“MR. PRESIDENT?”
Jack McAtee looked up from his desk in the Oval Office to see his longtime secretary, Betsey Hall, standing in the doorway. She had the look. Something was up. It was nearly ten o’clock at night and he was only now getting around to reading his goddamn PDB. The president’s daily brief was so sensitive only a dozen people shared it. He was bone-tired. Dr. Ken Beer, his newly appointed White House physician, had told him just this morning that he needed to get more sleep and more exercise. And cut down on the cigars. The bourbon and branch water. And that golf didn’t count as exercise and—
“Mr. President?”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s apparently urgent.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Gooch and General Moore to see you, sir. Assistant Secretary Baker from the State Department is in the Roosevelt Room, if you need him.”
“Please show them in, Betsey,” McAtee said.
His national security advisor, John Gooch, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Charlie Moore, walked in. He closed his PDB file and pushed it aside. Maybe he’d get to it before tomorrow’s report arrived on his desk at 6:45. He got to his feet and moved over to the sofa near the fireplace. Might as well be comfortable. The two men filed in and took the two chairs opposite him.
“Let me guess,” McAtee said, smiling at each of them in turn, “Something troubling is afoot.”
Gooch, a tall, thin Boston Brahmin, St. Paul’s and Harvard, spoke first. This was not at all unusual. The NSA talked and the JCS chairman listened. Moore would hold his fire until he heard something he and the president would construe as actionable. Sometimes this happened and sometimes it did not.
“Mr. President,” Gooch said, riffling through a sheaf of reports, “I don’t like what I’m seeing here. There are patterns here that—”
“Tea-leaf reading again, John?” McAtee said, firing up his Partagas Black Label despite doctor’s orders.
“I’m afraid it’s a bit more than that. We’ve got French naval assets—here, have a look at the overheads. Time-sequenced satellite imagery shows French assets moving rapidly out of the Indian Ocean into the Gulf of Oman…go ahead, sir, take a look.”
“What am I looking at?”
“That’s the nuclear carrier Charles de Gaulle, sir, their flag vessel, and—”
“Just last month you—or someone—told me the de Gaulle was laid up in dry dock for repairs,” McAtee said. “Her reactors were throwing off too much radiation. The crews were getting sick and suing the goddamn French government.”
“They’ve apparently repaired her, sir. At least temporarily. Here you’ve got tankers, destroyers, frigates, subs…”
“Goddamn it, this is an offensive configuration—or am I wrong?” McAtee said, holding up a photo for closer inspection. “These smaller boats here and here are amphibious landing craft, right?”
“Indeed they are, sir.”
“So they’re going ahead with this damn thing, John, this invasion.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Goddamn it! Are they fucking nuts?”
“Not all of them. You can point the finger directly at this man Bonaparte, sir. He’s going to have to be dealt with, sooner rather than later. We’re building the Interpol file now. It’s only a matter of days before we go public with the patricide story.”
“Guy murdered his own father to get ahead in the Union Corse. At sixteen. You believe that, Charlie?”
“From what I’ve heard about him, yes, it’s believable.”
“He’s guilty of homicide and we can prove it, sir. We’ve got an eyewitness to that crime. I just got a call from Captain John Mariucci, NYPD. He and a Scotland Yard man named Ambrose Congreve located a witness in New York.”
“I know Congreve. Through Alex Hawke. Any news from him, John? Hawke, I mean.”
“As you know, Hawke is involved in an arm’s-length operation to get the sultan out of Oman alive, Mr. President.”
“Right. Put him in front of a camera. Have him tell the truth about Oman asking France to invade. France has pulled the wool over the world’s eyes for long enough. Suppress an insurrection, my ass. They’re going in for oil to sell to China.”
“Our team is inside the fortress on Masara Island now, Mr. President. They went in to pull the sultan out at 1140 hours EST. About twenty minutes ago. We are monitoring real-time.”
“Hawke and I go back a long way. Not the kind of man who’ll let us down. But the sooner we get Sultan Abbas out of that hellhole, the better. Do what you have to do, John.”
“We’re on it, sir.”
“All right, Charlie. What do you make of this French navy in the Arabian Sea bullshit? All this faux muscle- flexing?”
“It may be just that, Mr. President,” General Moore said. “The CNO has been on the horn with Frank Blair, who commands the Sixth Fleet now…they’re trying to get a read on it, sir.”
“Is the fleet moving?”
“Yes, sir. The Pentagon confirmed that Admiral Starke’s lead units entered the canal at 1700 hours. They’re positioning for a holding action. Assume we control the canal at this point—no one in, or out, unless we give the word.”
“Good! Now that’s thinking ahead.”
“That is good,” Gooch said, “but we haven’t heard from the Egyptians, or the Chinese, or the rest of the ‘striped-pants’ crowd yet.”
General Moore leaned forward in his chair. “Frankly, Mr. President, the French are overextended and they know it. Probably a little tension in the dialogue back in Paris. They know we could take them down in about four hours.”
“I know we could. We could, but we won’t. Because France, as we all know, is just a goddamn shill for the Chinese, a prophylactic in this whole thing. Hell, if China wasn’t involved—let’s talk seriously about this China gambit. Where are we with them? John?”
“Certainly, sir,” Gooch said. “Here’s where we are now. There are—”
“Don’t tell me. Two schools of thought,” the president said with a wry smile. He’d been down this well- traveled road before.
“Exactly,” Gooch said. “That much hasn’t changed. On the one hand, the State Department’s position. State says don’t rock the boat. We can go along to get along. Because we have to.”
“On the other hand,” General Moore said, “there’s my position. Send a signal to the French and the Chinese that we won’t tolerate interference with our oil supply in the Gulf. The kick-ass-and-take-names position.”
The president smiled and waited for Gooch’s reaction.
“Mr. President,” Gooch said, “we probably ought to round-table this in the morning. Get a fresh look at it from State, the Pentagon, and the Agency—especially if you are considering a policy change. I have to tell you I firmly believe we can get along with China once we move past this situation in Oman. We have to, sir. In all honesty, we’re in a very tight spot with Beijing.”
“You mean we find a way to get along with them or we’ll tank our own economy.”
“Exactly my feeling, Mr. President.”
“John, the bullet points. Just briefly.”
“There are two pressure points with China, sir. Our economy and Taiwan. The one that concerns me most right now is the former.”
“Because?”
“Because if we lean on China about the OOTB in Taiwan or their little misadventure in Oman, we run the risk of an economic—”
“OOTB? What the hell is that? Why does everybody who comes in this office have to sound like a walking
