Major Tamatha Jones watched as Vice President Clark Winston saw off the governors shortly after their last breakfast meeting. A green-top Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey would deliver them directly to Dulles International.
HMX-1 was divided into two sections: white side and green side. Both sides focused on executive transport, but no object passed between them. If the white side needed a spare part or a tool, it couldn’t just go to green side and take one because security around the white-side Presidential aircraft was too high.
Governors could travel on the helos painted all green.
The President and Vice President exclusively traveled on a White Top helo like her VH-92A Superhawk.
Tamatha sat in her bird close by the Camp David hangar it had been parked for the last three days. The big green-side Osprey had returned to Quantico during the week and only just returned for the governors’ departure, but the VIP lift didn’t risk leaving the site as long as the Vice President might need emergency transport.
On this fine April morning, while the governors had their final breakfast and meeting with the Vice President, Tamatha had already been aloft, doing a half-hour flight above Camp David to check all systems and pick up the other escort birds. Now she was once more on the helipad, engines idling at warm, and the rotor blades braked.
Trees towered all around her, towering being relative, of course. Oaks, maples, and ash rose six or seven stories tall here. Back home in Colorado, a Ponderosa pine was just stretching its limbs as it passed fifteen stories headed for twenty.
With the governors safely aboard their Osprey, the Vice President and several of his key advisors strolled over to her Superhawk. She could see that they were in a good mood; of course Vice President Winston usually was. It was one of the pleasures of flying with him. He didn’t think much about the crew, not the way the President did, but she could feel the lightness of the mood whenever he was aboard.
Tamatha also noted that his wife wasn’t with him, though she’d flown down with them. There was something about that woman that was always…off. She was too studied. Her clothes were always perfect as was her hair.
During her brief inattention, Mathieson had hauled up the stairs and closed the door, but she and Vance were ready by the time he took his seat behind them.
The heavy Osprey was waiting until she was clear and aloft, just another safety precaution. If anything went wrong with the takeoff of the governors’ flight, it wouldn’t do to have the Vice President in the area.
When Sergeant Mathieson took his seat, she released the rotor brake. Once the blades had begun to spin, she ran the engines up to full RPMs and lifted up and out of the trees. A glance down showed the MV-22 Osprey spinning up its own rotors. To either side, her two decoy Superhawks were even now sliding for a position change. From above, the overwatch gunships were also tracking her.
Just north of Lewiston, Maryland—five minutes into their twenty-minute flight—the much faster Osprey raced past her.
As she let her gaze track its passage, she saw it race above a rising smoke cloud across the route she had planned to follow between Walkersville and north Frederick. She began to veer aside but something about it bothered her.
“Vance?” Her copilot was on the radio to the Flight Center of the White House Military Office.
“They’re saying…” he paused as he listened, “…farmer’s field on fire.”
Before she was even ten degrees into her turn, walls of smoke rose to the right and left of her flight path. “Big fire.”
“Damn big.”
Big enough that it would be hard to climb over.
Tamatha had been flying at five thousand feet, and the smoke was quickly climbing toward ten thousand. It would be a race to the Superhawk’s operational ceiling of fourteen thousand.
She felt an uncomfortable itch between her shoulder blades.
Turning the Superhawk, she looked behind…to see yet another fire flashing to life. They were being boxed in.
17
“Thanks so much for letting me join you this morning, Rose. I hated missing our monthly dinner last night.” It had become the one true fixture on Clarissa’s social calendar.
Since she’d come back early from Camp David, they were making up for the missed dinner with a Saturday breakfast.
Senator Ramson had been called away, which was only a trivial inconvenience. It wasn’t often she and Rose found time for just the two of them. In the luxury of the Presidential Suite’s living room, with its fine view of the Lower Senate Park near the Capitol Building, it was definitely a pleasure.
“The Southern governors were not to be denied.”
“Nor luxuriating at Camp David,” Rose offered a wink.
“It’s less fun than you’d think.”
“Just try me. I could dine out for a month on the status alone.” In addition to being the wife of the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Rose was a former Miss Utah. She had matured from merely gorgeous into a great beauty.
She was also the real brains behind the Senator’s lengthy career and had made herself one of DC’s leading social power brokers. Often called “The First Lady of DC”, she’d achieved nearly the status of Pamela Harriman, while staying true to one man. Of course, it was a different and in some ways more puritanical era now than when Harriman had ruled in the seventies after climbing over the backs of three husbands and a notoriously long list of lovers.
“I actually wanted to talk to you about Camp David in a way.”
“An invitation?” Rose tapped the shell of her three-minute egg with the side of her spoon without looking up.
“I’m not in the position to offer one—at this time.”
Rose smiled, as if to herself, carefully easing away the top of the shell. “Have you decided on a path?”
Clarissa might never have mentioned her plans for the White House directly, but that was part of the joy of speaking with Rose Ramson, she didn’t need to. In answer, she simply cut a piece from her own Nova Scotia lox and egg-white omelet.
“You’re going to run?”
Clarissa cut and ate a second bite before asking, “Possible?”
Rose hummed noncommittedly as she peppered her egg.
Without Rose’s help, it wouldn’t be, but Clarissa had an idea about how to guarantee Rose Ramson’s support.
She waited until Rose glanced up to judge her pause.
Clarissa reached for her coffee. “Of course, every President needs a good Vice President.”
Rose was sharp enough that she only had to blink once before a slow smile stated that anything was possible, including getting Clarissa elected on the same ticket as her husband. And once her husband was gone…
“How long?”
For Clark to be gone, opening the Presidency for herself and the Vice Presidency for Rose? Clarissa fiddled with her wedding ring as if impatiently.
“Bad?”
“Politically awkward,” Clarissa decided was a better description. “Near-term awkward. There is support for certain policies that aren’t…” Clarissa decided to splurge and selected an almond croissant as she searched for the right word, “…becoming.”
“Or palatable?” Rose ducked a tiny spoon into the open eggshell.
“Not past election day,” she placed a definitive timeline on it.
Rose eyed her speculatively, then offered a Miss Utah smile. She’d helped Clarissa remove the Vice President to put Clark in power. To offer similar assistance so that Rose herself could step in as Clarissa’s future Vice President shouldn’t bother her in the least.
They ate in a contented silence for a while as they each considered the implications.
“Any specific policy?” Rose asked as if it was mere curiosity.
“Saudi Arabia.” Clarissa hadn’t meant to lay that on the linen tablecloth like a piece of week-old toast but there it was.
There was the smallest bobble as Rose dipped into her egg once more. She broke off a piece of the shell
, which fell into the center of the egg.
“Rose?” Clarissa felt a distinct chill, despite the morning sun now shining in the window.
She didn’t look up.
“Rose.”
At her continued silence, Clarissa looked around the room. Love seat, sofa, art, all the usual trappings.
Something was missing though.
“Where is Senator Hunter Ramson this morning?”
Rose cleared her throat and daubed at her lips with her napkin before finally looking up at her. “I’m not sure.”
“Not sure?”
“He slips my leash on occasion. Every once in a great while, he insists on thinking for himself. When he saw this morning’s recap on the news coming out of the G-7 meeting, he hurried away. That speech that the President gave last night about rethinking American support alignments in the region shook him up.”
Clarissa could feel the blood drain from her face. “I, uh, missed that speech.”
“No specifics. Instead he simply talked about putting past partners on notice of review and possibly seeking new partners in the region. I assumed it was simply a political tactic, but Hunter appeared…alarmed.”
It was probably a good thing she’d missed the speech. If she’d stayed at Camp David and heard it with Clark, he’d have been immensely pleased at the President using his ideas. Then she’d have been much, much harder pressed to not damage his dumb ass.
“Then the President mentioned that he was placing a hold on all foreign arms sales throughout the region and had asked the other members of the G-7 to do the same. They agreed. Unfortunately, Hunter has been working on a particularly massive foreign arms sales package to the Saudis for some time, and it is coming to a Congressional vote soon.”
Clarissa sat up, thinking of last night’s untraceable chatter.
She swallowed hard to keep down her omelet and coffee.
“You’re sure it was Saudi Arabia? Not Egypt or Turkey? Or even Israel?”
Rose merely shook her head.
Clarissa didn’t waste time saying goodbye as she bolted from the room, pulling out her phone as she went to call for her car.
18
“Switch to internal air,” Tamatha wasn’t going to risk the health and safety of the Vice President.
At her order, Captain Vance Brown closed the external air feed and engaged the internal oxygen generator.
Most helicopters only operated below ten thousand feet and therefore could always use outside air without the pressurization an airliner needed. But this was a White Top and had to be secure against all types of attacks just like the Presidential limousine.
They could pass through the smoke wall in a few seconds, but the smell might bother the passengers.
And this definitely wasn’t just a simple farmer’s brush fire.
This might be a gas attack.
She slowed and circled once within the boundaries of the smoke-edged box to make sure none of the smoke entered their intake system.
“Anything on the threat detectors?”
“No unaccounted objects in the air. No launch flashes on the ground,” Vance was right on it.
The Superhawk’s emergency oxygen system was not like the tiny ones that were stowed above every seat section of an airliner, dropping masks in a crisis.
Their oxygen generator was the same kind used in submarines, and even in space, for catastrophic loss of life support systems. Each unit could deliver three thousand liters of safe, clean air sufficient for all twelve passengers and three crew for thirty minutes.
Under normal circumstances, the oxygen generators were loaded with a compound of sodium chlorate, barium peroxide, and potassium perchlorate. The thermal igniter would trigger a chemical reaction as it heated to five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, breaking down the mixture into inert elements and oxygen.
The primary emergency oxygen generator aboard the Vice President’s VH-92A Superhawk had been replaced.
Because it was HMX-1, there was a second, fully redundant unit, but it would only be triggered if the first failed.
The first unit didn’t fail.
The small percussive ignitor cap of tetrazene explosive to drive the reaction in the primary unit had been replaced by a much hotter thermite trigger. The generator’s altered chemical core of methane and ammonia, wrapped in a platinum catalyst shell was ignited by the four-thousand-degree heat source. The chemical reaction produced a cloud of explosive hydrogen and hydrogen cyanide gas.
Major Tamatha Jones’ ears popped so hard at the high-pressure injection of the gas into the helicopter’s closed environment, that her vision briefly tunneled from the pain alone.
When she recovered, she was panting.
Too little air.
“Did you…start O2…generator?”
Vance’s skin had gone pasty, as if his deep color was being leached out of him. He nodded once, but didn’t speak.
Unknown to Major Jones, the farmer’s smoky fire was simply a fire meant to elicit a response.
And she had responded.
19
The two decoy helos and the overwatch birds, with no VIP passengers to worry about, merely cut the air intakes as they flew through the smoke wall, then reopened them in clear air.
Aboard Marine Two, the only bird to have remained at Camp David the whole time, the tampered oxygen generator flooded the cabin with colorless hydrogen cyanide gas. Major Jones was among the twenty percent of the population unable to detect its bitter almond odor.
Once absorbed by the body, HCN halted the helicopter occupants’ cellular respiration by blocking their mitochondria’s ability to create a key enzyme.
Twenty-eight seconds after Captain Vance Brown initiated the oxygen generator, Major Tamatha Jones’ cells were already dying by the billions.
She managed to pull out the pilot’s emergency oxygen mask.
It was linked to a compressed air bottle, uncontaminated with cyanide. The air inside the helicopter was no longer killing her. Deep gasps allowed her head to clear enough to become marginally aware of the helicopter again.
It would take time for the oxygen to purge the poison sufficiently for her to fully regain her cognitive function.
However, time was definitely lacking.
Her hands once more on the controls, she plowed through the smoke wall and into the clear.
This was good. She could fly straight and everything would be fine.
Somewhere, a voice was calling to her.
She turned to Vance.
Not him.
He was having spastic seizures.
His flailing batted their shared joystick cyclic control so hard that it slapped it out of her numbing fingers.
It took all of her concentration, blinking hard, to relocate the cyclic and then convince her hand to move to it and reengage.
“Marine Two! Marine Two!” The radio. Someone shouting into her ears.
She’d lost the cyclic again.
By the second time she’d found it, the horizon was all wrong—it sliced perpendicularly across her screen. That couldn’t be right, could it?
She concentrated on her hands.
There was a microphone switch somewhere.
Her body knew it, even if she no longer did.
A distinctive click told a part of her failing brain that it was her turn to speak.
Right.
“Poison. Oxy. Generator.”
She looked over at Vance as he slumped in his seat. His mouth hung open; his eyes wide.
Major Jones’ instincts had managed to right the helo, but it was well past it’s never-exceed speed and would begin breaking apart if it survived another fifteen seconds.
It wouldn’t.
The buffeting of Major Tamatha Jones’ debilitated attempts to pull out of the dive caused Captain Vance Brown to collapse forward, with his chest pinning the cyclic in place.
Major Jones could no longer move her joined control.
It didn’t matter, she could
n’t remember what to do with them.
“Dying,” she said more to herself than the radio.
She looked out her windscreen and saw that she was about to do exactly that.
Or maybe she’d said, “Buying?” Which was also appropriate based on the sign across the front of the building they were about to impact.
It didn’t matter.
She guessed that she was the last person alive on the Marine Two VH-92A Superhawk. Was Marine Two still the proper call sign if the Vice President was indeed already dead?
It was the last relevant thought she had—ever.
20
HMX-1’s perfect seventy-four-year safety record ended seven seconds later.
Dead level and flying at two hundred and thirty-seven miles per hour, twenty-six-thousand pounds of helicopter flew into the Frederick, Maryland, Walmart Supercenter’s front entrance.
If the helicopter had flown a single foot lower, it might have averted the disaster that unfolded.
By less than three inches, the Superhawk cleared the three-foot-high concrete bollards lined across the entrance to keep a truck from driving into the entrance as part of a burglary attempt.
The VH-92A Superhawk blew through the glass doors, its fifty-six-foot-diameter, four-blade rotor killing twenty-seven people at the checkout kiosks and another nine at the Subway sandwich deli to the side as the blades shattered.
It plowed through women’s clothing first, then men’s. It missed the toy section, but slammed through the paint section and gardening supplies.
By then the bulk of its momentum had been spent.
The last of it was sufficient for the Superhawk to breach the wall between the front and back of the store. Spinning end-for-end as it caromed off thirty-five pallets of canned soup, the VH-92A ultimately came to rest back-end first against fifty cases of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream inside the store’s largest walk-in freezer.
Captain Vance Brown had been atypically susceptible to cyanide gas poisoning and had been the only one to die before the Superhawk finally came to rest. The passengers in the helicopter had survived. If they were given emergency pure oxygen in the next three minutes, they would all recover—with varying degrees of debilitation.
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