It was crisp and cool in San Francisco. Woolly gray clouds were building up along the row of hills that fronted the ocean. The President could not see either the Golden Gate or the Bay Bridge from where he stood, which disappointed him. But the familiar cadence of “Hail to the Chief” always gave him a lift.
He smiled his brightest and waved both arms over his head while a phalanx of secret service agents, most of them in dark topcoats, filtered through the crowd. His team of security technicians was setting up the portable podium down at the bottom of the stairs, with the teleprompters and blast-proof screens.
Standing beside him, the President’s chief of staff rubbed a hand over his shaved pate.
“It’s always cold in ‘Frisco,” Norman Foster complained. “Mark Twain said the coldest winter he’d ever spent was one summer in San Francisco.”
The President laughed and said, “The crowd’s nice and warm, Norm.”
Foster agreed with a vigorous nod. “That they are, Mr. President. That they are.”
The two men started down the stairs toward the knot of news reporters and photographers clustered by the portable podium, Foster a respectful two steps behind his chief.
It’s supposed to start raining in an hour or so, Foster thought. We’ll be at the Cow Palace by then. But he couldn’t help thinking that conditions would get much, much warmer if those two North Korean missiles reached the city.
Across the Bay, at the Oakland office of the National Weather Service, Sam Weathers riffled through the reports that were trickling in to his desk. Reports on paper, most of them radioed or teletyped in from weather observation posts from California to Idaho.
Weathers was a compactly built black man of forty-six, his shoulders wide and his gut still tight, thanks to weekly sessions on the basketball court at his local YMCA. He wasn’t especially tall, but he was fast and had good hands. He would flash a big toothy grin whenever he worked the ball around one of those tall, gawky giraffes and scored another basket.
He wasn’t grinning now. His desk was covered with a slowly growing glacier of papers, none of them bearing good news.
Sam had never intended to be a meteorologist. With his last name being Weathers, he thought it would be ridiculous to work for the National Weather Service. Weathers from Weather. He could hear the snickering wherever he went. So he had majored in geophysics in college, then somehow gotten interested in atmospheric physics as a graduate student. By the time he had earned his Ph.D., jobs in atmospheric physics were scarce. So he took a temporary position with the Weather Service in his college town, Berkeley, hoping to transfer to NOAA’s atmospheric physics section when the job market loosened up. Twenty-two years later he was still with the Weather Service. Weathers from Weather.
With the satellites down and phone service jammed up the kazoo, Sam had turned to the service’s radio system to get reports on the storm that had swept in from the ocean. Even that was hit-and-miss: radio reception was mostly poor because of the storm, and more and more stations were going off the air because of power outages.
Sam had rounded up a couple of kids who knew how to run the computer that fed the big electronic wall map. Even so, the map had large blank spaces in it. The low-pressure center of the storm had moved inland with surprising swiftness and was dumping snow in the higher elevations across the northern Rockies. A surprise autumn storm. There’ll be a white Hallowe’en, Sam thought bitterly. And that means trouble.
The last satellite data he’d received had shown the storm’s center still out over the Pacific. Then the weather satellites had gone dead and Sam felt blinded, groping in the dark, reverting back to communications systems that hadn’t been used, really, since before he’d started in college.
“How’s it look, Weather Man?” Sam’s boss still had his sense of humor.
Sam looked up from his littered desk and gave him a sour expression. “Major storm. We’ve got warnings out but a lot of the area is getting hit with blackouts. We got real troubles, Eddie.”
The boss shrugged. “Do your best, Weather Man.”
“Sure. What else?”
“The President landed at San Francisco International okay. Got in before the rain started.” “Rain?”
“Yeah. Don’t you read your own forecasts? It’s pouring cats and dogs outside.”
The boss walked off toward his office. Sam straightened up and headed for the windows, up the hall from his desk and the wall map.
Sure enough, it was raining out there. Raining hard.
For some reason that has delighted generations of cynics, the United States Department of State is headquartered in a part of the District of Columbia called Foggy Bottom. The Secretary of State’s spacious office was on the top floor of the handsome building. The Secretary had come directly to her office after her meeting in the Jefferson Hotel with her Chinese contact, Quang Chuli, still wearing her low-key gray pant suit and pearls. From her desk the Secretary could see across the Potomac River and its busy bridges to the glass-and-steel office towers of Virginia and the row upon row of white crosses lined up in military precision along the rolling green turf of Arlington National Cemetery.
As she sat at her broad, uncluttered desk, however, the Secretary of State was not looking out her windows. She was glaring at the image on her wall-sized display screen of a young brown-skinned upstart with a trim beard tracing his stubborn jawline.
“The Sarajevo scenario?” the Secretary repeated, in the icy, scornful tone that could send senators and White House officials scurrying for cover.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Michael Jamil.
General Higgins, whom the Oval Office had put in charge of this special situation team, was sitting beside Jamil and leaning toward the civilian so he could get his face in the picture that was on her wall screen.
“For what it’s worth, Madam Secretary,” Higgins said, in a tone that was little short of pompous, “this is Mr. Jamil’s personal assessment, not my team’s idea.”
“Thank you, General,” said the Secretary of State, putting on her sincerest smile. Shifting her eyes back to Jamil, she asked, “Is your scenario approved by the National Intelligence Council, young man?”
Jamil felt uncomfortable with General Higgins sitting beside him down at the end of the conference table and the eye of the computer camera staring at him unblinkingly. The others in the situation room were all on their feet, standing over to one side. Zuri Coggins was standing beside General Scheib, who was in front of the satellite image of the North Korean missiles, blocking Jamil’s view. But he could see the Secretary of State clearly enough, both on the computer display in front of him and on the wall screen on the other side of the room. No one stood in front of her image. He could see her brittle smile and hear the condescension in her “young man.”
“We’ve run many different scenarios at NIC,” he answered tightly. “The Sarajevo possibility is one of them.”
“But no one else at NIC has associated that scenario with the present situation,” the Secretary said, still smiling. “Only you.”
Feeling his insides clenching, Jamil replied, “I’m the only representative of the NIC present at this meeting, Madam Secretary.”
“I see,” she said.
“It’s the scenario that fits the facts best,” Jamil insisted. “A rogue attack triggers a full-scale nuclear exchange.”
“And you believe that the Chinese are behind this?”
Jamil hesitated. He knew the Secretary of State’s reputation. People didn’t get to challenge her more than once.
Carefully he answered, “I believe that the Chinese are prepared to profit from it. If we attack North Korea they will respond against us. If we allow the North Koreans to destroy an American city without retaliating, the Chinese will back North Korea’s demands. They want to eliminate our influence in Asia and this is the way for them to do it and keep their hands clean.”
