by Malcom James
Shock coursed through the room. Wary glances were exchanged. Secretary Masters spoke up. “Sir, what is this intelligence exactly?”
“I told you, it’s top secret, the most. I can’t reveal the source.”
Masters just stared at him.
“But sir, I’m the secretary of defense, and I, and the people in this room, for the most part anyway, we all have the highest levels of clearance. It would be very helpful to know what we are dealing with, to ensure it’s credible,” he added.
“Of course it’s credible, Jerry, I am the damn president, and I am telling you, am I not?” Franks barked.
“Yes sir, you are the president.”
“Good. Now, I want a first strike, Pyong Chang, the ‘Bloody Nose’ scenario you gamed out.”
“Pyong Chang is South Korea, sir, where the Olympics were. Do you mean Pyongyang?”
“Pyong yang, ping pong, I don’t fucking care, this is my sacred duty as president, to protect this country, am I right?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then start Operation Bloody Nose immediately. Decapitate the leadership. Take out Little Rocket Boy, before he can attack us.”
Franks had come around the desk, and the dark energy he was sending off was hitting the room like waves. Vice President Price stepped forward and in his calm, preacher-like manner, tried to referee as they stood at the brink of oblivion.
“Mr. President, I’m sure your intel is very good and very secret, but maybe we should take a minute to compare it to what our teams know?” he asked, as he looked at the directors of national intelligence and the CIA. They nodded their heads yes, afraid to utter what they were thinking. Maybe Dave, with help from God, could handle this?
“I am telling you, Dave, and all of you, as your president, I will not allow those slant-eyed fuckers to strike us, initiate Bloody Nose and that’s a fucking order!”
The vice president turned to find a sea of stone faces staring back. No one knew what to do. Harold Franks was president. Alexa stepped up, and in her patronizing princess voice, reminded them “you know my father takes his job very seriously, and when he means it, he means it.”
That was too much for Gen. Dawkins. He was the only one in the room in a military uniform bedecked with medals, of which Franks had no true understanding, but definitely respected the look.
“No disrespect, sir, but why the hell is she here? This is a classified national security meeting of the highest sensitivity. We are talking about potentially millions of lives at stake, on both sides.”
Franks inhaled loudly through his nostrils and stepped up to the Chairman.
“You know I respect you, Tommy, very strongly, but Alexa is here because she supplied the intelligence, isn’t that right, honey?” Franks said as he turned to her. She blinked for a second, like an ancient, vacuum-tube computer processing a punch card and struggling to calculate the answer.
“Absolutely, Daddy,” she finally said with a robotic smile, which, rather than charm anyone, simply confirmed she had zero recognition of the gravity of the words coming out of her pretty mouth.
“If we strike first, we can save America,” Franks said. Everyone was dumbstruck but silent.
“Gentleman, you heard the president’s orders, step out and alert the bombers to go on full alert,” Hartford said to Dawkins, Masters and the VP. They saw what he was saying as he was looking each in the eyes; they nodded in agreement and moved toward the door.
***
The software blinked “data recovery complete” just as the Honda pulled up to Finnegan’s, its blinking “Guinness” sign in the window the only hint of its presence in the otherwise dark neighborhood.
“This is it?” Natalie said under her breath.
“This is it,” Eli replied as he slipped the driver another hundred, closed his laptop and jumped out. He’d been praying the bar was open, counting on the fact that it was in the middle of nowhere, well beyond the range of the National Guard patrols, and operated in its own little dimension, just outside of everyday reality.
She followed him inside, and they saw Al wiping the bar, and two dudes shooting pool in the back. The TV was tuned to drag racing, nothing else apparently happening in the world.
“Perfect,” Eli said, and he guided Natalie to a table in the corner. He opened his laptop and scanned the data recovery results. The program presented a list of recovered, partially-recovered, and unrecoverable data and files, marked in green, yellow and red status. “11 videos, 486 photos, 1,212 other files” showed as recovered or partially-recovered.
He began playing the videos, one at a time. A video of Franks on Fox News, shot from his phone; he must have been filming himself being interviewed. A daytime shot, as he descended the stairs of a plane onto the tarmac at a rally, a large crowd cheering in a hangar. A video of Alexa speaking to a huge crowd, shot from the side of the stage, what looked like the Republican Convention. A video of a blond porn star who claimed an affair with Franks, giving some guy a blowjob. A video of TV monitors showing the cable news broadcasts in the middle of the evening of November 8, 2016, as the election was underway, just hours before the unexpected result. And then, Eli’s breathing froze.
“This is it,” he whispered to Natalie, and she swung her chair around to see. He made sure no one could view his screen from behind.
It was exactly as he remembered. All the times when he questioned whether he was losing it, as if maybe it had only been his own bad dream, were washed away in a split second, as they watched the beautiful young girl enter the picture at the command of some unseen Russian woman’s voice, and sit at the edge of the bed for a long, tense moment… then take something from her purse, and put it to her nose… inhale it, then put it back, and wipe away a tear… smearing her mascara in the process. Franks entered the shot in his white robe, the unmistakable hair and voice.
“Boy you are a pretty one, aren’t you?” he said as he closed in on her. Natalie watched in hypnotized horror as Franks commanded the person offscreen to “leave us” and moved to the bedside in his robe, then dropped it to the floor, revealing the same rotund flesh she had just been exposed to.
Eli forced himself to fast-forward the video, to finally confront the source of his nightmares. In the middle of the clip, Franks was on top of her, her skirt pulled up, her arms above her head and tied to the headboard with ropes, and he was grinding away on her thin frame, her head turned away from him and toward the hidden camera, her clear blue eyes wide open, staring into space, as tears dripped down.
“Too bad you’ll never see how pretty you look underneath me,” he groaned, and then he slapped her face and screamed “pay attention to me, you blind little bitch!”
“Shut it off!” Natalie screamed, and Eli did, as Al looked over from the bar.
“What’s going on?”
Natalie turned to him and blurted out “Everything’s fine, sorry. I’m fine, really,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes.
25
The Twenty-Fifth
While Gen. Hartford and Ken Miller and Alexa and Bradley kept the raging president at bay in the Oval, the vice president, the chairman of the joint chiefs and the secretary of defense pulled the entire Cabinet, plus the speaker of the house and the president pro tempore, into the Cabinet Room down the hall.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Tommy “Tomahawk” Dawkins explained the situation to the president’s Cabinet: the president had issued a direct order for a nuclear first strike to counter a supposed strike from North Korea, but no one seemed to know what the “secret intelligence” was the president was basing it on, except for the president, and supposedly his daughter.
The CIA and national intelligence directors had frantically called their deputies, and confirmed there was no known source for this intelligence. The watch command just below them on the ground floor also confirmed there were no reports of missile launches, or any other imminent threats against the nation.
“He’s out of his fucking mind,” said Secretary of State Tex Dickerson. He’d never been a fan of Franks, but they had a mutually-beneficial understanding when it came to Russia and oil.
“What does the law say?” asked the secretary of education.
“We’re only to follow a legal order from the president,” said Dawkins.
“Is it legal?” asked the vice president.
“No it’s not legal, Congress hasn’t declared war,” said Speaker Allen.
“A first strike to prevent an attack doesn’t require a Declaration of War, it’s defensive, ” said Defense Secretary Masters.
“But there’s no attack that we know of,” countered the secretary of labor.
“This is insane, are you telling us he can launch a nuclear weapon and we can’t stop him?” asked the treasury secretary. He was a weasel of a man who had used Franks for his own gain, like they all had, but he was now terrified of what might happen. He had a lot of prime real estate in California, a likely target if North Korea could get anything out of its silos.
“I can’t see any legal way of stopping him as long as he is president, it’s a legal order, and he seems convinced he knows an attack is coming. He is the commander in chief,” said Dawkins.
“You said ‘as long as he is president’ — what if he were not president?”
“There’s no time for impeachment, we just went through that. It failed,” said Speaker Allen.
“The 25th Amendment. If the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet determine that the president is unable to fulfill his duties under the Constitution, then the vice president would become the acting president,” said Dawkins.
Vice President Price looked at all of them. He seemed like a rock of rectitude and certainty in a storm of shit blowing all around them.
“This is a legal order from the president. What if he’s right? What if an attack is imminent? We’re going to override him and put this nation at risk? Are we really going to take that chance?” asked Attorney General Shelby Butler.
“I agree, invoking the 25th when we have no proof of his incapacity, in a time of possible attack, and while the nation is breaking apart from within, that would be extraordinarily reckless,” said the dim-witted secretary of energy.
“You’re right, Mac,” said the secretary of treasury, shifting his position. He didn’t really have a position, or a spine to mount one on.
“Okay, we need a roll call here to see where we stand. All those Cabinet members in favor of invoking the 25th immediately, raise your hand,” said Dawkins.
A few hands went up immediately, defense and state, then there was a long, tense round of looks as they scanned each other, and a few more went up. Of the fifteen Cabinet members and the vice president, only five raised their hands. Eleven did not.
“Well, there you have it,” said a dejected Dawkins. “I hope you all know what this means,” he added, scanning them again. But not a single hand that wasn’t already in the air went up.
The chairman turned to the secretary of defense. “Get the football,” he said. The “football” was the leather satchel carrying the nuclear launch authorization codes being held by a tough Marine down the hall, never far from the president.
Just as the secretary of defense moved to the door, every mobile phone in the room received a message from an unknown number. The unknown number was a very-highly placed FBI agent, who had access to a classified list of government phones, including every member of the president’s Cabinet. The message contained no text, but it did contain a video attachment.
They opened the attachment in unison, and stood horror-struck as it played. As the video progressed, faces turned pale, audible gasps filled the room, and phones dropped on the table and floor in disgust.
Franks and his children in the Oval Office next door had no idea what was happening in the Cabinet Room, or that Vice President Price had just suggested “maybe we should take the vote on invoking the 25th one more time.”
***
“It’s done,” came back the message from Tate on the MyMask app on Eli’s laptop. “Cross your fingers.”
Eli and Natalie looked at each other. She was shaking, almost imperceptibly. He began to consider what she had just done. He didn’t know for sure how far it went, but he could imagine.
She looked back at him, and saw the same desperate, exhausted, faraway look she had.
“I’ll get us a drink,” Eli said.
At the bar, he ordered two Irish whiskies, and asked Al if he wouldn’t mind switching from drag racing to the news.
“What is it now?” Al grumbled as he poured, then clicked on the remote. Fox News, one of the last networks still broadcasting, was running uninterrupted coverage of the “Get Out Of Jail Free” celebration.
Natalie pulled up a stool. “I wonder what ever became of her,” she said, almost to herself. Eli sat Franks’ Samsung on the bar next to his shot glass.
“Well, at least with this maybe the FBI can trace who sent it. It’s a safe bet whoever it was knows if she’s still alive.”
Natalie considered it.
“You think it’ll be enough to finally stop him?”
Eli stared at the TV for a long moment, then turned back to her.
“If they ever get the courage to put the country first,” he said. They looked at each other. His eyes said there were no guarantees.
Minutes later, the broadcast cut to a live shot of a motorcade of black vehicles and police cars with red and blue flashing lights, departing the White House gates. “MAJOR DISTURBANCE AT WHITE HOUSE…REPORTS OF POSSIBLE COUP UNDERWAY…” scrolled across the screen, as the motorcade crawled through the dark city streets.
Here’s to you, Dad, Eli said to himself, and then he downed the last of the whiskey in his glass. It burned in a strangely satisfying way.
Afterword
This edition of American Fascist was published independently by the author. If you enjoyed the book, please pass it on, and consider leaving a positive review wherever you acquired it.
For more information visit malcomjames.com
