State Of The Union

President Jack Rutledge was beyond exhausted. While most of his senior staff had begged him to get some rest, Rutledge had rolled up his sleeves and spent every single moment in the Situation Room beneath the White House with the vast array of experts who came and went around the clock to put in their two cents worth on how the crisis with Russia could best be dealt with.

Finally, Rutledge had had enough. Politely thanking the visiting experts, he had them shown out and then immediately restricted any further access to the Situation Room to representatives of the Joint Chiefs and his National Security Council. There were less than five days now until the State of the Union address and they still had no solid plan.

After a couple of hours of catch-up sleep, Rutledge convened his “war council” and wasted no time getting down to business. “Ladies and gentlemen, you represent the best and the brightest this country has to offer and the future of this country might very well rest upon what you are able to come up with in this very room. For the next half hour I want to hear what our possible options are. Anything goes. If we have to tear the tail off the Devil himself, I’ll consider it, let’s just throw it all out there and see what we can come up with. This is a worst case scenario and I want to hear anything you can come up with.”

The clock ran well past the half-hour mark with ideas being floated on everything from introducing a forward-engineered strain of the Ebola virus into Russia and then quarantining the entire country with an unprecedented land and naval blockade, to launching an all-out bombing attack with airplanes and nuclear weapons from the World War II era that many believed would be unaffected by the Russians’ new air defense system which seemed to affect modern electronic guidance systems.

After Rutledge had had his fill of talk about killer satellites, commandos suspended from jet-propelled parachutes, and even plague-infested rats with plague-dispersing backpacks; he retired to the residence for a quiet meal with his daughter, Amanda, whom he had pulled out of school and was keeping under close guard at the White House around the clock-not an easy thing to do with a young woman who had just passed her seventeenth birthday.

“Dad,” she said, after the steward set down their salads and then quietly left the room, “has America been fucked with a capital F?”

While the president had been known to privately extend a certain amount of latitude to his staff in their vocabular selections, that policy most certainly did not extend to his daughter. “First of all,” he began, “I don’t care how close USC and college life may appear to you, I don’t ever want to hear that language again. Am I clear?”

The rebuke was extremely embarrassing for Amanda Rutledge. It had been one of her first forays into an adult conversation with her father and it had failed miserably. Having overheard two of the agents on her Secret Service detail speaking, she had thought she might engage the president on a gritty, adult level, but the attempt had crashed and burned. Instead of relating to her as a knowledgeable young adult, her father had immediately shut her down as a child whose opinion didn’t matter. Nevertheless, Amanda Rutledge wasn’t one to be deterred. “I may not have used the best language, Dad, but I’m only repeating what I already heard. Is America in trouble?”

“Of course not,” said the president, making sure he smiled as he reached for the salad dressing.

“Then why’d you pull me out of school? I’m not stupid, you know.”

Rutledge dribbled the salad dressing onto his plate for as long as he could and wished for the millionth time that breast cancer had never taken his wife. She was so much better at handling these things than he was. Tackling the truth head-on was his forte, but breaking it down in such a way so as to not completely shatter the world of a seventeen-year-old, was almost totally beyond his realm of expertise.

No matter how much he wished things were different, though, his wife wasn’t with them anymore. He had no choice but to explain things to his daughter. “Amanda, I’m not going to lie to you. America is facing a potentially serious threat right now, but no matter what happens you’re going to be okay. I promise you.”

“What about you?” she asked.

“I’ll be okay too. We’ll both be together. So don’t worry. Okay?”

“Dad?” Amanda continued as she stabbed her fork into her salad. “What about the rest of the people in America? Are they going to be okay too?”

“I’m doing everything I can to make sure that they are,” responded the president.

“I know you are,” she said, before turning her attention back to her salad.

After several minutes of strained silence between them, Amanda asked, “Dad, are we going to die?”

Chapter 39

ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA

STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS-4 DAYS