Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

24 JEFF EDWARDS
He was a latecomer to politics, and he had entered the political arena by
the back door. (Some of his more vocal critics preferred to say he had
tunneled under the back fence.)
The son of an Iowa corn farmer, he had inherited three major things
from his father: a passion for the land, an iron-hard work ethic, and the
shambling big-boned frame of a farmhand. Six foot four and broad
shouldered, he had a roughness about him that spoke more of flannel shirts
and work-scuffed blue jeans than of suits and neckties.
His love of the land had not led him to the farm, as it had his father and
grandfather before him, but to the laboratories of the University of Iowa.
Armed with a master’s degree in organic chemistry, he had climbed
through the ranks of the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land
Stewardship, where his fierce determination to improve the lot of the
American farmer had eventually earned him an appointment as the state
secretary of agriculture.
With the appointment had come the realization that the future of the
farmer was being decided not in the fields or in the laboratory, but in the
boardrooms and on the floors of the legislature. Frank had decided to
throw his hat into the political ring. After an extremely successful term as
the state secretary of agriculture, he had made a dark-horse bid for
governor of Iowa. He’d never really expected to win. At best, he had
hoped to drag the plight of the farmer into the forefront of Iowa’s political
system. To raise important issues in the hopes that more viable
gubernatorial candidates would have to deal with them.
But his plain-talking grassroots campaign had resonated with the voters
of Iowa, and they had surprised him (and everyone else in the state
political machine) by electing him governor.
Four years later, he had entered the race for the presidency, running a
distant second to Martin Bridgewater: an archly conservative senator and
the fair-haired boy of the Republican Party. Bridgewater was a
charismatic speaker and a political heavyweight. The cameras loved him,
and so did the crowds. He had started with a thirty-point lead over Frank
in the CNN, USA Today, and Gallup polls, and had widened it quickly.
Frank had been poised to lose the election by the widest margin in
history, when fate dropped another surprise in his lap. Martin
Bridgewater’s pregnant nineteen-year-old mistress had decided to take her
story to the media. Bridgewater had lost twenty polling points in the first
forty-eight hours. Even so, he might well have weathered the storm. After
the predictable outcry, his supporters had settled down pretty quickly.
They seemed prepared to forgive him for his transgressions. Other