"And you turned the jobs down because it's a great big clusterfuck over there across the river, right?"
"Too much tail and not enough teeth. If I ran my business that way, the stockholders would lynch me. The Defense bureaucracy—"
"So fix it for me," Jack suggested.
"Can't be done."
"Don't give me that, Bretano. Anything man can make, he can unmake. If you don't think you have the stuff to get the job done, fine, tell me that, and you can head back to the coast."
"Wait a minute—"
Ryan cut him off again.
"No, you wait a minute. You saw what I said on TV, and I'm not going to repeat it. I need to clean up a few things, and I need the right people to do it, and if you don't have it, fine, I'll find somebody tough enough to—"
"Tough?" Bretano nearly came off his seat. "Tough? I got news for you, Mister President, my papa sold fruit from a cart on the corner. The world didn't give me shit!" Then he stopped short when Ryan laughed, and thought a moment before going on. "Not bad," he said more sedately, in the manner of the corporate chairman he was.
"George Winston says you're feisty. We haven't had a halfway decent SecDef in ten years. Good. When I'm wrong, I need people to tell me so. But I don't think I'm wrong about you."
"What do you want done?"
"When I pick up the phone, I want things to happen. I want to know that if I have to send kids into harm's way, they're properly equipped, properly trained, and properly supported. I want people to be afraid of what we can do. It makes life a lot easier for the State Department," the President explained. "When I was a little kid in east Baltimore and I saw a cop walking up Monument Street, I knew two things. I knew it wasn't a good idea to mess with him, and I also knew I could trust him to help me if I needed it."
"In other words, you want a product that we can deliver whenever we have to."
"Correct."
"We've drawn down a long way," Bretano said warily. "I want you to work with a good team—you pick it— to draw up a force structure that meets our needs. Then I want you to rebuild the Pentagon to deliver it."
"How much time do I have?"
"I'll give you two weeks on the first part."
"Not long enough."
"Don't give me that. We study things so much I'm surprised the paper all those things are printed on hasn't consumed every tree in the country. Hell, I know what the threats are out there, remember? That used to be my business. A month ago we were in a shooting war, sucking air because we were out of assets to use. We got lucky. I don't want to depend on luck anymore. I want you to clear out the bureaucracy, so if we need to do something it gets done. In fact, I want things done before we have to do them. If we do the job right, nobody'll be crazy enough to take us on. Question is, are you willing to take it on, Dr. Bretano?"
"It'll be bloody."
"My wife's a doc," Jack told him.
"Half the job's getting good intelligence," Bretano pointed out.
"I know that, too. We've already started on CIA. George ought to be okay at Treasury. I'm checking out a list of judges to head Justice. I said it all on TV. I'm putting a team together. I want you on it. I made my way on my own, too. You think two people like us would have got this far anywhere else? Payback time, Bretano." Ryan leaned back, pleased with himself for the delivery.
There was no fighting it, the executive knew. "When do I start?"
Ryan checked his watch. "Tomorrow morning suit you?"
THE MAINTENANCE CREW showed up just after dawn. The aircraft had a military guard arrayed around it to keep the curious away, though this airport was already more secure than most of its international counterparts because of the Iranian air force presence. The crew foreman's clipboard told him what had to be done, and the long list of procedures had him curious, but little else. Aircraft of this type always got special treatment, because the people who flew in them deemed themselves the elect of God, or something even higher still. Not that it mattered. He had his procedures, and the advice for extra caution was hardly necessary. His people were always thorough. The aircraft maintenance sheet said that it was time to replace two cockpit instruments, and two replacements were ready, still in the manufacturer's boxes; those would have to be calibrated after installation. Two other members of his crew would refuel the aircraft and change the engine oil. The rest would work on the cabin under the foreman's supervision.
They'd scarcely begun when a captain showed up with fresh orders, predictably ones which contradicted the first set. The seats had to be replaced quickly. The G-IV would be taking off in a few hours for another flight. The officer didn't say where to, and the foreman didn't care to ask. He told his instrument mechanic to hurry with his assigned task. That was fairly easy in the G-IV with its modular instrument arrangement. A truck appeared with the seats that had been taken out two days earlier, and the cleanup crewmen assisted, manhandling them into place before they could properly begin. The foreman wondered why they'd been removed in the first place, but it wasn't his place to ask, and the answer would not have made much sense anyway. A pity everyone was in a hurry. It would have been easier to do the cleaning with so much open space. Instead, the fourteen-seat configuration was quickly reestablished, making the aircraft back into a mini-airliner, albeit a very comfortable one. The replacement seating had been dry-cleaned in the hangar as it always was, the ashtrays emptied and swabbed out. The caterer showed up next with food for the galley, and soon the aircraft was overcrowded with workers, each getting in the other's way, and in the resulting confusion, work was not done properly, but that was not the foreman's fault. Things just accelerated from there. The new flight crew showed up with their charts and flight plans. They found a mechanic lying half on the pilot's seat and half on the cabin floor, finishing his work on the digital engine instruments. Never patient with mechanics, the pilot merely stood and glared as the man did his work—for his part, the mechanic didn't care at all what pilots thought. He attached the last connector, wriggled his way free, and ran a test program to make sure it was working properly, without so much as a look at the aviators who would be sure to curse him all the louder if he failed to install the electronics properly. He'd not yet left the area when the copilot took his place and ran the same test program again. Leaving the aircraft to get out of the way, the mechanic saw the reason for the rush.
Five of them, standing there on the ramp, looking impatient and important as they stared at the white-painted executive jet, excited about something. The mechanic and everyone else on the crew knew them all by name, they appeared so often on TV. All of them nodded deference to the mullahs and speeded their efforts, as a result of which not everything got done. The cleanup crew was called off the aircraft, and limited their efforts to wiping a few surfaces down after getting all the seats reinstalled. The VIP passengers boarded at once, heading to the after portion of the cabin so that they could confer. The flight crew started up, and the Guards force and the trucks hardly had a chance to withdraw before the G-IV taxied off to the end of the runway.
IN DAMASCUS, THE second member of that small executive fleet touched down, to discover that it had orders to return to Tehran at once. The crew swore, but did as they were told, limiting their time on the ground to a scant forty minutes before lifting off again in their turn for the short hop into Iran.
IT WAS A busy time at PALM BOWL. Something was going on. You could tell that by what wasn't going on. Traffic on the encrypted channels used by senior Iraqi generals had peaked and zeroed, then peaked again, and zeroed again. At the moment it was back at zero. Back at KKMC in Saudi Arabia, the computers were grinding through solutions to the chip-controlled scrambling systems used on Iraqi tactical radios. It took time in every case. Encryption technology, once the province only of affluent countries, had, with the advent of personal computers, become readily available to the humblest citizen in America and other technically advanced countries, and an unexpected spin-off of that fact was the current availability of highly advanced communications-security apparatus to the humblest nations. Now Malaysia had codes nearly as hard to break as Russia's—and so did Iraq, courtesy of Americans who worried about having the FBI read their fictitious e-mail adulteries. The encryption systems on tactical radios were necessarily somewhat simpler, and still breakable, but even that required a Cray computer that had been flown to the Saudi Kingdom years earlier. Another factor was that PALM BOWL was in Kuwait, and had indeed been fully financed by the local government, for which courtesy a return courtesy was required. They got to see the «take» from the NSA station. That was only fair, but the NSA and military-intelligence personnel hadn't been trained to consider what «fair» was. They had their orders, even so.