The Bear and the Dragon

was still at her home in Maryland, probably dressed and ready to head out the door-what shitty hours these people worked on his behalf, Jack reminded himself-for the hour-long drive into D.C. And with luck she’d make it home- when? Tonight? That depended on his schedule for today, and he couldn’t remember offhand what he had happening.

“Coffee, Boss?” one of the younger agents asked.

“Sounds like a winner, Charlie.” Ryan followed him, yawning. He ended up in the Secret Service guard post for this floor, a walk-in closet, really, with a TV and a coffeepot-probably stocked by the kitchen staff-and some munchies to help the people get through the night.

“When did you come on duty?” POTUS asked.

“Eleven, sir,” Charlie Malone answered.

“Boring duty?”

“Could be worse. At least I’m not working the bad-check detail in Omaha anymore.”

“Oh, yeah,” agreed Joe Hilton, another one of the young agents on the deathwatch.

“I bet you played ball,” Jack observed.

Hilton nodded. “Outside linebacker, sir. Florida State University. Not big enough for the pros, though.”

Only about two-twenty, and it’s all lean meat, Jack thought. Young Special Agent Hilton looked like a fundamental force of nature.

“Better off playing baseball. You make a good living, work fifteen years, maybe more, and you’re healthy at the end of it.”

“Well, maybe I’ll train my boy to be an outfielder,” Hilton said.

“How old?” Ryan asked, vaguely remembering that Hilton was a recent father. His wife was a lawyer at the Justice Department, wasn’t she?

“Three months. Sleeping through the night now, Mr. President. Good of you to ask.”

I wish they’d just call me Jack. I’m not God, am I? But that was about as likely as his calling his commanding general Bobby-Ray back when he’d been Second Lieutenant John P. Ryan, USMC.

“Anything interesting happen during the night?”

“Sir, CNN covered the departure of our diplomats from Beijing, but that just showed the airplane taking off.”

“I think they just send the cameras down halfway hoping the airplane’ll blow up so that they’ll have tape of it-you know, like when the chopper comes to lift me out of here.” Ryan sipped his coffee. These junior Secret Service agents were probably a little uneasy to have “The Boss,” as he was known within the Service, talking with them as if he and they were normal people. If so, Jack thought, tough shit. He wasn’t going to turn into Louis XIV just to make them happy. Besides, he wasn’t as good-looking as Leonardo DiCaprio, at least according to Sally, who thought that young actor was the cat’s ass.

Just then, a messenger arrived with the day’s copies of the morning’s Early Bird. Jack took one along with the coffee and headed back to read it over. A few editorials bemoaning the recall of the trade delegation-maybe it was the lingering liberalism in the media, the reason they were not, never had been, and probably never would be entirely comfortable with the amateur statesman in the White House. Privately, Ryan knew, they called him other things, some rather less polite, but the average Joe out there, Arnie van Damm told Jack once a week or so, still liked him a lot. Ryan’s approval rating was still very high, and the reason for it, it seemed, was that Jack was perceived as a regular guy who’d gotten lucky-if they called this luck, POTUS thought with a stifled grunt.

He returned to reading the news articles, wandering back to the breakfast room, as he did so, where, he saw, people were hustling to get things set up-notified, doubtless, by the Secret Service that SWORDSMAN was up and needed to be fed. Yet more of the His Majesty Effect, Ryan groused. But he was hungry, and food was food, and so he wandered in, picked what he wanted off the buffet, and flipped the TV on to see what was happening in the world as he attacked his eggs Benedict. He’d have to devour them quickly, before Cathy appeared to yell at him about the cholesterol intake. All around him, to a radius of thirty miles or so, the government was coming to consciousness, or what passed for it, dressing, getting in their cars, and heading in, just as he was, but not as comfortably.

“Morning, Dad,” Sally said, coming in next and walking to the TV, which she switched to MTV without asking. It was a long way since that bright afternoon in London when he’d been shot, Jack thought. He’d been “daddy” then.

In Beijing the computer on Ming’s desk had been in auto-sleep mode for just the right number of minutes. The hard drive started turning again, and the machine began its daily routine. Without lighting up the monitor, it examined the internal file of recent entries, compressed them, and then activated the internal modem to shoot them out over the’Net. The entire process took about seventeen seconds, and then the computer went back to sleep. The data proceeded along the telephone lines in the city of Beijing until it found its destination server, which was, actually, in Wisconsin. There it waited for the signal that would call it up, after which it would be dumped out of the server’s memory, and soon thereafter written over, eliminating any trace that it had ever existed.

In any case, as Washington woke up, Beijing was heading for sleep, with Moscow a few hours behind. The earth continued its turning, oblivious of what transpired in the endless cycle of night and day.

Well?” General Diggs looked at his subordinate.

“Well, sir,” Colonel Giusti said, “I think the cavalry squadron is in pretty good shape.” Like Diggs, Angelo Giusti was a career cavalryman. His job as commander of 1st Armored’s cavalry squadron (actually a battalion, but the cav had its own way of speaking) was to move out ahead of the division proper, locating the enemy and scouting out the land, being the eyes of Old Ironsides, but with enough combat power of its own to look after itself. A combat veteran of the Persian Gulf War, Giusti had smelled the smoke and seen the elephant. He knew what his job was, and he figured he had his troopers trained up about as well as circumstances in Germany allowed. He actually preferred the free-form play allowed by simulators to the crowded training fields of the Combat Maneuver Training Center, which was barely seventy-five square kilometers. It wasn’t the same as being out there in your vehicles, but neither was it restricted by time and distance, and on the global SimNet system you could play against a complete enemy battalion, even a brigade if you wanted your people to get some sweat in their play. Except for the bumpy-float sensation of driving your Abrams around (some tankers got motion sickness from that), it conveyed the complexity better than any place except the NTC at Fort Irwin in the California desert, or the comparable facility the Army had established for the Israelis in the Negev.

Diggs couldn’t quite read the younger officer’s mind, but he’d just watched the Quarter Horse move around with no lack of skill. They’d played against some Germans, and the Germans, as always, were pretty good at the war business-but not, today, as good as First Tanks’ cavalry troopers, who’d first outmaneuvered their European hosts, and then (to the surprise and distaste of the German brigadier who’d supervised the exercise) set an ambush that had cost them half a battalion of their Leos, as the Americans called the Leopard-II main battle tanks. Diggs would be having dinner with the brigadier later today. Even the Germans didn’t know night-fighting as well as the Americans did-which was odd, since their equipment was roughly comparable, and their soldiers pretty well trained … but the German army was still largely a conscript army, most of whose soldiers didn’t have the time-in-service the Americans enjoyed.

In the wider exercise-the cavalry part had just been the “real” segment of a wider command post exercise, or CPX–Colonel Don Lisle’s 2nd Brigade was handling the fuller, if theoretical, German attack quite capably. On the whole, the Bundeswehr was not having a good day. Well, it no longer had the mission of protecting its country against a Soviet invasion, and with that had gone the rather furious support of the citizenry that the West German army had enjoyed for so many years. Now the Bundeswehr was an anachronism with little obvious purpose, and the occupier of a lot of valuable real estate for which Germans could think up some practical uses. And so the former West German army had been downsized and mainly trained to do peacekeeping duty, which, when you got down to it, was heavily armed police work. The New World Order was a peaceful one, at least so far as Europeans were concerned. The Americans had engaged in combat operations to the rather distant interest of the Germans, who, while they’d always had a healthy interest in war-fighting, were now happy enough that their interest in it was entirely theoretical, rather like a particularly intricate Hollywood production. It also forced them to respect America