Power Play by Gavin Esler

Author:Gavin Esler [Esler, Gavin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007278107
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2009-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

Air Force One began its descent towards the Rocky Mountains. In the presidential suite, President Carr was shuffling through the six-by-four-inch cards that contained his speech of reassurance to the American people. He was, as usual, quickly memorizing every word. There would be no teleprompter, but that encouraged him. Carr thought teleprompters were the seed of the Devil. He worked best when the words were ingrained inside him, not written on a glass screen in front of the camera. President Carr was wearing a brown leather flight jacket with the presidential seal on his breast. All major US military facilities have their own TV crews and TV channels for base communications, and when he stepped off the plane he was filmed by a US Air Force crew, saluting, shaking hands with the top brass at the airfield, looking calm and confident. The President of the United States was taken underground immediately for a briefing on the military and security situation, chaired by Kristina. All quiet. Four American soldiers had been killed that day on the outskirts of Kabul in Afghanistan by an IED–an improvised explosive device. Two other US personnel were killed in Iraq when their Humvee was in collision with another vehicle. There was no connection in any of this with the Vice-President’s disappearance. As the President sat in the underground TV studio ready to broadcast to the American people, he received one further short briefing from Arlo Luntz on his delivery.

‘Slow and calm. Not sombre. It’s not a funeral. Not a war. Or not yet. Just slow and calm,’ Luntz said soothingly in a hypnotic voice. ‘It’s all under control. You have it all under control.’

‘All under control,’ President Carr repeated. ‘Slow and calm.’

An assistant gave him a touch of make-up to raise the colour on his pallid cheeks and to emphasize the line of his eyebrows, which were naturally blond and did not show up well on television. Luntz had, at one point, tried to insist that Carr dye his eyebrows dark brown, something Carr had so far resisted. He sat in the USAF TV studio and waited for the link to be established, surrounded by uniformed Air Force officers and White House staff. I was in the gym at Castle Dubh punching rapidly at the speed bag when the broadcast came on the BBC News Channel. I stood, panting with effort, and stared at the screen. My sports clothes were drenched with sweat as I took off the red boxing gloves and switched up the volume on the remote.

For the first time since he took office, I thought that President Theo Carr looked and sounded every inch the Commander-in-Chief with his troops in time of war. There was a strength in his voice and in his bearing that surprised me. Arlo Luntz had once told me that no other democracy in history had so glorified the military at the highest levels of power as the United States in the twenty-first century. But that was okay, Luntz

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