Line of Succession: A Thriller

by William Tyree

  “There ain’t no delegation,” the soldier said. He spat yellow phlegm dangerously close to Speers’ feet.

  This made zero sense. Speers whipped out his cell phone and said “CIC” into the receiver. The phone’s voice recognition software dialed the President’s mobile, but the call went straight to voicemail. He dialed the Vice President. It also went straight to voicemail. Next, he tried Dex Jackson and got the same result. He was about to try Eva when the Ulysses soldier snatched the cell phone from his hand, removed the battery, and returned the now-useless handset to Speers.

  Following his long-held practice not to piss off anyone with a gun, Speers didn’t dare protest further.

  “Wait here,” the soldier said. He went back to the Bradley. Speers saw him pull up the vehicle’s black jumbo-size phone receiver and talk into it. Several minutes went by. Speers leaned against the hood of his rental car. He longed for a shower and change of clothes.

  One of the soldiers lit a cigarette. Speers’ lips actually puckered. It had been the President himself who had given him the discipline and motivation to quit during the first term. The President had given him six cases of lollipops for Christmas that year to keep his mouth occupied. “Suck on these,” the President had said, playing into Speers’ weakness for sweets.

  “I’ll have to marry a dentist,” Speers told him.

  “Better her than the undertaker.”

  Finally, the soldier called to him and waved him toward the gates. “That was DOD,” the soldier said, moving aside a row of razor wire so that Speers could pass. “We’re relocating you to Site R.”

  Knowing nothing of the other attacks, Speers wondered what had prompted the President to take to the bunker, and weirder still, why he was finding out about it from a lowly Ulysses MP. He was on the first-team evac list. “Okay then,” he said, “Let’s go. Where’s my chariot?”

  “You’re lookin’ at it,” the soldier said, pointing at the Bradley.

  The other soldier popped his head up. “He ain’t riding in here,” he told his colleague, eyeing Speers’ clothes. “Check out those blast clothes. Guarantee if you take that tie to the lab you’ll find fifty people’s DNA on it.”

  Speers hadn’t thought of this. He had conveniently assumed the ash covering his clothes, body and car was nothing more than tiny bits of exploded masonry, insulation, wood and the like. But the soldier was right. Much as it horrified him to think of it, the ash was undoubtedly composed not only of building materials, but also tiny bits of human skin, bone and blood.

  “Here ya go,” the other soldier said as he mercifully tossed a gym bag at Speers. “There’s a pair of sweats and a t-shirt in there. Go on. It’s okay. Those clothes ain’t been worked out in yet.”

  Baltimore

  Hamilton Arms Apartment 309

  5:35 p.m.

  They were going to kill her. Of that, Angie Jackson was certain. She sat tied up with her back against the wall. Mrs. Defense Secretary Dexter P. Jackson wasn’t scared. She was far too angry to feel any fear. Dear God, she thought. Do what you want with me. Make sure LeBron is safe. Do what you want with my husband. He’s yours to judge.

  Apartment 309’s windows were covered in tin foil. There was no furniture in the living room except for a couch that had been found in a dumpster outside, and the little TV, which sat on top of a rusted milk crate. CNN played endless live coverage of the crisis, which the network had already branded: A Day of Terror, complete with an animated red, white and blue logo that played the opening notes of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” each time it swooshed onscreen. The tag line: America Mourns.

  Elvir sat next to her eating from a can of sardines while Ali slept in the next room with the rest of the crew. Angie sized up Elvir’s lean frame, which was wrapped in a too-tight wife beater t-shirt, and guessed his weight at about a buck sixty. Her eyes searched his arms and shoulders for some recognizable tattoo or mole, but all she saw was black hair. Elvir had to be the hairiest man she had ever seen. She took in all these details and committed them to memory. In the event that God spared her life, Angie vowed do her best to identify her captors and bring them to justice.

  The assassin felt her staring. His eyes broke from the TV.

  “Hungry?” he said in Bosnian-accented English. Angie nodded. He scooted closer and pulled back the tape covering her mouth. He spooned a sardine into her in a dispassionate, measured rhythm.

  They had not planned on taking a prisoner. In fact, the client had said nothing about the Secretary of Defense’s family being aboard the little sport fishing boat. Dex Jackson was supposed to be alone. In the heat of the moment, Elvir had decided to save Angie’s life for fear that he would not collect his money otherwise. In Bosnia, where he had been a teenager during the civil war, there were sometimes financial penalties for inflicting collateral damage.

  Besides, his employer had proved to be extremely particular. Given the very unusual nature of the assignment, he felt sure that they would not want Mrs. Jackson to die. He had vague hopes of earning some type of bonus for his heroism.

  Suddenly, his prisoner’s face was on live television. The anchor on TV put on a sympathetic face: “Though our focus has been on the drama of the multiple attacks today, our thoughts at this hour, by the way, are of course with all the victim’s families. In a new development, we have word that Secretary of Defense Dexter Jackson and his son LeBron Thomas Jackson are at Bethesda Naval Hospital being treated for a routine medical evaluation after gunmen attacked their boat in Chesapeake Bay. The White House has confirmed that his wife was killed in the attack.”

  Angie recognized the photo of herself. It had been taken at the Foreign Correspondents’ Press Dinner a year earlier.

  Elvir turned up the volume. “You see?” he said. “Everyone thinks you are dead.” They continued watching as the anchor eulogized her, detailing her years working as a policy analyst in the Pentagon before meeting and ultimately marrying Dex Jackson. “You should be happy,” Elvir said. “He’s saying such nice things. How does it feel?”

  Angie didn’t have to think about her answer. “Like being buried alive.”

  Over West Virginia

  8:45 p.m.

  The Ulysses helicopter approached slowly, uncertainly. The pilot was under strict orders – no running lights, no searchlights and no radio. The sliver of waxing moon illuminated nothing but a vast sea of cornstalks. Dex and LeBron were still in their boating clothes. “I thought you said we were close,” Dex croaked.

  “Sorry, Mister Secretary,” the pilot said. “We’re hovering over the coordinates CENTAF sent us, but I can’t see anything.”

  Nearly as soon as he spoke a helipad lit up directly beneath them. Thousands of cornstalks fanned as they descended. By the helipad’s dim glow, Dex could make out the outline of a tiny building surrounded by farmland. There didn’t seem to be any roads.

  The helipad dimmed as soon as the chopper landed. Two Ulysses soldiers wearing night vision goggles appeared and opened the doors. “Welcome Mister Secretary,” they said as Dex and LeBron exited. In near darkness, the soldiers led them down a short, narrow path lined on both sides by cornstalks. There they entered the concrete structure and stood in front of two chrome elevator doors. There were no exterior buttons. Dex put his hand on his son’s shoulder as they waited. The boy shrugged him off.

  The doors opened. General Wainewright stood before them, wearing the same elegantly decorated military dress uniform that he had worn to the White House earlier that day. “Welcome to Rapture Run,” he said.

  Dex and LeBron stepped inside the elevator. The soldiers held the pilot back, although there would have been plenty of room for everyone. The doors closed and the elevator began to descend.

  Dex braced himself as the elevator vibrated and groaned ever lower. “Where the hell are we?”

  “This is Site R.”

  “Site R? What happened to Raven Rock?”

  “You’ll find that this facility is a major upgrade.”r />
  Dex grunted disapprovingly. “How is it that the Secretary of Defense doesn’t know about the construction of a new emergency bunker?”

  “Don’t take it personally. Google Maps doesn’t even know about it yet.”

  The elevator doors opened to reveal a cavernous underground defense operations center. The room was easily the length of a basketball court and three stories tall. Touch-screen monitors built into the walls tracked troop and weapons movements around the world. Dozens of uniformed Ulysses communications personnel sat at workstations around the room.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Jackson said. “It’s as big as NORAD.”

  “You have no idea. We carved the command room out of an old Cold War missile silo that the Soviets never got wind of. The facility joins up with a natural cave to the north and a retired coal mine ‘bout half a mile south. We could keep an entire brigade down here for years if we needed to.”

  Dex took note of all the Ulysses uniforms in the room. “General,” he said, “I don’t see many regular military personnel.”

  Wainewright smiled. “Dex, you’re a Republican. You of all people should appreciate that the private sector will outperform the public sector every single time.”

  The General motioned for Corporal Hammond, one of the few regular military personnel in the bunker, to come to Dex’s assistance. Hammond carried a titanium briefcase with one hand and saluted with the other. “Secretary Jackson,” he beamed, knowing nothing of Angie Jackson’s disappearance into Chesapeake Bay. “Happy to see you safe and sound, sir.”

  Hammond. The imbecile that was responsible for all this. Dex clinched his fists and took a swing.

  Dex’s right hook connected with the Corporal’s left eyebrow, sending him to the deck with a rivulet of blood trickling into his eye.

  Wainewright shoved Dex backwards. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “This is the little prick that called me on the boat. He told me to stay put. That hesitation killed my wife.”

  “The Corporal here was just the messenger, Dex. He had no way of knowing.”

  Hammond got to his feet, wiped the blood out of his eye and swallowed hard. “I’m sorry about your loss,” he said. “I really had no idea.” The Corporal plopped the briefcase atop a workstation and opened it, revealing several dozen phones with the names of their owners written on sticky notes. “I’m afraid I need your phone, Mister Secretary.”

  “You don’t know when to quit, Corporal.”

  “He’s not trying to antagonize you,” the General explained. “There are no personal phones allowed down here. Not that you could get reception anyhow.”

  Jackson reached into his pocket, produced his phone, and grudgingly handed it over. LeBron’s phone – outfitted with little grips for playing video games, tucked into the carrying strap on his backpack – didn’t escape the Corporal’s prying eyes.

  “Sorry, kid,” Hammond told LeBron. “Rules are rules.”

  Dex’s jaw tightened. “He’s just a kid.”

  “Let him be,” Wainewright cut in. “He lost his mother today.”

  The Coal Mine

  8:47 p.m.

  After spending six gut-busting hours in a Ulysses Bradley armored vehicle that chugged along at sub-highway speeds, Julian Speers was led into an abandoned coal mine that had been fitted with blast-proof shielding. There the Ulysses soldier that had donated his gym clothes bid him good riddance and passed him off to a pair of MPs that led him down a long, gradually sloping tunnel. They passed through two additional sets of shielded doors and took an elevator and a rail car through what the MP described as the “ass end of the bunker.”

  They finally came to the Rapture Run command room. The cavernous operations center had the same awe-inspiring effect on him as it had on the other two hundred personnel that had first passed through its doors that day.

  Speers recognized Corporal Hammond, the little terrier of a man who often waited outside the White House cabinet room for General Wainewright during Security Council meetings. “Welcome to Rapture Run,” Hammond said with a smile. “I’ll need to check your phone.”

  The Corporal obviously didn’t recognize him. “I’m Julian –“

  “Speers. I know. You’re cleared to enter, Chief, but I’m afraid there are no exceptions to the policy on mobile devices.” The Corporal held out his hand for the phone.

  The Chief shook his head. “I’ve got data on this phone that is way above your security clearance.”

  Hammond leaned close and whispered into Speers’ ear. “Compliance with the rules is very important here. There is a zero tolerance policy.” Speers looked over his shoulder. He was surrounded by four armed Ulysses soldiers that were carefully observing his every move.

  Don’t piss off the guys with the guns, he reminded himself. Especially these guys. They don’t just have guns. They’ve also got stock options.

  As he surrendered his phone, he realized he had forgotten to call his neighbor, Ms. Tenningclaus. By now she was way out in Arizona, and the way this was going, those cats were going to have to catch their own dinner.

  The Corporal put Speers’ phone into the titanium briefcase that held several dozen others. He then led Speers through the command room toward the emergency NMCC. There, Speers recognized Major James Dobbs from CENTAF. Dobbs was supervising a small group of air traffic controllers. Speers left his chaperone and went to the mustachioed air traffic control czar.

  “Major Dobbs?” he said. “Julian Speers. We met last fall. You were testifying before the Armed Services Committee.”

  “I think everyone here knows who you are, Chief.” Dobbs looked Speers up and down, frowning at his track suit.

  “The President told me to meet him at Camp David,” Speers said. “When I got there they told me he’d never arrived. Nobody will give me a straight answer.”

  Dobbs turned to a junior officer. “Take the con. I’ll be back in five.”

  Dobbs took Speers by the arm and led him to an empty conference room adjacent to the command center. He shut the door. “What I’m about to tell you isn’t public knowledge. I haven’t even been debriefed yet.”

  The Chief of Staff sat down. He could tell by the look on Dobbs’ face that whatever story he was about to hear wouldn’t end well. His mouth seemed to fill up with cotton as he listened to the Major’s story. Dobbs described how he had generated a flight plan for Marine One that morning, and then tracked Marine One and its three identical decoys into the Maryland hills until they suddenly disappeared from radar. “I scrambled a pair of F-35s,” he said. “I notified General Wainewright.”

  “You said three choppers went down,” Speers interrupted. “That means one survived.”

  Dobbs shook his head. “You want to know if the President is alive. The answer is that I honestly don’t know. The NMCC took over communications with the surviving chopper on a secure channel. We weren’t even allowed to eavesdrop. Next thing we know, our entire squad of controllers was relocated here. We were told not to ask any questions.”

  “Was it the Iranians? “ Speers said.

  Dobbs was puzzled. “What Iranians?”

  “That’s the reason the President was going to Camp David. To meet the Iranian Ambassador. You see where I’m going with this. They request the meeting, then the Speaker of the House gets vaporized, then someone takes a shot at Marine One...” Speers tolerated Dobbs’ blank look for less than a second. “Don’t tell me nobody’s put that together yet.”

  “Chief, you’re mistaken. If there was an Iranian delegation en route to Camp David, I would’ve been told. Anytime foreign heads of state visit Camp David, we tighten up our air patrols. It’s protocol.”

  Speers held his weary face in his hands. “Okay. Besides you, who could’ve known the flight plan?”

  “Nobody. The flight plan isn’t decided until Marine One takes off. I request a plan, one is randomized from the Pentagon database, and then I communicate that orally to Marine One.”

  The Chief ha
d been on Marine One dozens of times, but he had never given much thought to the security procedures regarding flight plans. “What about the decoy pilots?”

  “The formation adapts to the flight plan mid-air. That way, even if an enemy catches onto a codename, there’s no time for them to get in place. We take no chances.”

  “It had to be rigged somehow. Was there anything unusual about today?”

  “I don’t think so, Chief. It worked just like always. I pushed a button and received the plan. But like I said, you didn’t hear the story from me. I’ve gotta get back to work.”

  Dobbs opened the door and headed back to the command room. Speers remained seated. His mind filled with more questions. The only thing he knew for sure was that it had only been twelve hours since he’d left the White House Security Council meeting. And in those twelve hours, the nation had come apart.

  Fort Campbell, Kentucky

  Standing outside the base’s screening room, Agent Carver could hear the voices of twenty-six unhappy contract linguists. On Carver’s orders, the linguists had been rounded up and flown into Fort Campbell under a clause that allowed the Feds to retain any former military employee contractor during a national emergency. Most of them had families that were upset about being uprooted during the crisis.

  Carver wasn’t exactly psyched to see them either. They were the same virtual team that had tried and failed to crack the coded transmissions Carver had given them during the investigation. Still, except for Nico, they were all he had.

  It had been more than twelve hours since Carver had heard from Speers. Without the benefit of the Chief’s input, Carver had decided to continue pursuing the original investigation. If nothing else, he wanted to explore the possibility that Lieutenant Flynn might have had ties to the assassins.

  “Hello Word Nerds,” Carver said as he entered the room. He held a tiny video projector. “I realize that this isn’t exactly convenient, but frankly, we blew it, folks, and a lot of good people are dead.” The room fell silent as O’Keefe and Nico entered. The skin of Nico’s wrists was red and irritated from wearing handcuffs during transit. “That’s my colleague Agent Meagan O’Keefe. With her is Nico Gold. Yes, the infamous Nico Gold. He’ll be working with you on this case. If that isn’t incentive to try harder, I dunno what is.”