Executive orders - Tom Clancy [259]
If this is a FleetEx and nothing else, we observe covertly. If things change, we let them know we care. You've got point, Bart. My cupboard's pretty damned bare.
They had only to look out the windows to see that. Enterprise and John Stennis were both in drydock. CINCPAC did not have a single carrier to deploy, and wouldn't for two more months. They'd run Johnnie Reb on two shafts for the retaking of the Marianas, but now she lay alongside her older sister, with huge holes torched from the flight deck down to the first platform level while new turbines and reduction gears were fabricated. The aircraft carrier was the usual means for the United States Navy to make a show offeree. Probably that was part of the Chinese plan, to see how America would react when a substantive reaction was not possible, or so it would appear to some.
Will you cover for me with DeMarco? Mancuso asked.
What do you mean?
I mean that Bruno's from the old school. He thinks it's bad to get detected. Personally, I think sometimes it can be a good thing. If you want me to rattle John Chinaman's cage, he has to hear the bars shake, doesn't he?
I'll write the orders accordingly. How you run it is your business. For the moment, if some 'can skipper talks to his XO about getting laid on the beach, I want it on tape for my collection.
Dave, that's an order a man can understand. I'll even get you the phone number, sir.
AND NOT A damned thing we can do, Cliff Rutledge concluded his assessment.
Gee, Cliff, Scott Adler responded. I kinda figured that one out for myself. The idea was that subordinates gave you alternatives instead of taking them away-or in this case, telling you what you already knew.
They'd been fairly lucky to this point. Nothing much had gotten out to the media. Washington was still too shell-shocked, the junior people filling senior posts were not yet confident enough to leak information without authorization, and the senior posts President Ryan had filled were remarkably loyal to their Commander-in-Chief, an unexpected benefit of picking outsiders who didn't know from politics. But it couldn't last, especially with something as juicy as a new country about to be born from two enemies, both of whom had shed American blood.
I suppose we could always just do nothing, Rutledge observed lightly, wondering what the reaction would be. This alternative was distinct from not being able to do anything, a metaphysical subtlety not lost on official Washington.
Taking that position only encourages developments adverse to our interests, another senior staffer observed crossly.
As opposed to proclaiming our impotence? Rutledge replied. If we say we don't like it, and then we fail to stop it, that's worse than our taking no position at all.
Adler reflected that you could always depend on a Harvard man for good grammar and finely split hairs and, in Rutledge's case, not much more than that. This career foreign service officer had gotten to the seventh floor by never putting a foot wrong, which was another way of saying that he'd never led a dance partner in his life. On the other hand, he was superbly connected-or had been. Cliff had the deadliest disease of a FSO, however. Everything was negotiable. Adler didn't think that way. You had to stand and fight for some things, because if you didn't, the other guy would decide where the battlefield was, and then he had control. The mission of diplomats was to prevent war, a serious business, Adler thought, which one accomplished by knowing where to stand firm and where the limits on negotiation were. For the Assistant Secretary of State for Policy, it was just an unending dance. With someone else leading. Alas, Adler didn't yet have the political capital to fire the man, or maybe make him an ambassador to some harmless post. He himself still had to be confirmed by the new Senate, for example.
So just call it a regional issue? another senior diplomat asked. Adler's head turned slowly. Was Rutledge building a consensus?
No, it is not that, the