The Threat (32 page)

He cleared his throat, fighting to keep his tone neutral. “What ‘people' is that, sir?”

“Your military folks. The top brass. Stahl, Bornheiter, Knight, those shirts. The CNO. The retired four-stars, like Skip Froelinghausen. What's your call, Dan? Any way I could turn them around?”

A fallen log lay across the snowy trail, powdery rot spilling out like dirty cinnamon from its hollow core. It had to have just come down; he couldn't imagine the detail letting the president run a trail they hadn't swept. McKoy waved, and two of the earpiece boys sprinted ahead. The president took a breather, arms akimbo, as they looked it over, then kicked it out of the way.

He couldn't believe this. De Bari knew his name. Had to know he was Blair Titus's husband. He was either totally oblivious, or totally shameless. Could he really believe a few flattering words could make him a Buddy de Bob again?

They eased back into a slow pace. “Ah, I couldn't tell you that, sir.”

“We've got to cut back. Tokyo's hammering Detroit. We're losing textiles and computers to the Chinese. And Social Security, tax reform, we can't let those go another year. Who've we got left to fight anyway?”

Dan said, still incredulous, “Sir, I'm way too far down the chop chain to give you any insight on that.”

“And you wouldn't tell me if you knew.” De Bari hit him, a fairly painful jab to the shoulder.

He didn't like this man. He grated out, trying to keep his timbre short of actively savage, “I would if I could, Mr. President.”

“Then give it a shot.”

Dan tried to focus. McKoy and the other detail guys were eyeballing the passing woods. “Well, my opinion—”

“That's what I want.”

“Shit flows downhill. But so does everything else.”

“Like what?” De Bari was riveted. Again, as if his total attention were on Dan. Once it had been mesmerizing. Now it nauseated him. What had Congressman Freck said about the guy—that he'd never known a human being De Bari really cared about.

“Uh, I don't know how it is dealing with other organizations. But with the Pentagon, whatever the guys at the top think, that flows downhill too. Everybody takes his cue from them.”

“I figured it was the conscientious-objector thing.”

“That's just a rag to smear you with,” Dan told him. “The admirals, the generals, used to at least say it didn't matter to them which party had power. Now they don't even bother to pretend.” He almost added that was the most ominous trend he'd seen in his years in the service, but didn't. Spilling his guts to De Bari wasn't going to change anything. And why should
he
even try to help him?

The snow was slushy down here out of the wind. Water stood in depressions as they came down off the saddle, making them weave among shining puddles of sky. De Bari panted, “I'm going to keep cutting. If the country wanted to keep a big military, they'd have elected the other guy.”

“They don't like backing down around the world, sir. Leaving places we've been for years.”

De Bari chuffed along frowning. “They think I'm retreating.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Know how I see it?”

“No, Mr. President.”

“We went into those places to keep the Soviets out. Right? Now they're gone. You wanted me to put troops into Bosnia. But it just ain't our fight. We're not all-powerful anymore. Is it better to start moving back, on our own? Or wait till somebody decides to kick us out?”

Dan saw what he was getting at. Like shortening a defensive perimeter. But you could argue just as well that if you had to fight, it was better to do it as far from the homeland as you could. Or that if you abandoned one ally, why should the others trust you? And you could say Bosnia wasn't America's business … like Czechoslovakia hadn't been Britain's business in 1938.

It was like looking into a hall of mirrors, where you couldn't see which was a wise choice and which a foolish overstepping. Maybe the historians could, in a hundred years. Or maybe not even then.

“See what I'm sayin'?”

“I do. But I don't know if you're right.”

For answer he got a bark of laughter, then wheezing as De Bari made up lost air. “So there's nothing I can do to get them on my side.”

“They're never going to
like
you, Mr. President. To them, you're the enemy.” He ran a few paces, then added recklessly, “So I guess—you've just got to decide where you want to go, and lead the way.”

De Bari gave him an ironic smile. “You find out fast, in this job, you can only lead people where they already want to go.”

“Then get out front, and see if they follow you.”

De Bari didn't answer. He seemed to be laboring to keep up even this slow pace. Dan shook his head as if flinging flies off. Despite everything, he felt just a little sorry for the guy. He was taking so much flak. The insults and innuendoes, the smears and outright contempt.

But De Bari was just so false. All the bonhomie, the sham compassion he oozed on television with some poor bastard who'd lost his house in a tornado,
everything about him
was a lie … even the way he
made
you like him. It was like fucking a whore. As soon as it was over you hated yourself. Even the policies Dan had once liked he saw now as just what made the guy's donors—including, no doubt, Tallinger and the Chinese—happy.

Bad Bob was no different from any other politician. Out for themselves and what they could get away with. And Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt? All just shyster politicians, canonized by a people so starved for heroes they closed their eyes to the fact they had none.

“Aw, shit. Here it comes.”

Dan saw it. The trail branched, one fork leading down into the valley, the other around the mountain again, back toward the hilltop. The sky was clouding, taking on the ominous leaden hue that presaged more snow. The lead runners glanced back, gauging which direction they'd take. Agent McKoy looked at De Bari, then waved: Go left. The long way around, Dan figured. That left two protective agents, Dan, and the president. They shuffled slowly up to the fork.

But instead of making the downhill turn, De Bari shambled to a halt. “I better get back,” he grunted. He bent for a few seconds, hands on knees, coughing. Then straightened, turned right, and started to walk, swinging his arms and wheezing as if he'd run a marathon. Dan figured all told, they'd gone half a mile.

Right then, almost from nowhere, Dan knew he could kill him.

They were alone on the trail. All he had to do was grab a fallen limb and brain the lying, adulterous son of a bitch. BS Bob, as the opposition called him, their commentators hammering it over and over into their programmable listeners. Or go for the pistol in the satchel. Getting even—wouldn't that be worth dying for?

He stood rooted, sick and trembling.

De Bari turned his head, as if he could sense his thoughts. Their eyes met. Then the president looked away, and resumed the climb.

Dan hiked after him, feeling sweat break all over his body. Feeling as if he could not stand one more hour of breathing. Why didn't anyone notice he was losing his grip, running off the rails, going just plain bughouse? He tried looking away. Lagging back. Thinking about how the shadowing sun embossed every bole and twig with cold pewter light.

Finally the shakes eased. He took a deep breath of cold air. Pulled it in slowly, so he could taste it around his tongue. Mint. Pine. Melting snow. Then let it out. Another. That was better.

He didn't really want to kill the man climbing laboriously ahead of him, panting, his once-white Adidas coated and slipping in the mud.

But he couldn't take much more of this either.

18

ASMARA, ERITREA

The familiar parching heat, glaring sun, pale dust of the Middle East. He stood watching the huge white-and-blue aircraft float down toward a runway he'd paced for hours that morning, inspecting for potholes, rocks, foreign objects, or anything suspicious.

The wheels touched, and kissed up smoke. And the chest-shaking roar of the immense engines reversing into braking thrust was met by an even greater thunder from hundreds of thousands of throats, a surging sea that broke and recoiled, walled from the heat-shimmering tarmac by lines of troops and armor, weapons pointed at the hungry and desperate.

As desperate, in a different way, as the De Bari administration, now trapped in a firestorm of criticism. The major indexes had hit new lows. A scandal was brewing in the Department of Education. Even the vice president was speaking out against Bob De Bari now, whose poll numbers had dropped into the thirties.

Dan had followed it on the BBC, and what little he'd heard through staff channels. But he couldn't say he did so with any interest. It felt distant, or
he
felt distant. He really couldn't say he cared.

*   *   *

Colonel Gunning had put him on the advance party for Adamant Black. “Adamant” was the code word for a presidential foreign visit. Since
Air Force One
would be taking off in less than a month, that meant he was playing catch-up from the start.

In his first meeting with the Air Mobility Command at Andrews, they'd told him a presidential visit was the equivalent of a medium-sized military intervention. The numbers were staggering: a thousand people, 180 airlift and aerial refueling missions, maintenance support teams, medical evacuation units. Actually it
was
a military operation, run by the Defense Department according to an order that included all the concepts of operations, logistics, command and signal sections, and minute-by-minute schedules he was familiar with from other operations. It would have struck someone who hadn't operated in a joint planning environment as insanely complex, anally specific, and neurotically over detailed, down to the thickness of the railings on the reviewing stands, ground loading for the helicopter dome shelters, and specs for the plugs on the microphones. But he'd plunged in, sleeping on the cot in the PEOC, pulling work over him like a sheltering blanket.

Along with the two 747s,
Air Force One
and
Two,
Adamant Black included three C-5 Galaxy heavy lift air transports carrying two presidential limousines, the Roadrunners, the command vans, a specially equipped ambulance, and hordes of other vehicles for staff and support. One airlifter carried
Marine One
and its escort aircraft. There was medical staff. Press corps. Comm staff. Valets, negotiators, advisers, stewards, area specialists, hairdressers … nearly two hundred security people, both uniformed and plainclothes. “Blacktop” alone, the Secret Service foreign mission personnel, consisted of fifty agents and four vans of equipment.

The advance party left at D minus six. Dan kept in constant phone contact with Charlie Ringalls. The little westerner was the go-to guy on presidential travel, though Dan had to consult with Holt and the first lady's people too, as she was coming along.

The chief of staff sounded peremptory and harried these days, no doubt because of the coverage a knot of demonstrators was getting. They'd camped out in front of the White House, demanding action on jobs. Their numbers were growing. So was concern about the president's polls. Holt kept emphasizing that the press secretary would call the shots on this tour. He kept mentioning “the Moment,” which Dan had at first taken as shorthand for the now-familiar De Bari photo op. But when the press secretary's people used the phrase, it sounded mystical, an iconic encapsulation in one unforgettable image of what the trip was about. When he asked them what the trip actually
was
about, one guy said that was it: the Moment.

At which point he gave up. This was just another bubble from Robert De Bari's content-free shipwreck of a presidency. He took that futility or reassurance out with him onto the dusty roads of drought-ridden East Africa, riding in rented Land Rovers with the press and protective detail through village after village. These people had
real
problems. He only wished he had even a little power, a little money. Even the smallest bit of what was being wasted …

*   *   *

And here he was, “Mustang,” arms lifted triumphantly heavenward as he posed atop the exit stair. De Bari descended to embrace President Afwerki. Then, ushered ahead, he preceded his host between ranks of troops at present arms. (Dan had personally inspected each rifle to make sure none was loaded.) The crowd-roar grew as they ducked into a limo with the Stars and Stripes and the green, red, and blue Eritrean banner.

Pushing through local officials, spitting windblown grit, Dan finally got to the command van. The door cracked to his hammering. Someone groaned; it was already over seating capacity with perspiring, crumpled USIA and USAID people, Nosler, and the press secretary. He wedged himself in with a sense of rejoining civilization.

He caught up to Gunning, who was carrying the football, in front of the Governor's Palace. The Raj-era building was surrounded by palms and gardens. The colonel nodded as if he'd seen him yesterday, and asked for the plans for the next stop. Dan looked around for shade, and punched the schedule up on his new personal digital assistant.

“Four countries in eight days, then Jerusalem,” the senior aide said in disgust. “And what countries. Who signed him up for these shitholes?”

“I get marching orders from Wrinkles, but I don't know who gives them to him. The press secretary? Holt?”

“Yeah, sounds like a Tony Pony. It's a good time to get Bob out of the country, though. People are talking impeachment, and not just Freck's gang. Since Louisville—”

“What about Louisville? Nobody got hurt.”

“I figure it's not for Louisville, it's for what hasn't happened since Louisville. And what's not happening on the stock market. And what's not happening, period.”