"I did, Mister President." Franks replied. "And I concur with Ritchie's opinion. We should be very, very careful about going down that path for all of the reasons he outlined. I can understand the attraction of a technological fix, Mister President. I don't like losing precious lives any more than you do."
"Well, then give me some options, General," Kipper said plaintively.
Franks nodded slowly, as if considering the issue for the first time, which was obviously not the case.
"If you are willing to write off large sections of New York City," he suggested after a moment, "we could send a flight of B-52s over."
"What? Conventional bombing?" Kipper asked.
"A massed conventional bombing run would certainly break the will of the irregular forces we face there. The pirates and whoever has been coaching them. Also, it would place the rest of the world on notice that whether or not we actually stand on a given piece of U.S. territory, it is ours and we will do whatever it takes to keep everyone else out."
"Cost," Culver chimed in. "Just how much will this bombing run cost us? In human and capital terms."
"Well, you do the job properly and you'll kill everyone needs killing, Mister Culver. Thousands of them. As for damage, the areas targeted will look a lot like pictures you may have seen of cities that were bombed during World War Two. If you like, I can have a member of my staff send over a brief."
"Jesus, we'd be better off just throwing a nuke at the place," Culver said to himself mordantly.
"To borrow a line from history, we will have to destroy part or all of the city in order to save it," Franks said. "New York is too valuable as a port of entry and a strategic location on the eastern seaboard to let anyone else take over there, even if we cannot take full advantage of it. Mister President, we have to give serious consideration to the reality on the ground. We can retake this city, hold it, restore it, but it won't be the New York we remember."
Kipper leaned back in his chair and stretched his back, which was feeling cramped. He poured himself a glass of water and pondered the options.
He knew as a basic tenet of his profession that occasionally you had to demolish something in order to rebuild. But such demolitions were neat, orderly affairs and never hurt anyone. Not on purpose, at any rate. Over the last four years he had proved, he hoped, that he wasn't squeamish about killing America's enemies when necessary, but the senseless destruction of all that property… New York City had such a long history… museums, galleries, Central Park, buildings that had a story, each and every last one of them. They were going to destroy so much of their heritage if they did this.
"Let me think on it, Tommy," Kipper said. "In the meantime, I authorize you to begin redeployment of the marines you mentioned to New York." A door knock behind them drew Kipper's attention, and he saw a young woman tapping her wristwatch apologetically.
"Mister President, we're about to lose the link."
He mouthed "thanks" at the woman and apologized to Franks for the interruption.
"Thank you, General. We're about to lose the satellite. Please, rest assured, I'm not going to dick around with this decision. You'll have word very soon about…"
But the screen where Franks had been sitting was already full of white noise.
Kipper and Jed sat in silence in the hot, oppressive room. For once his chief of staff seemed to understand that he did not want to be talked at. He most wanted just a few moments of quiet to think things through. The president tried to put himself in the place of all those men and women he had ordered to New York, at first assuming he was sending them on nothing more than a brief policing operation. The pirates, after all, were little better than glorified criminals, looters. They were a problem all over the country, not just in New York, and as well armed as they were, they had never presented as anything other than a rabble, until now.
And now?
He had no idea. There just wasn't enough information. How he envied his predecessor in this job. Bush had enjoyed almost infinite resources, the all-knowing intelligence agencies, the all-seeing spy satellites, vast networks of spies. Kipper often found himself having to put aside an almost childish jealousy when he thought of how much information Bush must've had as he prepared to go to war in Iraq. If only he now had but one-tenth of those resources available to him.
Instead he had imperfection, uncertainty, doubt. And fear. The fear that every decision he made was wrong, disastrously so. Every judgment in error. His reasons ill founded.
"Jed, I don't know what to do," he said hoarsely. "I never seem to get it right."
Culver reached across and squeezed his arm.
"No, Mister President, you do get it right more often than not. But you forget that the world is not an engineering problem, sir. You're not dealing with elegance and balance and discretely measurable artifacts. You're dealing with people. Flawed, imperfect people. You can never set right human affairs the same way you can square off a right angle in a technical drawing. Neither the virtues nor the malevolent rottenness of the human soul can be specified to millimeter tolerances. You can only do the best you can."
Kipper let his head fall forward into his hands. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, which were throbbing painfully.
"Jesus, Jed, way to cheer a guy up," he said.
He knew the TV screens in front of them were still running loops from the fighting in New York. He did not need to look at them. He would always be haunted by what he had seen there and, even worse, what he had imagined. Crowding out all those hellish images, however, was the woman he had visited in the hospital, the woman whom he had sent into battle and who had come back a broken and incomplete remnant of everything she once was and might yet have been.
The president of the United States of America let his hands fall slowly away from his face. He turned to his military aide, Colonel Ralls, who was standing quietly off to one side as always.
"Mike, can you get General Franks back for me?" he said. "A phone line will be fine. I've made a decision."
40
Berlin Caitlin did not follow the woman immediately. Fabia Shah was on her lunch break and would not venture far. She disappeared around the corner about a hundred yards down the street, marching the whole way, stopping to talk with nobody. Caitlin and Mirsaad finished their meals with a couple of very short, strong Turkish coffees before leaving to spend a few hours working on the reporter's behalf. Having found Baumer's mother where she expected, Caitlin could pick up her tail later in the day. Meanwhile, Mirsaad moved about Neukolln, and Caitlin tagged along with him, dutifully playing the obedient intern as he drove from one appointment to another, interviewing the imam of a small reformist mosque that had taken over a Chinese Christian church on Werbellinstrasse, the local welfare officer for the city's Islamic Federation, and the director of a women's shelter operating about a mile north of the shariatown.
As the light began to fail, they headed back into Neukolln's dense warren of faded identikit apartment blocks, the ranks of grimy whitewashed four-and five-story tenements recalling for her a line she'd read sometime in her college years. Aesthetically worthless rent slabs. Caitlin struggled for a second to recall where she'd seen such an evocative description. She frequently had trouble recalling little things like that after the operation to remove her tumor. She knew the line wasn't written about this section of Berlin but was struck by how apt it was.
"This woman you are looking for…"
"Not looking for, Sadie. We found her already. I just needed to confirm she was still here in Neukolln. Do you think you could head over to Mahlower; it's the next right."