After dismissing Murray and Price, it had begun in earnest.
Ryan's introduction began with a national-security briefing delivered by one of the national intelligence officers assigned to the White House staff. Here, over a period of twenty-six minutes, he learned what he already knew because of the job he'd held until the previous day. But he had to sit through it anyway, if for no other reason than to get a feel for the man who would be one of his daily briefing team. They were all different. Each one had an individual perspective, and Ryan had to understand the nuances peculiar to the separate voices he'd be hearing.
"So, nothing on the horizon for now?" Jack asked.
"Nothing we see at the National Security Council, Mr. President. You know the potential trouble spots as well as I do, of course, and those change on a day-to-day basis." The man hedged with the grace of someone who'd been dancing to this particular brand of music for years. Ryan's face didn't change, only because he'd seen it before. A real intelligence officer didn't fear death, didn't fear finding his wife in bed with his best friend, didn't fear any of the normal vicissitudes of life. A national intelligence officer did fear being found wrong on anything he said in his official capacity. To avoid that was simple, however: you never took a real stand on any single thing. It was a disease not limited to elected officials, after all. Only the President had to take a stand, and it was his good fortune to have such trained experts to supply him with the information he needed, wasn't it?
"Let me tell you something," Ryan said after a few seconds of reflection.
"What is that, sir?" the NIO asked cautiously.
"I don't just want to hear what you know. I also want to hear what you and your people think. You are responsible for what you know, but I'll take the heat for acting on what you think. I've been there and done that, okay?"
"Of course, Mr. President." The man allowed himself a smile that masked his terror at the prospect. "I'll pass that along to my people."
"Thank you." Ryan dismissed the man, knowing then and there that he needed a National Security Advisor he could trust, and wondering where he'd get one.
The door opened as though by magic to let the NIO out—a Secret Service agent had done that, having watched through the spy hole for most of the briefing. The next in was a DOD briefing team.
The senior man was a two-star who handed over a plastic card.
"Mr. President, you need to put this in your wallet."
Jack nodded, knowing what it was before his hands touched the orange plastic. It looked like a credit card, but on it was a series of number groups….
"Which one?" Ryan asked.
"You decide, sir."
Ryan did so, reading off the third such group twice. There were two commissioned officers with the general, a colonel and a major, both of whom wrote down the number group he'd selected and read it back to him twice. President Ryan now had the ability to order the release of strategic nuclear weapons.
"Why is this necessary?" he asked. "We trashed the last ballistic weapons last year."
"Mr. President, we still have cruise missiles which can be armed with W-80 warheads, plus B-61 gravity bombs assigned to our bomber fleet. We need your authorization to enable the Permissible Action Links—the PALs—and the idea is that we enable them as early as possible, just in case—"
Ryan completed the sentence: "I get taken out early."
You're really important now, Jack, a nasty little voice told him. Now you can initiate a nuclear attack. "I hate those goddamned things. Always have."
"You aren't supposed to like them, sir," the general sympathized. "Now, as you know, the Marines have the VMH-1 helicopter squadron that's always ready to get you out of here and to a place of safety at a moment's notice, and…"
Ryan listened to the rest while his mind wondered if he should do what Jimmy Carter had done at this point: Okay, let's see, then. Tell them I want them to pick me up NOW. Which presidential command had turned into a major embarrassment for a lot of Marines. But he couldn't do that now, could he? It would get out that Ryan was a paranoid fool, not someone who wanted to see if the system really worked the way people said it would. Besides, today VMH-1 would definitely be spun up, wouldn't it?
The fourth member of the briefing team was an Army warrant officer in civilian clothes who carried a quite ordinary-looking briefcase known as "the football," inside of which was a binder, inside of which was the attack plan—actually a whole set of them…
"Let me see it." Ryan pointed. The warrant hesitated, then unlocked the case and handed over the navy blue binder, which Ryan flipped open.
"Sir, we haven't changed it since—"
The first section, Jack saw, was labeled MAJOR ATTACK OPTION. It showed a map of Japan, many of whose cities were marked with multicolored dots. The legend at the bottom showed what the dots meant in terms of delivered megatonnage; probably another page would quantify the predicted deaths. Ryan opened the binder rings and removed the whole section. "I want these pages burned. I want this MAO eliminated immediately." That merely meant that it would be filed away in some drawer in Pentagon War Plans, and also in Omaha. Things like this never died.
"Sir, we have not yet confirmed that the Japanese have destroyed all of their launchers, nor have we confirmed the neutralization of their weapons. You see—"
"General, that's an order," Ryan said quietly. "I can give them, you know."
The man's back braced to attention. "Yes, Mr. President."
Ryan flipped through the rest of the binder. Despite his previous job, what he found was a revelation. Jack had always avoided too-intimate knowledge of the damned things. He'd never expected them to be used. After the terrorist incident in Denver and all the horror that had swept the surface of the planet in its aftermath, statesmen across continents and political beliefs had indulged themselves in a collective think about the weapons under their control. Even during the shooting war with Japan just ended, Ryan had known that somewhere, some team of experts had concocted a plan for a nuclear retaliatory strike, but he'd concentrated his efforts at making it unnecessary, and it was a source of considerable pride to the new President that he'd never even contemplated implementing the plan whose summary was still in his left hand. LONG RIFLE, he saw, was the code name. Why did the names have to be like that, virile and exciting, as though for something that one could be proud of?
"What's this one? LIGHT SWITCH…?"
"Mr. President," the general answered, "that's a method of using an EMP attack. Electromagnetic pulse. If you explode a device at very high altitude, there's nothing—no air, actually—to absorb the initial energy of the detonation and convert it into mechanical energy—no shock wave, that is. As a result all the energy goes out in its original electromagnetic form. The resulting energy surge is murder on power and telephone lines. We always had a bunch of weapons fused for high-altitude burst in our SIOPs for the Soviet Union. Their telephone system was so primitive that it would have been easy to destroy. It's a cheap mission-kill, won't really hurt anybody on the ground."
"I see." Ryan closed the binder and handed it back to the warrant officer, who immediately locked the now-lighter document away. "I take it there's nothing going on which is likely to require a nuclear strike of any kind?"
"Correct, Mr. President."
"So, what's the point of having this man sitting outside my office all the time?"
"You can't predict all possible contingencies, can you, sir?" the general asked. It must have been difficult for him to deliver the line with a straight face, Ryan realized, as soon as the shock went away.