“What is this, the dungeon?” I asked.
The senior watch officer had the decency to look embarrassed. “We’ve been meaning to upgrade things…”
“It’s authorized. Start tomorrow,” I told him. I found a seat at the big table. “Okay, so, where are we at?”
“Sir, in approximately five minutes, it will be 9:00 AM local time, X-Hour.” He hit a remote control and one of the screens lit up, with a map of Afghanistan, with several cities shown, and a number of colored arrows and dots moving slowly. “The B-2s are on their final approaches. They are at 45,000 feet, so even though it is daylight, nobody can actually see them from the ground, and they are radar invisible to anything the Afghans might have available. In a few minutes they will be dropping 1,000 pound JDAM munitions on the initial target list. That would be all the Taliban and military hard targets and headquarter targets we had. In some cases multiple bombs are targeted to the same site.”
“JDAMs?”
“It’s a new type of bomb, sir. We basically bolt an extremely accurate guidance system onto cheap old dumb bombs. They are guided by GPS signals,” he explained.
“And if somebody jams the GPS signals?”
He shook his head. “They are multiply redundant, with backup inertial guidance units. They are extremely accurate. This is the first time we are actually using them. On the tests we have been running, you can practically pick the window out that you want the bomb to fly through.”
“Huh.” This all sounded like more of the video game warfare we had seen during Desert Storm. I wondered if any of these guys had ever gotten their hands dirty and feet muddy in the real Army.
“We should be seeing something on the satellite screens shortly.” He pointed to a different screen, with a black and white image of an urban zone, but without labels I didn’t know what I was looking at. A timer in the corner was ticking down, and then went to 0:00, and began climbing again. Nothing had happened. I glanced over at him and he smiled, saying, “It takes a bit for the bombs to fall from nine miles up and ten miles away.”
Okay, that made sense. I turned back to the screen and wondered when and what I would see. If I tried, I could sit down and figure it out, but by then, it would probably be over. Suddenly there was a bright flash on the screen, which washed out everything, and the room erupted in a massive, “WHOA!” Fifteen seconds later the video was back, and in the center of the screen, one of the buildings was a mass of rubble and dust.
I looked over at Colin and said, “I guess these things work after all.”
“Mister President, if you thought Desert Storm was high tech, you ain’t seen nothing yet. In a few years we’ll be able to do live reconnaissance before, during, and after one of these things. You and me? We’re dinosaurs with this stuff.”
“Colin, not to be rude about it, but I would guess that you were saying the same thing right before you went to Viet Nam, and we lost that one. Let’s hope these guys don’t get the same rude awakening.”
“Touché!”
I turned back to the Watch Officer, a colonel. “Colonel, what was it we just saw happen there?”
“That was the headquarters of their Army, such as it is, in Kabul. The Taliban is relatively low tech and doesn’t have a lot of formal headquarters and such, but this was the closest we could come to it.” He pointed at another screen. “The B-2s also took out what radar they had, mostly at what they had for airports and airstrips. The Bones are on final approach. They have a heavy load of Mk 83 Snake Eyes with a mix of fusing options.” On another screen was another black and white image of something, I guess a valley of some sort, with various black dots on it. Suddenly, from right to left, something streaked across the screen, and then behind it massive clouds of dust rose up. There was more yelling and congratulating from the watchers.
I watched a little longer, and some reports were coming over from the Pentagon. It was well after one in the morning when I stretched and said, “I am going to bed. Colin, I suggest you do the same. Tonight I need to make a speech.” I made a final look around the room. “These guys are playing video games and it feels like we are playing Pong on a black and white television in my aunt’s basement. Get this place updated before somebody sees it and laughs themselves to death.”
He laughed at that. “I’ll pass that along. Good night, sir.”
“Good night, Colin. Thank you for being here tonight.”
I slept late, and Josh had the writers do up a speech for me. Ari was going to put me on television tonight at 7:30. Ari wasn’t in the need-to-know loop, but he would understand, and I didn’t expect the speech to take long. It would be half rah-rah patriotism and half real information. Actually, that wouldn’t be fair, to anyone. Americans were angry and scared, and up until now it didn’t look like their government was doing jack shit about a disaster that had killed about 3,200 of their fellow citizens. They wanted something done, and they wanted it done sooner rather than later. A decent speech and solid action would help bring my fellow citizens back to an even keel.
Mindy and the staff knew I was reserving today for something critical, and not to schedule me for much. We had maintained fairly tight security on the operation so far. Josh had known what was going on, but all Ari had been told was that he had to get me time on the air. I was in my office, in khakis and a sports shirt, by 10:00. I asked Josh, Ari, and Matt Scully into my office at that time. Mike Gerson was out of town on a long weekend, which he had earned.
After they came in, I asked, “Josh, anything new on the operation?”
Ari interrupted and asked, “What operation, Mister President?” I glanced at him in surprise, and he continued. “I was asked a question by the Washington Post a little while ago, something about some unusual explosions or something going on in Afghanistan. It wasn’t very clear, but something happened over there.”
I had a half smile on my face as I asked, “What did you tell them?”
“That I didn’t know what he was talking about. What is going on, Mister President?”
I looked over at Josh. “Well, security seems to work sometimes around here.” He snorted at that. To the others I said, “This is why you are here and why I need to speak to the nation tonight. Last night, around midnight our time, we launched quite a few bombers and blew up quite a few targets in Afghanistan. A terrorist group there, called Al Qaeda, and the Afghan government, the Taliban, were the ones behind the 9-11 attacks. Tonight I need to tell the nation.”
Ari looked very distressed. “Mr. President, how can I craft the appropriate response if I am kept in the dark like this? I have a top secret clearance!”
“Ari, you do have the clearance, and I do trust you. This is a matter of military security. If anybody had said something to anybody, and it had gotten out, lives could have been lost. I will never compromise that for the sake of not looking bad. For weeks now people have been asking you when we are going to do something. You’ve told me that. What would you have done differently if you had known this?”
“I could at least have said we were working on a response. Instead everybody thinks we’re a bunch of idiots who don’t know what we’re doing,” he replied.
I nodded. “Ari, we have known who did this since the first night I spoke to the nation, that night, 9-11. We had to wait to get everything ready and get men and ships and planes into position. If I had given you more of the details, you might have inadvertently said something and, they would have disappeared. I can afford to look foolish. I can’t afford to let them get away.”
He stared at me in shock. “You’ve known all along?!”