Executive orders - Tom Clancy [8]
THAT LOOKS LIKE President Ryan there, an anchorman said in his warm, dry studio. Probably trying to get a handle on rescue operations. Ryan is a man not unaccustomed to crisis, as we all know.
I've known Ryan for six years, a more senior network analyst opined, studiously not looking at the camera, so as to give the appearance of instructing the more highly paid anchorman who was trying to report on the event. Both had been in the studio to provide commentary for President Durling's speech, and had read all the briefing material on Ryan, whom the analyst didn't really know, though they'd bumped into each other at various dinners during the past few years. He's a remarkably low-key gentleman, but without question one of the brightest people in government service. Such a statement could not go unchallenged. Tom the anchor leaned forward, half-looking at his colleague, and half at the cameras.
But, John, he's not a politician. He has no political background or experience. He's a national-security specialist in an age when national security is not the issue it once was, he pontificated.
John the analyst managed to stifle the reply that the statement so richly deserved. Someone else did not.
Yeah, Chavez grumbled. And that airplane that took the building out was really a Delta flight that got lost. Jesus! he concluded.
It's a great country we serve, Ding, my boy. Where else do people get paid five mill' a year to be stupid? John Clark decided to finish his beer. There was no sense in driving back to Washington until Mary Pat called. He was a worker bee, after all, and only the top-floor CIA types would be racing around now. And racing around they would be. They wouldn't be accomplishing much, but at times like this you didn't really accomplish much of anything, except to look harried and important and to the worker bees, ineffective.
WITH LITTLE TO show the public, the network reran tape of President Durling's speech. The C-SPAN cameras in the chamber had been remotely controlled, and control-room technicians froze various frames to show the front row of senior government officials, and, again, the roll of the dead was cataloged: All but two of the Cabinet secretaries, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, senior agency directors, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Director Bill Shaw of the FBI, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Administrator of NASA, all nine Justices of the Supreme Court. The anchorman's voice listed the names and the positions they'd held, and the tape advanced frame by frame until the moment when the Secret Service agents were shown racing into the chamber, startling President Durling and causing some brief confusion. Heads turned, looking for danger, and perhaps the quicker-minded among them had wondered about the presence of a gunman in the galleries, but then came three frames from a wide-shot camera that showed the blurred displacement of the back wall, followed by blackness. Anchor and commentator were then back on-screen, staring down at their desktop monitors, then back up at each other, and perhaps only now the full enormity of the event finally began to hit them, as it was hitting the new President.
President Ryan's principal task will be to rebuild the government, if he can, John the analyst said, after a long moment's pause. My God, so many good men and women dead It had also occurred to him that a few years earlier, before becoming the senior network commentator, he would have been in that chamber, along with so many of his professional friends; and for him, also, the event finally broke past the shock, and his hands started quivering below the top of the desk. An experienced pro who did not allow his voice to shake, he nonetheless could not totally control the look