Thank God for that at least, thought Jed. Caveats he could work with. Especially big, ass-kicking caveats that effectively guaranteed most of these punks a trip back to sea on his garbage scow.
‘What sort of restrictions would we be looking at?’ he asked.
A deep crease formed in the middle of Humboldt’s brow. ‘I don’t believe it would be good policy to maintain the integrity of the original cohort,’ she said, lapsing into bureaucratese.
When she failed to explain any further, Kipper prompted, ‘So, what, you’re talking about breaking them up?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Not family groups, of course. But I think we would find that integrating them into existing communities would be a smoother process if they weren’t allowed to cluster.’
This time a querying frown from the President caused her to hurry on with an explanation. ‘They’re less likely to cause trouble, much more likely to settle in, if we bed them down well away from any bad influences. And from each other. They’re not ideologues. For the most part, they’re young widows with quite young children, often three or four of them, to look after. And no men, of course, to provide for them. I think they could be settled if we placed them within compatible communities.’
‘Such as?’ Jed asked, his scepticism leaking through.
At this, Humboldt shrugged briefly. ‘Many of the Indian nationals we’ve taken in to work on the railway programs came from that country’s Muslim community. After the war with Pakistan, they weren’t entirely welcome in their homeland anymore. But they’ve had no trouble fitting in here. Most are observant in their faith, but not politicised by it. There are enough of them now that we could salt most of our East Coast detainees through their population without ghettoising them.’
‘And the fighters?’ Kipper quizzed, saving Jed the effort. ‘The men?’
Culver was certain he saw Humboldt flick her eyes quickly over at Admiral Ritchie.
‘It’s not within the purview of my department, Mr President. But we have been turning this matter over for a while now, both in this working group and the wider Cabinet, and there have been a couple of position papers drawn up that might be of help.’
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement head started rifling through the thick wad of papers she’d extracted from her tote bag. She kept her head down, studiously avoiding eye contact with Culver, who knew nothing of any so-called position papers. Retrieving what she wanted, she passed copies around the room. Ritchie, he noted, didn’t need to scan the document even for a moment. He gave the impression of being familiar with it.
‘The fighters are a more difficult question,’ said Humboldt. ‘Especially if we accept the settlement of the non-combatants. Many of the fighters, nearly two-thirds of them, have relatives among the women and children we are holding. We cannot separate them, in law or in conscience.’
The hell we can’t, thought Jed.
Kipper was nodding slowly, feeding himself small chunks of cookie that he broke off the mother lode like a kid trying to make a treat last a little longer. Jed could not be sure he was nodding in agreement with Ms Humboldt; he may simply have been acknowledging her. The President liked people to know he was listening to them. The Chief of Staff, on the other hand, was having trouble constraining himself. He didn’t like where this was going, and he felt himself blind-sided by whatever arrangement Humboldt and Ritchie had come to before the meeting. Jed was going to have to reassess his reading of the National Security Advisor. It appeared that Ritchie was more practised at the dark arts of politics than he had imagined when lobbying Kipper on the admiral’s behalf.
‘ICE sought input from all the major stakeholders on this question …’
But not from me, thought Culver.
‘… and as you would imagine, their responses varied considerably. Defense and the NIA argued strongly in favour of continued detention. Treasury’ - she spared a glance for McAuley at this point - ‘has been updating its forward estimates for funding a number of scenarios. And we at ICE, of course, are in constant contact with Reconstruction about their needs for various skill sets that remain under-subscribed.’
Barney Tench appeared to be nonplussed by the inclusion of his department in Sarah’s magic circle. But as Jed examined his shorthand notes of what she’d just said, he suppressed a sour grin of admiration. Humboldt had drawn the other players in the room into whatever gambit she was about to make, simply by stating the fucking obvious. Of course Reconstruction and Treasury were in constant contact with Immigration and Customs Enforcement about labour shortfalls and funding requirements - that didn’t mean they were on board for every program Humboldt wanted to push. As tempted as he was to interrupt, the Chief of Staff thought it best to let her play her hand.
‘It would be possible,’ she continued, ‘to include most of the problematic cohort, the fighters with family ties to our non-combatant detainees, as part of the general intake into this year’s frontier militia forces.’
At this, Jed had reached the limit of his forbearance.
‘Seriously? You seriously want to integrate these nutjobs into our military forces?’
‘The frontier militias aren’t part of the regular military,’ corrected James Ritchie.
The unexpected intervention drew Culver up short, and he cursed himself for making such an undergraduate mistake. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But you’re splitting hairs. No, the frontier militias are not part of the armed forces. You know that, I know that, but such fine gradations of meaning are well beyond most people. And it’s most people who’ll go apeshit at the mere suggestion of letting these guys out of their cage, handing them a gun, and sending them off into the wilderness.’
‘He has a point,’ said Kip.
The President wasn’t nearly as worked up as Jed, but you could see he was puzzled by the suggestion. That was a relief. To Culver’s dismay, though, Ritchie took up the role of explaining Humboldt’s idea, confirming any suspicions about his prior knowledge of it.
‘The frontier militias’ chain of command runs up through Reconstruction, not Defense. They’re an armed force, but an irregular one. The duties can vary from securing the boundaries of small settlements, just like a garrison force, to riding shotgun on reclamation crews in the big cities, or scouting wilderness in the Declared Zones. It’s dangerous work. Very dangerous. And a lot of it is done in small teams, thousands of miles away from civilisation. If we were to take in a small number of these fighters, break them up, and scatter them through the militia, making sure they were posted well out into the badlands, and impose, say, a ten-year probationary period, we could sell it as both punishment and redemption. Their families would become, well … our hostages, to be brutally frank. If their men gave us any trouble, we’d just toss them all on Jed’s garbage scow and wave them off at the dock. For lesser infringements, we’d cancel home leave, maybe transfer the women and children to some more godforsaken hole - that sort of thing.’
The sleet slapping against the window behind the presidential desk had thickened up into a serious dump of snow. Gusting, contrary winds whipped fractal patterns through the white haze and rattled the old wooden window in its frame. Kipper frowned and searched around in his desk drawer for some notepaper. As he ripped out a piece, folded it, and folded it again a few times, he turned his back on them to jam the makeshift wedge into the window and muffle the rattling, talking while he did so.
‘Is there any reason any of these guys would agree to this?’ he asked. ‘I imagine you’d be planning to break them up completely so that you only had one of Baumer’s fighters attached to any particular unit. But really, how’s it going to work in practice? Ten years? That’s a hell of a long time. A hell of an incentive to cut and run the first chance you had.’