“C’mon in, General McLanahan,” the man said, with a broad smile. “We need to talk.”
The Oval Office, The White House,
Washington, D.C.
“The Joint Chiefs are meeting right now at the Pentagon,” Secretary of Defense Robert Goff said, as he was ushered into the Oval Office. “They’ll be ready with some recommendations for you shortly. It’s pretty clear what happened: someone in Russia leaked the information about the downed bomber to the world press. The State Department tells me several world leaders have already called our embassies asking for an explanation. The press is going nuts. Every bit of information they’ve ever had about Dreamland is being trotted out and fitted together with the information the Russians are publicizing, and it’s all coming together. Dreamland has been blown wide open.”
President Thomas Thorn put down the papers he was looking at, motioned to the sofa, and nodded. Goff took his usual place on the sofa; the President continued to pace the floor, looking thoughtful if not concerned. “It’ll still be a classified installation,” the President said. “Only now, everyone will know it’s classified.”
“If I didn’t know you better, Thomas, I’d say you were just trying to make a funny,” Goff said. He knew, of course, that he wasn’t. “Thomas?” Goff prompted, the concern evident in his voice. “What are we going to do?”
“Admit to it, of course,” Thorn replied. “Admit that it was our bomber, our aircraft, on a spy mission inside Russia. We were trying to rescue a spy that had valuable information for us. We’re going to do exactly what I told Sen’kov I’d do — go in front of the American people, in front of the world, and admit everything.”
“I disagree. I think we shouldn’t say anything,” Goff said. “The Russians trumped us. Anything we say now will sound like we’re making excuses.”
“We’re not making excuses — we’re offering explanations,” the President said. “We can’t deny any of it, Bob. We knew we were working off borrowed time anyway. Expecting the Russians to sit on the intelligence bonanza of the decade was too much to hope for. We had to face the music eventually. I’m surprised the Russians waited this long.”
“Then why in hell didn’t we do something more?” Goff snapped.
“Because our objective always was to get our men and women back home,” the President said. “The Russians had their hands on two American aviators from a top-secret weapons research facility. They could have had the other bomber, too — they almost did. They could have sent a hundred planes after them. We made them hesitate with a half-baked threat that shouldn’t have worked but did. All we needed was enough hesitation to get our people clear. I expected Sen’kov to renege on the deal the next morning. Nobody won, but the important thing was, we didn’t lose.” He punctuated the last sentence with an angry glare.
“Congress is going to roast us,” Goff said. “The media is going to chew on us for weeks, maybe months.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Goff asked incredulously. “Don’t you get it, Thomas? Don’t you understand? Congress, the American people, the world will think we are completely inept. They’ll think we don’t care about our allies, that we’re afraid, that we can’t protect ourselves. If we can’t protect our own people, how can we protect our friends and allies?”
“Our job is not to protect the rest of the world, Bob,” Thorn said. “We are not the defenders of freedom. We are one nation among hundreds of other nations around the planet.”
“Are you joking, Thomas?” Goff asked. “You are the president of the United States. You are the leader of the free world. This office is the center of hope, freedom, and democracy for billions of people around the globe—”
“I don’t buy any of that, Robert — I never did, and you know it,” the President said. “This office stands for one thing and one thing only: the executive branch of the United States, one of three branches of the American government. The Constitution specifies exactly what this office is and what my responsibilities are, and I’m quite certain the Constitution does not authorize me to be the leader of the free world, defender of liberty, truth, justice, or of anything else except to faithfully uphold and defend the Constitution. I am the president, that’s it.”
“It’s not a Constitutional thing, Thomas. It’s … it’s symbolic,” Goff said uncomfortably, irritated that he had to explain this concept to his friend. “The president of the United States is a symbol of democracy and freedom. It’s not legislated or conferred upon you — you’ve got it because people have come to believe it.”
“So I don’t have a choice? That’s nonsense. I have a choice, and I choose not to be a symbol of something like that.” But it was obvious he wanted to change the subject — and besides, he didn’t like arguing with his friend.
Thorn motioned to the reports on the EB-1C aircraft coming in from intelligence analysts and experts. “All this stuff about how our country has been compromised by the Russians revealing information on the bomber? It’s all nonsense. These analysts put all that gloom-and-doom stuff in their report simply because if they underestimated the impact of the news, they’d be judged unreliable in their estimates. They’d rather be known for predicting the worst and hoping for the best than the other way around. The information reveals nothing, Robert. It’s a sensational episode that in the end affects nothing.”
Robert Goff stared disbelievingly at his old friend, then shook his head. “What’s happened to you, Thomas?” he breathed.
“I was wondering the same about you, Robert,” Thorn said, angry that he had decided not to engage his friend in a half-philosophical, half-personal argument, but that Goff had come back wanting more anyway. “I thought we both believed in the same things — smaller government, fewer foreign entanglements, less reliance on military power. America first, foremost, and always — that was our vision. The office — yours and mine — seems to have diverted your attention.”
Goff ignored Thorn’s observations. He chuckled and gave him a wry smile. “I remember when you got back from Desert Storm, when I brought Amelia to Dover to be there when you got off that plane with your unit. There you were, with your ‘chocolate chip’ battle-dress uniform, beret, desert combat boots, still with your web gear on like you were getting ready to go into battle again. You looked like John Wayne and Superman rolled into one. You had several dozen confirmed kills to your credit, and regular folks treated you like the second coming of Elvis — twenty years earlier, they would have spit on you if they even thought you were military. You cried when those people cheered for you. You cried when the band started playing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ and the crowds broke through the barricades and surrounded you.” Thorn had stopped his pacing and was staring off into space as if reliving that moment.
“You were proud of your men and the Army,” Goff went on. “You went back and thanked every one of your men for their service. You got down on your knees on the tarmac and thanked the ones who didn’t come back. You were a proud man, Thomas.”
“I’m still proud of our soldiers,” he shot back, almost defensively. “I’m proud enough of them that I refuse to send them away from home just so they can be ‘trip wires’ or so we can maintain a ‘presence’ in some foreign country. Soldiers are meant to fight and kill to defend their country, not to fight and die for someone else’s country, or for the latest slogan or jingle or buzzword, or so we can police a country whose people want nothing more than to kill one another, or because the media saturates our senses with scenes of downtrodden people supposedly in need of liberation. I won’t follow the pattern of past leaders and send troops overseas just because we can, or because someone believes we should because we’re the leaders of the free world.”