The President's Daughter Read online

  The man—Jiang can’t recall his name, only knows he’s the leader of one of the 150 or so tribes in this barren land—sways again, belches, and says, “Duty, yes.” Tears come to his eyes. “I must say this…I must…but your duty, your presence here, it has brought so much to our land. The Italians, the French, the British, the Qataris, the damn Egyptians…they have all tried to rule us, take our resources…Who would think the yellow race would travel halfway around the world to shower us with your wisdom and knowledge?”

  At this very moment, Jiang wants to slap the man hard in the face, spin him around, twist and break his neck—Yellow race, indeed!—and drop him on the floor.

  Instead, mindful of who he is and what he must do, Jiang keeps smiling, squeezes the man’s filthy hands, and says, “When I next return to Beijing, I will make sure that your words of thanks are passed along to our president.”

  And with that, Jiang briskly walks away, feeling the need to go to a washroom and scrub that peasant’s stench and dirt off his hands, but instead he presses on.

  Duty.

  He walks past two unsmiling embassy guards with partially hidden earpieces and pistols barely covered by their suits, and he meets up with Ling, standing by the entrance to the lift. Ling is holding the door open for him and Jiang ignores him, taking the stairs to the basement, moving fast. The electricity in this alleged country still has its sudden blackouts, and even with the building’s backup generators, Jiang isn’t going to risk being stuck between floors.

  He opens the door to the basement, going past another embassy guard, going down an ill-lit hallway, until he comes to a heavy steel door equipped with a palm-print reader mechanism. Jiang presses his right hand down, there’s a brief flare of light, and the steel door swings open.

  Jiang steps inside, the door swinging shut and locking behind him. The room is pleasantly cool and comfortable, and he’s now craving a smoke, but there’s no smoking allowed in here, in the embassy operations center for China’s Ministry of State Security, staffed around the clock.

  The night-duty officer, Liu Xiaobo, wearing black-rimmed glasses, casually dressed in black pants and white open-collared dress shirt, is typing on a keyboard in front of a large computer monitor. “How goes that party upstairs?” he asks. “Lots of camel dung on the floor?”

  “Not yet,” Jiang says. “What’s going on?”

  The small room is jammed with filing cabinets, counters, computer monitors, television screens showing CNN, the BBC, and CCTV-13, the China Central Television news channel, as well as plasma screens depicting North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Gulf of Sidra. Eight other members of the Ministry of State Security are also at work this early morning.

  Liu says, “The Americans are up to something.”

  “Aren’t they always? Those dog whelps. What is it this time?”

  “They have an amphibious assault ship in the Gulf of Sidra, about twenty kilometers off the Tripoli coast,” Liu says, pointing to a reference map on his large video screen. “Thirty minutes ago, they launched two UH-60 helicopters, Black Hawks. They’re heading in this direction”—a nicotine-stained finger traces a path on the glowing screen—“and have violated Libyan airspace and are now about…here.”

  Jiang stares at the screen, at the little triangles marking towns and villages, the geography so flat and nearly featureless until—

  “They are heading to the Nafusa Mountains,” Jiang says.

  “Yes,” Liu replies. “They appear to be flying straight and level—no evasive maneuvers—and based on the fuel consumption of their helicopters, there is barely enough fuel to get there and return back to the Wasp. To me, that says they are going after something very important in those peaks, something worth the risk of running out of fuel.”

  A stinging bee, Jiang thinks. What kind of fools name a warship after an insect?

  He focuses again on the video display.

  Liu cautiously says, “Don’t you have…an interest in the Nafusa Mountains?”

  From long practice and years of work, Jiang keeps his face impassive, his breathing regular, his body still. One does not succeed or get promoted by showing emotion. “Anything else?” he asks.

  “No,” Liu says. “I just wanted you to know.”

  Jiang gently clasps the man’s shoulder. “That is appreciated, comrade.”

  Liu appears to enjoy the attention from a man higher up than he is. “May I do any other service for you?”

  Jiang nods. “Yes. You have a worker here named Ling, correct? The one who came to fetch me?”

  Liu’s voice is cautious. “Yes.”

  “Get him on the next transport home,” Jiang says. “Ensure he ends up working for the largest pig farm in Liaoning. Earlier, when he came to me, he nearly ran across the room, practically shouting at me, telling anyone with a brain larger than a pea that I was someone of importance, and not just a typical technocrat. He needs to be punished.”

  “Very well,” Liu says.

  “Good,” Jiang says. “Now it’s time to return upstairs, to see if the camels have arrived, and if the peasants up there are tossing lumps of dung at each other.”

  Liu laughs at that, returns to his large screen. Jiang walks away and uses a hand scanner to depart the operations center, going back into the empty hallway. If he were to turn left, he would go back to the upward staircase to the reception.

  Instead, he turns right, walking quickly to his office at the other end, where Jiang Lijun is not a vice president for the China State Construction Engineering Corporation but a senior officer with the Ministry of State Security.

  What the hell are the Americans up to?

  Chapter

  3

  Two thirty a.m. local time

  Nafusa Mountains, Libya

  Aboard Spear One, the crew chief yells out, “Two minutes! Two minutes to target!”

  Nick Zeppos holds up two fingers in acknowledgment, and the other team members each hold up two fingers in response. They take off the helicopter’s comm gear, put on their helmets with NVGs, which they quickly lower. Zeppos switches on the goggles, and the interior of the modified and stealth Black Hawk comes into sharp, ghostly green view.

  Two minutes.

  One hundred and twenty seconds.

  The voice of Spear One’s pilot comes to Zeppos: “Target in sight, at about two o’clock.”

  Zeppos quickly recalls one other horrific murder that Asim Al-Asheed committed, two years ago, when in front of his followers he and his group executed a Syrian family they thought had betrayed him, and they broadcast a video of the killing to the world. A simple execution, the family had been herded into a steel cage, doused with gasoline, and Asim had struck the match.

  The last clear image on the videotape, before the billowing smoke obscured the lens, was the crumpled form of the mother among the flames, desperately and futilely covering her dying son’s body with her own.

  “Thirty seconds,” the pilot announces.

  The helicopter’s crew chief unlatches the side door, slides it open. Zeppos gives his gear one last check. Cold air rushes in. Zeppos stands up and calls out, “Stick close, move fast, let’s get this done.”

  Nods of acknowledgment and thumbs-up from his team members, all looking like the proverbial bug-eyed monsters, with gear, weapons, and helmets with the four-lensed NVGs. Zeppos leans out the open doorway, takes in the buildings quickly coming into view. Three small buildings to the left, one larger building to the right, set back by itself.

  That’s Asim Al-Asheed’s home, where he is at this very moment, based on all the streams of intelligence gathering that came together to send Zeppos and his team out here tonight.

  The structures are all one story. Built of rock and stone. A goat corral in the distance. And that’s it. Not even enough buildings to make it a village.

  The Black Hawk helicopter flares out, hovers less than a meter above the rocky ground, and in seconds Zeppos is first off, his Oakley combat boots touching g
round in the western mountains of Libya, near the border with Tunisia. He’s carrying about fifty pounds of gear, along with his Heckler & Koch 416 with extended magazines, but whenever an op like this kicks off, Zeppos feels light and trim.

  Through his night-vision goggles he sees the shapes of the other SEAL members, dropped off by Spear Two, as they move forward in the well-practiced bounding overwatch attack, with sections staying behind, providing cover to those in the lead, and then leapfrogging ahead to take point. Nick takes the lead, head moving back and forth, back and forth, seeing thin lines of the infrared laser sights moving around in the cold and dark air through his NVGs.

  Still quiet.

  He moves up the slope to the little compound, looking, evaluating, scanning.

  Nobody’s made contact yet?

  No emerging target on the roofs of the three small buildings?

  Too damn quiet.

  His team is spread out in their roles, weapons at the ready, heads moving back and forth. Their advance should have encountered resistance by now.

  “Breach team,” Nick whispers to the men next to him. “Go.”

  With his NVGs, he sees the infrared laser designators flickering around as he keeps on moving. The breach team moves around the larger building, goes to a side window. Chances are the main door is booby-trapped.

  He feels a slight thump through the soles of his boots, a brief flare of light.

  Movement of his team into the building.

  He and the others keep up their silent movement.

  Through the earpiece to his PRC 148 MBITR radio, he hears one of his team, Ramirez: “Nick.”

  “Go.”

  “We’re in the target house.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s empty,” says the disappointed voice. “Nobody’s here.”

  Chapter

  4

  Seven thirty p.m. local time

  White House Situation Room

  It’s crowded in the Situation Room this tense evening. I’m at the head of the table, watching the raid on Asim Al-Asheed’s compound unfold. It’s tight quarters, with Vice President Pamela Barnes sitting in the near corner, staring at the video screens, and with Admiral Horace McCoy, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sitting at my elbow. Next to him are a Navy captain and an Army colonel, tapping away on their secure government laptops, whispering information for McCoy to pass on to the crowd in this historic room. Funny thing that doesn’t get reported much is that there’s more than just one room in here, the others full of staff serving and processing information from around the world.

  Besides the vice president, the other officials in here are Jack Lyon, my chief of staff; the members of my national security team; and a White House photographer.

  The two most important are a stern Black woman with long, braided hair, Sandra Powell, the national security advisor, and Pridham Collum, secretary of defense, a smooth-faced bespectacled man who looks younger than his forty years.

  Sandra is both a defense and foreign policy expert and the author of several policy books that are actually easy to read. Pridham was appointed because of his mastery of the Pentagon’s massive, complex budget and his extraordinary ability to cut through the regulatory and procurement jungle to get needed weapons systems off the design software and into the field. He also has important defense experience from his previous job, as a deputy assistant secretary for International Security Policy.

  Though the media refers to them as President Keating’s security team, they’re largely my predecessor’s team. I just haven’t had the time to evaluate them and decide who I want to stay on as my term ends its first full year, which began six months ago, when my predecessor, President Martin Lovering, died of an aortic aneurysm that ruptured while he was fishing on the Columbia River in his beloved Washington State.

  Admiral McCoy says, “Spear One and Spear Two are thirty seconds out from the target.”

  I nod, looking up at the ghostly infrared images displayed on the large center screen, showing the two modified stealth Black Hawk helicopters approaching the small compound where Asim Al-Asheed and his band of followers are supposed to be hiding. One of those helicopters is carrying Navy chief Nick Zeppos. I guess I shouldn’t have called him a few minutes ago, but the temptation was too great. I really did want to wish him well, and I really wished I could have been on this raid, where the objectives are clear and one’s enemies are out in the open, unlike in the Washington political scene, where motives are murky and adversaries disguise themselves within power suits and smooth rhetoric.

  My right hip aches in muscle memory at seeing the SEALs fly in, remembering my own missions, and that helo crack-up years ago in Afghanistan that shattered my hip and ended my Navy career. Later, at loose ends, I opted for a fresh round of danger and peril—I entered politics, and the good people of Texas’s Seventh Congressional District sent me to represent them on Capitol Hill.

  The helicopters halt in their flight, and ghostly figures emerge from both, advancing in the bounding overwatch attack I’m so very familiar with.

  A faint snap, and I realize I’ve just broken the pen I’m holding.

  No one seems to notice except my vice president, who gives me a cool, appraising glance, and then goes back to watching the screen.

  They say politics is the art of the compromise, and the last tumultuous year has been full of it. When then senator Martin Lovering was on the edge of getting enough delegates to win our party’s nomination two years ago, there was a push to balance the ticket and enhance his national security creds by picking…me, someone who hadn’t been in Congress very long, and certainly hadn’t been in what’s known as the race for the White House.

  That calculated political move angered a lot of the party’s more dovish members, including Florida governor Pamela Barnes, who had run a close second to Senator Lovering in the campaign, and who understandably thought she should have been asked to serve as vice president with Lovering.

  Well, that dream did eventually come true for her. A month after I became president because of President Lovering’s sudden and unexpected death, I nominated her to the job. She was the third person to become vice president in this way since the Twenty-Fifth Amendment gave us a process to fill a vacancy in that office. I chose her because I wanted to unify our party, hoping that we could accomplish more as I served out the rest of my predecessor’s term. But if Barnes was happy or grateful to get to her current spot, she’s never once showed it to me.

  Meanwhile, flanked by my national security team, I’m doing something that’s hard for me: keeping my damn mouth shut.

  Waiting.

  On the screen I see the shapes of the SEALs moving briskly and efficiently, and I fight off my own memories of being on missions just like this one. With your team, breathing hard, weapon in hand, every sense in your body heightened, on the move, following the rehearsed plan, ready at a moment’s notice to open fire.

  I’ve been there before, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen.

  In all of them, the constant factor was being out at night exposed, with your best friends and fellow warriors around you, ready to cry havoc and let slip 5.56mm ammunition and grenades at our nation’s enemies. Like these men now in Libya, nearly five thousand miles away, their every movement and action being noted here, in this room.

  Being here, instead of there, feels strange. Adding to the unreality, just a short walk away from this intense meeting is my wife, Dr. Samantha Rowell Keating, working on a paper for some prominent archaeological journal, and our daughter, Melanie, whom we always call Mel, holding a party in the family quarters with some of her classmates from Sidwell Friends.

  I’m happy for both of them. It’s not easy to maintain any sort of normal life in this very unnormal place.

  I’m looking at the screen again, seeing the figures move, see three enter a building.

  That’s all.

  No flares of light, no tracer rounds, no frantic movement of armed men rushing out to attac
k the invaders.

  Admiral McCoy clears his throat. “Sir…”

  “I know,” I say. “The raid’s a bust. Asim Al-Asheed isn’t there.”

  Chapter

  5

  Two thirty-five a.m. local time

  Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, Tripoli

  In his secure and dull basement office marking his role as the senior officer of the Chinese Ministry of State Security for all of North Africa, Jiang Lijun sits at his desk, smoking another Zhonghua cigarette, thinking. The room is spare, with only one bookshelf and three heavy-metal locked filing cabinets. A photo of the Great Helmsman is on the wall, next to one of the current president. On his desk are two photos: one of his wife, Zhen, and the other of his late father. Jiang was only five years old in 1999 when he and his weeping mother stood on the tarmac at the Beijing Capital International Airport, awaiting the cremated remains of Father after the Americans killed him along with two others in the basement of the Chinese Embassy.

  The May 7 raid had occurred during the NATO bombing campaign to halt the Serbians from doing what was their destiny: to control their territories and conquer their enemies. The West had been using that tactic for centuries, but because the Serbs were “the other,” they were blamed and bombed for doing the same as all the great powers.

  Father had been working at the Chinese Embassy on Augusta Cesarca Road as a communications officer when four bombs from an American B-2 Spirit hit the embassy, supposedly by mistake, although no one in China believed such a tale. Everyone knew it was a deliberate attempt by the West to punish China for standing with the Serbians.

  Later, as Jiang grew older and attended school, he learned that the bomber that killed Father had come from the famed American Air Force 509th Bomb Group, the same that had dropped the atomic bombs in 1945, incinerating tens of thousands of civilians.