Executive orders - Tom Clancy [467]
The Kuwaiti officer looked back and forth from map to screen. On the latter, there was a road, now. But that was easily explained. A column of a hundred tanks would convert almost any surface into a hard-packed highway of sorts, and that had happened here.
But there hadn't been a road there before. The tanks had made it over the last few hours.
That's a change, Major. The Iraqi army was always road-bound before.
Sabah nodded. It was so obvious that he hadn't seen it. Though native to the desert, and supposedly schooled in traveling there, the Iraqi army in 1991 had connived at its own destruction by sticking close to roads, because its officers always seemed to get lost when moving cross-country. Not as mad as it sounded-the desert was essentially as featureless as the sea-it had made their movements predictable, never a good thing in a war, and given advancing allied forces free rein to approach from unexpected directions.
That had just changed.
You suppose they have GPS, too? the chief master sergeant asked.
We couldn't expect them to stay stupid forever, could we?
PRESIDENT RYAN KISSED his wife on the way to the elevator. The kids weren't up yet. One sort of work lay ahead. Another sort lay behind. Today there wasn't time for both, though some efforts would be made. Ben Goodley was waiting on the helicopter.
Here's the notes from Adler on his Tehran trip. The National Security Advisor passed them over. Also the write-up from Beijing. The working group is getting together at ten to go over that situation. The SNIE team will be meeting at Langley later today, too.
Thanks. Jack strapped into his seat and started reading. Arnie and Callie came aboard and took their seats forward of his.
Any ideas, Mr. President? Goodley asked.
Ben, you're supposed to tell me, remember?
How about I tell you that it doesn't make much sense?
I already know that part. You guard the phones and faxes today. Scott should be in Taipei now. Whatever comes from him, fast-track it to me.
Yes, sir.
The helicopter lurched aloft. Ryan hardly noticed that. His mind was on the job, crummy though it was. Price and Raman were with him. There would be more agents on the 747, and more still waiting even now in Nashville. The presidency of John Patrick Ryan went on, whether he liked it or not.
THIS COUNTRY MIGHT be small, might be unimportant, might be a pariah in the international community-not because of anything it had done, except perhaps to prosper, but because of its larger and less prosperous neighbor to the west-but it did have an elected government, and that was supposed to count for something in the community of nations, especially those with popularly elected governments themselves. The People's Republic had come to exist by force of arms-well, most countries did, Sec-State reminded himself-and had immediately thereafter slaughtered millions of its own citizens (nobody knew how many; nobody was terribly interested in finding out), launched into a revolutionary development program (the Great Leap Forward), which had turned out more disastrously than was the norm even for Marxist nations; and launched yet another internal reform effort (the Cultural Revolution) which had come after something called the Hundred Flowers campaign, whose real purpose had been to smoke out potential dissidents for later elimination at the hands of students whose revolutionary enthusiasm had indeed been revolutionary toward Chinese culture-they'd come close to destroying it entirely, in favor of The Little Red Book. Then had come more reform, the supposed changeover from Marxism to something else, another student revolution-this one against the existing political