The President's Pilot Read online

  “Here they come,” said Batchelder.

  Brand turned to peer out the side window. The President’s motorcade was coming through the outer security perimeter, turning onto the tarmac. In the lead was an unmarked Humvee. No flags, no insignia. Then a black panel truck, which Brand knew contained a dozen Secret Service agents with communications gear and weapons. The truck was followed by two Russian-built Iranian military vehicles bristling with machine guns. Then came the President’s black, armored limousine. It was trailed by another Humvee and four more Iranian vehicles.

  The motorcade sped through the protective ring of Iranian armored vehicles that encircled Air Force One. A dozen Rangers spilled from the Humvees to form a cordon at the foot of the mobile stairs. The President’s limo pulled to a stop. A pair of Secret Service agents positioned themselves at either side of the passenger door. One opened the door.

  Evans had already briefed Brand on the departure protocol. It was going to be a get-out-of-Dodge operation. No ceremony, no farewell speech, no banter with the media. Most of the reporters who accompanied the President would be left at the palace after her abrupt exit. They would be pissed.

  The President stepped onto the tarmac. She paused, blinking in the harsh sunlight. She was wearing a loose-fitting, gray pant suit, purposely tailored, Brand assumed, not to offend Islamic sensibilities. Her trademark leather satchel hung over her shoulder.

  She stood gazing around the ramp. The two Secret Service agents flanking her didn’t look happy. Their heads were swiveling, faces showing their tenseness. She removed her sunglasses and peered up at the cockpit. For a long moment she met Brand’s gaze. She looked worried, Brand thought. Abruptly she wheeled and headed for the boarding ladder. She moved with long, purposeful strides, one hand clutching the leather satchel.

  Brand watched until she was gone from his view. She hasn’t changed. Still a good looking woman, even in the frumpy outfit. Same long-legged, flouncy stride. The walk of a woman always in a hurry to get somewhere. He recognized that intent, gray-eyed gaze. He’d seen it before.

  <>

  That goddamned McDivott.

  General Chuck Greeley gnawed on his unlit cigar and glowered down at the Virginia countryside. What was McDivott up to? Nearly an hour had passed since the assassination of the Vice President. Every attempt Greeley made to contact McDivott, who was supposed to be his deputy in the Pentagon command center, received the same reply. He’ll get back to you.

  Then McDivott issued the Angel Swoop order—and DefCon Two—without clearing it with anyone. The sonofabitch had overstepped his authority by a country mile. There was going to be a rearrangement of chairs in the Joint Chiefs this week. Greeley would see to it.

  “What the hell?” said Tom Zuckerman, the Army colonel who served as Greeley’s aide. Like most armored cavalry officers, Zuckerman distrusted helicopters. Even choppers as plush as this UH-60 Black Hawk, which was the Chairman’s personal mount.

  “Now what?” said Greeley. The way things were going this morning, nothing surprised him.

  “The Purple net,” said Zuckerman. “It’s off line.” Zuckerman was sitting at the communications console. The Black Hawk carried a comm package nearly as sophisticated as the array in Greeley’s Pentagon office. Seated next to Zuckerman was a communications specialist who could access every wireless and satellite link in the U.S. military spectrum.

  But it wasn’t working. Zuckerman and the specialist kept poking at their keyboards, staring at the blank screens before them. “I can’t believe this shit,” said Zuckerman. “Nothing.”

  “Use the cell phone.”

  “I did. No one’s picking up.”

  Greeley shook his head in frustration. This was what happened when you put your faith in all this high tech crap. One little electronic spasm and the commander was out of the loop. Well, he’d be back in the loop in—he did a quick calculation—fifteen minutes. That was when he’d get some straight answers from McDivott.

  It had been an error in judgment naming McDivott to the Vice Chairman’s job. It went against all Greeley’s instincts. He’d yielded to pressure from Stroud, the senator who could make or break Greeley’s own career. Greeley caved in and submitted McDivott’s name to the President, who was not a McDivott fan either but wanted to placate the right wingers in the Senate.

  Big mistake.

  Despite being the same rank, Greeley and McDivott were so dissimilar they might have come from opposite planets. At Congressional appearances Greeley came off looking like a rumpled uncle in uniform. McDivott, by contrast, had sleek gray hair and the chiseled features of a film star. Greeley was famous for his mangled syntax and convoluted sentences. McDivott could mesmerize an audience with his messianic voice and his warnings about America’s invisible enemies. Vance McDivott, insiders liked to joke, had you spellbound or had you scared shitless.

  Well, Greeley wasn’t scared shitless of McDivott. Firing the sonofabitch would take only a brief word with the President, with whom Greeley had a good rapport. McDivott would be history.

  Or maybe he wouldn’t. Greeley had a feeling that Vance McDivott wouldn’t leave the stage quietly. Greeley had heard rumors. McDivott was connected with an extreme right wing movement called Capella. Capella was reputed to have members in every branch of government and in each military service. It was Greeley, not McDivott, who was the outsider.

  Through the cabin insulation Greeley could feel the metallic whine of the Black Hawk’s turbine engines. The chopper was rocking in the heat waves from the farmland below. Greeley guessed they were at about three thousand feet.

  He shifted the cigar to the corner of his mouth. During his last physical at Walter Reed, the surgeon told him he got more nicotine from gnawing than when he smoked. Screw the surgeon. Greeley was the senior officer in the entire goddamn U.S. military. He’d gnaw anything he wanted.

  The patchwork of farmland was yielding to a suburban sprawl. Somewhere down there were the air defense rings that surrounded Washington. The outer ring had a thirty mile radius, the inner five. No aircraft could cross the outer ring without air traffic control clearance. Now that they’d gone to DefCon Two, no one could penetrate the inner ring without specific authorization from the Pentagon. Greeley wondered if the pilots were having the same communications troubles that—

  What was that?

  Something on the ground. Something that didn’t belong .

  Greeley had been a soldier for thirty-four years. He’d seen it before. A few times in Iraq, once in Afghanistan, but those were combat zones. This was the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States of America. He wasn’t supposed to see such a thing here.

  He blinked. It was still there. It was no longer on the ground. Greeley knew exactly what he was seeing now.

  So did the pilot of the Black Hawk. Greeley felt the helicopter bank hard to the left, descending with a stomach-heaving lurch. He had to cling to the sides of his seat to keep from being flung across the cabin.

  Greeley kept his eyes on the object. It was climbing, zigzagging like a crazed bat, trailing a plume of fire.

  Chuck Greeley’s life condensed into a single flashpoint in time. He stared at the object. What he saw was a Hawk surface-to-air missile. Swelling in size. No longer zigzagging.

  The helicopter lurched hard back to the right. Greeley lost sight of the missile. He saw an arc of chaff and flares spewing in the helicopter’s wake. It was their last—and only—defense against a supersonic air defense missile. Greeley tried to remember whether the Hawk was an infrared or radar-guided weapon. It didn’t matter. He had seen enough live firepower demonstrations to know what would happen next.

  When the impact came, it was above him, in the power plant section of the aircraft. The engines absorbed the shuddering explosion of the warhead.

  He glimpsed Zuckerman’s face across the cabin. The former tank commander wore an expression of pure disbelief. He’d been correct in his distrust of helicopters.

  Time slowed
to a crawl. The destruction of the Black Hawk seemed to be playing out in slow motion. Greeley felt the dull whump of the fuel tanks detonating.

  Damn it, he thought. He was supposed to die from cholesterol and cigars. Not this. It was his last thought before the world dissolved in an orange blur.

  <>

  They closed the main cabin door.

  In her office in the forward cabin, Libby Paulsen heard the first engine starting. The low whine resonated through the airframe. Then the second engine. While the third was still spinning up, she felt the jet begin to roll across the ramp. The crew wasn’t wasting time. Fewer than five minutes had elapsed since she arrived with the motorcade. She had changed from the ugly business costume to the tailored blue jump suit she preferred when she was aboard Air Force One.

  “How are the Iranians?” Libby asked.

  “They’re cool,” said Jill Maitlin. She was in the settee facing Libby’s desk. “They raised hell about being wanded and frisked by the Secret Service, but when they saw that everyone was getting the same treatment, they calmed down.”

  Libby nodded. Inviting the Iranian foreign minister, Mahmoud Said, and Hosseini’s chief of staff, Kamil Al-Bashir, to fly back to Washington on Air Force One had been Jill Maitlin’s idea. The idea met a storm of resistance from Gus Gritti, and even more flak from Mike Grossman, the chief of the Secret Service detail. They didn’t have any data on the Iranians. There wasn’t time to run checks on them. For all anyone knew, they could be planted terrorists. Grossman said he would assign an agent in the cabin to watch the two Iranians. Just in case.

  Libby didn’t care. This was too good an opportunity to pass up. The Iranians were authorized by Hosseini himself to continue the negotiations. With luck, they might even have a deal by the time Air Force One landed in Washington. Libby was already thinking about the press conference where she and the Iranians would stand together, treaty in hand. It would be a single item of good news in an unbelievably horrific day.

  “It may seem a little early,” said Jill, “but have you given any thought to nominating a new Vice President?”

  Libby stared at her. “New Vice President? I still have to figure out how I’m going to eulogize the old one.”

  “No problem. He gets a state funeral. Flag-draped casket, dirge music, horse-drawn caisson. Lots of pomp and ceremony.”

  “That’s the easy part. I have to give a speech. What do I say about him?”

  “The usual stuff. What a great American Lyle Bethune was. What a terrible loss to the nation this has been. And, oh, yeah, what lousy luck it was to get shot while getting a blow job.”

  Libby groaned. “The Christian Coalition will go crazy.”

  “They’re already crazy.”

  “Good point. You write the speech.”

  “Sure thing. What’s a senior advisor for?”

  Libby shook her head. That was Jill Maitlin. Nothing fazed her, not even an assassination.

  Jill Maitlin had been with Libby since her first year in Congress. Jill kept a placard on her desk that read Take No Shit. It was her motto and her style. Jill had come up in the rough and tumble arena of Washington politics. She’d worked as a staffer in Speaker Fred Atwater’s office before moving across the river to the national party office. She was still there on the national staff when she spotted the newly-elected Representative Libby Paulsen as a rising star. Jill Maitlin signed on as one of the early members of the Paulsen team.

  It was a successful mix of talents. Libby brought brains and charm to the office, Jill the toughness. When Libby needed backing up, as she often did, she turned to Jill Maitlin. As a team they had gone on to the Senate, then the White House.

  Number four engine was whining to life. Libby leaned back and peered out the cabin window. She saw the Iranian armored vehicles escorting them to the runway. For a moment she felt the anxiety build up in her. Were the Iranians crazy enough to attack Air Force One on the ground in Iran? She pushed the thought away. They might be crazy, but they weren’t stupid. They understood the utter devastation that would rain down on them if anything happened to the U.S. President in their country.

  Air Force One reached the end of the taxiway. Without stopping it trundled onto the runway. Libby was reaching for her coffee cup when a man’s voice came over the bulkhead-mounted speaker. “Good evening from the cockpit.”

  Libby knew the voice. A soft baritone with a Midwestern flatness.

  “This is your pilot, Colonel Pete Brand. On behalf of the President of the United States, welcome aboard Air Force One. We have been cleared for take off from the Mehrabad International Airport. Would you please check that your seat belts are fastened.”

  Libby could see the face that went with the voice. Long, straight nose, chin that jutted like the prow of a boat. Intensely blue eyes that could fix on you like lasers. Not a movie star face, but certifiably handsome.

  She was checking her seat belt, just as the man said—and then caught herself. Damn it, she was President of the United States. She commanded entire armies and navies and air forces. She didn’t have to take orders from that sonofabitch Pete Brand.

  Chapter 4

  “Iranians?” asked McDivott.

  Ripley nodded. Air Force One’s passenger manifest was displayed on his computer screen. “Al-Bashir and Said. They weren’t on the inbound manifest. Probably officials from Hosseini’s government.”

  “Why are they on Air Force One?”

  “You know Paulsen. Sucking up to the ragheads.”

  McDivott shook his head. He knew Paulsen. Sucking up to the ragheads was the essence of her foreign policy. He turned back to the sixty-inch plasma screen on the wall. In the middle of the North Atlantic display the two pulsing yellow symbols were nearly joined. The in-flight refueling would be finished in fifteen minutes.

  Ripley had been opposed to using the static fuel. Removing the President was one thing. Downing an Air Force airplane with everyone aboard was another. If the world ever learned that they’d ordered the transfer of the CAFEM-301 to the President’s airplane, they could all be tried as assassins.

  McDivott dismissed Ripley’s objections. Even if they later found traces of the CAFEM-301, it wouldn’t prove anything. The substance was carried in small amounts on most Air Force aircraft. It was a catalytically altered jet fuel that was so inert you couldn’t light it with a blow torch. It was supposed to be injected into the empty tanks of combat aircraft so they wouldn’t explode if they took a hit. The chemists who invented CAFEM-301 hadn’t anticipated that it might be fed to the engines of Air Force One one night over the North Atlantic.

  McDivott continued to stare at the symbols on the situational display. In the pulsing pattern of the symbols, he saw something emerging. An opportunity. He stared at the display another full minute. And it came to him.

  McDivott almost laughed. There it was, like a gift. A gift from Allah.

  He turned back to Ripley’s computer screen. Ripley still had the names highlighted: Al-Bashir and Said.

  McDivott pointed at the names. “They’re the ones.”

  Ripley looked up. “Excuse me?”

  “The Iranians on Air Force One.”

  Ripley stared, still not getting it. “I don’t follow what you—”

  “Terrorists, General Ripley. The ones responsible for the death of the President.”

  <>

  “Visual on the tanker,” called out Morganti.

  Brand looked up from the display panel. Through the windshield he saw the navigation lights and the gray shape of the KC-135 refueling ship. It was a militarized version of the old Boeing 707. The tanker was barely visible against the darkness of the western sky.

  One of the rules of Angel Swoop was that the in-flight refueling of Air Force One would be conducted in radio silence. The only communication between tanker and receiver would be with light signals.

  “Autopilot coming off.” Brand pressed the red disconnect button on the yoke.

  They were sliding
up behind the tanker. Brand could see the refueling boom extending like a stinger from the tanker’s tail cone. Near the end of the boom were the two vanes which the boom operator moved to steer the boom to the receptacle in Air Force One’s nose.

  This was the tricky part. Brand had to place the 747 directly behind and beneath the tanker. He would maintain that position—no wobbling or oscillating—until the refueling was complete.

  The long swept wings of the KC-135 filled up the windscreen. Brand saw the boom inching toward them, swaying slightly in the slipstream, seeking the opened refueling receptacle in the nose of the 747. The boom wobbled once, then went rigid. In the cockpit, they heard a clunk.

  “Contact,” said Morganti.

  A few seconds passed. From the flight engineer’s station Sergeant Switzer said, “Good connection. We have fuel transfer.”

  <>

  Chief Master Sergeant Bruce DeWitt emerged from the lower avionics bay. He took the stairway to the second level—the main cabin area—then continued to the upper deck, which housed the cockpit and the communications compartment. DeWitt nodded to the Secret Service agent stationed in the passageway outside the cockpit, then he opened the door with his key.

  The cockpit was dark, barely illuminated by dim red lighting. All eyes—those of the three pilots and Switzer, the senior flight engineer—were riveted on the object in the windshield. The gray mass of the KC-135 tanker.

  Switzer glanced at DeWitt. “Did you find the problem?”

  “I reset the UHF module. If that doesn’t fix it, then we’ll have to do without it.”

  Switzer shrugged and returned his attention to the refueling operation. The matter of one inoperative UHF—ultra high frequency—radio was insignificant. Air Force One had four of them, plus half a dozen radios of different wave lengths.

  DeWitt knew that Switzer, being senior and an asshole, would have questions. He’d want to know why it took DeWitt fifteen minutes to reset the module, a procedure that required one button push. DeWitt had answers. He didn’t care whether Switzer believed them or not. What happened next would be blamed on static electricity. Any evidence to the contrary would be covered up by a Capella team after they landed.