Trigger Point (24 page)
THAT VETERANS’ DAY weekend, the country was in a kind of shock. The markets, of course, were closed. For a brief respite of forty-eight hours, the financial catastrophe wasn’t the thing on everyone’s mind. Instead, it was the horrendous death of one man called Harley Gauss – one man who suddenly seemed to be everyone’s son, or father, or brother.
Tom Knowles had spoken to the families of fallen soldiers before. He had met them, had stood beside them at funerals with flag-draped coffins. As Nevada governor and as president. Men who had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Colombia, the Philippines. But not one of them had died like Harley Gauss.
He spoke to them on Saturday morning, less than twenty-four hours after the events. First there was a call to a pair of grieving parents in Roseville, California, the mother and father of Jack Duffey, the pilot who had died on impact in Uganda. He assured them their son had died in a good cause. He expressed his admiration for his bravery, commitment, loyalty and patriotism. He gave thanks on behalf of the entire country for his sacrifice. He told them it was only fine young men and women like their son who kept safe the freedom and liberty that other Americans enjoyed. He listened to them say the things they needed to say, listened as the pain came out. They talked. Those were the easy calls, he had learned, the ones where the relatives talked. The hard ones were the calls where the relatives were silent, and you found yourself talking into a vacuum, sounding more grotesque and platitudinous with each word you uttered. He told the parents he would bring their boy back and there was a place for him in Arlington, among heroes, if that was where they wanted him to rest. They thanked him at the end. That always got him, the way people thanked him at the end.
Then there was the second call. This one was to a young widow in Jacksonville, North Carolina.
The words were harder to say. As he spoke he kept seeing that video, seeing those twitching legs. He wondered if she had seen it too but didn’t dare to ask. He could only hope that she hadn’t. She didn’t speak, just emitted a flat, toneless, ‘yes, sir’. Nothing else came back, nothing but a sense of great emptiness, a great, disbelieving emptiness on the other end of the phone.
‘Mrs Gauss, Cindy, we will get the people who did this thing. Ma’am, we will bring these people to justice.’ He had tears in his eyes.
He didn’t know what to say next. That her husband had died quick? He hadn’t. That he had served his country well and honorably? He had said that already. That no one deserved to be clubbed to death in the middle of the jungle by a gang of barbarian killers? Yes, but what kind of comfort was that?
‘Ma’am, we will bring him back to Arlington. We will bring him back to Arlington and lay him to rest.’
‘Yes, sir.’
He didn’t know what else to say. But it wasn’t enough.
‘Cindy, have you got people looking after you? They taking care of you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m going to get my private secretary to give you a number. You need to speak to me, you call that number. You call me direct.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We’re going to bring him back, Cindy.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
AFTER THE CALLS, Knowles held a Saturday StratCom in the Oval Office. There was general agreement that they had to go on the offensive. The week that had started with an apparent deal to save Fidelian on the eve of the election had turned into an unalloyed catastrophe – financially, politically, and now militarily. Through the week their tone had become defensive. They had to change that or there would be a collapse of confidence in the administration. If the president was seen to be acting calmly and strongly on each of these fronts, with robust purpose and clear intent, the American people would come back in behind him. Horrible as it was, the killing of Harley Gauss gave him an opportunity to do that. The crisis in the markets looked like incompetence. The Midterm Massacre, as the press had termed the November 6 elections, looked like fragility. But a bare four days after the election, the killing of Harley Gauss had made that term unusable. With the brutal murder of a disarmed airman, America felt itself under attack. When the country was under attack, people wanted to support their president. They didn’t want to hear partisan bickering and watch people taking shots at the commander in chief. Ed Abrahams argued that they could stretch that support to include the president’s handling of the financial crisis if they could craft the right lines. But they had to seize the moment. It was time to lead.
Ruiz-Kellerman, with results of polling from the previous day – this was even before the Harley Gauss video appeared – said there was a strong appetite to see the president taking more direct control. People were sick of seeing Ron Strickland and Susan Opitz. They hadn’t voted for either of those two people. They had voted for Thomas Paxton Knowles. They wanted to see the man they had put in the White House.
Knowles spoke to Jack Harris, the chairman of the Republican Party, and to the congressional majority leaders. They gave him the same message.
The Veterans’ Day speech that he would be giving the following day gave him the perfect platform. It would need to be completely rewritten. Through the day, Josh Bentner and another speechwriter worked on the address. They struggled to combine references to the president’s handling of the financial crisis with the almost sacred solemnity required on this tragic Veterans’ Day. At around 2pm Bentner showed a first draft to Ed Abrahams.
‘What are you doing?’ demanded Abrahams. ‘He doesn’t need to say a word about the markets. All he needs to do is show that he’s a statesman. He needs to show that he can feel our pain and lift us up. For Christ’s sake, Josh! What’s wrong with you? Poetry, not prose! He’s the commander in fucking chief, not an economics professor! Make him look like it.’
The next morning Knowles flew to New York for the Veterans’ Day event. Sarah accompanied him. This year, the hundredth anniversary of the original Armistice Day in 1918 when the guns of World War One fell silent, he had chosen to make his speech at the docks in New York City from which so many of the two million Americans who sailed to Europe in the last year of that conflict, and of the hundred thousand who never returned, embarked on their voyage. It was a bright November Sunday in Manhattan, and the sun glinted on the medals of the veterans sitting in front of him, medals from Georgia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, even a few on the chests of snowy-headed veterans of World War Two, the dwindling remnant of their generation. As Knowles read the speech, with the events of the previous two days present in everyone’s mind, and the knowledge that two American servicemen were at that moment in the custody of the same people who had already killed one of their comrades, the poignancy was almost unbearable. On more than one occasion there was a hoarseness in his throat. In the audience he could see old men putting handkerchiefs to their eyes. And young men too.
The final words were too sentimental perhaps. At another time, he would have had Bentner tone them down. But this time, he felt they were right. He really felt they were true. So did everyone who worked on the speech. When the time came to speak to them, the emotion in his voice was real.
‘Each year, on this day, we remember. And when we remember, the pain of loss – whether it is a day ago, or a century ago – reminds us why we are here. The hurt we feel lights the path through the shadow to what we must do. America is never stronger, never brighter, never more of a beacon to the world than when the darkness in the world tries to snuff that beacon out. It will never be extinguished. We burn the more strongly and more passionately. We rise up to do the good work.’ He paused. ‘God bless this country. God bless America.’
AT THE WHITE HOUSE that night, after flying back from New York, Knowles watched the Sunday night football game with Ed Abrahams over a beer. The St Louis Rams were playing the Philadelphia Eagles. He ordered up a couple of pizzas.
St Louis was having it easy. 23 to 6 in the third quarter. The Eagles defense was a shambles.
He glanced at Ed. ‘We hear anything from Susan about when she’s talking to that Chinese finance minister?’
It felt that it was long ago that they had made the decision to have the Treasury secretary talk to her Chinese counterpart, but it was only two days previously.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Abrahams. ‘First thing.’
‘You think they’ll make a statement?’
‘They’ll probably hold on a few days. I wouldn’t expect it right away. By the way, Gary tells me it might be Liang, the Chinese premier, who makes it. Zhang uses him to say things he’d rather not say himself. Doesn’t matter anyway. Everyone knows he’s Zhang’s mouthpiece so the effect would be the same. Once they say something, we can draw a line under it. They can say it was a commercial decision. They can say they didn’t interfere one way or the other. Whatever lie they like. The markets will know they’ve got the message.’
‘They’d better say something.’
‘Zhang’s made his point now, whatever the hell that was. He doesn’t want to see the markets in a real crisis any more than we do.’
Knowles took a sip on his beer and swallowed it thoughtfully, reflecting on the last couple of days. The reaction to his speech today had been just what he wanted. The commentators were saying it was strong, statesmanlike, leaderly. Dean Moss had been briefing hard to talk that angle up.
He turned to Abrahams. ‘You know, Ed, I agree with your strategy. This is the time to stop being defensive, be strong, show our own agenda. But that’s just talk. Stuff’s got to happen. If we don’t get our guys back soon, it’s going to be hard.’ Knowles paused. ‘We’re going to have hell if we don’t have them back for Thanksgiving.’
Abrahams grimaced. ‘Let’s not set any deadlines. We’ll crucify ourselves.’
‘You think we should replace Pressler?’
Abrahams looked at Knowles in surprise. ‘Replacing a commander in the field isn’t a small thing. The military’ll go postal.’
‘Yeah. Hale is just as fucking bad. Maybe I should replace him as well.’ Knowles watched the screen. St Louis threw another touchdown pass. ‘You see that? You ever seen a defense like that? It’s a Swiss cheese it’s got so many holes.’
‘Tom. This is okay. You’re at the halfway point of your first term. You have plenty of time to deal with this stuff.’
Knowles looked at him.
‘Plenty of time.’
‘You think I should cancel the CSS?’
‘And do what?’ said Abrahams.
The Caribbean Storm Summit was a meeting of the thirty-four Caribbean countries due to take place the following week to discuss action on hurricane activity, which was getting steadily more severe with climate change. Ostensibly its objective was to develop provisions for mutual emergency help. In reality it was a forum at which everyone else extracted funds from the US for storm recovery projects.
‘Walt could go,’ said Knowles. ‘I’m not sure I should be out of Washington.’
‘That doesn’t fit with the image you presented today.’
‘That image said I was going to deal with the problems here, not go off to Cancun to hand out a couple of billion dollars to our wonderful neighbors.’
‘I disagree. That image said I’m the president and I’m still leading this country and damn anyone who doesn’t think so, I’m still in charge. The CSS is part of being president.’ Abrahams sat his big bulk forward. ‘Tom, we get this stuff dealt with, we put it behind us. In two years, all people will remember is the way you
dealt
with it. Picked up the ball, ran with it, slam dunk.’ Abrahams slapped one hand against the other. ‘Every president has to do this. You have to show you can deal with it. That’s what makes you the Chief. That’s what makes you the man. It makes you more re-electable, not less.’
Knowles was silent for a moment. ‘Ed, you don’t feel the responsibility like I do. You weren’t the one who sent those guys into Uganda.’
‘Tom, I know that.’
Knowles gazed into his beer. ‘Nothing else I’ve done haunts me like that.’ He looked at Abrahams. ‘I feel sick just thinking about it. It was like watching some kind of animal being killed. Who’d even kill an animal like that? What kind of people would even kill an animal like that?’
‘That’s why what we’re doing is right.’
‘I know that. Doesn’t make it easier. And now we’ve got hostages. I think hostages, I think Jimmy Carter. I think one-term president and you spend the rest of your life fucking monitoring elections.’
‘Tom, it’s all about how you handle it. It’s not hostages as such, it’s how you deal with it. Look at the history. The Teheran hostages killed Carter, but the Beirut hostages didn’t touch Ronald Reagan. Right? And why did it kill Carter? Because he let it define him. Because he locked himself away in the Oval Office and turned into a hostage himself. Ronald Reagan just kept on smiling and taking his afternoon naps and allowed the most unscrupulous things to happen to get our people back. Now, canceling the CSS, sitting here in the White House worrying about it – because God knows there’s nothing more you can do –
that’s
how you turn yourself into Jimmy Carter.’
Knowles took another swig of his beer, thinking about it.
‘Tom, I’m not saying the stuff that’s happened in the last week is good. We sure could use more than forty-nine senators. But it’s happened. In a four-year term some bad things are bound to happen. True, we could have had better timing. But the one thing you do have now is the chance to show you’re a strong president. And that’s a good thing. So out of this very bad stuff comes at least one thing that’s good.’ Abrahams paused, watching the president. ‘Tom, this right now is the defining week of your presidency. When historians look back on your first term, they’re going to see that this was the moment you showed what you were made of. You looked right into Zhang’s eyes and you faced him down. You gave comfort to the nation after the brutal killing of one of its soldiers and made sure the others were returned. You dealt with a financial crisis and turned it into a platform for growth. This is the week. A week from now, Zhang’s made his statement, the markets are settled, Fidelian turns out to be just one bad bank, with a bit of luck we’ll have our two guys back, and you’re the hero.’
‘Just like that?’
Abrahams smiled. ‘Why not? Who could have said how bad this week was going to be?’
Knowles laughed.
‘Just don’t expect anything from Zhang right away.’
SUSAN OPITZ SPOKE to the Chinese finance minister the following morning. There was no statement from the Chinese president or his deputy that day. Or the day after. The markets remained uncertain, volatile, prey to disinformation and rumor that sent stocks of individual companies down and up and down again. The whereabouts of the missing airmen remained unknown. On Wednesday the president went to the CSS and pledged annual storm relief funds of two billion for the region. The press attacked him for the sum being either too much or too little.
There was still no statement from Zhang, but there was news from another source. Defense intelligence had received a report, of uncertain reliability, that the two missing Apache airmen were alive and had been transported across the Ugandan border into Sudan.
No one outside the highest levels of the Pentagon and the White House was being informed until the report was checked further. Everyone else was outside the loop, including the State Department.