The General's President Read Online Free PDF

CPO to you naval types."
    No one said anything for a moment. Dudak looked disappointed. Carmody's face didn't show it, but he was thinking that a platoon sergeant at least knew how to kick ass, which was more than Donnelly did. Correction: Donnelly had booted Strock when the Qaddir scandal broke; he'd had to.
    Then Trenary threw up his hands in disgust. "Jumper, you're going to do what the hell you want to anyway. Why don't you go ahead and do it?"
    Cromwell nodded and got up. "Right. Let's take a break; I've got a phone call to make."
    They watched him leave. Carmody grinned. "I'd like to listen in on that phone call," he said, then did an impression of Cromwell. " 'Haugen, how'd you like to come to D.C. and be President of the United States for a while?' "
    Carmody laughed at his own wit. Hanke smiled. Trenary and Dudak didn't seem to think it was humorous at all.
    ***
    There'd been more than just conversation between Cromwell and Haugen, that September three years earlier. More than long talks on common interest had impressed the general.
    The fishing camp had been some hundred miles north of Sioux Lookout, Ontario. Though the weather had turned bad, the food and company were excellent, and the relaxed atmosphere a welcome change from the Pentagon, where Cromwell had been in charge of the Readiness Command then.
    After two days of rain, the radio had predicted a partly sunny day, to be followed by more cold showery weather. He and Haugen had gone out without a guide, so they could talk more comfortably; Carlson, the resort operator, knew Haugen's backwoods background, and allowed him the privilege. They'd motored five or six miles down the large wild lake to a bay Haugen knew, where the pike grew big and had a mean streak. After fishing for a few hours, the wind had freshened and the temperature began to fall. They started back then, and had just cleared the bay when the motor quit.
    There was a little tool kit in the boat. They'd paddled to shore, and Haugen had stripped the motor down, using the overturned boat as a workbench. The problem had been a blown gasket. He'd been cutting a replacement out of the top of his boot when the storm hit, hours earlier than predicted. Wind whipped up dangerous waves, and it began to snow. Within minutes they couldn't see a hundred feet through the slanting large white flakes.
    Haugen had stashed the stripped down motor under the boat and dispatched Cromwell to cut balsam and cedar branches with his sheath knife. "Get a lot of them," he'd said. But Cromwell wasn't familiar with balsam. "Balsam," Haugen had replied, "is the one with short soft needles. Get a lot of them. The pickery ones are spruce, and they're not good for sleeping on."
    Cromwell had walked back into the forest, cutting  
    branches off balsam saplings with his sheath knife, leaving them where they fell to help guide him back to the boat. When he'd returned, arms full, through the thick-falling whiteness of flakes, Haugen had already broken and cut off saplings and was framing a lean-to with them beneath a big old spruce, tying them together with strings from the big landing net. The snow was beginning to stick on the ground. When Cromwell came back with a second armful, the lean-to was already being roofed with bark from a decayed and fallen birch; the old man worked fast. When Cromwell had come back with a third armful, Haugen was beginning another, smaller steep-roofed lean-to, and the snow was an inch or more deep.
    "Go get some dry branches for firewood," Haugen had said. "The biggest ones you can break off." Cromwell had seen just the ideal source, a large fallen spruce a few dozen yards away. When he returned with his first armload of fuel, Haugen was tepeeing punkwood over a little pile of papery outer bark of birch, beneath the smaller lean-to. Minutes later, getting more wood, he'd heard Haugen breaking branches too.
    When they had a large pile of broken-up branchwood, Haugen had baked pike in the foil from