“One thing puzzles me,” Parrish said. “Why is he involved?”
“I’m more worried about Vashin,” Mazie said. “We hurt him and he’ll react.”
“What will he do?” Turner asked.
“I don’t honestly know, Madame President.”
“At least we’ve got honesty on our side.”
SEVENTEEN
Vandenberg Air Force Base, California
Noreen Coker’s dark brown eyes followed Air Force One as the beautiful blue-and-white Boeing 747 taxied in. “What does it cost to fly that thing?” she asked the Air Force colonel standing next to her.
“The last I heard, ma’am, it was over $50,000 an hour.” The colonel escorted her to the waiting helicopter that would fly the president to the outdoor rally in San Luis Obispo. A Marine escorted her up the air stairs and into the passenger compartment.
“Those seats are for the president,” the Marine said, pointing to two airline-type seats facing each other and flanking the window on the left side of the aircraft.
Noreen laughed at the thought of Maddy Turner needing two seats. “But she’s such a little thing.”
The Marine didn’t see the humor. “The rear-facing seat is for whoever the president wishes to talk to.”
“I see,” Noreen said. She settled into the seat on the opposite side of the aisle and waited for Turner to arrive. She pulled out her speech introducing the president. Key phrases leaped off the page and she committed them to memory:…my best friend…the little girl from San Luis Obispo who had a dream…a woman whose vision reaches across generations and into the future…possesses a rare courage and integrity. Noreen leaned back and smiled at what was coming. Madeline O’Keith Turner would end her speech by announcing herself as a candidate for the presidency of the United States. Maddy was going to run in her own right.
Dennis was the first of the presidential party to climb on board. “The weather is perfect,” he said. “It’s hard to believe Christmas is only five days away.”
“Is Maura here?” Noreen asked.
“She’s already at the rally,” Dennis replied. “Along with Sarah, Richard, and most of the press corps.”
The pilots started the engines, a sign that the president was only minutes away. Dennis stood by the door and waited for her arrival. Moments later, Madeline Turner stepped through the entryway and made her way to her seat. “Dennis,” she called, pointing to the seat facing hers, “please join us.” Dennis beamed as he sat down in the rear-facing seat. “We need to talk,” she said as the steward buttoned up the cabin. It was amazingly quiet for a helicopter. “Noreen, you’re looking quite glamorous today. Have you lost weight?”
Noreen’s laugh was silky smooth. “I got rid of that no-good man.” She strapped in and the helicopter lifted off, heading for the park in San Luis Obispo, forty miles due north. “Don’t say it, you warned me.” Their laughter joined as the helicopter turned out of the pattern. As always, it received priority clearance and Air Traffic Control diverted all traffic.
Pismo Beach, California
On a side street just off Highway 101, a white panel van pulled out of a ramshackle garage. The woman sitting in the passenger seat listened to a VHF radio scanner. She turned to the man in the back. “Leon, the helicopter is airborne.” Leon zipped up his fire-retardant Nomex suit and pulled the hood over his head. He bent over the aluminum case that resembled a small coffin and unsnapped the cover. The driver wheeled onto the on ramp and headed north toward San Luis Obispo. The woman checked her stopwatch. “Eleven minutes.”
“We’ll be there,” the driver promised.
Leon checked the battery pack.
Near San Luis Obispo, California
Dennis leaned forward in his seat and handed Turner the final draft of her speech. “It’s the same except for the introduction. We punched up the hometown angle.”
Turner read the speech. It was short, perhaps twenty minutes, not counting applause. She read it again, this time half aloud. She made one correction to the opening statement; it sounded too much like Shaw. “Schedule,” she said. Dennis handed her and Noreen a detailed listing of the day’s events following the rally. Turner leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. Her hand reached out for Noreen’s. “Thank you for coming.”
“Girl, I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
The white van approached the last bridge on Highway 101. The front-seat passenger duly noted the two Secret Service agents standing at the rail checking traffic. “Not enough,” she muttered to herself. “Leon,” she said to the man in the back, “check the back side of the bridge for scanners.”
Leon moved against the windows in the rear door as they passed underneath. “Yeah. Two shits on this side. One’s got a camera. The other, a radio, I think.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the woman said.
“I can see it,” Leon said, the calm in his voice not matching what he felt.
The woman checked her watch. “Right on time. Go.” They started the routine they had practiced more than fifty times. Leon moved into the center of the cargo compartment and dropped the panel that had been cut in the roof. He looked up, checking his field of view. He could see the helicopter off to their rear left. “It’s at our seven o’clock coming to four o’clock.” The woman picked up her laser range finder and held it in her lap as she rolled down her window and focused intently on the van’s side rearview mirror. “Four o’clock,” Leon said. He adjusted his oxygen mask and blast goggles. He bent over the aluminum case and extracted the deadly shoulder-held, surface-to-air missile.
“I’ve got it,” she replied, her words coming more quickly. She raised the laser range finder and aimed it at the mirror. She didn’t want to be seen aiming anything directly at the president’s aircraft. The moment the helicopter was in the crosshairs, she pulled the trigger. The LED window flashed and she immediately lowered the range finder out of sight. “Two point four klicks,” she read. The helicopter was in the heart of the envelope. The woman drew the blast curtains sealing Leon in the rear and placed her hand on the release lever to the back doors.
Leon dialed 2.4 into the Strela and raised the missile to his shoulder, aiming it through the open roof. He placed the crosshairs on the helicopter and pulled the trigger to the first detent. The cryogenically cooled infrared seeker head locked on. The tracking light flashed and he pulled the trigger to the second detent. “FIRE!” Leon shouted. The solid-propellant booster filled the cargo compartment with smoke and flame as the four-and-one-half-foot missile leaped skyward. At the same time the woman pulled the release lever and the rear doors snapped open. The powerful fan they had installed in the van switched on and vented the cargo compartment, laying a smoke screen behind them. The doors slammed shut and the van raced for the next exit.
The sustainer rocket ignited as the missile reached its max speed of 1.76 Mach. The Secret Service agent on the bridge a mile back saw the rocket plume and yelled into his radio. “MISSILE! ON YOUR LEFT, NINE O’CLOCK!”
The cameraman focused his Betacam on Liz Gordon, CNC-TV’s star political reporter covering the rally. They did a sound check and she started to talk. “It’s a gorgeous December day here in San Luis Obispo and I can see the president’s helicopter as it approaches to land. There is an unconfirmed rumor that Madeline Turner will announce…OH, MY GOD THERE’S A MISSILE HOMING IN ON THE PRESIDENT’S HELICOPTER!” She pointed to the sky and the cameraman swung his camera around.
It was a contest between the Russian-built Strela-3 and the Sikorsky S-61V helicopter. On one side, was a missile with advanced guidance and the capability to defeat flares and infrared jammers. The 4.4-pound high-explosive warhead had both contact and graze fusing. On the other side, was a specially built helicopter equipped with flare dispensers and a new reticulated light infrared jammer. But the critical factor was the skill of the Marine pilot.
Without acknowledging the radio call, the pilot turned into the missile and saw it. He pulled on the coll
ective lever and the helicopter shot skyward, forcing the missile into an upward trajectory. Then he slammed the collective to the floor and the big helicopter dropped like a rock as he turned through the missile. Flares streamed into the helicopter’s wake.
The missile’s warhead briefly acquired the flares and then rejected that heat signature. It reacquired the heat from the helicopter’s intake and arched downward just as the pilot called for autorotation. The copilot reached up and retarded the throttles to flight idle, reducing the heat signature coming from the engines. Now a little ruby-red cupola mounted on the side of the helicopter flashed and a stream of conflicting heat signatures burned into the missile’s guidance head.
The missile went ballistic in the last 200 feet and passed over the helicopter. But the fuse sensed a shift in mass and exploded, the graze function working as designed.
A hail of expanding core shrapnel cut into the rear of the helicopter, slicing into the top-mounted engines, chipping at the rotor blades, and rupturing hydraulic lines. But the lightweight ceramic armor plate surrounding the passenger compartment held. The engines burst into flame as a savage vibration from the damaged engines shook the helicopter. The copilot’s hands were a blur of action as he reached up, pulled the throttles to the off position, and pulled the T-handles that shot the fire bottles, extinguishing the fire. With the power off, the vibration stopped. The helicopter plummeted earthward as the pilot set up for an autorotational landing.
The copilot hit the crash alarm and Dennis desperately held on. He glanced out the window and then at his president. He hit his seat-belt release and came out of his seat. Before the Secret Service agent sitting on the jump seat at the rear could move, Dennis spun Turner’s seat around so she was facing rearward, a much safer position. The Secret Service agent was out of his seat and coming forward as Dennis shoved pillows into her lap. The agent threw a silver fire blanket over her and reached for more pillows.
Liz Gordon never stopped talking as her cameraman tracked the helicopter. “The missile exploded above the helicopter…I saw a brief flash of fire and now can only see smoke…It is coming in to land on the park near us and I can see something dark streaming out behind the helicopter…It’s falling fast, way too fast. Oh, my God, the president’s mother and daughter are in the crowd. They have to be seeing this.
“Oh! Oh! The nose of the helicopter is coming up. I think they’re going to make it. No. They’re going way too fast! Oh, no!” She gasped for breath.
“Fuel off!” the pilot yelled. The copilot hit the two main fuel switches on the center console. The pilot pulled on the collective to flare and to stop the rate of descent. But without power to feed in, they weren’t going to make it. As they passed through forty feet, the pilot knew they were going to crash and pulled back on the cyclic-control stick to raise the nose. The helicopter banged down tail-first. The rotors flexed downward from the impact and cut into the tail rotor driveshaft. The aircraft bounced into the air as it yawed to the right and rolled to the left.
Dennis and the Secret Service agent were not strapped in and they shot forward, crashing into the forward bulkhead. The rotor blades dug into the ground and broke off, cartwheeling across the ground and tearing into the scattering crowd. The last thing the pilot did before dying was to hit the battery switch, cutting off all electrical power. Noreen Coker’s seat broke free of its mounts and tumbled forward, smashing into Dennis and the Secret Service agent as the helicopter skidded over the ground on its side. A piece of the transmission shaft pierced the ceramic armor and speared the back of her seat, passing through her body and pinning her to Dennis. A flash of flame engulfed the cabin as the helicopter came to rest.
Liz Gordon was screaming but coherent. “I can see flames. I can see flames. But the main part of the helicopter is intact. A man is running for the helicopter.”
A Secret Service agent standing by for the landing had grabbed a fire extinguisher and was running for the helicopter. He never stopped as flames licked out from under the fuselage. He threw himself into the flames and stuck the horn of the fire extinguisher into the engine compartment. A fog of retardant billowed up and the fire went out. The Secret Service agent rolled away on the grass, his face horribly burned.
Liz Gordon and her cameraman ran for the crash. A policeman rushed up and held his hands up. “It’s going to explode!” They skidded to a halt. A crash wagon slammed to a halt beside the helicopter and two medtechs piled out, carrying a crash ax and a fire extinguisher. They were joined by a fireman and four Secret Service agents. Together, they shoved the fireman up and onto the side of the helicopter. He swung the crash ax at the window and disappeared into the fuselage. A medtech followed him inside. Two Secret Service agents climbed up and within moments, the inert body of the president of the United States was passed into their waiting arms. They passed her down to the other medtech and the two Secret Service agents.
The three men carried her into the crash wagon and it backed away as the helicopter burst into flames. The agents still on the fuselage jumped clear as the medtech and fireman climbed out of the fuselage and ran for cover, their clothes smoking.
The crash wagon slammed to a halt and its rear doors opened. Two more Secret Service agents jumped in and it started to move, heading for safety and the nearest emergency room. Before the doors slammed closed, they heard someone shout, “She’s okay!”
A Secret Service agent ripped off his sunglasses and rubbed the tears in his eyes. “Thank you, Lord,” he whispered.
Before the crash wagon had gone fifty feet, it stopped. The rear doors opened and Liz Gordon heard the president of the United States shouting.
“Get out of my way!” Madeline Turner climbed out of the crash truck as a flock of Secret Service agents surrounded her. “Back off! Give me room!”
“Madame President,” one of them shouted, “we’ve got to get you to…”
“I don’t give a damn what you have to do! There are injured people out there.” She pushed clear of the cordon and started pointing. “You, establish a perimeter. You! Get Dr. Smithson and find out who needs medical attention.” She pointed to the crash truck. “That’s for the injured, not me. Get me a telephone.” For a moment, no one moved. “Dammit, move! Get the police to clear a lane for emergency vehicles. Are you listening!”
For a moment it was chaos around her. Then there was order. A Secret Service agent handed her a cell phone. “You’re talking to our command post, ma’am.”
She took it. “Connect me to the National Military Command Center and contact the vice president.” She waited. “Please find my mother and daughter and tell them I’m okay,” she said to the nearest Secret Service agent. A voice came on the line. “This is President Turner. I’m alive and well, there is no change of command.” She waited for a moment and then authenticated.
The vice president came on the line. “Sam, I’m okay. Take care of things at your end.” Dr. Smithson, her personal physician scurried up. “Hold on, Sam.” She turned to the doctor. “Check me out. Here. Be quick.”
The doctor placed both hands on her temples and studied her eyes. “Take three deep breaths.” He listened and smelled her breath as she breathed deeply. Her eyes and lungs were clear. “Follow my finger.” He waved a finger in front of her eyes and measured her response. He pressed her ribs. “Any pain?” She shook her head. “I don’t see any bleeding. Do you feel wet or warm under your clothes?” She shook her head. He ran his hands over her arms and shoulders feeling for broken bones. Then he felt her pulse. “You’re in a mild state of shock, but other than that, you seem okay. We need to get you to a hospital for a complete physical.”
“Take care of the injured first,” she ordered. “Sam, you still there? Listen, get hold of Patrick and tell him everything is on hold.”
In the background, Liz Gordon faced the camera. “We have witnessed a miracle here and President Turner is totally unscathed.” Her cameraman panned to the burning pillar of flame reaching into the sky.
“All others on board perished in the crash.”
The White House
Patrick Flannery Shaw was staring at the TV set and listening to Liz Gordon when the phone rang. He picked it up and listened as the vice president relayed Turner’s message. “Thanks, Sam,” he said, hanging up. He stared at the image of the burning helicopter on his TV. His knees gave out. He sat down and held his head in his big hands, shaking in relief.
The Western White House, California
Maura closed her eyes and listened to her daughter. Maddy’s voice was calm and measured as she talked to Brian on the telephone. “It happened so fast,” she told him. “It’s really hard to remember. One moment we were all over the sky and the next they’re dragging me out of the helicopter.” Maddy listened for a moment. “No, I’m fine, I really am.”
Sarah never took her eyes off her mother. At first, the eleven-year-old girl had simply clung to her mother like a baby. Now she was safe and secure, her world back in place and content to cuddle next to her grandmother. But she could hear something different in her mother’s voice. “Grams, is Mom going to be okay?” she whispered.
“She’s still a little shook,” Maura said. “But, yes, she’s fine.” She got up and walked down the hall, finding Richard Parrish.
“Richard, call the Air Force and get Matt Pontowski here as quickly as possible. He’s at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix.”
Luke Air Force Base, Arizona
Like most everyone in the squadron, Pontowski was glued to the TV set in the pilots’ lounge as the story of the failed assassination of the president unfolded. All of the pilots in the 309th Fighter Squadron, better known as the Wild Ducks, had heard the rumors about his friendship, or affair, with the president, depending on who was spreading the rumor, and accorded him a respectful distance. The fact that he was a brigadier general also added to his isolation.
Edge of Honor Page 25
