End Game

prologue

Masindi, Uganda

July 5, 2018

PEOPLE BEGAN ARRIVING at daybreak. They came along the dirt roads and tracks leading into the town, some on foot, some in brightly painted trucks that bounced in and out of potholes, bringing the products of the local countryside, maize, chillies, sweet potato, okra, tomatoes, onions, gourds. They spread their wares on rugs in the marketplace. Business began, as it did every Thursday. A group of policemen stood by, lazily leaning on their rifles and exchanging remarks with the traders. The colonial-era shopfronts around the market were faded and peeling, bearing handwritten signs. The Bamugisa Barber Shop. Honest Brothers General Store. The shopkeepers waited in the doorways and bantered with the country people, enticing them inside.

By four o’clock it was over. The market emptied. The people who had come into the town made their way back into the countryside. The shopkeepers watched them go.

Night fell. The bare red dirt of the streets turned inky black. Lights glowed for a while in the shops and then went out.

And then they came. Out of the scrub north of the town. Twenty-five, maybe thirty. They wore green fatigues. Some were tall, lean, in their late teens or twenties. Others were children. They carried machetes and rough wooden clubs. The older ones had Kalashnikovs.

In the Masindi Hotel, a colonial building dating from the 1920s, a few westerners were drinking in the bar. The town had nothing much of interest for tourists. Travellers who stopped in Masindi were usually on their way to the Murchison Falls, sixty miles to the northwest, or on their way back. A couple of the drinkers were aid workers from the town’s hospital, where an American medical charity, Health for All, supplemented the government service.

But the hotel wasn’t the objective of the group that had come in from the bush, and they slipped silently past it, hugging the shadows and ignoring the lights and the sound of voices from the bar. One of them knew the town and was leading the others. They used the darkest streets, avoiding the police station. They streamed through the empty market and past the shops, now shuttered, that surrounded it. Finally they stopped.

Further along the street a naked bulb hung at the entrance to the hospital compound. Inside the fence, a row of long, barracks-like wards stood in the darkness. Beyond the wards were the living quarters of the foreign staff.

The leaders of the group exchanged words. One of them went up the street and looked and came back. There was no sign of a guard at the gate. More words were exchanged. Then the adults amongst them grabbed hold of the children, in case they should try to back off, and they moved up the street and went in.

The killing began with machetes and clubs. The screams of the patients woke the four guards who were asleep in their shack in the compound. They had pistols. Gunfire broke out. Twenty minutes later a group of police arrived in an open-top vehicle and were mown down by two of the attackers who had been left at the gate, while behind them the frenzy of killing in the compound continued. Soldiers from the regional army barracks joined the assault. They stormed the entrance, losing a number of their men in the street. Inside, they had to fight for the hospital ward by ward. Then they had to fight for the grounds. It wasn’t until dawn that they took back control.

The light of morning revealed the death toll. Two hundred and eighteen bodies were found in the hospital, the living quarters and the grounds. Most had been clubbed or hacked to death. At least as many again were injured. Six attackers were taken alive with wounds of varying severity.

Word of the massacre was already being fed to the world over mobile phone. News outlets around the globe carried interviews with confused tourists who had awoken to the sound of gunfire from across the town. The district’s civil governor made a statement that admitted an incident had taken place but gave no details. In the army infirmary, the captured attackers were being interrogated. Lying on bloodstained stretchers, they claimed to be fighters of the Lord’s Resistance Army, making no attempt to hide their identities. The district military commander was skeptical. LRA activity had been subdued over recent months, and the group had never struck so far from the heartland of its insurgency in the far north of the country. Masindi was over a hundred miles from the jungle borderlands of Uganda, Congo and Sudan where the LRA had waged a thirty-year war of terror. It had always been safe from such attacks.

Yet the injured prisoners persisted in their story, even when their interrogators used blows to try to beat an alternative version out of them. They seemed to want to be sure the authorities knew. And the killing method and the presence of children amongst the attackers were consistent with the practices of the LRA. It seemed that the LRA had chosen to strike the town as a way of sending a message to the government that it was still in business, more dangerous than ever.

Over the next day, the bodies were identified. Of the dead, one hundred and seventeen were patients, fifty-nine were hospital staff, twenty-four were police and soldiers, and eighteen were the corpses of attackers.

Amongst the fifty-nine dead staff, thirty-two were citizens of the United States.

1

HE OPENED THE file. It wasn’t the first time he had looked at it. He glanced down the lines of the first page, a summary of the known sequence of events. The following two pages were intelligence background on the LRA and the regional political situation. The next page was an outline of possible options for response from his national security advisor. After that were pictures and short biographies of each of the dead Americans, four to a page. There were eight pages of them. Another three had died of their wounds since the file had been prepared, and a number of others were in critical condition.

He looked through the pictures. Then he turned back to the page that set out the options for response. He had issued an immediate condemnation of the killings. One of the options was to leave it at that. There were several others. In the wake of the attack, the Ugandan government had called on the US to aid it in eradicating the LRA.

He read over the options, thinking through the implications.

Thomas Paxton Knowles was a tall man of fifty-eight with a jutting, square jaw and a full head of greying hair. President for eighteen months, he had spent twenty years of his life making his way towards the White House, the last four as governor of Nevada.

Like any president, Tom Knowles had inherited a ready-made complexity of foreign involvements the day he walked into the Oval Office. Seventeen years after invading Afghanistan US forces were still deployed in and around Kabul, supposedly acting as advisors and trainers to the Afghan army, and American drone aircraft were a constant feature in the skies over the Pakistan border. Five years on from the Georgia crisis the presence of US troops remained a constant irritant with the Russians, without any obvious exit strategy. Closer to home, what had started as a program of joint US and Mexican border patrols had turned into a fortified deployment with a virtual war being fought with armed drugs gangs on both sides of the border and frequent US casualties. Colombia, Liberia, Haiti and the Philippines were all places where there were US missions of varying sizes.

That was a good long list and it posed enough challenges without requiring any additions. The Masindi Massacre was one in a litany of outrages by a longstanding, local insurgency in a distant country in which a group of Americans had happened to get involved. The charity had been warned by the State Department about sending people to serve in Uganda. It would be perfectly possible for him to do nothing beyond the condemnation he had already issued.

But thirty-two Americans – rising to thirty-five, and possibly going higher – had been killed in cold blood. And who was to say the LRA hadn’t targeted the hospital compound in Masindi because they knew Americans would be there?

A good part of the Republican Party was demanding some kind of response, but Knowles didn’t need political pressure to make him feel the need for action. From all he had been told in the last couple of days, the LRA was a cancer on humanity. It had no apparent program beyond the murder, rape and robbery of the local populations in a terrorized triangle of territory in northern Uganda, southern Sudan and northeast Congo. Like some kind of hideous reptile, it survived in the dark crevices created by the political tensions between the three affected states. Every time the group seemed to be dying away, it flared back into life, usually with a spectacular atrocity like the Masindi Massacre. Peace talks had brought the insurgency to the brink of cessation a number of times, only to collapse when the leaders of the group disappeared into the jungle to restart hostilities. At other times the Ugandan army had mounted a drive to eradicate it but had ground to a halt in the dense jungle of the area through inadequate manpower and lack of resolve from the other two countries where the LRA found temporary shelter before reinfiltrating its Ugandan base. And while this was happening, the ranks of the insurgents were constantly replenished by the abduction of children and their forced conversion into soldiers. There were stories of children being taken back to their villages and compelled to kill their own parents to prove their loyalty to their abductors. After thirty years of fighting this monster the Ugandan authorities felt powerless to eradicate it.

Knowles could envisage himself agreeing to the Ugandan government’s request. If he gave the go-ahead, US troops could probably be on the ground in weeks. Eradicating the LRA was a clear objective, defined, contained, with a short time horizon, a willing local government, and an unambiguous case for intervention in the name of humanitarian goals. He hadn’t seen a military assessment yet, but he didn’t think an outfit like the LRA would pose much of a threat to the US army. His national security advisor, Gary Rose, thought likewise. The situation in Uganda had nothing in common with the awful embroilments in Afghanistan and Georgia, where military success was prevented by constant political double-dealing and corruption.

But Tom Knowles was a politician, not a crusader. As the standard bearer of the centrist wing of the Republican Party, he had taken the Republican nomination two years previously after a bruising set of primaries that narrowed down to a straight runoff with Mitch Moynihan, an Idaho senator out of the hardcore Republican right. The election he fought the following November was the first in which the recession that came out of the credit crunch of ’08 and its long, lingering shock waves were beginning to seem a thing of the past. The pendulum had swung back and the country right across the political spectrum, left as well as right, responded to a rhetoric of smaller government, tax cuts and reduced federal spending. Knowles carefully kept his program moderate. He crafted a kind of reverse-Obama coalition of Republicans and centrist Democrats that swept him to power. His first eighteen months in the Oval Office had delivered economic stability and rising markets. That was the first thing the American electorate demanded of its president and would be until the trauma of the economic crisis was a lot more distant still. Rectitude and trust, as he said in just about every one of his speeches on the economy. Growth without overheating. That was the focus, a sound and stable domestic economy, and that was what he aimed to deliver. New foreign adventures weren’t supposed to be on the menu.

Yet presidents aren’t elected so as not to raise their eyes beyond the horizon, even presidents elected to steer a steady course away from the reef of a monumental economic trauma. Like all his predecessors, Tom Knowles took his place in history extremely seriously. He did have an international agenda, although not one that he had talked about much in the election or in the eighteen months since he had been sworn in. Together with his national security advisor and defense secretary, he felt that over the last eight years the US had led too little, had been too much interested in consensus and too little prepared to act. It was as if the country had looked at what it had done during the Bush years, saw the results, and been fearful of doing the same again, so fearful that it hadn’t trusted itself to do anything on its own. It was a fearfulness that made him angry. Knowles believed that the world needed leadership now more than ever before. As China and India and Brazil rose to prominence – each with its different perspective and political culture – he felt strongly that the world needed someone to set out certain common, ineluctable principles and to be prepared to put those principles into action. Rightly or wrongly, Tom Knowles believed that only the United States could play that role.

The truth was, he couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity than the one the Masindi Massacre presented. It came at the perfect time in his first term, with eighteen months of solid governance behind him to show that he was no trigger happy adventurer and enough time left ahead of him to get the whole thing done before he faced the American people again. None of the current US foreign interventions was of his making and each was bogged down in one way or another, in his view, because of compromises and poor decisions made by previous administrations. This one would be his, one that he could launch, prosecute and bring to a close on his watch, one that would allow him to show how a US military intervention should be done.

Beyond the effect of freeing the people of north Uganda from a terrorist menace, an intervention against the LRA would make a strong point. It would make the kind of statement Knowles wanted to make about American leadership in the world and about American willingness to exert that leadership when the cause was just.

Yet he knew enough history to recognize that his inclination to reach for the gun needed to be questioned. In the first flush of outrage after the massacre, the American people would support him. But it was easy to start something like this and then find, for reasons you hadn’t foreseen, that it turned into a quagmire from which there was no honorable way out. And the American people wouldn’t thank him for that. They wouldn’t thank him in two years’ time if he hadn’t got it done and American boys were dying in Uganda when he was up for re-election.

He leafed through the file. He looked at the pages of faces staring out at him, young American men and women. All good people, all motivated by altruism – all dead. He paused and read a couple of the biographies beside the pictures.

He just didn’t see how this could turn into a quagmire. It was so clear cut. The local political support was there, the objective was so well defined, the cause so just.

2

MARION ELLMAN LOOKED around the horseshoe-shaped table in the middle of the UN Security Council chamber. Seventeen ambassadors were seated there, including herself. Set back from the table, the spectator seats within the chamber were largely filled with African diplomats waiting to see which way the vote would go. Ellman herself had no idea.

It had taken almost two months to get here. Tom Knowles’ idea of starting the operation against the LRA within a few weeks had sounded fine until the military planners got to work. The government of Uganda didn’t need UN authorization to invite the US army onto its territory, but it soon became clear that the only practical way to project force into the landlocked territory of Uganda would require access across Kenya. The Kenyan government was prepared to provide air and land access and the use of a military base in the northwest of the country in exchange for a large chunk of development and military assistance, but not without domestic political cover in the form of a UN resolution calling for armed intervention in the Republic of Uganda. Suddenly the US found itself needing not only a majority on the Security Council, but the avoidance of opposition from China and Russia, the two veto-wielding members of the Council who were likely to vote down the resolution. That in turn meant weeks of negotiation and horse-trading in the corridors of the UN headquarters in Manhattan and in foreign ministries across the world.

Through the summer the State Department machine worked at getting a majority of votes behind a resolution and putting the Chinese and Russians into a position where they couldn’t – or wouldn’t – vote against it. They had reasons to. The Russians were always looking for leverage against the US because of the continuing American presence in Georgia. The Chinese were deeply involved in Sudan, where they ran the oil industry, and had no reason to want to see US troops across the Ugandan border, for however short a time. But for their own domestic and regional strategic reasons, neither government wanted to be seen gratuitously blocking an operation with overwhelmingly humanitarian aims. That was where they were vulnerable and Marion Ellman, the US ambassador to the UN, led the diplomatic offensive. Forty-four, an ex-assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs and professor of international relations at Berkeley, Ellman was a tall woman, usually dressed in a pant suit, with an attractive, slightly masculine face and dark shoulder-length hair.

Now she waited for the president of the Council to open the debate.

As proposer of the resolution, Ellman spoke first. Her speech was relatively brief. Minds around the table had been made up, she knew, and nothing she said now was going to change them. The crimes of the LRA were well known. She gave a succinct overview of the LRA’s murderous record and the failed attempts by the Ugandan government to eradicate it. Without naming them explicity, she concluded with a last reminder to China and Russia of how they would be seen if they blocked the resolution.

The Russian ambassador, Evgeny Stepsin, didn’t speak in the debate. The Chinese ambassador, Liu Ziyang, made remarks about the gravity of the decision and the risks attached to the internationalization of any conflict, no matter how localized it seemed. Ellman listened carefully to his words. It was always hard to read the nuances through translation, when not only the subtlety of meaning might be lost but the words were detached from the expression and body language that accompanied them. She knew Liu wasn’t going to vote in favor. She tried to decipher whether he was using his apparent objection to ‘internationalization’, as he called it, in order to rationalize an abstention. Or was he trying to justify a veto? The Chinese ambassador was a small, energetic man with rimless spectacles. By the time he concluded Ellman still didn’t know which way China was going to go.

Speaking in French, the Ivory Coast ambassador, the Council’s president for the month, called for the vote.

First he asked those in favor of the resolution to raise their hands. Ellman did so and looked at the other ambassadors. She counted them off. Argentina, France, India, Ireland, Ivory Coast, Spain, Thailand, Tunisia and, sitting right beside her, the United Kingdom.

Ten votes, including hers, out of seventeen. She let out her breath. She had a majority. That was the first hurdle.

The translation of the Ivory Coast ambassador’s voice came through her earpiece, calling on those voting against the resolution.

Chad, Bolivia and Serbia immediately voted no. Then Brazil. Then Malaysia.

She looked at Liu Ziyang across the stenographers’ table in the middle of the horseshoe. Further around the table sat the big bulk of Evgeny Stepsin.

Neither Liu nor Stepsin made a move.

‘Abstentions?’ said the voice of the translator in her earphone.

Silently, the two men raised their hands.

THE SESSION BROKE up. The Ugandan ambassador, who had been watching from the spectator seats in the chamber, headed straight for her.

He grabbed her hand in both of his and wouldn’t let it go. He was a large man in a grey double-breasted suit that made him look even larger, and he was genuinely choked up. He tried to tell her how much this meant to Uganda but all he managed to say was that he couldn’t express how much it meant. Ellman nodded. ‘We’re going to do what we can,’ she said. He thanked her again. There were tears in his eyes.

‘We depend on you, Madam Ambassador,’ he said, still holding her hand in his big, soft mitts.

‘You can depend on us,’ she said.

The Kenyan ambassador joined them. Marion managed to extricate her hand from the Ugandan ambassador’s grip. They talked for a few minutes about the implications of the vote. Ellman couldn’t give them a timetable for action. That would be worked out over the coming days.

Out of the corner of her eye she noticed the Sudanese ambassador deep in conversation with Liu.

China had spent a decade building up its position in Africa, and nowhere more dominantly than in Sudan. The strong opinion in the State Department was that if the US was going to do this thing, it would have to be done in coalition. France and Britain had already told her they were prepared to consider sending limited contingents. Participation from developing countries would be even more important. No matter how small the contributions, no matter how symbolic, they were needed. China would simply lose too much face if the US went in alone.

The Kenyan and Ugandan ambassadors were still speaking to her. Ellman nodded, only half listening. She looked at Liu again. The Chinese ambassador glanced at her from behind his rimless glasses and turned away.

3

THE MAN HOLDING the laser pointer was a short, barrel-chested admiral called Pete Pressler, head of the US Africa Command. In front of him in the White House Situation Room sat the president, the most senior members of the administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a dozen other military officers and presidential aides.

The red dot of the pointer moved across a map and stopped on a town called Lodwar in northern Kenya.

‘That’s the closest we can get to the Uganda border with a runway with the spec we need,’ said Pressler. ‘Gives us coverage of southern Sudan and northwest Congo if we need it as well. We’ll pilot the drones out of Creech air force base in Nevada. Operations will be coordinated from the Abraham Lincoln, which will be my command post.’

‘Offshore?’

‘Exactly, Mr President. Off the Kenyan coast. We’ll have the entire carrier strike group in theater. We’ll refuel Lodwar by air. The storage capacity they have on the ground isn’t worth jack so we’ll put tanks in first thing. Operationally, our primary weapon will be unmanned aircraft. Other than that, we’ll use Apaches or F-35s if we think they’re needed, special forces if we’ve got a high value target and we decide we want to take him alive or can’t get to him any other way. Otherwise, it’ll be air power.’

The president stretched out in his chair and locked his hands behind his head. ‘How does this work with the drones? It’s jungle up there, right?’

Pressler nodded. ‘Infrared, Mr President. Goes right through the tree canopy. We’ll blanket the place with unmanned vehicles. Day, night. Anything moves in there, in the open, under the trees, we’ll pick it up.’

‘What if it’s an animal?’ asked Gary Rose, the national security advisor.

‘It’s the patterns we’ll be looking for. The numbers involved, the way the groups move. If we have a single individual and we pick him up on infrared, we’re not going to go after that. Could be anything, and if it’s a fighter, well, this time he gets away. But when you start to see a group moving in the pattern that human groups move, then you know you’re dealing with something.’

‘What if they’re gorillas?’ asked Roberta Devlin, Knowles’ chief of staff. She was a small, intense woman with probing blue-green eyes. ‘Don’t they move in groups?’

‘I believe they do have gorillas in that area, ma’am.’

‘If we blow the hell out of a clan of gorillas we’ll take more flak than if we massacred a whole town of Afghans.’

‘I don’t believe the US military ever massacred a town of Afghans,’ said Mortlock Hale, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had held a number of commands in Afghanistan and didn’t appreciate the insinuation.

‘We can live with some dead gorillas,’ said the president. ‘Admiral, this doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a very thorough process.’

‘It’s not an invasion, Mr President. We’re not aiming to conquer this territory, only to cleanse it.’

‘Mr President, if I may,’ said General Hale. ‘Insurgencies normally depend on support from the local population. Not this one. The population dreads them and they run a mile if they know they’re coming. Normal counter-insurgency strategy, which is about choking off support from the local population, isn’t what we need. We’re going to beat these guys with a two-pronged strategy: Interdict and Attrit. By using the air power Admiral Pressler has described, we interdict the enemy’s routes out of the jungle to replenish their supplies and their escape routes out of Uganda into Sudan and Congo. Meanwhile, as they’re bottled up, we pick them off – that’s the attrition – and destroy whatever supplies they’ve got, which further reduces their ability to survive. At a certain point we’ll see them trying to break out through our interdiction. We’ll encourage defection by dropping leaflets and other communication modalities to show them they’ve got no chance of outlasting us. Hopefully that’ll help detach the weakly committed and get them out of the jungle. The fanatics, we’re going to have to kill.’

The president glanced at Gary Rose.

‘Sounds about as clean as you can do it,’ said the national security advisor.

‘John?’ said the president to the defense secretary.

‘I’m good with this. It’s a solid plan that makes the best of our capabilities.’ John Oakley was a bear of a man, an ex-undersecretary of the army in the second Bush administration. Tom Knowles had known him all the way back when they were together at law school and highly respected him. Oakley was a strong advocate of unmanned force and had steered the defense budget into a massive expansion of unmanned technology. Uganda was an opportunity to prove the worth of his strategy in a topography unlike Afghanistan or Georgia.

‘What if some of these guys manage to break out, say, to Sudan?’ asked Devlin.

Oakley shrugged. ‘You mean if we’re in hot pursuit? We go after them. If we land a few bombs in southern Sudan, what are they going to do?’

‘The UN resolution only refers to Uganda,’ said the secretary of state, Bob Livingstone.

Oakley shrugged again.

‘There are Chinese military in Sudan.’

‘Not that they admit to. Anyway, like I said, what are they going to do? Shoot down a couple of drones. Who cares?’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Livingstone. ‘Are you saying this is all going to be done with unmanned vehicles? Do we really believe that’s how it’s going to work?’

The president glanced at the military men.

‘We think it’s feasible,’ said Pressler. ‘Seventeen years in Afghanistan has taught us a hell of a lot about use of unmanned weaponry.’

‘Not enough to get us out of there.’

‘I’m not saying that’s all we’ll use. As I mentioned, when there is a need, we’ll project manned air power. I’ll have plenty of that in theater.’

‘Mr President,’ said the secretary of state, ‘the plan that General Hale and Admiral Pressler are presenting is, if I understand it, a plan for the United States acting alone. Have we made that decision?’

‘Mr Secretary,’ said Hale, ‘there are no other potential partners who have anywhere near our depth of experience in the use of unmanned attack vehicles, with the possible exception of the Israelis, and their experience is largely limited to urban environments. And of course this is a judgment for the president, but I don’t think we would want the Israelis involved here.’

‘We can do this ourselves,’ said Oakley.

‘I know we can, but–’

‘We’re going to learn a lot from this. We’re going to extend our experience with unmanned vehicles into a whole new type of terrain. That alone would make the operation worthwhile.’

‘So you can guarantee me with this plan of yours there won’t be any casualties,’ said the president.

‘There’ll be a hell of a lot of LRA casualties,’ replied Pressler.

The president smiled. ‘But our guys?’

Pressler was serious now. ‘No one can guarantee there won’t be any, sir. But I can guarantee you that the risk is low, the total number of Americans in harm’s way is small, enemy arms are very unsophisticated, and whatever we can do with unmanned vehicles, we’ll do. This is about the lowest risk operation I’ve ever had the privilege of planning. I don’t aim on losing anybody.’

‘How long before you can be on the ground?’

‘We have a liaison team ready to go into Nairobi as soon as they get the word. We can do the setup in Lodwar in a couple of weeks as long as the Kenyans cooperate. By that time the Lincoln strike group will be in theater and we’re ready to roll.’

‘Two weeks?’

Pressler nodded.

‘How long before you get results?’ asked one of the other men in the room. Ed Abrahams was the president’s senior political advisor and strategist, a corpulent fifty-three-year-old Californian who had been memorably described as having the brain of Einstein in the body of Moby Dick.

‘We’ll start to gather information immediately.’

‘Results,’ said Abrahams.

‘Body count, Admiral,’ said the president. ‘I think you’ll find that’s what Ed means.’

‘It’s hard to say. As soon as we can. We find a group, we’ll take them out.’

‘Within weeks?’

‘Definitely. I would hope so.’

Abrahams glanced at the president. His place in these meetings was more to listen than to speak, but Knowles always understood the point when he did intervene. There was nothing Ed Abrahams saw, heard or read that he didn’t put through a political filter. The congressional midterm elections were on November 6, eight weeks away. Thirty-three Senate seats were up for grabs, of which four were potentially winnable by Republican candidates. Any two of those seats would give the Republicans sixty votes in the Senate, making the president’s program pretty much unstoppable. A strong performance in the midterms would also go a long way to guaranteeing his unopposed renomination in two years’ time.

Abrahams and the president had discussed the Uganda intervention exhaustively over the previous few days. Politically, at one level, it was a risk. Tom Knowles had had a good first two years in office, the economy was continuing to grow, and he looked set to achieve the gains he needed in Congress on that record alone. If they launched this operation and something went wrong, that could only be jeopardized. In that respect, they would be better waiting until after the midterm elections. On the other hand, launching the operation would boost his immediate popularity, and a few notable successes in the field before the elections would make him even more popular. And waiting until after the elections, after it had taken so long to get to this point, might make him look as if he was vacillating and give ammunition to his critics. The Republican right was always ready to take shots at him, midterms or no midterms, and the Democrats, who would normally be in favor of deliberation, would turn instantly into ardent supporters of action if that meant they could paint him as a procrastinator. Besides, he wanted to get going. The pressure to unleash a response suited him down to the ground.

‘So you can do this in a risk-free way,’ said Abrahams.

‘Sir, nothing’s totally risk-free,’ replied Pressler.

‘Ah, I think what we can say,’ said General Hale, ‘is that for the first period we can restrict ourselves pretty much entirely to unmanned sorties. Do you agree, Admiral Pressler?’

Pressler looked at him blankly. He was a field commander and lacked the political antennae that Hale had developed in Washington. ‘That’s the aim, but as the commander in theater I would–’

‘Of course,’ said Hale. ‘But I think we could agree that for any non-emergent intervention requiring manned force, presidential approval would be required. I think that could be one of the rules of engagement, at least in the first period.’

‘That sounds very sensible, General,’ said Abrahams.

Hale gazed meaningfully at Pressler. The admiral may have lacked political antennae, but he knew enough to understand what that look meant. He kept quiet.

‘You got a name for this operation, Admiral?’ asked Walt Stephenson, the vice-president.

Pressler turned to him. ‘Not yet.’

‘We need a good name. That’s half the battle.’

Oakley grinned. ‘We’ve got a few ideas.’

‘Okay, this is sounding pretty good,’ said the president. ‘Roberta, are we looking okay in Congress?’

Knowles’ chief of staff nodded. Congress would be voting to authorize the intervention in the next couple of days. The numbers handily gave them the vote. There was strong support in the country and most members of Congress, so close to an election, weren’t about to oppose it.

‘Good. Admiral Pressler, I understand I’m going to see more detailed plans in the next few days.’

‘Yes, sir. My staff–’

‘Mr President,’ said the secretary of state, ‘I do want to come back to the question of whether we do this alone.’

‘I thought we just agreed we would,’ said Oakley. ‘What are the Brits going to do? Give us a communications unit? Great, we could really use one.’

The president smiled. ‘John, let Bob have his say. Bob, what is it?’

‘We need to do this as a coalition,’ said Livingstone.

He paused, glancing at Gary Rose. The national security advisor, a man of medium height with short dark hair and an elongated nose, was watching him, head tilted slightly, arms folded. Livingstone knew that Rose was a lot closer to the president than he was. It was an open secret that Rose had wanted to be secretary of state and Knowles had originally considered giving him the position, but decided that he needed to use the appointment to build support for the administration amongst right-leaning Democrats. Knowles had even privately mooted nominating a Democrat for the post until a strong backlash from the Republican congressional leadership persuaded him to shut that option down. Senator Bob Livingstone, an affable, chubby Missourian in his late sixties with silky white hair, was the next best choice. A longserving member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he was about the most moderate Republican in the Senate, someone a person like Mitch Moynihan would hardly recognize as belonging to the same party. Livingstone accepted the nomination in the expectation that he would be the president’s lead source of foreign policy. But the reality had turned out somewhat differently. Livingstone soon realized that the president had appointed him for political reasons and had appointed Rose because he actually wanted his advice. The secretary of state hadn’t proven strong enough to overcome the president’s reliance on the other man. Anything he sent to the president was passed directly to the national security advisor to be read.

Livingstone looked back at the president. ‘We got the vote in the Security Council, but there’s a lot of resistance. China’s losing face. They’re heavily involved in Sudan and across the entire Central African region, and now we’re coming in there to do this thing and one way of reading it is that implicitly we’re saying, you should have done this yourselves, you could have offered to do it, and now we’re going to come and do it for you.’

‘And what was to stop them?’ demanded Oakley.

‘The Ugandans don’t want Chinese forces on their territory. They don’t want them within a million miles.’

‘And maybe they’ve got good reason. Mr President, we have thirty-nine dead Americans and that’s thirty-nine good reasons for us to go in there and beat the hell out of whoever did it, UN resolution or no resolution. Well, we’ve got a resolution. That’s great. Thanks, Bob. I don’t see why we need anyone’s help.’

‘Because we need help on other things,’ said Livingstone. Diplomatic considerations, he knew, were like water off a duck’s back to John Oakley. ‘The Arctic treaty, the situation in South Africa. Carbon emissions, as always. You name it. There’s a thousand things and you can’t just rule them out of the picture. If we’re going to show leadership on those things we’re going to need support.’

‘Maybe we do better on those things if we show strong leadership on something else first,’ said Gary Rose.

‘Like this?’

‘Yes. Like this. If you ask me, Bob, this is the perfect way to do it.’

Livingstone guessed that the president and Gary Rose had had extensive discussions about the message this intervention would send to the rest of the world. The president hadn’t discussed it with him at all.

‘I’m not sure what we’re going to look like messing around for two months while we try to line up a coalition,’ added Ed Abrahams pointedly.

The president glanced at him, then turned back to Livingstone.

‘Bob,’ he said, ‘I want us to go out and do this thing because it’s a good thing and we should do it. The United States should lead on this. The LRA is an evil in our world and they’ve been given many opportunities to lay down their arms and they haven’t done that. And now they’ve killed a bunch of Americans and the time has come for them to feel our wrath, the anger and power of the civilized world. I don’t see any person who could possibly create an argument against us doing this.’

‘I’m not disputing that,’ said Livingstone. ‘But there are different ways we can do this. We can reach out and try to create a coalition, even reach out to China and Russia–’

Oakley snorted.

‘Even reach out to them,’ persisted Livingstone, ‘and see if they’ll join us. If you go back a little, remember, Russia joined us in Kosovo.’

‘Yeah,’ said Oakley, ‘and do you remember the race for Pristina?’

‘Sounds like it’ll take for fucking ever,’ muttered the vice-president.

‘It will take a little time,’ said Livingstone, ‘that’s true. But I think–’

‘The eighty-odd per cent of Americans who want us to do this don’t want to see us fucking around for six months trying to get two Brits and an Aussie to come join us,’ said Stephenson. ‘They want to see Uncle Sam go in there and get the job done!’

Knowles smiled. He had brought Walt Stephenson, a Florida senator, onto the ticket for his ability to deliver Florida’s electoral college votes. Not for his tact.

‘I understand that,’ said Livingstone, ‘but I do think that–’

‘And we’re not looking for hundreds of thousands of troops, right?’ Stephenson looked at Hale. ‘This is, what, a couple of thousand?’

‘Somewhat more, sir, with the naval contingent.’

‘One carrier strike force.’ Stephenson threw a glance at the president and shrugged dismissively.

‘Nonetheless,’ said Livingstone, still trying to get the point across, ‘if we want to maximize this opportunity, we should take the extra time, build the coalition, and try to keep our relationships good for all the other reasons that we need them.’

‘The alternative view, Bob,’ said Gary Rose, ‘is that bold action, decisive action, does a lot to return us to the leadership position which, frankly, we’ve largely lost over the past few years. It shows the United States doing what it should do, setting out good, solid principles and leading the world in enforcing them. I’d rather see us do the other things from that position.’

‘I think we’re showing that leadership by what we’ve already done in getting the Security Council resolution,’ said Livingstone.

‘And I think you’ll squander it by what you’re suggesting,’ retorted Oakley.

‘Mr President,’ said General Hale, ‘it’s not my role to offer political advice, but in military terms, we can do this much cleaner and quicker if we do it ourselves.’

Livingstone looked at Hale in irritation. They could do it with others if they had to.

There was silence.

The president thought for a moment. ‘I think we can show strength in a coalition, even in this situation. Gary, I do think the United States can show leadership in that context. I don’t think that’s a door we should close right now. Bob, I think you should go out there and try to build a coalition for us. And in the meantime, Admiral Pressler,