Line of Succession: A Thriller

by William Tyree

  The Pakistani and the sympathizer settled into a trailer park near Creech Air Force base about 35 miles north of Las Vegas. They lived off baked beans, white bread and five-a-day prayers. They spent the rest of the time hitting every 12-step program in the northern Las Vegas suburbs.

  It didn’t take long for Carver to surmise what the pair was doing there. Creech was home to America’s unmanned aircraft program, where hundreds of Air Force pilots reported to virtual cockpits to fly Predator drones around the clock, attacking militants in the field with nearly supernatural weaponry in theatres as far away as Afghanistan. The war had been on for years. But unlike their counterparts deployed overseas, they would then return to the air-conditioned safety of their families and living rooms.

  At least most of them did. Although the battles took place far from the threat of enemy fire, the pilots’ power and responsibilities were nearly God-like. Pinned-down units in the field relied on them to spot enemy ambushes miles above the earth and destroy hostile militants in pitch-black darkness. Villagers planting roadside bombs had to be snuffed out while in the act. Attacks on remote bases had to be repelled with unforgiving vengeance. And there were the inevitable civilian casualties. Mothers, out of their minds with grief, trying to find a child’s right arm in a pile of rubble. All of it caught on camera in high-definition. All of it available for replay.

  It didn’t take long before a drone pilot with shattered nerves wandered into an AA meeting in a North Las Vegas church basement. As the 32-year-old Captain stood, introduced himself and began sharing the horrors of his occupation, the sympathizer sat in the corner, studying the prey that had suddenly flown into his web.

  By 2 a.m., the pilot was gagged and bound in a van on his way to Mexico. The Pakistani planned to torture the pilot and extract information that might help insurgents in the Afpak mountains evade the deadly drone attacks. When he was no longer useful, they would toss his body in a ditch and cover him with calcium oxide powder so that the bloodhounds would never find him.

  But Agent Carver, who, like the Pakistani, had never in his life had a drink, had also been present at the AA meeting. Now he was in a chopper high over the desert. It had taken a great deal of trust in his team to allow the pilot to be abducted. He had to allow the operation to play out a little longer. If there were other Jihadists in the area, Carver wanted to know about them.

  Near Barstow, the Pakistani decided that the risk in smuggling the pilot into Mexico was too great. He called an audible and broke into an abandoned warehouse to begin the interrogation. Carver’s team moved in. Within the hour, the Pakistani and the sympathizer were on their way to a classified detention center halfway across the world, and the pilot was on his way to a hospital to be treated for shock.

  Carver’s team celebrated with a night on the town in Sin City that tested their immune system for days to come.

  Not Carver. He didn’t like to party. Instead, he rewarded himself with eight hours of uninterrupted sleep in a quiet Ramada Inn outside the city. The next evening he hitched a redeye aboard a cargo plane bound for Langley AFB. It was there on the tarmac that he was met by a pair of uniformed Secret Service officers, sent by Speers to bring him to the White House.

  Twenty-five minutes later he entered the Eisenhower Building, adjacent to the West Wing, where Speers sat behind a massive mahogany desk. The Secret Service agent shut the office door behind Carver and stood outside in the hallway.

  Speers stood, leaned across the desktop and shook Carver’s hand.

  “The great Agent Carver,” he said. “It’s a pleasure.”

  “I guess news travels fast.”

  Speers sat and rubbed his Van Dyke goatee. “News?”

  “The operation in Nevada,” Carver said. “I assumed that’s why you called me here.”

  Speers gestured for Carver to sit. Carver did, but not before angling his chair toward the corner. He never sat with his back to a door.

  Speers seemed amused. “So you think you’re here to get a medal? Is that it?”

  The glow of victory that had surrounded Agent Carver suddenly evaporated. He folded himself into the low-slung chair and scanned the Chief’s desktop for a clue as to the purpose of the visit. The desk was bare except for a small computer, some empty candy wrappers near the desk phone and two manila folders.

  “I apologize,” Speers said. “I only get briefed on the big ops.”

  Jackass, Carver thought. As if the abduction of a drone pilot on American soil wasn’t huge. He crossed his legs and felt a bead of sweat forming on his brow. The air conditioners in the ancient building were no match for the hundred-degree weather outside.

  “We’re going to be joined by someone from NSA momentarily,” Speers said.

  “May I ask why?”

  “You’ve both been chosen for a special assignment.”

  Carver didn’t like the sound of this. He had been in the CIA long enough to know that the White House communicated its needs directly to the agency directors. They didn’t just go pulling in field operatives fresh off a mission without going through the chain of command.

  “You’ll need to sign some paperwork.” Speers opened a manila folder containing some documents bearing the Presidential letterhead. He plucked one of the docs from the pile and pushed it across the desk. Carver scanned the first paragraph. It was a letter of resignation from the CIA.

  Carver found himself suddenly out of breath. “You want me to resign?”

  “What I want is what the President wants.”

  “What exactly is it that the President wants? Does he want me in the Secret Service? The DIA? What?”

  Speers sighed. He opened his desk drawer, pulled out a purple lollipop, and offered it to Carver, who refused the candy.

  The intercom buzzed. Speers pressed the button and grunted into it. A pleasant voice chirped back on the other side. “Meagan O’Keefe from NSA is here to see you.”

  “Send her in.”

  O’Keefe entered, wearing a navy suit that flattered her bust. She looked as bewildered as Carver felt. He stood, reached for her hand and shook it firmly. “Blake Carver, CIA.”

  “Meagan O’Keefe. NSA.”

  The Chief of Staff did not stand. He smiled and motioned for O’Keefe to sit in the remaining chair. He opened the second folder on his desk and presented it to her. The form on top contained her letter of resignation from the National Security Agency. She let out a small gasp.

  “There, there,” Speers said. “Neither of you should be upset. This is a kind of promotion.”

  “A kind of promotion or an actual promotion?” O’Keefe said.

  “Well, you’ll work for me, which means the White House. But not officially. Officially speaking, you’ll be on your own.”

  Now Speers scratched his overgrown beard and peered at Lieutenant Flynn through the observation glass. “The investigation was supposed to focus on Ulysses,” Speers said.

  He referred to Ulysses USA, a private security contractor that, by the DOD’s own estimates, now made up a full third of the U.S. military presence around the world. Ulysses had been founded by a former Blackwater exec during the second Iraq war. In addition to the Department of Defense, Ulysses counted several multinational corporations as clients. Ulysses USA stock – its ticker symbol was UUSA – was trading at $119 per share.

  But Ulysses had become a problem for the President. The company had slowly earned a nasty rep as indiscriminate mercenaries that killed not only for U.S. interests, but for those of the company’s shareholders.

  “The investigation is focusing on Ulysses,” Carver insisted. “Lieutenant Flynn here’s been double-dipping.”

  Speers turned. “Explain.”

  “In addition to his government salary, the Lieutenant received three payments from Ulysses via various fronts in the past eight months. All deposited to accounts in the Caymans.”

  “Start from the top. How’d you even find this guy?”

  O’Keefe slipped on her black wir
e-framed glasses and leaned against a metal tool cabinet. “We started working up personas on likely arms smugglers several weeks ago. We decided to look for any government employees between a G-5 and a G-12 that had paid cash for new luxury vehicles in the past year. We got four thousand matches. We filtered those results by military personnel. That dropped it to about a thousand suspects. Then we narrowed it to those with access to specific weaponry that had been reported missing or stolen in the past year. There were just two matches.”

  Speers smiled at the ex-NSA cryptographer. “I knew we hired you for a reason.”

  “But wait,” Carver quipped, “You still haven’t heard the punch line.”

  “Three days ago,” O’Keefe went on, “Private Matt Doheny died in an explosion about 20 miles from Fort Bragg, where Lieutenant Flynn had significant access to military weaponry. It’s listed as a suicide, but here’s something that wasn’t in the DOD report: Doheny was transporting twenty Stinger missiles.”

  Speers rolled his eyes. “That’s all been documented. The Stingers were resupplies for the Indonesia campaign. Maybe you geniuses never thought of this, but our Army can’t kill bad guys unless grunts like Private Doheny haul weapons from point A to point B.”

  Carver cut in: “Without filing a standard transport authorization form? In the middle of the night? The Lieutenant here sent Private Doheny off-base in a Humvee loaded with Stingers, and he made damn sure they never got to our units in Indonesia.”

  “Prove it.”

  O’Keefe picked up a transcript of a voicemail dated three days earlier and handed it to Speers. “That’s the transcription of the voicemail Doheny left his ex-girlfriend that night,” O’Keefe explained.

  She gave Speers a moment to process the transcript, which mentioned Lieutenant Flynn by name. Then she handed him the forensics report. “I had forensics go over the blast area again and again. No trace of any of the unique composites used in a Stinger missile.”

  “Meaning the Stingers are still out there somewhere,” Carver added.

  Speers looked through the glass at Lieutenant Flynn. “So you’re telling me Lieutenant Flynn has been selling arms to Ulysses?”

  O’Keefe shook her head. “We’re saying the Lieutenant directed an unauthorized weapons transport. We have no hard evidence that he was preparing to sell them.”

  “Yet,” Carver added.

  “Stay out of this,” Speers said. He turned back to O’Keefe. “What are the chances that Flynn’s buyer isn’t Ulysses? Could he be planning to use the weapons?”

  O’Keefe bit her bottom lip. She wasn’t used to having bureaucrats breathing down her neck before she had even analyzed all the data. “We don’t know his intentions yet.”

  Speers’ imagination was already running wild. This brought up an entirely new set of issues. “Could you shoot down a commercial airliner with one of those Stingers?”

  “Why stop at one?” Carver cut in. “They’re missing twenty from Fort Bragg alone.”

  The Chief’s eyebrows furrowed with worry. “What now?” Speers had made no secret of the fact that he was unqualified to direct this investigation, a point he himself had made repeatedly in several self-deprecating conversations with President Hatch. But the unpopular President had enemies right in his own cabinet, and many more in the Pentagon. It came down to a matter of trust, and there was no one the President trusted more than Speers. The investigation was his, whether he liked it or not.

  Carver sat down and folded his hands. What he was about to suggest was the real reason he’d woken Speers up. “Look,” he said, “maybe at NSA you’d continue to build a case for weeks or months on end. But at the Company, we’d assume that the clock was ticking on something big, and we’d pull out all the stops.”

  “You mean torture,” Speers said with disgust.

  “Not technically,” Carver said, referring to the Supreme Court’s rather loose definitions of the myriad ways to inflict suffering on a human being. Although President Hatch had scored a victory for the left by putting a stop to water boarding, there was still a lot of wiggle room in the Court’s interpretation of prisoners’ rights.

  “I can’t support it.”

  “Imagine that a week from now, one of those Stingers is used against an airliner,” Carver said. “Two hundred people die, including children. Would you be able to forgive yourself for not doing everything in your power to stop it?”

  Speers crunched the lollipop with his back molars and pulled out the stick. “You’ve made your point.”

  “So?”

  “I won’t rule it out. But first I’d like the satisfaction of talking to Lieutenant Flynn.”

  “You?” Carver said.

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t risk the exposure. If he recognizes your voice…”

  “He won’t.”

  Carver wasn’t the only experienced interrogator in the room. Before joining then-Governor Hatch’s staff as General Counsel, Speers had worked as a district attorney. He grew famous in Virginia after his line of questioning prompted a key mob witness to urinate in his pants in federal court.

  Carver pulled a tiny ear microphone out of his pocket and placed it in Speers’ right ear. “You’re the boss in there,” he said, “but I’m going to be talking to you.”

  The Chief of Staff entered the ten-by-eight-foot soundproof cell. He approached Flynn apprehensively, like a toddler working up the courage to sit on Santa’s lap. The last time Speers had been this close to a naked man was in his high school P.E. class, and the stench of Lieutenant Flynn’s body odor – twenty hours of nervous perspiration and indigestion – hit hard.

  In the observation room, O’Keefe sat down to watch the spectacle through the two-way mirror, resting her feet on a two-drawer file cabinet. Carver sat beside her, talking into the microphone, his voice crackling in Speers’ ear: “Get closer,” he urged. “He might bite, but he’s not poisonous.”

  “Who’s there?” the blindfolded Lieutenant Flynn rasped. Speers knew better than to answer fully. It was important that the President have full immunity. So far, he hadn’t even disclosed the details of the ongoing investigation to the President so that the Chief Executive could never be held personally responsible for the team’s actions.

  “I’m a federal attorney,” Speers told the soldier. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it also wasn’t a lie. Speers hadn’t practiced law in years, but he was still technically a member of the Virginia State Bar.

  Flynn’s pectorals quaked as he trembled. “You gotta help me,” he begged. “They can’t hold me like this. I’ve got a wife and kids.”

  “Lieutenant Flynn,” Speers said with sudden empathy in his voice, “I’ve had the misfortune of witnessing the darker side of intelligence operations. You don’t look like someone who could survive it.”

  Flynn mumbled through quivering lips.

  Speers went on: “I’ll have to fight to even get permission to notify your family that you’re in custody. A battle that I’ll probably lose, by the way. From the looks of you, we should start with getting a doctor to make a house call, just to make sure you’re okay, maybe dispense something for the nerves. If I can talk them into letting you sleep, I can see about contacting your family. But I can’t convince these guys to give an inch unless we have something to offer.” Speers could practically see the cogs in Flynn’s brain smoking. “Now gimmie something I can sell.”

  The Lieutenant swallowed hard. “Rapture Run.”

  “Rapture Run?” Speers repeated. “Sounds like a death metal band.”

  “Forget it,” Flynn said. “Forget I said it.”

  Carver spoke into Speers’ ear microphone. “Stay on that,” he said. “That key phrase has been floating around the intel database for a few months, but we can’t get any context. Ask him where he heard it.”

  “Come on,” Speers told the Lieutenant. “Tell me what Rapture Run is, or where you heard it, and I’ll go back in and fight like hell for you. Promise.”

&nb
sp; Flynn’s next utterance came up like a blast of vomit: “SECDEF Jackson.”

  SECDEF was military jargon for the Secretary of Defense. “Jackson?” Speers said. “As in Defense Secretary Dexter P. Jackson?”

  “You heard me,” Flynn said. “There was a supply order for Rapture Run with his signature. Worth billions.”

  “And what is Rapture Run?”

  Flynn shook his head. “I dunno. Has something to do with USOC. Something they’re building. Really skunkworks stuff. I’m not sure what.”

  “USOC?”

  Flynn laughed. “Ulysses Strike Operations Command.”

  “And USOC does what?”

  “Covert assassinations. Now help me, dammit!”

  A smile broke across Speers’ face. Over the past year, Secretary Jackson had become a hostile force within the President’s cabinet, but the President didn’t have the political capital to oust someone so popular with the Pentagon. “Thank you, Lieutenant. You did well. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Speers rejoined Carver and O’Keefe in the observation room. The Chief was jumping out of his skin with excitement. “The Lieutenant just implicated a sitting cabinet secretary,” he gloated. He used his sleeve to wipe the sweat from his face. He turned to Carver. “We’ve gotta wake the President.”

  Monroe, West Virginia

  5:30 a.m.

  The first hints of sunrise rose over Monroe Gatlin Raceway. Tiny shards of glass and metal, crushed into the asphalt by so many local hot-rods, shimmered like a hundred thousand tiny emeralds. The grandstands had long been sold off and weeds had sprouted on the sun-cracked drag strip. Faruq Ahmed, needing a private avenue to practice his mission several weeks ago, had gained access with nothing more than a bolt cutter.

  Now the 29-year-old Yemeni got out of the Ford F-450 commercial-grade truck and knelt toward the eastern sky. Even at this early hour, his face felt the heat of the rising sun. The ribbed tank top he wore was soaked with perspiration. He prayed silently for several minutes, rocking back and forth on his knees. Then he got back into the vehicle to focus on the matter at hand. This was his final opportunity to practice. Later today, he would do the real thing.