Line of Succession: A Thriller

by William Tyree

  “So, about the NMCC…The Joint Chiefs were talking about commanding from someplace called Rapture Run.”

  Rios looked over Ellis’ shoulder. “Uh, your sister…”

  “I rent the back bedroom out to her. She’s back there now. I made her promise to wear her noise-cancelling headphones until after you left.”

  Rios smiled. “Never heard of Rapture Run. Probably just a new codename for Site R.”

  “That wasn’t all. General Wainewright said -- I’m trying to remember the exact words – something like the ‘chain of command is not intact.’”

  Rios’ expression did not change, but his voice shifted lower. “What else did the General say?”

  “They were suppressing casualty information.”

  Rios considered this for a moment. “Back to the chain of command. It might not mean what you think it means. A chain of command can be considered less than intact just because communications have broken down.”

  She smiled at him. “You lead the President’s personal detail. Don’t tell me you don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Look,” he said, “Truth is I didn’t get back to Washington until a few hours ago. The President put me on special assignment. I’m out of the loop.”

  “What was the assignment?”

  Rios smiled. He liked Haley. He had always liked her. He wanted to tell her – to tell someone, anyone – that he had gunned down two would-be assassins and saved Eva Hudson’s life. And he wanted to tell her that he had not heard from First Team since Sunday morning, and that he had no idea what was going on, and that the President might be dead, and that it scared the hell out of him.

  Instead, he would have to make small talk. “Your furniture,” he said as his eyes turned to the living room. “It’s…well…”

  “Beneath me,” Ellis said. “I know. I’m saving my money. That’s why I live with my sister, in case you were wondering.”

  “What are you saving for?”

  “Don’t laugh.”

  “I’m going to go now.”

  “A boat,” she said. She waited for a reaction, but Rios only listened. “I’d like to quit my job and sail around the world.”

  “I saw the books.”

  “I’m taking lessons every Saturday.”

  “So come with me tonight,” Rios said, an invitation that surprised even him. “I live down at the marina.”

  “What?”

  “Serious. I live on a boat. A sailboat.”

  “Shut up.”

  “A thirty-two footer. Are you in?”

  “What?”

  “You should come with me. What are you gonna do here? You’re locked out of your office. Locked out of the network. It’s not like you’re going to get anything done.” He checked his watch. “Those Ulysses patrols are starting in just a few minutes. So what’s it gonna be? Another night at home with the sister, or a night with ex-Jacksonville Jaguar first round draft pick Hector Rios?”

  He blushed, embarrassed by the fact that he had just used his status as an ex-NFL player to seduce Ellis. It wasn’t his style. But maybe it was a sign of how badly he wanted her.

  She stared at him for a moment. Sizing him up. The former football player. She had never been with anyone like him. And there had never been a week like this. It was like the world was coming to an end. Or at least her world. She couldn’t remember the last time she had done something just because. Just for her.

  She got up from the table. She took a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from the rack. She grabbed her keys, already imagining the rhythm of the gentle marina waves lapping up against the hull.

  Baltimore

  The apartment had taken on the permanent odor of mushroom soup and baked beans. They had eaten the combo for every meal, and Angie had come to dread the sound of pots and pans in the kitchen. But maybe the fact that they were feeding her meant they weren’t going to kill her after all.

  Elvir came to her with yet another helping. “Hungry?” he asked her.

  She nodded wearily. Then she smiled – not because she liked him, but because she thought that he might be less willing to kill her if she was nice. To her surprise, he held a container of honey vanilla yogurt. “This is the good kind,” he said as he opened it. “No corn syrup.”

  He spooned some into her mouth. She swallowed. He pushed another bite toward her, but she moved her head aside and spoke. “Just tell me one thing,” she said. “You were trying to kill us. So why didn’t you let me drown?”

  He contemplated his words carefully before speaking. He spooned more of the yogurt into her mouth and said, “I am fully trained on the Stinger missile. Trust me, Misses Jackson. Had I wanted to kill you and your family, my aim would have been true.”

  PART III

  “The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.”

  Assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat

  Baltimore Outskirts

  Tuesday 4:45 a.m. Eastern

  Two Maryland National Guardsmen stood next to an eight-wheeled Stryker fighting vehicle. Three hundred feet of razor wire and a few construction barricades stretched across the six-lane interstate leading into Baltimore. Less than 60 feet away, the remains of a Chevy pickup truck burned. They had blown it up an hour earlier.

  Two stray dogs chewed a foot that had been blown off the driver near the debris. One of the construction signs flashed TURN BACK - CURFEW STRICTLY ENFORCED.

  A set of headlights appeared in the distance. The sight of the burning truck had warded off every single approaching vehicle since they had attacked it around midnight. But this one – a black Humvee – came within fifty yards before it eventually stopped.

  The two guardsmen squinted as Chris Abrams stepped out of the Hummer. His arms were raised above his head. The sun was rising in the east, but the half-light made it twice as hard to see. One of the guardsmen switched on the spotlight, and they saw Abrams’ closely cropped head and his Ulysses uniform. He was clutching an ID card.

  They kept their guns on Abrams even as he drew close and they could see his battle fatigues.

  “La Familia?” one of the guardsmen said, meaning Ulysses.

  “Yep,” Abrams said. “Joint Ops called us into Baltimore. You wanna see the orders?”

  He handed over his ID and manufactured travel authorization. The guardsmen passed it between them although they scarcely examined it. “Look how ripped he is,” one of the guardsmen said in astonished Spanish. “Even his head is ripped!”

  Unfortunately for the guardsmen, Abrams understood Spanish perfectly. His head was not in fact “ripped,” at least not in the traditional sense. Facial wasting, a side effect of his particular strain of HIV, caused his body fat to be improperly distributed. Abrams was incredibly self-conscious about it, as he was often falsely accused of being on steroids. Some years ago, he’d even undergone painful collagen injections to beef up his facial features, but the improvements were only fleeting.

  Abrams was not the name he had been born with, but it was the name his employer had given him. For the past few years he had inhabited Christian Merrill Abrams so completely that, for the most part, he had forgotten that he had once been known as Henry and had been a prison guard in a small Wyoming town. After racking up too much debt, he had left his family for a year to make a hundred thousand dollars working for Blackwater, the American contract militia that had become so notorious on the streets of Baghdad.

  The first thing that surprised him about Iraq was the heat. Abrams had trained in Yuma, Arizona, during the month of May, which was positively hellish for a man who had been brought up in Wyoming. But the training did little to prepare him for the 130-degree heat that hit him like a hydrogen blast upon arriving in Baghdad.

  More surprising was that his crew was under fire nearly every day. It didn’t help that they were assigned to protect an Iraqi interpreter who had been discovered cooperating with the Americans. The interpreter lasted about three weeks. He was killed by an RPG when Abrams was o
ff duty. Abrams was called to an unrefrigerated morgue to identify the man’s face and one of his colleagues. After that, he volunteered for units that took “proactive” assignments to ensure a target’s safety.

  Sixteen kills and twelve months later, Abrams returned to find that his wife and young son had suddenly relocated and did not want to be found. Abrams’ wife had left a terse note explaining that she had transferred everything he had earned from the joint bank account, but that she had carefully signed over the house and both cars to him and left the papers in a folder on top of the refrigerator. Abrams searched for his family for three weeks, interrogating friends and relatives, sometimes at gunpoint. During one such episode, in which he tied up one of his wife’s cousins in her mobile home, he had actually shot a Golden Retriever.

  He served a four-month prison sentence for gross animal cruelty in Wyoming. It was there in the state pen that Abrams reckoned that he contracted HIV from another inmate, although he did not show symptoms for at least another year.

  During his incarceration, government contracts were there for the taking and need for experienced soldiers was dire. Some of the major American security firms had taken to trolling the prison system for able-bodied former military with combat training and imminent release dates. A rap sheet with murder, grand larceny and anything sexually related automatically disqualified a candidate. But fortunately for Chris Abrams, Ulysses was able to look past animal cruelty. His prior combat experience and lack of family ties made him an ideal candidate.

  He was offered jobs of varying levels by three firms in the weeks before his release. Having read about Ulysses’ rapid rise in a Web news article, Abrams held out for a hefty salary and a big signing bonus. Not because he would have refused a lower offer, but because he enjoyed the negotiation. The truth was that he wanted nothing more than to get back into the action. He would have done it for free.

  By the time that his HIV was discovered by the Ulysses medical staff, his reputation as a strategist who could also personally execute complex assassinations was considered essential. He was guaranteed the best possible medical care and a promise not to share his secret with anyone.

  Now Abrams eyed the charred truck. “What happened to those guys?” he asked the guardsmen. “They get a little too close for comfort?”

  The taller of the two handed Abrams his Ulysses ID. “No habla ingles.”

  Abrams laughed, stunned at the idea that the National Guard was employing active duty soldiers that didn’t speak any English at all. He switched to Spanish. “You’ve gotta be shitting me,” he said in a Juarez, Mexico dialect. “I knew recruiting was down, but this...” He felt the men tense up. “I mean, holy shit, right?”

  The guardsmen didn’t find this funny. They had been picked up by the border patrol in June and given a choice between being deported to Mexico or cutting an amnesty deal that would include six years of National Guard service. At the end of their service, they were to receive green cards. Neither men had thought twice about the decision, even though they realized they could be deployed to a combat zone.

  Yesterday they had been quickly – and quite prematurely – declared fit for duty after only four weeks of basic training. Last night they had received a crash course in checkpoint security procedures by two retired Iraqi War vets. With no relief scheduled, the soldiers took turns sleeping in the Stryker. For food, they had raided the walnut grove on the other side of the interstate. Around midnight, a pickup truck had approached with no sign of slowing down. On the vets’ advice, they had fired on it. The truck’s driver and three passengers were killed instantly.

  “Okay then,” Abrams told them, “I’ll just wave my guys through, then we’ll be on our way. Okay?”

  The guardsmen nodded and lowered their weapons. Abrams waved the Hummer through and put some distance between himself and the guardsmen. The Hummer rolled forward, its windows tinted as dark as a limousine’s. As they drew close, the Hummer’s passenger-side windows rolled down, revealing the barrels of M4 carbines that opened up with deafening thunder and twittering flashes of light.

  The guardsmen were cut down before they could even get a shot off. Abrams opened the rear driver’s side door and high-fived his USOC crew. “Freaking National Guard doesn’t even speak English,” Abrams said to his colleagues in the SUV. “You believe that?”

  Abrams heard a ruckus coming from the Stryker, which was parked some 20 feet away. The Stryker’s engine groaned to life and someone inside threw it hastily into gear. Abrams braced himself for the wrath of its 105mm machine gun, but the vehicle did not fire. It merely began moving away.

  Abrams pulled a Javelin anti-tank weapon from the Humvee and knelt down on the asphalt. It took him less than two seconds to take aim and launch the missile. A millisecond later the Javelin slammed into the Stryker, transforming it into a hunk of flaming scrap metal.

  The third Guardsman scrambled from the burning mess, his uniform aflame. He ran at full speed toward the walnut grove. Abrams marveled for a moment at the sight of the Guardsman, who looked like a streaking two-legged asteroid. He watched for a moment longer before pulling his sidearm and placing a single shot through the man’s spine. “Damn!” somebody shouted. Indeed. At more than fifty yards, with a pistol, it was a hell of a shot.

  Abrams spat, clicked his weapon on safety, piled back into the Humvee and raided the cooler for something to eat. He needed to pack in a couple thousand calories between now and their arrival in the city. He chugged the first of several protein shakes as they rolled past the lit sign that read WELCOME TO BALTIMORE.

  Fort Campbell

  5:05 a.m.

  Eva’s Under-Secretary was in hysterics. “Are you seeing this?” the squeaky voice on the phone said. “Greenbacks are down by double digits against the Euro, the Yen, the Yuan, the Pound, even the Canadian dollar. We’re down a full ten percent against the Canadians.”

  “Finally,” Eva said as she walked toward Colonel Madsen’s office. “At long last, America’s seniors can stop crossing the border to buy cheap prescriptions.”

  The Under-Secretary didn’t appreciate Eva’s gallows humor. “With all due respect Madam Secretary, we’ve can’t absorb further currency erosion. This is a major emergency.”

  Eva stopped just outside Madsen’s office. She was on her last nerve, but she had to remind herself that the situation looked far different here at Fort Campbell than it did in a living room in Northern Virginia. It was time to delegate some busy work. “Great idea,” Eva said. “You’ve got my support to get the team together. I expect a full proposal by this time tomorrow.”

  “Really?” the Under-Secretary chirped. “I’m on it! Thank you so much!”

  With her staff temporarily appeased, Eva hung up, peered into the Garrison Commander’s office and found Madsen just getting off the phone himself. He looked up at Eva with bloodshot eyes. “The two Special Ops units you authorized are with Carver and O’Keefe in Baltimore,” he said.

  Eva looked like she’d been broadsided. And she had been.

  “Special Ops,” Madsen iterated. “I said those units you authorized are with Carver and O’Keefe now. In Baltimore.”

  Eva realized she was living on a couple of power naps and a dozen energy drinks, but she was quite sure she hadn’t ordered any supporting units to Baltimore.

  “Something wrong?” Madsen said. He handed her a printout of the email from EHudson@fortcampbell.mil ordering two units of Green Berets to Baltimore. “You wrote this, right?”

  But of course she had not. Still, she considered her options. Admitting that Agent Carver had pulled an end run would undermine the Colonel’s confidence in her authority. She decided to avoid the question and take the matter up with Carver upon his return. “Is there anything else, Colonel?”

  “Uh, yeah. Are you ready for this one? Intel ID’d the guys that went after you up in Martha’s Vineyard. Their names showed up in the database.”

  “Which database?”

  “DOD’s.
Both were retired Marines.”

  She remembered seeing the men’s bodies on the Edgartown Street moments after Agent Rios had gunned them down. She envisioned the tide of fluids running down the sidewalk and the thickets of brown hair atop their heads. But she had not looked at their faces. Despite Carver’s assertions that this was not the work of Allied Jihad, she had subconsciously assumed the assassins were foreign. Russians, maybe, or North Africans or extremist Saudis. Those nationalities fit the stereotypes. Those ideas were somehow palatable. Now she was faced with the possibility that her own countrymen – soldiers, no less – wanted her dead.

  “Not active duty?” Eva said.

  “No.”

  “I need to see their files for myself.”

  “For some reason, the files are sealed. The Joint Chiefs could authorize a look. Barring that, you’d have to call the President and get an executive order.”

  An executive order. That would be nice. That would be everything.

  Eva thanked the Colonel, walked back to her office and dialed Agent Carver. As the phone rang, she opened the drawer and took out the bottle of Ativan. She removed one pill and broke it in half. Just to take the edge off.

  Baltimore

  5:15 a.m.

  Carver, O’Keefe and the twelve Special Ops soldiers of Viper Squad gathered next to a pair of grey Humvees on the city’s western edge. In what was easily the most dilapidated slum Carver had ever seen, it was still dark enough that the strike force blended into the shadows. Except for a few lunatics jawing on the other side of the street, the streets had been emptied by Ulysses patrols sent in to enforce martial law.

  Master Sergeant Hundley, a square-jawed soldier who resembled a walking side of beef, handed out battle gear. Green Berets had the best of the best – state-of-the-art body armor, night-vision goggles, hands-free radios and a new prototype assault rifle that carried forty-round clips and weighed less than five pounds.