“The President will see you now,” the President’s personal assistant said. She was young, Japanese-American, and pretty enough to send heads turning everywhere. If it had been any other President, there would have been suspicions that she did more than just type, but they couldn’t say that about President Kirkpatrick. “Please will you come with me?”
The White House had been refurbished after a terrorist missile had destroyed the original Oval Office. The new one was a strange mixture of comfortable, authoritarian, and high-tech, all concentrated in the figure of the slight woman who rose from behind her desk to greet Luong. Her presence was almost overwhelming; it was easy to see why she had a seventy percent approval rating, few would dare vote against her. Luong himself had voted for her.
President Joan Kirkpatrick was slight, but carried herself with immense dignity and gravitas; her long red hair was curled up neatly into a teacher’s bun and perched on her head, her eyes were both smiling and thoughtful at the same time. She looked like everyone’s favourite teacher; she was around forty years old, and looked around fifty. It had been six months since Luong had seen her in the flesh and the change worried him; she had grown older, with grey hairs appearing in her bun.
“Welcome back to the United States,” the President said, without further ado. She was a Republican, but that meant less these days; she had also expected to sail comfortably into her second term in office before the Russians had launched their war. “I’m very relieved to see that you made it out safely when so many others didn’t have a chance.”
“Thank you, Madam President,” Luong said. The President had been married and then had become a widow; her husband had died on the Kennedy when it had gone down near Iran. There was no questioning her determination to fight the war to the bitter end. “I’m glad to be here.”
The President briefly introduced the other men in the room, and then motioned for Luong to begin his story, which he did as quickly as he could. He outlined the warnings, such as they were, the chaos that had enveloped London, and the news that the Russians had invaded Poland and then Denmark. He explained what had happened to Colonel Seth Fanaroff, who was being debriefed at the Pentagon, and how badly EUROFOR had been hurt by the Russians.
“I don’t understand how they’re moving so quickly,” General McDowell said. The President’s Chief of Staff was a former tank driver himself. “We had problems in Iraq and Iran because we ran out of fuel.”
“They captured stocks, apparently, and pressed drivers into service,” Luong said. “There will be places that have hardly felt the touch of the Russian boot yet, but… it’s amazing how far you can move if no one is trying to slow you down.”
McDowell scowled. “What I want to know is how the hell they — and we — missed it?” He snapped. “They had a massive build up and no one even fucking — begging your pardon, madam — noticed!”
CIA looked uncomfortable. “We did notice,” he admitted. “We didn’t realise that the Russians had their eye on all of Europe; we thought, from the information that we were getting from Russia, that they were posturing to ensure that they had a favourable deal from the Ukraine when the country finally managed to solve its problems. They did it before, and at least three other times; the Poles just ended up being treated as the nation of boys who called wolf.”
McDowell looked unconvinced. “And our spy satellites?”
“The Russians don’t have satellites as good as ours, but they do have a very good idea of what works and what doesn’t,” CIA said. “They hid the sheer scale of the build up from us; by the time we had a handle on it, it was too late. Our human intelligence sources were either lied to or have been turned; there is no other explanation.”
“Morons,” McDowell muttered. “You couldn’t anticipate my fist if it was right in front of your face.”
Luong shook his head slowly. They both had good points; Intelligence was often about guessing from incomplete information, rather than knowing every last detail before it was too late. Dictator-led regimes were very good at security; it was quite possible that the spies had been sending information they believed to be true, rather than simply being Russian double-agents. There was no way to know; heads would be rolling back at Langley for that failure.
“These points can be addressed later,” the President said, tapping the table for quiet. It fell very quickly. “The important question is simple; what do we do about it?”
Luong took a long breath. “The British have formally asked for our help, along with the Irish,” he said. He spoke rapidly and well, covering all of the issues; the British needed help now. “They’re short on everything,” he said, finally. “If they don’t get help soon, they will almost certainly fall when the Russians come over the Channel.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” McDowell said. “We looked at the problem back during the bad old days of the Cold War. It’s not like crossing a river.”
“The British are certain that the Russians have the capability,” Luong said sharply. “In a week, or however long it takes the Russians to get organised, they will launch the Second Battle of Britain; the difference being that they will almost certainly succeed in forcing the RAF to expend its remaining aircraft and units, while grinding away at the Royal Navy with bombers and missiles. There will be nowhere for the British to hide; they don’t have the SHORAD assets needed to cover all of their bases, or indeed their cities. It will take time, but time is on the side of the Russians…
“Once they have air cover, they will move in using the transports we have tracked them moving down the coast,” he continued. “Unless the British get very lucky, they will gain a foothold on British soil and expand their foothold towards London. Once that happens, it’s just a matter of time before Britain falls.”
There was a long pause.
The President broke it. “Opinions?”
“I have never pretended to be a politician,” McDowell said. “I understand that civilian control of the military is supposed to be absolute. However, it is my duty to bring certain points to the President’s attention.”
“Go on,” the President said.
“At the moment, we have heavily committed in Korea, and in fact we have two additional divisions heading there to reinforce III Corps after the losses they took in the battle for Seoul,” McDowell said. “If we can hold on, we can break the North Korean Army once and for all, and this time, we won’t have to worry about Chinese intervention in the north. Kang may go nuts and try to use his nukes, but with the FIELD GREEN system in place, that is no longer the threat it once was… I must stress, however, that the forces in Korea have been in a war zone for a month and they are faltering; they need reinforcements, not the removal of more of their units.
“At the same time, we have a number of units heavily committed across the Middle East, fighting a low-intensity war against various rag-headed factions,” McDowell continued. The President scowled; as a woman, she was regarded with scorn and outright hatred by the more lunatic of the factions, some of whom had pronounced her a transvestite because they couldn’t understand how she wielded the power of a man. “The game-play is basically simple; where we are strong, there is peace, where we are weak…
“Oh, we’re making progress,” he admitted, “we’re helping our allies to build up their own forces and in around ten more years, we might even win the war in the Middle East. The sad thing is that the Russians may have done us a favour; their invasion and how they treat known terrorists means that they have done what the European Union refused to do, cut off the funding for the terror factions. The end of the war is finally in sight…”