But there would be no mutiny aboard Air Force One that spring day and the trouble their President was in wasn’t the sort that a pair of loyal, athletic men with sunglasses and wires in their ears could hope to fix.
If there had been one intelligence specialist, somebody from Defense or State, along to remind Claymore that the Iranian crazies had threatened to “roast the greatest Satan in his lair,” maybe Claymore wouldn’t have gone into the bathroom and blown his brains out.
But no such person was on board that day to avert World War Three by aborting the launch-and-arm sequence within the seven minutes required.
When the shot rang through Air Force One, however, the entire situation changed: the Vice President was informed and a cooler hand took the helm.
Unfortunately, even that wasn’t enough to avert all the consequences of what would be called, forever after, the Forty-Minute War.
Book One:
FOREIGN PORTS
Chapter 1
The question people asked one another after that day in April was no longer, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?”
But like that earlier and, by comparison, milder tragedy, everyone remembered exactly where they were when they got the word that the Forty-Minute War had begun—and ended.
To most Foreign Service officers, even in the Mediterranean, word came earlier than it did to Marc Beck, who was babysitting a convention of genetic engineers with astronomical security clearances being held at a private estate on the Red Sea when an aide slipped him a note.
The State Department being what it was, the note was cryptic—HP/NSB B-1; RSVP—but the Israeli hand holding it out to him was as white as the paper and shaking like a leaf: the aide, loaned to him from Israeli Military Intelligence, was sec onded from a Saiyeret crack commando unit and one look at that blanched face was all Beck needed to confirm the urgency of the coded message.
The prefix HP was familiar, even routine: Home Plate—Washington; following it, instead of an operation’s cryptonym, was the acronym for Nuclear Surface Blast; after that came the standard letter-number intelligence appraisal, B-1, which told Beck that the information was from a usually reliable source and confirmed by other sources; the RSVP appended was somebody’s cynical joke.
Given the above, he left the genetic engineers to their Israeli hosts and RSVP’d toward Jerusalem at a hundred eighty klicks per hour, eschewing a driver and pushing his Corps Diplomatique Plymouth well beyond the laws of man and physics in exactly the way every new diplomat was warned against when first posted overseas.
He would never remember the cars he ran off the road into the soft sand, and later into one another; he only remembered the sky, which he watched through his double-gradient aviator’s glasses for some sign of thermal shock wave, a flash of light, a mushroom cloud, a doomsday darkening in the northeast over Iran—and the radio, which was stubbornly refusing to confirm or deny what the little piece of State Department letterhead in his pocket said.
Beck wasn’t naive but he couldn’t believe that the bombing of his nation’s capital wasn’t newsworthy. Damn it to hell, Ashmead’s report had been right on the money: the Islamic Jihad had actually done it! Nobody believed they could—or would… nobody but a handful of Ashmead’s field- weary counterterrorists who couldn’t write a grammatical report.
Beck, in fifteen years of overseas postings, had never been party to an error of this magnitude. He’d signed off on a negative analysis of Ashmead’s intelligence, along with everyone else whose opinion he respected, right up to CIA’s Regional Commander for the Middle East and his own Bureau Chief, Dickson. It wasn’t going to look nearly as bad in his superiors’ files as it was in his. He was praying that Muffy and the kids were safe in East Hampton as he wheeled the competent Plymouth past an Israeli convoy on the move, their desert camouflage reminding him, if he needed the reminder, that he was posted in a war zone.
The worst that could happen, he decided, was that he’d be sent Stateside—headquarters wouldn’t sack the lot of them, even if old Claymore was a puff of radioactive dust wafting over the Mall by now.
And that wouldn’t be all bad, as far as Beck was concerned—he was ready for a rest. The only cure for the craziness that seeped into your bones when you lived in a terrorist environment was to leave that environment. He’d been here seventeen months as State’s liaison without portfolio, trying to reduce friction among the various intelligence services crawling over Israel like ants on a picnic table.
And he’d been doing pretty well—Ashmead had trusted Beck, and Ashmead, the Agency’s Area Covert Action Chief, didn’t trust anybody; Mossad and Shin Bet honchos invited Beck to weapons tests and gave him Saiyeret commandos, no questions asked, when he needed security boys, as he had for the genetic engineering conference—pretty well, until today.
He focused through the Plymouth’s tinted glass on the sun-baked road ahead, blinked, then cranked the steering wheel around and the Plymouth went up on two wheels to avoid a woman and a donkey crossing the road directly in his path. Beyond them, eucalyptus whispered, their leaves shimmying in a white-hot breeze.
Pretty well, Beck knew, wasn’t good enough when you were in the field. Beck’s official post was that of Special Assistant to the Ambassador and he did perform some nebulous duties in that capacity; his real status was that of Assistant to the Chief for Operations of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Middle East. The Bureau, called INR by those who worked for it, was going to take a lot of flak over this botch: by fragging CIA’s high-priority-flagged warning of an imminent terrorist attack on Home Plate, they had end-run themselves.
He hoped to hell they hadn’t end-run the whole intelligence community—or the whole blessed US of A: a “Nuclear Incident” like this could start a damned war.
The thought made him nervous and he began punching buttons on the Plymouth’s multiband. When the radio chattered on blithely in Hebrew, Arabic and English of quotidian affairs between musical interludes, he could only assume that stringent Israeli security measures were in effect.
And that made good sense: only the parental and unceasing care of the US kept Israel from destruction by her enemies. But then again, it was ridiculous to assume that even the Israelis would censor news of that magnitude. So it had to be something more: sensitive negotiations must be in progress.
And this, finally, cracked Beck’s calm: in the air-conditioned sedan, he began to sweat. There was something really wrong and Beck, a high-powered polymath with an MIT education who just happened to be a Senior Arab Specialist because languages and history to him were recreational drugs, was beginning to realize what it might be.
By the time he careened into East Jerusalem, he was getting visual confirmation: too many of the wrong kind of official vehicles on streets not as busy as they should have been; too few of others.
Driving up to the new temporary American Consulate—the last one had been car-bombed three weeks before with no casualties, thanks to another of Ashmead’s terse and profane warnings—he was praying in nonsectarian fashion for the English-language radio commentator to drop even a hint of the nuking of Home Plate.
But it wasn’t forthcoming. He told himself that there was no way it could be as bad as he was assuming it was—at home, once Defcon Three was reached, the whole country would have known about it. A state of actual war ought to leak, even in Israel.
RSVP. Right. Check.