The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America

by Michael Kurland

  “Reports are coming in now, sir,” Captain Fargo, his adjutant, said from the back seat of the jeep. “A pattern is emerging.”

  “How’s that, Captain?”

  “All the streets into the downtown area seem to be jammed. One of our scouts who surveyed the jam on foot reports that there’s a roadblock on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  “Police? Construction?”

  “No, sir. MPs, he says.”

  “MPs?”

  “Yes, sir. I have the other scouts checking their streets now, but I’ll give four to one that they find the same thing.”

  During the next few minutes two more reports came in confirming the adjutant’s bet. “This,” the colonel said, “is a whole new ball game!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Notify the senior officers to get their collective asses up here on the double.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Colonel Hanes paced in front of his jeep while waiting for his officers, hands locked behind his back, shoulders up, jaws thrust forward—the way he had once seen Omar Bradley pacing in some World War II film footage. When his officers were gathered around the hood of his jeep he stood in front of them and jabbed at the street map with his right forefinger. “New York Avenue is jammed for ten blocks,” he said. “Roadblocks set up by some MP unit. Half a mile of civilian vehicles piled up and no way to get around them.” He turned to his officers gathered around him. “You know our mission, gentlemen,” he said. “What do you suggest? We have an appointment with the President in front of the White House in approximately twenty minutes. I intend to keep that appointment—with your help.”

  “What about sending some infantry forward to eliminate the blockage?” This from Major Morgan, the commander of one of the three heavily armed battalions that made up the Fifth Brigade.

  “I don’t think so, Morgan,” Hanes replied. “A firefight would get all the civilians out of their cars and scattered from here to Baltimore. We’d never get the mess cleared up.”

  “What do we do, then, sir?” one of his captains asked respectfully.

  “We divide the brigade up into three elements,” Hanes said. “Major Morgan will take the first element along the B and O Railroad tracks, cutting off somewhere this side of Union Station and heading in toward the White House on interior streets. Captain Fargo will take the second and backtrack to Montana and around, coming in on Rhode Island. If it’s blocked at any point, jog to the left.” His finger stabbed down on the map. “If you make it to here,” he said, “where you intersect Massachusetts and Sixteenth, go in on Sixteenth, if it’s clear. If not, keep heading west until you find a clear street. They can’t have the whole city cut off.”

  Colonel Hanes folded up the map. “I’ll take the third element and head in through Mount Olivet and over to Maryland,” he told them. “We’ll keep in close radio contact. Remember, the important thing is to get through to the White House as fast as possible and set up a defensive perimeter. If you find a thin spot, with only a few cars between you and a clear street, remember a tank will go over a car. It won’t leave much of the car, but that’s just a goddamn shame. Try to get the civilians out first before going over their vehicles.”

  “What about the use of weapons, sir?”

  “If those damn MPs get in your way, blast them. When you reach the White House, defend it. Remember, don’t take orders from anyone but the President himself, Mr. Vandermeer, one of their direct representatives, or me. I intend to beat you there, but in case I don’t, remember who’s in charge.”

  “Yes, sir,” Major Morgan said.

  “What about civilian casualties?” Captain Fargo asked.

  “Try not to shoot civilians, but if any get in your way and refuse to move, you may assume they’re enemy force and treat them accordingly.” Colonel Hanes waved his hand. “Back to your vehicles. Let’s get out of this mess and go do our jobs.”

  The scene was deceptively peaceful. There was a roadblock visible about ten blocks down Constitution Avenue, and the cars were backed up past the White House. But most of the drivers were being very phlegmatic about it. For whatever reason, there was surprisingly little fuss.

  The Executive Protection Service guards behind the White House fence paced stolidly by in their parody uniforms and pretended to be unaware that anything unusual was happening.

  Grier Laporte was slumped against one wall of the phone booth across from the van, the handset cradled between his shoulder and his ear, making notes with his oversized black pen on a yellow pad. He looked like nothing so much, Adams thought, as an anxious bookie.

  The plan was proceeding much as Adams had expected it to. Colonel Green and his regiment from the Eighty-Second Airborne were not going to make it. Adams had never expected them to. In the world he was trained to operate in, the surface plan was what you fooled the enemy with. You might also have to fool a couple of friends, but those were the breaks of the game. Colonel Green’s regiment would keep the remaining two thirds of the Eighty-Second holed up in Fort Bragg, and that’s all Adams had ever really hoped for.

  A coup is a largely mystical process, Adams thought, involving the transfer of an intangible godhead of power from one group to another. If the transfer occurs, regardless of the size of the force involved, then the coup is legitimatized and the fighting stops. And if everyone thinks that power has been transferred, then it indeed has been.

  The trick, then, is to convince those who make the decisions—the great majority of noninvolved military, judicial, bureaucratic, and political personnel—as well as the television-viewing public, that, for good or evil, the deed has been accomplished. Even in a country as vast as the United States, the number of people required for success is astonishingly small, if the other factors are right. Within the next couple of hours Aaron Adams would discover whether the United States of America was prepared to remove a sitting president.

  Laporte dropped the phone, leaving the handset dangling, and stomped across to Adams. “A couple of bad breaks. The President’s troops are on their way,” he told Adams morosely.

  “Which troops?” Adams demanded.

  “At least two companies of mixed armor coming in from the north. Fitzpatrick says he figures it’s a reinforced brigade—probably the Fifth.”

  “Can he hold them?”

  “As long as they can’t get at him, he can hold them. He says that when it occurs to them to use infantry to knock out the roadblocks, he won’t be able to stop them.”

  “But even after that, it will take better than an hour to clear out traffic so the tanks can get through.”

  “Fitzpatrick says that, too. He says they’ll probably try to go around.”

  “Well, that will take an hour, anyway.”

  “Have you heard the news on the radio?”

  “What news?”

  “Federal marshals picked up most of the members of Congress this morning.”

  “Shit!” Adams said. “Not that it’s unexpected—but shit!”

  “You expected it?” Laporte asked. “Doesn’t this blow the whole thing? Don’t we need the impeachment business? I thought that was the heart of the plan.”

  “It’s like playing chess, Grier,” Adams said. “There are layers within layers. You hope the outer one will work, but you’re always prepared to play a deeper game.”

  “Are we prepared?” Grier Laporte asked.

  A faint droning noise came from the south like a distant swarm of bees, and a phalanx of troop-carrying helicopters dotted the southern sky and came steadily on.

  “What you see before you,” Adams said, waving his hand toward the southern sky with the air of a smug magician, “is phase two of the master plan, otherwise known as the unexpected jab to the solar plexus.”

  “They’re on our side?” Laporte demanded.

  “I do believe,” Adams said.

  Adams watched the approaching Marines. It was like watching a textbook exercise. The twenty-two helicopters from the U.S.S. Guam spread out into
their prearranged pattern and began touching down, rapidly, one after another. They landed inside the White House fence, as well as in Lafayette Square in front of the White House and the Ellipse behind it. Battle-dressed Marines leaped from the great cargo doors of the Chinook copters and immediately began setting up a defense perimeter surrounding the Executive Mansion. Within minutes the full complement of Marines and their air-portable equipment was offloaded, and the copters then lifted off and settled, in neat rows, along the far side of the Mall.

  Sporadic shooting broke out as some members of the Executive Protection Service and Some Secret Service men fired on the Marines. But General Moor’s training held; the firing was answered and stopped by the specific troops fired upon, and did not spread. Within a few minutes the shooting had stopped. Most of the EPS officers, unsure as to which side the Marines were on, and lacking specific instructions, retreated to the inside of the White House or the small guardhouses by the White House gates and awaited instructions. The Marines left them alone.

  Five minutes after the first copter had put down, the tranquil scene had transformed into an armed camp, ready for battle. Squads of Marines covered each entrance to the grounds and the White House itself, and antitank squads and sharpshooters settled behind the statues in Lafayette Square. General Moor, in plain battle fatigues with no sign of rank visible beyond an almost palpable air of command, ignored Adams and set up a command post to the side of the statue of Rochambeau.

  A contingent of four Secret Service agents came out into the West Wing garden to try to find out who was in command of the Marines, and just what they thought they were doing there. The discussion quickly grew heated, and one of the Secret Service men pulled out a pistol and waved it at the corporal he was arguing with. The corporal, a credit to his training, merely gestured toward his squad of men, whose automatic weapons were all more or less loosely pointed in the general direction of the Secret Service agent. The agent cursed, holstered his revolver, and stalked back inside the White House with his companions.

  Meanwhile a squad of Marines trotted across the street to the Treasury Building to block off the far end of the so-called secret tunnel which ran from the White House to the Treasury Building cellar.

  Adams checked his watch and nodded. Those things that could be controlled had been controlled. The game was well under way. It was time to put the last counters into play. From this moment on, as George Washington had said so many years before, the event was in the hands of God. He lifted the microphone of his CB radio and spoke softly into it.

  George Warren found himself stuck in traffic on Connecticut Avenue, unable to approach any closer to downtown Washington. It took the better part of half an hour for him to work his Chevy onto a side street. He would have made better time on foot, and many around him seemed to have deserted their cars to do just that. But Warren could not leave his precious cargo. With many backs and cuts, occasionally driving along the sidewalk, he tacked his way toward the White House.

  Suddenly, turning a corner, he found his way blocked by four deserted cars with flat tires—one of a series of improvised unmanned roadblocks that the MPs were creating as fast as they could between the oncoming tanks and their goal.

  And then Warren found himself between the tanks and their goal, as two medium tanks came around the corner, blocking his retreat. “What the hell are you guys doing here?” he yelled. “This street’s blocked. Back up so I can get out of here!”

  The tank commander in the lead tank waved a leather-gloved hand at him. “Get out of the way, mister,” he said. “We’re coming through.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Warren demanded. “I got to get out of here. Come on, back up.”

  “Move it, mister!” the commander ordered.

  This was too much. After the hours of fighting traffic, Warren had had it. He would simply have to go through on foot, lugging that mother of a missile on his back. He climbed into the back seat to pry the missile out.

  The tank commander watched Warren climb into the back seat of his car, and then through the back window he saw the bulbous nose of the missile appear, and could just make out the shape of the firing tube behind it. “The son of a bitch has an antitank weapon in the back seat!” he announced over his intercom. “Move it before he gets it lined up. Hit that car!”

  The tank lurched forward and crunched into the Chevy. The right track climbed the side of the car, ripping the door off and lifting the thirty tons of tank up onto the car. After a few seconds the tank leveled off, with the car collapsing under it. By the time the tank spat the car out from under its massive treads there was nothing recognizably human inside the mangled wreck. The ATX-3 missile was crushed and broken in half. The atomic warhead, safely nestled in a concussion-and radiation-proof shell, escaped major damage.

  The second tank followed in the path of the first.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Christopher Young went to the Map Room on the ground floor of the White House and joined Colonel Kovacs and four of his Special Forces volunteers. They had entered the building early that morning and had settled in the Map Room, the room from which FDR had plotted the daily changing course of World War II. They had variously spent the time playing solitaire, reading paperback novels, smoking, dozing on the couch, drinking coffee—and waiting. There wasn’t much conversation in the room during the waiting hours; there wasn’t much to say. But there was a lot for each of them to think about in the mutually respected privacy of these last moments. These men were the hit squad—the enemy within—Aaron Adams’ secret weapon. Their mission was to arrest the President of the United States.

  It was Adams’ theory that the longer they waited the more the President’s men would focus on the growing external dangers, and the less prepared they would be to handle a sudden internal threat.

  And so they waited. The Eighty-Second Airborne came in and out of action, the 404th MPs moved about the chessboard of downtown Washington, the Fifth Brigade smashed through toward the White House, Miriam and her friends occupied the White House switchboard, the Marines landed on the White House lawn, and still they waited.

  The CB transceiver next to Kit’s leg squawked into life. “Good morning again,” Adams’ tinny voice sounded. “This is Jubilee to Trojan Horse. Time for you Greeks to move out. Good luck.”

  Kit got up and went to the door. Colonel Kovacs and his men came up silently behind him. As the one most familiar with the White House, and least likely to cause suspicion, Kit was the natural point man for the group. He opened the door to the corridor and stepped out.

  There was nobody else in the West Wing corridor. Kit hurried along it, taking the most direct path to the Oval Office. Colonel Kovacs and his men stayed a constant ten yards behind.

  Through one of the corridor windows Kit could see out to the L of the Rose Garden and past it to the great French windows of the Oval Office. There was someone in the Oval Office, but Kit could not make out whether it was the President. Here was the unavoidable weak point in the plan: they could not control the President’s actions. There was an overwhelming probability that he would remain in the Oval Office, which he seemed to regard almost mystically as the seat of his power. But if Vandermeer had talked him into going anywhere else, they had a problem.

  Kit wet his lips and started forward. The door to his left was the Cabinet Room, and past that the short corridor to the Oval Office. Kit strode forward confidently, as though he belonged there, and turned the corner.

  The President sat behind his desk in the Oval Office watching a squad of Marines digging in behind the Darlington Oak. “These men,” he said almost plaintively to Vandermeer, “they’re not on our team?”

  “That’s right, Mr. President,” Vandermeer said. “But they won’t try to come in here.”

  The ranking agent of the six Secret Service men in the room shook his head. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, “but we don’t know that. I’d feel much better, sir, if you’d come back downst
airs to the command post in the presidential bomb shelter.”

  The phone rang and Vandermeer turned to pick it up. The President looked at Vandermeer and then back at the Secret Service agent. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Fifth Brigade will be here any moment now. Those helicopter Marines won’t be able to stand up to an armored brigade. And the television people are due. It would be bad for my image to be anywhere but the Oval Office in this time of crisis.”

  Vandermeer hung up the phone. “It will be your finest hour, Mr. President.” He went to the hall door and opened it. “St. Yves!” he called.

  St. Yves appeared in the doorway.

  “I have a new name for you,” Vandermeer said. “Just picked it up downstairs in an intercept. It will interest you.” He wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to St. Yves. “Keep an eye out.”

  St. Yves looked at the paper. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “What is it?” the President asked.

  “Administrative, sir,” Vandermeer said. “Detail. Have the television crews arrived yet?”

  “I don’t see them,” the President said, peering out the window.

  “Any second now,” Vandermeer said. This crisis will be resolved on national television. As I said, your finest hour.”

  “Yes, it will be, won’t it? The President of the United States directing an armored brigade against a bunch of traitors. It will be living proof that I’ve been right all along. That they’ve been plotting against me. That I was right in postponing the elections.” He slapped Vandermeer on the back. “You planned it this way, didn’t you? A real crisis. You’ve always—” He broke off as gunfire sounded in the outside hall. “What was that?” he demanded.

  St. Yves was standing by the door to the Oval office with four Secret Service men when Kit rounded the corner. “Morning, St. Yves,” Kit said, nodding. “Is the President in?”