Line of Succession: A Thriller (10 page)

His phone rang again. It was Julian Speers. “Congressman Bailey is dead,” Speers blurted out. “He was killed in the blast.”

The President was stunned. “I just got off the phone with Homeland Security. They’ve got nothing on that.”

“
I was there!” Speers shouted so loudly that the President had to pull the phone away from his ear. “I’m ninety-eight percent sure. The explosion was so big. Nothing could’ve survived that.” President Hatch got a breathless earful as Speers confessed that he had disobeyed the order to take a vacation, and had instead gone down to Monroe this very morning to talk to Congressman Bailey.

“
God Almighty, Julian. Don’t go rogue on me. I need you.”

“
I’m sorry. I can explain.”

“
Never mind. Where are you now?”

“
Headed back to the airport. Sir, I don’t want to sound paranoid, but maybe we should operate from Site R.” Site R was codename for Raven Rock, the not-so-secret, but still virtually impenetrable emergency bunker in Maryland.

“
Negative. Meet me at Camp David.”

“
I’d like to check with Agent Rios on that. I’d like to get his opinion about heading to Site R.”

The President signed off tersely, privately fearing Speers was right as usual. He knew that if he had followed his Chief of Staff’s advice more often, the administration would probably be in better shape. His main problem with Julian was that he made decisions from a position of fear. But as the President was learning, the world had devolved into a state where fear-based problem-solving was often the best approach.

He looked out the window and saw the green Maryland hills below blurring past. He turned to the Secret Service agent sitting in the seat beside him, and wished the man was Eva. She would know how to approach the meeting.

“
Incoming!” the pilot suddenly shouted over the cabin radio. Deafening missile warning alarms sounded. Marine One jerked wildly left. The President grasped for something to hold onto.

A brilliant white flash blinded him temporarily. One of the decoy choppers had been hit. The President watched as the Marine One clone flying next to them jerked right to evade a SAM.

Time slowed as the President watched the adjacent Kestrel’s rotors slice into Marine One’s aft, sending the treetop-level craft spinning downward through the hillside vegetation. A vision of his late wife was suddenly thrust upon him. She was sickly and cross. He tried hard to summon an image of her face in the good times, before the cancer. A laugh. A smile. He couldn’t. His thoughts turned to that gray winter day in Northern Virginia at Sovereign Hills Cemetery. Eva had been there, standing on the other side of the casket with the others from his Gubernatorial staff. He remembered the pre-inscribed, double-wide headstone.

Jan Tolle Hatch

Loving Mother

Born: 1960

Died: 2009

Isaac Samuel Hatch

Governor of Virginia

Born: 1961

Died:

The idea that they would someday be interred side-by-side had comforted his wife in the days before they passed. But Hatch had never been at peace with it. The pre-inscribed headstone seemed to beckon death.

A wave of compressed air knocked Marine One sideways. Kevlar air bags deployed in a protective cocoon around him. He was completely insulated as the smoldering chopper jounced manically through several poplar trees to the ground.

The President blacked out as he hung upside down by his safety belts. The air bags shrank magically away. The luxury helicopter cabin the President had known was reduced to a series of highly protective roll bars, not unlike the sand rails he had raced as a boy. The roll cage was in a patch of underbrush, and there was no sign of the Secret Service agent who had sat next to him, the pilots or any other part of Marine One.

Smoke wafted through the roll cage along with the scent of burning fuel and fiberglass. The smell brought him awake. The President blinked. Sharp pain bolted through his neck and shoulders, but he could move. He was alive.

It took several seconds for the President to realize that he had survived a deliberate attack. The Ambassador had set him up. There was little question about that.

He imagined a group of young Iranians, or other extremists from the Allied Jihad, perhaps in the U.S. on student visas, searching for him in the woods. He needed to get as far away from the wreckage as possible.

He pawed at the release button on his safety belt. It was jammed. He reached into his tweed blazer and found a pen. He pushed the tip out and tried using it to trip a bit of exposed spring in the belt buckle. Nothing worked.

Two quick bursts of gunfire echoed through the forest. The President smiled as he recognized the sound of an American-made M4 Carbine.

During his first term, members of the Secret Service’s uniformed Emergency Response Team had taught him basic survival tactics in the unlikely event that he was caught without protection in a hostile environment. He had forgotten most of it by now, but one thing that had stuck with him was the difference between the sound of American-made M4s versus the developing world’s weapon of choice, the AK-47. “If you hear an AK,” he remembered one of the ERTs telling him, “run like hell or go into deep hiding if you can. If you hear M4s, stay put. Help is nearby.”

He expected the gunfire was from Ulysses’ Camp David unit, and that they were already hunting down the assailants. Last year, when the need for highly skilled special ops soldiers had broken out in the Central African Republic, General Wainewright had informed him that none were available. The last remaining Special Forces group that was not deployed was Marine Security Company, Camp David, a unit in which each solider was hand-picked from infantry, then sent through a rigorous program of psychological and physical tests to qualify for Marine Security Training in Chesapeake, Virginia. Wainewright told him that since there had never been an incident at Camp David, apart from accidental civilian aircraft fly-overs, MSC-CD’s skills were being wasted there. He suggested that the unit be deployed to the combat zone, while Camp David security should be left to a joint effort between senior Ulysses USA employees and the Secret Service. The President had agreed, and he was anticipating seeing members of that highly paid Ulysses unit any moment now.

He hung helplessly from his safety belts for another minute, his ears attuned to a crackling forest fire that seemed to be getting closer. Finally, he heard rustling and footsteps. He remained perfectly still except for the heaving of his lungs.

Then, he heard conversation – two men, somewhere behind him. They were speaking a language that was nothing like any foreign tongue he’d ever heard before. He held his breath and pulled his limbs close to his body, as if to make himself smaller, less visible.

A pair of American-made hiking boots stepped directly in front of the roll cage. The upside down President strained his neck to see Chris Abrams’ face staring directly at him. It hurt to hold his neck this way. He dropped his head for a moment before taking another look.

Abrams wasn’t wearing a Ulysses uniform, but he was holding an M4. “Mister President?” Abrams said in perfect English.

The President relaxed and let his head hang. “Thank God,” he said upon hearing Abrams’ decidedly American accent. “What happened to the others?”

“
You’re the last of ‘em,” Abrams replied.

Always the politician, President Hatch thought carefully about his response. He imagined this moment would be re-enacted in a movie someday. “Well I hope you’re a Democrat.”

“
No sir,” Abrams replied, “I’m not.”

He waited until the President strained his neck to look up again. Then he shot him twice in the face.

Chesapeake Bay

11:09 a.m.

The blue marlin leapt into the air, shaking its mighty head in hopes of freeing itself from the barbed hook in its mouth. It seemed to drift in mid-air for a moment before falling tail-first back into the Atlantic.

“
You see that?” Dex Jackson said. A toothpick stuck out the corner of his mouth. “He’s fading. Another half hour and he’s dinner.”

His son, LeBron, didn’t seem so sure of that. The obese 12-year-old was strapped into a game fishing chair on the back of his father’s Predator sports boat. LeBron was no outdoorsman, and the marlin was diving hard, taking up slack, whipping the rod tip around with supernatural force. The reel was actually smoking as the thick line spun out at more than ten feet per second. Dex trickled some bottled water over it to cool it off.

LeBron’s palms were bleeding. “Dad,” he said, “Can you take it? Please?”

“
This ain’t no video game,” Dex said. “C’mon, boy. You can do this.”

This summer, the 56-year-old Defense Secretary had vowed to get his youngest child off his soft video-gaming ass and into the great outdoors. LeBron was one hundred percent nerd. He was already on his fourth set of ever more powerful prescription glasses, a fact that Dex attributed to his all-nighters staring at game monitors. It was classic – LeBron had even gotten beaten up by jocks just before the summer break. When Dex asked the school’s Vice Principal why it happened, he showed Dex his notes from the head bully: “We jumped LeBron cuz he’s such a fat pussy.”

Dex blamed himself. His own childhood had been 180-degrees from LeBron’s, having racked up a 45-3 amateur boxing record prior to entering West Point, from which the structural integrity of his nose cartilage had never recovered. But since going into politics after a stellar military career, he’d let his work take over his life and left LeBron to a life of shopping with his mother and long nights of video gaming. But now he was going to change all that. The kid needed to build some muscle, see a few sunsets and breathe some air that hadn’t been breathed before.

Angie Jackson was twenty years her husband’s junior and many times more sympathetic. She stroked LeBron’s forehead. “I’ll get you some gloves, baby.”

Something caught Dex’s eye. A boat in the distance. He grabbed his binoculars.

It was a powerboat. He saw three men in black wetsuits, but they didn’t look like recreational divers. They sure as hell didn’t look like anglers.

Angie held the rod for LeBron as he quickly slipped the gloves over his lacerated hands.

Dex’s phone rang. “ESC,” the Executive Support Center within the Pentagon, came up on the ID. Shit. He’d been on vacation less than two hours, and his staff was already pinging him. He answered. It was General Wainewright’s assistant, Corporal Hammond.

“
We’re evacuating to Site R,” Corporal Hammond said without elaboration. “A Coast Guard vessel is en route to escort you back to shore.”

“
Are they in an unmarked boat?” Dex said, but Hammond had already hung up.

“
Everything okay?” Angie said.

Dex picked up the binoculars again. The powerboat was coming straight for them. He looked at LeBron. The boy was finally getting into it, getting some leverage over the fish. Dex saw his boy changing before his eyes.

Then he looked out again at the boat and knew he had to stop thinking so much. That sure as hell didn’t look like any Coast Guard patrol he’d ever seen.

“
Let the fish go,” he said.

LeBron was incredulous. As much pain as he was in, he wanted the fish. He wanted to prove something.

“
Let it go, boy,” Dex said. “I’m not asking you.”

Martha’s Vineyard

11:10 a.m.

Eva Hudson’s plastic oversized sunglasses covered nearly half her face. She peered into the window of an upscale boutique in Edgartown, a quintessential Martha’s Vineyard village – complete with an old red brick lighthouse – that had remained largely unchanged for more than a century. She walked past the famous Whaling Church, with its white Greek columns and fortress-solid structure that had been crafted by shipbuilders one hundred and fifty some-odd years earlier. After a bit of shopping, she planned to take in the 11:30 a.m. church service. Nothing in the world left her feeling more centered than an hour with a hundred strangers praying in unison.

She loved Edgartown’s white picket fence sensibility. It was a bit more upscale than Oak Bluff, the island village that former Presidents and several notable rap stars liked to frequent. Last year, she and the President had stolen away from the watchful eyes of his security detail and squeezed into a local tour of the historic homes of long-dead whaling captains. After a couple years of sneaking around the White House, the unsupervised three-hour tour had felt as good as a prison break.

She lifted her sunglasses and leaned into the storefront glass, getting a good look at her face. Damn. That tanning salon had gotten her
way
too orange. And the crow’s feet were back. She’d have to make another appointment with the dermatologist. It was well known that Presidents aged visibly – and quickly – during their time in office, but she swore this term had been harder on her than on Hatch.