Point of Contact

Dom stood up to grab his shoes, but Jack just stared at the two blades in his hands, feeling their heft and fearing the worst.

7

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, D.C.

He’d read somewhere that the Chinese ideograph for the word crisis was supposedly composed of the two words for opportunity and danger. Even if it wasn’t true, President Jack Ryan found it relevant to today’s meeting.

The President sat on the far end of the long mahogany conference table. All of the tall leather chairs surrounding the table were empty except for the four next to him. In times of national crisis every chair would be filled, and deputy assistants would crowd the rest of the room, either sitting or standing. But today he wasn’t facing a crisis — at least, not yet. He certainly saw an opportunity, but he also sensed extreme danger for the nation if he made the wrong choice in the next thirty minutes.

President Ryan was flanked on his left by Mary Pat Foley, the director of national intelligence, and Robert Burgess, the secretary of defense. On his right sat the secretary of state, Scott Adler, and the President’s chief of staff, Arnold Van Damm, the only political voice he allowed in the room. Arnie’s hair was long gone and the lines in his careworn face were deeper than when the President had first met him, but the pale blue eyes — and the brain behind them — were as keen as ever.

That was it. These were four of his most trusted advisers. Ryan didn’t want a cacophony of political opinions or academic theories clouding the room. He needed only the clear, sober, actionable analysis these four would give him in order to make his decision, and quickly.

“Thank you all for coming on such short notice — and for keeping this meeting just between us. We don’t need public opinion or the Hill getting ahead of us on this.”

They all nodded. “Of course, Mr. President,” Mary Pat Foley said. “We understand completely and we serve at your discretion.”

Ryan poured himself a cup of black coffee from the service in front of them and invited the others to do the same. “We don’t have much time to make this call. You know I count on each of you for your honest and candid opinions. I know you’ve all been briefed by Mary Pat, but I want to catch you up on the facts before we proceed. Mary Pat.”

The director of national intelligence picked up a remote control and pointed it at one of the big wall monitors. She talked through the video from the SBIRS GEO-3 infrared missile-warning satellite as it played on the screen.

“As you all know, the North Koreans managed to successfully launch a MIRV’d SLBM yesterday at approximately five p.m. EST. The missile carried three dummy warheads, each landing harmlessly, thankfully, in the northern Pacific Ocean with no loss of life or property damage. Nevertheless, the event is significant for several reasons.

“First, we had no idea that the missile in question — the Pukkuksong-1—had this kind of range. Either the missile has been improved or our intelligence estimates were way off base.”

“Or it’s not the KN-11 at all,” the SecDef said, preferring the American designation. “It could be an entirely different weapon. It has nearly the same performance characteristics as our Polaris A-1, which we first deployed back in 1962.”

Jack Ryan smiled to himself. It never failed to amaze him how technologically advanced the United States was compared to the rest of the world. Most of the planet still wasn’t able to achieve what his parents’ generation had accomplished fifty years earlier.

Mary Pat continued. “Our second concern is that we had no idea that the North Koreans had acquired MIRV technology — another intelligence failure.” She frowned when she said this. As the titular head of America’s civilian intelligence community, she felt personally responsible for the current crisis.

“Third, because they’ve acquired MIRV technology, it’s only a matter of time before they move from three warheads to seven, ten, or even more on this platform. Multiple, independently targeted warheads means that each missile has more target opportunities and greater capacity to defeat any kind of ABM defense with decoys and countermeasures. That changes the strategic equation in Asia, especially when the North Koreans are able to arm them with nuclear warheads. But what’s particularly worrisome is the idea of the North Koreans deploying MIRV technology on their land-based ICBM platforms. The Taepodong-3 has a range of eight thousand miles. At that point they become a world power, like it or not.”

“And we removed all of our MIRVs from our ICBMs a few years ago,” Ryan said. He was a trained security analyst, so it didn’t take long for him to process the implications. “If we don’t stop the North Koreans from MIRVing, we’ll have to go back to it ourselves, and that will launch another nuclear arms race between us, the Russians, and the Chinese.”

“Exactly our concerns, Mr. President,” Mary Pat said as the SecDef nodded in agreement.