“Three of,” Ginny said.
Cory turned to the pilot. “When my companion tells you, I want the engine cut.”
“We’re over the mountains.”
“They’re little mountains.”
“Oh, Christ,” the pilot said in a resigned voice.
“Time,” Ginny said.
“Cut the engine,” Cory commanded.
The pilot flipped a switch, and the engine drone stopped. He feathered the whirring blade until only their forward momentum kept it slowly turning. There was silence in the small craft.
Cory snapped open the side door and shifted his weight.
“Five seconds, Cory.” Ginny’s voice cracked as she began to count backward. “Five … four …”
Cory slipped his legs out the door and grasped both edges of the frame.
“Three … Two … Goodbye, dar—”
He jerked his body forward and left the plane in a sitting position with his boots clamped tightly together.
He began to fall. He fought the rising panic that a parachute jump always produced in him and counted aloud.
Colonel Edward Halliburton left the President’s cabin. Two guards at the front door stiffened to attention as he walked outside. He nodded in their direction and turned down a walkway toward his own quarters.
An eighty-second Airborne master sergeant appeared out of the shadows directly to his front. The sergeant snapped a salute.
“Begging the colonel’s pardon. May I ask where you are going?”
“I am going to my quarters to change clothes, Sergeant. Do you mind?” He deliberately kept a biting tone in his voice.
“You’re in Dogwood, sir?”
“That is correct. Now, get the hell out of my way.” He brushed past the noncom and strode briskly down the walk. He wondered what misinformation General Evans had given the troopers concerning this increased security.
The interior walks of Camp David were gently curving pavements around the cluster of cabins and service buildings. They were lit by low street lamps that were replicas of Victorian gas lamps. The cabins were large one- or two-bedroom suites, and the guests were either provided with room service or ate at Laurel, where they were served by Navy stewards. Under Eisenhower the camp had been rustic. The Nixon administration had refurbished it so that, while exteriors were rustic in appearance, inside they were furnished luxuriously.
As he passed Laurel, Halliburton noticed that the stewards were preparing sandwiches and coffee for the changing shift of trooper guards.
That would be his next step as soon as he changed from mufti.
Liz Crescatt wriggled into the short shorts. They barely buttoned at the waist, and she had to hold her breath, flip the button, and slowly exhale.
It would be disaster to sit down in the pants, as she was afraid she might split the rear seam. She did a half turn in front of a full-length mirror.
My God, she thought. It looked like she had been sewn into the things. They were positively pornographic. She took off her bra and searched through a drawer for a tight T-shirt. She fully intended to jiggle.
She carefully slipped half a dozen marijuana joints into an empty cigarette package. Dr. Halliburton had assured her that the vendor he contacted in Washington Square told him they were pure Colombian Gold. She sniffed one and doubted that assessment, only hoping that they weren’t a complete ripoff.
She glanced at the small clock on the dresser it was almost time to go.
President Orville Crescatt stood in the center of the floor watching the phone on the desk with one glance and the clock over the mantel with the next. When the time arrived, he walked briskly to the phone and flipped it from its cradle.
“Yes, sir,” was the immediate reply from the camp’s switchboard operator. The usual efficient Elfie from the White House staff, had been replaced by a trooper corporal.
“Get me Mr. Smythe and General Evans I want to see them both immediately.”
“Yes, sir,” the soldier barely had time to reply as Crescatt slammed down the phone.
He walked to the sofa in front of the fireplace and slightly shifted it. Furniture position during a confrontation was important. Every nuance of the coming meeting was important, and this was going to be the most important meeting of his life.
He finished turning furniture and sat down in an easy chair to wait.
Colonel Edward Halliburton put on dress pinks. He did something he rarely did—attached his ribbons. He squared the garrison cap on his head, checked the crease of his pants and the fall of his coat in the mirror, and picked a piece of lint from his lapel.
He was ordinarily a casual soldier, more inclined to gray flannel trousers and a blazer, but tonight he would need every possible advantage. The double eagles on his shoulders and the eight rows of ribbons might just be the edge that would serve him well. He dropped a vial of clear powder into his right pants pocket and left the suite.
Halliburton walked to Laurel House, where the soldiers’ mess had been established. A young corporal looked up from a sandwich when he entered the building, and yelled a loud “Atten-hut!”
The dozen or so troopers lounging over coffee and sandwiches sprang to their feet.
“At ease,” Halliburton said as he strode through the room toward the kitchen area. The men went back to their coversations and food.
A senior mess steward came over to him. “Can I get you something, Colonel?”
“I’m running a spot health inspection, Warren,” he said, reading the steward’s name tag. “I can find my way about. Carry on.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dr. Halliburton made a thorough kitchen inspection. He looked into grease traps, inspected the cleanliness of unused pans, and ran his finger along high ledges for dust. He paid minute attention to the large coffee urn in the serving area.
He lifted the lid of the urn and appeared to be peering inside while he surreptitiously poured the vial of white powder into the coffee.
He left Laurel with a curt nod to the senior steward and a crisp, “Very good.”
His next stop would be the generator building, fifty yards back in the woods.
At prep school, Liz Crescatt had once roomed with a girl who was said to have laid the complete Phillips Exeter Academy Lacrosse team. She had once asked her roommate how many boys she had gone to bed with, and was nonplussed at the inexactitude of the answer, “Oh, somewhere between eighty and a hundred.”
As she strolled past Laurel, she tried to remember how her roommate walked and talked. As she consciously thought about it, her hips took on a pronounced seductive sway.
Cory Williams’s instructions were explicit. A hundred yards from the President’s cottage was a gun emplacement with a fifty-caliber machine gun and searchlight. The light was powered by an auxiliary generator at the rear of the emplacement. It had to be neutralized.
Liz knew the soldiers had been watching her for the last ten yards of her walk. “Hi.”
They smiled at her lasciviously.
“Hi,” a PFC of her own age finally replied.
“Want to share a joint?”
“Jesus, Miss Crescatt, they’d shoot us for that.”
She sat on an ammunition box and hoped her pants wouldn’t split while she lit up. She took a deep breath of smoke and held it in her lungs for a count of six before slowly exhaling. She leaned over to the private first class, with the joint in her hand. She let her left breast rub against his arm. “Come on. Scared?”
President Orville Crescatt dominated the room. General Evans, in stiffly starched combat fatigues and with a holster clipped to his pistol belt, sat ramrod stiff on the edge of his chair. Al Smythe, the ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips, slouched across the room.
“General Evans, I demand that you arrest Mr. Smythe.”
“I can’t do that, sir.”
“That is a direct order.”
The general looked uncomfortable but didn’t answer.
“Drop it, Or
ville,” Smythe said softly.
“I am your Commander-in-Chief, Evans. You can be broken. You can be cashiered from the service.”
“Don’t forget to tear off his epaulets, Orville.”
“That man is a traitor, General,” Crescatt said, ignoring Smythe.
“I take my orders from Mr. Symthe, Mr. President. Tomorrow I will take orders from the new President.”
“All right, Al,” Crescatt said as he turned his attention to his aide. “How are you going to handle it?”
“You are resigning tomorrow.”
“Do you plan to kill me?”
“Sometime during the day you will experience what is euphemistically known as a psychotic episode, caused by stress from the recent attempts on your life. Halliburton will be relieved of his medical duties for incompetence.”
“As I expected. I assume you will administer hallucinogens?”
Smythe shrugged and lit another cigarette. “I leave the exact details to men of expertise in that sort of thing. It will be necessary to hospitalize you and impanel a group of doctors to rule on your mental health. When you speak of such things as this meeting, they will term it paranoia. The Vice-President will assume your duties.”
“We’ve known each other for a long time, Al. If it weren’t for your help I wouldn’t have this job in the first place. Why are you doing this?”
“Why didn’t you appoint me to a cabinet post?”
Crescatt looked astonished. “I wanted you in the White House. I needed your day-to-day political comments and advice, not to have you running some huge bureaucracy.”
“I could have done both. Other men have. That isn’t the real reason you didn’t appoint me.”
“We were a team. You tend to be ruthless and need my tempering.”
“Why don’t you use the word you’ve used to others about me—Machiavellian.”
“You said it, Al.”
“No, Mr. President.” He used the title sarcastically. “You used me. And then, when you designed this dangerous “Crusade” of yours, you were really over the political fence.”
“I knew it wouldn’t be politically expedient. My plan is meant to transcend expediency and reach the world.”
“And to take the party down to ruin in next November’s election.”
“Perhaps not.”
“Certain people weren’t willing to take the risk.”
“And now you will control the presidency when the Vice-President takes office.”
“Absolutely and completely. He will do as he is told.”
Crescatt looked back at General Evans. “And you, General?”
“It’s for the good of the country.”
“God, how much abuse has been committed in the name of patriotism,” Orville Crescatt said.
The main parachute opened and jerked Cory upward like a marionette.
The sporting parachute had a different configuration from a military chute, and he found it far easier to control. A tug of the shroud lines could control his descent in either direction.
Below and to the right he could see the walkways, lights, and gatehouse of Camp David. He estimated that he was five hundred yards to the south. He pulled on the shrouds and felt his body sway as air spilled from the edge of his chute and his direction changed.
He had nearly lost the hunting rifle when his body had been snapped up on the chute’s impact. He grasped it firmly. He might have to use it immediately upon landing.
He knew from his army experience that his most vulnerable time would be the instant of touchdown. The chute might fill with air and drag him in a prone position. He might make a tree landing and dangle helplessly until plucked like ripe fruit. Or he might have the bad luck to land within yards of armed men.
It was a chance that had to be taken.
He was directly over the main walkways of the camp when the lights blinked out.
The question of his survival would be determined in the next thirty seconds.
CHAPTER 27
Cory sideslipped the parachute until it hovered directly over the center maze of walkways at Camp David. He was only yards from touchdown. His visual accommodation now allowed him to make out dim shapes on the ground below.
He was going to land a few feet in front of a machine gun emplacement. Not only was he going to land near the emplacement, but he would be directly in front of the long fifty-caliber barrel, and for precious seconds he would be helpless in the chute.
It was over. He had failed.
He clamped his feet together and braced himself for a textbook “parachute landing fall.” Cory hit the ground and immediately rocked his body sideways to absorb the landing shock with the full side of his torso. It was a good landing, and in the breezeless night the black parachute collapsed over him like a shroud. He hit the quick-release clamp and shrugged out of the harness.
He slowly turned to face the long barrel of the heavy machine gun. He knew what he looked like—a man dressed in black, holding a hunting rifle in his arms with another weapon draped along his side. He had parachuted into a restricted area—he was a dead man.
He stood before the machine gun, waiting for the audible click of the bolt as the first bullet of the belt was pumped into the weapon’s chamber.
Only crickets protested the night’s intrusion.
Cory walked slowly toward the sandbagged enclosure. There were three men in the nest; one was bent over the firing mechanism, while two others were sprawled nearby.
He stepped over the embankment and placed his fingers along the carotid artery of the soldier nearest the weapon. The man was alive, the strong pulse attested to that; he was sound asleep, as were the two others.
A thermos jug tilted on its side contained the last remnants of spilled coffee. Canteen mugs lay next to each of the unconscious soldiers.
Halliburton had performed well.
Cory quickly retrieved the parachute and weighted it down at the bottom of the foxhole. Shading his flashlight with his hand, he briefly flicked it on. A pair of infrared binoculars was perched on the edge of the emplacement, near the sleeping gunnery sergeant. He raised the glasses to his eyes and activated the mechanism.
The infrared light turned the whole area into a visible shadow etched in white. He swept the glasses around the perimeter of the position.
The machine gun’s mate was three hundred meters away, at a slight angle to his present position. The three gunners were obviously noncoffee drinkers. They were wide awake and struggling with an amorous Liz Crescatt. She had her arms draped over one soldier’s neck as he struggled toward the searchlight generator. She kissed the trooper and pressed her body against his.
Cory swept the glasses toward the President’s cottage. It was a few hundred yards from his position. Two sentries stationed by the front door had dropped to the ground and were now faced in opposite directions. Their weapons were extended and they were propped on elbows. They were in full combat position. Other awake soldiers in the complex would also be on full alert due to the electrical failure.
A helicopter stood at the rear of the presidential cottage. Its rotor blades slowly turned in preparation for instant take-off.
Cory took the infrared binoculars with him as he vaulted from the emplacement and began to run toward the presidential cottage. The darkness and his possession of the infrared device were the edge he needed to overcome the two cottage guards.
He made a wide circle in the dark in order to come around the far corner of the cottage. Occasionally, he would stop and take a bearing with the binoculars.
He stopped by the edge of the cottage and took one last look at the prone soldier a few yards away.
“See anything?” one of the guards in front of the house asked.
“Naw. What happened to the goddamn lights?”
“Who the hell knows?”
The troopers were only wearing helmet liners, and Cory brought the butt of the hunting rifle down in a swinging blow that caught the first soldier along
the side of the head. He toppled over on his side.
“What the fuck—” The other guard scrambled to his feet and swung his weapon in an arc toward Cory.
Cory instantly reversed the weapon and smashed the butt into the soldier’s solar plexus. As the paratrooper collapsed, he caught him a second time across the side of the head.
He was bathed in light from a powerful searchlight.
The gunner with Liz Crescatt had untwined himself from her arms and switched on the generator and light. It had been pointed directly at the entrance to the presidential cottage and now outlined Cory in its beam.
The gunner reacted with the reflexes of a well-trained professional soldier. The heavy machine gun, operating on single fire, began to spit as its barrel swung toward Cory.
Cory dropped to one knee and snapped off a shot which shattered the searchlight and plunged the area into darkness.
“Sergeant of the guard, post number three!”
There were other yells from the surrounding area.
Walkway and interior lights switched on. Whatever sabotage Dr. Halliburton had performed was either repaired or a backup system had been brought into use. Cory threw his shoulder against the cottage door and stumbled into the hallway as the door splintered before the force of his blow.
General Evans was crouched at the end of the hall with a .45 in his hand.
The grease gun had slipped from Cory’s shoulder and lay across his chest. He reached for the trigger and turned. The weapon’s natural momentum walked the barrel upward as it rattled in his hand.
Half a dozen bullets sketched a bloody pattern across Evans’s front and knocked him backwards into the living room.
Cory rushed forward into the living room, where Orville Crescatt clutched at his arm.
“Smythe! You’ve got to get him. He went out the back to the helicopter. For God’s sake, Cory. Get Smythe!”
Beyond the living room was a serving pantry with a rear entrance that exited out onto a patio near a swimming pool. Beyond the pool, squatting on its concrete pad, the helicopter prepared for take off. Al Smythe climbed into the machine and gave rapid orders to the pilot.
Game Bet Page 27
