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The President of the United States watched the backs of his National Security Adviser and his Special Assistant for Security Affairs as they left the Oval Office. They were kids, really, both younger than his own children. Better not continue that train of thought, he reminded himself.
Watching his staff turn and routinely walk away always left the President feeling he had been abandoned to deal alone with whatever challenge or misery they had just brought into his office. The experience seemed to occur virtually every twenty minutes of every ten-hour working day. He wondered if reigning monarchs felt better when their courtiers backed out of their presence. The President decided that would be even worse; his poker-face would never be able to survive the added stress.
Those two kids had delivered news that had already pushed his well-known poker-face to its limit: a fax someone had sent seven days earlier to the president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest, most remote nations on the face of the earth.
To the President of Burkina Faso:
You are directed to inform the United States of America that the nation of Burkina Faso is starving. A combination of long-term drought in the Sahel and certain short-term weather factors threaten the country with annihilation. International aid organizations greatly underestimate the imminence of the death of a nation.
You are directed to request from the United States food supplies on an urgent humanitarian basis. Shipments must begin to arrive in Burkina Faso within two weeks and be shown on American television networks.
Should the United States refuse, a nuclear bomb will detonate in a major American city. The Burkinabé will not die quietly.
It is our hope that neither the Burkinabé nor the Americans will die but that, simply, the Americans will be stimulated to recognize the urgency of the need and will feed the people.
The fax was a work of art. It declared a threat without any hint as to the location or the perpetrators.
And one week, half the period to the deadline, was already gone--consumed by Washington bureaucrats with zero to show for the time.
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Washington's high-level task force, the Terrorist Working Committee, had been convened, representing the State Department, Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Council and the White House. Among themselves, with their mind-boggling budgets, they had been able to determine two things: a) there was indeed a famine in Burkina Faso and b) five students from Burkina Faso had arrived the previous week and picked up $100,000 in cash from their embassy in Washington.
The students could not be found. Nothing had been discovered to validate the nuclear threat or, if it were real, where it was directed.
The secret Department of Defense special unit, NEST (Nuclear Emergency Search Team) had been deployed. Despite a $100 million annual budget, it was no surprise that NEST had nothing to show for four days of effort. After all, they had the whole country to cover.
During his first year in office, the President's favorite joke to his wife was that if he had a magic wand with a single wish, he would spend it to convince the voters the President didn't have a magic wand. Real solutions were seldom simple and were never cost-free.
Thinking of his wife, the chief executive suddenly realized that the fax's deadline fell on their wedding anniversary. He sighed.
Then he sighed again, imagining how television news would play the threat once it leaked. Stock footage of mushroom clouds made for great TV; so did cadaverous starving natives with popping staring eyes. Both were sure-fire bets to file the voters.
After his election, the President's predecessor had offered a lone bit of advice, and that only after the television cameras had turned elsewhere and the two men could relax their inane smiles. The President easily recalled the words, "Just remember that every job has its ups and downs."
The President resurrected the moment from his memory and relived the soon-to-be-ex-President turning his back and walking away, chuckling quietly to himself.
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* * * * *
Bob Chamberlin, still the brush-cut, tall, slim man at 50 he was as an infantry captain in Viet Nam at 25, stood and nodded at the group. They knew each other, had met together many times already on a succession of threats that hadn't materialized. The group also knew Chamberlin's looks were deceiving. He had gone back to school after the war--on the Army's nickel--and gotten his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering. His jargon frightened those who didn't know him, who wondered how a bureaucrat could protect the country from all the terrorists and loonies; those who worked with him had learned the jargon and bureaucratic methods were Bob's way of saving his mind for other things.
"We know there's a nuclear bomb threat; that's all we know about the what. We may well know the who. They've given a two week deadline, so we have a rough when. We don't have a where. We have the why--maybe; it could be the famine, but I want to hear what our psychologists have to say as this thing develops. We don't know the material or configuration of the bomb; that's the how. So the big questions are where and how.
"We've activated our command center at the Department of Energy in Germantown, Maryland. Of course, our acronymic designation is EACT, for Emergency Action Coordination Team, so the Germantown office is designated EACT One. That will be our point of coordination. EACTs Two, Three and Four are our bases in Las Vegas, Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington and the liaison office in Albuquerque that links Sandia Labs, Livermore and Los Alamos.
"Working without a clue as to location, we have two courses of action. These have been developed using think-tank research and computer simulations.
"Course One: We start looking at transportation hubs. Our group will be checking out airline cargo holds, trucks, trains and buses. We've run simulations on this from time to time. By basing ourselves at major maintenance facilities in eight major cities, we can cover 97% of scheduled airlines' fleets and 85% of other modes of transportation in three days."
"Course Two: We take our high-sensitivity radiation detection equipment airborne in two C-141's and fly mapping missions over the fifty of the largest cities and most appealing strategic targets in the contiguous United States. Time to completion on this is approximately three days. We map these same areas at least once a year and the trick in doing the comparison of the current radiation profile to the last one is a new computer routine. By using satellites and inertial navigation equipment, the computers can adjust for varying flight paths of the airplanes doing the mapping. The program then compares the current map with the previous one and only informs us of the variances, saving us man-years of effort in eliminating the data which hasn't changed. There will still be hundreds of changes, each of which must be checked out, but the analysis work is one percent of what it used to be."
Ross unconsciously looked at his watch, and thought about his Senators.
Chamberlin carried on, "Work on Courses One and Two started early Friday night. No results so far, but we're still at it. If we're successful, it will give some mix of information on the where and the how.
"The what remains basically unanswered. Our standard protocol calls for an assessment of the type of device, likelihood of detonation and estimate of damage. We haven't enough information yet to make any determination at all on these issues.
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