Hazardous Duty - PA 8 Read online

  President Clendennen preferred to hold meetings of the type he was about to convene in the Cabinet Room, even if there were just a few—say, four or five—people involved.

  This afternoon, there were nine senior officers sitting at the long mahogany table—a gift of former President Richard Nixon, although this was rarely mentioned—waiting for the President. They were Secretary of State Natalie Cohen, who was in a chair to the right of the President’s chair. The chair on the right of that was empty. Vice President Charles W. Montvale sat next to the empty chair, which most of the people at the table thought of as “Belinda-Sue’s throne.”

  Sitting across the table from them were Frederick P. Palmer, United States attorney general, Director of National Intelligence Truman C. Ellsworth, CIA Director A. Franklin Lammelle, Secretary of Defense Frederick K. Beiderman, FBI Director Mark Schmidt, and General Allan B. Naylor, commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command.

  They were a diverse group of very intelligent—one might even say brilliant—and powerful people who really agreed on only one thing vis-à-vis President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen.

  Secretary Cohen—she was of course a diplomat—had admitted in a very private conversation with the CIA director that she had been forced to the conclusion that the President had “some mental problems.” CIA Director Lammelle, who was not a diplomat, had replied that he had concluded, based on the same criteria, that the Commander in Chief was “absolutely bonkers, as mad as the legendary March hare.”

  The opinions of the others were somewhere between these two extremes, but all were agreed the President’s mental health was a serious problem.

  There is, of course, provision in the law for the removal from office of a President who is physically incapable of performing his duties, and this is understood to include mental illness, although those words do not appear. No one likes to admit that a President might become, to use Mr. Lammelle’s phraseology, absolutely bonkers.

  Each of the people in the Cabinet Room was familiar with previous problems of Presidents who left, or should have left, office before their successor was sworn in on Inauguration Day. Obviously, these included Richard M. Nixon, who ultimately resigned, and William Jefferson Clinton, who had to face an impeachment trial in the Senate but managed to hold on to his job.

  And there were other cases of Presidents whose physical condition raised serious questions about their ability to properly discharge their duties.

  Woodrow Wilson, for example, was one of these. Many people believed that after suffering a massive debilitating stroke in 1919 he should have resigned and allowed the Vice President to assume his duties. Instead, he stayed on in the White House and allowed his wife, the former Edith Bolling Galt, to determine which visitors he saw, and which he did not, and which papers were presented to him for his approval, and which were not, leading his detractors to refer to his wife as the “first unelected President.”

  Whenever anyone at the Cabinet table thought of biting the bullet and getting rid of Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen by making his psychological problems public, the face of First Lady Mrs. Belinda-Sue Clendennen popped into their minds.

  From the moment—and perhaps even before—her husband had acceded to the presidency following the sudden demise of his predecessor from a ruptured aortal aneurysm, Belinda-Sue had had her eyes on the vice presidency and perhaps—even probably—the presidency itself.

  The first clue to this came when Belinda-Sue sat down on her throne at her husband’s very first Cabinet meeting as President. As soon as she could get the secretary of State alone, she opened a conversation dealing with the political history of the Argentine Republic, especially that of its president, Juan Domingo Perón.

  “Do you know that President Perón appointed his wife,” Belinda-Sue began, “not the blonde, Evita, the other one, the redheaded one, Isabel, to be vice president?”

  “Circumstances in Argentina are somewhat different than they are here, Mrs. Clendennen.”

  “You can call me Belinda-Sue, honey,” Mrs. Clendennen said. “And I’ll call you Natalie.”

  The secretary had smiled wanly but had not replied.

  Mrs. Clendennen’s ambitions regarding the vice presidency had had to be put on hold when her husband was forced to appoint Charles W. Montvale to that office. His only other option was to face impeachment charges in the Congress for a number of offenses. One of these, for example, was described by the attorney general as so egregious that its “illegality boggled the mind.”

  But she had by no means abandoned them, which everyone in the Cabinet Room had to consider very carefully when they thought about getting President Clendennen out of the White House.

  So long as her husband was President, there was the possibility that Vice President Montvale would suffer a rupture of his aorta, or get run over by a truck, thus making the office of vice president vacant once again. If something like that happened, God forbid, Belinda-Sue wanted to be available.

  The people in the Cabinet Room today had decided—not in a formal meeting, but in an interlocking series of private conversations between no more than three of them at a time—that the best, and probably only, way to deal with the situation was to do nothing and hope for the best.

  The President’s aorta was reported to be in absolutely no danger of rupturing, and it was highly unlikely that he would get run over by a bus, but hope, someone said, springs eternal in the human breast.

  Eventually the President’s term of office would expire. In the meantime, they would just have to live with him and with Belinda-Sue attempting—with only slight success—to decide who got to see her husband, and who did not, and what documents of state were—and were not—presented to him for his signature.

  In the meantime, they would pretend the President was sane, and that the First Lady was indeed the twenty-first-century embodiment of Martha Washington, which was, she had confided to her friend Natalie, how she often thought of herself.

  Everyone stood as the President walked from the door to the Oval Office to his chair.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, flashing his benign smile. “Please be seated.”

  Everyone sat down and looked at him expectantly.

  “Inasmuch as the First Lady had to go to Mississippi to deal with a family medical problem and won’t be with us, we might as well get started,” the President said.

  “I hope it’s nothing serious, Mr. President,” Secretary of Defense Frederick K. Beiderman said solicitously.

  Freddy, CIA Director A. Franklin Lammelle thought, you know as well as I do that means that Belinda-Sue’s mother has once again escaped from the Ocean Springs Baptist Assisted Living facility and is now holed up somewhere they can’t find her with three Mason jars full of Mississippi’s finest 140-proof white lightning.

  “Nothing serious,” the President said. “A recurring problem.”

  Usually recurring about once a month, Lammelle thought.

  Well, at least Belinda-Sue won’t be here to offer her solutions to the nation’s problems.

  “I have been thinking…” President Clendennen began.

  Oh, shit! We’re in trouble!

  “. . . about our war on the drug trade and piracy.”

  Double shit! In spades!

  “And I have concluded we should start thinking out of the box,” he went on. “And, doing that, I have come up with an idea that I want your wholehearted cooperation in implementing.”

  How bad can this get?

  “Specifically, I think we should involve Lieutenant Colonel Castillo.”

  What did he say?

  Lammelle looked at Secretary of State Cohen, whose eyes were rolling.

  That’s involuntary. Natalie plays the game of life with a poker face Las Vegas gamblers would kill for.

  “Now, that may surprise some of you, b
ut surprise is what you get when you start thinking out of the box,” the President went on. “And this will surprise you even more, but after thinking about it at length, I’ve concluded that my predecessor had a pretty good idea when he first involved Colonel Castillo in affairs of state.

  “When that diplomat was kidnapped in Argentina, my predecessor wanted a knowledgeable, objective observer to see how the situation was being handled, and to report his observations and recommendations directly to him.

  “He bungled the carrying out of the idea, as we all know, but the idea was sound. If he had given Colonel Castillo the proper supervision, everything would have worked out fine. I won’t repeat that mistake. I’m very good at supervising people. Hands-on is how I think of it.

  “How soon can we get him in here?”

  No one replied.

  “General Naylor?”

  “Mr. President, Colonel Castillo is retired.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? He can be recalled to active duty.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. President, in ‘extraordinary circumstances’ Colonel Castillo could be recalled to hazardous active duty.”

  “General, would you call Mexican drug cartels shooting up the streets of Laredo and El Paso—my God, the next thing you know they’ll be doing that in Biloxi—ordinary circumstances? Not to mention Somali pirates holding three of our tankers for ransom? Call Colonel Castillo to active duty and get him in here. Where is he?”

  “I don’t really know, Mr. President,” General Naylor confessed.

  “What about you, Mr. Ellsworth?” the President asked. “Does my director of National Intelligence know where Colonel Castillo is?”

  “I have some unconfirmed reports that he’s either in Budapest or Argentina, Mr. President,” Truman C. Ellsworth replied. “I’ll look into it further for you, Mr. President.”

  “Huh,” the President snorted. “You’ll do better than that. You will personally go to Budapest to see if he’s there and, if so, order him to report to me immediately. And while you’re doing that, General Naylor will go to Argentina for the same purpose. And while they’re doing that, if my CIA director acquires unconfirmed intelligence that Colonel Castillo is in Timbuktu, Mr. Lammelle will go there for the same purpose. And while all that is going on, you, Secretary Beiderman, will handle the administrative details of recalling Colonel Castillo from retirement.”

  Ellsworth, Naylor, and Beiderman all said, “Yes, sir,” on top of one another.

  “And the rest of you will take whatever action in this regard that pops into your fertile imaginations,” the President went on. “I’m sure you all heard what I said about wanting your wholehearted cooperation in that matter.”

  He let that sink in for a moment, and then dismissed them by saying, “That will be all. Thank you for coming.”

  Then he stood and walked to the door to the Oval Office, which Supervisory Secret Service Agent Robert J. Mulligan opened for him as he approached, and went through it.

  [THREE]

  The Portico

  The White House

  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

  Washington, D.C.

  1405 5 June 2007

  The vehicles that had brought everybody to the White House were lined up on the drive waiting for them when they came out.

  With the exception of the silver Jaguar Vanden Plas in which Truman C. Ellsworth, at his own expense, moved around Washington, they were all black—or very dark blue, almost black—GMC Yukons. But their drivers and assistant drivers—read bodyguards—reflected the agency whose chief they were moving around.

  Ellsworth’s driver and bodyguard were from the CIA’s Internal Security Staff, as were those of CIA Director Lammelle. The CIA was forbidden by law from operating within the United States, which seemed to imply they couldn’t go about armed. If anyone noticed that Ellsworth’s and Lammelle’s drivers and their assistants had previously been officers of the CIA Clandestine Service, no one said anything.

  Vice President Montvale’s driver and assistant were special agents of the Secret Service. In addition, wherever Montvale went, so did Supervisory Secret Service Special Agent Thomas McGuire.

  Secretary Cohen’s driver was a member of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service. In lieu of an assistant, Charlene Stevens, a blonde, Rubenesque former Secret Service agent who headed Secretary Cohen’s security detail, always rode with her in her Yukon.

  Defense Secretary Beiderman’s driver and his assistant were agents of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Beiderman was a former naval officer.

  General Naylor was traveling in a Yukon assigned to the fleet of the chief of staff, U.S. Army. Its driver and his assistant were special agents of the Counterintelligence Corps and no one mentioned that before they had been assigned to protect the chief of staff and a very few other very senior officers, they had been members of the Ultra Secret Black Fox section of the Special Operations Command.

  “Give me a call sometime, Frank, please,” Secretary Cohen said, as she prepared to get into the backseat of her Yukon.

  “Absolutely,” Lammelle replied, and then directed his attention to General Naylor. “It looks a little crowded in there, General,” he said, nodding toward Naylor’s waiting Yukon. “Why don’t you let me take you out to Andrews? It’s on my way.”

  There were already five people in the Yukon Naylor had been provided by Brigadier General Homer S. Dutton, junior deputy assistant chief of staff to the chief of staff, when the task of transporting the Central Command commander in chief from Andrews Air Force Base to the White House and back again had been laid on him.

  While General Dutton’s precise role in the Pentagon hierarchy might pose problems for the layman, it was actually quite clear to Pentagon cognoscenti and even to some officials—such as Mr. Lammelle—who dealt often with the Pentagon.

  At the top of the pyramid was the chief of staff himself, a four-star general. To assist him in the discharge of his duties, the chief of staff had a chief of staff, also a four-star general, who was chief of staff to the chief of staff. This luminary also had an assistant, known as the assistant chief of staff to the chief of staff. He was a lieutenant general, a three-star general. To assist him in carrying out his many duties, he had two deputies. These were a major general (two stars) who was the senior deputy assistant chief of staff to the chief of staff, and a brigadier general (one star) who was the junior deputy assistant chief of staff to the chief of staff. This was General Dutton.

  It had been General Dutton who had sent an urgent radio message earlier in the day to General Naylor, who had then been aboard his airplane bound for Fort Lewis, Washington, informing him that the Commander in Chief wished to see him at 1330 in the Cabinet Room at the White House.

  Lammelle recognized three of the people in Naylor’s Yukon. One was Naylor’s senior aide-de-camp, Colonel J. D. Brewer, who was always with Naylor. A second was one of his junior aides-de-camp, Captain Charles D. Seward III, who performed the traditional duties of an aide-de-camp, in other words anything that spared the general’s time for more important matters. Taking care of the luggage, for example. He was also usually very close to the general.

  The third officer Lammelle recognized was the commanding officer of Headquarters & Headquarters Company, United States Central Command & Combined Base MacDill. Combined Base MacDill was formerly designated MacDill Air Force Base. The name had been changed to reflect its role vis-à-vis Central Command, which included naval, Marine Corps, and Army elements.

  This officer was responsible for feeding and housing the military personnel and their dependents assigned to any of these, and for the base fire department and the schools. In civilian parlance, he would have been the mayor.

  Most officers would regard the assignment as desirable. It would give them a chance to shine before the many se
nior officers of Central Command. It was jokingly but accurately said there were enough Army, Air Force, and Marine generals and Navy admirals in Central Command to form a reinforced platoon of infantry.

  The incumbent, Lieutenant Colonel Allan B. Naylor, Junior, had confided in Frank Lammelle that he hated it. His father, who had had no role in his son’s selection for the assignment and shared his opinion that it was not a particularly desirable assignment for a newly promoted lieutenant colonel of cavalry, nevertheless saw a silver lining in his son’s black cloud.

  Because all he had to do was keep the schools running and the fire department ready to do its job, et cetera, and didn’t need permission from anyone to leave his office, he would be free to accompany his father on many of his travels, which would expose him to command at the very highest levels, which would prove of great value to him when general’s stars gleamed from his own epaulets.

  There was no question in General Naylor’s mind that his son would become a general officer. That was what Naylors did. They went to West Point, served in the cavalry, became general officers, and then retired to the family farm in Virginia.

  The problem with this scenario, Allan, Junior, had confided in Lammelle, was that the fire department and the schools and the garbage collection services did not run themselves, the result of which was he had two full-time jobs, “as the goddamn mayor and the goddamn unofficial aide-de-camp.”

  “Thank you,” General Naylor said simply in response to Mr. Lammelle’s offer of a ride to Andrews Air Force Base. He then went to “his” Yukon, told them what was going on, and then got in the backseat of Lammelle’s Yukon.

  As the vehicle turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue, Mr. Lammelle took what looked very much like a BlackBerry from his pocket, punched one of its buttons, and put the device to his ear.

  “Well,” he said, “what thinks the Queen of Foggy Bottom?”