On Your Mark

by M. L. Buchman

  “When a dog team preps a site, we’re done before the Motorcade arrives. By the time Sidekick or any other protectee shows up, we’re typically done and gone. One or two will hang on to keep the site secure, but most of us move on to prep the next locale. We aren’t embedded directly in the Motorcade by any prior standard of practice.” He’d always preferred the fence line, but that hadn’t freed him completely from site prep for the President’s trips.

  “The Motorcade,” Reese tapped a few controls and the DC map was replaced with images of vehicles lined up across the screen. She swept her hands across the surface and split it into sections so that she could stack and enlarge them, now a long double line spanning two screens. “It’s typically made up of twenty-five to thirty vehicles, if you don’t count the motorcycle police.”

  “Seen it go by enough times,” Jim studied the pictures. “Never knew you were one of the drivers.” As if he was apologizing for not having noticed her sooner.

  “We don’t go looking for trouble,” even though Jim was definitely giving her some. “But we’re ready when it comes.” She’d give it back twice as hard as he dished trouble out if it came to that.

  He shrugged as if her threat was of no consequence. He tapped the image of the first vehicle to zoom in on it. A standard black sedan.

  “Tell me about it,” but he didn’t seem to be talking about the vehicle. If he thought she was going to talk about anything else in this room full of testosterone-laden men, he had another think coming.

  “That’s the Route Car. It runs several minutes ahead of the Motorcade, typically with a small fleet of motorcycle cops who stop to block intersections as needed. They make sure the route is clear. Pilot car is another sedan usually. Their job is to make sure we follow the planned route. Don’t want to get lost or turn into a cul-de-sac with a thirty-five vehicle caravan on your tail.”

  “Then a bunch of cop cars and more motorcycles.”

  “We call them Sweepers. Sweeping along at the front to make sure the road is clear.”

  “Then another sedan,” he started to brush the picture off the side of the screen but she pulled it back.

  “Don’t dismiss it. This is a key car—called the Lead Car. It’s directly in front of the main package: Stagecoach and the Spares. It’s my buffer if anything goes wrong. Guide, early alert, and offensive driving. They’re the best drivers outside of the limos. Remember the guy who stopped the delivery truck in New York by slamming on his brakes and taking the crash himself? That’s the Lead Car.”

  Reese closed her eyes and hung on to the edge of the table as she continued. Wished they were in a place Jim could put his arm around her as the images came back.

  “That driver died yesterday. Some blood vessel in his brain was too damaged. He was getting better, talking to his wife, and it just let go. Killed him almost instantly. The first the docs knew was from her screaming.”

  If it had come down to that moment and she’d been the driver of the Lead Car, would she have done that to protect the First Lady?

  She supposed she would have or they wouldn’t have chosen her to drive Stagecoach.

  Unless she’d been chosen for some other reason. The first woman to drive Stagecoach. Or the first one they thought was weak enough to let an attack through? She glanced around the room. Was one of these guys, her fellow drivers, setting her up for the fall? What about Doogan? She could hear him being snooty over the phone to some poor Colorado police chief who probably deserved better. Or Harvey? Or…

  It was the road to madness.

  “That’s my car,” Jim stabbed a finger down on it and it zoomed in to fill the screen.

  “What?” Her shout was loud enough to silence the room. Even Doogan paused in mid-phone-snoot to glance over at her.

  “The Lead Car. That’s my spot,” he said it more quietly and the other guys turned back to what they’d been doing, though they did keep glancing over.

  “That—” she swallowed hard and tried to temper her voice. All she could picture was Jim in the car as it was battered and broken on the FDR. “In reality, Lead Car is probably the most dangerous position in the entire Motorcade. It’s the last line of defense.”

  “But,” Jim tapped the image again and it zoomed in until all they could see was a tire. He pulled his hands away rather than touching the screen again. “I’m with the Motorcade. In fact, I’m guessing that it’s unlikely that we’d ever be separated from the main Motorcade. But I’d still be first to arrive. That means Malcolm and I can deploy while Stagecoach is still coming to a stop. We’d be able to check the immediate area for as much as ten or twenty seconds before the President steps out.”

  “We don’t release Stagecoach’s door until we’re positive the zone is safe,” but she wasn’t paying much attention to her own words as she considered the implications. She zoomed back until the entire Motorcade was in view. Reese had thought he’d travel in a support vehicle, maybe back by the inevitable press corps vans. But each of those were specialist vehicles: ambulance, hazmat, mobile communications center… Each was crammed with personnel. The Lead Car usually had just a driver and a spotter in the front passenger seat. There would always be room for Jim and Malcolm in the back seat.

  “You sure?” She looked at him carefully.

  Something about him had changed. He wasn’t just some Okie trucker with an unexpected set of skills in bed. After what they’d both witnessed, it would take an immensely brave man to ride in the Lead Car. Doubly if they were right and the run at the First Lady’s Motorcade had merely been a test. Suddenly her dog walker was the Army soldier who had driven through war zones for a living.

  Jim nodded down toward Malcolm. “We’re sure.”

  She knew how he felt about protecting his dog. If he was willing to risk both their lives, then he really was sure.

  Then he looked at her, straight in the eye with no evasion, no blinking. Just that totally male smile of his that said they were now on a completely different topic.

  “I’m sure.”

  Chapter Ten

  Jim followed Reese up the back stairs of Air Force One and tried not to feel like he was getting ready to leave the planet. He was certainly headed for a whole new world.

  He’d been able to watch Air Force One just taxiing into position as their Motorcade had raced along the back road from the Air and Space Museum. Even for that short distance on a closed road, over a dozen vehicles had been involved: Route Car, Stagecoach, the five heavy-duty Suburbans carrying various aspects of the Secret Service, the cluster of press vans, and an inevitable ambulance. Overhead he’d been able to hear the pounding beat of Overwatch—a Marine Sikorsky Black armed to the teeth.

  “I don’t even hear it anymore. It’s always there,” Reese noticed where his attention had strayed. “Keep moving or you’ll get run down.”

  Now the rush was for everyone joining the flight to race up the back stairs in the time it took the President and the senior staffers to ascend the front ones. The plane would leave when he was ready, not when everyone in the back was.

  The members of the press clearly knew that as they crowded up the stairs behind him, most carrying small suitcases. For himself, he’d tucked a toothbrush and a change of underwear into Malcolm’s pack and called it good.

  He’d never walked under a 747 on the runway before and it was daunting how large it was. Planes never seemed that big when walking to them along an enclosed jetway. But this thing was massive. It blocked out the entire sunset sky. He could feel the weight of the responsibility of the Presidential load far more than from his first short ride in the Motorcade. All this, all these people, were to make sure that one man traveled safely.

  At the head of the stairs, Reese headed out the left-side door into a seating area that looked like any other business class section he’d had to walk past on his way to the cheap seats. A glance behind revealed that the press exited the stairs via the right-side door.

  “They get a boxed-in area on the other
side of the fuselage from us. Fourteen seats, paid for by their agencies in the hopes of getting some tiny scoop from the President. They can’t enter the rest of the plane without a personal escort by one of Harvey’s boys.”

  “Harvey’s girls don’t count?”

  She ignored him and led them to a pair of seats. The seats were generous enough for Malcolm to join them on the area between his feet and Reese’s.

  He was starting to recognize the faces who came into their side of the aircraft: four members of the PPD led by Harvey Lieber and two of the other drivers. The rest were unknown to him, but were easily identified as being attached to the plane rather than the Motorcade. They wore blue uniforms. Over their left breast, their name was stitched in white. Over their right was the Presidential Seal with “Air Force One” stitched above it.

  “Is it me or is the air in here getting a little thin?”

  “It’s not you,” Reese offered. “I’ve only been aboard a few times. Mostly I’m on the C-17 transport with the vehicles.”

  He wanted to take her hand, hold on to some concrete evidence that he wasn’t so far in over his head. But he was…and he knew it. Two days assigned to work with Reese. He’d pictured at least meals and two nights together to explore a little of what was going on between them.

  That idea had died in the first ten minutes.

  “Joining the Motorcade is normally a three-month indoctrination. You have two days, so let’s get to work.”

  Meals had been eaten while standing up or studying videos of simulated attack scenarios. Each had come with a twenty-page manual of what to watch for, position by position. The response scenarios had taken less than two minutes, but he’d had to watch some a dozen times to see how all of the pieces were moving at a deep level of coordination. Once he’d spent a day doing that, Reese ran him through a video he’d already seen dozens of times, the attack in New York.

  A journalist had also taken a series of superb photos and videos that hadn’t been available during his initial debriefing. The photographer had caught the feeling—and detail—of being right in the middle of every moment of the attack.

  Step by step, Reese led him through the entire event second by second, displaying all of the different angles on the various screens of the central conference table. Much of the team had gathered around—it was the first-ever attack on the Motorcade in history that hadn’t been repulsed while still several blocks away.

  Each instant had a coordinated action.

  “If a crisis occurs while you are traveling within our company,” Tad Doogan had said in one of his tones, “I would highly recommend that you remain in your vehicle. Such an action will vastly increase the likelihood of survival for you and your animal.”

  Jim had wanted to brush off the warning, but Reese’s deadpan expression stated that she’d heard worse advice.

  As the frame-by-frame continued, Jim began to realize that perhaps she and Doogan weren’t kidding. The agents who had poured out of the flipped SUV that had been caught in the truck’s wreckage had moved quickly and aggressively to create a zone of protection despite how badly they’d just been rattled. And they’d done it in seconds.

  On Day Two, they’d taken him out to James J. Rowley Training Center, but this time it was a full Motorcade, not just Reese. They moved into the winding streets of the simulated residential neighborhood.

  They’d placed an agent in the back seat of the Lead Car with him. “Want to observe how you and your dog react.”

  Jim had served in the Army for six years and done dozens of training exercises here at RTC, so he hadn’t expected anything surprising. He should have. The Motorcade was an attempt to reproduce the security offered by the White House and Air Force One, except in a mobile form. It was an incredible experience.

  Malcolm’s main complaint had been when the agent riding with them had asked him to roll up the window just because it was thirty-six degrees outside.

  Jim’s main complaint was that for two nights he hadn’t slept with Reese Carver. Somehow, both nights he’d found himself driving home alone and he didn’t like it one bit. He’d have been glad to plummet into sleep beside her and wake up together just getting dressed.

  Instead, they hadn’t so much as brushed fingers since that one morning in his fifth wheel. Reese was deep in the task, so deep that maybe she didn’t even see that she was pushing him away.

  He’d always been a family-oriented guy, he knew that much—he saw more of his parents and siblings, who were scattered all over the country, than most of his coworkers did who grew up in Baltimore or Charleston and had family nearby. Having Reese beside him when he woke up in New York and the one night at his place had him thinking about it for himself as well.

  Reese had made it damn clear over the last two days that he’d been far too naive.

  He glanced over at her as Air Force One roared down the runway, powering its way aloft with a surprising rate of climb. He almost felt as if he was an astronaut pushed back in his seat.

  Reese sat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes closed.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Feels like a stock car coming off the line,” her voice was soft and whispery with nostalgia. “Pressed back in your seat. Two, three, four hundred miles of a challenging race just waiting for you to push the envelope. To find the edge and ride it through the heart of the pack. I miss it sometimes.”

  “Ever think of going back?”

  She rocked her head side to side without opening her eyes. “Got a taste for doing something more important. Saving the First Ladies. That was something. We did that.”

  “You did.” That had been clear from the videos. If she had been a single moment slower to respond, the entire rear of the Suburban would have been crushed. That had been clearly demonstrated by what the truck had done to the nose of the following Suburban instead.

  “You’d have done the same,” she opened her eyes and looked at him. It seemed it was the first time they’d had a moment to really look at each other in two days.

  “I’m just a trucker, not—”

  “Hate to break this up. You two are with me.” Harvey Lieber was standing in the aisle by Jim’s elbow. The climb had eased, though they weren’t up to cruising altitude yet.

  Jim hadn’t realized how closely they’d leaned their heads together as they talked quietly over the four big engines’ roar.

  “Three of us,” Jim popped his seatbelt and nudged Malcolm awake with his foot.

  “Right,” Harvey said dryly before heading up the aisle.

  A glance at Reese. She didn’t know what was going on either.

  They passed through the luxurious guest area with eight seats for guests plus two more tucked in corners occupied by agents watching the guests. Lieber didn’t stop as they moved past the staff area, a big conference room with eight executive armchairs and a line of couches along the wall encircling a sprawling table of walnut, or even the senior staff lounge where four people were huddled together debating something.

  “Uh.”

  Harvey continued leading them forward past the galley and a doctor’s office presently configured as a small conference room.

  They were fast running out of airplane.

  A naval officer sat in the last chair in the long hallway they’d been following forward. At his feet sat the black leather briefcase of the nuclear football—the launch codes and communications gear that was never more than a hundred feet from the President in case he had to launch a strike.

  Across from him sat a massive black man who Jim was fairly sure was the head of Secretary Matthews’ protection. His hands were big enough that he could probably break Air Force One in two if he needed to.

  Jim considered turning and sprinting for the back of the plane, but it wasn’t nearly far enough away.

  Harvey finally stepped through a double door bearing the Seal of the President painted in gold on the mahogany.

  There was even less air here th
an there’d been at the rear of the plane.

  Reese had been within steps of the President any number of times, but she’d never actually met him. As a driver, her job was to stay behind the wheel of the car and be ready to move.

  Now she was standing in his unoccupied office.

  “He’ll be with you in a minute. Sit. Don’t touch anything.” Then Harvey stepped out and closed the doors behind him.

  She looked at Jim in desperation, but what right did she have to look there for comfort? For two days she’d tried to rediscover herself.

  She depended on no one.

  She needed no one!

  Yet she’d spent almost every waking moment with Jim and enjoyed every second of it. She’d learned to anticipate his moods, partly by watching him, partly by watching Malcolm. Jim’s sharp mind had been revealed behind his easy manner as they’d dissected video after video.

  The only way to keep her head clear had been to get away—steer clear of him each night. Which had worked brilliantly. She’d lain alone in her bed both nights, thinking of him. Wishing him there beside her. Missing his silence in which to explore her thoughts.

  Now she didn’t dare speak. The President’s flying office was a disorienting space—it felt twisted inside the square space. The President’s chair was in the forward corner and a curved desk defined the power of the position by its sheer size within the small area. For visitors there was a single armchair near the hull and a curved sofa lined the other two walls. Anyone seated there would be a head shorter than the President.

  Jim dropped onto the sofa as if it didn’t matter and Malcolm climbed up beside him to rest his head on Jim’s thigh.

  Resigned, Reese was most of the way into the lone armchair when the door opened.

  The President stepped in.

  Jim jumped to his feet.

  She tried to, but was past the tipping point and had to bounce off the cushion with all the guilt of a little girl caught playing in her parents’ room.