Panic Switch полностью

They waited expectantly for the arrival of the president. Pacino checked his phone, scanning for any new texts or news files alerts, but everything seemed routine. He looked up to see Secretary of War Bret Hogshead walking in, his face flushed, whether from exertion or emotion, Pacino couldn’t tell. Hogshead was one of the cabinet members whom VP Karen Chushi had labeled a “silver spoon,” the super-rich who controlled much of the world. Hogshead’s people had come over on the Mayflower and owned most of Massachusetts.

Behind Hogshead was the Secretary of the Navy, former test pilot and Space Shuttle astronaut Jeremy Shingles, who Pacino considered an ally and friend. And walking in behind Shingles was Vice President Karen Chushi, the former Senator from Texas with the grating west Texas accent to go with it. This seemed odd, Pacino thought, since Chushi and President Carlucci did not come anywhere close to getting along, and Carlucci had broken precedent by briefing her into the Panther operation, but then shutting her out of his day-to-day administration immediately after, yet here she was, a dark frown on her face. Pacino looked at Chushi, who looked like she’d aged ten years since he’d seen her last — perhaps some difficult crisis in her life weighing heavily on her.

While the occupants awaited the arrival of the president, Pacino shivered despite it being one of the hotter late summer days in Washington. The air conditioning was blowing intensely in the Situation Room at the president’s insistence. Despite being a career politician, and while he enjoyed being surrounded by his subordinates in the Oval Office, he hated gatherings in stuffy confined quarters like his office on Air Force One or down here in the Situation Room. In fact, he’d taken the PEOC — the Presidential Emergency Operations Center — out of service for a long construction overhaul, the complex buried deep beneath the East Wing of the White House, equipped for use as a nuclear bunker in the event of a full-scale nuclear attack, but by virtue of being carved out of the bedrock, it was small, cramped and nearly airless. Carlucci had insisted on a dramatic expansion of it. Pacino wondered whether that were the real reason for the construction, or if Carlucci just wanted it out of commission for the rest of his term so he’d never have to go down there. Odds were, Pacino thought, no one would be able to convince Carlucci to descend into any of half a dozen other presidential evacuation bunkers within six hours of Washington.

Pacino heard President Carlucci’s smooth tenor voice greeting them all. Carlucci stepped into the room and flashed his usual politician’s smile as he took his seat at the end of the table, his Secret Service agents behind him. Pacino knew the president well enough to know he was anxious despite his confident expression. Carlucci was in his fifties, a tall, slender, athletic man almost never seen out of a several-thousand dollar suit, with a swooping head of salt-and-pepper hair. Pacino and the president went back to the days when Carlucci was running for the U.S. Senate seat for the state of Ohio after being the mayor of Cleveland.

Carlucci had called on Pacino to be his National Security Advisor at the start of the Panther operation, and Pacino had almost quit when the operation wrapped, but Margo Allende had talked him into staying. At the time, Pacino had felt resentment that Carlucci had played fast and loose with the submarine force — and with Anthony’s life — risking their lives over an objective that seemingly had limited utility. But in the month since, he and Carlucci had gotten along well, the younger man leaning heavily on Pacino for advice.

Rear Admiral Frieda Sutton, head of Naval Intelligence, stood in front of a large display screen at the end of the room. Carlucci frowned at it, his arms crossed over his chest. On the display was a torpedo-shaped object. The figure of a man stood near it for scale. The torpedo was gigantic.

“Sir,” Sutton began, “you’ve heard before from us on the Russian 2M39 Ocean Multipurpose System that NATO code-named ‘Kanyon,’ before we heard that the Russians called it the ‘Status-6.’ President Vostov put it out to the public in a press release and asked for the Russian population to give it a name. The Russians operate much differently now than in the Soviet era, when we had no idea what they called their weapon systems, leaving us and NATO to name things. The weapon was renamed ‘Poseidon.’ Regardless of the name, the unit is a deadly weapon designed to get nuclear warheads on target while circumventing our ballistic missile defenses.