Kipper rolled his eyes. You would have thought they'd have been content with the collapse of the global economy. That had wound back carbon emissions to early-twentieth-century levels once you corrected for the one-off addition of the toxic firestorms back in '03. But no, the Greens had the swing votes in Congress, and they had proved themselves to be entirely ruthless in using their numbers to play off the old Republicans and Democrats. They were even worse in many ways. Their party discipline was kind of frightening. Probably it had something to do with that weird messianic fervor they all seemed to share. In private, he and Jed often referred to them as the Borg, and he was very much looking forward to leaving them behind when his term was over. The next president of the United States could argue with them about who should actually be running Reconstruction. In his darker moments he really hoped Sarah Palin would run. They deserved each other.
"Mister President?"
Kip turned away from the window and found a young woman waiting at the door with a clipboard.
"The chief of staff is here, sir. And your secure link to Pearl Harbor will be up in the conference room in five minutes. Oh, and Mister Tench is here early. I've given him a doughnut and a coffee downstairs."
The president laughed out loud.
"If Barney is early, you're going to need some more doughnuts. Tell him I'll be down as soon as I can."
He thanked the young lady and said good morning to Jed as he bustled into the room, also carrying a doughnut. Kipper wondered where they came from. Surely they weren't being flown in from Seattle.
Jed was hauling around a couple of ring binders under one arm, which he dropped onto the bare, rather cheap-looking desk. The office was remarkably spartan for the nation's chief executive, but Kip liked it because of the great view it afforded him of the reclamation work. From the southwest corner of the building, it was possible to see the rail yards of North Kansas City, the planes coming into Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport, and the skyline of Kansas City, Missouri, proper. Trucks and buses rumbled down Highway 210 laden with workers, salvage, and supplies. A good many horses and bicycles could be seen plying the roads as well. If he looked due west, it was possible to see the restored and fully operational North Kansas City federal medical facility. Kipper felt a pang of guilt, knowing that some of his soldiers were in there struggling for their lives. He needed to get over and see them before he returned to Seattle. Turning away to the east, he could see the stream of smoke rising from Hawthorne Unit 5's power plant, which provided power for the entire metro area. He hoped he would be able to get out there before the end of the day and personally see how things were going. Or to micromanage the chicken shit and put everyone's teeth on edge, as Culver put it.
"Good morning Mister President," said his chief of staff, who was dressed in a perfectly pressed charcoal-gray three-piece suit. Kipper wore chinos and a blue denim shirt, a casual ensemble that was justified in his mind, by all the site visits he'd be making later in the day and possible because his wife was not there to hassle him into a monkey suit.
"Any good news out of New York overnight?" Jed asked. "I've been caught up with Treasury."
"Nothing I'd call good," said Kip. "Forty-eight confirmed dead on our side, mostly from the clearance teams we saw yesterday. About as many again badly wounded and enormous destruction of the city between Union and Madison squares. The casualties will be flown out to Northtown Medical later today."
"I see," Culver said. "Any news of enemy casualties?"
Kipper rubbed his eyes, which were grainy and red. He never slept well the first night in a new bed at the best of times, which these weren't.
"Six hundred plus, according to the cav. But there's plenty more where they came from. Including our mystery men. We've apparently got an updater coming from Colonel Kinninmore later in the day about that. And what about you, Jed? What complications do you have for me this morning?"
He meant it to be a joke, but it came out a little surly and undignified.
"Sorry," Kip added. "I'm tired and pissed off. And I have forty-eight very sad letters to write later today."
Culver joined him at the panoramic windows to look out over the city.
"Well, you know my views on that," he said.
"And you know mine," Kipper shot back with a slightly warning tone. "It is not a waste of time, Jed. It is something I have to do. They're just short notes, but I know they mean a lot to the families."
Thankfully, Culver chose to ignore yet another of their old arguments.
"The press isn't too bad this morning," he said, choosing to plow on in his usual pragmatic style. "They're getting right behind us in Manhattan. Calling it the Battle of New York."
"Has anyone started speculating on this business of the-" Kipper checked his notes. "-the fedayeen involvement?"
"Not yet," said Culver. "But it's early days, and there are half a dozen or so reporters and war bloggers embedded with our guys and Schimmel's militia over there. If it's a live issue, they will get onto it before long."
Kipper gazed down at the hospital where casualties would be arriving from New York throughout the day.
"Good," he said. "Maybe they can get us better info than official channels. You know, if they're writing and filing their stories from the front."
Culver looked skeptical.
"Unlikely, sir. If they're embedded, all of their reports are going through our links and getting censored by our intel guys. They're not going to let raw data like that get out to the public till they've had time to work out their own spin."
"That's actually kind of a pity, Jed," Kipper said, and meant it. "Sometimes it's good to get an alternative reading of a situation. What chance you reckon any of these embeds might be able to file independently, via satellite phone or something?"
"I suppose they could," said his chief of staff. "But it's unlikely they'd ass fuck the army like that. The embed system works for them. Increases traffic to their sites. Mostly, they won't jeopardize that relationship. They're on board. Look at what happened after the attack. I was wrong to think the casualties from Castle Clinton would turn them against us. Even Arianna is baying for pirate blood now. I think staying behind while we evacuated the casualties on your chopper really helped."
Kipper frowned.
"Jed, it wasn't about spinning the story. Those people would have died."
"I know, I know," he apologized. "But someone has to think the ugly thoughts in this administration, Mister President, which brings us to Blackstone. I've had a few ideas…"
"Just hold that thought, Jed. We can work through your Texas problems later today."
"My Texas problems?" Jed replied archly.
"Yes." Kipper smiled. "Yours. Didn't you get the memo? I'm sure there was a memo. Anyway, that's for later. Right now I want to talk to a man about a bomb."
"You'll have to wait, Mister President," said Jed Culver with a touch of satisfaction. "It's only three a.m. in Honolulu, leaving plenty of time to work through my Texas problem." The man charged with guarding and maintaining the strategic deterrent of the United States of America found himself staring out at a light blue Pacific sky not long after sunrise. A glass of juice sat untouched on a paper napkin on his desk while he waited for the video link to tie him in to his commander in chief. While he waited, Admiral James Ritchie looked over the latest updates from the Pacific Fleet's deterrent force of Ohio-class submarines, six boomers in all, down from a pre-Wave total of eighteen, deployed in a pattern to allow maximum coverage of all potential targets on the face of the globe. After sixty years during which the awful specter of nuclear war sometimes seemed to be the only thing preventing it, some people had grown awfully blase about tossing atomic weapons at each other. The death toll from Israel's first strike in 2003 was now conservatively estimated at six hundred million as the secondary die-off continued. They had decimated humanity.