word, things were very different. What were his duties? What should he decide? Well, nothing, was the answer on both counts. He was not required to decide a damn thing, and he found this almost impossible to accept.
Kathy was out at the hairdresser. He absentmindedly watched Harry bring out the plastic bag in which he would deposit most of the mail. But the letter from Hamas was burning his hand like a hot coal. He watched Harry wander out of the pool gate, poured himself a cup of coffee, and ruminated.
Finally, he decided the correct thing to do was to take the correspondence, place it in an envelope, tell Harry to whistle up the White House courier, and send the little package around to the man who had replaced him in the office of the President’s National Security Adviser.
Let him worry about the damn thing. It was no longer his — Arnold’s — concern. So he went inside, carefully made a couple of copies, and did exactly what he had decided. After placing the letter into a plastic bag, he added a little note to his successor, Cyrus Romney, former professor of Liberal Arts at Berkeley, and for all Arnold knew, marcher
If Arnold Morgan had had his way, Cyrus Romney would have been instructed to march his way to Outer Mongolia and stay there. Arnold Morgan did not at all believe the Californian to be an ideal choice to occupy the great office of the Department of State, which, by all accounts, he owed mainly to a lifelong friendship with fellow peacenik Charles McBride.
Arnold’s letter was cool:
Dear Cyrus…This came to me, mistakenly, today, possibly from people who did not know of the changes in the U.S. Government this year. Make of it what you will.
Sincerely,
Arnold Morgan.
The personal note from the old Lion of the West Wing would, Arnold knew, probably get short shrift from both Cyrus and his boss. Did he care what either of them thought? Not a jot.
Did he care what the implied Hamas threat might mean to the United States of America? On a scale of 1 to 1,000, Admiral Morgan was somewhere in the high fractions above 999. He walked back to the pool, picked up his mobile phone, and made a call to the private line of Admiral George Morris at Fort Meade.
“George…Arnie…got time for a brief private chat?”
A half hour later, he was on his way around the beltway, Harry at the wheel of the Admiral’s new automobile, General Motors’ state-of-the-art four-wheel-drive masterpiece, the 2009 Hummer-H2A. A polished city ride, at home on Fifth Avenue or downtown Washington, this broad-shouldered, off-road vehicle is a direct descendant of the military’s old desert warhorse, the Humvee. The new Hummer can go through streams twenty inches deep and climb over rocks sixteen inches high. Mud, deep sand, no problem. Admiral Morgan’s great friend Jack Smith, the Energy Secretary in the last Republican Administration and former President of General Motors, had told him: “This thing is made for you, mainly because Kathy could drive it easily, and you could go to war in it.”
Arnold replied, “Would General Patton have liked it?”
“General Patton would probably have lived in it!” replied Jack.
Two other armed agents in a private White House car followed hard astern. They too had bulletproof glass.
They swung north up the parkway and drove quickly through the sprawling countryside surrounding the National Security Agency. At the main gates, a security guard walked to the driver’s side and asked for passes. He was hardly able to finish his sentence.
The guard recognized the former Tsar of Fort Meade, and understood that he might be working out the last three minutes of his career if he was not careful.
“SIR, YES, SIR!” snapped the former U.S. Army Master Chief, and hopped right into the backseat. Harry knew the way, and the guard jumped out and hissed to the next guard on the main doors. “Chuck, it’s the Big Man — I’m taking him up to Admiral Morris.”
“Rightaway, sir,” he replied and opened the door while Arnold was disembarking. He and his escort went up to the eighth floor in the Director’s private elevator.
“Tell Harry to take you back, then to wait right outside for me…and thanks, soldier.”
“You’re welcome, sir,” he replied holding the door open and waiting to hear Admiral Morris greet the Big Man, as he knew he would.
“Arnie, great to see you…come and sit down. It’s been too long.”
Actually it had been about two months. Too long, for both of the old seafarers. And for the first time, Admiral Morgan did not walk around to the big chair, which he had once occupied himself. He accepted an offer of coffee, declined lunch, and parked himself in a large wooden captain’s chair in front of the Director’s desk.
Solemnly, he reached into his inside jacket pocket and handed over a copy of the letter he had received a couple of hours previously. George Morris stared at it, his bushy eyebrows raised.
“Jesus,” he said. “When did this arrive?”
“This morning.”
“How?”
“Regular mail.”
“From where?”
“The Middle East. All the postmarks were very smudged. But I think the stamp was Palestinian, the special ones issued in parts of Israel. Had a picture of some sheikh on it.”
“Have you told anyone?”
“Oh, sure. I sent the original over to the White House, to my successor. Told him the letter had come to me by mistake.”
Admiral Morris nodded. “You did not elaborate about our previous discussions on the subject of Arab terrorists and volcanoes?”
“Hell, no. They would have loved an opportunity to imply that I was a paranoid old relic from the Cold War… and anyway, I don’t have the energy to argue with jerks.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I know. But I don’t feel like it.”
George Morris looked again at the message from Hamas. And he recalled their evening together with Jimmy Ramshawe in Chevy Chase a couple of months before.
“Of course I know what you’re thinking, Arnie…your honeymoon mountain in the Canaries last January, right? One of them almost certainly a Hamas assault commander? And we have your photograph of him, in company with two volcanologists from Tehran? And now this — eight months later, Hamas sends a note…implies they blew Mount St. Helens. Kinda fits together.”
“Well, the coincidence is a little striking. Although I understand you can’t just go around blowing up volcanoes. So far as I recall, no one’s ever done such a thing. Not in all of history, and volcanoes have a lot of that — thousands of years.”
“Yeah, but the last sixty are the only ones that count,” said George. “No one had a big enough explosive before that.”
“You read anything about nuclear fallout in the Mount St. Helens area?”
“Well, I haven’t looked. But we would have been informed if there was any such thing. I’d guess that mountain is still a lot too hot for anyone to make any checks.”
“I don’t get it,” pondered Admiral Morgan. “I cannot believe anyone just planted a bomb in the crater. And anyway, a bomb probably would not have done the job. They don’t explode downwards. Surely to blow a volcano, you’d have to burrow down into the ground, way down, and then detonate.”
“Christ,” said George. “Imagine doing that. Excavating the main lava chimney of a volcano, probably several hundred feet, knowing the damn thing could erupt any moment and fry you.”
“How about a missile?” said Arnold suddenly. “How about a missile coming in at high speed with a sharp front end, designed to bang its way into the rock on the floor of the crater?”
“Well, who knows? It would take a pretty wide investigation to find out if such a thing was possible — like
