynolds cut in. “He’s heard that before. Hell, if I had to hear that meaningless claptrap one more time, I’d push the button.” From the stares he received from around the long table, he realized that he’d better add the standard-issue disclaimer: “I’m joking. Jesus, folks, get real. What are we going to do?”
“We buy time,” Abrams said icily.
“What about giving the Dwarf a brownout, or a blackout even? Briefly shut down the plants to send him a signal that we’re serious about negotiating. Can we do that?” he asked his energy secretary.
The energy secretary nodded. “We can.”
Reynolds liked his direct and satisfying answer. “If we’re going to give the Dwarf something in the first round, give him something that feels real. We could think of it as earnest money, a way to say ‘We feel your pain.’ Domestically, we could blame it on a broken transformer, but tell him privately that it was to show our good faith.”
“The problem, Mr. President,” Abrams said, “is that Al Qaeda’s demanding a shutdown of coal-fired plants, too, and if we have a power outage of any note, they will take public credit for it. They’ll say it’s a sign of how they’re already dragging the Great Satan to his knees. They’re not going to be quiet.”
“Voters would see that as capitulating to Arab terrorists,” said Ralph Ebbing, Reynolds’s chief of staff, who was leaning against an Oval Office wall a few feet from his boss. “You cannot let that happen.”
“So no blackouts then.” Reynolds leaned back. “Okay, let’s send him a C-17 filled with food. Promise him thousands of tons more.”
“You couldn’t get a single-engine Cessna with a bushel of wheat to Pyongyang without some aviation geek somewhere Tweeting about it. Sending aid to North Korea? Right before the