KLINGHOFF: Remember when the President interviewed you for your job? When you said you could make the tough choices? When you said you wanted to be the one to make them? That if he picked you, you’d never shirk.
MARCUS: That’s not fair. I’m not shirking. I’m wondering which choice here is the best.
[The tape records everyone talking at the same time. Snippets of voices… “Yes, but…” “I wish he’d destroyed the tape…” “How did the Chinese get that news…”]
KLINGHOFF: It’s time for a vote. I’d rather have this unanimous, if possible. All in favor? Scenario A: Try to move the living onto barges, if we can disarm the Marines, let the thing burn through, try to move the barges south. All for it? Only one? Okay, then! Scenario B: Give it thirty-six hours, maybe Dr. Rush pulls off a miracle, and then destroy the ship and announce the real reason. Nobody for honesty, eh? C: Missiles or torpedoes. An accident. Hmmm, three out of five. Eileen? Vote!
MARCUS: There has to be another way.
KLINGHOFF: The President expects me in twelve minutes across the street, with a recommendation.
MARCUS: I vote to quarantine.
PELFREY: Sir, it’s the thirty-six hours that bothers me. It doesn’t seem like enough time. Colonel Rush will be giving medicines. He’ll need time to see if they work. To see if it spreads, or just dies off. Can’t we go longer?
KLINGHOFF: Mr. Grady?
GRADY: The longer you give them, the more chance the story will get out. Once it does, it’s out of control.
KLINGHOFF: Oh, a few more hours won’t make such a big difference. Shall we say, forty-eight hours, Director Pelfrey?
PELFREY: Can we say more?
KLINGHOFF (irritated): How much more?
PELFREY: Five days. We’re not even sure what the latency period is for this thing. For God’s sake, give my guys time!
GRADY: That’s pushing it.
KLINGHOFF: Fifty hours then! Okay! Hands, please. Eileen, still no? Elias? Okay, to sum up, I will tell the President that after being responsible for the destruction of a U.S. submarine, the outbreak is spreading on a second vessel. We recommend a fifty-hour window to see if Colonel Rush can show progress. After that, the National Emergency Powers Act enables him to use protocol five. The President might ignore us anyway. It wouldn’t be the first time.
PELFREY: Two days. My God!
KLINGHOFF: It’s a bit more than two. Certainly enough time to see if any treatments are working. Dr. Graves said that antivirals kick in fast. We’re compassionate people. We’ll give them a chance. We’re all here because we can make tough choices, and this one might be the toughest we will ever make. I thank you. Now, all, perhaps a brief moment of prayer is in order, for the sick, and for Colonel Rush’s efforts, before I cross the street.
At the White House, the President thanked Klinghoff, and sat alone for a long time in the dark of the Oval Office. He was a midsized, plain-looking, tough-minded man, a former governor, and he’d come a long way from his boyhood as a lower-middle-class son of a Montana cattle rancher. He remembered his boyhood on that beautiful ranch, and the worst day of it, when he was eight. He recalled his father taking him out to the east range, where they looked over a herd of eight thousand prime beef cows. He remembered sobbing when his father told him that all those animals would have to be shot, burned, and buried, because one had been found to be infected with something called “mad cow disease,” which ate away brains.
In order to protect people in the nearby town, and those who would one day eat Montana beef across America, the entire herd would be put down, even though this would cause his father to lose the ranch.
“That’s not fair,” the boy had blurted out.
“It is the right thing to do,” his father had said.
“You said we’ll lose everything.”
“When you have a tough decision to make, the longer you wait, the harder it gets.”
At 3 A.M., the President picked up the phone and called his old college roommate, now an Air Force general in Seattle. He told the general what he needed, but asked the general to do it as a personal favor. He said he’d understand if the general refused.
The Air Force general said, “Christ, Mike,” but then he said he would do it. He added, “We’ve got thick cloud cover moving in up there again, so the satellites will be blind.”
The President hung up. He had decided that two days was too long to wait.
In twenty hours, if there was no definite progress, the ship would be destroyed. Then the surface of the ocean would be sprayed with oil and ignited to cleanse any bodies or debris. Then the President would go on national television, and tell the truth about everything except the old film.
The President figured this would quite possibly end his career. His enemies would call for his resignation, possibly even prosecution, but he’d weather the second part, and anyway, neither was the point. He had campaigned for office by telling voters he was the man they wanted in office when the eventual 3 A.M. emergency — every President faced one — occurred. Now the moment had come.
He wondered how he’d live with it.
He said out loud, “You said it, Daddy.”
The President looked out at the Rose Garden, beyond the glass, without seeing it. After a while the First Lady came in, having woken, seen his side of the bed empty, and known that his habit, when disturbed, was to sit in his “home office.” She got a wool comforter from a closet and lay down on one of the two couches. It was her custom, when he was troubled, to sleep near him. He liked the company, even if he didn’t talk.
She was still sleeping when the sun came up. He did not notice the light brightening, though normally the sight of the Rose Garden at dawn was — to the old rancher’s boy, a kid who’d grown up under drought conditions, a kid who’d worked his way up after his family went broke — a dew-drenched delight.
TWENTY-ONE
Clinton was in bad shape. He lay wheezing on a cot, in row two, the last cot that had been open. Now there were no more cots left if new people fell ill. Body temperature, 103 plus. He was shivering. Sweat poured from his forehead, drenched his bedding. Janice Cullen had laid a knapsack as a pillow at the head of the cot, as there was no wall or other way to prop him up; and sitting up was better for patients whose lungs filled with fluid.
“We’re out of IVs,” Cullen told me. Her eyes were clear, her voice steady. She might be afraid of storms, I saw, but not disease outbreaks. She had guts.