"And she and Bucky are ... you know!"
"Mister President, ever heard of 'Don't ask, don't tell!'"
I just growled and threw my hands up in the air. "Aaaaggghh! Daughters!" I looked over at her and pointed a finger. "This is all your fault!"
"My fault?!"
"I wanted sons, but you said, 'No, let's have twin daughters!' This is all your fault!"
"Oh, puhhhleeeease! As I recall, it's the male who provides the X or the Y chromosome, so don't blame me!", was Marilyn's reply.
"Yeah? I recall Henry the Eighth and what he did to a few of his wives when they didn't provide some sons! You are on shaky ground here, your Highness!"
Marilyn just snorted and ignored me.
Thankfully the media never twigged to my daughters' romantic liaisons, or maybe they just didn't care. When the summer started and the girls were out of school, Molly went on an internship with Harley-Davidson that Tusker had arranged, and Holly spent the summer goofing off and visiting friends. If Charlie was anywhere near where we were, we tried to take an afternoon off and watch, but that is such a production to travel to that we mostly watched on ESPN.
It was still blood curdling to watch, but I knew enough about what he was doing to see that he really was good at it. The boys had made their business plan based on being in the top ten in the rankings after two years, and it looked like Charlie was there and more. Charlie had begun racing at the end of 2003 and had very quickly proved he could still outrace almost everybody on the smaller regional tracks. In 2004 he continued, and by mid-summer had been picked up by a pair of major sponsors. The first was Red Bull, the god-awful energy drink that tasted like kerosene, only worse. High energy, that was Charlie, all right!
Amazingly, the Marine Corps was the other major sponsor, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with me! The services often had NASCAR teams, and the presence of a certified Marine hero in the top ranks of motocross was definitely aimed at their demographic target. They actually built a recruiting campaign around Charlie, with ads and posters of him in his combat gear side by side with him in his racing gear. The Few, the Proud, the Hopelessly Insane!
In any case, it was beginning to look like Charlie might be able to make a go of this. He was going to begin racing in the AMA Pro Championship races, and was actually getting a real paycheck from his sponsors. If he continued at this pace, he had a chance to make it to national ranks by next year. He told me once what some of the top tier people made, and it was in the millions. Who knew!? To a considerable extent, however, this destroyed the Charlie-Bucky team, but both boys explained that that had only been a short term plan anyway. Bucky would go back to work at Tusk Cycle, and Red Bull would have professional handlers who would deal with the racing and transportation. Then Bucky arranged for an agent from Creative Artists Agency to handle endorsements and appearances.
As for me, I tried to stay on top of the tiger rather than inside him. In May we had a little war that nobody outside of the administration even knew about! For several years the CIA had been quietly supporting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against the Taliban. Things had begun heating up a hair, so we airdropped in a few Special Forces A-Teams to help and began flying a few more B-2 patrols. In turn, the Taliban complained to their bosses back in Pakistan, who decided a more active role was needed. In early May the CIA reported that an infantry brigade was slowly being prepared for action in Pakistan, much as it had been before 9-11.
We really didn't want the Taliban to win, so I called in the new Ambassador from Pakistan, Jehangir Karamat. Karamat had been a four star general in Pakistan's army at one point, so hopefully he would be able to convince his superiors of the folly of poking a tiger through the bars of a cage. I met Karamat with the Secretaries of State and Defense, and told him we knew about the planned 'invasion'. Of course he denied everything, which was what we expected, and then he called home. Two days later a motorized infantry battalion crossed the border. We waited until they bedded down for the night, and then a pair of B-2s carpet bombed their encampment.
We didn't broadcast this to the world, hoping the Pakistanis would take the hint and go home. Pakistan is really an army with a country attached, not the other way around. The remnants of the battalion did begin going home, but the Air Force and Navy decided to screw around. A large flight of French-built Mirages and U.S.-built F-16s lifted off from Masroor, near Karachi, and sortied towards the Truman carrier group in the Bay of Bengal. They tried to fly beneath the radar and completely failed. They were picked up almost immediately by airborne radar and warned off. About half turned back then, and the rest turned back when they were lit up by fire control radar from the F-18s which were shadowing them. Smart move.
Not so smart was the captain of the Pakistani submarine Khalid, a French-built submarine that was shadowing the Truman group. She was trying to maneuver into an attack position, though it wasn't working, since the Scranton, an Improved Los Angeles class American sub was shadowing the Khalid! The Truman launched an anti-submarine equipped Sea King helicopter which positioned itself directly over the Khalid and then hammered her with active sonar to let her know we knew where she was. Unfortunately, that simply rattled the Khalid's commander, who promptly launched a pair of Exocet missiles at the nearest American destroyer, the Kidd. The Exocets never even came close to the destroyer, but the Sea King dropped a pair of homing torpedoes and sank the Khalid.
We kept the whole thing quiet, to allow the Pakistanis to save face. They backed down, although diplomatically things were very frosty. We lost nobody, and only spent some money on ordnance and fuel. I heard later that Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan, was on thin ice with his ruling junta of generals, and was drinking a lot. Ambassador Karamat was also recalled and replaced.
That was a relatively simple problem. Otherwise, it was becoming trickier, not easier. Condi Rice was good, but she didn't quite have the gravitas and respect Colin Powell did. Still, I wasn't going to get rid of her. She and Colin had developed a fairly decent team, and it was she who pointed out to me the problems developing in Iraq. It had been 14 years since Bush 41 had kicked his can down the road, and he was really feeling feisty again. The provocations were becoming more frequent and the rhetoric was becoming noisier. She thought that we needed to get proactive over there.
Since Bill Clinton's time, we had been enforcing a no-fly zone over both the southern, Shiite, part of the country and the northern, Kurdish, part of the country. Every once in awhile Saddam Hussein would get to feeling aggressive and light up one of our planes with a fire control radar, and occasionally launch a missile at it. Our response was predictable, in that we would then destroy the SAM and radar sites. I had raised the bar, by adding a Tomahawk strike or two at one of Hussein's innumerable palaces, razing it to rubble. It wasn't an intentional attempt to kill him, but if he died, I wouldn't lose any sleep.
Meanwhile, the Kurds up north were busy forging a national identity. Kurdistan was an area of the map that occupied northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northeastern Syria. The heart of it was in Iraq. Still in all those countries they were a generally oppressed minority. Now, under American aerial protection, they were developing an autonomous nation, and the central government in Baghdad was squawking loudly. We said (diplomatically of course), "Up yours!", to Hussein, and sent over a few teams of Special Forces trainers, and Bismarck Myrick as Special Envoy.