“No doubt about it. They’re getting ready to move, probably within the week. We have the 10th Cavalry in place in Kuwait. We have the 11th and the First Brigade of the North Carolina National Guard moving now. That’s all we can do for the moment. It won’t be till Friday at the earliest that we can cut any more units loose from the quarantine.”
“And that’s public information,” Ed Foley added.
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“Essentially, we’re deploying one division, a very heavy one, but only one,” Jackson concluded. “The Kuwait military is fully in the field. The Saudis are spinning up, too.”
“And the third brigade depends on getting the MPS ships past the Indian navy,” Secretary Bretano pointed out.
“We can’t do that,” Admiral DeMarco informed them. “We don’t have the combat power to fight our way through.”
Jackson didn’t reply to that. He couldn’t. The acting Chief of Naval Operations was his senior, despite what he thought of him.
“Look, Brucie,” Mickey Moore said, turning to look right at him, “my boys need those vehicles, or the Carolina Guard is gonna be facing an advancing enemy mechanized force with side arms. You blue-suits been telling us for years how ballsy those Aegis cruisers are. Put up or shut up, okay? By this time tomorrow, I’ll have fifteen thousand soldiers at risk.”
“Admiral Jackson,” the President said. “You’re Operations.”
“Mr. President, without air cover–”
“Can we do it or can’t we?” Ryan demanded.
“No,” DeMarco replied. “I won’t see ships wasted that way. Not without air cover.”
“Robby, I want your best judgment on this,” Secretary Bretano said.
“Okay.” Jackson took a breath. “They have a total of about forty Harriers. Nice airplanes, but not really high-performance. The escorting force has a total of maybe thirty surface-to-surface missiles. We don’t have to worry about a gunfight. Anzio currently carries seventy-five SAMs, fifteen Tomahawks, and eight harpoons. Kiddhas seventy SAMs, and eight Harpoons. O’Bannon isn’t a SAM ship. She just has point-defense weapons, but she has Harpoons, too. The two frigates that just joined up have about twenty SAMs each. Theoretically, they can fight through.”
“It’s too dangerous, Jackson! You don’t send a surface force against a carrier group by itself, ever!”
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“What if we shoot first?” Ryan asked. That caused heads to turn.
“Mr. President.” It was DeMarco again. “We don’t do that. We’re not even sure that they are hostile.”
“The ambassador thinks they are,” Bretano told them.
“Admiral DeMarco, that equipment has to be delivered,” the President said, his own face coloring up.
“The Air Force is deploying to Saudi now. Two extra days and we can deal with it, but until then–”
“Admiral, call your relief.” Secretary Bretano looked down at his briefing folder. “Your services are not needed here anymore. We don’t have two days to bicker.”
That was actually a violation of protocol. The Joint Chiefs were presidential appointments, and while they were titularly military advisers to the Secretary of Defense and the President, supposedly only the latter could ask one to resign. Admiral DeMarco looked to Ryan’s place in the center of the conference table.
“Mr. President, I have to give you my best feel for this.”
“Admiral, we have fifteen thousand men standing in harm’s way. You can’t tell us that the Navy will not support them. You are relieved of duty effective now,” the President said. “Good day.” The other uniformed Chiefs glanced at one another. This hadn’t happened before. “How long before contact with the Indians?” Ryan asked, moving on.
“About twenty-four hours, sir.”
“Any way we can provide additional support?”
“There’s a submarine there also, loaded with torpedoes and missiles. She’s about fifty miles in advance of Anzio,” Jackson said, as a stunned admiral and his aide left the room. “We can speed her up. That risks detection, but the Indians aren’t all that swift on ASW. She would be an offensive weapon, sir. Submarines can’t defend passively. They sink ships.”
“I think the Indian Prime Minister and I need to have a little chat,” POTUS observed. “After we get through them, then what?”
“Well, then we have to transit the strait and make it up to the unloading ports.”
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“That I can help you with,” the Air Force chief of staff promised. “We’ll have the F-16s in-country and in range for that part of the passage. The 366th Wing won’t be ready yet, but the boys from Israel will be.”
“We’re going to need that cover, General,” Jackson emphasized.
“Well, God damn, the Navy’s asking for help from us Air Scouts,” the Air Force said lightly, then turned serious. “We’ll kill every rag-head son of a bitch who gets in the air, Robby. Those forty-eight-16-Charlies are locked and cocked. As soon as you’re within a hundred miles of the Strait, you have a friend overhead.”
“Is it enough?” the President asked.
“Strictly speaking, no. The other side has four hundred top-of-the-line airplanes. When the 366th gets fully set up–in three days, minimum–we’ll have eighty fighters for air-to-air, but the Saudis aren’t bad. We have AW ACS in place. Your tanks will fight under a neutral sky at worst, Mickey.” The general checked his watch. “They should be getting off right about now.”
THE FIRST FLIGHT of four F-15C fighter-interceptors rotated aloft together. Twenty minutes later, they formed up with their KC-135R tankers. There were six of them from their own wing, and others would join from the Montana and North and South Dakota Air National Guard, their home states as yet untouched by the epidemic. For most of the way to the Arabian Peninsula, they’d hold position ten miles from the lead commercial aircraft coming out of California. The flight path took them north to the Pole, then over the hump and south toward Russia, continuing over Eastern Europe. West of Cyprus, they would be joined by an Israeli escort, which would convey them as far as Jordan. From there on, the American Eagle fighters would be augmented by Saudi F-15s. They might make the first few arrivals covertly, the planning officers thought in their own commercial transports, but if the other side woke up, then there would be an air battle. The pilots in the lead Eagle flight really didn’t mind that very much.
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There was no extraneous chatter on the radios as they saw dawn to their right. It would be a flight of two dawns. The next one would be to their left.
‘OKAY, LADIES AND gentlemen,” the public affairs officer told the fifteen assembled journalists. “Here’s the scoop. You have been called up for a military deployment. Sergeant Astor is now handing out consent forms. You will please sign them and hand them back.”
“What’s this?” one of them asked.
“You maybe want to try reading it?” the Marine colonel suggested from behind his mask.
“Blood test,” one muttered. “I guess so. But what about the rest?”
“Ma’am, those of you who sign the form will find out more. Those who do not will be driven home.” Curiosity won in every case. They all signed.
“Thank you.” The colonel examined all the forms. “Now if you will go through the door to your left, some Navy corpsmen are waiting for you.”
HE WAS PLEADING his own case. Though a member of the bar for thirty years, Ed Realty had been in a court of law only as a spectator, though on many occasions he’d stood on the steps of a courthouse to make a speech or announcement. It was always dramatic, and so was this.
“May it please the court,” the former Vice President began, “I stand here to request summary judgment. My right to cross a state line has been violated by the executive order of the President. This is contrary to explicit constitutional guarantees, and also to Supreme Court precedent, to wit, the Lemuel Penn case, in which the Court ruled unanimously …”
Pat Martin sat beside the Solicitor General, who would speak for the government. There was a camera from Court TV to send the case up and down via satellite into homes across the nation. It was a strange scene. The judge, the court reporter, the bailiff, all the attorneys, the ten reporters, and four spectators were all wearing surgical
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masks and rubber gloves. All had just seen Ed Kealty make the greatest political miscalculation of his career, though none had grasped it yet. Martin had come in anticipation of that very fact.
“Freedom of travel is central to all of the freedoms established and protected by the Constitution. The President has neither constitutional nor statutory authority to deny this freedom to the citizens, most particularly not by the application of armed force, which has already resulted in the death of a citizen, and the wounding of several others. This is a simple point of law,” Kealty was saying, half an hour later, “and on behalf of myself and our fellow citizens, I beg the court to set this illegal order aside.” With that, Edward J. Kealty took his place.