6
THE PRESIDENT and Harkins leaned back against the wooden slatted bench. They toweled the sweat from their faces. The President liked playing tennis in the heat, despite the warnings of his doctor. He caught the eye of one of the Secret Service people who stood watching them and smiling through the grating of the metal fence. He winked acknowledgment. He had just beaten the pants off his CIA Director.
"You were lean and mean today, Mr. President," Harkins said.
"As always, you were a worthy opponent."
Amy, with her infallible instincts, had once said that his secret weapon was his passion to win and, yet, to appear indifferent. Only she knew how defeat twisted his guts inside. She had dubbed him a much better actor than Reagan. He would always be the one who got the girl.
Jack Harkins, too, loved to win, which made their matches memorable. His game revealed a great deal about the man. He had a kind of feinting junk shot. His arm would arc back for a long-angled swing, then he would cut it short, abruptly reduce its power, and send a soft floater that barely cleared the net.
Devious bastard, the President knew. But a good man to have on your side, he supposed, especially in this job. Hadn't he wanted an aggressive CIA Director? He had gotten more than he had bargained for. The intelligence boys were always tempted to make policy.
"Maybe the win will get you up for that meeting later," Harkins said.
"Trying to say you took a fall," the President responded with a touch of mock sarcasm. But the mention of the meeting took the edge off the satisfaction.
"What the hell am I going to tell those poor bastards?"
"You've got the pictures. And the letters."
Through his sources Harkins had managed to acquire photographs of some of the hostages taken in captivity and a handful of letters. Of course the letters had been carefully screened and resealed. The President hadn't liked the idea, but it was better than going in empty-handed.
"Shows that we're in touch with them," Harkins had argued.
"How the hell do I explain how I got them?"
"Say it will harm them if you revealed the source."
"Will it?"
"No more than they're already harmed."
"And do I say the others were shy and had writer's cramp?"
"Tell them it wasn't easy getting these," Harkins said.
Harkins' earlier explanation on how he had acquired the letters and photographs was, as always, laced with the copious use of the term "assets," the ultimate code word for his covert operation.
"The point is, Mr. President, that it suits their purpose to get these pictures and letters out. Keeps the pot boiling."
"Why don't they just pop them into the nearest mailbox?" the President asked.
"Because they know that by doing it this way, making you the mailman, gives them the biggest echo in the media."
"That again."
"Name of the game," Harkins said, pausing. As always, the President knew, the man would wait for just the right moment to bring up his covert solution.
"Nothing wrong with dispensing hope, I suppose," the President sighed.
To make this latest decision on meeting with the families of the hostages, he had assembled his secretaries of Defense and State, Ned Foreman, his National Security Advisor, Harkins, and two of his closest old friends and loyalists, Lou Shore, a counselor, and Bob Nickels, his Chief of Staff, along with Steve Potter, his press secretary.
It was, the President had known from the beginning, a deliberate exercise in futility. He had listened patiently to their various points of view. They were all good men, intelligent with the right instincts. An adequate military response was impossible. Above all, it could not be small. It had to be massive, specific, devastating. The Secretary of Defense had outlined the option.
But on whom would this devastation be directed? The concept of a surgical strike had pretty well been discredited a few years back by the Reagan-ordered bombing of Libya. It hadn't really helped stop the problem and it had killed an unacceptable number of civilians. The press secretary had suggested giving in to their demands by some subterfuge. Foreman got his dander up over that one. Can't do that, his National Security Advisor had interjected. Not even surreptitiously. Buckling under only encouraged more of the same. The old story. Round and round.
Harkins, as usual, got in his pitch for covert action, eliciting the usual rebuttals. No guarantees. Too vulnerable to legalities and moral strictures. And, of course, the dreaded Congressional Oversight Committee.
"We blow it, they'll be the first to scream foul," Foreman had said. Harkins had retreated. Only temporarily, the President knew.
"What about the Egyptians?" the President had asked the group. "Have they any leads as yet on the bastards that took the woman and her child?"
"They're working on it," Foreman had responded. "I wouldn't rule that out." Foreman had come from academia and his comments always seemed to come out in a superior, world-weary tone. He also looked the part, brown hair, spiky and dry, partless, his skin pallid, his eyes squinty with tension above satchel bags of fatigue.
"I would," Harkins had countered, his words clipped and cocksure. They were always biting at each other. As always, his pale blue eyes were clear behind his thin horn-rims. His face was all sharp planes, his steel-gray hair side-parted with perfect symmetry, as if it had been done with a T-square.
"We giving them support?" the President asked.
"Some," Harkins had replied. "Unfortunately, they've got a pride problem." He had paused and looked at the men's faces around the room. "And you know what pride goeth before."
Eventually they got around to the public relations aspects of the situation. Just thinking about it sometimes made the President want to puke.
"You've got to look upbeat and appear to be doing something about this," Bob Nickels had said. His Chief of Staff was a former PR man from Minneapolis. It was then that someone had come up with the mailman ploy.
"Better than ignoring it," Potter had pointed out. "Besides, some of the relatives are beginning to make odd noises in the press."
"Can you blame them?"
"That's not the issue, Mr. President."
"Then what is?"
"Four years or eight," Nickels had reminded him. On that note the meeting had broken up.
Cooled down, he and Harkins got up from the bench and headed across the White House lawn to the south entrance.
"God, I dread that meeting," the President said.
"Might be better to tell them the truth and be done with it," Harkins said. The President stopped and faced him.
"What does that mean?"
"That there's not a damned thing we can do for them."