The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

expect it, and Ricks knew that he was in direct competition with thirteen other
SSBN COs. To get that squadron command, he had to be the best of fourteen. To be
the best, he had to do things that would impress the squadron commander. Okay,
so to keep his career path as straight as it had been for twenty years, he had
to do a few new and different things. Ricks would have preferred not to, but
career came first, didn't it? He knew that he was destined to have an Admiral's
flag in the corner of his Pentagon office someday – someday soon. He'd make the
adjustment. With an Admiral's flag came a staff, and a driver, and his own
parking place in the acres of Pentagon blacktop, and further career-enhancing
jobs that might, if he were very lucky, culminate in the E-Ring office of the
CNO – better yet, Director of Naval Reactors, which was technically junior to
the CNO, but carried with it eight full years in place. He knew himself better
suited for that job, which was the one that set policy for the entire nuclear
community. DNR wrote The Book. Everything he had to do was set forth in The
Book. As the Bible was the path to salvation for Christian and Jew, The Book was
the path of flag rank. Ricks knew The Book. Ricks was a brilliant engineer.
***
J. Robert Fowler was human after all, Ryan told himself. The conference was held
upstairs, on the bedroom level of the White House, because the air conditioning
in the West Wing was down for repairs, and the sun blasting through the windows
of the Oval Office made that room uninhabitable. Instead they were using an
upstairs sitting room, the one often delegated for the buffet line at those
'informal' White House dinners that the President liked to have for 'intimate'
groups of fifty or so. The antique chairs were grouped around a largish dinner
table in a room whose walls were decorated with a mural melange of historical
scenes. Moreover, it was a shirtsleeve environment. Fowler was a man
uncomfortable with the trappings of his office. Once a federal prosecutor, an
attorney who had not once defended a criminal before entering politics with both
feet and never looking back, he'd grown up in an informal working environment
and seemed to prefer a tie loose in his collar and sleeves rolled up to the
elbow. It seemed so very odd to Ryan, who knew the President also to be priggish
and stiff in his relationship with subordinates. Odder still, the President had
walked into the room carrying the sports page from the Baltimore Sun, which he
preferred to the local papers' sports coverage. President Fowler was a rabid
football fan. The first NFL pre-season games were already history, and he was
handicapping the teams for the coming season. The DDCI shrugged, leaving his
coat on. There was as much complexity in this man as any other, Jack knew, and
complexities were not predictable.
The President had discreetly cleared his calendar for this afternoon conference.
Sitting at the head of the table, and directly under an air-conditioning vent,
Fowler actually smiled a little as his guests took their places. At his left was
G. Dennis Bunker, Secretary of Defense. Former CEO of Aerospace, Inc., Bunker
was a former USAF fighter pilot who'd flown 100 missions in the early days of
Vietnam, then left the service to found a company he'd ultimately built into a
multi-billion-dollar empire that sprawled across southern California. He'd sold
that and all his other commercial holdings to take this job, keeping only one
enterprise under his control – the San Diego Chargers. That retention had been