Countdown by Keith Douglass

Author:Keith Douglass [Douglass, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Technological, Action & Adventure, Espionage, Fiction
ISBN: 9780515113099
Publisher: Jove Books
Published: 1994-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Saturday, 14 March

0915 hours EST (Zulu -5)

White House Situation Room

Washington, D.C.

Admiral Thomas Magruder took his seat in the White House Situation Room.

As a special Presidential Advisor on military matters, he’d been here plenty of times before. Ordered constructed by President Kennedy right after the Bay of Pigs, the carpeted, concrete-walled room in the White House basement was not as large, as glamorous, or as high-tech as popular fiction usually described it. There were hidden television screens behind wood-paneled cupboards, yes, and the room next door was filled with telex machines, a crypto unit, facsimile machines, and secure telephones.

For most high-level briefings, though, the President used a second Situation Room located in Room 208 of the Executive Office Building, the same room, in fact, from which Secretary of State Cordell Hull had ejected the Japanese envoys on December 7, 1941. Variously called the Crisis Management Center and the Situation Room Support Facility, it was large enough for all of the President’s principal officers and their aides.

As a matter of course, however, the President’s senior aides and cabinet officers used the original White House basement Sit Room to discuss specific strategies before going upstairs to brief the President. The current President, while not as anti-military as some of his more liberal White House cabinet officers, was less than fully knowledgeable about military affairs.

Rather than sitting in on military and intelligence briefings, the President preferred to have his National Security Advisor, Herbert T. Waring, chair the meeting instead, then brief him afterward.

Magruder leaned back in his chair, glumly studying the American and Presidential flags flanking a curtained screen at the far end of the room.

There’d been a lot of changes in the U.S. military during the past few years, and in his opinion, none of them were good.

Since 1991, the military had been called upon to fill a rapidly expanding role in policing a world that reverberated with the ongoing death throes of the old Communist empire. There’d been the Gulf War with a state originally armed and trained by the old U.S.S.R., a war possible only because the Soviets under Gorbachev had been willing to turn a blind eye to what was happening in Iraq in exchange for a free hand in suppressing the popular revolutions in the Baltics. Then had come the coup, and the breakup of the Soviet Union despite the Black Berets’ attacks against Baltic nationalism. By the end of the year, the Communist flag had been lowered above the Kremlin for the last time … or at least, so everyone had thought. The Cold War was over, and the calls to drastically pare back an unnecessary American military had begun.

Somehow it hadn’t worked out that way, though. There’d been Somalia and Bosnia and continued trouble in Iraq. A Marine foray into North Korea to rescue the crew of a Navy intelligence ship taken hostage. A coup in Thailand backed by renegade Chinese Communists. A war between Pakistan and India that might have gone nuclear without intervention by an American carrier task force.

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