‘Sarah, why don’t you just tell me what you think? Don’t give me options. I don’t need to run through every scenario your guys have come up with. You’ve been working this area your whole life, so just tell me what you think.’
Secretary Humboldt looked horrified. But with an observable effort of will, she put aside the briefing notes. ‘Well, sir …’
That was as far as she progressed for a few seconds, as she groped wordlessly for the right thing to say.
‘Come on, Sarah,’ urged Kip. ‘You’ve been out to the detention camps. You sat in on a lot of interviews. What’s your gut feeling?’
Humboldt frowned. All of her training, all of her professional experience, had taught her to divorce her feelings from her judgment.
‘Mr President, most of them are just little people. They’ve been carried along by events. This is the women and children I’m talking about. Most of them have lost their men in the fighting. They’re alone in the world except for each other. If you’re asking could they be integrated, I believe the answer is yes.’
Culver kept his face neutral, concentrating on taking handwritten notes as Humboldt spoke. Kip had made it clear that he didn’t care for his Chief of Staff monstering the Cabinet secretaries. When Jed spoke, he did so in such a way that Ms Humboldt could not have known he thought she was a fucking mad woman.
‘Madam Secretary, would it be the case that you would differentiate between the women and children and the captured fighters?’
Everyone in the room was interested in the answer. The President waited on her eagerly. Admiral Ritchie bored into her with his unwavering gaze. Even Secretary McAuley gave the impression of concentrating wholly on what she said next, deficits at least set aside for now. It didn’t ease Humboldt’s discomfort.
‘All of the enemy combatants were initially debriefed by the military. I don’t have access to the raw transcripts or interview recordings, just executive summaries. Some of the prisoners, the surviving leadership cadre, as I understand it, have been separated out and remain under military control. The lower ranks - if that’s an appropriate description - can probably be roughly sorted into two groups. True believers and, well, soldiers of fortune, I suppose. Opportunists. Like the pirate bands they were fighting with, but nominally motivated by religious conviction. Most of the second group, I believe, were less interested in Baumer’s jihad than they were in securing land and life for themselves and their families. They’re not true believers. If we were serious about taking them up into the broader migration program’ - she said that very carefully, watching to see if Culver would react - ‘I would recommend that only this latter cohort, the opportunists if you will, those without strong ideological attachment to Baumer, be accepted, and then with certain caveats.’
‘What sort of restrictions would we be looking at?’ he asked.
A deep crease formed in the middle of Humboldt’s brow. ‘I don’t believe it would be good policy to maintain the integrity of the original cohort,’ she said, lapsing into bureaucratese.
When she failed to explain any further, Kipper prompted, ‘So, what, you’re talking about breaking them up?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Not family groups, of course. But I think we would find that integrating them into existing communities would be a smoother process if they weren’t allowed to cluster.’
This time a querying frown from the President caused her to hurry on with an explanation. ‘They’re less likely to cause trouble, much more likely to settle in, if we bed them down well away from any bad influences. And from each other. They’re not ideologues. For the most part, they’re young widows with quite young children, often three or four of them, to look after. And no men, of course, to provide for them. I think they could be settled if we placed them within compatible communities.’
‘Such as?’ Jed asked, his scepticism leaking through.
At this, Humboldt shrugged briefly. ‘Many of the Indian nationals we’ve taken in to work on the railway programs came from that country’s Muslim community. After the war with Pakistan, they weren’t entirely welcome in their homeland anymore. But they’ve had no trouble fitting in here. Most are observant in their faith, but not politicised by it. There are enough of them now that we could salt most of our East Coast detainees through their population without ghettoising them.’
‘And the fighters?’ Kipper quizzed, saving Jed the effort. ‘The men?’
Culver was certain he saw Humboldt flick her eyes quickly over at Admiral Ritchie.
‘It’s not within the purview of my department, Mr President. But we have been turning this matter over for a while now, both in this working group and the wider Cabinet, and there have been a couple of position papers drawn up that might be of help.’
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement head started rifling through the thick wad of papers she’d extracted from her tote bag. She kept her head down, studiously avoiding eye contact with Culver, who knew nothing of any so-called position papers. Retrieving what she wanted, she passed copies around the room. Ritchie, he noted, didn’t need to scan the document even for a moment. He gave the impression of being familiar with it.
‘The fighters are a more difficult question,’ said Humboldt. ‘Especially if we accept the settlement of the non-combatants. Many of the fighters, nearly two-thirds of them, have relatives among the women and children we are holding. We cannot separate them, in law or in conscience.’
Kipper was nodding slowly, feeding himself small chunks of cookie that he broke off the mother lode like a kid trying to make a treat last a little longer. Jed could not be sure he was nodding in agreement with Ms Humboldt; he may simply have been acknowledging her. The President liked people to know he was listening to them. The Chief of Staff, on the other hand, was having trouble constraining himself. He didn’t like where this was going, and he felt himself blind-sided by whatever arrangement Humboldt and Ritchie had come to before the meeting. Jed was going to have to reassess his reading of the National Security Advisor. It appeared that Ritchie was more practised at the dark arts of politics than he had imagined when lobbying Kipper on the admiral’s behalf.
‘ICE sought input from all the major stakeholders on this question …’
‘… and as you would imagine, their responses varied considerably. Defense and the NIA argued strongly in favour of continued detention. Treasury’ - she spared a glance for McAuley at this point - ‘has been updating its forward estimates for funding a number of scenarios. And we at ICE, of course, are in constant contact with Reconstruction about their needs for various skill sets that remain under-subscribed.’
Barney Tench appeared to be nonplussed by the inclusion of his department in Sarah’s magic circle. But as Jed examined his shorthand notes of what she’d just said, he suppressed a sour grin of admiration. Humboldt had drawn the other players in the room into whatever gambit she was about to make, simply by stating the fucking obvious. Of course Reconstruction and Treasury were in constant contact with Immigration and Customs Enforcement about labour shortfalls and funding requirements - that didn’t mean they were on board for every program Humboldt wanted to push. As tempted as he was to interrupt, the Chief of Staff thought it best to let her play her hand.
‘It would be possible,’ she continued, ‘to include most of the problematic cohort, the fighters with family ties to our non-combatant detainees, as part of the general intake into this year’s frontier militia forces.’
At this, Jed had reached the limit of his forbearance.
‘Seriously? You seriously want to integrate these nutjobs into our
‘The frontier militias aren’t part of the regular military,’ corrected James Ritchie.
The unexpected intervention drew Culver up short, and he cursed himself for making such an undergraduate mistake. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But you’re splitting hairs. No, the frontier militias are not part of the armed forces. You know that, I know that, but such fine gradations of meaning are well beyond most people. And it’s most people who’ll go apeshit at the mere suggestion of letting these guys out of their cage, handing them a gun, and sending them off into the wilderness.’
