Few things in this world could knock guys like Talbot back on their heels, but GENESIS, Brad Elliott’s classified call sign from Dreamland, was one. Just mentioning the word meant that most of the Pentagon was involved. Which was, Talbot thought, typical of Elliott, who was known to be kicking ass with an array of high-tech toys developed out in his secret labs in Nevada. Rumors had been circulating for months about Elliott’s B-2 bombers and other strange planes flying around the desert. God only knows what he needed Masters for. But the fact that Elliott knew all about a classified satellite launch that had gone wrong only twenty minutes before, told Talbot that Elliott was plugged in right at the top.
“Well, you got him, Brad. Now where do you want him?”
“I need him back in his lab in Arkansas soonest. When are you going to be done chewing on him?”
“I’m done. I don’t have the time or energy for shit like this anymore,” Talbot said in a low voice. “His jet is already fueled. He’ll be airborne in thirty minutes and in Arkansas in three hours. Does this have something to do with… events this afternoon?”
“It could have
“I was afraid of that. The little prick leads a charmed life. You need his satellite intact as well?”
“Have you deorbited it yet?”
“Just about ready to do it — window opens in about an hour.”
“Better leave it, then. The brass hasn’t made up their minds what they want.”
Talbot knew the “brass” usually included only men who had collected more than fifty million popular votes.
“Whatever you say, Brad. I’ll be glad to jettison that little cocksucker anyway. He’s a pain in the ass.”
“You have that effect on people, my friend.”
“Yeah, right. The bastard never stops smiling, too. You notice that? Always with the damned grin on his puss. I don’t trust somebody who grins all the time — it usually means they found someone else to put the blame on.”
“If he busted one of your rules, Mike, he’s gotta pay. When GENESIS is done with him, I’ll send him back to you. How’s that?”
“Naw. Keep him outta my sight. Just get the bastards who fried my NAVSTAR satellites and we’ll call it even.”
“Deal, buddy. GENESIS out.”
The President had been in the Roosevelt Room listening to a planning meeting for a world economic conference when they told him.
Lloyd Emerson Taylor, forty-third President of the United States and a descendant of the twelfth President, had made a mental note of what he was doing at that moment. It would, after all, be important for the memoirs he was going to write after he left office. And this, Lloyd Emerson Taylor guessed, was going to be one hell of an important chapter in his book.
After his military aide had handed him the Eyes Only message, Taylor had immediately excused himself from the planning meeting and retreated to the Oval Office. From there, over a secure hot line, he began to get a handle on the situation: he learned that Defense, JCS, and the CIA suspected the Chinese of setting off the nuke, but no one had been able to completely verify that. Worse, the President couldn’t get word on how President Mikaso was or what was going on in Manila because all phone lines were jammed and all satellite and HF networks had been disrupted. He also learned that even though the U.S. had been monitoring the situation between the Chinese and the Philippines since their naval skirmish of a few months ago, nobody wanted China or the Philippines to know that the United States had pictures of the explosion. Apparently the pictures were not taken by a regular satellite but by a new, highly classified one called PACER SKY, an experimental system that would allow real-time targeting data for strategic bombers.
Whatever the hell PACER SKY was, Taylor knew it had just snapped what might be one of the most famous photographs in thirty years, thanks to a simple stroke of luck.
Finally, a more formal, albeit hastily arranged, assessment meeting was scheduled a half-hour later in the Situation Room.
As Taylor, his military aide, his official White House photographer, his Secret Service bodyguard, and a civilian- clothed Navy captain who carried his “football,” the portable scrambled UHF transceiver that Taylor would use in an emergency to order his strategic nuclear forces to war, made their way down the elevator to the Situation Room in the basement of the White House, the enormity and gravity of the situation finally began to sink in.
Like his famous great-great-great-great-grandfather, the President was a bull-nosed, laissez-faire bureaucrat who’d done well as president because of his quiet, hardworking, rock-steady style. And like his ancestor, Taylor was an exArmy general and judge advocate who had retired to enter politics at age fifty-one, soon after pinning on his first star. Taylor had, above everything else, a keen sense of history — and his place in it.
