Authors: Eric Harry
“Who's he in there with?” Lambert asked the President's appointments secretary.
“White House counsel,” she said, eyeing Lambert as if that information held particular import for him.
“I need to speak to him.”
“He asked not to be interrupted.” She opened up the thick appointments book. “I'll see if I can get you in at aroundâ”
“Now.” Lambert looked at the woman, always one of the most powerful figures in the White House. “I need to see him now.”
She picked up the phone and said, “Mr. President, Mr. Lambert is here to see you.” After a moment, she said, with an icy expression, “You may go right in.”
The President opened the door before Lambert got to it. “Greg,” he said, placing his hands on Lambert's shoulders. They
stood there like that for a moment in the doorway, the President much too close for Lambert to feel comfortable. “I cannot tell you how deeply grieved Margaret and I are about your loss. Jane was a special woman, special to us all. We will really miss her.”
Every word, every single word, that the President spoke struck Lambert in a way the President had not intended. He wanted no one to speak of Jane. Only
he
knew her. Only
he
felt her passing. Everyone else was simply an intruder in his private life.
Lambert stepped out of the President's grasp and walked into his office. “I've come here to tell you that I am resigning as national security adviser.” His back was to Livingston, and the President could not get a read on his face.
Seated at the opposite side of a conference table taking Greg in with quiet interest was the President's lawyer, his pen poised but motionless over the yellow pad as he watched the scene.
“I can't do it,” Lambert said. The words were easy. They took no effort. He needed sleep, he realized. He felt that if only he could close his eyes he could sleep for days.
“Greg, is it”âLivingston looked at his lawyer, who stared back at him with a face registering intense concernâ“is it for political reasons?”
“No!” Lambert blurted out, and out of the corner of his eye Livingston saw his lawyer relax slightly. “I just don't know if . . . I don't know if I can get up in the morning and shave and put my suit on, much less serve as national security adviser at a time like this.”
Livingston heard the emotional strain evident in his voice. Lambert sounded exhausted. Livingston reached out and rested his hand on Lambert's shoulder.
“I need you, Greg. Things are very touchy right now. The situation with the Russians hangs in the balance. As much as I try, I can't seem to separate us, our two countries' armed forces. It's like we're in some giant clench, all over the globe, and for one of us to let go is a risk that's too great to take. You have contacts with the Russians. That man, Filipov, is now General Razov's aide. You know him, and he knows you. The Russians may trust you, and I need trust right now more than anything else in the world. I need you, Greg.”
Lambert sighed deeply. There was a brisk knock on the still open door behind him, and then Colonel Rutherford, General Thomas's aide, said, “We've had another contact in the Barents Sea, Mr. President.”
“Oh, Lord. Did we lose anybody?”
“No, sir. But one of our attack submarines sank a Russian sub. It wasn't a boomer, just another hunter-killer.”
“You tell them to clear out of there. Break it off.”
“There's also been another incident in Poland. Two helicopters of unidentified origin penetrated Polish airspace. An F-16 downed them. The wreckage is clearly on Polish territory, and although the ID isn't positive since we haven't gotten to the crash site, the Polish government has already protested to the Russians and is trying to get the incident on the agenda at the U.N. Security Council meeting.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes, sir. We do have a body count on that auxiliary that got torpedoed out of the Port of New Orleans. It's not good. Tentatively, it's about four hundred dead, with only about a hundred survivors. The press is asking us for that number. Can we give it to them?”
“Oh, shit,” the President said, shaking his head and looking at Lambert. “You know, we could lose a whole task force in the Norwegian Sea and it wouldn't merit two lines on the evening news these days, but some jake-leg camera crew in a traffic helicopter out of New Orleans gets dramatic pictures of a sinking supply ship and it's the lead story.” He shook his head again and turned to Rutherford. “Stall them with those numbers a little longer. Tell them they're too preliminaryâno, no. Tell them we've got to contact the families first.”
When the door closed behind Rutherford, the White House counsel was the first to speak. “Mr. Lambert, you'll be happy to know that the Supreme Court has ruled in your favor on your refusal to testify before the Committee to Investigate the Nuclear War.”
“Oh, yes,” the President said. “The Justices are all down here in Mount Weather. They only took four hours after oral arguments to publish their decision. We asked them to rule that there was a national security privilege against your testimony. They upheld your refusal to testify, but not on those constitutional grounds. They held the committee not to have been properly constituted under House rules. The House didn't have a quorum, it seems, when they purportedly established the ad hoc committee, and so that action was invalid.”
“You know, Greg,” the White House counsel said, “if I can call you that. It would be a really bad time for the President if you were to, you know, bail out on him like this. It would look bad, you understand?”
There was another knock on the door, and General Thomas stepped in. He glanced briefly at the President and then faced Lambert. Thomas looked exhausted, and his stare was hard.
“Mr. Lambert, you and I have been subpoenaed to testify before the Armed Forces Committee in closed session at Congress's special facility at zero nine hundred hours tomorrow. They want a report on the continued fighting between Russia and the United
States. You'll need to prepare briefing notes, and you've got a lot of catching up to do. I recommend that you come with me and attend the Joint Chiefs' briefing, and then participate in this afternoon's full NSC meeting.”
“That son of a bitch Costanzo is behind this,” the President said glancing at his lawyer and then turning to Lambert to explain. “When I got here, he'd already hightailed it over to the Congressional Facility. Now he's using Congress's subpoena powers to get the military briefings that I cut him out of.” The President looked at his counsel and then at General Thomas. “Fuck him. I'm going with you to Greenbriar. Unannounced, this time!”
The baby was tossing and turning among the pillows lying next to Melissa in a drawer from the room's armoire. His sleep was fitful, and he cried most of the time he was awake. Melissa's milk had never come in, either her nerves or poor diet ruining her chance at nursing her child. Getting out of bed, she padded over to the vanity in the bathroom where she kept the remainder of her meager cache from the day's forage: two eggs and some droopy lettuce.
She broke open the eggs and drank them from a glass, stuffing a leaf of lettuce into her mouth. She gagged. Her eyes jammed shut and she thought,
Three days. The ban will be lifted in three days.
Her chest bucked, and she began to sob. The government had banned the sale of all food other than perishables for five days after the attack in order, the store manager at the last of the six stores she had tried had explained, to prevent inflation. She had offered him a thousand dollars for a few cans of soup, but he had refused.
The attack was two days ago.
Four more days and I can go home,
she thought.
Tomorrow I get my gas ration book. Three days and I can buy some food and enough gas to get home.
Sniffling as she sat weakly back down on the bed, she resolved to watch one more hour of news and then try again to sleep.
She groped for the remote in the darkness and hit the now familiar
POWER
button. The sound came on immediately, and the room lit in the growing brightness from the screen. As always, the channel was reset to the advertisement for the pay-per-view offerings of the hotel. She changed to CNN.
“Well, at least we may finally be in for some good news,” the anchorwoman said. “What effect do you think the administration's
threat to use nuclear weapons against North Korea will have in the short term? Will the fighting stop immediately, or will it drag on for a little while?”
“There's no way to know, really,” some man said. “We can't even be sure that the North Koreans will actually stop fighting.”
“But surely they wouldn't risk nuclear attack by the United States,” the anchorwoman said. “That would be suicide.”
“Oh, I'm not disagreeing with you,” the analyst said, “but this is still a liberal Democratic administration, and they are negotiating with the Russians despite having the Russians, who had been badly weakened by the war with China, on the ropes militarily. All I'm saying is that the North Koreans might just decide to roll the dice.”
“A-all right,” the anchorwoman said as she shook her head in disbelief and turned to face a different camera. “We go now to Philadelphia for the latest domestic political developments. Bob?”
“Yes, Christine,” the man said. A map of the eastern U.S., marking Philadelphia, the nation's temporary capital, with a star, appeared on the screen.
“We apologize to our viewers, but we still haven't solved our video transmission difficulties,” Christine said. “Bob, as day breaks in West Virginia, what's in store at the underground Congressional Facility today?”
“A lot,” Bob answered, the quality of the audio poor. “First off, the Ad Hoc Joint Committee to Investigate the Nuclear War will continue its deliberations despite being held improperly convened by White House legal maneuvering designed to defeat a subpoena of top White House aide Gregory Lambert, the President's national security adviser. Then Under Secretary Anderson, the acting Secretary of State who is just returning from a quick minitour of NATO capitals where he got rather chilly receptions in Berlin and Paris, will be called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about President Livingston's relatively ineffective marshaling of allied support. The real fireworks, however, will begin tomorrow morning when the Armed Services Committee begins its briefings on the continuing hostilities with Russia.”
“Any word on when the debate on the proposal for a Declaration of War might get kicked off?”
“Well, it's difficult to say. All bets appear off. Some are saying that it could begin as early as today, but if precedent is any guide I expect it'll be sometime next week before the Joint Session will take up the Republican resolution, signed by all but four of the Republican Congressmen present, to declare war on Russia and to destroy through military action all of their remaining nuclear arsenal. The Democrats are preparing their own resolution to declare war on Russia,
without the approval of President Livingston but with, we are told, the backing of the Democratic party apparatus and the Vice President, that will be debated if the vote on the Republicans' proposal is defeated or tabled.”
“Bob,” the anchorwoman said as the reporter continued talking. “Bob. Let me interrupt you for a second to say that we're showing some new videotape that just arrived from Warner Robins, Georgia, site of the former Robins Air Force Base, without editing. Viewers are warned that some of the footage may be graphic and disturbing.”
The warning came too late. Close-ups on the next shot showed a large group of burn victims lying under an open three-cornered tent of an army medical unit.
“O-h-h,” Melissa moaned, shaking her head and averting her eyes from the television.
“Is the Republican measure expected to pass?”
“Again, it's difficult to say. The President is opposed to it, but what cannot be known is how many of the Democrats will stay with the President and how many will jump the aisle and vote for the first proposal to come before the Joint Sessionâthe Republicans'âunder intense pressure from their constituencies. Of course the President is the commander in chief, and he would still have to give the orders to the military to actually fight.”
“Well, whatever happens needs to happen soon,” the anchorwoman said. “We seem to be in some kind of limbo, with low-intensity but still deadly combat flaring up spontaneously every few hours around the periphery of both countries and, in fact, all around the globe.”
When Melissa saw out of the corner of her eyes that the tape had ended she looked back at the picture of the CNN studios in Atlanta.
“While the President circled the nation high above it all in his luxury 747, the Russian attack, by all appearances, has galvanized the American people like no other event in modern history. It's beginning to look like the Alamo, the bombing of the U.S.S.
Maine,
the sinking of the
Lusitania,
and Pearl Harbor all wrapped into one. In the latest CNN/Gallup Poll,” she said, and the poll's graphics replaced the picture on the screen, “an astonishing ninety-three percent of the people polled favor a Declaration of War against Russia, with a margin of error of plus or minus five percent.”
As the story ran on, Melissa's eyes glazed over in the flickering light of the television. After several minutes, Melissa said quietly, “Come home, David. Come home.”
“We've had over three hundred engagements reported since the President declared a cease-fire,” said Colonel Rutherford, General Thomas's aide, as he stood before the National Security Council. Lambert, the senior civilian adviser there given the absence of the Secretary of Defense, who was in Philadelphia trying to organize the massive bureaucracy that is the Defense Department, sat at the side of the President at the head of the table. “The contacts have tapered off noticeably, but with the Russian naval and ground force movements that we are monitoring the situation across most of Eurasia remains tense.”