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The
President’s
Plane
is
Missing
Robert J. Serling
One Monday evening, Air Force One, with the President of the United States on board, takes off from Andrews Air Force Base on what is to be a routine flight. The destination is Palm Springs, where the President, wearied by the tensions of the worsening international situation, plans a quiet, secluded vacation. But suddenly, while flying over Arizona, the plane disappears from the horrified controller’s radar screen. Even as the world counts the few hours to fuel exhaustion time, which would mean that the plane must definitely be down somewhere, a massive search begins . . .
What happens form there on as each development enshrouds still another shocking, baffling discovery is a story of incalculable suspense and reverberating implications, fiction so close to what could happen that it has the impact of screaming headlines.
Jeremy Haines has been a much admired President, embodying the best qualities of his predecessors—Truman’s courage, Eisenhower’s idealism, Kennedy’s intellect and verve, Johnson’s political shrewdness. No one really knows what is in the mind and conscience of the man who would have to replace him—Vice President Fredrick James Madigan, who had frankly been a compromise choice. Nor does anyone really know just how to cope with the unprecedented circumstances created by a series of extraordinary disclosures.
Under Robert Serling’s knowledgeable guidance, we see close up what transpires at the White House and the Pentagon, inside an aggressive wire service bureau, on a sun-scorched desert. Rumors, suspicions, theories, clues—all are part of a vast dilemma in which top officials in government, the FBI, the CIA, the military, the ever-diligent press, aviation experts, and the President’s own brother, are key figures while the people of every rank throughout the world form a sad and bewildered chorus. Then, as the mystery deepens, the dilemma, in a harrowingly plausible fashion, becomes a crisis . . .
By Robert J. Serling
THE PRESIDENT’S PLANE IS MISSING
THE LEFT SEAT
THE ELECTRA STORY
THE PROBABLE CAUSE
THE PRESIDENT’S PLANE IS MISSING
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1967 by Robert J. Serling
All rights reserved
Printed in the Untied States of America
For Ellin K. Roberts—den mother, editor and friend
THE PRESIDENT’S PLANE IS MISSING
CHAPTER ONE
The President of the United States awoke that Monday morning with his usual hangover—fashioned not of liquor but of tensions and worries that sleep had failed to dissolve.
It was this way every morning for Jeremy Haines. With the first stirrings of consciousness, the cares of office snapped to attention and began an immediate march through his tired brain. He shook his head wearily, almost impatiently, as if the gesture would somehow dislodge his troubled thoughts. He looked at the clock on the table adjoining his bed. Seven A.M. His nine hundred and sixty third day in the presidency.
Jeremy Haines picked up the white phone next to the clock and ordered his breakfast. Then he climbed out of bed and donned a robe. Since his wife’s death, five years before when he was governor of a Midwestern state, he had acquired the habit of eating breakfast in his bedroom on the second floor of the White House, while he planned his strategies for the day. He could accept this solitude but insisted on company at lunch and dinner. The solitude in the morning seemed to refresh him and prepare him.
He went into the bathroom to shave, examining himself critically in the mirror beforehand in the somewhat worried manner of a middle-aged man searching for any sign of aging. Except for the fatigue that showed mostly in his eyes, the image was not displeasing to either his ego or his concern. At fifty-seven, Jeremy Haines looked ten years younger than his chronological age.
He stood two inches over six feet, without an ounce of excess fat on his slim frame. The only wrinkles on his masculinely handsome face were tiny crow’s feet fencing his clear gray eyes, giving him the appearance of a man who had been squinting at the sun all his life. His nose was aquiline, his mouth wide with thin lips. His closely cropped hair was only partially graying, cut so short at the temples that it was impossible to tell where the haircut ended and the graying process began.
He wore rimless glasses for reading, and they gave his rather thin, pinched features a professorial look. A reporter had once described the President as resembling “a husky Woodrow Wilson or a trimmer Warren Harding.”
Keeping his hair clipped (he got a haircut once a week) was one of his rare vanities. He thought the near crew cut made him appear younger. Another vanity was a perpetual tan, thanks to a daily fifteen-minute exposure to a sun lamp. The combination made him seem more athletic than he really was. He detested golf and kept his waistline down through religiously regular calisthenics prescribed by an Army physical fitness expert.
By the time he had showered, shaved and donned a charcoal-brown (his favorite color) suit, there was a discreet knock on the bedroom door. That had to be his personal valet, a distinguished-looking Negro who had served three Presidents before Haines.
The valet skillfully and quickly set up the breakfast on a small table. By the coffee he placed the usual copies of the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Knowing the President’s penchant for breakfasting alone, he performed his last chore—holding the chair for Haines as the tall, stern-faced Chief Executive sat down.
“Thank you, John. I’ll be through in about a half hour. Then I guess you can come back and start the packing.”
“Fine, Mr. President. I’ll return shortly.”
The valet left. Jeremy Haines idly stirred sugar in the steaming coffee and perused the top headlines on the Post’s front page.
PEKING WARNS U.S. CHINA READY FOR GLOBAL WAR
BOASTS OF VAST H-BOMB MISSILE ARMADA
The President put down the Post and picked up the Times. Slightly smaller type and only five columns wide instead of the Post’s eight, but the headlines were just as alarming.
CHINA AGAIN DEMANDS U.S. WITHDRAWAL
FROM FAR EAST; SAYS NEW ICBM WEAPONS
POISED FOR WAR
Jeremy Haines shuddered inwardly, an emotional rather than a physical chill and one that was immune from the warming effects of the first sip of hot coffee. He turned to the Times’s editorial page and glanced over the lead editorial. It was a crisply persuasive argument, couched in the Times’s typically calm logic, urging the spending of eighty-five billion dollars on an anti-missile system even if it meant indefinite postponement of all major domestic projects.
He put the Times aside and read the Post’s lead editorial, mildly critical of his Administration’s “thus far ineffective gestures in easing the present world crisis.” The Post called for a summit meeting with both Red China and Russia and commented that the President’s party was using international tensions as an excuse for “treading water on his own long-promised reforms on the domestic scene.” The editorial lamented that the Haines Administration evidently had embarked on a “course that is neither guns nor butter” and suggested that the President either make stronger efforts toward world peace or go all out with war preparations.
Haines nibbled at his toast with the slow, aimless
mastication of a man eating out of duty, not hunger. Those damned editorial writers, so free with pontifical advice. It was easy for them to criticize from their sacrosanct ivory towers. They never had to soil their minds with the mud of real, massive, sometimes even life-or-death problems facing the President of the United States. Suddenly he realized he was enmeshed in the throes of self-pity and because he was a fair man, an intelligent man, he scolded himself for this sulking reaction to a couple of well-written editorials. A President couldn’t afford the vulnerability of being thin-skinned, or he would act to avoid criticism rather than do what he thought best.
And, he decided with an inner chuckle, he had just demonstrated exactly such vulnerability. If the editorials had been dripping with favorable adjectives and gushing forth praise, he knew he would have consigned their authors to whatever category was inhabited by journalists of acumen and perspicacity. It was this blasted job that reduced a man’s skin to the thickness of gossamer. No wonder Thomas Jefferson had called it a “life of splendid misery.” No wonder Abraham Lincoln referred to the Executive Mansion as “that damned old house.” No wonder James Garfield had confided to a friend, “My God, what is there in this place that a man should ever want to get in it?”
But that was the peculiarly druglike quality of the presidency. Few Presidents actually enjoyed their terms of office, the two Roosevelts being among the rare exceptions to the rule. Jeremy Haines was not really happy. Being human, he relished the trappings of the nation’s highest elective post. The heady, delicious savor of being called “Mr. President.” The physical luxuries of magnificent planes and cars at his instant disposal. The beauty and dignity of the White House itself, not just a place in which to live but a shrine in which every occupant walked with the ghosts of his predecessors.
Yet for every materialistic and ego-feeding advantage, there were a score of nagging, never-ending pressures. They went beyond the strain of at least one crisis daily, usually coming on top of yesterday’s still unsolved crisis. They extended to the demands on his body, such as having to sign his name several hundred times a day. Out of curiosity once, he had kept track of those signatures during an especially busy time and discovered he had affixed “Jeremy Haines” to no fewer than five hundred and seven documents in a twenty-four-hour period. A petty complaint, perhaps, and one that would draw scorn from fellow Americans envying that yearly salary of $100,000, plus a tax-free $50,000 for expenses resulting from official duties and an untaxable $40,000 for travel and official entertainment.
Those same Americans seldom realized that a President’s average age at death is five years below the national average, meaning that the mere distinction of being elected carries the dubious bonus of reduced life expectancy. That little statistic, Haines mused, was not cited by the politicians who had urged him to run nor would he have even considered it if it had been brought up when he was deciding whether to run. A man bitten by the presidential bug, afflicted with the uncurable White House virus, thinks only of the honor, the prestige, the challenge and the knowledge that even lackluster Presidents find a place in history books. Not until he is in the White House does he discover that $100,000 a year plus expenses and all the trappings are poor compensation for drudgery, worry and a sense of responsibility magnified a thousand times into a nightmarish ogre.
Jeremy Haines was not afraid of responsibility, or he never would have entertained the slightest notion of trying for the White House. He had been a successful businessman in his earlier years, a kind of career trouble-shooter whose specialty was nursing sick firms back to financial health. He had gone into politics largely because the techniques of curing industrial ailments had assumed a sameness that bordered on the routine. Then there was his older brother, Bertrand, a United States senator, who persistently maintained that Jeremy had a future in public service and urged him to run for governor of their home state. Finally, it was a personal tragedy that had turned wavering indecision into firm resolve.
He had married a college sweetheart, and their union was blessed by an only son. Jeremy Haines, Jr., was killed in the early days of the Vietnam war and it was mainly this that led Jeremy Haines into public service. He served two highly successful gubernatorial terms, the second scarred by the death of his wife from cancer only two weeks before he was to leave office.
In a sense, the fatal presidential bug never really entered his blood stream until fairly late in the actual campaign, when he realized he wanted very much to be President. The decision to fight for the nomination was not so much ambition as therapy for grief and loneliness in bereavement. At that point, entrance into national politics was a diversion from sorrow and unhappy memories, the present and future eclipsing the past.
It was not until he won the election and took up his four-year lease on the mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, when he became aware that the presidency was no cure for his own loneliness. In fact it worsened his constant emotional solitude by its very nature. At first he enjoyed the pressuring burdens because they kept him busy. But he was not in office very long before he began to miss more than ever the mutual comradeship he and his wife had shared. Theirs had been a happy, mature, extremely deep relationship, one that would have been a perfect antidote for the tribulation of the White House.
He found he lacked, most of all, a true, intimate confidant. Advisers he had in ample supply. Friends too. He was closest to Phil Sabath, a city editor of a major newspaper in his home state whom he had brought to Washington as his press secretary. Sabath had resigned his newspaper job to help him run his campaign, and Haines not only trusted him but liked him as a person. Phil was competent at his job, surprisingly so in view of this relative unfamiliarity with Washington. If he lacked experience in dealing with the journalistic commandos known as the White House press corps, he had plenty of experience in dealing with the somewhat complex person who was Jeremy Haines. Sabath quickly learned the former, and when he did the latter stood him in good stead.
It was thanks to Sabath that Haines gradually evolved a kind of friendly armistice with the press. If Sabath protected the President from reporters, he also protected the President from himself—from his natural inclination to resent criticism, barbed questions, and persistent intrusions into what a President considered private affairs. His press conferences usually were fast-paced, laced with humor and always productive. Like Kennedy before him, Haines had a gift for good-natured repartee and a quick, rapier mind. He was erudite without being patronizing, fluent with no aroma of glibness. Admittedly, he enjoyed his fencing sessions with the press except when he could not avoid bristling at interrogation he considered unfair or childishly petty and unimportant.
“Don’t let them get you down,” Sabath once told Haines after a particularly rough news conference which had left the President steaming at some of the questioning. “They’re doing their job. If I were still on the other side, I’d be asking you the same stuff. And remember, they don’t always dream up those questions on their own. A lot of them come from their editors.”
Haines had snapped, “I know it’s their job but some of them have the subtlety of a hangman. They don’t want information, they want blood. They’re not out to get answers, they’re out to embarrass me. They’re not after news, they’re after my Administration.”
Patiently, wisely and tactfully, Sabath managed to instruct Haines in the mores and morals of the press. Principally, he got it across that a presidential news conference was a Chief Executive’s best media for getting his policies and decisions explained to the country and, in turn, getting a feeling of grass-roots opinions from the press.
“Most of the questions they ask,” he had reminded Haines, “are the same ones the average citizen wants answered. The men and women attending your press conferences represent nothing but a cross section of America— rural, urban, farm, labor, rich, poor and middle class.”
The respect the reporters had toward Haines slowly turned into outright affection on the part of many. The President
was considerate, for one thing. Sabath did not have to urge him more than a single time to be reasonable about “the lid”—that moment when the regulars in the White House press room were told that nothing more was expectable that day and they could go home. Some Presidents had been known to use the lid as a means of revenge, keeping reporters around late deliberately even though there was little chance of a news break. Sabath, with Haines’s co-operation, tried whenever possible to announce, “The lid’s on, boys,” no later than 6 P.M.
And where other Chief Executives seemed to take perverted delight in giving insufficient advance warning of travel plans (such as disclosing a departure from Andrews Air Force Base only fifteen minutes before the helicopters left the White House for Andrews), Haines made a practice of even delaying a desired departure time because he knew the press needed time to make its own travel arrangements. He also tried to be punctual, after he saw a group of reporters shivering in the cold at the Andrews ramp area on one occasion because he was almost an hour late.
He could become impatient with the press when, after all these little but important acts of thoughtfulness, the boys inserted needles into his desire for some semblance of privacy. His widower status left him open prey to gossip and rumors. Jeremy Haines was a healthy, virile man who enjoyed female companionship. Rather naively, he assumed at first that if the President of the United States wanted to escort a lady to some function it was his prerogative to do so with no public or press outcry.
He once asked the attractive widow of a former senator to attend a Washington Redskins football game. It was almost impossible to see the game itself because of the swarm of photographers hovering around like hungry bees. Haines finally ordered the Secret Service to chase them away. His temper was not improved when the next day’s papers were filled with speculation on a presidential “romance.”
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