TOM KNOWLES GLANCED over the two stapled pages in his hand. There was nothing much in them that the uniformed officer in front of him hadn’t already covered in his verbal summary. Ten days into Jungle Peace, the president was still receiving a daily briefing on the operation. The Pentagon’s White House liaison officer came in each morning to present the update at the daily StratCom, the strategy and communications meeting held at 8am in the Oval Office.
The usual participants at the StratCom were White House press secretary Dean Moss, White House chief of staff Roberta Devlin, Gary Rose, Ed Abrahams, Director of the National Economic Council Marty Perez, and Sandra Ruiz-Kellerman, a pollster and political advisor who had made her name in a series of high-profile Republican campaigns. Together they represented Tom Knowles’ closest and most trusted White House advisors.
Knowles put down the paper. It reported a series of drone reconnaissance sorties over northern Uganda. A pair of Chinese destroyers was shadowing the Abraham Lincoln strike group in international waters off Uganda, as they had done since the beginning of the operation. The LRA, which had proven to have the capability of posting messages and even video on the internet, had posted another message threatening to beat the American invaders to death and eat their brains, which was apparently supposed to scare them.
‘So essentially, Colonel,’ he said to the officer, ‘nothing’s changed since yesterday.’
‘I wouldn’t quite say that, sir. As I said, in the past twenty-four hours we’ve flown twenty-seven drone sorties and covered a number of areas that we hadn’t had the opportunity to survey previously.’
‘And found?’
‘We’ve excluded significant enemy concentrations in those areas, Mr President.’
The president shook his head. ‘Zip. That’s what you’re telling me. We found zip. How many of these guys have we actually killed?’
‘We estimate in the region of four to six.’
‘In two weeks?’
‘Somewhat less than two weeks, Mr President.’
Knowles glanced at Gary Rose.
‘Mr President,’ said the colonel, ‘we have significantly reduced their activity amongst the civilian population. Our assessment is they’re laying low, moving between sites in small groups. That’s pretty much what we expected them to do.’
‘I thought we expected to find them with our drones and blow the hell out of them.’
‘Well, we’re hoping to do that, sir. Our strategy is interdict and attrit. This is interdiction. The attrit element takes a little longer. Right now we expect them to break up into small groups and try to lay low for a period, but that’s not something they can sustain over the long term, and when it becomes unsustainable for them, that’s when we will, as you say, begin to eliminate them in larger numbers.’
There was silence. Knowles looked questioningly at the others. There were no remarks.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Colonel.’
‘Thank you, Mr President.’
The officer picked up his briefcase and left the room.
‘Same story every day,’ muttered Knowles. He looked at Rose. ‘What do you think?’
The national security advisor shrugged. ‘There’ll be a couple of phases in this and we’re still in the first. We’re using a light touch approach. We don’t want to send ground troops into that jungle. I think this approach will work but it does mean it’s going to take more time. The alternative is putting large numbers of troops on the ground and that’s an option we ruled out at the start.’
‘Sandy, how long have we got on this?’
‘At this stage,’ said Ruiz-Kellerman, ‘our polling is saying we have solid support among people who are aware of the operation. They’re glad we went in.’
‘They’re not concerned we don’t have anything to show?’
‘Not yet. The whole thing changes if we take casualties.’
‘That’s the point of the strategy we’ve chosen,’ said Rose.
‘Gary, are you saying we’re not going to get a body count before the midterms?’
‘I’m saying it’s possible. That’s only four weeks now. It could take longer before we get a meaningful success.’
The president looked at Abrahams.
‘I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem,’ said Abrahams. ‘People like the fact we’ve gone in, that’s been a boost. Now everything stays steady and we’re looking at getting the numbers we need on the Hill in the midterms. Would you agree with that, Sandy?’
Ruiz-Kellerman nodded. ‘If the election was tomorrow, we’d get sixty in the Senate. Maybe sixty-one. In the House, we expand our majority ten to twenty.’
‘So it’s risk minimization,’ said Abrahams. ‘A big bunch of dead LRA gets us a little more support, a couple of Americans in body bags loses us a hell of a lot more. Risk-reward, it makes no sense to take a chance. That says we go with the strategy, like Gary says. Unmanned vehicles – no risk. We just need to start adjusting press expectations. Start talking about interdiction, safety of the civilian population, that kind of stuff. Make those the wins. Give it a humanitarian angle. Make if feel good, like we’re achieving something.’
‘That doesn’t sound too exciting,’ said Devlin.
Abrahams glanced at Moss. ‘We can make it sound exciting, right, Dean?’
The press secretary smiled.
Knowles nodded. ‘Okay. Sandy, you agree?’
‘I do. I think that’s right.’
‘Okay,’ said the president. They were done with that. ‘Roberta, what else have we got?’
‘We should talk about where we are on the Emergency Relief bill,’ said Devlin. ‘Senator Hotchkiss made a speech in New Orleans last night where he came out against the additional appropriations facilities we have in the bill.’
Don Hotchkiss was turning into a thorn in Knowles’ flesh. The senator was a traditional, right-wing Texas conservative and short of announcing his candidacy he was doing everything he could to position himself to challenge for the Republican nomination in two years’ time. The midterm election results would determine whether he would actually launch a bid. Hotchkiss was a more credible candidate than any of the conservatives Knowles had had to face in his first run, Mitch Moynihan included. Knowles didn’t look forward to facing a serious challenge from within his own party.
‘We’ve got to start going after this guy,’ said Abrahams. ‘I mean, seriously, we’ve got to go after him.’
‘Hotchkiss will take another three or four senators with him on this bill,’ said Devlin. ‘It if was someone else, I wouldn’t worry.’
Abrahams looked at the president. ‘We’ve got to put Hotchkiss in his corner of the cage and make sure he’s still sitting there in two years’ time. I’m going to take a look at it.’
Knowles nodded. He glanced at his watch. ‘What else? Where am I this afternoon? Alabama?’
‘Colorado,’ said Devlin.
Knowles smiled. He loved campaigning, and he loved it even more when his ratings were so high. There were twenty-seven days to the midterms and his schedule had him out of Washington for no less than eighteen of them. Tom Knowles was a president candidates wanted to be seen with, and there was enough at stake for him in the midterms to be prepared to put the time into helping get key candidates over the line. In Colorado, the Republicans had an impressive challenger in a tight Senate race. Knowles would be speaking on a platform with him in Denver.
‘What about the first lady?’ he said. ‘She coming with me?’
‘No, sir. I believe she’ll be with you in Iowa on Saturday.’
‘Okay. Josh done the speech?’
Ed Abrahams smiled. ‘How much work does it need?’
Knowles laughed. He gave just about the same stump speech for every candidate he supported. First there was a brief folksy section about the candidate that his speechwriter, Josh Bentner, prepared on the basis of facts supplied by the candidate’s campaign manager. The main section of the speech then focused on Knowles’ record as president, which was the same on every occasion, with a drop-in set of remarks about the benefits his administration had brought to the candidate’s state. Finally he came back to a brief endorsement of the candidate.
Knowles had a good story to tell and he felt good standing up to tell it. The first two years of his presidency had been reassuringly benign. No specter of a return to financial disaster. The details varied state by state, but the message of the speech was always the same. Trust. Rectitude. Stability. Scrutiny. Prosperity and growth without the fear of a crash.
‘We done?’
‘Almost,’ said Devlin, looking at the screen of her tablet. ‘Strickland gave his quarterly report yesterday. We should cover that off.’
Knowles looked at Marty Perez, his economic advisor.
‘Nothing special,’ said Perez. ‘He talked about how he was ready to intervene.’
‘That’s what we want, right?’
‘Yeah. He kept hammering it in the questions, possibly a little too much. You know what he’s like. He can be a little tin-eared and then the press read everything he says like it’s the Talmud. There’s no doubt his communication’s a problem.’
‘You think we should reappoint him?’
There were glances around the room. Knowles had asked the question somewhat mischievously. Marty Perez, he knew, coveted the job of chairman of the Fed for himself. Strickland’s term ran another two years. Tom Knowles thought Strickland was doing a pretty good job, although everyone was always talking about his communication style. Personally, he found him stiff and long-winded, and he had no great personal rapport with the man. But as long as the economy was running smoothly he could live with that.
‘I just think he’s never going to be a great communicator,’ said Perez eventually.
‘We all know that,’ said Ed Abrahams. ‘Look, have we got a problem from his statement yesterday or not?’
Perez shook his head. ‘No. There was a little selling in the market afterwards, that’s all.’