It Could Happen Here –: A Roadmap to Disaster

By J. F. Cronin

Eric King the CEO of International Surveillance, Security and Construction, ISSAC, received a call from Wilbur Barron, the president of the United States, requesting that he attend a meeting at the National Golf Club. Barron was vague but hinted that he needed King’s business expertise in planning an election year strategy. King wasn’t surprised by the call. The president always sought advice from friends outside of his staff. Barron didn’t mention it openly, but those who worked for him knew he had a basic distrust of people who were attached to the system and worked for government paychecks. He wanted input from people whose wealth freed them from having to worry about their next government stipend and leaned on his rich friends for all sorts of tasks and advice. He vested some with cabinet level decision making powers without ever having to run them before congress for confirmation. Cabinet members and the presidential staff knew the president’s friends could overturn their decisions with a phone call and of all the members of the president’s kitchen cabinet, King was the most heavily relied on. He undertook jobs for Barron that were unadvertised, sometimes shady, and he was secretive enough never to let the press know what he was doing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663242280

J. F. Cronin

J.F. Cronin is a retired marine general who has written extensively about the state of politial-military affairs. He currently resides in a fishing village on the Oregon Coast.

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Copyright © 2022 J. F. Cronin.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-4227-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4228-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022912676

iUniverse rev. date: 08/11/2022

CONTENTS

Chapter One The Setup

Chapter Two Stryker

Chapter Three A Company Man

Chapter Four The Swamp

Chapter Five Voyage of Discovery

Chapter Six Team Stryker

Chapter Seven FOG in a Fog

Chapter Eight Change in Plans

Chapter Nine Inside Outside Man

Chapter Ten Man against the Machine

Chapter Eleven Let’s Get Serious

Chapter Twelve Reversal

Chapter Thirteen The Big Tent

Chapter Fourteen The Power of the Press

Chapter Fifteen Crisis at the Palace

Chapter Sixteen Becoming a Yooper

CHAPTER ONE

THE SETUP

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Eric King, the CEO of International Surveillance, Security, and Construction—ISSAC—received a call from Wilbur Barron, the president of the United States, requesting that he attend a meeting at the National Golf Club. Barron was vague but hinted that he needed King’s business expertise in planning an election-year strategy. King wasn’t surprised by the call. The president always sought advice from friends outside his staff. Barron didn’t mention it openly, but those who worked for him knew he had a basic distrust of people who were attached to the system and worked for government paychecks. He wanted input from people whose wealth freed them from having to worry about their next government stipend and leaned on his rich friends for all sorts of tasks and advice. He vested some of these with cabinet-level decision-making powers without ever having to run them before Congress for confirmation.

Cabinet members and the presidential staff knew the president’s friends could overturn their decisions with a phone call and that of all the members of the president’s kitchen cabinet, King was the most heavily relied on. He undertook jobs for Barron that were unadvertised, sometimes shady, and he was secretive enough never to let the press know what he was doing.

King was the CEO of ISSAC, but he was the company; there were no shareholders to rein him in. He started the company by investing part of the vast fortune he had inherited. Like many who had inherited their positions in life, he resented paying taxes and was a fierce libertarian, willing to shrink the government to nothingness. The shrinkage, of course, was not intended to affect those parts of the government that did business with ISSAC, which posed an intellectual and moral dilemma for him. The parts of government that didn’t need shrinking were those that provided his company with billions of dollars in contracts. So, while he talked about smaller government, he was careful to talk around shutting down anything that would affect his bottom line.

King gladly accepted the president’s invitation, thinking that politics weren’t his long suit. He couldn’t be bothered with making compromises as politicians sometimes had to do and preferred to buy bureaucrats by promising them lucrative jobs within his company after they left government service. His business model was a revolving door that placed ISSAC personnel in the military-industrial and security complex and rotated them between ISSAC and the government. He understood that by placing people in key federal and state jobs, he could influence decisions. And with Barron pressuring his staff to throw money at friendly companies, it was smart to stay in his good graces.

Sure, Wil. King was one of the few men in the world who could get away with shortening the president’s first name. That privilege came because their backgrounds were mirror images. They were both sons of great wealth and complained about its burdens, while suppressing feelings that they might not have gotten as far ahead in life without the boost. That insecurity was buried in the subconscious of each man and was the reason each had designed his businesses, and Barron his presidency, as one-man shows where they weren’t questioned.

Barron was vocal in his insecurity, going so far as to praise dictators who had inherited their positions, intimating that people didn’t know how hard it was to run a country. King was more protective of his past and personal life and was an unknown commodity in the financial world and the power circles that ran through Washington. He had inherited substantially more than Barron and was more successful in using family money to grow his fortune, and for this the president envied him. It was the reason that when the White House sent King a nondisclosure agreement, he refused to sign it.

The presidential staff didn’t think it was funny when he sent his own NDA to the president and several of his top staff.

Barron shrugged it off, and King was the only person in the president’s inner circle without one. The president let him get away with it because King had business interests worldwide and no one knew what they were. King was obsessed with secrecy, and Barron knew that whatever happened between them, King would keep his mouth shut. While the president relied on him and considered him a friend, King kept his distance. Before the president had been elected, he had tried to get King and ISSAC involved with big projects he was building, but King knew too many people whom Barron had stiffed for millions and wanted no part of him. Somehow, Barron, a man who didn’t forget snubs, liked King and had seemingly forgotten.

Isn’t it kind of early to start worrying about the election? King queried.

It’s never too early. This is a twenty-four/seven/three-hundred-sixty-five business, and I intend to stay ahead of things. Barron paused. King could hear his sigh over the phone. Several of our pollsters have me way ahead in the early polls, but I’m not too crazy about the way the people running my campaign are responding to the data. They’re more interested in spending the money I’m raking in on fancy media campaigns instead of putting in the legwork that I know works.

I’m not the best guy to consult on politics. King could see no way to make money out of the meeting and didn’t want to get involved.

Rich said he wanted you there. He’s got some ideas he wants to run by you. I want you to listen to them to give them a sanity check.

King said nothing. The mention of Richard Slate made his jaw tighten. Slate was a man who hadn’t outgrown his college days where he worked to get his fraternity brothers elected to positions in student government by any means possible. The training had served him well, depending on how one looked at it. He had become an unethical political leech who made his money by fawning over those in power and selling himself as an expert in political warfare.

Come to the meeting as a favor to me.

Sure, Mister President. King became a bit more formal when mentioning that he would grant the president a favor because there were always favors in return.

Rich is meeting with Sam tomorrow at the Doral.

The Sam the president was referring to was his lawyer Samuel DeGata, another of the president’s associates whom King disliked. He had reason to dislike DeGata, a politician who had stumbled into fame after a terrorist attack and of whom no one had asked the question why his city hadn’t been prepared. They only looked at his actions among the smoldering ruins.

Stretching his fifteen minutes of fame, DeGata monetized it and set himself up as a security expert, competing for security contracts in the government and around the world, cutting into ISSAC’s business. The difference was that DeGata had no company. He sold his name and the idea that he had access to the highest levels of government. When he was awarded contracts, he understaffed them with the cheapest labor, often unqualified third world mercenaries, and couldn’t fulfill what he advertised he could do. He never got fired because he let it be known he was politically connected.

He gave US companies trying to sell security internationally a bad name, so foreign governments shied away from them, preferring European security firms. With a string of failures, DeGata brought attention to the privatization of security. And there were calls for Congress to investigate legitimate companies and subject them to oversight. With his star fading, he had been resurrected when Barron was elected. The election enabled him to grow his business with nothing more than the promise of his access to the president.

King had no respect for him as a businessman. He wasn’t professional. Nor did he like him as a person. He felt DeGata was slimy, and he didn’t know which of the two he disliked more, him or Slate.

I know you’re in Key West and was wondering if you could stop in Miami to pick them up?

I can’t. I’ve got a commitment in Houston before I can head to Washington. King lied. He was a person who could refuse the president without angering him. I’ll tell you what. I’ll pick up their first-class tickets to Washington and have a limo meet them. That way I can get my business done.

The president didn’t take offense. If Slate and DeGata had been wealthy instead of hangers-on, they would have had their own airplanes.

Seeing as King was vacationing in Key West, stopping at Miami International to pick up the two men would have been easy, but he didn’t want either of them in his airplane. His company had recently picked up a new Gulfstream jet that still had the new airplane smell, and he didn’t want to soil it with their body odors, especially Slate’s, who slathered himself with a coconut-infused tanning oil that emanated its odor, so that he could look like he had spent time at the beach.

King considered both of them opportunists and couldn’t understand what the president saw in them. They were men who groveled and weren’t embarrassed by picking up the crumbs that fell off rich and powerful men’s tables. They attached themselves to the president for their own benefit, and no humiliation was too great for them to endure. King felt uneasy around them.

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The lunch meeting at the National Golf Club was set for after Barron had finished playing a morning round. King was the first to arrive, followed closely by Slate and DeGata, who complained that they hadn’t been booked on a nonstop to Reagan National. They had had an hour layover in Atlanta, and whoever had made their arrangements hadn’t booked them into the airport VIP lounge, which they weren’t happy about. Nor were they happy that they had to retrieve their own luggage prior to sharing a limo to the golf club. The president must have told them that King had made the arrangements, so they voiced their displeasure to him, having expected to be afforded treatment equal to the self-importance with which they endowed themselves. King listened to them without responding, feeling they were lucky to have been given first-class seats.

As the president hadn’t finished golfing, the three dissimilar men waited in a cavernous private banquet room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the fairways and the Potomac River. Chairs were neatly stacked and pushed against the walls, and only a single table was set up in the middle of the room, perfectly centered over a mosaic compass rose inlaid in the floor. A huge chandelier, hanging from a high ceiling, was unlighted but dominated the room from overhead.

King avoided talking to either man because the small talk and the crazy ideas they spouted openly in front of the Secret Service personnel who were prepping the room made him uncomfortable. Not wanting to get involved in the screwball conversations, he stood away from them, conducting business on his cell phone and hoping the president would arrive to put an end to his discomfort.

When the Secret Service detail assigned to the president arrived, King breathed a sigh of relief. They coordinated with the Secret Service personnel already in the room, then Barron was ushered in. The president was smiling after what was supposedly a good round of golf and invited his guests to join him at the table. As they sat, Barron teased Slate and DeGata about their wearing suits to the meeting. Although the comments were delivered with a smile, seemingly jokes, they were mildly insulting, meant to push the two men down while elevating Barron.

The president didn’t engage King, knowing that he didn’t need the president’s attention as did the others. Of the four, King was the only one who looked physically fit, the only one among them without a potbelly. It wasn’t that their stomachs protruded inordinately—they were all fleshy—but the men carried too much weight in their hips and rear ends that they couldn’t hide. It was evident that they had spent too much time sitting. When they sat, they oozed over the edges of the folding chairs, which seemed barely capable of supporting their weight.

King smiled, thinking that he was looking at a clown car. He included Barron in that observation.

Slate was ferret-looking. His face from his cheekbones to his chin narrowed, tightening around pursed thin lips, and his large hooked nose sagged downward toward his devious smile. His small eyes were deep set and didn’t move naturally. They flitted quickly, nervously, as if he were in a survival mode. He had white hair, which contrasted with his tan, gained from too much sun or a tanning booth, aging his skin. He compensated for the skin’s dryness by applying too much oil, making him look slimy, a look that fit his personality. His teeth were crooked and stained, and for a man of purported style, the image he hoped to project, it presented a skewed picture. He wore expensive suits with a flower in the buttonhole but couldn’t make up in fashion enough to overcome his physical characteristics.

DeGata was a contrast. His face was round without symmetry, as if it had been put together by sculptor with wads of clay who hadn’t finished the project. King thought he looked like a freakish character out of the next Batman movie. DeGata’s hair was almost gone, but rails of dyed black hair clung to the sides of his oversized head like escalator railings. His forehead protruded in two nodules of uneven size that would have drawn more attention if his large round eyes weren’t so frantic. Trapped between his eyes and his mouth, with teeth that looked like fangs, was a broad nose that expanded and contracted when he breathed. Unlike Slate, whose skin was damp with scented oils, DeGata was always damp with a film of perspiration. Making him more detestable was his body odor. The garlic in his diet seeped to the surface, and the cheap colognes he used to hide the scent didn’t work. He was a mix of sweet and sour.

Sitting with these men was the president, whose skin was an unnatural color of peach and who had hair that was supposed to be golden. It was hard to tell how much hair he had. It was coiled from the sides of his head to the crown in an ever-tightening spiral. The president shouldn’t have worn the knit shirt he had played golf in to the meeting. He had sweated, and it looked as if he had been in a wet T-shirt contest. His breasts and ample belly, unable to be contained by the fabric, puffed out like marshmallows.

King felt he was the only normal person at the table. He was more than six feet tall, Barron’s height, but he had the good fortune to have inherited good genes along with wealth. He was younger than the men with whom he sat, who were in or near their seventies. His blond crew cut indicated he had a full head of hair, and his face didn’t hint of his age. He retained the appearance of a male model who had aged slightly. Everything about him was in proportion. He was the all-American boy who had grown up. His hazel eyes sparkled, and he was quick to smile, showing off his perfect teeth. He seemed that he might be approachable, but that was an outward appearance and deceiving. He was a hard man, looking out for himself at all times.

Shall we order? Barron wanted to get the meeting started. He was in a good mood.

How’d your game go today, sir? DeGata pandered.

Good. I shot two under par.

King knew Barron was notorious for using his hand wedge to position the ball so that he never had a bad lie and considered any ball on the green a gimme putt, so there was no way to tell his score, but he felt it wasn’t close to par.

He said nothing to break Barron’s euphoria.

The group looked over the elaborate lunch menu.

I’ve ordered you hamburgers, Barron informed Slate and DeGata. Eric, I figured you would want something healthy, so you can order for yourself. The deference shown to King put the others on notice that they were not equals.

I had a meal on the flight in, so I’ll pass. King had mentioned this so that Slate and DeGata would sense the inferiority of having to fly commercial.

The meals came quickly, and there was no hesitation as those eating dug in. Barron seemed to inhale his food and was ready to talk.

I’ve got a few concerns with the way my campaign is being run. Norm Smith, he said, referring to his campaign manager, "keeps telling me we are in good shape because the money is rolling in. He’s convinced