“No one at the Pentagon doubts his expertise,” Secretary of Defense Spencer said, and Admiral Altman agreed.
“The man has never been wrong.”
And that was one of the main sticking points for Miller. The man was never wrong. It was a condition in people — especially in her advisers — that she’d always found disturbing.
Before her election, she’d been only a one-term junior senator from Minnesota, but before that she had been the dean of the University of Minnesota. It had been an important job, heading one of the leading universities in the U.S., the job made more interesting because of the geniuses who answered to her administration.
But she had, for the most part, let them do their own thing. Before she had taken the job, a friend of hers who was the dean of a small but prestigious Northeastern college had given her a piece of advice that she’d always thought was sound.
“Venerate your geniuses — the straight-A students who will go on to do major things, win prizes, bring honor to your school. But take special care of your C and even your D students because they are the ones who will go out into the world and make millions with which they’ll endow your new library or science wing.”
It was the same for her in the White House. She was bombarded by geniuses — eggheads — but it was the workers in the trenches, the ones with real-world experiences, that she most admired. The problem was that Haaris was both an egghead and a man of the world.
“If the Taliban are truly in charge — or at least are partners — they will retaliate,” she said.
“We don’t have a choice,” Secretary of Defense Spencer replied. “We have to strike now.”
“We won’t get them all.”
“No,” Spencer said. “But we’ll get most of them.”
Politics, Miller had decided early in her campaign for president, was like chess. The opening moves for control of the center board were decisive. A master against a mere journeyman could force a checkmate in the first four or five moves. But against an out-of-control wild man who was likely to do the totally unexpected, even the superior player sometimes had serious trouble.
Like now.
The screens lit up in red, and a moment later Page was back on. “Madam President, we’ve had a nuclear incident in Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. It may be a detonation of the weapon taken from Quetta Air Force Base. We have a WC-135 Constant Phoenix aircraft operating out of Kandahar that is measuring particulates in the atmosphere, and we’ve a seismic confirmation of a ten-kiloton-plus event.”
Haaris came on. “We can see it off to the north,” he said. “Definitely a nuclear explosion.”
“Have you been affected?” Miller asked. She felt numb.
“Physically we’re okay. Have you sent the teams?”
She looked at the others, and nodded. “They’re on their way.”
PART TWO
The Mission
TWELVE
The Gulf water one hundred yards off Florida’s west coast was in the mid-eighties, and Kirk McGarvey, just finishing his five-mile swim for the day, was warmed up — his body heat keeping just ahead of the drag from cooler water. Sometimes like this in the mornings just after dawn, he felt that he could swim day and night forever. Across the Gulf to the Bay of Campeche if he wanted to.
He was in his early fifties with the solid build of an athlete, the stamina of a man much younger and the grace of a world-class fencer, which in fact he had once been. He was not an overly handsome man, but a certain type of woman found him very good looking because of his almost always calm demeanor even under the most trying of circumstances. When McGarvey — Mac to his friends — showed up you just knew that everything would turn out fine. It was an aura that he radiated.
After his air force days with the Office of Special Investigations, he’d been snapped up by the CIA, where at the agency’s training facility outside Williamsburg, Virginia, he had gone through the field operator’s course with the highest marks ever recorded. He’d been a natural for special operations from the beginning. And he’d been groomed to think on his feet, which came naturally to him, and to kill with a variety of weapons, including sniper rifles, pistols, knives, garrotes, and if the need arose, with his hands.
A sailboat heading south toward the Keys was low on the horizon, just a couple of miles out, and McGarvey considered taking out his own forty-two-foot Island Packet ketch, docked behind his house on Casey Key, about seventy miles south of Tampa. Maybe down to the Dry Tortugas, then ride the Gulf Stream up to the Bahamas, maybe spend a month or so before the hurricane season started in earnest.
It was a trip that he and his wife, Katy, had taken several times since moving down here from the Washington, DC, area. But she was gone now, assassinated with an IED meant for him. They’d been attending the funeral at Arlington for their son-in-law, Todd, a CIA officer killed in the line of duty. Mac was riding in a separate limousine from Katy and their daughter, Elizabeth, when theirs in front ran over the powerful explosive before his eyes. There’d been little or nothing left of the car, and almost nothing of Katy, Liz and their driver.
Since then he’d taken a few freelance assignments for the Company, but his heart had never really been in them, let alone the day-to-day business of enjoying life as he had before their deaths.
Nor did he think now that he was ready to solo his boat to places where people — couples — would be enjoying themselves. Laughing, playing, making love.
He would head back to his house just across the road from the beach, take a shower, have a little breakfast and then head up to his office in the philosophy department at the University of South Florida’s New College campus in Sarasota. He taught Voltaire during the fall and spring semesters to a bunch of gifted kids, who were so liberal in their views that sometimes it was all he could do to stop himself from smiling indulgently at them. But most of them were seriously bright, and they had the habit of asking some seriously difficult questions. He loved the challenge.
But before September rolled around he needed to put some work into the book he was in the middle of writing, about Voltaire’s influence not only on Western thought since the eighteenth century, but especially on the United States’ fledgling democracy. It would be a hard sell to the kids, but he’d had a personal connection with the Frenchman’s philosophy and its direct effect on the U.S., starting with the Civil War.
He was about to start back toward the beach when he glanced again at the southbound sailboat in time to spot a speedboat heading from the north almost directly toward him. It wasn’t uncommon to see boats like that coming so close to shore, especially along Casey Key, where a lot of millionaires maintained seasonal homes. Tourists who wanted to get a glimpse of someone famous sometimes came up on the beach and walked around.
McGarvey angled back toward the shore and put real effort into his swimming, his progress aided by an incoming tide and a light westerly breeze. A woman standing on the beach began waving at him. She looked vaguely familiar, but the distance was too great for him to make out more than the fact that she was a woman and that she was gesturing.
Two minutes later he could feel the buzz of the outboard motors as well as hear their high-pitched drone — two of them, he thought, maybe two-fifty or three-hundred horsepower each — capable of pushing a boat with the right hull shape to speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour.
He glanced over his shoulder in time to see the center-console boat just a dozen yards away and heading directly for him.
The water here was less than ten feet deep, and he immediately dove for the bottom, jackknifing with a powerful kick.