Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  “Yes sir. If they chug right along we oughtn’t to be more than a half hour late.”

  Rifkind and Cord left; McNeely said, “It’ll be good for a laugh in Madrid. Another case of marvelous American technology.”

  “Breakdowns happen. It doesn’t matter.” Fairlie slid the speech into his inside pocket.

  The view through the window was spectacular: vast broken planes, an upheaval aglitter with snow, a craggy wilderness; Fairlie, McNeely thought, had a face that matched it.

  Fairlie spoke abruptly. “Liam, you remember what Andy Bee said about a President running for a second term?”

  “That it ties his hands? Yes, I remember. Why?” Andrew Bee, one-time Senator and now a Congressman from Los Angeles County, had been Fairlie’s strongest opponent in the Republican presidential primaries and had only deferred to Fairlie at the last minute at Denver. A big lumberjack, Andrew Bee; and a thoughtful force in American politics.

  Fairlie said, “I’m not going to run for a second term, Liam.”

  “What, tired of the job already?”

  “Bee was right. It’s got to hamstring a man. You can’t be expected to be both President and politician.”

  “The hell. That’s the object of the game.”

  “No. I’m going to announce it right up front. I want you to put it in the draft of the Inaugural Address.”

  “With all due respect I think you’re nuts. Why commit yourself?”

  “It frees my hand.”

  “To do what?”

  Fairlie smiled a little with that unexpected self-deprecation that sometimes, out of context, warmed his face. As if reminding himself not to equate his person, with the power of the office he was about to assume. “Andy Bee and I had some long talks. The man has some important ideas.”

  “I’m sure he does. Next time he runs for President maybe he’ll get a chance to put them into practice.”

  “Why wait?”

  “To do what?” McNeely asked again.

  “Mainly to rip apart the committees.”

  “That’s a pipe dream.” McNeely knew all about that, it had been Andrew Bee’s private crusade for years: the unraveling of the archaic committee system in Congress which governed not by majority but by seniority. The satrapies of Congress were tyrannies of old men, most of them rural, many of them corrupt, some of them stupid. No law could pass without the support of these old men, yet nothing in the Constitution required this shackling of Congress; for years the younger members, led by Andrew Bee, had called for reform.

  “It’s not a pipe dream, Liam.”

  “If you want to get legislation through, you’ve got to have committee support. If you attack the chairmen they’ll eviscerate you.”

  “But if I’m not running for reelection what have I got left to lose?”

  “All the rest of your programs.”

  “Not if I settle this one first,” Fairlie said. “And don’t forget those old boys have to be reelected too. I think they understand the sentiments of the times. Look at the kind of support Andy Bee has with the public. He’s made his stand on the issue for years and the public’s solidly behind him.”

  “You’re the one they elected President. Not Andrew Bee.”

  Fairlie only smiled; he turned and reached for his coat. “Let’s go outside, I want some air.”

  “Don’t you realize how cold it is out there?”

  “Oh come on, Liam.”

  McNeely went to the phone and summoned assistants to organize Fairlie’s belongings and bring them along to the deck. When he put down the phone Fairlie was almost to the door. McNeely said, “You really want me to put that in the Inaugural Address?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well what the hell. It won’t do any harm. You can always change your mind later.”

  Fairlie laughed and went out. McNeely caught up on the mezzanine and joined the circle of Secret Service men moving along with him.

  Cord was canted over the open engine compartment of “the chopper; Anderson, on the deck, was rubbing his hands and exhaling steam. McNeely looked at his watch, buttoned his coat, turned the collar up around his ears. Fairlie was looking up the ski slope, squinting, smiling with visible wistfulness.

  McNeely walked over to Anderson. “Find anything yet?”

  “I sure can’t figure it. Everything checks out good. But she’s still screechin’ ever time we start her up.”

  “Sounds like gasoline trouble. Did you check the fuel pump?”

  “First thing.” Anderson made a gesture of baffled disgust with his hands. “Anyhow they’re flying a mechanic up passenger on the bird they sending in to replace this one. He’ll figure it out.”

  McNeely nodded. A helicopter was not such a fragile mechanism as it appeared. True, it lacked the dubious visible stability of wings and for that reason a great many people distrusted it but the truth was a helicopter had a better glide chance than a jet plane: if a jet engine quit in midair the plane would hit the ground like a bomb; if a helicopter lost its engine in midair the rotors would freewheel and you could let yourself down dead-stick, and a chopper in distress required very little flat surface area to land on. McNeely respected the fluttery machines.

  He patted the metal skin of the big chopper and turned away. Anderson was striding around the far corner of the hotel, possibly headed for one of the rear workshops to hunt up additional tools.

  When the pilot went out of sight, McNeely drifted over to Fair-lie’s little circle, his mind going back to Fairlie’s quietly explosive statement about not running for reelection. It was the kind of statement which, if made in heat, meant nothing; but made in deliberate calm, on the basis of obvious lengthy consideration, it meant everything. McNeely stood with the statement undigested, like a lump in his chest that wouldn’t go up and wouldn’t go down. Politics at the very top was the most fascinating game in the world and McNeely, a championship player, selfishly wanted it to go on: but Fairlie was dead right and intellectually McNeely could only accept that it was time to quit playing games.

  A stray cool vesper brought the distant flut-flut-flut to his ears and he turned, searching the sky. Presently it appeared between the mountains, a dragonfly of a helicopter with its skinny tail in the air: a Bell Sioux 13R, the DC-3 of helicopters, the military workhorse since Korea.

  McNeely hurried back to Cord, the copilot on the engine housing.

  “Did you guys call for a Thirteen?” McNeely shouted to make himself heard.

  Cord looked up. His head swiveled, he focused on the incoming chopper, he shook his head and cupped his hands around his mouth to shout down. “We only got two big ones aboard. Maybe the other one was out airborne someplace.”

  It could cause a problem. The Sioux was a reliable machine but it carried only three passengers. Two passengers if you insisted on having two pilots.

  He threaded the cluster of Secret Service men and buttonholed Rifkind and moved him over next to Fairlie. “That’s a three-passenger chopper,” McNeely said.

  The Navy helicopter descended slowly, expertly in the thin high-altitude air; it settled on its skids at the far end of the deck beyond the grounded Huey.

  The group walked forward; Fairlie was saying, “It’s all right, what the devil, I’ll go along with Meyer and Liam. The rest of you can go down to Madrid by car.”

  Rifkind said, “No sir. You need more coverage than just me.”

  “Now come on, Meyer, there’ll be an army of Spanish police to mother-hen me the minute we land.”

  “I’m sorry sir. You need at least two of us with you at all times. Preferably four.”

  “You’re giving me orders, Meyer?”

  “No sir. I’ve got my own orders, that’s all.”

  They stopped just outside the circle of the slow circling rotors. The pilot was coming out to meet them, stooping low under the blades, a Negro lieutenant in Navy fatigues. He was fifteen pounds overweight, had a neat trimmed black-on-black moustache and slightly bulbous cheeks the roundn
ess of which was accentuated by the wad of gum he was chewing. He emerged, stood up and rendered a crisp salute. “Mr. President-elect.”

  Cord had come over from the crippled chopper. “Where’s the mechanic, Lieutenant?”

  “Be along on the second machine,” the black lieutenant said. He removed his fatigue cap to reveal a completely bald head; wiped his pate with his sleeve and replaced the cap.

  McNeely turned. “What second machine?” He had the lieutenant’s face on a bias toward the light and saw the ridge of a dark scar that ran along the jawline.

  The lieutenant was chewing with the open-mouthed insouciance of the chronic gum addict. “Fleet didn’t have a Huey to send, sir, so they ordered two Thirteens out. The other one will be along in a few minutes—they had to wait for the mechanic to get his gear. Captain said you’d probably want a second machine for the gentlemen from Secret Service.”

  Fairlie was nodding, reaching for his briefcase which was in one of the aides’ hands. “That’s fine then. Meyer, pick yourself a side-man and the three of us will ride this one. Liam, you come along in the second helicopter with two more of the boys. That soothe your feathers, Meyer?”

  McNeely was swiveling on his heels. “Where’s Anderson?”

  Cord said, “He went to find a socket-wrench set.”

  “He’s got a hell of a sense of timing.”

  Fairlie was moving toward the idling chopper. “Never mind, I’ll ride with the lieutenant here.”

  “But Anderson knows the route—he knows the landing spot, the timing.…”

  “Is he the only pilot alive? Good Lord, Liam, give the information to the lieutenant here and let’s take off—we’re more than half an hour late as it is.”

  Rifkind had turned toward the black lieutenant. “I’ll have to look at some ID.”

  “Sure.” The lieutenant took out his documentation and Rifkind flipped through it and handed it back. Rifkind was a man who stuck to the letter.

  Cord had his two ratings over at the new chopper filling its fuel tanks from a gasoline cart. The lieutenant went over to the Huey with Cord and for a minute the two Navy officers stood plotting course on Cord’s charts, after which the black lieutenant folded them and carried them forward, nodding briskly to Rifkind, popping a new stick of gum into his mouth.

  They climbed aboard, Fairlie and Rifkind and Rifkind’s number two, and the black lieutenant who strapped in and talked into a microphone and acknowledged responses from his earlappy headset. The ratings topped up and withdrew the gasoline hose and capped the tank, and Fair lie leaned forward to wave at McNeely.

  McNeely gave him thumbs-up and the chopper lifted off a few feet, swung back and forth with a pendulant uncertainty, got its bite in the air and soared away. McNeely stood in the whipping down-draft and watched its graceful tilt and sway toward the mountain pass.

  The chopper dwindled with distance. Haze absorbed it over the mountains.

  Cord stood beside him, a scowl deepening, and with a sudden growl Cord turned and yelled at the ratings who were trundling the gasoline cart away across the ramp. “Hey. Go on back there and find out what the hell’s holding up Lieutenant Anderson.”

  There was a brief discussion among the five remaining Secret Service agents as to which two would ride with McNeely. The reporters had already begun to scatter toward the parking lot and their hired cars.

  Within a few minutes McNeely heard another helicopter and turned to watch it emerge from the haze, pushing between the peaks.

  Cord was at McNeely’s shoulder. “That’s funny. I thought he said they couldn’t get the other Huey.”

  And one of the ratings was running full tilt up the deck stairs, shouting. McNeely couldn’t make out the words. The rating ran halfway forward across the deck and stopped, red-faced and out of breath, and made himself heard:

  “… tenant Anderson back there—I think he’s dead, sir!”

  Certainty hit McNeely an abrupt physical blow. The Secret Service agents were running but McNeely grabbed Cord by the arm. “Never mind him. Get on your Goddamned radio and let me talk to Fleet. Now!”

  1:43 P.M. Continental European Time Fairlie had experienced it before but the sensation was always disturbing: the bubble canopy extended down to the level of your feet and it was as if there were nothing under you but air.

  The chugging racket of the engine made conversation difficult; none of them spoke very much. The black lieutenant had a sure hand on the controls, one gloved fist on the cyclic stick and the other on a smaller lever at the left, both feet gently heel-and-toeing the pedals. The air was pungent with oil smoke and the spearmint aura of chewing gum.

  He watched the jagged upheaval of the Pyrenees slide by beneath. Pamplona off somewhere to starboard—he thought of the running of the bulls; he had been there for it once, the Fiesta de San Fermin, summer of ’64. His first and last bullfights: he had found he disliked them intensely. It wasn’t the blood that angered him, it was the predestined formality of the slaughter. Spanish bullfighting and Spanish-style dancing had that in common: they had dehumanized these activities, shaped them into rote mannerisms—the bullfight and the flamenco dance had not changed in hundreds of years, they were static rituals, there wasn’t a scintilla of creativity in them anymore. That worried him because it implied a key to the Spanish character which he did not comprehend. He was not altogether confident of his ability to persuade Perez-Blasco of anything at all, but he hoped the man was not a bullfight aficionado or a flamenco buff. Impossible to understand a nation of people who were satisfied with art forms that had ceased developing at the time of Velazquez and El Greco.

  The helicopter swayed in gentle ballet through the valleys and passes of the mountains. A strange free feeling of dreamlike three-dimensional movement: he wondered if hallucinatory drugs had anything on this. He was a little frightened by the visual precariousness and that added something keen to his pleasure; he caught Rifkind’s puzzled glance and realized he was grinning like a schoolboy.

  A change in the engine’s note; a tilt in the seat under him. He reached for a grip. The black lieutenant’s expletive was loud and angry: “Oh Jesus.”

  Rifkind, straining forward, put his preternaturally white face over the lieutenant’s shoulder. “What—what?”

  “Not two in a row,” the lieutenant growled.

  “What is it?”

  “Man we got trouble.”

  Fairlie’s grip tightened on the handhold.

  “Losing fuel.… She ain’t pumping right.” The lieutenant’s gloved hands were all over the controls, his head shifting as his eyes whipped from point to point. “Man, I think we blew a hole in the gas line someplace.”

  Immediate childish anger exploded in Fairlie: what the devil was wrong with Navy’s maintenance?

  The black lieutenant was growling urgently into his radio microphone. Rifkind’s eyes had gone round, the second agent was kneading his knuckles, Fairlie’s fingers started to ache from squeezing the steel. The lieutenant flung the microphone down and jabbed at controls; the helicopter was changing its drumbeat, lurching a little now, and the lieutenant was talking to himself: “Oh man, oh man.”

  Rifkind let out an odd little sound—a cry, choked off; the lieutenant shot him a look. “Everybody take it easy now. Oh man, oh man. Listen, we ain’t in no real danger, just take it easy. I got to find a place to set her down. Look for somewhere flat. Mr. President-elect, I do apologize sir, I do apologize.”

  “Just ease us down,” Fairlie heard himself say in a voice filled with perjured calm.

  Rifkind’s eyes came around, grateful; Rifkind even essayed a smile. Fairlie found himself gripping Rifkind’s shoulder in a gesture of reassurance.

  Rifkind’s number two was pointing past the lieutenant’s shoulder. “That looks pretty flat.”

  The lieutenant glanced that way. “I don’t know. You can’t tell about those snowdrifts—sometimes nothing under them but air.… Wait now, look over there—that look like houses
to you?”

  Coils of thin mist hung in the passes; it was hard to make out detail; Rifkind said in a high-pitched tone, “It looks like a farm doesn’t it?”

  “Farm with a nice flat yard,” the lieutenant said. “Aeah, we can make that easy.” He sat back visibly relieved. The jaws resumed their rumination on the chewing gum. “All right, now you gentlemen snug up your seat belts real tight if you don’t mind and sit back tight against your seats, hear? We’ll set down like a fly on a soap bubble, I give you my promise. Everybody just take it easy…” The lieutenant kept talking like a wrangler soothing an alarmed horse: after a while the words became repetitive and lost meaning but Fairlie found the steady sound of the lieutenant’s voice had a good hypnotic effect and he thought, he’s a good man.

  It came up toward them slowly, three or four scrubby little buildings in a flat white groin of the mountains. The helicopter’s engine was sputtering noisily now but the black lieutenant did not act worried. The hands were steady on the controls; Fairlie felt the seat tip under him as the lieutenant put the chopper into a nose-high attitude and the descent slowed until Fairlie had no sensation of movement.

  The farm had a look of disuse and long abandonment: paneless windows gaped, there were no livestock, the buildings looked ready to collapse. But as they closed slowly Fairlie began to see he had been mistaken. Smoke curled vaguely from the house chimney and the yard between house and barn had been chewed up by vehicles and foot tracks. Twin ribbons of tire tracks followed a thin corkscrew road away into the canyons below.

  The lieutenant set the chopper down so gently Fairlie hardly felt the bump.

  He heard a gusty exhalation and realized it had been Rifkind. Rifkind’s number two was scanning the buildings and he had a gun in his fist and Fairlie said mildly, “Put that thing down out of sight, please.”

  The lieutenant was talking into his microphone, reading coordinates off his chart into the radio: “Fox zero-niner, about the middle of the northwest quadrant. It’s a little old farm, you can see the buildings from quite a ways up, you ought to find us easy. Repeat, coordinates Fox zero-niner, center of northwest quadrant. Over.…”