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  I know exactly what that means."

  "Mr. President, I don't question your motives or your sincerity, or else I never would have agreed to serve on your Cabinet," Kercheval said. "I'm just trying to advise you on what's in store for you and this government if you go ahead with this plan. A lot of nations, institutions, and individuals around the world owe their way of life-perhaps even their very life-to the perception of the peace, strength, and security of the United States of America. What you are proposing might erase a lot of that. That could cause a ripple effect that will wash over the entire world."

  "I'm well aware of that, Ed-"

  "I don't think you are, Mr. President," Kercheval interjected.

  The others in the Oval Office turned and looked at Kercheval with shock, then at the President. Even Kercheval expected an explosion. Although Thomas N. Thorn's public persona was one of quiet, peaceful, dignified ease with the world, they all knew that the President had once been a trained professional killer-some powerful emotions bubbled just below the surface.

  "Edward, the United States has been obsessed with dealing with these little rogue nation bruslifires, ever since the Persian Gulf War," the President said. "Somalia, Haiti, Iraq twice, Bosnia, Kosovo, North Korea-we seem to have peacekeeping forces in every corner of the planet. Then, when a major confrontation such as China flares up, we don't have the resources to pull together to counter them. We have to rely on unconventional forces to do something that our regular forces should do, and I'm not comfortable with that.

  "The way I see it, the problem is twofold: our forces are too big and unwieldy to respond quickly enough, and we're spending too much time, resources, and attention on these little regional brushfires. Not one peacekeeping operation we've undertaken, with the possible exception of Haiti, has been successful. We've wasted billions of dollars and a lot of intemational. prestige on operations that have not advanced American

  peace and security one bit. I'm tired of it, I think our military is tired of it, and the American people are tired of it."

  "These 'brushfires,' as you call them, could cause a much wider conflict, sir," Kercheval maintained. "There was never any doubt about Iraq-they threatened the West's primary oil supply. Other regions, such as the Balkans, are not as 6lear, but just as important. Ethnic violence in the Balkans has directly caused one world war and indirectly caused another. By intervening in these small conflicts, we've prevented them from escalating into much more serious, continentwide wars."

  "I wasn't convinced during the campaign, and I'm not convinced now," the President said. "We were assured by the previous administration that intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo was in our national interest. Now I've received all the data that the previous commanders-in-chief received, and I don't see it. Either I'm not as smart as they were and I'm missing something, or there is nothing there that threatens our peace and security. Which is it, Edward?"

  "I think it's important to look beyond the present and look to the geopolitics of the region, sir," Kercheval said by way of response. "Russia is cracking down on dissenters within its own borders. It wants to reestablish ties with Serbia and is threatening any Eastern European nation that wants to join the European Union or NATO. That's enough provocation for me, Mr. President. That is very evident to me. Can I explain it any better?"

  The last sentence caught everyone's attention in the room, including the President's. Instead of taking a return shot, however, the President nodded, politely terminating the discussion. "I appreciate your candor, Ed," the President said, without a trace of malice-it sounded as if he really meant it, the Secretary of State thought. He turned to Douglas Morgan, the Director of Central Intelligence. "Doug? Comments?"

  "How will this affect ongoing intelligence operations?" Morgan asked. "We have several dozen fully authorized and active field operations in progress, especially in the Balkans, Middle East, and Asia. You're not going just to pull the plug on them, are you, sir?"

  "Of course not," the President replied. "In fact, I see no

  reason to change any aspect of intelligence operations. I think it's just as important to maintain a strong and active intelligence and counterintelligence operation, perhaps even more so if my plan is fully implemented."

  "Perhaps because the world will see this plan as something like cowardice and think that every American governmental function will implode as well?" Kercheval intedected.

  If the Secretary of State meant to stir up another argument with the President, it didn't work. Thorn simply looked at Kercheval, nodded, and said with a smile, "Something like that, Ed, something like that." To the others in the room, he offered, "Anything else?" When no one said anything, Thorn turned directly to Kercheval, hands outspread, eyes riveted on him as if saying, "C'mon, Ed, if you want another shot at me, go ahead and take it."

  Kercheval shook his head. That was all he could do. He had voiced his objections for weeks, had had all the input he was allowed and more, and now even challenged the President's veracity. The man was obviously determined to do it.

  "We're going to implement the plan immediately, then," the President said resolutely.' Goff and Venti's faces looked grim. Thorn added, "Let's get it started, Bob." He reached over, opened the folder before him, and signed the cover sheet of the executive order. "There you go, gentlemen. Let's do it."

  Goff picked up the document and looked at it as if it were a copy of a death certificate. "I'm sure this is the most historic document I'll ever hold in my hand." He looked at Thorn with a mixture of awe and shock. "We'll put it in motion right away, Mr. President. I have my first closed-door congressional hearing scheduled for next week, but when word leaks out about this, I'm sure that'll be pushed up, more hearings will undoubtedly be scheduled, and some may even want to go unclassified. I'll be sure to have th6 White House and Pentagon counsels set up the ground rules."

  "Good luck, Bob. I'll be watching."

  "Are you going to mention it in the State of the Union address?"

  "I do not intend to make a State of the Union address," Thorn said.

  "What?" the others exclaimed, almost in unison.

  "Mr. President, you can't be serious," Kercheval said, his voice almost agitated. "Skipping the inaugural was bad enough-"

  "I did not 'skip' the inaugural, Ed. I just chose -not to attend."

  "It was political suicide, Mr. President," Kercheval insisted. "It made you look like a laughingstock in front of the entire world!"

  "I got my entire Cabinet confirmed in two weeks, and by the end of this month I'll have every federal judge position filled," the President said. "I don't care if the world thought it was crazy, and I don't care about political suicide, because there is virtually no political party behind me."

  "But not giving a speech before Congress-"

  "Nothing mandates either an inaugural at the Capitol or a speech before Congress," the President reminded him. "The Constitution mandates a swearing-in and an oath of office, which I did. The Constitution mandates an annual report to Congress on the state of the union and my legislative agenda, and that's what I intend to do. I will deliver my budget to Congress at the same time.

  "You think it's political suicide-I say that it tells Congress and tells the American people I mean business. Congress knew I was serious about forming and running my government, and they helped me get my Cabinet confirmed in record time. My judges will be sworn in in months, and in some cases years, before the previous administration's were."

  Kercheval still looked worried. Thorn stood, clasped him on the shoulder, and said seriously, "It looks suicidal to you, Ed, because you've been stained by Washington politics, which most times bears little resemblance to either the law or the Constitution."

  "Sir?" Kercheval asked, letting a bit more anger seep into his voice. "Surely you're not implying ... T'

  "I don't know Washington politics," the President went on, ignoring Kercheval's rising anger. "All I know is the Constitution and a little bit of the law. But y
ou know something? That's all I need to know. That's why I know I can choose not

  to show up for an inaugural or a State of the Union speech, and have complete confidence that I'm doing the right thing. That kind of confidence rubs off on others. I hope it'll rub off on you." He went back to his desk, sat down, and began to type again on the computer keyboard at his desk. "We meet with

  the congressional leadership this morning," he said aloud, without looking again at Kercheval. "First conference call is scheduled for later this afternoon, isn't it, Ed?"

  "Yes, sir. The prime ministers of the NATO countries," Kercheval replied, completely taken aback by the President's words. "It'll be a video teleconference from the Cabinet Room at three Pm. Tonight's video teleconference is with the Asian allies, scheduled for eight Pm. Tomorrow will be the second round at ten A.M. with the nonaligned countries of Europe and Central and South America."

  "Any advance word?"

  "The general assumption is that you're going to announce the removal of peacekeeping forces from Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo," Kercheval replied. "That rumor started last week. Already, France and Great Britain have announced their intention to pull out if we pull out. Russia has already hinted they will pull out of Kosovo, but our formal announcement might make them change their mind. Germany will likely stay in both Kosovo and Bosnia."

  "Why is that?"

  "It's right on Germany's doorstep, and the Balkans have been of great German interest for centuries," Kercheval said. "Unfortunately, most of the historical connections are negative ones, especially the more recent ones. The Third Reich received a lot of support from sympathizers in the Balkans in their quest to wipe out 'unclean' races like Jews and Gypsies. Germany has continued to be a close supporter of Croatiathey fully sponsored Croatia's admittance into the United Nations, long before their break from Yugoslavia, and they have supported Croatia's attempts to get land and citizen's rights from Bosnia. Besides, Germany sees itself as the one and only counterbalance to Russian encroachments in the Balkans. They'll stay."

  "I need to know for certain," President Thorn said. "Let's get Minister Schramm on the line before the teleconference. I'm committed to our plan, but I don't want to leave our allies flat-footed."

  "Mr. President, this will simply not be taken any other way except as the United States withdrawing from an unwinnable situation in the Balkans," Kercheval said. "It will absolutely throw U.S. foreign policy into chaos!"

  "I disagree, Ed-"

  "Our allies will see it as nothing but the United States turning tail and running away," Kercheval went on angrily. "We have risked too many lives over there to just turn our backs now!"

  "Enough, Mr. Kercheval," the President said. The room was instantly quiet. Everyone in the Oval Office noticed itthat little bit of an edge to the President's voice, the one many people knew was under the surface but had just not been seen before.

  The President was an ex-Army Special Forces officer, welltrained in commando tactics and experienced in various methods of killing an enemy, and a man doesn't live that kind of life without certain traits being indelibly ingrained into the psyche. Thorn's political opponents saw this as an opportunity to try to portray the upstart as a potential mad dog and had exposed his military background in grisly, bloodcurdling detail. They had maintained, and the Pentagon finally confirmed, that as an Army Special Forces platoon leader, Thorn led over two dozen search-and-destroy missions in Kuwait, Iraq, and-secretly-into Iran, during Operation Desert Storm. Needless to say, the fact that U.S. forces had been secretly in Iran during the war, with America promising not to threaten Iran as long as it stayed neutral, did not sit well with Iran or with many nations in the Persian Gulf region.

  As a first lieutenant, Thomas N. "TNT"'Thorn had commanded a Special Forces platoon tasked with sneaking deep into various enemy-held territories and lazing targets for precision-guided bombing missions. He and his men were authorized to use any and all means necessary to get close enough to a target to shine it with a laser or mark it with a laser fre-

  quency generator so that the target could be hit by laser-guided bombs dropped from Army, Air Force, and Navy attack planes or helicopters.

  His own accounts and those of his men told the story: he had pulled the trigger of a weapon or withdrawn a blade in combat over a hundred times, and had

  confirmed kills on over a hundred men. Most were from relatively short distances, less than fifteen yards, using a silenced pistol. Some were from almost a mile away, where the bullet reaches its target before the sound. A few had been from knife-fighting distance, close enough so Thorn could feel his victim's final gush of breath on his hand as he drove a knife into an unprotected neck or brain stem. This didn't include the countless number of enemy forces killed by the laser-guided bombs he and his team had sent to their targets-the estimated final "head count" was well into triple digits.

  But rather than horrifying the voters, as the opposition candidates had hoped, it had drawn attention to him. At first, of course, it had been the spectacle----everyone wanted to see what a real-life assassin looked like. But if they had come to see the monster, they had stayed to hear the message. The message had soon become a campaign, which had become a race, which had become a president. But though most had never seen the monster, they assumed it still existed.

  They had caught a glimpse of it just now.

  "I'd like to speak with Minister Schramm after the meeting with the congressional leadership, but before the videoconference," the President said, and this time it was an order, not a request or suggestion. "Set it up. Please." At that, the meeting came to an abrupt and very uncomfortable end.

  Office of the President, The Kremlin, Russian Federation

  The next morning

  "It cannot be true," the president said. He took a sip of coffee, then set the cup back on its delicate china saucer and stared off

  through the window of his office into the cold rain outside. "It is amazing what a few weeks can do."

  "The report has not yet been confirmed, Mr. President," Army General Nikolai Stepashin replied, refilling his coffee cup. "It may not be true. It may be an elaborate hoax, or a security test, or a joke." The general, wearing a civilian suit too big for him and a tie too small, still looked very much like the grizzled field commander that he was. He downed the coffee, his third that morning, but craved more. "But the information in the intercept was so crazy, and the Chancellor's reaction so strong, that I thought it best to pass it along."

  "Tell me what this means," Valentin Gennadievich Sen'kov, president of the Russian Federation, said. "Someone please tell me what in hell this means." Sometimes, Sen'kov thought, the more he learned, the less he knew, and he understood even less.

  Fifty-two-year-old Valentin Gennadievich Sen'kov was the leader of the Russia All-Fatherland Party, formerly the Liberal Democratic Party under Sen'kov's mentor and friend, President Vitaly Velichko. But when Velichko was killed in the joint American-Ukrainian attack on Moscow following Russia's attempt to reunite its former empire by force, Sen'kov, a for7ner KGB agent and former prime minister, had been named acting president. He had been quickly voted out of office in the national elections that soon followed; his name and that of his party had been so tainted by Velichko's failure that he'd had the name of his political party changed so the Russian people might not recognize it and associate it with past failures. He'd held on to his seat in the Federation Council, the Russian Parliament's upper house, by his very fingernails.

  When the reformist government of Boris Yeltsin had failed to lift Russia out of its economic, political, and morale doldrums, Sen'kov and his new Russia All-Fatherland Party had been called upon to support the government and help restore the citizens' confidence in it. Yeltsin had been able to hold on to power only by bringing back Sen'kov, and with him a few vestiges of the old Soviet-style authoritarian govemment. Sen'kov had finally been back in the Kremlin, no

  longer an outcast, first as foreign minister and then
as prime minister. When Yeltsin, helpless in his alcoholic haze, had been forced to resign in disgrace, Valentin Sen'kov had been chosen by a unanimous vote of Parliament

  as acting president. His election, just four months before the U.S. elections, had been a landslide victory for the conservative NeoCommunist Party.

  Sen'kov seemed to take over where Velichko had left off, but this time the Russian people had responded positively to his political views and actions. Sen'kov immediately crushed the rebellion in Chechnya; he pledged to modernize Russia's nuclear arsenal; and he resigned his nation from membership in the Council of Europe, the judicial body formed to resolve conflicts between European nations, because the Council had denounced Russia's actions in Chechnya but refused to speak out against the NATO bombing of Bosnia or Serbia. His brand of quiet toughness and conservative, nationalistic ideals resonated well with the Russian people, who were growing tired of seeing their country become nothing more than a very large third-world nation. In the national elections that soon followed, the Russia All-Fatherland Party under Valentin Sen'kov had captured a huge majority in both the Federation Council and the Duma, and he had been elected the new president.

  "What is happening? What are they trying to do?" Sen'kov asked himself. "The Americans are actually going to leave Kosovo, leave Bosnia, leave the Balkans, leave NATO, leave Europe?"

  "Sir, what it means, if true, is that the United States is imploding-literally as well as figuratively," Stepashin said. Stepashin was the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service. He looked at the other members of the president's Cabinet there for the impromptu meeting: retired Rocket Forces General Viktor Trubnikov, minister of defense; Ivan Filippov, the foreign minister; Sergey Yejsk, aide to the president on national security affairs and secretary of the Security Council; and Colonel-General Valeriy Zhurbenko, the first deputy minister of defense and chief of the general staff. "For years, ever since their president's foreign policy debacles, domestic stag-