Code Word: Paternity, A Presidential Thriller (13 page)

Chapter 23

Rick felt their tension as he entered.
I bruised a lot of egos when I left the last
meeting, to shake them out of their ruts. I hope I won’t need to repeat that
performance today, but if they still haven’t come around, I may just have to
dispense with these meetings and drive everything myself!

The NSC waited around a rosewood table in
a conference room dominated by five large video screens. Staff and experts were
along the walls. shelved in their chairs like reference books Several
odd-looking semicircular glass enclosures, of the type that usually contained
revolving doors, bulged from the walls, each sheltering a pair of encrypted
telephones, one with video and one without. Intended to permit a participant to
step away for a private conversation, they existed because of some techie with
a big budget and a desire to make the world’s coolest conference room. No one
used them. Anne Battista spoke for all when she said, “Standing in one of those
bubbles makes me feel like I’m stripping in Macy’s window.”

Plastic water bottles and paper cups were
positioned within reach of the participants. Several laptops gaped open near
their owners. Encrypted smart phones sat on every blotter, and people hurriedly
fingered them to silence their bleeps, wondering what mood would sweep into the
room with the president.

Dorn looked apprehensively toward the
president, wondering whether Martin, or maybe Guarini, would make those little
moves that show he’d lost the president’s confidence.

Martin made a go-ahead gesture.

“Mr. President, I’ll start by summarizing
the courses of action we’ve developed. We believe that taken together they
constitute an initial response to Paternity’s implication of North Korea,
plus a way forward. We also believe that we should have your decision on these
measures today or in the very near future.”

Martin’s face revealed nothing as he
waited, fingers steepled on the table.
Maybe
you will, maybe you won’t,
he thought.
It depends on what you offer.

Dorn read from notes: “The United States
will declare that Las Vegas was destroyed by a North Korean nuclear weapon and
that we hold the North Korean government responsible; that any further such
attack will cause a full nuclear retaliatory response on North Korea; that we
will lead the UN to condemn North Korea for a breach of international peace and
security, a finding that obligates the UN to address the matter; that we go to
the UN for sanction and cooperation for a blockade; and that we convene two
summit conferences—NATO, and the Northeast Asia regional powers: China, Japan,
Russia and South Korea.

“Subsequently, we propose demanding that
Kim step down, going to Congress for authorization to use force if necessary to
remove him, and making a comprehensive proposal for a UN-led scheme to prevent
nuclear terrorism by denying terrorists access to nuclear weapons or
materials.”

His list complete, Dorn looked
uncertainly at Martin.

Not
bad,
thought the
president.
I see Bruce got the nuclear
option back in, and I’m not having it, but their thinking is coming along.

The president looked around the table,
his gaze a sunlamp warming Dorn as he spoke. “Overall, this is a good package.
I do want to tweak it, and I’m not going along with the threat to nuke North Korea.

“You don’t mention any terrorist group. I
suspected al-Qaeda and told the country that the day it happened. I still
suspect them. So, why not say that?”

The attorney general spoke from Martin’s
right:
 
“Because, so far, we have no
evidence at all linking any person or entity other than Kim and the DPRK to Las Vegas.”

“Besides which,” the vice president
barged in, “by laying it all at Kim’s door we have the possibility he will not
only deny it but finger the terrorists,
and
,
if we make no mention of al-Qaeda, they might not be able to stand being
ignored and make their claim.”

They’re
right,
thought Martin,
let’s put some pressure on North Korea and
see what happens.

“OK, Bruce.

“Anybody else. .
. . No? Fine, that’s the way we’ll go.”

Dorn relaxed a
little; the president wasn’t going to retaliate, at least right now, for his
blunt words in the private office. But he felt the emotional barrier between
them and he knew that Guarini, and maybe Battista, would sense it the way
sharks sense an injured fish.

“The second item was threatening a
nuclear response. I remember my grandfather—he was a Chesapeake waterman—saying that if you have
to
tell
people you’re tough, then
you’re not. Real toughness doesn’t need to be announced. It’s obvious that we
could obliterate North Korea.
I don’t need to say that, and if I do, some people who would otherwise support
us would call it saber rattling and back away. I want Kim to be the one
sounding warlike, which he surely will when we point to him. Who disagrees?”

Surprise and irritation flared in
Guarini.
Who disagrees? That’s not
inviting debate; it’s trying to bulldoze the NSC! Who’s he after? What happened
to the guy who wanted a full exchange of views?

Seeing Griffith gather himself, his shoulders
tensing, Guarini spoke: “Mr. President, the number of dead and missing is
nearing eighty thousand. A lot of Americans—not all of them right-wingers, by
any means—want payback. Right now that’s focused on al-Qaeda, but when we
announce that North Korea’s
responsible, a lot of folks, including some big-name bloggers and newspaper
editors, are going to call for retaliation. Plus, the scholars of nuclear
deterrence will point out that it needs to be restored, which is an indirect
way of urging retaliation.

“We all agree with you a nuclear strike
should be our last option, not our first. The part about retaliation isn’t
really a threat. It is, as you just said, a statement of the obvious. Making it
gives you some pushback against the nuke ’em now crowd and also against the
think tanks’ hand-wringing over the failure of deterrence.”

We
aren’t goin’ there!
thought
Rick
. Once we suggest nuclear
retaliation, it’ll suck all the air out of the room. Nothing else will get any
attention from the press.
“Well, Bart, I just don’t want to make a chest-pounding
threat like that. How else could we do what you recommend?”

“How about by
low-keyed actions and leaks?” said the secretary of defense, as intent as
Guarini at heading off a clash between Martin and Griffith.

“Like what,
Eric?”

“Like . . . we make some unannounced but
discoverable moves with the nuclear force. Say . . . we surge missile sub
deployments to get an extra boat or two to sea. We deploy strategic nuclear
bombers to Guam . . . I’m sure Mac and the
chiefs can come up with more ideas. Maybe we leak that we’re updating nuclear
strike plans. Things like that. And we need to go to higher alert in the region
in anyway, to be prepared for what Kim might do after we finger him.”

Bart’s
probably right,
thought
Martin.
This is a bit of chest-pounding
for those who want it, but it’s not me on camera. OK.

“Bart and Eric,
I take your points. We’ll do it that way.”

OK,
we’re two for two!
Cheerfully, Martin shifted his gaze to Anne Battista and UN Ambassador Oscar
Neumann sitting across the table from her. “Anne, how about you and Oscar tell
me how the UN will play in this package of ours? I believe the UN is an
important resource.”

“Well, Mr. President, I have some ideas,
but Oscar’s our expert. Oscar, why don’t you walk us through this?”

 
Neumann began eagerly. “With respect to
obtaining a Security Council resolution condemning North Korea, there’s good news and
bad news. The good is, it’s not unprecedented. In fact the council has done
that before where North
Korea was concerned, in 1950. The council
also found, in 1991, that when Iraq
invaded Kuwait
it committed a breach of international peace and security. The bad is this time
we don’t have tens of thousands of troops crossing a border. There are no North
Korean attackers to show on CNN. So, getting the resolution depends on
presenting credible evidence that North Korea
bombed Las Vegas.
I don’t have to tell you that since the 2003 WMD fiasco U.S.
credibility isn’t high at the UN. It will be a struggle to get what we want
from the Security Council.”

Martin’s face
became a thundercloud.

What
the hell—in for a penny, in for a pound,
thought Battista, who said, “Oscar, what about UN approval
for a blockade to prevent North Korea from passing more nukes to terrorists?”

Neumann pursed his fleshy lips, aware that
his boss was pushing him onto thin ice. “More of the same, I’m afraid. There
are precedents; after Iraq’s
invasion of Kuwait the
council approved a resolution that, although it never used
the word, sanctioned
a blockade of Iraq. After the
DPRK’s first nuclear test in 2006 the Security Council passed a resolution,
1718, that could be used to legitimize international inspections of all
shipments moving in or out of the DPRK. But neither China
nor South Korea wants to
impede North Korea’s
trade because they fear a complete collapse of the country if they do that.
Neither wants the chaos and risk from North Korea falling apart right
next door. With its veto in the Security Council, China can stop us cold.”

 
I
can’t believe,
thought
Martin,
how frozen and unimaginative
professional diplomats are. They make the generals seem forward-thinking!

“Ambassador
Neumann, I’m going to give you the same reality check I gave your colleagues!
The game changed on June thirteenth! Terrorists with nukes aren’t just a
problem; they’re annihilation itself! The old equations for calculating
self-interest no longer apply. If you have as much diplomatic skill as I have
been told you have, you’ll be able to make them understand that. If you cannot,
I’ll replace you with someone who can!”

The president’s threat left everyone
unsettled. In Griffith’s
case, it was more than unsettled. He was boiling.
This is outrageous! If this man doesn’t hear what he wants to hear, he
shoots the messenger. We can’t have this!

Guarini felt Griffith’s anger rising but kept silent. It
was the secretary of defense who maneuvered them around the wreckage, speaking
calmly, as if Martin’s outburst never happened.

“Mr. President, it seems to me we’ve
reached a workable plan—challenging, but workable. May I suggest we direct the
staff to follow up, then meet again tomorrow afternoon?”

OK,
I’d give them about a B-minus this time, and if I slap down someone else,
they’ll sulk.
Martin
agreed and left to prepare for calls to the leaders of China, South Korea,
and Japan.

Griffith
, too, had some calls to make, but his
were local.

Chapter 24

As he often did when receiving sudden and
momentous news China’s
president, Ming Liu, let his mind go blank, then thought of earth, trees, and
sky and waited for ideas to grow. Soon they began to appear, like shoots poking
through soil into spring sunshine. Except in this case there was no sunshine.

Ming leaned back in a wicker armchair and
gazed out the window at his beloved vegetable garden. He braced his elbows
against his chest, steepled his fingers, and rested his chin on them.
I must call Jia and Chen, but first, I will
think a few minutes.

Parts of President Martin’s call began to
replay themselves. Martin’s tone of voice was hard to read because his own
English was poor. Still, his impression mirrored that of his interpreter: It
was the voice of someone under great strain and carried much sadness.

Next to appear in his mind’s eye was the
dissolute face of Kim Jong-il.
Damn that
man!
Whether or not he had done it, his behavior over many years had made
him the Americans’ p
rime target,
and an
inviting one at that. Kim was outrageous, capricious
—
no, crazy
—
and that
prepared the world to believe he was fool enough to have done w
hat Martin was soon to announce: det
onate a nuclear
bomb in an American city. He had to admit that soon after hearing about the
explosion he, Ming, had wondered if Kim was involved. He had pushed the thought
away, and now here it was again, not a thought, not a suspicion, but an
assertion by the leader of a country easily capable of erasing all life in North Korea.
Which direction would the radioactive fallout drift? He needed to find out,
since only the Yalu River separated North
Korea from China.

Martin
said he wanted to avoid nuclear retaliation if there was any other way to make
his country safe again and give a just response to Kim’s attack. I believe him.
That’s the only thing about this that is not a disaster for China. The
rest—it’s all terrible news for us.

Well,
perhaps not entirely terrible. The likely outcome, loss of North Korean
sovereignty, is certainly bad. Our buffer will be gone. But . . . Martin knows
he needs China’s
support to accomplish anything other than nuclear retaliation. He told me that
I’m the first foreign leader he’s called and that he will call only Gwon and
Kato before making his announcement two days from now. He’s acknowledging that China is much more important in this crisis than
Russia.
I’m certainly not going to hear any more prattle from him about human rights,
or about our currency! So, it’s not all bad.

A few minutes later Ming had Foreign
Minister Jia Jinping and National Defense Minister Chen Shaoshi on the line.

“Martin wants to convene a five-party
conference immediately to agree upon measures to screen or block all North
Korean exports so that no more of Kim’s bombs get to terrorists. Us, Russia, South
Korea, Japan
and them. He wants us to host it. What do you think, Jia?”

Jia marshaled his thoughts. After perhaps
five seconds, he said, “It’s not unprecedented. This is actually a revival of
the Six-Party Talks of the Bush administration, but without North Korea.”

Ming knew his foreign minister had no
initiative, so he was not surprised by Jia’s non-answer. He was, however,
surprised by what Jia said next.

“Have you spoken
with Comrade Kim yet?”

Ming had in fact thought of it while
contemplating his garden, but let it go.
What
was to be gained?
It would be an unsatisfying conversation and would, as
always, leave him feeling soiled. Kim was a liar, a lecher, and a bombastic
idiot.
But . . .

Ming said, “To what purpose, Jia? He’ll
deny it, and then probably make some outrageous public statement that will
preempt President Martin’s speech to Congress. I’ve just told you how China can gain
from working with Martin in his time of desperate need; why risk that
opportunity? Martin would surely know where Kim’s information came from!”

“I know, but isn’t it possible the
Americans are wrong or are lying, that the bomb was not North Korean? I’m sure,
Comrade President, you would want to be prepared for that possibility.”

Ming sighed. “Jia, surely you have no
doubt that Kim is erratic enough to do something like this and that the
analysis of nuclear explosions has been a well-established fact ever since China and
others did it in the fifties and sixties? And, yes, the Americans could be
lying, but I doubt it. Martin said he was going to make the evidence available
for independent verification.”

Chen Shaoshi’s voice sounded from the
speakerphone. As he listened, Ming lit a cigarette. “Comrades, there’s nothing
for us in telling Kim what’s up. In fact there’s a risk: if Kim responds by
doing something that frightens the South Koreans and makes him look guilty—the
man is crazy enough to admit it and dare the Americans to do something about
it—that will make Martin’s task easier. We want him to need China badly in
order to assemble his coalition. That way he will be forced to give us
something substantial in return, as you said Comrade President—Taiwan Province,
perhaps, or a reduction in military sales to Japan. We have Martin by the balls
and I want to keep it that way.”

“Jia, I think Chen just summed up the
situation. No, I’m not going to call Comrade Kim.”

 
“Comrade President.” It was Chen again. “Did
Martin say whether he was taking any immediate military measures?”

“Yes, Chen. He is sending several
cruisers to the waters between Korea
and Japan.
They have rockets that can shoot down ballistic missiles that Kim might launch
toward Japan.
When he speaks to Gwon, Martin will offer to send Patriot antimissile batteries
to protect South Korea.
And today he has ordered the American aircraft carrier that is based in Japan to put to sea and move within attack range
of North Korea.
He assured me that when the danger is resolved, his ships will leave.”

“That’s what I would do, in his place,”
said the defense minister. “I think I will send a submarine or two and perhaps
some destroyers to help the Americans remember that we have a true navy now.”

After emphasizing that Kim was not to be
alerted and directing Jia to be skeptical but helpful when his American
counterpart arrived in about fifteen hours, Ming hung up.

China
’s president exhaled, crushed out the
cigarette, and went into his garden. He was a husky six-footer
who
walked with a slight limp. His hands were lar
ge enough to palm a basketball.

Do
I truly have Martin by the balls? Maybe, but we may actually have each other by
the balls. China will suffer
if Martin turns North Korea
into a radioactive wasteland and the fallout and the survivors come here.
There’s also a problem—perhaps more of a problem—if he unseats Kim and unifies Korea under
southern rule. Still, the united Korea will be weak for many years;
repairing the social and economic devastation the Kims created will be a huge
drain. On balance, I’d rather deal with unification.

Ming’s mind returned to Jia’s skepticism.
Yes, they could be lying, but why should
they? That would be very risky. And they
do
have the technology. Albright told our ambassador some of the uranium
that produced the Pakistani explosions had come from our enrichment plant in
Heping. She was dead right.

That’s
it! It is I who have Martin.
Ming
smiled at the tomato plant he was spraying.
He’ll
be desperate for China’s
confirmation of his technology! He needs us so badly that I may be able to get
him to withdraw American support for Taiwan
Province. I could bring
them back into the nation, just as Jiang Zemin brought Hong
Kong back. Now
that
would
be something!