Critical Mass (17 page)

“We believe that the threat in this document has substance. If we do not close our churches, there will be a further bomb. What I want to know is if this is what you call a credible threat?”

The president did what presidents must do, but only good ones do well. He made an educated guess. “Holiness, I can confirm that the document you have is authentic, and is almost certainly linked to the group that has detonated this weapon.”

When the pope’s voice returned, it was low, and now so thickly accented that Fitz could hardly understand. “We cannot close all churches.”

“It’s not in your power, anyway.”

“No, only the Catholic.” He paused. “Is there anything to be done?”

The president considered his answer. He had to communicate force and caution both. “We’re evaluating the situation. World leaders will be notified first, including Your Holiness.”

“God be with you, then.”

He hung up the phone. Millie came in and laid a color printout of the Mahdi’s Web page on Fitz’s desk. He fingered it, read it, read it again.

He went to the window, and watched the shafts of morning sun, gold and soft, spreading across the lawn. He wondered if he would be alive in fifteen minutes, or in ten . . . or one?

“Fitzie!”

Joy possessed him, followed immediately by as cold a dread as he had ever known, because his wife should not be here. Then the sound of her voice shot a bolt of memory straight into the depths of his mind. He saw her in girlhood, when they had been kids together, saw her in the tree house with little boxes of cereal and milk she had brought for a picnic, holding them while he kissed her and she turned away from him, her eyes as sharp as crystal, her cheeks red. She had a dusting of freckles then.

Tall, proud, her blond hair swinging, she strode to him. But her eyes did not have that crystal sharpness in them now. Her eyes were terrible. She had been crying, and doing it a lot.

He opened his arms and she flew in, and he said, with all the determination he could force into his voice, “Get out of here.”

She looked up at him. Briefly there was the old twinkle there. Then it was gone. “Not gonna happen, buddy.”

He kissed her.

Logan hovered. “Sir?”

Fitz drew back, taking her taste with him.

“Sir, your meeting’s here.”

“Let’s roll.”

The Joint Chiefs came trooping in, and the intelligence chiefs, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the military secretaries.

“Gentlemen,” Fitz asked, “can we carry out Dream Angel?”

Air Force Secretary Hobbes said, “The planes are already in the air, Sir.”

Fitz looked at the faces of the assembled men, and of his wife and now also, he saw, his son and daughter, who stood in the back of the crowded room.

Dream Angel was the most fearsome military operation ever conceived. Over a thirty-hour period, it would deliver 1,750 W101 neutron bombs across all areas on the planet controlled by Muslim fundamentalists. At least, this was the theory. But Fitz knew military planning and its accuracy. He’d been a young congressman when a U.S. smart bomb had blown up the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. One thing was certain—wherever the bombs actually exploded, they would certainly kill an almost inconceivable number of human beings.

“Very well,” he said.

Planes and cruise missiles would deliver the ordnance. From Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, the affected areas of the world would literally be depopulated. The expected death rate was so high that there was an environmental impact assessment that discussed the climatic effects of the huge amount of methane that would be released by the decaying corpses.

“Do we go?”

The question, raised by Air Force General Alfred Mandell, hung in the silence.

Fitz wished that he could raise the question of the penetration. But how could he? Once he reaches office, a president learns very quickly why such a massive intelligence organization is needed. Presidential power extends only as far as presidential knowledge. For example, they were helpless right now because they didn’t know anything about this so-called Mahdi, and even more helpless because of this catastrophic security issue.

“What fools we mortals be,” Fitz said. He looked at Webb Morgath, who literally twisted in his seat on the uneasy end of a couch. “Webb, can we narrow this thing down? Who’s the Mahdi?”

“Sir, I don’t have that information.”

“Do you know why?”

“We have the website—we know that it was set up on a server at a Japanese university, but that’s all we know.”

“Japan,” Fitz said softly, tasting the history in the word: T
j
ruining the country, then people bowing to MacArthur’s car as it passed, now Toyota and Honda standing astride the industrial economy of the planet.

The world, as it existed now, was an outcome of American victories in
World War II and over the Soviet Union, and American foreign policy since.

But all policy is based on knowledge, and Fitz’s knowledge right now was compromised. He knew that Las Vegas had been nuked. He knew that this had happened, almost certainly, because U.S. security assets were being used or neutralized by the enemy. He knew that somebody who called himself the Mahdi had taken responsibility for the bombing. But he did not know if Dream Angel would work, and for a very specific reason. “So what happens if this attack isn’t coordinated from within the target areas? We execute Dream Angel and it doesn’t help?”

“Sir,” Secretary of Defense Mike Ryland said, “with all due respect, that isn’t the issue. The issue is spreading terror a thousandfold greater among the Muslims than they can deliver to us. Break their will.”

Fitz’s phone rang. Every eye turned toward it. All knew the same thing—Millie would never put through a call at a time like this unless it was terribly, terribly urgent.

He picked it up. “Yes?” He listened, then put it down. “Mosques are being set fire to all over the world. The UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, India—a huge backlash.” Then he added, “It’s working both ways. In Cairo and Beirut, they’re driving through the streets of Christian neighborhoods, machine-gunning people at random. In St. Louis and Atlanta and Mobile, mosques are burning. A man walked down a street in Seattle, shooting men with moustaches. A Sikh was strangled with his turban in a Dallas shopping mall while a crowd applauded and cheered.”

“We need to deploy the Guard,” Ryland said.

“Let it run,” Webb countered. “Let the energy dissipate now or it’ll be worse later.”

“No.” A voice from the back, tiny with unease. Polly. Fitz sought his daughter with his eyes. She looked back at him from as if from another dimension, her gaze resplendent with the unquenchable hope of youth, her mother’s proud lips, determined, supremely confident that her dad was the great man she believed him to be.

“Here are my decisions,” he said. “I am federalizing the National Guard in every state except Nevada, under provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2007. I am declaring that a state of martial law exists in the United States, and I am ordering the armed forces to DEFCON 1, with the specification that nuclear weapons must be mounted and armed at once.
I am further commanding that any aircraft without specific military authorization found in flight in the United States, day or night, are to be shot down without warning. I am closing the borders, and please inform the Mexican and Canadian embassies that anyone crossing will be shot on sight until further notice, with regrets; I’m sure they’ll understand.” He stopped.

There was silence. He knew why. All of the above was expected. It was another order that they were waiting to hear.

He looked again from face to face. Briefly his wife’s eyes touched his. He went on. His daughter’s pleaded. Brave girl—until a month ago she’d been working at an AIDS mission in Botswana. She knew all too well the suffering of the third world and therefore the agony that Dream Angel would cause.

“Very well,” he said. “Now listen. I am going to communicate to the vice president that it is my recommendation that Dream Angel be enacted if Washington, D.C., is destroyed. Is that understood?”

Polly shook her head back and forth, back and forth, so hard that the only sound in the room was that of her hair swishing. Her face had gone bright red. He could see tears flying.

Then they all erupted. “Mr. President!” “Fitz!” “Sir!” All of them, their voices furious.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Not be a damn coward!” General Mandell blurted.

“That’s out of line, General.” Fitz knew that there could be a coup. He knew that the entire government could fly apart on this morning like an overwound spring.

Mandell saluted him. “Sorry, Sir.”

“What I am looking at is threats that originated in Finland and Japan. Not in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Pakistan.” He took a deep breath. “And I am looking at something else.” He glanced toward Logan. “That I cannot discuss, even in this room.

“What I can say is this. Power—world power—is gone from our hands. While we’ve been listening in on the pillow talk of the princes, the little guy has come up from the kitchen and stolen the damn silverware.”

“Mr. President, that’s defeatism.”

“Shut your mouth, Ryland. You’re a damn fool! Fifty years ago, we had divisions to fight against. Waves of Chinese soldiers to cut down in Korea, columns of tanks to blow up. Then came Vietnam, and that was a little different.
A sort of army that came and went in the shadows. Then 9/11 and Iraq, and we were fighting ragtag Bedouins, disorganized and sparse on the ground, but far more effective than the Vietcong. But now where are we? Warfare has gone from divisions to individuals to . . . nobody. The virtual state. So you expect me to kill ten percent of the world’s population—just to be sure we
don’t miss
?”

Now the chorus of complaints rose to a roar, and there was menace in it. He saw bulging eyes. He saw spit in the shouting throats.

“Hear me out!”

They fell silent.

“If we carry out Dream Angel, and afterward we are still under nuclear threat, as I am sure we will be, we might have to surrender—”

There was an explosion of voices. He held up his hands. Sought them with his eyes. He regained control of the room . . . barely.

“Face this. It’s reality. What if they do another city, and then tell us they have more, and will do worse? What we do then is surrender. And that can happen
after
we execute Dream Angel.”

“You’re talking about Western civilization,” Polly said, the youth in her voice almost taking Fitz’s breath away. “We can’t surrender.”

But they could, if they were beaten, and he knew it. They would have to. “If we execute Dream Angel and we destroy all those countries, and we miss the leaders of this thing, then they could end up in control anyway. They will punish our people terribly for our actions. We’ll be marked as a nation of war criminals, cursed for a thousand years.”

Fitz had seen many men break, and they broke all in the same way. There was a stillness; then the shoulders dropped, then the head. He saw his secretary of defense break. “Trust my decision, Mike.”

Ryland looked at him. Looked him up and down. Fitz had brought him in because he was hard. A tough, brilliant man with a history in the military, in business.

“You are saying that we’ve lost.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Fitz, we need to retaliate.”

Fitz put his hand on Ryland’s shoulder. “I want you to say to me, ‘We need to kill two hundred million people.’ You say that.”

“We need to kill these terrorists!”

“
Who?
Who in hell do you mean?” He glared toward the intelligence
chiefs, who stood together near the door, as if they wanted to escape. “With all your equipment, all those damned listening devices, all those brilliant agents, you can’t tell me a thing. You know when Assad jacks off or Putin blows his nose,
so who is this Mahdi? Where is he
?”

“Sir—”

“We’ve thrown away billions watching the embassies and the palaces. And what do we have? Not one damn thing!”

Millie gestured from the doorway to her office. The media was ready.

“We’re done here,” he said.