Executive Orders by Tom Clancy

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careful drinking the local water, that could explain the stomach discomfort. And he, too, went home with a bottle of aspirin, plus an over-the-counter medication for his GI problems, and presently MacGregor went off duty after one more routine day.

“MR. PRESIDENT? Ben Goodley coming through on the STU,” a sergeant told him. Then she showed him how the phones worked up front.

“Yeah, Ben?” Jack said.

“We have reports of a lot of Iraqi big shots getting put up against the wall. I’m faxing the report down to you. The Russians and the Israelis both confirm.” And on cue, another Air Force NCO appeared and handed Ryan three sheets of paper. The first one merely said TOP SECRET– PRESIDENT’S EYES ONLY, even though three or four communications types had seen it, and that was just in the airplane, now beginning its descent into Tinker.

“Got it now, let me read it.” He took his time, first scanning the report, then going back to the beginning for a slower read. “Okay, who’s going to be left?”

“Vasco says nobody worth mentioning. This is the entire Ba’ath Party leadership and all the remaining senior military commanders. That leaves nobody with status behind. Okay, the scary part comes from PALM BOWL, and–”

“Who’s this Major Sabah?”

“I called on that myself, sir,” Goodley replied. “He’s a Kuwaiti spook. Our people say he’s pretty swift. Vasco concurs in his assessment. It’s going down the track we were afraid of, and it’s going real fast.”

“Saudi response?” Ryan was jolted by a minor bump as the VC-25A came through some clouds. It looked to be raining outside.

“None yet. They’re still talking things over.”

“Okay, thanks for the heads-up, Ben. Keep me posted.”

“Will do, sir.”

Ryan put the phone back in its cradle and frowned.

“Trouble?” Arnie asked.

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“Iraq, it’s going fast. They’re executing people at a brisk clip at the moment.” The President handed the pages over to his chief of staff.

There was always a huge sense of unreality to it. The NSA report, as amended and augmented by C1A and others, gave a list of men. Had he been in his office, Ryan would also have looked at photos of men he’d never met, and now never would, because while he was descending into Oklahoma to give a nonpolitical political speech, the lives of the men on that list were ending–more likely already had. It was rather like listening to a ballgame on the radio, except in this game real people were being shot. Reality was coming to an end for human beings seven thousand miles away, and Ryan was hearing about it from radio intercepts made even farther away and relayed to him, and it was real, but at the same time not real. There was just something about distance which did that–and his surroundings. A hundred or so senior Iraqi officials are being shot–want a sandwich before you get off the airplane? The dualism might have been amusing except for the foreign-policy implications. No, that wasn’t true, either. There wasn’t anything funny about it at all.

“What are you thinking?” van Damm asked.

“I ought to be back at the office,” Ryan replied. “This is important, and I need to keep track of it.”

“Wrong!” Arnie said at once with a shake of the head and a pointing finger. “You are not the National Security Advisor anymore. You have people to do that for you. You’re the President, and you have a lot of things to do, and they’re all important. The President never gets tied down on one issue and he never gets trapped in the Oval Office. The people out there don’t want to see that. It means you’re not in control. It means events are controlling you. Ask Jimmy Carter about how great his second term was. Hell, this isn’t all that important.”

“It could be,” Jack protested, as the aircraft touched down.

“What’s important right now is your speech for the Sooner State.” He paused before going on. “It isn’t just charity that begins at home. It’s political power, too. It

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starts right out there.” He pointed out the windows, as Oklahoma slowed to a halt outside.

Ryan looked, but what he saw was the United Islamic Republic.

IT HAD ONCE been hard to enter the Soviet Union. There had been a vast organization called the Chief Border Guards Directorate of the Committee for State Security which had patrolled the fences–in some cases minefields and genuine fortifications, as well–with the dual purpose of keeping people both in and out, but these had long since fallen into disrepair, and the main purpose of the border checkpoints today was for the new crop of regional border guards to accept the bribes that came from smugglers who now used large trucks to bring their wares into the nation that had once been ruled with an iron hand in Moscow, but was now a collection of semi-independent republics that were mostly on their own in economic, and because of that, political terms as well. It hadn’t been planned that way. When he’d established the country’s central-planned economy, Stalin had made a deliberate effort to spread out production sites, so that each segment of the vast empire would depend for vital commodities upon every other, but he’d overlooked the discordant fact that if the entire economy went to pot, then needing something you couldn’t get from one source meant that you had to get it from another, and with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, smuggling, which had been well controlled under Communist rule, had become a genuine industry of its own. And with wares also came ideas, hard enough to stop, and impossible to tax.

The only thing lacking was a welcoming committee, but that wouldn’t have done. The corruption of the border guards went both ways. They might well have told their superiors about things while sharing the requisite percentage of the loot from their informal tariff collection, and so the representative merely sat in the right seat of the truck while the driver handled business–out the back of the truck in this case, an offer to the guards of a selection

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of his cargo. They weren’t the least bit greedy about it, instead taking little more than they could easily conceal in the back of their personal automobiles. (The only concession to the illegality of the entire business was that it took place at night.) With that, the proper stamps were affixed to the proper documents, and the truck pulled off, heading down the cross-border highway, which was probably the only decently surfaced road in the area. The remaining drive took a little over an hour, and then, entering the large town which had once serviced the caravan trade, the truck stopped briefly and the representative got out and walked to a private automobile to continue his journey, carrying only a small bag with a change of clothes or two.

The president of this semiautonomous republic claimed to be a Muslim, but he was mainly an opportunist, a former senior party official who as a matter of course had denied God regularly to ensure his political advancement and then, with the changing of the political wind, embraced Islam with public enthusiasm and private disinterest. His faith, if one could call it that, was entirely about his secular well-being. There were several passages in the Koran concerning such people, none of them flattering. He lived a comfortable life in a comfortable personal palace which had once quartered the party boss of this former Soviet republic. In that official residence, he drank liquor, fornicated, and ruled his republic with a hand that was by turns too firm and too gentle. Too firmly he controlled the regional economy (with his Communist training, he was hopelessly inept) and too gently he allowed Islam to flourish, so, he thought, to give his people the illusion of personal freedom (and in that he clearly misunderstood the nature of the Islamic Faith he professed to have, for Islamic law was written to apply to the secular as well as the spiritual). Like all presidents before him, he thought himself beloved of his people. It was, the representative knew, a common illusion of fools. In due course, the representative arrived at the modest private home of a friend of the local religious leader. This was a man of simple faith and quiet honor, beloved by all who knew him

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and disliked by no one, for his was a kindly voice in most things, and his occasional anger was founded on principles that even unbelievers could respect. In his middle fifties, he’d suffered at the hands of the previous regime, but never wavered in the strength of his beliefs. He was perfectly suited to the task at hand, and around him were his closest associates.

There were the usual greetings in God’s Holy Name, followed by the serving of tea, and then it was time for business.