The General's President Read online

  "Fine. Anything you want me to tell them?"

  "Tell them I got a 'yes' from Arne."

  When they'd left, they paused at Cromwell's office for just a moment while Cromwell called the White House and spoke to someone named Charles; they'd be there in ten minutes, he told him.

  In the corridor again, Cromwell said, "I wanted Hanke to meet you. It's good PR, and Hank's a hell of a good man. Best man on the JCS, in most ways; better than me, better than Carmody."

  Which left two chiefs of staff unmentioned, Haugen noted. A small helicopter waited for them on a helipad outside; Cromwell had arranged for it in advance, he supposed. From the air, he saw what had not been apparent while driving to the Pentagon—the widespread damage and destruction north of the river. There was no smoke though; the evening's heavy rain had seen to that. Trucks were out, along with front-end loaders, clearing away the remains of dozed out barricades. That suggested that the sniping had ended, or nearly enough for whoever had made the decision.

  Haugen had visited the White House once, nearly forty years earlier, as a tourist. Now there were no tourists, only marines, and he was met on the lawn by the president's military aide, General Hammaker, and Charles Milstead, chief of the White House staff. Cromwell made the introductions; then they walked together to the Oval Office, where President Kevin J. Donnelly met them seated, a full colonel standing behind him with a Medical Corps caduceus on his shirt collar.

  The president looked terrible, like a long-term invalid, his flesh and complexion like bread dough. Not drawn like yesterday, Cromwell thought. Fuffy. The result of some drug, he supposed. Some medicine, and perhaps no sleep or too much sleep... But he straightened when we came in; he's that much in control.

  Haugen wondered if Donnelly was dying. Cromwell made the introduction, and the president stared at Haugen without extending his hand. Then, without preamble, Donnelly asked: "Mr. Haugen, are you willing to be vice president?"

  Haugen's voice was unexpectedly husky. "Yes, Mr. President, I am."

  Donnelly sat briefly silent, as if gathering himself. "Good. You are now the vice president of the United States of America."

  Then he turned his eyes to Milstead, questioningly. "Is that it?" he asked.

  "Yes, Mr. President, that's it."

  Again a lag. "Then I resign," he murmured.

  Milstead started to speak. His voice broke, and Haugen looked at him; tears had overbrimmed the man's eyes, and it seemed to Haugen that this man and Donnelly had had dreams together. Milstead gathered his control, sucked in his cheeks and started again.

  "Yes Mr. President. We are witness to your appointment of Vice President Haugen, and of your resignation." He looked at Colonel Singleton; Singleton nodded.

  "Gentlemen," Singleton said, "if you please." Milstead led the others out of the office. Donnelly's secretary turned away from the door as they came out, but a box of Kleenex was open on her desk. She knew. Haugen felt like an inheritance tax collector at a funeral. Milstead took them into his own office, next to the president's. They could have entered it directly from the Oval Office, but apparently, under the circumstances, Milstead thought their manner of departure was more appropriate.

  "Mr. President," Milstead said to Haugen, "we've arranged to have President Donnelly taken at once to Bethesda Naval Hospital. An aerial ambulance should be arriving very shortly."

  Milstead paused, seeking mentally for a moment, then took a notebook from his desk, seeming to gain poise and strength as he scanned it. "The first lady and I," he said, "organized the evacuation of the Donnelly's personal and household effects last night. I'll have the household staff notified next. Actual removal should begin tomorrow, and the White House will be yours by the end of the week, or sooner if necessary. Between now and then, a guest room has been prepared for your occupation."

  Arne Haugen, President of the United States of America, began to feel a heavy mass settling on him.

  "I appreciate that you've had no briefings, nor time to arrange for your own staff," Milstead went on. "I'm available to continue as White House chief of staff until you've selected a replacement, and I believe we can assume the same of most of the appointive staff, including the cabinet. Many of them, I'm sure, have anticipated something like this."

  He turned a page in the notebook. "With your approval, sir, I'll call your press secretary, Mr. Okada, now. The nation needs to be informed..."

  Abruptly a shock hit Haugen, and he interrupted. "Mr. Milstead," he said, "I have to make a phone call. Right now!"

  The man looked startled. "Of course, Mr. President."

  "How do I get long distance on your phone?"

  "Dial nine."

  Haugen leaned over the desk, picked up the privacy receiver, and rapped out his home phone number on the keypad. While he waited, he said, I can't have my wife learn about this on television!"

  The ringing at the other end stopped, and Lois Haugen answered.

  "Hi, Babe," Haugen said. "I took the job. It starts today.... Well, it's kind of hard to tell you, but—I'm the President of the United States.... I know that's not funny; it's true though. I was just appointed vice president a few minutes ago and then President Donnelly resigned.... No I'm not crazy either. It'll be on the news later today; I'm calling from the White House right now.... Lois? Are you there? ..."

  He turned his face to Cromwell and rolled his eyes.

  "Yeah, that's right. I'll have someone on the staff call later today and talk with you about what stuff we ought to ship out here.... I know. That's how it feels to me too." He smiled slightly. "It's like the old saying: It's dirty work, but somebody's got to do it.

  "Look, I'll call again later. Right now I've got a ton of stuff to do. Okay?... Right.... If you watch the twelve o'clock news, you'll probably know more about it than I know now.... Thanks, sweetheart. You too."

  He disconnected and turned to the others. The call seemed to have raised his spirits considerably. "Okay," he said, "let's call Okada in."

  ***

  The penthouse office of Paul Willard Randolph Massey measured twenty-five by thirty feet, and the suite it was part of occupied the entire fifty-eighth floor penthouse of the Randolph Building in lower Manhattan. There was plenty of room on the adjacent landscaped roof for the private helipad. Massey had been informed that Manhattan was now safe, and he'd had himself flown down after breakfast.

  The office furnishings could be described as expensively tasteful or quietly ostentatious, if you were connoisseur enough to realize how much they cost. The whole southwest wall of the office was a polarized thermal window. The drapes were drawn back, exposing a view across Upper Bay toward the Statue of Liberty, and in the farther distance, Staten Island.

  The aesthetics of it didn't mean much to Massey, only the convenience. He was a gamesman, the game was power, and only some of the markers were money.

  The late morning sun was angling in; it was just past noon, Eastern Daylight Time. His phone buzzed discreetly. A code flashed on its screen, telling him it was a direct line, scrambled, bypassing his receptionist. He touched a key, and a familiar face appeared on the screen. He touched another, activating a recording device that had no telltale. And a third, completing the connection.

  Massey hadn't activated the camera at his end. He usually didn't; even in phone conversations with an employee, he liked to operate unseen. Instead he identified himself by his preferred name. "Willard," he said.

  "Sir, this is Barron. There is something on the television news you should see. I have it on CBS."

  Massey touched keys on a remote, and a picture, with sound, popped into being on his wall set.

  "I have it, Barron," he said drily, then neither said anything more as they listened to Lester Okada, the White House press secretary.

  "...per the Emergency Powers Act," Okada was saying. "President Donnelly therefore appointed a vice president and resigned. We now have a new president." Okada paused; the screen cut to a face-on close-up. "The new presiden
t's name is Arne Eino Haugen. President Haugen will be formally sworn in this afternoon at 2 P.M., before the cabinet, the Supreme Court, and leading members of the Congress."

  After a moment of reportorial silence, Okada proceeded to choose individuals out of the clamor that arose, and answered about ten minutes of questions about Donnelly and Haugen and the legality of the process. When he was done and the network cut away to its commentators in New York, Massey lowered the volume nearly to nil and turned back to Barron Tallmon on the phone.

  "Barron," he said, "contact Jaubert. Have him see what he can learn about this Haugen—his finances, his interests, his personal habits and idiosyncracies. Anything discreditable will be particularly appreciated."

  He cut Tallmon off and sat quietly thinking for a few moments, then gave his attention to the report he'd been dictating.

  SEVEN

  Transcript from the evening news, NBC-TV, October 10. Read by Elliot Blanchard.

  "Washington was startled, earlier today, by White House press secretary Lester Okada's announcement that President Donnelly had named a new vice president and then resigned. Our new president is Arne Eino Haugen of Duluth, Minnesota.

  "The most common response has been 'Arne Who?'

  "We have put together the following information about Arne Eino Haugen, and it provides a very unusual and interesting picture.

  "Arne Haugen was born on April 3, 1924, reportedly in a log cabin, on a backwoods homestead in Koochiching County, Minnesota, only a few miles from the Canadian border. He was the third of four children, three boys and a girl. His parents were Karl Oskar Haugen, a Norwegian immigrant, and Eila Salminen, a Finnish immigrant, and the children grew up speaking both Norwegian and Finnish. The family had very little money.

  "Arne Haugen grew up working for his father on the farm and in the forest, and a few days after his eighteenth birthday, entered the army in April 1942. There, following infantry training, he volunteered for the parachute infantry and was assigned to the Eleventh Airborne Division.

  "On completion of parachute training, he went with his division to Australia for jungle training, later participating in the liberation of New Guinea from Japanese occupation. Later, as a platoon sergeant, he took part in the liberation of the Philippines, including the capture of the Los Baños prisoner of war camp on Luzon, behind the collapsing Japanese lines, rescuing the hundreds of American prisoners there before they could be removed or possibly killed by their Japanese guards.

  "Both of Haugen's brothers, Kaarlo and Martin, were killed in World War Two, Kaarlo with the 101st Airborne in Normandy, and Martin with the marines on Okinawa, in the last great battle of the war.

  "After the war, Haugen worked for a time at logging. Then, on the G.I. Bill, he attended the University of Minnesota, where he studied electrical engineering, participated in intramural wrestling, married Lois Hedstrom of Thief River Falls, Minnesota, and graduated summa cum laude—with high honors—in 1952.

  "After graduating, Haugen was employed briefly with the Koochiching County, Minnesota, Electric Co-op, which supplied electricity to farm settlements. In 1954 he opened a television repair shop in Duluth, Minnesota, and began spare-time research that, by 1957, had led to several profitable patents in electronics.

  "In 1957 he founded Haugen Electronics, Inc., to manufacture and market products based on his patents. He, a cousin, and his father-in-law were reportedly the sole shareholders. By 1961, when he changed the firm's name to Duluth Technologies, Inc., it was reputedly worth two million dollars. It has grown vastly since then, with factories in several locations, and is said to remain family owned.

  "The Haugens have two grown children—a son Karl and a daughter Liisa—and seven grandchildren.

  "Reportedly, Arne Haugen is a voracious and rapid reader who is respectably informed on a wide variety of subjects. Apparently he will be by far the best linguist ever to occupy the White House. Both he and Mrs. Haugen are said to have studied one language after another for years, and to be at least modestly proficient in about a dozen of them, including Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Swedish, Tagalog and, not surprisingly, Norwegian and Finnish. Spoken Chinese is reportedly a recent project. Nothing was said about Arabic and Hebrew.

  "The president is said to be very healthy, still strong and active, and to have a good sense of humor. All of which he will need. He is also said to be nonpolitical, which will certainly be unusual in a president.

  "In a time of domestic troubles unequalled since the War Between the States, the nation will watch this new leader with what undoubtedly will be unprecedented interest and attention, and the interest of the rest of the world will hardly be less."

  ***

  Party Secretary Boris Alexeevich Kulish sat presiding over the morning meeting of the Politburo. Copies of the previous day's intelligence summary, printed late the night before, were routinely set at each man's place before the members arrived. Normally its review was the first piece of business. This morning though, it lay so far unexamined, except for what it had to say about the new American president.

  In the Soviet hierarchy, listening to the BBC, the Voice of America, and Deutsche Welle, are regular, albeit illegal, practices. The night previous, the Politburo members had listened with particular interest for what they could learn about Arne Eino Haugen.

  Not that they believed what they heard. In a subculture where lies in politics are essential not only to success but survival, under a philosophy which states unequivocally that lying is an important tool to be used without hesitation, it is assumed that anything is likely to be a lie.

  GRU agents in America would even now be gathering more details on Arne Eino Haugen. Meanwhile, all that the Politburo knew with any confidence was that Haugen was a capitalist-industrialist and a technologist. Obviously his reported background as a poor country boy and laborer had to be felse—an artifact manufactured by publicists for public consumption. Very probably, claims of his skill as a technologist, and his youthful experience as a parachute trooper in the Great Patriotic War, were also lies.

  And most important, his inexperience in government, at any executive level, was proof that he was a Pentagon puppet.

  So now the American president not only had dictatorial authority; America also had a president who might prove effective in using that authority.

  It was not at all clear what would ensue, but it could hardly be favorable to Soviet interests. Heretofore, their own greatest advantage over the Americans had been the sometimes unbelievable discoordination and incredible security weaknesses of American government; but now, under Pentagon control, presumably these would be much reduced. The GRU would have to intensify its efforts to monitor and analyze the activities of the American government.

  Meanwhile, just now the Politburo had a war and its own serious internal problems to see to, and it was no time to generate unpredictable major complications. Thus it would be well not to move, just then, to capitalize on American social unrest; that could spark unpredictable responses.

  Of course, if the new government in Washington should begin a serious anti-Soviet program, perhaps to divert the American people's attention from their troubles at home, that would be something else.

  ***

  Dave Fiori touched a key, and the flashing light on his phone turned steady white, the beeper stilling. "What is it, Millie?"

  "It's Mr. Haugen for you on line three."

  "Thanks."

  The chief. Everybody's chief now! Fiori touched the button marked 3, and his phone screen lit up. Haugen's face looked through at him, Haugen's voice talking to him from the speaker.

  "Dave, I guess you know what's happened back here."

  "Right, Mr. President." He grinned. "I'm not sure whether it calls for congratulations or condolences though."

  "I'm not either. But it changes some things. I want you to get together with Laura and Morrie and make the final selection of GPC target communities, and then activate the release program, b
ut only for the U.S. Same basic timetable as the original, but set to start tomorrow."

  Fiori nodded. It had first been scheduled to start four days ago, then postponed until the civil scene got sorted out.

  "Any questions?" Haugen asked.

  "Nope. I'm glad it's on again."

  "Me too. Have fun with it. I've got a ton of stuff to do here, and I've never given a state-of-the-nation address before. Gotta get at it. So long."

  The screen went blank, and the light on the key pad blinked out. Fiori unfolded from the chair and left his office, long legs scissoring down the hall and across a heatable skywalk that led to the new assembly plant.

  There was no need to go there. He just wanted to look once more before calling Laura and Morrie. He liked looking at it. Simply, it excited him.

  In the plant, from a catwalk, he peered out across the assembly line. It was cleaner than it needed to be; the manufacturing conditions necessary for the GPC were not especially demanding. Men and women there wore white coveralls; the place was nearly spotless, and thoroughly and softly lit without noticeable shadows. Silent circulators cycled the air, removing dust electrically.

  The activity here was not intense; the chief wasn't big on intensity, just on production and quality. He preferred things calm and businesslike. Thick ceramic housings—head-high cylinders with one end open—lay on low electric jack trucks along one side, then ranged trackless down an assembly line on the other side in a sequence of increasing metamorphosis. They looked like maroon culvert sections with bases. On feeder lines that ribbed the space, workers assembled modules which other workers installed in the housings.