The door opened as though by magic to let the NIO out—a Secret Service agent had done that, having watched through the spy hole for most of the briefing. The next in was a DOD briefing team.
The senior man was a two-star who handed over a plastic card.
'Mr. President, you need to put this in your wallet.'
Jack nodded, knowing what it was before his hands touched the orange plastic. It looked like a credit card, but on it was a series of number groups….
'Which one?' Ryan asked.
'You decide, sir.'
Ryan did so, reading off the third such group twice. There were two commissioned officers with the general, a colonel and a major, both of whom wrote down the number group he'd selected and read it back to him twice. President Ryan now had the ability to order the release of strategic nuclear weapons.
'Why is this necessary?' he asked. 'We trashed the last ballistic weapons last year.'
'Mr. President, we still have cruise missiles which can be armed with W-80 warheads, plus B-61 gravity bombs assigned to our bomber fleet. We need your authorization to enable the Permissible Action Links—the PALs —and the idea is that we enable them as early as possible, just in case—'
Ryan completed the sentence: 'I get taken out early.'
You're really important now, Jack, a nasty little voice told him. Now you can initiate a nuclear attack. 'I hate those goddamned things. Always have.'
'You aren't supposed to like them, sir,' the general sympathized. 'Now, as you know, the Marines have the VMH-1 helicopter squadron that's always ready to get you out of here and to a place of safety at a moment's notice, and…'
Ryan listened to the rest while his mind wondered if he should do what Jimmy Carter had done at this point: Okay, let's see, then. Tell them I want them to pick me up NOW. Which presidential command had turned into a major embarrassment for a lot of Marines. But he couldn't do that now, could he? It would get out that Ryan was a paranoid fool, not someone who wanted to see if the system really worked the way people said it would. Besides, today VMH-1 would definitely be spun up, wouldn't it?
The fourth member of the briefing team was an Army warrant officer in civilian clothes who carried a quite ordinary-looking briefcase known as 'the football,' inside of which was a binder, inside of which was the attack plan—actually a whole set of them…
'Let me see it.' Ryan pointed. The warrant hesitated, then unlocked the case and handed over the navy blue binder, which Ryan flipped open.
'Sir, we haven't changed it since—'
The first section, Jack saw, was labeled MAJOR ATTACK OPTION. It showed a map of Japan, many of whose cities were marked with multicolored dots. The legend at the bottom showed what the dots meant in terms of delivered megatonnage; probably another page would quantify the predicted deaths. Ryan opened the binder rings and removed the whole section. 'I want these pages burned. I want this MAO eliminated immediately.' That merely meant that it would be filed away in some drawer in Pentagon War Plans, and also in Omaha. Things like this never died.
'Sir, we have not yet confirmed that the Japanese have destroyed all of their launchers, nor have we confirmed the neutralization of their weapons. You see—'
'General, that's an order,' Ryan said quietly. 'I can give them, you know.'
The man's back braced to attention. 'Yes, Mr. President.'
Ryan flipped through the rest of the binder. Despite his previous job, what he found was a revelation. Jack had always avoided too-intimate knowledge of the damned things. He'd never expected them to be used. After the terrorist incident in Denver and all the horror that had swept the surface of the planet in its aftermath, statesmen across continents and political beliefs had indulged themselves in a collective think about the weapons under their control. Even during the shooting war with Japan just ended, Ryan had known that somewhere, some team of experts had concocted a plan for a nuclear retaliatory strike, but he'd concentrated his efforts at making it unnecessary, and it was a source of considerable pride to the new President that he'd never even contemplated implementing the plan whose summary was still in his left hand. LONG RIFLE, he saw, was the code name. Why did the names have to be like that, virile and exciting, as though for something that one could be proud of?
'What's this one? LIGHT SWITCH…?'
'Mr. President,' the general answered, 'that's a method of using an EMP attack. Electromagnetic pulse. If you explode a device at very high altitude, there's nothing—no air, actually—to absorb the initial energy of the detonation and convert it into mechanical energy—no shock wave, that is. As a result all the energy goes out in its original electromagnetic form. The resulting energy surge is murder on power and telephone lines. We always had a bunch of weapons fused for high-altitude burst in our SIOPs for the Soviet Union. Their telephone system was so primitive that it would have been easy to destroy. It's a cheap mission-kill, won't really hurt anybody on the ground.'
'I see.' Ryan closed the binder and handed it back to the warrant officer, who immediately locked the now- lighter document away. 'I take it there's nothing going on which is likely to require a nuclear strike of any kind?'
'Correct, Mr. President.'
'So, what's the point of having this man sitting outside my office all the time?'
'You can't predict all possible contingencies, can you, sir?' the general asked. It must have been difficult for him to deliver the line with a straight face, Ryan realized, as soon as the shock went away.
'I guess not,' a chastised President replied.
THE WHITE HOUSE Protocol Office was headed by a lady named Judy Simmons, who'd been seconded to the White House staff from the State Department four months earlier. Her office in the basement of the building had been busy since just after midnight, when she'd arrived from her home in Burke, Virginia. Her thankless job was to prepare arrangements for what would be the largest state funeral in American history, a task on which over a hundred staff members had already kibitzed, and it was not yet lunch time.
The list of all the dead still had to be compiled, but from careful examination of the videotapes it was largely known who was in the chamber, and there was biographical information on all of them—married or single, religion, etc. — from which to make the necessary, if preliminary, plans. Whatever was finally decided, Jack would be the master of the grim ceremony, and had to be kept informed of every step of the planning. A funeral for thousands, Ryan thought, most of whom he hadn't known, for most of whose as yet unrecovered bodies waited wives and husbands and children.
'National Cathedral,' he saw, turning the page. The approximate numbers of religious affiliations had been compiled. That would determine the clergy to take the various functions in the ecumenical religious service.
'That's where such ceremonies are usually carried out, Mr. President,' a very harried official confirmed. 'There will not be room for all of the remains' — she didn't say that one White House staffer had suggested an outdoor memorial service at RFK Stadium in order to accommodate all the victims—'but there will be room for the President and Mrs. Durling, plus a representative sampling of the congressional victims. We've contacted eleven foreign governments on the question of the diplomats who were present. We also have a preliminary list of foreign- government representatives who will be coming in to attend the ceremony.' She handed over that sheet as well.
Ryan scanned it briefly. It meant that after the memorial service he'd be meeting «informally» with numerous chiefs of state to conduct «informal» business. He'd need a briefing page for each meeting, and in addition to whatever they all might ask or want, every one would be checking him out. Jack knew how that worked. All over the world, presidents, prime ministers, and a few lingering dictators would now be reading briefing documents of their own—who was this John Patrick Ryan, and what can we expect of him? He wondered if they had a better idea of the answer than he did. Probably not. Their NIOs wouldn't be all that different from his, after all. And so a raft of them would come over on government jets, partly to show respect for President Durling and the American government, partly to eyeball the new American President, partly for domestic political consumption at home, and partly because it was expected that they should do so. And so this event, horrific as it was for uncounted thousands, was just one more mechanical exercise in the world of politics. Jack wanted to cry out in rage, but what else was there to do? The dead were dead, and all his grief could not bring them back, and the business of his country and others would go on.
