Right now he was standing with President Bedford, staring at the depths of water that surrounded the island of La Palma, almost 10,000 feet high, 50 miles to the east, 5,000 feet all around the 1,000-meter line, 200 feet close inshore, and almost 100 feet sloping steeply west right below the cliffs, almost on the goddamned beach.
He glanced up as Admiral Dickson came in, the President having retreated to the far end of the room to speak with Henry Wolfson. It was clear already that the Oval Office was about to become Admiral Morgan’s ops room, and that an army of possibly five cleaners and tidiers would be required twice a day to keep even a semblance of order.
The former President’s secretary, Miss Betty-Ann Jones, the very lady who had been ordered to fire Arnold as soon as the result of the Presidential Election was known, was in the process of clearing her desk and preparing to leave for her home in Alabama. She had given herself no more than two hours to remain at her power desk outside the Oval Office, since it was rumored that Mrs. Arnold Morgan was on her way into the White House, essentially to take charge of her husband’s life while he tried to fight off the Hamas threat.
Betty-Ann need not have worried. Arnold Morgan treated everyone the same — Presidents, Admirals, Generals, Ambassadors, Emperors, and waiters. Usually with impatience, occasionally with irritation, but rarely with malice. He would not have remembered the manner of his removal from office — only that he was leaving his beloved nation in the hands of people whom he judged to be incompetent to handle the task. That almost broke his heart. Phone calls from secretaries did not figure in the equation. But he did want his capable wife close at hand in the hours of duress.
“Where the hell’s Kathy?” he growled to Admiral Doran.
“Who’s Kathy?” replied the Commander in Chief of the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet.
Arnold looked up from his charts, surprised. “Oh, Kathy? Sorry Frank, I was talking to myself…pretty familiar phrase in my life — they’ll probably inscribe it on my grave…‘Where the hell’s Kathy?’ ”
“Is that Mrs. Morgan?”
“That’s her. The best secretary I ever had, the best-looking lady who ever even spoke to me, and the best of my three wives, by several miles.”
Frank Doran chuckled. “You expecting her, sir?”
“Damn right. I just gave her back her old job, and told her to get right down here to the West Wing, on the double.”
“Is she coming?”
“Well, she told me she’d give some thought to working again for the rudest man she ever met. But not to hold my breath.”
Admiral Doran laughed out loud at that, and ventured that everyone had to refrain from the impulse to speak to wives and children as if they belonged on the lower deck.
Arnold was about to reply when Kathy Morgan came marching into the office, looking, as ever, radiantly beautiful.
Without looking up, he snapped, “ ’Bout time. COFFEE! And call the Iranian Ambassador and tell him he’s a devious lying son of a bitch.”
Admiral Doran was stunned. Admiral Dickson, who had attended this charade before, just shook his head. And Arnold leapt up from his desk and hugged his wife right in front of everyone.
Throughout all her years as Arnold’s secretary, she had always been astounded at the commands he gave her…Call the head of this, the head of that, ambassadors and diplomats, and say the most frightful things to them. To Arnold Morgan a request for speed of reply from a senior Russian Admiral translated to Tell Nikolai what’s-his-name to get his ass in gear…
The sudden order to lay into the Iranian ambassador was a mere “Welcome Home” to Kathy, who had promised to return to work only if it was for a two-week tenure.
Arnold introduced Frank Doran, and then instructed Kathy to tell that lady outside, Betty Something, that she was welcome to work as Kathy’s assistant in the smaller office for a couple of weeks. Failing that, to tell her to go now, and get a replacement.
The former Kathy O’Brien knew the White House routines as well as anyone, but she balked at this. “Darling, I cannot just arrive here and start firing people,” she said.
“Okay,” said Arnold, returning to his charts of the waters on the eastern Atlantic Ocean. “Get Frank to do it.”
“I’m not firing President McBride’s secretary!” said Admiral Doran.
“All right, all right,” said Arnold. “I’ll do it.” And with that, he walked out of the door and explained to Betty-Ann that his secretary of many years was now in residence, and that she would be taking over. Betty-Ann should now clear her desk, but she was more than welcome to stay as an assistant in the smaller office, so long as she was sharp and stayed on her toes.
Admiral Morgan did not wait around for a chat. Having established his opening chain of command, he returned to the Oval Office and trusted that matters secretarial would somehow sort themselves out.
He sat at the head of his new table and suggested Admirals Dickson and Doran be seated on either side so they could each look at the Atlantic charts. “We’d better have some coffee, and some cookies,” he told Kathy. “None of us had any lunch. And can you make sure I have a pair of dividers, a compass, rulers, calculators, notepads, and pencils?”
“How about a sextant and a telescope, since you appear to be going back to sea?” Mrs. Arnold Morgan had lost none of her edge.
Just then the President himself arrived and Arnold introduced him to his wife. “You were very good on television, sir,” she said. “Very neat the way you kept those reporters in line.”
“From the wife of Admiral Morgan, I’m taking that as a major compliment,” he replied, smiling. “And you’re nothing like so stern as he is — and much better looking.”
Arnold invited Paul Bedford to sit down and join them. “I’m starting right now with our opening plan to trap that submarine,” he said. “We’ll finalize our evacuation plans tomorrow. But I want to get some heavy warships into the area we believe he’s heading towards. We just might get lucky and trip over him, and I don’t want to deny us that chance.”
“How many ships, Admiral?”
“I think for the moment we want to send in a dozen frigates. We can use the Oliver Hazard Perry guided missile ships. Then I guess we want to move an aircraft carrier into the area and pack its flight deck with helicopters.
“I think Admiral Dickson and I are agreed we’re more likely to catch this bastard from the air, rather than in deep water with submarines. As you know, submarine hunts are very difficult. They usually end up with subs under the same flag shooting at each other by mistake”
“Do we have a CVBG anywhere near?”
“We do. The Ronald Reagan, eastern end of the Mediterranean, maybe three days away. The frigates can all be in the area within six days — five of them are halfway there already, and the rest are ready to clear Norfolk tonight, five hours from now.”
“Did our departed President know that?”
“The hell he did. If we’d been listening to him, we would not have been ready.”
“One thing, Arnold. The communiqués from the terrorists. None of them actually mentioned the Cumbre Vieja, did they? Are we certain we got the right volcano?”
“Sir, you have to get into deep volcanology to find that out,” chuckled Arnold. “Hamas mentioned the eastern Atlantic, and when you’re talking tidal waves, that means the Canary Islands. Because of the height of the mountains and the depth of the ocean.
“There is nowhere else in the Atlantic where such a tsunami could develop. And when you express that scenario to any volcanologist, they say, before you finish your sentence…‘Cumbre Vieja. Canary Islands. It’s happened there before, and it will one day happen there again.’