Executive orders - Tom Clancy [130]
When do you need your reply? the army chief asked, more politely than the others.
Tomorrow would be sufficient, or even the day after. Beyond that, I cannot say. My instructions, Badrayn went on, go only that far.
And the arrangements?
You may set them yourselves, within reason. Badrayn wondered how much more they could possibly expect from him, or his sponsor.
But the decision he demanded was harder than one might imagine. The patriotism of the assembled general officers was not of the usual sort. They loved their country, largely because they controlled it. They had power, genuine life-and-death power, a far greater narcotic than money, and one of the things for which a man would risk his life and his soul. One of their number, many of them thought-hoped-just might pull it off. One of them just might assume the presidency of their country successfully, and together they just might calm things down and continue as before. They'd have to open their nation up somewhat, of course. They'd have to allow U.N. and other inspectors to see everything, but with the death of their leader they'd have the chance to start anew, even though everyone would know that nothing new at all was happening. Such were the rules of the world. A promise here or there, a few remarks about democracy and elections, and their former enemies would fall all over themselves giving them and their nation a chance. A further incentive was the sheer opportunity of it. Not one of them had felt truly secure in years. Everyone knew of colleagues who had died, either at the hands of their dead leader, or under circumstances euphemistically called mysterious-helicopter crashes had been a favorite ploy of their fallen and beloved President. Now they had a chance to live lives of power with much greater confidence, and against that was a life of indolence in some foreign place. Each of them already had a life of every luxury a man could imagine-plus power. Each could snap his fingers and the people who jumped were not servants but soldiers
Except for one thing. To stay would be the greatest and most dangerous gamble of their lives. Their country was now under the strictest control they could remember, and there was a reason for it. The people who'd roared their love and affection for the dead one-what did they really think? It hadn't mattered a week before, but it mattered now. The soldiers they commanded came from the same human sea. Which of them had the charisma to assume the leadership of the country? Which of them had the keys to the Ba'ath Party? Which of them could rule by the force of will? Because only then could they look into the future, if not without fear, then with a small enough quantity of it that their experience and courage could deal with the chances they would be taking. Each of them, standing at the racetrack, looked around the assembly of brother officers and wondered the same question: Which one?
That was the problem, because if there had been one of their number to do it, he would already have been dead, probably in a tragic helicopter mishap. And a dictatorship was not operated by a committee. Strong as they all felt themselves to be, each looked at the others and saw potential weakness. Private jealousies would destroy them. Jockeying and rivalries would, probably, cause such internal turmoil that the iron hand needed to control the people would weaken. And in a few months, probably, it would come apart. They had all seen it happen before, and the ultimate result was foretold in their deaths, standing before a line of their own soldiers, and a wall to their backs.
There was no ethos for these men other than power and its exercise. That sufficed for one man, but not for many. Many needed to be unified around something, whether it be the rule imposed by one superior, or a commonly held idea, but it had to be something that imposed a common outlook. No one of them could do the former, and collectively they lacked the latter. Powerful as they each might be, they were also weak in a fundamental