With the measured control that had seen her through tough elections and had made her an effective governor, Wilson pushed her anger aside. Without any hint of disappointment or regret, she looked up at Soares. "I am sincerely sorry that you find it necessary to leave this administration at this time." Her emphasis was lost on Soares. Instead, he stood, growing madder by the minute as this woman sat there barely concealing a smile, talking to him in this manner. Still he let her finish. "I cannot tell you how much your wise counsel and support in the past have meant to me. For that I thank you. I do, however, understand your position on this matter and accept your resignation." Then, as if the whole incident had never happened and Soares was no longer in the room, Wilson turned to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Now, General, you were saying that General Malin has accepted Operation En Passant as reasonable and is already taking steps to prepare his corps for their role?"
Without so much as a second glance at Soares, the Chairman responded to Wilson. "Yes, Madam President, he has. I was on the phone to him just before we adjourned and…"
While the general spoke and everyone at the table listened, Soares realized that somehow, somewhere, he had lost control. He had suddenly fallen from being the power behind the throne to becoming an object of scorn. As the conversation went from one member of the Security Council to another, Soares's heart sank. He had for the moment lost. Now all that remained was to play out this hand, sit back, and watch what happened, hoping that somewhere along the line Wilson would stumble and leave him free of stain to pick up the party's political leadership and in a few years nomination for President. Without another word and with no one except Ed Lewis paying any attention to him, Soares left the room.
There was a light knock on the door, followed by the appearance of his aide's head. "General Malin, General Prentice has returned, sir."
Malin, who had been mechanically reading a stack of messages and requests for information with no great enthusiasm, looked up. "Great. Tell him I would like to see him as soon as possible, if not sooner." Then he added, "And tell the chief I need to see him after I finish with General Prentice."
Knowing that the first thing the corps chief of staff would ask was if the aide knew why Malin wanted to see him, the aide asked, "Sir, any particular subject you want to discuss with the chief?"
With a sweep of his hand across the scattered messages and reports sitting on his desk, Malin grunted. "Yeah. I want him to do something about all this bullshit the Pentagon dumped on us after we reopened our channels with them. Half of this stuff is pure crap that has no relevance to what we're doing, and I have no intention of providing a response."
The aide, who had organized the general's incoming correspondence, knew exactly what Malin was talking about. Though "officially" the Tenth Corps had severed communications with the National Command Authority when Malin had declared himself a renegade and begun his march north through Germany, selected channels had been maintained. In this manner, intelligence from the Defense Intelligence Agency freely flowed into the Tenth Corps and had given Malin information he needed that his own corps couldn't gather. Since this intelligence was sent out over a network that the Tenth Corps, like all the other major American commands scattered across the world, had access to, there was no compromise of Wilson's administration. The only direct two-way communication was between Malin himself and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was limited to a single phone conversation made each evening after Malin had received his last formal update for the day. This timing allowed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to report to the President in the late afternoon every day. The number of people who were involved in this chain was held to the bare minimum. Though no one had any doubt that the Wilson-Lewis-Malin conspiracy would eventually come to light, the longer they maintained the renegade corps commander story, the better, especially when dealing with other nations.
The commencement of hostilities, the refusal of the German Chancellor to open reasonable negotiations with Wilson, and the internal German conflict, with the Parliament demanding that Ruff accept a UN-mediated armistice and his refusal to do so, had altered the international political landscape. Careful manipulation of the stories fed to the media and well-worded press releases, not to mention round-the-clock discussions with members of NATO, were slowly shifting popular and official thinking. Malin, rather than being an insane and uncontrolled maverick, was now being viewed by many as a hero, a man with the foresight and courage to stand up against an aggressive and resurgent German leader bent on altering the political, military, and nuclear balance in Europe. This, coupled with Wilson's pledge to the American public that she would not sit idle while the Germans destroyed the Tenth Corps, allowed her to broaden the conflict with the consent of the American public and all major NATO allies.
Hence, the commitment of the 17th Airborne to secure Bremerhaven, round-the-clock air cover from bases in Great Britain, and the dispatching of a Marine expeditionary force to the Baltic to threaten the German coast became possible. Along with these operations came the opening of all communications nets and channels, followed by a virtual avalanche of messages, requests for information, directives, and helpful advice from Pentagon staff officers who were far removed from the trauma of the battlefield. Tasked with updating their own charts and briefings, well-meaning Pentagon staff officers immediately inundated the Tenth Corps staff with message after message requesting information that the Tenth Corps staff had no need to accumulate or track. The Tenth Corps staff, which had been quite happy to operate as an independent entity, free from the curse of modern communications that allowed higher headquarters to talk to practically anyone, soon found itself in danger of being paralyzed by these requests.
All these requests came on top of the need to deal with the current battle, the drafting of new plans that would incorporate other American units coming into the theater, and the necessity of moving every twelve to twenty-four hours. When faced with the imperatives of dealing with the current battle and preparing for the next, the staff of the Tenth Corps, almost to a man, ignored the requests for information and the advice from Washington. When this happened, the well-meaning Washington staff officer informed his commander, who had tasked him to get the information, that the Tenth Corps was not cooperating. The higher-ranking officer in Washington in turn sent a message to a higher-ranking staff officer on the Tenth Corps staff repeating the request. The higher-ranking officer in Germany, with no more time to deal with outside requests than his subordinate, did as his subordinate had done; he ignored the request. Back in Washington this started a whole new chain of calls, message generation, etc., until finally almost all requests for information were being addressed to General Malin himself. It was a system gone berserk, and Malin intended to stop it.
He had to, for important orders and information were being crowded off the communications channels by mindless correspondence. Operation En Passant, a directive signed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself, had been lost in the flood of lesser messages. It wasn't until the Chairman called Malin and asked for Malin's opinion on the operation that Malin, who had still not seen the directive and was therefore caught off guard, began to appreciate the seriousness of the communications glut. Even Malin's chief of operations, Brigadier General Jerry Prentice, was unaware of Operation En Passant. A quick search found that the message was still waiting patiently in an electronic computer queue in Washington for its turn to be bounced off a satellite and down to the Tenth Corps.