Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [7]
"I wonder how the office is doing."
"Probably conjuring up a plan for the invasion of Bangladesh," Jack said, looking up and reentering the conversation.
"That was last week," Jackson said with a grin.
"How do they manage without us?" Cathy wondered aloud, probably worrying about a patient.
"Well, concert season doesn't start for me until next month," Sissy observed.
"Mmmm," Ryan noted, looking back down at his plate, wondering how he was going to break the news.
"Jack, I know," Cathy finally said. "You're not good at hiding it."
"Who—"
"She asked where you were," Robby said from across the table. "A naval officer can't lie."
"Did you think I'd be mad?" Cathy asked her husband.
"Yes."
"You don't know what he's like," Cathy told the others. "Every morning, gets his paper and grumbles. Every night, catches the news and grumbles. Every Sunday, watches the interview shows and grumhles. Jack," she said quietly, "do you think I could ever stop doing surgery?"
"Probably not, but it's not the same—"
"No, it's not, but it's the same for you. When do you start?" Caroline Ryan asked.
1—Alumni
There was a university somewhere in the Midwest, Jack had once heard on the radio, which had an instrument package designed to go inside a tornado.
Each spring, graduate students and a professor or two staked out a likely swath of land, and on spotting a tornado, tried to set the instrument package, called "Toto"—what else?—directly in the path of the onrushing storm. So far they had been unsuccessful. Perhaps they'd just picked the wrong place, Ryan thought, looking out the window to the leafless trees in Lafayette Park.
The office of the President's National Security Advisor was surely cyclonic enough for anyone's taste, and, unfortunately, much easier for people to enter.
"You know," Ryan said, leaning back in his chair, "it was supposed to be a lot simpler than this." And I thought it would be, he didn't add.
"The world had rules before," Scott Adler pointed out. "Now it doesn't."
"How's the President been doing, Scott?"
"You really want the truth?" Adler asked, meaning, We are in the White House, remember? and wondering if there really were tape machines covering this room. "We screwed up the Korean situation, but we lucked out. Thank God we didn't screw up Yugoslavia that badly, because there just isn't any luck to be had in that place. We haven't been handling Russia very well. The whole continent of Africa's a dog's breakfast. About the only thing we've done right lately was the trade treaty—"
"And that doesn't include Japan and China," Ryan finished for him.
"Hey, you and I fixed the Middle East, remember? That's working out fairly nicely."
"Hottest spot right now?" Ryan didn't want praise for that. The "success" had developed some very adverse consequences, and was the prime reason he had left government service.
"Take your pick," Adler suggested. Ryan grunted agreement.
"SecState?"
"Hanson? Politician," replied the career foreign-service officer. And a proud one at that, Jack reminded himself. Adler had started off at State right after graduating number one in his Fletcher School class, then worked his way up the career ladder through all the drudgery and internal politics that had together claimed his first wife's love and a good deal of his hair. It had to be love of country that kept him going, Jack knew. The son of an Auschwitz survivor, Adler cared about America in a way that few could duplicate. Better still, his love was not blind, even now that his current position was political and not a career rank. Like Ryan, he served at the pleasure of the President, and still he'd had the character to answer Jack's questions honestly.
"Worse than that," Ryan went on for him. "He's a lawyer. They always get in the way."
"The usual prejudice," Adler observed with a smile,