“What?” she said.
“You’re approving my decision.”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
“Colonel, I keep telling you — this is my operation. You’re just helping.”
“Keep telling yourself that. Sooner or later you’ll believe it.”
Boston eyed the woman who’d just given birth.
“I don’t know, Colonel. Moving her. I don’t know.”
“We don’t have a stretcher,” said Danny, “and we’re not leaving her.”
“I can carry her, that’s not the problem,” Boston told him. “But I don’t know about moving her. She’s lost a ton of blood.”
“She’ll lose a hell of a lot more if they put a bullet through her,” snapped Nuri.
That settled it for Boston. “Boost her on my back and tell her to hang on.”
Nuri and Danny helped her onto Boston’s back as gently as they could. The woman was exhausted and barely conscious. Boston grabbed her forearms to hold her in place.
Flash, meanwhile, had doffed his armored vest and pulled off his shirt to wrap the child. Bloom put the baby into the shirt and tied off the bottom, swaddling it, then snugging it against her chest. She folded her torso over the infant, protecting it as much as possible.
The baby boy’s round eyes looked at the world with unabashed inquisitiveness, undoubtedly wondering what the hell he had just descended into.
Flash started to put his armored vest on Bloom.
“No,” Danny told him. “You have a point. You need the vest.”
“She’s got the kid.”
“They won’t be in the line of fire. Don’t be a hero.”
Slowly, the small group began moving through the field, Flash at the front, Danny at the rear, Boston, Nuri, and the women in the middle. Melissa had the toddler in her arms; the two other patients who’d been in the clinic flanked her, each holding onto the back of her shirt.
As they crossed the road, they heard grenades and gunfire from the direction they’d come from.
“Keep moving,” said Nuri. He repeated it in Arabic and then the local language, helped by MY-PID. “Get across the road and move west.”
Chapter 15
When Christine Mary Todd was elected President, the pundits and chattering class had declared that her main attention would be on domestic affairs, issues like unemployment, health care, and education. She’d expected as much herself. Having spent years focusing on the world’s problems, the time seemed ripe for the U.S. to turn its attention homeward. There was an enormous amount of work to be done in the country. America was recovering from a deep recession, and while the war on terror seemed never-ending, it had been wrestled into a manageable if still tricky state — or so it appeared from a distance.
But since she’d been in office, Todd had found that more than sixty percent of her time and an outsized amount of her energy were spent on international affairs. China and Iran were openly hostile, North Korea threatened war with the U.S. as well as South Korea, the Germans were making noises about rearming in the face of a rising Russian defense budget, and the war on terror grew more intricate every day.
At the same time, the tools Todd had to deal with these problems were unwieldy. They also came with complications of their own, the latest being the CIA and its clandestine Raven program.
It wasn’t clear when rumors of the program’s existence had first begun circulating, much less where they originated. But literally within hours of her ordering Edmund to tell her everything he knew about it, word of its existence seemed to have reached every corner of the D.C. establishment.
That word, of course, was wildly inflated and focused on the sensational; the rumors had the U.S. attempting to assassinate world leaders and even using the program domestically. The lack of hard data encouraged the wildest speculation and attracted the most diverse political agendas possible. The fact that the computer software at the heart of the program wasn’t mentioned was hardly reassuring. It wasn’t surprising that as soon as word reached the Senate Intelligence Committee, they voted to call Edmund in.
“I don’t think everyone in Washington has heard.” National Security Advisor Dr. Michael Blitz shifted uneasily in the chair in Todd’s working office, a small former cloakroom next to the cabinet room in the West Wing. The President liked to work there, like most of her predecessors, reserving the Oval Office for meeting visitors and ceremonial occasions. “I think what we have here are a set of older rumors being given some fresh wind. I would bet that someone on Edmund’s staff gave the information to Ernst. Once he got it…”
Blitz made a fluttering motion with his hand, mimicking a bird taking flight. “That will just make things worse.”
Todd pushed herself up out of her chair. She’d never liked sitting for very long, and this job required a lot of it.
“You can’t let him testify before Congress,” said Blitz. “Not until the weapon is recovered. Assuming what Reid told you is true.”
“I realize that.” Blitz’s mention of Reid bothered her — she was hoping to somehow protect him as the source of her information. But she’d had to tell Blitz where she’d gotten the assessment of Raven in the first place, otherwise he wouldn’t have taken it as seriously as he should.
If it were up to her, she’d let the committee roast Edmund for having gone ahead with the program without proper authorization. In fact, she was planning to fire him over this — as soon as Raven was safely in hand.
But in the meantime she couldn’t take the chance of word getting out and the terrorists in Africa discovering exactly how potent the weapon was. In theory, Edmund
“Very possibly this weapon isn’t as effective as anyone believes,” said Blitz. “You know how these things go. The contractors pump them up—”
“We can’t really take that chance.” Todd paced around the very small office, literally moving only a few feet each way. Finally she sat back in her seat. “I can’t have him testify until Raven is recovered. His schedule will have to be full for a few days, that’s all.”
“That will get them talking all the more,” said William Bozzone, her politcal advisor. Bozzone was a lawyer and former congressman who held the official title of Counsel to the President, but was well known in Washington as her personal ward healer.
“I understand.”
“There’s another problem, you know,” added Blitz. “Senator Stockard. Maybe you should brief him before his wife does.”
Todd frowned. Zen was an ally on some matters and an antagonist on others. The fact that his wife headed the Office of Special Technology worked in Todd’s favor, to an extent, even if he abstained from matters relating to it. Still, he could be a potent critic, all the more so because he knew what he was talking about, unlike people like Ernst.
“I don’t think there’ll be any pillow talk,” said Todd.
Blitz raised an eyebrow in disbelief.
“I don’t.” The president liked Breanna Stockard; she reminded her of herself twenty years before.
“Irregardless, you want to keep him on your side,” said Bozzone.
“I can’t tell one person on the committee and not the others,” said Todd. “Even Zen. I know he’ll be discreet, but even so — you see how far this has gone already.”
Todd folded her arms. The committee had voted to ask Edmund to appear
