By Order of the President

by Kilian, Michael;

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  By Order of the President

  Michael Kilian

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  For Annie,

  for Darla,

  and for David

  All that we see or seem

  Is but a dream within a dream.

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE

  1

  Moving carefully in the narrow confines of the tower’s pitch-dark crawl space, Manuel Lopez Angel Huerta slid the M-16 rifle from its sheepskin case and set it gently on the metal floor beside him.

  He had been two nights and a long day in this cold, painful place, with only a penlight for illumination. This second day would be a much shorter wait. He had eaten the last of his food and stowed the remnant garbage in the same self-sealing plastic bag that held the human waste he had produced in his confinement. His only sustenance now would be the cocoa beans he methodically chewed. They and the drive of his hatred would suffice, would warm him, clear his eyes, steady his fingers. Hatred and vengeance, debt and honor, these alone drove him now.

  Hatred was his only remaining possession. His house had been burned; his wife and three children had been found in a row of bodies lying alongside the ditch in which they had been shot. It had been only a few months before. Huerta had not expected an opportunity for revenge to come so soon, nor that it would come in this country, but it was welcome.

  He had hidden the money they had given him here on the battlefield, with some papers, but he had no illusions that he would live to recover it. He had no wish to. He wondered if they had realized this when they gave it to him; if they had followed him to see where he had put it. But it did not matter. He had no survivors to whom he could leave anything. The cause he served would receive from him a gift much greater than money.

  Inching along on his back, he shifted himself until he was under the removable plate that led to the tower platform above. He had jammed it closed with a wedge when he heard the men begin their careful examination of the tall structure, and they had left satisfied, without disturbing him.

  Only one of them now remained, and he seemed relaxed. Huerta heard only an occasional shifting of feet above him.

  Slowly, slowly, he removed the wedge. A push now and the plate would fly open and he could rise rifle-first.

  But not yet.

  He must wait for the band music. The second playing of the song they had made him listen to over and over. “Hail to the Chief.”

  It would be an hour or more. He would pray. He had abandoned the church long ago, but in recent weeks had returned to its road. In a whisper, he would speak now, to God, to Jesus, to the Holy Virgin, to all the saints he could remember. He would thank them for this, for his manhood, for his death to come. Fifteen of his relatives and friends had been killed, most of them dumped like rubbish. Manuel would soon join them, but he would die more a man than anyone in his country.

  He slipped another bean between his teeth, the acrid juice sliding into his throat as he mashed it. He stroked the stock of the rifle and pressed the cold barrel against his cheek. He closed his eyes, and waited patiently for the music.

  The presidential motorcade, eleven vehicles shepherded by three marine helicopters, hastened along U.S. Route 15 toward Gettysburg at well above the speed limit, splashing with fits of spray through the flat highway puddles left by a now dissipating November storm. The first vehicle was a Maryland state police car. After that came the first of the Secret Service cars, carrying five agents, four of them armed with Uzi submachine guns. The three identical armored Lincoln limousines in which the presidential party rode were next, followed by the Secret Service communications station wagon, which contained among other things the air force colonel who carried the “football,” a briefcase full of the computer-coded missile-launching plans the president needed to fight a nuclear war. In its rear-facing seat, another Secret Service agent with an Uzi sat scanning the moist gray skies through an open back window.

  Immediately behind were the two cars carrying the press pool. Then came the “war wagon,” a black recreational vehicle converted for use as a heavy weapons carrier, its ordnance including machine guns, gas grenades, shoulder-fired rockets, and even a small antiaircraft missile launcher. It had been a regular component of presidential motorcades ever since the suicide car bomb attacks against American embassies and other installations back in the Reagan administration. Following that were another Secret Service sedan, and, at the end of the motorcade, an additional state police car.

  President Henry Hampton rode in the middle Lincoln with Irving Ambrose, his White House chief of staff, and his driver, Peter Schlessler. Albert Berger, the head of the Secret Service Presidential Protection Division, better known as the White House detail, was supposed to accompany him as well. But, as often occurred, Hampton had dismissed him because he wanted to talk with Ambrose about confidential political matters.

  Schlessler had been Hampton’s driver and aide when the president had been governor of Colorado. When the Secret Service had insisted that the presidential limousine be driven by an actual Secret Service man, Hampton had simply sent Schlessler through a Secret Service training course and then had him accredited as an agent.

  He was a good driver, Schlessler. He’d been a good scout car and jeep driver in Vietnam, but tended to oversteer the heavy limousine in rainy weather and was continually sideslipping on the sharper curves. Hampton, busy with his speech, paid no mind. Had he used a helicopter to make this trip, as all of his recent predecessors would have done, he would have been at his destination by now. But he intensely disliked those noisy, precarious machines. He was fond of saying it was because helicopters were designed to want to fall, while fixed-wing aircraft wanted to fly, even with engines off, but some in the press more accurately attributed his phobia to his experiences as an infantry captain in the Vietnam war.

  In any case, the Gettysburg battlefield was just seventy-five miles from the White House. After his speech, Hampton was going no farther than Camp David, a scant twenty miles to the south. It was not pleasant flying weather in any event, the lowering clouds and drizzle interspersed with passing thunderstorms and only an occasional vague glimpse of sunlight to the west.

  “Did you know that there were three drafts of the Gettysburg Address?” Hampton asked Ambrose. “No mention of God in the first or second. We didn’t get ‘this nation, under God’ until the final one.”

  Hampton was perusing a small notebook he had taken from the open black leather briefcase on the seat beside him. He was an inordinately Anglo-Saxon-looking man, his long-jawed face as ruddy as a drunkard’s, his eyes the sea blue-gray of the Vikings who had raped and pillaged his Briton ancestors a millennium before. He wore his sandy gray hair long enough to comb over his ears, which were unusually large, but had it trimmed carefully every few days. He was a fastidiously elegant man, wearing sometimes as many as four different shirts in a day, having the dark, pin-striped suits he favored meticulously tailored to fit his tall, long-boned frame perfectly, his long wrists covered by suit jacket and shirt cuffs reaching to just the proper place. The press marveled at how well his Kevlar bulletproof vest fitted under his suit jacket. But as only a very few knew, he refused to wear even the thinnest such protective garment. None of his aides had
ever seen him with his tie loosened, and certainly not with his shoes off, except in a long-ago campaign television commercial in which he was filmed wading in a cold Colorado stream.

  “I thought Lincoln just scribbled the whole thing on the back of an envelope,” Ambrose said.

  “Lincoln never scribbled anything,” said Hampton. “He never put a word to paper he hadn’t considered carefully.”

  “If you can’t believe the envelope story, what can you believe about him?”

  “You can believe he was the smartest and most effective president in the history of the United States. He didn’t just preserve the Union; he created it. Before the Civil War, you know, people used to say, ‘The United States are.’ After the war, it was ‘The United States is.’ Lincoln did that. He may have suspended habeus corpus and jailed his political enemies to do it, but it was the greatest accomplishment in the history of the presidency. I really envy him.”

  Ambrose fell silent. Though history was Hampton’s mania, Ambrose knew relatively little about it, having studied and remembered only that which bolstered his prejudices. He sincerely believed the nation would have been better served if Lincoln had left well enough alone. The South, Ambrose felt, would have freed the slaves in its own time—in its own way.

  He didn’t particularly like the nickname Bushy, which was owed to the luxuriant thickness of his now gray, close-cropped hair, but he preferred it to Irving, which he had all his life feared made him sound Jewish. Ambrose came from a working-class Colorado family whose lowest esteem had always been reserved for Jews, Mexicans, Chinese, blacks, Italians, and Indians. A short man who had sought to compensate for his size with an inordinate muscle development that only emphasized his small stature, he had been Hampton’s battalion commander in Vietnam. Retiring only a colonel, though he was a West Point man, Ambrose had taken a job managing an amusement park outside Denver until a newly elected Governor Hampton offered him a job on his staff. He had quickly risen to the top and stayed there. Hampton called him and Schlessler the most loyal subordinates he had. “If you can trust a man in combat,” Hampton liked to say, “you can trust him the rest of your life.”

  The press tended to ignore Ambrose’s military record and concentrate on the amusement park. The White House had quickly become known as the “fun house,” and Ambrose’s unfocused briefings as “merry-go-rounds” or “thrill rides.” Hampton was pleased with this. He had been fearful the media would instead have dwelled upon the many former military men around him. A Time magazine writer had floated the term “Hampton’s khaki mafia,” but no one had picked up on it. Ambrose the Ferris-wheel operator made for better jokes.

  The visual distortion of the thick, bulletproof glass of the side window made Ambrose slightly ill. He shifted his gaze to look straight out the less disconcerting windshield, staring at the twirling red Mars lights atop the roofs of the security cars preceding them. Ambrose had been in the White House nearly two years, but those bright bursts of heralding color still thrilled him with a sense of his own power, a sense never before satisfactorily provided, even by the experience of command in Vietnam.

  Yet there were limits to this power that no bystander, or even White House correspondent, could ever know. President Hampton was a man who acted on sudden whim, secret fears, and private, sometimes bizarre perceptions. Ambrose, who issued orders from his big White House office dozens of times a day, never did so without the nagging apprehension that he might be abruptly countermanded.

  Ambrose had a serious problem now. An army friend he had proposed as ambassador to Ireland, a brigadier general with an Irish name and father, was being opposed by the vice president’s allies in the Senate, including the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. There were some painfully effective measures Ambrose could take to shove these people out of his way, but he was unsure of the president’s response.

  “Damn!” said Hampton, staring hard at the last page of his speech. “Sometimes I think Barnes’s brain is solid brick. This won’t do.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Ambrose. He had hired speechwriter Barnes from a conservative newspaper in Indiana.

  “We have to have something from the Gettysburg Address. But this is so damned wrong: ‘That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ What the hell does that have to do with the V.A. bill?”

  Ambrose reached for the radio telephone at his right elbow. “I’ll have him fix that right up.”

  “No,” said Hampton. “I’ll take care of it. I think I have a better line.” He studied his notebook. “Here we go. ‘The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here.’ The brave men, living and dead. Perfect.” He scratched the offending phrase from the speech with a gold pencil and scrawled in the new-found replacement.

  “Perfect,” Ambrose said. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. He would wait to bring up the Irish ambassadorial appointment until they were in the more relaxed atmosphere and circumstance of Camp David.

  It was November 19, the anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Hampton was going to give his own speech in exactly the same place—at the edge of the National Cemetery just behind what had been the Union lines in the great battle, near the point where Pickett’s charge, and the Confederate cause, had reached and faltered. As Lincoln’s had not immediately, Hampton’s speech would make news. He would be signing a bill to make the Veterans Administration a full-fledged cabinet department. Its sponsor was a member of the liberal opposition who was running for president in the next election and wanted to soften his antimilitary image. The president would in return receive a freer hand in his conduct of the expanding war in Central America.

  Hampton, known as “the great compromisor” as Reagan had been called “the great communicator,” had triumphed again. It had become a cliché response among the White House press corps to seize upon his every act and pronouncement as further evidence of his moderation and flexibility.

  He often played on Civil War themes. A graduate of the University of Virginia and Harvard Law, he had grown up in rural, if wealthy, Loudon County, Virginia. His father was a Virginian, but his mother represented seven generations of Pennsylvanians. In this Gettysburg speech, he would name those of his ancestors who had fallen on both sides. He had recently done the same thing in a speech at the Antietam Battlefield in Maryland, standing on the old stone bridge where General Burnside had ordered one of them forward to die.

  The president returned his speech to its protective plastic case, put that in his briefcase, snapped it shut, and slid it toward Ambrose, who lifted it off the president’s side of the leather seat and set it on the floor.

  “We’ll have some whiskey and a good movie tonight,” Hampton said, leaning back and putting his hands behind his head, with a care to avoid creasing his suit coat. “Jerry Greene got us an advance copy of Fragments. They say it’s the best movie ever made about Vietnam.”

  “The heroine’s a slope,” Ambrose said.

  “We all had such heroines.” The president looked to the distorted glass of the thick side window, then closed his eyes.

  “Bushy,” he said, finally, without opening his eyes. “I want you to withdraw the Donlon nomination.”

  “It’s only ambassador to Ireland.”

  “Bushy. Half the committee chairmen in the House are Irish. They do not like Donlon. They think he’s a flag-waving fool. They’re afraid he’ll get mixed up with the Sinn Fein on the Ulster thing. Our people on Senate Foreign Relations feel the same way.”

  “You mean the vice president’s people.”

  “Irving. I want him pulled. I said it in the beginning. I’ve said it a thousand times since. I’ll say it again. We’ll get what we want. But we can’t afford to put anything in the way. Donlon is in the way.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “I’m pleased to hear you say that, Colonel.”

  With that, Hampton touched upon Ambrose’s most sensitive vulnerability. For all o
f his twenty-five years in the service, he had with desperate hope looked to retiring as a general officer, if only to make up for his having graduated from the Point next to last in his class. But they had passed him over too many times and shoved him into retirement with nothing more than the colonelcy that itself had been too long in coming. Now, Hampton, the secretary of defense, and Senator Andrew Rollins of Tennessee, the president’s best friend in the Congress, were working discreetly to get Ambrose promoted to brigadier general in the reserves. It meant everything to him.

  They were taking a very long time with this promotion. There were times when Ambrose despaired of getting it before Hampton’s term expired.

  As Hampton said, Ambrose would put nothing in the way.

  The motorcade crossed the Pennsylvania line, speeding through a wide shaft of inadvertent sunlight. Far ahead, a Pennsylvania state police car roared from the shoulder onto the highway and quickly gathered speed. As the Maryland car pulled off, the Pennsylvania cruiser eased slowly back until it became an integral part of the motorcade. The president appeared now to be sleeping, or at least in deep and private thought. Ambrose folded his arms and yawned. At length they reached Highway 97, following it northwest toward Gettysburg under skies that had again turned to gloom. Soon, Day-Glo colored billboards began to appear, advertising some of the glut of commercial tourist attractions in the town. Ambrose revered the battlefield as passionately as Hampton did, and had no tolerance whatsoever for the glitz that had grown up around it.

  In the limousine behind, C. D. Bragg, the president’s young and ruthlessly effective chief political adviser, sat with Jerry Greene, White House communications director, going over the television campaign videotape footage they hoped to acquire at Gettysburg. The Marine Band would be there, and a costumed ceremonial unit of Union infantry. Greene, a genius at such work, had ordered three White House video units to the ceremonial grounds. In the front seat of their car, next to the driver, was Albert Berger, the head of the Secret Service’s one-hundred-fifty-man Presidential Protection Division. As was always the case now when he was exiled from the president’s car, he sat with a radio microphone in one hand and his unholstered .357 Magnum revolver in the other, his face a grim weaving of pumberless anxieties.