Brown, Dale - Independent 04

by Storming Heaven (v1. 1)

  “I had Air Force representatives on my staff—”

  “Sure—for AW ACS and OTH-B, not for the guys who really knew the air sovereignty game, us pilots in the field,” Vincenti said. “You sucked up almost the entire E-3 AWACS fleet on drug-interdiction stuff, and you took over all the long-range over-the-horizon backscatter radar ops, but you never employed the F-4s, F-106s, F-15s, and F-16 air defense fighters for your operations except when that crazy bastard Salazar used military hardware on your platforms. Plus you spent billions on all that fancy hardware, when all the time you had the best pilots and the best planes in the business already in place.”

  Marc Sheehan stepped forward toward Vincenti. “I think you’ve said enough, Colonel Vincenti.”

  “No, let him finish, Marc.” Hardcastle smiled. “I want to hear this. Go ahead, Al. Continue. You don’t like it. Tell me why.”

  “Because you’re doing it half-assed, that’s why,” Vincenti said. “You did it half-assed wrong with the Hammerheads, and you’re doing it half-assed now. You’re still thinking two-dimensionally, still thinking in razzle-dazzle terms instead of strategic, layered, logical, multilayered structures. You had fancy, expensive tilt-rotors and drones and a few helicopters and boats, and almost nothing else. When your aviation units got into trouble, when the politicians believed your air units couldn’t do the job, your whole infrastructure was weakened and your organization collapsed. Hell, your air units were properly doing their job, and one lousy lawsuit, one lousy smuggler, in which just one of your air units was involved, brought down your entire Border Security Force in no time flat. Why? Because your basic organization was built on one foundation—your air units.

  “The same thing will happen with your current plan,” Vincenti went on. “Your current plans are based on air units like the F-16 and F-15 fighters. But an expert can easily blow holes in this plan, and I think Cazaux is smart enough to get by even the toughest air patrols. You wouldn’t even survive a comparison between now and your disbanded Hammerheads.” Vincenti glared at Sheehan, then at Hardcastle. “I thought you guys were supposed to be smart. You’re advising future presidents, formulating policy and laws, spending hundreds of millions of dollars, and you can’t even see how fucked up you are.”

  “Then help me fix it,” Hardcastle said. “Help me create a system to stop terrorists like Cazaux.”

  “You don’t have the guts,” Vincenti said. “All I see is a bunch of bureaucrats jockeying for position. You throw your beach parties and press conferences and fund-raisers, but when it comes time to actually put the hardware on the line, you back off. I’m not going to waste my breath on a bunch of politicos whose only goal is to rack up percentage points in the polls or electoral votes.”

  Sheehan, who had stepped away for a few minutes, came back and said, “Sir, we got a call from Vice President Martindale. He’s on his way back from San Francisco now. Cazaux hit another airport. Memphis International. Just a few minutes ago. They’re saying the death toll could be in the thousands this time.”

  “Oh, my God ...” gasped Hardcastle.

  “He got a call from the President, Admiral,” Sheehan went on. “He wants you and your staff to report to the White House immediately. They want a complete briefing on your plans to set up an air defense network in the United States.” “Jesus . . . Marc, phone the flight crew, get the Gulf- stream ready to go, drop me off at base ops, and get the investigation team together right away,” Hardcastle said. He turned to Vincenti: “Al, you’re with me.”

  “I’m not cleared to leave the base, Admiral.”

  “I just cleared you,” Hardcastle said. “You’re a member of my staff, effective yesterday, and the President has just ordered you to Washington. We’ve got about five hours for you to tell me precisely what I need to do to make my air defense plan airtight. Let’s go.”

  PART 3

  The White House Cabinet Room The Next Morning

  “W’ve got only one thing to say to you, Admiral Hardcas- I tie,” Deputy Attorney General Elizabeth Lowe said an- Mgrily, dramatically waving a bound report in her hand, then tossing it on the Cabinet Room table in disgust just as. the door leading to the Oval Office opened and everyone got to their feet. “You must be totally insane, or at the very least so ill-informed as to defy reason and logic.” She saw the President of the United States stride in, then said to him, “Mr. President, I can’t believe you even allowed that crackpot in this room at a time like this.”

  “Allow me to respond to the Deputy Attorney General’s statement, Mr. President—on the record,” Ian Hardcastle said, a slight, challenging smile on his face.

  “This meeting will come to order,” the President’s chief of staff said. Lowe quietly took her seat with the others after the President was seated, glaring angrily at Ian Hardcastle. What he did not know was that Elizabeth Lowe, one of the President’s most capable political insiders, had met personally with the President just before the meeting and had already been instructed as to how this meeting was going to proceed—her tirade against Hardcastle was part of a hastily but carefully rehearsed trap for Hardcastle and his cohorts.

  The members of the Executive Committee on Terrorism, the group responsible to the National Security Council and the President for all antiterrorist matters, had assembled in the White House Cabinet Room to receive the latest briefing on the hunt for Henri Cazaux. The ECT was composed of senior officials from the Departments of Treasury, Justice, State, Defense, Transportation, and Energy, along with representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council staff. Because the President had convened this meeting at the White House, most of the Cabinet itself was present along with their ECT representatives, so it was a tight fit in the Cabinet Room.

  This was just the latest crisis in what seemed like an Administration plagued by problems from the very beginning, starting with a furor over the President’s attempt to drop the ban on gays in the military, to his health care package, to problems within his own White House.

  His wife, for instance, known around town as the Steel Magnolia, was conspicuously absent from this and other meetings as of late. A formidable woman who was highly intelligent and, for a while, almost inseparable from her husband, the Steel Magnolia had recently been devoting all her time to extricating herself from a shady real-estate deal that was now threatening to turn into a Watergate-sized problem for the Administration. Things weren’t helped when her own counsel killed himself.

  But even now, in the midst of a major domestic crisis, the President hardly had time to worry about his wife. There were far bigger problems at hand for this poor boy from what many had laughingly called a hillbilly southern state. This current crisis might be the final straw for his Administration. Depending, of course, on how he handled it.

  Joining the President, the ECT members, and Hardcastle were Colonel A1 Vincenti; Colonel Marc Sheehan, Hard- castle’s aide; and Deborah Harley, who was cleared to come to this meeting as an assistant to Hardcastle but who was in reality an executive assistant to Kevin Martindale— the former Vice President was not invited to attend this meeting, but he made sure he had his spy in place. If the President or his staff knew about Harley, they did not seem to care.

  Vincenti’s face looked grim as Lani Wilkes, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, began the briefing with a rundown of the attack on Memphis International Airport last evening. He could all-too-easily envision the two airliners barreling in toward the airport, then raining devastation on hundreds of innocent people below. Thankfully, the death toll was not as high as in San Francisco— over two hundred dead and over five hundred injured, mostly at the Universal Express super hub facility—but Vincenti felt responsible for each and every one of their deaths. When he looked up, he saw a few of the ECT members looking back at him, and he felt that they were silently accusing him of not stopping Cazaux when he had the chance.

  Hardcastle looked at the oval cherry table, his hands folded in fr
ont of him, with a stony, neutral expression; Sheehan was watching the southern President (who was popping M&Ms into his mouth from ajar on the table) and Hardcastle, waiting for the sparks to fly. “We’re assisting the local authorities in hunting down the aircraft,” Judge Lani Wilkes was saying, “but the attack on the airport knocked out all the radar control centers in the entire region—both Approach and Center radar control centers are located at Memphis International—and we couldn’t track any of the aircraft.

  “Our best lead right now circles on aircraft dealers in the south and southeast, particularly ones handling civil and military-surplus cargo aircraft. But there are two hundred and thirty such dealers and brokers in the region; plus, getting a plane from Central or South America flown into the southern U.S. is too easy. Getting warrants to search each establishment will take time. We—”

  Hardcastle let out an exasperated sigh at the mention of warrants. A few eyes darted in his direction, but Hardcastle did not speak and no one else said a word. Wilkes, pretending she did not notice, continued, “Sir, I’ve said this before: we can’t let our concern over Cazaux’s attacks force us to degenerate into simply lashing out at every hint of criminal or suspected terrorist activities—it’s stretching my manpower too thin, and it’s creating more panic. We’ve got every available federal agent involved in this manhunt. I’ve got agents in Mexico and Canada. I’ve diverted extra agents to four different locations following up investigations on suspicious explosions, and each one has come up with nothing. The Bureau has investigated over one hundred bombings in the United States just last month, and none of them were tied in to Cazaux.”

  “But now Cazaux’s finally gone over the edge, and I believe we’ve got to investigate each incident,” said Transportation Secretary Ralph Mersky. He turned to the President and said, “Mr. President, under the Federal Aviation Regulations, I’ve had the FAA close Tucson International Airport because a suspected terrorist incident is under investigation—we think Cazaux was flying on a commercial airliner, and he was afraid of getting caught and killed some airline service workers to make his escape. By. the law, I should close every other major airport near any of these other suspected terrorist incidents as well— whether or not Judge Wilkes believes they have anything to do with Cazaux. But I’ve had meetings with every major air carrier in the country, and to a man they’ve pleaded with me not to shut down the airports.”

  “What in hell would you expect them to say?” Deputy Attorney General Lowe interjected. Under the National Security Act of 1949, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States was the most senior manager of any domestic terrorism crisis. Elizabeth Lowe was a hard-nosed Army veteran, attorney, and Washington lobbyist—perfectly suited for the job of dealing with the exclusive men’s domains of defense and antiterrorist strategy and response. “They need to keep making money, and they’re willing to bet other people’s lives on the long odds that Cazaux will strike anywhere else but their location or their planes.”

  “I know that, Liz,” Mersky shot back, “but I need the White House’s direction on this one.” To the President, he continued: “We’ve already enacted Level Three security, which deals primarily with terrorist threats such as bombs in baggage, sabotaging planes at the gate, car bombs near terminals, that sort of thing. The law says I must enact Level Two security measures at all airports that carry more than eighteen passengers per plane if terrorist activity is suspected in the vicinity or on a national level, Mr. President.”

  The President of the United States, sitting half-slouched at his big desk in the Cabinet Room, looked as if sleep and he were complete strangers. He was tall, young compared to recent Chief Executives, well-built and handsome, with prematurely gray hair that was thick and bushy. But the dark bags under his eyes from lack of sleep, and the wrinkles around the eyes caused by stress and squinting at reports and televisions without using his glasses, made him look considerably older. He wrapped his big hands around a coffee cup and took a sip—cold again. He let the cup rattle back onto its saucer, popped some more M&Ms into his mouth (his affection for junk food was legendary), then drawled, “Ralph, it doesn’t sound like this Level Three protects anyone if Cazaux drops a damned bomb on their heads. Why hasn’t stricter security been set up already?”

  “Sir, the reason is that we have no procedures for dealing with air raids against major airports inside the United States except for closing them down,” Mersky said. “We have Civil Defense procedures drawn up thirty years ago for use in case of Soviet air raids, and even then they mostly deal with evacuation, medical care, restricting access to navigation facilities—”

  “So the only option we have right now is to close the airports until we track this Cazaux down?” the President asked incredulously. God, how he hated these meetings without his wife present. That fucking real-estate deal was consuming all of her time, time that she could have been spending helping him. Damn her. They should have never invested in that fucking land in the first place. Oh, well. They’d just have to live with it. And he, unfortunately, was having to live without her at a time when he needed her most—like now. “Hey, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand what a disaster that would be. Remember how disrupted everything was when American Airlines’ flight attendants went on strike. Remember the panic? Jesus. I want to hear more options.” He turned to Hardcastle, Vincenti, and his Secretary of Defense, Dr. Donald Scheer, and said, “Admiral Hardcastle, I asked you to come down here because I’ve heard of your”—he took a moment to consider his next words, then decided to just say it—“genius, concerning this disaster.

  “I don’t agree with it, and I frankly suspect that much of it stems from your political agenda with the Project 2000 Task Force and Vice President Martindale’s campaign,” he continued. “We don’t need partisan politics interfering with this investigation. I think the little stunt you orchestrated in the Senate to step into the middle of the FBI’s investigation of the San Francisco attack was a cheap, dirty trick to take advantage of the situation to promote your own agenda.”

  “Except Cazaux did strike again,” Hardcastle pointed out bluntly.

  The President spread his hands and nodded. “Yes, he did,” he drawled. “I thought he’d be long gone, but he’s not, and he’s got to be dealt with. And you offered your technical assistance, which I deeply appreciate.” He picked up Hardcastle’s point paper on the air defense emergency and added angrily, “But showing this report to the press at the same time as handing it to me stinks. The American people see you on TV promoting this plan, and they cling to it because it’s a ‘do-something, do-anything’ move. It makes me question your motivation here, Admiral: do you really want to help me solve this crisis or are you just pushing a political agenda?”

  “I’m trying to stop Cazaux, Mr. President,” Hardcastle said evenly. “It’s that simple. With all due respect, sir, how you respond to this crisis affects your own political agenda more than how I respond.”

  “When I need your advice on politics, Admiral, I’ll ask,” the President snapped. “With all due respect, Admiral, dealing with you is worse than Cazaux—at least that maniac is not on TV every two hours. But let’s get back to what we should do about Cazaux. Dr. Scheer’s staff has outlined your suggestions for me, and although I consider your response dangerous, it could be the only one available to us.”

  “I believe it is your only response, Mr. President,” Hardcastle said, “and I’ve encouraged your advisers to just come out and say so. FAA Level One security is the only set of procedures on the civilian side for dealing with this emergency, and it won’t help stop or find Cazaux. Civil and strategic defense is virtually nonexistent in this country. The FAA’s SCATANA procedures basically entail shutting down all but a few major airports and most navigation radio facilities, and we’re still faced with finding and stopping Cazaux.”

  “So your solution is to turn security for this crisis over to the military?” Lani Wilkes asked incredulously. She motion
ed to Hardcastle’s report. “You want to use the military inside the United States for law enforcement?”

  “This is no longer a law enforcement question, Judge Wilkes, this is a national defense crisis.”

  “You’re wrong, Hardcastle. This is a criminal investigation, and it should be handled like one. Mr. President, there is no doubt whatsoever that this is a serious crisis, but imposing martial law is not the answer.”

  “I do not want to impose martial law,” the President said immediately, running his hand through his hair. “Let’s make that real clear right from the get-go.”

  “Mr. President, I’ve read Admiral Hardcastle’s proposed plan,” Wilkes said, “and it’s nothing but a reactionary, grandstanding power grab.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Deputy Attorney General Lowe said. “We don’t need the military to secure the skies and hunt down Henri Cazaux. Mr. President, the Executive Committee on Terrorism is in charge and in control of this situation.”

  “Judge Wilkes, Liz, hold on a minute,” the President said evenly. “I brought Hardcastle and the Colonel in here to get their thoughts.” He turned to Hardcastle again. “I was briefed on your proposal, Admiral. It’s pretty severe. Tell me why this isn’t martial law.”