trial, we still won’t be off the hook. You know, I’ve got a very
unpleasant feeling that we haven’t heard the last of either one of these
affairs … Margolis or Pellet.”
Tombstone nodded slowly. “I’m afraid I have to agree, sir.”
CHAPTER 16
Saturday, 14 March
0915 hours EST (Zulu -5)
White House Situation Room
Washington, D.C.
Admiral Thomas Magruder took his seat in the White House Situation Room.
As a special Presidential Advisor on military matters, he’d been here
plenty of times before. Ordered constructed by President Kennedy right
after the Bay of Pigs, the carpeted, concrete-walled room in the White
House basement was not as large, as glamorous, or as high-tech as
popular fiction usually described it. There were hidden television
screens behind wood-paneled cupboards, yes, and the room next door was
filled with telex machines, a crypto unit, facsimile machines, and
secure telephones.
For most high-level briefings, though, the President used a second
Situation Room located in Room 208 of the Executive Office Building, the
same room, in fact, from which Secretary of State Cordell Hull had
ejected the Japanese envoys on December 7, 1941. Variously called the
Crisis Management Center and the Situation Room Support Facility, it was
large enough for all of the President’s principal officers and their
aides.
As a matter of course, however, the President’s senior aides and cabinet
officers used the original White House basement Sit Room to discuss
specific strategies before going upstairs to brief the President. The
current President, while not as anti-military as some of his more
liberal White House cabinet officers, was less than fully knowledgeable
about military affairs.
Rather than sitting in on military and intelligence briefings, the
President preferred to have his National Security Advisor, Herbert T.
Waring, chair the meeting instead, then brief him afterward.
Magruder leaned back in his chair, glumly studying the American and
Presidential flags flanking a curtained screen at the far end of the
room.
There’d been a lot of changes in the U.S. military during the past few
years, and in his opinion, none of them were good.
Since 1991, the military had been called upon to fill a rapidly
expanding role in policing a world that reverberated with the ongoing
death throes of the old Communist empire. There’d been the Gulf War
with a state originally armed and trained by the old U.S.S.R., a war
possible only because the Soviets under Gorbachev had been willing to
turn a blind eye to what was happening in Iraq in exchange for a free
hand in suppressing the popular revolutions in the Baltics. Then had
come the coup, and the breakup of the Soviet Union despite the Black
Berets’ attacks against Baltic nationalism. By the end of the year, the
Communist flag had been lowered above the Kremlin for the last time …
or at least, so everyone had thought. The Cold War was over, and the
calls to drastically pare back an unnecessary American military had
begun.
Somehow it hadn’t worked out that way, though. There’d been Somalia and
Bosnia and continued trouble in Iraq. A Marine foray into North Korea
to rescue the crew of a Navy intelligence ship taken hostage. A coup in
Thailand backed by renegade Chinese Communists. A war between Pakistan
and India that might have gone nuclear without intervention by an
American carrier task force.
And finally, the year before, there’d been the neo-Soviet coup and the
invasion of Scandinavia.
Both the press and the U.S. government were carefully avoiding calling
that bloody fracas World War III. The neo-Soviets, needing a war to
secure their own power base at home, had tried to snap up Scandinavia in
a quick military adventure while a fragmenting NATO argued about what to
do. The heroic stand by the U.S.S. Jefferson and her CBG had stopped
the Russians in their tracks off Norway, but still the Russian giant was
threatening to drag the rest of the world into final Armageddon.
Now it was a civil war being fought on a ragged line all the way from
Minsk to Vladivostok, one that already had engulfed Belarus, Ukraine,
and Kazakhstan and might well soon involve China, North Korea, and most
of Europe as well … and if that wasn’t a world war, Admiral Magruder