“Mr. President, this will simply not be taken any other way except as the United States withdrawing from an unwinnable situation in the Balkans,” Kercheval said. “It will absolutely throw U.S. foreign policy into chaos!”
“I disagree, Ed—”
“Our allies will see it as nothing but the United States turning tail and running away,” Kercheval went on angrily. “We have risked too many lives over there to just turn our backs now!”
“Enough, Mr. Kercheval,” the President said. The room was instantly quiet. Everyone in the Oval Office noticed it — that little bit of an edge to the President’s voice, the one many people knew was under the surface but had just not been seen before.
The President was an ex-Army Special Forces officer, well-trained in commando tactics and experienced in various methods of killing an enemy, and a man doesn’t live that kind of life without certain traits being indelibly ingrained into the psyche. Thorn’s political opponents saw this as an opportunity to try to portray the upstart as a potential mad dog and had exposed his military background in grisly, bloodcurdling detail. They had maintained, and the Pentagon finally confirmed, that as an Army Special Forces platoon leader, Thorn led over two dozen search-and-destroy missions in Kuwait, Iraq, and — secretly — into Iran, during Operation Desert Storm. Needless to say, the fact that U.S. forces had been secretly in Iran during the war, with America promising not to threaten Iran as long as it stayed neutral, did not sit well with Iran or with many nations in the Persian Gulf region.
As a first lieutenant, Thomas N. “TNT” Thorn had commanded a Special Forces platoon tasked with sneaking deep into various enemy-held territories and lazing targets for precision-guided bombing missions. He and his men were authorized to use any and all means necessary to get close enough to a target to shine it with a laser or mark it with a laser frequency generator so that the target could be hit by laser-guided bombs dropped from Army, Air Force, and Navy attack planes or helicopters.
His own accounts and those of his men told the story: he had pulled the trigger of a weapon or withdrawn a blade in combat over a hundred times, and had confirmed kills on over a hundred men. Most were from relatively short distances, less than fifteen yards, using a silenced pistol. Some were from almost a mile away, where the bullet reaches its target before the sound. A few had been from knife-fighting distance, close enough so Thorn could feel his victim’s final gush of breath on his hand as he drove a knife into an unprotected neck or brain stem. This didn’t include the countless number of enemy forces killed by the laser-guided bombs he and his team had sent to their targets — the estimated final “head count” was well into triple digits.
But rather than horrifying the voters, as the opposition candidates had hoped, it had drawn attention to him. At first, of course, it had been the spectacle — everyone wanted to see what a real-life assassin looked like. But if they had come to see the monster, they had stayed to hear the message. The message had soon become a campaign, which had become a race, which had become a president. But though most had never seen the monster, they assumed it still existed.
They had caught a glimpse of it just now.
“I’d like to speak with Minister Schramm after the meeting with the congressional leadership, but before the videoconference,” the President said, and this time it was an order, not a request or suggestion. “Set it up. Please.” At that, the meeting came to an abrupt and very uncomfortable end.
Office of the President, The Kremlin,
Russian Federation
“It cannot be true,” the president said. He took a sip of coffee, then set the cup back on its delicate china saucer and stared off through the window of his office into the cold rain outside. “It is amazing what a few weeks can do.
“The report has not yet been confirmed, Mr. President,” Army General Nikolai Stepashin replied, refilling his coffee cup. “It may not be true. It may be an elaborate hoax, or a security test, or a joke.” The general, wearing a civilian suit too big for him and a tie too small, still looked very much like the grizzled field commander that he was. He downed the coffee, his third that morning, but craved more. “But the information in the intercept was so crazy, and the Chancellor’s reaction so strong, that I thought it best to pass it along.”
“Tell me what this means,” Valentin Gennadievich Sen’kov, president of the Russian Federation, said. “Someone please tell me what in hell this means.” Sometimes, Sen’kov thought, the more he learned, the less he knew, and he understood even less.
Fifty-two-year-old Valentin Gennadievich Sen’kov was the leader of the Russia All-Fatherland Party, formerly the Liberal Democratic Party under Sen’kov’s mentor and friend, President Vitaly Velichko. But when Velichko was killed in the joint American-Ukrainian attack on Moscow following Russia’s attempt to reunite its former empire by force, Sen’kov, a former KGB agent and former prime minister, had been named acting president. He had been quickly voted out of office in the national elections that soon followed; his name and that of his party had been so tainted by Velichko’s failure that he’d had the name of his political party changed so the Russian people might not recognize it and associate it with past failures. He’d held on to his seat in the Federation Council, the Russian Parliament’s upper house, by his very fingernails.
When the reformist government of Boris Yeltsin had failed to lift Russia out of its economic, political, and morale doldrums, Sen’kov and his new Russia All-Fatherland Party had been called upon to support the government and help restore the citizens’ confidence in it. Yeltsin had been able to hold on to power only by bringing back Sen’kov, and with him a few vestiges of the old Soviet-style authoritarian government. Sen’kov had finally been back in the Kremlin, no longer an outcast, first as foreign minister and then as prime minister. When Yeltsin, helpless in his alcoholic haze, had been forced to resign in disgrace, Valentin Sen’kov had been chosen by a unanimous vote of Parliament as acting president. His election, just four months before the U.S. elections, had been a landslide victory for the conservative NeoCommunist Party.
Sen’kov seemed to take over where Velichko had left off, but this time the Russian people had responded positively to his political views and actions. Sen’kov immediately crushed the rebellion in Chechnya; he pledged to modernize Russia’s nuclear arsenal; and he resigned his nation from membership in the Council of Europe, the judicial body formed to resolve conflicts between European nations, because the Council had denounced Russia’s actions in Chechnya but refused to speak out against the NATO bombing of Bosnia or Serbia. His brand of quiet toughness and conservative, nationalistic ideals resonated well with the Russian people, who were growing tired of seeing their country become nothing more than a very large third-world nation. In the national elections that soon followed, the Russia All-Fatherland Party under Valentin Sen’kov had captured a huge majority in both the Federation Council and the Duma, and he had been elected the new president.
“What is happening? What are they trying to do?” Sen’kov asked himself. “The Americans are actually going to leave Kosovo, leave Bosnia, leave the Balkans, leave NATO, leave Europe?”
“Sir, what it means, if true, is that the United States is imploding — literally as well as figuratively,” Stepashin said. Stepashin was the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service. He looked at the other members of the president’s Cabinet there for the impromptu meeting: retired Rocket Forces General Viktor Trubnikov, minister of defense; Ivan Filippov, the foreign minister; Sergey Yejsk, aide to the president on national security affairs and secretary of the Security Council; and Colonel-General Valeriy Zhurbenko, the first deputy minister of defense and chief of the general staff. “For years, ever since their president’s foreign policy debacles, domestic stagnation — and personal indiscretions — the Americans have been like frightened children.”