Free Shock Warning by Michael Walsh Page A

caused me enough trouble? After what’s happened, he’s lucky I haven’t fired his ass.”
    “Maybe you should have, sir.”
    “And look like an ungrateful sonofabitch who can’t or won’t defend his own people? What happened in New York wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t the NYPD’s fault. Hell, it wasn’t even the fault of those useless wankers at the Langley Home for Lost Boys. It was the Iranians’ fault—that bastard Kohanloo and that woman I let . . .” He caught himself. “Never mind. That’s classified.”
    “Above my pay grade.”
    “Correct. Now show General Seelye in. And bring me another drink. This one will be gone before you know it.”
    Concepcion turned to leave. Tyler followed him to the door and opened it to admit Seelye. Then he noticed the refill was already on the Resolute desk. Good man, Concepcion.
    “What is it, General?” he said.
    “It’s important, Mr. President,” said the head of the National Security Agency.
    “It had better be. Can’t you see there’s a war on and I’m losing it?”
    “Yes, sir,” said Seelye. “May I sit down?”
    Tyler waved him to a chair. “Give it to me straight.”
    Seelye tossed a manila folder on Tyler’s coffee table. “These were taken by one of our operatives in Iran yesterday. Qom, to be exact.”
    “We have operatives in Iran?” said the president, sarcastically. “Who knew?”
    “Please look at the pictures, Mr. President.”
    Gingerly, Tyler picked up the folder. He didn’t like it when Seelye called him “Mr. President.” It was too formal. It meant trouble.
    A bunch of mustachioed men with their asses in the air. A big mosque. Clouds. Sky. “What am I looking at?” He had been handed pictures like these for years; in the middle of the eternal War on Terror, Muslim men at prayer or in rage were a staple of the morning intelligence briefing, just as they had been for his predecessor and would be for his successor. Make that, successors. For it would never be over until either the West brought down the hammer in most brutal, final way possible, or Islam submitted. And that, he knew, would never happen. Not until the Last Trump. This was a fight to the finish, even if only one side had figured that out.
    Well, as the old saying went, better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. For months now, his political advisers had been advocating a bold stroke—something so dramatic that it changed the game overnight. The nuclear option, so to speak.
    Except this time, it really was the nuclear option.
    The October Surprise, for which Angela Hassett would have no answer, no reply, no comeback. Two days before the election, he had already decided, he would use the bomb on the Iranian nuclear facilities, as payback for the 1979 hostage crisis and for every other sin the Muslim world had visited upon the West and Israel since then. There was nothing to lose except the good opinion of the Europeans, and they couldn’t vote, and a world of rich Iranian votes in Los Angeles to gain.
    Whatever jack-in-the-box Angela Hassett and her minions were planning on springing on him in October, it would be no match for his little gift to the American people.
    After all, wasn’t freedom just another word for nothing left to lose?
    “The sky,” sir,” General Seelye was saying. “Look at the sky.”
    Maybe he should have fired Seelye after New York. Sure, his boy Devlin had cleaned up that mess, salvaged what was left of the city, taken down Kohanloo, and dealt with some other putz with a peripheral involvement—a kid about whom there had been repeated inquiries by that broad on the People’s News Network, who’d apparently had a run-in with him near the Metropolitan Museum. For Tyler’s money, she looked better in a wig, after that scalping she took, but what did he know? In any case, it had been a good career move, since Ms. Stanley was now anchoring the evening news on the highest-rated news network in the world.
    “The sky, Mr.