Brown, Dale - Independent 04

by Storming Heaven (v1. 1)

  Wilkes saw the smile diminish and knew that Vice President Martindale wasn’t going to spar with her any longer. But she wasn’t going to be bullied by any of these outsiders either. “Of course I understand, Mr. Vice President. I’ll extend every consideration to you and your people. All I need is confirmation from the president pro tern of the Senate.” Wilkes knew the current Vice President would put a halt to all this nonsense right away. “We can start as soon as—”

  “I’m sorry, Judge Wilkes, I should have handed this over earlier,” Senator Georgette Heyerdahl said. It was a warrant, signed by the Senate Minority Leader. “As you know, the Vice President is overseas, and he turned the gavel over to the Majority Leader. Unfortunately, Senator Collingsworth lost an aunt in the explosion in San Francisco airport last night, and he is on emergency leave. Since the Senate Majority Whip is also out of the country, he allowed the gavel to be transferred to the Senate Minority Leader. Here is his charter for our organization to conduct this investigation.”

  Wilkes accepted the letter but did not look at it—she was very familiar with this type of provision, called a “roundhouse.” Officially, the U.S. Senate is never formally adjourned—the gavel, or presidency of the Senate, is always in someone’s hand, day and night, while the Senate is “in recess.” The president pro tern of the Senate (the Vice President of the United States) usually leaves it up to the leader of his party in the Senate to choose who would preside in his stead, but there is a definite “pecking order” in case of emergencies or disaster. Usually the day-to-day presidency of the Senate is ceremonial in nature, but it also conveys a lot of power to anyone who knows the law and who has the guts to use it. Establishing a charter to a Senate subcommittee to begin some work is one such power of the president pro tern, and pulling a roundhouse is a quick way to get it enacted. “The charter is only good for five days or until the full Senate can vote to cancel it,” Heyerdahl added, as if trying to instruct Wilkes on the law, “but it’s in force right now.”

  “I’m well aware of the law, Senator, thank you,” Wilkes interrupted. Of course, the Vice President, who was away in Tokyo, could snatch the gavel back immediately just by stepping aboard Air Force Two or into the American embassy—both were always considered American territory— and he could yank the group’s charter away in a New York minute. But at this stage of the game, with a very public press conference just concluded, it was probably not a wise decision. Any hesitancy the Vice President or Wilkes might show toward such a distinguished group as the Project 2000 Task Force might appear like a cover-up.

  “As I said, I’ll be more than happy to cooperate with your subcommittee, Mr. Vice President.” Wilkes sighed. No use in trying to fight this anymore, she thought. She had to contact the Justice Department and the President right away and let them handle Martindale and Hardcastle. “An office has been set up in one of the SR-71 hangars for our team, and I’m due to receive a situation briefing as soon as I arrive. You’re welcome to sit in.”

  “Thank you, Judge Wilkes,” Martindale said, the famous boyish smile returning. He shook hands again with her, making sure that the press photographers captured the moment.

  After the impromptu press conference broke up, Hardcastle noticed several Air Force officers standing by a blue sedan nearby. He walked over to them, extended a hand, and said, “Colonel Vincenti, Colonel Gaspar? I’m Admiral Ian Hardcastle, U.S. Coast Guard, retired.” They shook hands, and Hardcastle was introduced to the public affairs officer and Vincenti’s area defense counsel. “I’m sorry for what happened to Major McKenzie. I know what it’s like to lose a good crewman.” The Air Force officers nodded without saying anything—Hardcastle could easily read the distrust in their eyes. “Colonel Vincenti, tell me about Henri Cazaux.”

  “Colonel Vincenti has been advised not to speak with anyone else, Admiral,” the area defense counsel said.

  Hardcastle shot her an angry stare, then turned back to Vincenti. “I need to know, Colonel,” Hardcastle said. “I’m a part of a Senate investigation into the incident.”

  “Another government investigation,” Vincenti scoffed. “Great. Just what we need.”

  “We’re not trying to pin the blame on you, Colonel—I’m trying to pin the blame on where it belongs: on the White House and the Pentagon,” Hardcastle said. “I’m trying to get Congress and the President to act seriously about national defense.”

  “I appreciate that, Admiral,” the area defense counsel said, “but we’re still not going to discuss—”

  “One question, if that’s okay with your ADC,” Hardcastle said. Vincenti did not respond, but he did not object, either. “You were the hunter, Colonel. You had your prey in your sights. Now tell me about Henri Cazaux.”

  At first Vincenti didn’t know what to make of this tall, lean, ghostly-looking man. He had seen Hardcastle on all the TV shows, of course, but when Hardcastle said the word “hunter,” he heard something else. Yes. . . yes, Vincenti thought. I know what he’s talking about. Al Vincenti knew about the mystique of the hunter.

  The hunter, at the moment of unleashing deadly energy against his prey, forms a sort of mind-meld with his quarry. Deer hunters feel it, experience the synergism of minds linked together for a brief instant. Bombardiers sometimes feel as if they are on the ground, watching their bombs fall on their own heads. The inexperienced hunter can’t handle it and gets “target fixation” or the “shakes,” and the spell is broken and the quarry usually escapes. A young or emotional bombardier that feels it turns to the bottle, gets a Section 8, or gets a .45 and blows himself away. Vincenti remembered that Hardcastle had once lined up lots of targets in the sights of his awesome V-22 Sea Lion tilt-rotor interceptors, so he definitely knew what it felt like to search, track, find, pursue, attack, and destroy a target— Jesus, he had done it for real Hardcastle had fired on many real targets. Vincenti didn’t know how many men he had killed, but he knew he had killed before. He knew what it was like. And so did Vincenti...

  “Defiance,” Vincenti said. “No fear. Not at any time did I feel fear from Henri Cazaux. Even in his parachute. He was . .. happy. Satisfied. Ready to begin ...”

  “Begin what, Colonel?”

  “I don’t know, Admiral.” Vincenti shrugged. “I don’t even know what I’m talking about. You asked me what I felt when I thought about Cazaux, and that’s the first thing that popped into my head. I wish I had taken him out. I won’t miss next time.”

  As the group headed toward their cars to take them to their first meeting, Lani Wilkes turned and noticed Admiral Hardcastle talking with the F-16 pilot involved in the previous night’s incident, along with his group commander. She excused herself from the former Vice President and the Senator and walked back to them.

  Hardcastle ignored her as she approached. “I hope you get the chance, Colonel,” Hardcastle said as Wilkes got closer, a grim, angry expression on her face, “but I rather doubt you will. We’ll meet again. No matter what the press says, remember you’ve got someone on your side—”

  “Excuse me, Admiral Hardcastle,” Wilkes said testily, standing several paces away from the group. “Can I have a word with you, please?”

  Hardcastle closed his notebook, shook hands with both Vincenti and Gaspar, clasped Vincenti reassuringly on the shoulder, and moved aside with Wilkes until the crowd passed her by, with just a few of Wilkes’ aides remaining. The press had left, and they were alone. The veteran Coast Guard flier extended a hand to Lani Wilkes and said, “It’s very nice to see you again, Judge Wilkes.”

  Wilkes put her hands on her narrow hips, sliding her jacket open and slightly exposing a shoulder holster with a small automatic pistol as well as a slender waist and a firm bosom. With her sunglasses now in place against the hot summer sun, her lips red with a touch of lipstick, it was hard not to notice that this tough lawmaker and civil rights activist was a very beautiful woman. But, like Sandra Gef- far, his partner and co-commander of the old Border Security Force and other good-looking f
emale public figures, Hardcastle knew that a very tough woman still lurked under that beauty.

  “Listen, Admiral,” Wilkes said testily, “let’s get something straight. I’m going along with this charade only because I’ve got you and Martindale and Wescott in my face in front of the press. Your Senate subcommittee charter is a joke—it’ll be nullified by the Vice President before the day’s out, and they might even pass a law banning all such charters by the gavel. You may not realize it, even Martindale may not know it, but all this is a sham. I know it and Wescott knows it. After that, you’ll be off this base and out of the picture—permanently.”

  “That remains to be seen, Judge.” Hardcastle smiled.

  “So what is it you want, Hardcastle?” Wilkes asked. “Is this just another publicity stunt?”

  “No more of a stunt than trotting Colonel Vincenti out here in front of the press, accusing him of screwing up the mission, and then letting the press feed on him,” Hardcastle snapped. “I heard your press conference, Judge, and I think you’re wrong: Henri Cazaux is not just ‘a merchant of death,’ he is a homicidal maniac. He will kill anyone to escape, including himself. He has no conception of the sanctity of life.”

  “Spare me. We have a full psychological profile on him, Admiral.”

  “Then you haven’t read it, Judge—because it would say that trying to apprehend Cazaux would be a waste of lives,” Hardcastle continued. “He will slaughter anyone within reach before taking his own life.”

  “The Bureau has dealt with homicidal personalities before, Admiral, and Cazaux is no different.” She sighed, rolling her eyes.

  “He’s different, Judge, because he’s got access to aircraft, special weapons, and sophisticated military expertise,” Hardcastle said. “He can begin a reign of terror the likes of which this country has never seen before.”

  “Listen, Admiral, I’m sorry, but I don’t have the time for your pro-military speeches—I’ve got an investigation to run,” Wilkes said impatiently. “We will deal with whatever he throws at us—and we’ll do it without using the military, without big, expensive tilt-rotor aircraft loaded with machine guns and guided missiles, without one-hundred- million-dollar oil platforms which are now gathering barnacles and rust out in the Gulf of Mexico, without blimps with radars on them, and without weird robot helicopters that crash-land every time you turn around. Unlike former so-called law enforcement agencies, the FBI doesn’t feel as if we have to harass and scare half the law-abiding population just to find one slimeball.” Her indirect jab at the Hammerheads, Hardcastle’s high-tech drug interdiction and Border Security Force, was fully intentional and heartfelt: Wilkes had always believed the military had no place in law enforcement, and that the rights of all individuals—the accused as well as the innocent—needed to be protected at all times.

  “But let me remind you of a few things, Admiral,” the FBI Director went on. “This is my investigation. I am running the show here. I will not hesitate to throw your tail off this base and into a federal lockup if you try to interfere with my investigation while you’re part of this Senate probe. You are not to talk with the crews, you are not to talk with the commanders, you are not to talk with the press about anything you see or hear. Charter or no charter, I’ll have you arrested for interfering with an FBI investigation. I may not be able to hold you for long, what with David Brinkley and Larry King, your good TV talk-show buddies, on my ass, but it’ll be long enough to disrupt your TV schedule. Is all that clear, Admiral?”

  “Yes, it’s very clear, Judge,” Hardcastle replied. “But I’ve got one thing to say to you. I’ve seen this once before. Agusto Salazar, Pablo Escobar, Manuel Noriega—they all thought they could take on the United States and win. Henri Cazaux will hide behind the Bill of Rights and use it to get what he wants. Don’t let it happen now. Use all the forces you have available.”

  “You’re paranoid, Hardcastle. Why don’t you run for office? You’d fit right in.” She spun on a heel and stepped away from Hardcastle as quickly as she could.

  The former Vice President’s limousine was waiting for Hardcastle, and he joined up with them a few moments later. “Well, how did it go, Ian?” Martindale asked Hardcastle as he sat down opposite the Vice President, beside Senator Heyerdahl.

  “I don’t think she’s going to cooperate.” Hardcastle sighed. “We’re going to have to battle her every step of the way.”

  “Too bad,” Martindale said.

  Hardcastle said, “I think I scared her a bit, and that pissed her off.”

  “Well, she’s certain to go to the White House and vent now,” Heyerdahl concluded. “Our charter will be history by the end of the day, after the press has gone to bed for the night.” She turned to Hardcastle and said, “Wilkes is a very powerful and very dangerous opponent.”

  Hardcastle said, “She’s tough, and strong, and beautiful. The press loves her. But as tough as she is, Henri Cazaux is tougher. And in a battle of wills, his is superior.”

  “How do you know this Cazaux so well, Ian?” Wescott, seated next to the former Vice President, asked. “You chase him when you were with the Hammerheads?”

  “We’d received a bit of intelligence about him,” Hardcastle replied. “We thought he might begin working with Salazar’s Cuchillos pilots, using military hardware to protect drug shipments. Cazaux was trained to fly everything from Mirage fighters to Huey helicopters, and he was one of Europe’s top commando instructors. Cazaux never moved in, and I lost track of him when the Border Security Force was disbanded. But I know a few Henri Cazauxs, Congressman Wescott, and a few Agusto Salazars.”

  “I have no doubt that you’d like to see every one of these sleazoids in prison, or better, at the bottom of the deepest ocean you can find,” Kevin Martindale said. “But let’s keep our ultimate objective in mind—to call attention to the current Administration’s piss-poor military utilization and lack of military planning. But we don’t want to look like armchair quarterbacks to the press.

  “We’re here to observe, yes,” Martindale went on, affixing a stern glare on all of those around him in the limo, “but our attitude should be that we’ve got a better way. So the question facing us all during our trip here is simple: if we were in the driver’s seat, what would we be doing better? Faced with the threat from Henri Cazaux ourselves, what would we be doing that the current Administration isn’t? We shit in Lani Wilkes’ cornflakes by crashing her press conference, but in fact the President is doing pretty -much what I’d expect—call for a massive manhunt, order the FBI Director to set up a command center in the area and personally coordinate the investigation. So far, we’d be doing the same thing as the current White House residents.

  “We need a specific plan of action, something we can point to and say, ‘The President should be doing this,’ and the American people lean forward toward their TVs and respond, ‘Yeah, the dipshit, he should be doing that, I’m voting for Martindale in ninety-six.’ Everyone got the picture?” There were nodding heads and “Yes, sirs” all around. “Okay, good. Comments?”

  “Judging by Wilkes’ attitude, I’d say the Administration is treating this as a random, isolated, one-in-a-million incident,” Hardcastle surmised. “Focus of the FBI’s investigation will be the coordination of the federal agencies involved—actually, their lack of cooperation. Wilkes has already tipped her hand by trotting Vincenti and Gaspar out in front of the press—no doubt Vincenti’s record in Europe will be ‘leaked,’ and everyone will make the same conclusion—that Vincenti screwed up. The federal government, and the Air Force in particular, will take the heat for a screwed-up pursuit and needless deaths, simply to avoid a general panic.”

  “You mentioned something about him on the way out here,” Martindale said. “What was it again?”

  “Vincenti was flying F-4 Phantoms up in Iceland—this was just before Gorbachev came to power,” Hardcastle explained. “He scrambled on a Badger bomber that he found flying low-level across the ice pack. The Defense Early Wa
rning radars were out, but he did the pursuit on his own and shoots the damned thing down.”

  “You’re kidding! I never heard about that.”

  “Hardly anyone did,” Hardcastle explained. “Turns out the bomber was a rogue—a crew of fliers sympathetic to Andropov wanted to start World War Three by bombing U.S. bases in Iceland. They had nukes on board, but they say they never would have gone off.”

  “But Vincenti’s not a hero in this story, right?”

  “Yes, sir. Problem was, Vincenti never got clearance to shoot—no communications between the controllers and the plane. Vincenti just went ahead and did it, much like the incident last night. He gets a reputation as a hero with the crew dogs, but a wild-dog reputation with the brass. The . Badger shoot-down is highly classified—”

  “But the Pentagon’s recollection of Vincenti isn’t,” Martindale finished for him. “Vincenti can’t follow orders. Vincenti likes to shoot first and ask questions later. Question, Ian: is he a wild dog?”

  “No, sir, he’s not—but my reputation is not exactly fresh and clean either,” Hardcastle said with a wry smile. “In my opinion, putting on my pundit’s hat for a moment, I think it would be ill-advised for you to openly support Vincenti. But I want to consult with him on a regular basis. He knows his shit, and he will be very valuable to us and the Air Force when Cazaux tries to take on the authorities again.”

  “Wait a minute, Ian ... So you don’t think this is a random incident?” Martindale asked Hardcastle. He was getting nervous already—his high-profile military guy was thinking in a totally unexpected direction, and with more press conferences scheduled for that day, he had to be brought up to speed immediately. “Just bad luck that Cazaux hit that terminal with a cargo plane and killed several hundred people .. . ?”