“Next time he steps into a public men’s room we’re going to Larry Craig him.”
“So Senator Craig was set up?”
“Who knows? Who cares? But it’ll take this senator right off our backs.”
“And what do you call that tactic?”
“The ‘I’m
screwed’ maneuver,” Pender said smiling.
“An apt name.”
“I actually prefer a more subtle approach where the target doesn’t event realize what’s happened. You recall reporters were embedded with troops in Iraq?”
“So they could see the war firsthand?”
“No, so they could be told the story only from the point of view of the Pentagon. That was my idea, and every general and administration official involved has personally come here and kissed my ass for coming up with it.”
“You know your field well, Dick.”
“I learned from the best.”
“Where was that?”
“I started out in the White House Press Office.”
Creel pointed to a large worktable in the war room where two people were laboring over some written materials.
“Explain.”
“That’s the ‘Tablet of Tragedies.’ We recently discovered that one of our competitors was hired to put something like this together during Persian Gulf One to help convince the West to defend Kuwait. It worked brilliantly there. So we thought we’d use the same concept here. But instead of printing hundreds of thousands of glossy copies we opted for handmade rudimentary stuff. That’ll give it a realistic homegrown feel to balance the high-tech attack so far. We’ll only make a dozen but send them out to optimal targets for maximum effect.”
“Boots on the ground,” Creel muttered thoughtfully.
“That was to be on your end,” Pender pointed out. “I can make anyone believe a lie is true. However, there’s no substitute for real blood spilled.”
“I have the boots quite figured out. In fact you’ll see evidence of that very soon.”
“What about the other piece of the equation?”
“What about it?” Creel said sharply.
“Only that you said you would advise us of the timing of it.”
“Have I advised you yet?”
“No.”
“Then it must not be time!”
A moment later Creel was gone. Pender had helped make the man a fortune during the cold war, and when that dried up, they’d engineered numerous smaller global conflicts until the first Iraq War had literally fallen into their laps followed by the lucrative second Iraq War. But as he’d recently told Pender, “The Americans are completely tapped out. And the EU’s in a peace mode, pouring their money into education, infrastructure, and health care instead of defense. The idiots never stop to think that it would be damn hard for the kiddies to go to school and Grandma to the doctor if they can’t protect their countries from ending up pledging allegiance to Allah. But with all that going against me I’m going to win this war.”
And Dick Pender would never bet against the man.
CHAPTER 20
SERGEI PETROV WALKED DOWN THE STREET, his collar upturned against the chill that had descended on New York in the last two days. He’d just finished a taping for a local television show, recounting the considerable horrors that he’d witnessed under the Putin/Gorskhov regimes as the number two man in the Federal Security Service before fleeing the country. The westerners ate up what he was selling and paid well for the privilege, Petrov had found, far better than playing lapdog to dictators disguised as presidents. He didn’t know where the Red Menace campaign had originated from and didn’t really care. Gorshkov was evil. Petrov’s homeland was going in the wrong direction. Whether all the horrors that had come to light recently were true or not he also didn’t care about. Some of them probably were. That was good enough.