spoke frankly, as a scientist. Very much to the point. Untroubled by the obvious innuendoes of the equally obvious terrorist who held him prisoner. The science was what mattered to Professor Landon.
Yes, General Rashood liked him. This whole thing was rather a pity.
“Thank you, Professor,” said the Hamas General. “Thank you very much. We’ll have some breakfast now, and talk more.”
1
The brand-new Democratic Administration, fresh from a narrow election victory, was moving into the West Wing. With the exception of the President, who knew he was going anyway at the end of his second term, every hour of every day was a trauma for the outgoing Republicans. For the big hitters of the military and government, handing over the reins to what most of them believed to be a bunch of naive, inexperienced, half-assed limousine liberals led by an idealistic young President from Rhode Island, who would have been pushed to hold down a proper executive job — well, anywhere — was appalling.
And today was probably the worst day of all. Adm. Arnold Morgan, the retiring President’s National Security Adviser, was about to leave the White House for the last time. His big nineteenth-century Naval desk had already been cleared and removed, and now there were only a few good-byes left. The door to his office was wide open, and the Admiral, accompanied by his alarmingly beautiful secretary Kathy O’Brien, was ready to go. In attendance was the Secretary of State Harcourt Travis; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Tim Scannell; the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Alan Dickson; the Director of the National Security Agency, Adm. George Morris; and Morris’s personal assistant, Lt. Comdr. James Ramshawe, American by birth, with Australian parents.
As the great man took his leave, they all stood in a small “family” huddle, veterans in the last half-dozen years of some of the most brutal secret operations ever conducted by the United States Military. Their devotion to Arnold had grown from the series of great triumphs on the international stage due, almost entirely, to the strengths of the Admiral’s intellect.
Like Caesar, Admiral Morgan was not lovable — except to Kathy — but his grasp of international politics, string-pulling, poker-playing, threats and counterthreats, Machiavellian propaganda, and the conduct of restricted, classified military operations was second to none. At all of the above he was a virtuoso, driven by an unbending sense of patriotism. During his reign in the West Wing he intimidated, cajoled, outwitted, and bullied some of the most powerful men on earth. His creed was to fight and fight, and never to lower his blade short of victory. Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Gen. George Patton were his heroes. And now the Admiral was departing, leaving his Washington confidants devastated, convinced that another heaven and another earth must surely pass before such a man could be again.
Many of the high-ranking civilians would themselves go within a few short weeks of the incoming Democrats, but none so utterly ignominiously as Admiral Morgan himself. Called on the telephone by a Miss Betty-Ann Jones, a Southern liberal who had never been to Washington, he was told, “President McBride thinks it would be better if y’all resigned raht now, since he dun’t think you and he’s gonna get along real well.”
Arnold Morgan had needed no second bidding. Five minutes later, he had dictated his short letter of resignation to Kathy, and ten minutes later, they were working on their wedding date, the colossal job of National Security Adviser no longer standing between them.
At Arnold’s farewell dinner, at a favorite Georgetown restaurant, Secretary Travis, always the voice of irony and sly humor, had arrived at the table humming theatrically and loudly the tune of “Those Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.” Shortly he would return to Harvard to take up a professorship.
The military members of Arnold’s inner circle would remain at their posts, more or less, under a new Commander in Chief.
And now Admiral Morgan stood at the great oak door to his office. He hesitated briefly, and nodded curtly to the empty room. Then he strode outside to the corridor, where his former colleagues waited. He smiled with some difficulty. “I’d be grateful,” he said, “if each one of you would come and take me by the hand.”
And so they said their farewells, each consumed by the private sense of trust they all shared with the National Security Chief. The last handshake was with the youngest of them, Lieutenant Commander Ramshawe, with whom Admiral Morgan had a near father-son relationship.
“I’ll miss you, Jimmy,” he said.
“And I’ll miss you, sir,” replied the young officer. “I don’t suppose you’ll ever know how much.”
“Thanks, kid,” said the Admiral informally. And then he turned on his heel, immaculately tailored in a dark gray suit, gleaming black leather lace-up shoes, blue shirt, and Naval Academy tie.
He walked resolutely, shoulders back, upright, full of dignity, with Kathy, his bride-to-be, at his side. He walked among the portraits of Presidents past, nodding sharply to General Eisenhower, as he always did. He walked like a man not departing but like a young officer recently summoned to the colors. In his mind a lifetime of thoughts, a lifetime of service to his country. The different people he had been…the Commanding Officer of a surface ship and then of a nuclear submarine out of Norfolk, Virginia…the Intelligence Tsar, head of the National Security Agency in Maryland…and finally the right hand of a faltering Republican President who ended up knowing neither loyalty nor patriotism. That never mattered. Arnold had enough for both of them.
Walking along the familiar corridors, the Admiral heard once more the swish of the waves on a ship’s hull heading out of a threatened harbor and into the great rolling swells of the ocean, the metallic scream of the anchor chain, the terse instructions of the COB, and in the deepest recesses of his mind, the shouts and commands of far- lost U.S. Navy SEALs whom he had never seen, never met, obeying his orders. Always obeying. As he himself obeyed his. Mostly.
He heard again the bells of the watch, tolling off the hours. And the smooth slide of his submarine’s periscope. Once outside, he knew he would inevitably glance upward in the chill December breeze, and he would see it, snapping so damn proudly, right above him. The flag, always the flag.
He wore no overcoat, though Kathy was cozily engulfed in a light-brown full-length shearling number. And just before they turned left towards the main doors and out onto the West Wing veranda, she stretched out her right hand to take his, confirming once more that he would not be alone, as he left his quarterdeck for the last time and steered their ship into the long years of retirement. Admiral Morgan was sixty-four.
No one who was there would ever forget the departure of Arnold Morgan. Each and every man in the lower corridor felt a sense of control slipping away, as if a giant warship had somehow lost its helm. There had already been reports of civilians replacing the Marine guards at the White House. Patient young men in their early thirties were shaking their heads and sadly talking about the primitive ways of the U.S. Military under a Republican Administration. The new young ideologues came from a different world, the world of the future, where education of the Third World was paramount. Where no one was evil, just ignorant. Where death and destruction were to be replaced by more and more financial aid, where tyrants must be taught the ways of the West, not murdered. And where the poor and the helpless had to be given succor, and trained Americans had to work on their lack of self- esteem. And where absolutely no one could ever be harmed in the interests of revenge, conquest, or the destruction of a rogue regime.
Massive Naval and Military cuts were on the horizon. President Charles McBride was a globalist, certain in his own mind that reason, reason, and mercy would always prevail, however misguided a foe may appear. But like President Clinton, and Carter before him, McBride was a vacillator, a career politician accustomed to compromises, always looking for the middle ground. He was a man of nothing but political conviction, the way forwards for the lifelong lightweight. And he was chronically inexperienced in the harsher reaches of international diplomacy. President-elect McBride could not have recognized a scheming, self-interested statesman at six paces.
The one thing that Charles McBride did know, however, was the futility of spending zillions of dollars on defense, if you weren’t planning to fight. No one had yet told him the age-old mantra of the wise—
