A hundred yards or so ahead of them a swath of road is suddenly illuminated by the lights of a low flying helicopter. There is no mistaking just what chopper it is. Even as it streaks across the sky ahead of them, its’ silhouette is unmistakable. It is Marine One, the Presidential Chopper. Lamar glances at his mirrors, and seeing the road clear behind him, cuts across four lanes to get to the shoulder. He hits the brakes and brings his Mercedes to a screeching stop.
“What’s wrong?” Annie asks.
Lamar Reed doesn’t know how to respond. He doesn’t have the words for it. Something is bothering him about the timing of the attack on the President. And then there are the planes. It didn’t make much sense to attack the capital when most of its politicians were spread across the country with their families. It made little sense if it was an attack of Islamic terrorism. And the attempt on the President’s life happened at Andrews, at one of the most secure bases in the country, if not the world. It couldn’t be jihadists. No, he thought. It could, however, be the military cabal they have been investigating the last six months. Yes, it could be them.
It had to be them!
Lamar takes the wheel back in his hands. He backs the car, turning the wheel until the Mercedes is pointing perpendicular to the road. At the first break in the traffic’s flow, he speeds across the road and onto the median. He then turns east after Marine One and floors the pedal.
22:07:23
“Repeat. You are entering the No Fly Zone! You are ordered to change course immediately!”
Major Kettering and his crew listen to the fighter pilot’s voice over the speakers. He has been trying to establish communication with the cluster of planes for five minutes. They are not responding. More disturbingly, the pilot reported that their windows were blackened. They have been unable to establish visual contact. Could they be flying remotely, Kettering wonders? It has been done before, during the Border War. An assassin for the drug cartels flew a C-4 loaded, radio controlled, toy plane into an Arizona’s sheriff ’s office. The poor man’s drone killed the sheriff and two of his deputies. Was the stunt being improved upon by the use of real planes? The Major feared so.
“Fire a warning at them,” Kettering orders.
His command is relayed to the pilots.
“Copy that.” The pilot’s response crackles through the speaker.
Lt. James ‘Big Mac’ McDonald pulls his F-22 Raptor above and behind the phalanx of Cessnas. Carlos ‘Da Rodster’ Rodriguez maneuvers his F-22 above and ahead of the small planes. Da Rodster scans the terrain before and beneath them. There is nothing in their way and no traffic on the Potomac.
He radios his partner. “Big Mac, you’re all clear. All clear, Big Mac.”
“Copy that, Rodster.”
McDonald thumbs the safety off his 50 caliber guns. He lets loose a burst of gunfire. The spray of bullets flashes across the front of the small planes. The Cessnas break formation and start weaving and bobbing in the air.
“Bogeys are taking evasive maneuvers,” McDonald relays to his superiors at Andrews. “They are still inbound for DC. Repeat. Bogeys still inbound.”
On the ground Major Kettering has no options left. The Cessnas will enter the No Fly Zone in another minute and a half. Further north he has another pair of Raptors flanking a 757 jet that seems to be setting itself up for a kamikaze plunge into the capital. It is not responding either. Homeland Security has given him the green light to shoot them all down. The Major will wait until the jet is over the Chesapeake before he deals with it. The Cessnas, on the other hand, will have to be handled immediately.
“Something happening here, sir,” Levine blurts out behind him.
Kettering turns and notices that the radarscopes and computer screens are all blinking on and off. Within seconds they all go black.
“We’re blind, sir.”
“Do we still have audio?”
“Yes sir!”
“Then advise the Raptors to take out the Cessnas.”
His controller echoes the command to the jets.
“Copy that, Eagle Nest,” McDonald replies. And then, after a few moments, “Fox one. Fox one away! Fox two. Fox two away!”
22:05:44
Earl Forrester considers himself a practical man. He accepts the world at face value. It baffles him to no end when others can’t or won’t do the same. And nothing turns his befuddlement into gnawing frustration and pure indigestion like a Presidential Cabinet Meeting. The one he attended earlier in the afternoon was no exception. Invariably at these meetings, matters of national security were trumped by considerations of opinion polls. The nation’s course was charted by equal parts of what was thought to be good for her image and what might be good for the people; two aims which were, in Forrester’s estimation, most often inimical to each other. The ‘next election’ was an ever present consideration in every issue and crisis giving the good of the nation a permanent back seat to the good of the political party in power. Earl can’t say that it is new to him. He is sixty-nine years old now and has witnessed administration after administration paralyzed by this madness. He can’t say that he has gotten used to it either. The government frustrates Forrester now as much as it did when he was a teenage recruit wading through Vietnamese jungles. It didn’t matter what party was in power. Earl had taken to calling them republicrats and demopublicans. A pox on both their houses, he thinks.
They had their chance.
It now up to us, Earl tells himself. The pieces are in place and the wheels are in motion. The operation is a go!
Forrester connects his CarComm to the Presidential limousine with a push of a button on the back seat’s armrest. He is patched through to Box Car almost immediately. It is a voice only transmission.
“Mr. President, our satellites have been blinded. All visual transmissions have ceased.”
“Who blinded us?” the President asks. “How?”
“We’re working on that,” the Chief of Homeland Security responds. “It appears the cyber-attack is native, uploaded from Washington. We should be able to pinpoint the source of origin in a few minutes. In the meantime we’re scrambling jets and AWACs to patch together a birds-eye view of the homeland.”
“And where are the planes?”
“The Cessnas have been shot down.”
“What’s the damage?” O’Neill asks.
“None sir,” Earl replies. “They were shot down over the river.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“Yes sir,” Forrester continues. “Unfortunately we still have that inbound 757. I’ve ordered Major Kettering at Andrews to evacuate Marine One. It’s en route to you as we speak. We will extract you at the Suitland-Pennsylvania Avenue connection and get you out of DC immediately.”
“Got it,” the President says. “Let me know what happens over the bay.”
“I will, sir.”
“And get your own ass out of Dodge, Earl,” O’Neill adds. “There is no telling what is on that plane.”
“Don’t worry about me, sir,” Forrester says. “I should be safe where I am. You just make sure you get on that chopper.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Godspeed, Mr. President,” Earl says and signs off.
The Chief of Homeland Security relaxes into the plush leather of his armored car’s back seat and exhales. It is over now. His career with the United States government is finished. Earl closes his eyes and lets his mind drift back to its beginning.
It was 1969 when Earl signed up to fight in Vietnam. After basic, Forrester applied and qualified for Special Operations training. Six months later he donned his Green Beret and boarded a plane with dozens of others for the Vietnamese peninsula. Through two tours, he worked his way up the ranks. Earl and his Green Berets fought their war with little consideration for the lines on a map. They sought out their enemies wherever they hid. Laos, Cambodia and even into mainland China, they pursued, hunted down and killed the Viet Cong. They had even less consideration for the pol
itical hand wringing back home. They carried no tags and often operated without official sanction, answering only to the conditions on the ground. It was bloody work that took the lives of many of their comrades. Yet regardless of the privations and casualties they suffered, they remained of a single mind. There were no draftees among them. Every man was a volunteer intent on doing his part to stem the spread of Communism across the world. Earl believed, as they all did, that defeating the Viet Cong would go a long way to reversing the tide of totalitarianism sweeping westward since the end of the second World War. Forrester’s father lost his life holding the line in Korea. Earl was more than willing to lay his down in Vietnam.
The CIA recruited Forrester after the war and for the next thirty years he worked with the Agency’s Black Ops teams that took the fight to America’s more rabid enemies. He was responsible for the deaths of scores of men, many at his own hands. Earl never relished the killings but neither did he regret them. The enemies he took out were all butchers themselves. They had no cause to complain of their treatment at his hands.
Through the decades, Earl found his job becoming more difficult as more oversight was piled on, bureaucratic layer atop bean-counting, bureaucratic layer. It became increasingly hard to fulfill missions without committing lies of omission and he slowly grew to resent hiding the ugly but necessary truths of the work from his new, sanctimonious bosses. Recommendations from boots on the ground were summarily dismissed as extreme or politically risky by desk-jock analysts with inordinate regard for world opinion.
It did not matter what party was running things. Clinton and his Democrats passed up more than one opportunity to kill Osama Bin Laden long before his fateful attack on the homeland. In the tragedy of Bush’s War on Terror that followed September 11, American treasure and blood was squandered tip-toeing around mosques that the enemy would later destroy. Men like Zarquarwi, Muqtada Al Sadr and others who were cornered in arms-stacked mosques during the early days of the war were allowed to escape with their arsenals in an effort to win political appeasement from those who would never grant it.
Al Sadr and the others would then return to the field and bite coalition forces in the ass.
The last straw for Earl Forrester was the government’s refusal to allow an attack on a gathering of some eighty Taliban leaders in Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2006. An unmanned, aerial drone confirmed reports that the group of leaders and their lieutenants were gathered to bury one of their own. The pictures the drone sent back was of a target as rich as any the war ever presented them with. As protocol demanded, they requested permission to drop the drone’s Hellfire missile on the group. Earl could not believe his ears when the response came back.
“Permission denied.”
It was insanity. Pure insanity, Forrester thought. Washington was concerned the attack would upset surrounding tribal leaders, complicating the job of Afghanistan’s new president. It was crazy and no way to fight a war. It certainly wasn’t Forrester’s way.
Earl handed in his resignation the very next day.
He returned home to Nevada and for a while he was glad to have left that life behind. He was grateful that he got to spend the last three years of his wife’s life with her. After she died however, the restlessness that had driven him all his life stirred anew. He wanted back into the life but couldn’t imagine being able to stomach the political climate evolving in Washington. The politicians, like the talking heads on the news, argued about the best way to end the war. No one was talking about winning it. It was Vietnam all over again. The shame and anger he felt during the evacuation of Saigon revisited him as bitterness and resentment as he watched the mayhem and massacre brought on by the failed partitioning of Iraq. The newly formed Department of Peace and the war crime trials they held made him all but lose hope in his country.
And then he was introduced to Colonel Miguel Pereira.
It was in Chicago. Earl went every year to meet with his old comrades from the Green Berets. They first gathered there to bury their company leader in 2000. Over the years they returned to catch a Cubs game and eat and drink into the night. They would use the short visits to the windy city to fill each other in on their lives. They would boast about their wives and children, gripe about their jobs; and, while they rarely talked about the war that brought them all together, they would always reminisce over those whose lives had been lost to it. As the years passed, their numbers dwindled. In 2014 when their old corpsman, Lester Dolby brought Colonel Pereira along to their gathering, there were only eleven members left of the original twenty four of their ‘survivors club.’
They were all taken aback by his visit. It was the unspoken rule of the group that no outsider was ever invited. They all knew of the man, they knew his reputation and his record. They had all seen his fiery confrontation with the Senate in 2010 and followed the headlines and investigations until the end of the shameless trial. To a man, though only Dolby knew him personally, they had nothing but admiration for the Colonel. He did not serve with them in Vietnam, but he was immediately welcomed at their table.
For the next three days Colonel Pereira confided in them. He detailed his plans to them, all that had been done so far and all that was yet to be done. Earl Forrester was fascinated. They all were. The Colonel was advocating nothing less than what Earl himself would wish for the country to which he had given so much of his life. Others of course would not see it that way, particularly those in power.
It was Dolby himself who voiced what they were all thinking.
“They will call it treason, you know?”
“Of course they will,” Pereira responded. “And it doesn’t matter. We will no longer let them define us. Let them call it treason. We will call it revolution.”
The memory of that meeting is still charged with emotion for Earl. They were in Smith & Wollensky plotting a coup d’etat over porterhouses and baked potatoes, their conspirators’ conniving lost in the cacophony of a Chicago Cubs post-game dinner rush.
“The country is rightfully ours, gentlemen,” Pereira continued. “It’s purchased for us by our sacrifice and the blood of our fallen comrades. We are the first to fight and die for it. We are also the first to be betrayed and reviled by our leaders. They give us missions and then tie our hands. When the missions fail, it is we who are blamed and we who are defamed.”
Miguel Pereira paused to look from one Vietnam veteran to the other.
“You all know full well what they call us,” the Colonel said. “You all know very well how they treat returning soldiers. And I say, to hell with them. I say, let’s take our country back.”
He raised a glass to them.
Eleven glasses rose in toast with the Colonel’s.
Shortly after that, at Pereira’s prompting, Earl Forrester returned to government. The Colonel assured him that he would arrange his appointment as Chief of Homeland Security. While it was a job that he was more than qualified for, it was not one he would have sought out himself. There was entirely too much politics in it for his taste. Once the Senate confirmed him, Earl delegated as many of the public duties as he could to an assistant and threw himself into the fight against the rising wave of terrorism in America.
It was not easy. President Pelosi lost the country years of vital intelligence gathering when she scrapped a whole slew of surveillance programs. Civil libertarians and pandering politicians further complicated the job, obstructing his every effort while, through the benefit of a suicidal double-standard, jihadist imams and Wahabist madrassas freely preached their nihilism under the protection of free speech.
Still, it was a means to an end, an end that was quickly coming to pass.
“We’re almost there sir,” Forrester’s driver announces softly.
Earl opens his eyes and snaps back to the present. We’re almost there, indeed, he thinks. He looks out the window. Langley’s CIA headquarters is out there, round the next bend in the road. Carlton Quinn is being held within its walls.
Forre
ster’s first job for the new administration will be an extraction.
22:00:00
“What now?” Major Kettering asks, knowing he will not like the answer.
“Sir, we’ve lost contact with our planes.”
“How?”
“I… I don’t know… We’ve just lost everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“The airwaves are being jammed… All of them… there’s nothing but static… nothing but static on every frequency.”
“Where’s the jamming coming from?”
“It’s coming from space, Major,” Levine answers. “They’re using our own satellites against us.”
21:58:21
Joseph Corelli is certain they will wreck and he will die in a crush of glass and twisted metal. He digs his nails into the leather headrest of the driver’s side back seat with one hand and grips the handle over the window with the other. It is all he can do to keep from being tossed around the back of Lamar’s Mercedes as the congressman snakes through traffic after the presidential chopper. The light, Christmas Eve traffic offers little comfort against Reed’s driving. No one in the car is talking. They are all trying to get their heads around what is happening. Joe doesn’t know why the congressman suddenly decided to chase after Marine One instead of driving to the NSA, but Joe isn’t about to bother him with questions.
The helicopter descends for a landing ahead of them. Joe can see the presidential limo stopped before it. Two tank-like Hummer Mark VII’s flank the limousine. Their machine gun turrets turn slowly, one clockwise, the other counter-clockwise, looking for threats. Marine One touches down on the median. Its door opens and the short, boarding ladder folds out. Two marines jump out with automatic weapons drawn. Secret Servicemen pour out of the Hummers and take defensive positions around the limo and the chopper. The door of the limousine opens and more agents step out onto the median. The President is the last one out.
Lamar hits the brakes and brings the car to a stop on the shoulder, some thirty yards from the site. He steps out and Annie follows him as he runs to the scene. Joe is squeezing himself out of the back seat when one of the agents on the perimeter fires off a volley of gunfire over their heads. The burst frightens Joe. He loses his balance and falls to the ground. Lamar and Annie stop cold. The congressman raises his hands and continues forward at a walk. Annie stays put as the Secret Serviceman steps forward to intercept Lamar.
The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE Page 12