Max was becoming impatient with Andrew’s pedantic focus. “Thanks for the science lesson, but I need answers. Are you saying that the cars in my garage at home, and all of the audio-visual equipment in the press room were not affected by the blast?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Do you know how to operate one of those cameras?” “Yeah, sure. Any idiot can do it. I took a video class in college,
and I—”
“Andrew, I want you to go to the Press Room, get all of the
equipment you need, and start recording smiling faces and upbeat
words,” Max interjected. Get another camera set up at the far end
of the mall, and put a third at the podium. No other cameras are to
be made available, and all recordings are to be kept from the press
until we edit the material and give it to them. They will have to use
what we give them.”
Max scanned the room, looking for his press secretary, Bill
Staffman. He spotted him at the back of the room, looking rumpled
and alienated. “Bill, I have ten Secret Service agents milling around
on the lawn, and I need them to bring their bikes down to the
kitchen immediately. If they ask why, tell them because I said so.”
Staffman looked puzzled and dejected, but turned to carry out orders.
“And Bill, I need for you to do the narrative on the images we will
release to the press, digitize the whole thing, and get copies to all major networks as soon as I am through with my speech.” Staffman turned to Max and beamed. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he intoned. “I think I’m beginning to understand you, Mr. President. I can give them a clear message of vitality and optimism that they will never forget.”
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CHAPTER 48
A
s Max and Rachel made their way to the kitchen in the White House basement ahead of the entourage of security and staff, Rachel finally had the opportunity to ask questions. “Have you lost your mind? Why are we going down to the
kitchen? What’s so all-fired important that you are ordering everyone around? Talk to me!”
“If you let me get a word in edgewise, I’ll tell you. Remember that surprise I promised? It’s down here. Luke showed it to me last week. He has been keeping it a secret since Dad died, and you and he are the only living people in the world to know beside me, at least for the next minute or so.”
Max opened the utility closet and stepped inside. He pulled out the floor buffer and moved it aside, leaving the small space unobstructed. Then he pulled Rachel inside and closed the door. He turned on the light switch and pushed hard on the hidden panel at the back of the closet, and it swung open with a hiss. Rachel gasped in wonderment as the lights illuminated the tunnel, extending into the darkness. The EMP pulse had not penetrated to damage the electronics, and the power source was provided by the White House’s shielded emergency generator. They stood behind the electric car, plugged into its charger inside of a metal cage.
“Another Faraday cage,” Max exclaimed. I’m beginning to see them everywhere.“This is our private passageway to Fairlane.”
Max and Rachel scrambled into the electric car. Max turned the key, and the headlights shone brightly. He turned to his Secret Service contingent. They were busy mounting their bikes after a tight squeeze in the kitchen closet.
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“You know how I hate speeches, so I’ll be brief. This is a secret, and I’ll have your balls surgically removed if you breathe a word of this to anyone. Clear?”
“Yes, Mr. President!” They had been well-trained.
“You are about to embark on a high-speed bike ride beneath the Potomac to my house. This is a test of your fitness level and your devotion to your elite status as my protectors. I want five riders ahead, and five behind. Your assignment is to clear the way to Fairlane at the far end of this tunnel, and I have no idea what waits for us when we get there. You will establish communications with your team on site and with the White House, and you will equip every car in my garage with communicators that have a direct link to both locations. I have been advised that we can assume that there may be other EMP devices out there somewhere, so we will only be driving cars that were built before 1970,” Max announced.
“Why?” Justin Armstrong was the first to speak. His puzzled look betrayed a lack of knowledge of nuclear weaponry, and he silently cursed his ignorance. It was a huge gap in his training, and he knew his lack of knowledge could place the president in danger. He vowed to become an expert before another device wreaked havoc.
“No electronics to fry,” Max replied. “The same gamma radiation that comes from solar flares was emitted when that EMP device was detonated, and if you were lucky enough to get a newer car going again, another detonation would stop you dead in the middle of the road.”
“Mr. President, we will have those cars delivered to your front door, gassed up and ready to go. Which one will you be riding in?”
“I’m partial to the red, ’66 Vette, and I’ll be doing my own driving,” Max replied.
Max pressed the accelerator pedal and the electric car lurched silently forward. Around the first curve, the cyclists encountered a spider web that spanned the width of the tunnel, the large spider situated in the center of the passageway. The lead cyclist broke through ahead of the pack, parting the web with his head. A portion of the web, together with its builder, stuck to his black suit, and he sputtered, frantically trying to brush the arachnid away with his right hand.
“Max, this is creepy,” whispered Rachel.
“Yeah, we’ll have to do something about those things when I get half a chance,” he replied, intent on the planning. “I encountered a big one last week when I was down here. I didn’t know that they could spin a web that fast.” Rachel moved closer to Max and held his arm tightly. Her fright was peaking. “You need to know that I was briefed on possible terrorist activity a few days ago, and again last night, and I ordered that they keep me in plain sight. The terrorists are homegrown, and I’m betting that they are staring at a black TV screen somewhere, just like the rest of the world. Any image they have is of me standing at the podium. Even if they have people on the ground communicating to them, the only idea they have of our whereabouts is that I holed up in the White House about ten minutes ago.”
Under the well-established protocol of protecting the president, Max would have been whisked away to a secret command center under a mountain outside of Washington, along with a contingent of every available member of Congress, his cabinet, and military decision-makers. He had ordered that protocol be abandoned. He was safer being unpredictable, appearing in public at times and places that could not be anticipated. If he was correct in his assumptions, his enemy not only knew of the protocol for protecting the president, he had established it.
“Rachel will lead the way with the helicopter, and I want an agent to accompany her to communicate with our people on the ground and in the air. By the time we get back to the Capitol, I imagine our military will be everywhere, and I would appreciate it if you told them we are coming their way. I’d hate for some field commander with his finger on the button of a surface to air missile to see us as a threat, if you know what I mean.”
Armstrong rode powerfully alongside the electric car, relaying commands to his subordinates in rapid succession. Max chuckled when he yelled, “Whatever you do, don’t shoot at us, and don’t shoot at Flygirl’s helo. We’ll be coming across the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge in fifteen clicks, and I want a path cleared direct to the steps of the Capitol.”
Rachel remained nervous and unsure, her mind leaping forward in time. She had not received combat training, and evasive maneuvers would be a challenge if she encountered anything that remotely resembled ground fire. She shuffled in her seat and looked at Max with concern. “I’m not sure I’m ready for this,” she whispered. He stared ahead, confident. ”Don’t worry, you�
�re going to be fine. The last thing they will expect is to have us come back there from the opposite direction like some big magic trick,” he replied.
Max knew that his ultimate goal would be to avoid mass panic, and to do that, he would need to be back at the Capitol quickly. Fear of the unknown was the immediate enemy. Without contact with the outside world, the public rumors would spread rapidly, and his ability to lead effectively would be lost. Above all, he had to be visible to America, and to lead. He couldn’t do that from a bunker, hidden for his protection from that same unknown danger.He began to relay messages back to the White House through Armstrong, who dutifully dictated the words verbatim. They spoke in intense staccato sentences as the advance riders increased their speed to provide a security buffer ahead.
“Tell Andrew to get those cameras from the press room in the hands of the press, but to keep filming without broadcasting. I want the scenes to be edited before the rest of the country sees them. Tell him that I only want positive images. Control the content. Staffman needs to immediately get a press release out, explaining that a power failure has delayed the broadcast, accompanied by still pictures of happy faces and parade scenes, if he can find any. Scarlett needs to get a sound stage ready for her speech, but she is not to start until I get there…and oh, tell her to stick to her original script. She’ll love that. Keep the bands playing loud and continuously. Is the path cleared for us yet? I want all flyovers to look like we planned them from the start. Don’t we have the Blue Angels as part of the program? Move them up. Get them in the air now.”
“We’re headed back to the inauguration fifteen minutes after we arrive at Fairlane, and I want this operation to be flawless in the execution,” Armstrong announced to his subordinates. Calling ahead to the skeleton crew left at the house during the inauguration, he verified that the grounds were secure and directed them to prepare for their arrival. The advance team reached the end of the tunnel and dispersed through the metal door in pursuit of the assigned tasks. Max and Rachel were only two minutes behind, but by the time they reached their destination, the helicopter had been removed from storage.
Five classic cars stood idling, their rumbling exhausts projected the sound of power not often heard since Detroit stopped producing muscle cars. Their paint had been recently polished to a mirror finish, each one looked better than the day it had been driven off the assembly line. In the front of the pack was a1966, candy apple red, Corvette Stingray convertible. Behind it, a green 1967 Mustang convertible rumbled, followed by a Shelby Cobra, blue with its characteristic racing stripe. They led the only two hardtops in the collection: a bronze 1968 Camaro Super Sport and a 1957 T-Bird hardtop, in turquoise, not driven since Adrianna died. The sight of it tugged at his heart; it was his mother’s favorite car. All of them had been made in America in the heyday of the United States auto industry, and all of the vehicles chosen lacked the electronics that EMP radiation could immobilize.
Rachel ran into the house and emerged three minutes later in her flight suit, carrying her flight helmet. The helo, a two-person Baby Belle, had already been wheeled from a tiny hanger next to the massive garage. “Can you fly this thing in a straight line?” Max asked, shaking his head. He had always been envious of Rachel’s talent for flying. It seemed that she could fly anything, and she took to it naturally. He, on the other hand, knew the limits of his abilities. Where he excelled at many activities that were beyond the grasp of others, flying was not one of them, and Rachel took silent pride in her ability to do something that Max lacked in his repertoire of talents.
“What do you think?” She batted her eyelashes and put her hand on her hip, doing an inept bimbo imitation, which provoked a laugh from Max. “Do you think I just lie around and eat bon-bons by the pool while you’re out running the country?” She smiled and slid into his arms like fingers into a glove, content for a brief hug before they set off across the Potomac for their grand return to the inauguration. There was no time for more.
“I have been practicing while you neglected me,” she teased. “Not only have I become good at it, I have trained your Secret Service detail to prepare Baby Belle for flight, do the pre-flight check, and call in my flight plan, but I suppose there’s no time for that today. I assume there is nothing but military aircraft flying in my airspace right now.” She paused at the sound of the Blue Angels flying over the Capitol far in the distance. It was accompanied by the unmistakable thrup-thrup of military helicopters beyond the horizon. The sounds underscored the need to get back in a hurry, and the revving of engines in Max’s personal inaugural parade would soon be drowned out by the roar of her take-off.
She broke the embrace and looked into his eyes. “You had me from the first time you smiled in my direction, and I had you from the time you first saw me in a bikini, boytoy,” she bantered. “Get back to work.” Rachel turned to finish her pre-flight check, and Max’s smile dissolved as his mind returned to the many tasks that lay before them. There would be time for passion once they had survived the day.
“Armstrong, notify the White House over our secure channel that I want every operable camera pointed in our direction when we come across the bridge, and tell Andrew Fox and Bill Staffman that I will need our footage edited, copies made, and distributed to the press. Then, I will need official copies delivered to all of the major networks by every means possible. Tell Andrew to splice me together a message of hope and leadership using my words, and I want it done by the time I finish speaking at the inauguration. Oh, and tell him this: No speeches. He’ll know what that means.”
By controlling the message and keeping it short, Max was assured that the press wouldn’t have the opportunity to distort the meaning or put their editorial spin on it. He had to convey hope and leadership, or whoever had committed this despicable act of terrorism would have succeeded at severing him from the base of his power: the people.
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P
lease, Mr. President, please.”
Armstrong stood in Max’s path, his six-foot-four height and broad shoulders providing a barrier between Max and the Corvette. He towered over Max, but his face showed a fear that
made the muscular Secret Service agent seem vulnerable. “What is it, Armstrong? You have your orders, and we need to
get back,” Max said.
“Sir, from the time I became a SEAL, I took an oath. I take it
very seriously, and I have pledged my life on it.”
“This had better be important.”
“If you value your life, you will walk over to that bathroom, and
you will put this fucking thing on, and you won’t give me a hard
time about it.” He stood over Max and intruded into his personal
space, square jaw set, and his attitude was necessary.
Max stood face to face with his protector, absorbed in thought
and oblivious to the reason for the confrontation.
“Sir, I can’t let you go out bare-naked.” He held out a body
protector, molded to fit Max, with a few enhancements to make him
look more like a Spartan warrior than the President of the United
States. It would stop a bullet. No politician would be protected from
an attack to the head, but it was something.
“Armstrong, if they want to kill me, they’ll just blow my head off.” “Humor me.”
He stood immobile, and Max realized that if he was going to make any progress, this was a battle that he would never win. “OK,
OK, I’ll do it for you, Armstrong, but we will talk about this later.” “I want there to be a later, sir.”
Max slipped the vest over his head and smoothed the Velcro straps
around his torso. He changed back into his inaugural clothes inside
the expansive garage as the security team scrambled to prepare for
their departure. They brought a tool kit and extra points for each
car, in the even
t that more EMP bombs were to follow. By their
pre-electronic status, the only part of the cars that could disable
their progress was the points, which transferred a spark between
the distributor and the spark plugs. They would fuse together in
the massive gamma radiation emitted by the nefarious devices, but
it was a quick fix that any amateur mechanic could perform in a
few minutes. It involved popping the distributor cap off, turning
a screw, taking out the fused points, and installing the new points
with a screwdriver.
Each was carefully wrapped in a metal screen and placed inside
of a tool box lined with yet another Faraday cage.
He marveled at the metal mesh that covered the walls and
windows of the huge garage, protecting the car collection from
outside radiation. In the senator’s estimation, it had been just a
matter of time before a massive solar flare or EMP attack would
occur, and in his certainty, preparation was the only remedy for
his concerns. Before Max was born, at least before the senator had
adopted him, Fairlane had been hardened from EMP radiation by
the construction of Faraday shields around the sensitive electronics
of the house and out-buildings. The senator had prepared his home
for the almost certain eventuality of an attack on the nation’s infrastructure, and Max saw his familiar surroundings with new eyes. All power to the house was supplied by a photovoltaic array in the garden, together with a small hydroelectric dam in the stream that flowed through the woods on its way to the Potomac. He had never realized or appreciated the efforts of his father to make Fairlane independent from the utility company until that moment in time. All of the aspects of society that he took for granted were turned upside down, and without the senator’s foresight, he would have been powerless to do anything about it. But not this day, and
No Corner to Hide (The Max Masterson Series Book 2) Page 15