• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1575 0

was supposed to know—he was paid to know—what to say to people to deflect them from irrational actions. At base that could mean telling them, Do this and the full power and fury of America will descend on you and ruin your whole day. Better to cajole them into being reasonable, because in reasonableness was their best salvation as a nation in the global village. But the truth was that the Chinese thought in ways that he could not replicate within his own mind, and so he wasn't sure what to say to make them see the light. The worst part of all was that he'd met this Zhang guy in addition to Foreign Minister Shen, and all he knew for sure was that they did not look upon reality as he did. They saw blue where he saw green, and he couldn't understand their strange version of green well enough to explain it into blue. A small voice chided him for possible racism, but this situation was too far gone for political correctness. He had a war to stop, and he didn't know how. He ended up staring at the bulkhead in front of his comfortable glove-leather seat and wishing it was a movie screen. He felt like seeing a movie now, something to get his mind off the hamster wheel that just kept turning and turning. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned to see his President, who motioned him to the circular staircase to the upper level. Again they chased two Air Force communicators off their seats.

"Thinking over the newest SORGE?"

"Yep." EAGLE nodded.

"Any ideas?"

The head moved in a different plane now. "No. Sorry, Jack, but it just isn't there. Maybe you need a new SecState."

Ryan grunted. "No, just different enemies. The only thing I see is to tell them we know what they're up to, and that they'd better stop."

"And when they tell us to shove it up our collective ass, then what?"

"You know what we need right now?" SWORDSMAN asked.

"Oh, yeah, a couple hundred Minuteman or Trident missiles would work just fine to show them the light. Unfortunately … "

"Unfortunately, we did away with them to make the world a safer place. Oops," Ryan concluded.

"Well, we have the bombs and the aircraft to deliver them, and—"

"No!" Ryan hissed. "No, God damn it, I will not initiate a nuclear war in order to stop a conventional one. How many people do you want me to kill?"

"Easy, Jack. It's my job to present options, remember? Not to advocate them—not that one anyway." He paused. "What did you think of Auschwitz?"

"It's the stuff of nightmares—wait a minute, your parents, right?"

"My father—Belzec in his case, and he lucked out and survived."

"Does he talk about it?"

"Never. Not a single word, even to his rabbi. Maybe a pshrink. He went to one for a few years, but I never knew what for."

"I can't let anything like that happen again. To stop that—yeah, to stop that," Ryan speculated aloud, "yeah, I might drop a B-83."

"You know the lingo?"

"A little. I got briefed in a long time ago, the names for the hardware stuck in my mind. Funny thing, I've never had nightmares about that. Well, I've never read into the SIOP—Single Integrated Operation Plan, the cookbook for ending the world. I think I'd eat a gun before I did that."

"A whole lot of presidents had to think those things over," Adler pointed out.

"Before my time, Scott, and they never expected them to happen anyway. They all figured they'd smart their way through it. 'Til Bob Fowler came along and damned near stumbled into calling in the codes. That was some wild Sunday night," Ryan said, remembering.

"Yeah, I know the story. You kept your head screwed on straight. Not many others did."

"Yeah. And look where it got me," POTUS observed with a grim chuckle. He looked out a window. They were over land now, probably Labrador, lots of green and lakes, and few straight lines to show the hand of man on the land. "What do we do, Scott?"

"We try to warn them off. They'll do things we can see with satellites, and then we can call them on it. Our last play will be to tell them that Russia is an American ally now, and messing with Ivan means messing with Uncle Sam. If that doesn't stop them,