Good God, she thought caustically, pretending to respect the mediocrities she’d appointed to head various Executive Branch departments was sometimes tiresome. But she’d deliberately surrounded herself with sycophantic second raters at the cabinet level. As president, she could bully lower-echelon appointees into doing her bidding. If anyone balked, she could dump them without igniting a political firestorm. She couldn’t ax a recalcitrant secretary of state or defense or treasury with the same impunity. So she’d picked men and women who were politically reliable and pliable, rather than competent.
After all, Stacy Anne Barbeau knew better than to trust anyone who might prove to be as shrewd, devious, and power-hungry as she was herself. For decades, she’d clawed her way up through the rough-and-tumble world of American politics. Washington, D.C., was full of onetime allies and rivals she’d first charmed, then outfoxed, and finally discarded.
Well, by God, now she was at the top of the heap. She was the queen bee of the American political scene. And like it was in a hive, there wasn’t room for another queen. Nor, for that matter, a king.
“And most especially not that swaggering son of a bitch John Dalton Farrell,” she muttered.
Luke Cohen nodded solemnly. He’d been sounding the alarm about the state of her reelection campaign for weeks, ever since it became clear that John D. Farrell had effectively locked up the other party’s nomination to run against her in November.
Farrell was the current governor of Texas, but that wasn’t what made him a dangerous general election opponent. As the incumbent president, Barbeau had a lot of advantages — including virtually unlimited campaign funds and all the TV-camera-friendly pomp and circumstance surrounding her as America’s commander-in-chief. Even with the nation’s economy sputtering along in low gear, no ordinary, run-of-the-mill politician should be able to shake her hold on the White House.
But as both Cohen and his boss knew, John Dalton Farrell was about as far away from a conventional politician as it was possible to get and still be a viable presidential candidate. Born into a hardscrabble farming family, the Texan had made his substantial fortune as a wildcatter in the energy industry. Time after time, he’d played hunches and beaten the big players — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, and the others — to new oil and gas fields. And then he’d made them pay through the nose for the rights to develop his discoveries. Along the way, he’d also cemented a reputation as a no-nonsense, plainspoken, tough-as-nails defender of free markets and enemy of crony capitalism. Straight from the long-ago days when his sole asset was one battered, secondhand drilling rig, he’d blasted the kind of backroom special deals career politicians loved to cut with favored big businesses and unions.
And now Farrell was out there every day on TV and at big campaign rallies pounding on the president’s handouts to major corporate donors, especially in the defense and finance industries. He was also savaging her for allowing NATO to fall apart while the Russians pushed hard on Eastern and central Europe. All of those attacks were starting to bite, eating into her narrow polling edge.
Coldly, Barbeau looked across her big desk at Cohen and Rauch. “Okay, no more bullshit. I need straight talk and straight answers.”
Rauch, gray-haired, pale, and painfully thin, looked confused. “About what, Madam President?”
“About finding ways to spike Farrell’s guns before he kicks the living shit out of me in November,” Barbeau snapped.
Rauch stared back at her, suddenly looking even more uncomfortable. Before joining the administration, he’d devoted his working life at different Beltway think tanks to producing research papers on U.S. defense policy. Unfortunately, crafting careful academic analyses on subjects like strategic force modernization and base reorganization had turned out to be poor preparation for serving a president far more interested in politics than in policy. He cleared his throat. “Campaign tactics and strategy aren’t exactly my forte.”
“No kidding, Ed,” Barbeau retorted. She pointed at Cohen. “That’s Luke’s patch.” Her eyes glittered. “But you are minding my national security shop, aren’t you?”
Cautiously, he nodded. Since both the secretary of defense and the head of the CIA were amiable, unambitious nonentities, more and more of the White House’s day-to-day business with the defense and intelligence agencies flowed through his hands. Despite Rauch’s occasional misgivings about some of her decisions, Barbeau knew it was tough for him to resist access to that kind of power.
“Then figure out how I can push back against the crap Farrell’s peddling about our national security strategy,” she demanded. “Every time I turn on the damned TV, he’s out bitching somewhere about how we’re letting Gennadiy Gryzlov run wild. Or how we’re blowing billions of taxpayer dollars on bloated defense contracts for weapons systems that won’t work as advertised.”
Rauch looked down at his hands for a moment, thinking. “For one thing, the Russians aren’t running wild,” he said. He perked up a bit. “Oh, they’ve made some very limited territorial gains — in eastern Ukraine, for example. But otherwise Moscow has achieved nothing of any real strategic consequence. President Gryzlov’s offensive operations against the Poles and their allies have yielded only a continuing stalemate.”
“No thanks to us,” Cohen pointed out carefully.
Early in her term, unwilling to risk a clash with the Russians, Stacy Anne Barbeau had abandoned the Poles — refusing to send help when Gryzlov unleashed his armies and airpower against them. Then, to her surprise and chagrin, former president Kevin Martindale’s band of high-tech mercenaries managed to fight the Russian onslaught to a standstill. Feeling betrayed by the United States, the Poles and their Eastern European neighbors had broken away from NATO and formed their own defense pact, the so-called Alliance of Free Nations.
She had taken political heat for that outcome, especially from the kind of armchair generals who were always eager to send other people’s kids off to fight and die. Well, screw them, she thought. Nothing in Eastern Europe was worth a single American soldier or airman’s life.
“Yes, no thanks to us,” Rauch agreed, echoing Cohen. “But that’s precisely my point. Despite the odds, the Poles and their allies have contained the Russians so far — without any financial or military cost to us. So, in a strategic sense, the president’s policies have produced the best of all worlds for the United States.” He had the grace to look embarrassed. “And that isn’t the result I would have predicted using any kind of conventional political or military analysis.”
Barbeau eyed him coolly. She’d known her national security adviser thought she was crazy for standing aside every time Gennadiy Gryzlov got a burr up his ass about the Poles. If she hadn’t needed Rauch to ride herd for her on the labyrinthine defense and intelligence communities, she’d have shit-canned him a long time ago. That made watching the onetime academic eat crow even more enjoyable.
“Not bad, Ed,” Cohen said admiringly. His eyes were full of mischief. “We can definitely sell that. Every time Farrell mouths off about unchecked Russian aggression, we’ll point out how little all their ‘mighty tank divisions, bombers, and cyberwar geniuses’ have really achieved. He’ll come across like a whiny dick for trying to make Gryzlov look ten feet tall. And the president will end up looking pretty damned smart for showing so much restraint in the face of both Russian and Polish provocation.”