FOREWORD

by Ten To Midnight--Free(Lit)

  As they got closer to the Bell, Lewis could see that a pilot was already at the controls. The pilot was wearing Marine gear and, like thousands of other soldiers tonight, was probably awaiting his next set of orders.

  He was about to get them.

  “Okay, Colonel,” Lewis whispered in McGuire’s ear, reverting to his natural English accent, “you’re going to order the pilot to take us to Maryland.”

  “Maryland?” McGuire hissed through clenched teeth. He momentarily considered calling for help, thinking that there was no way that these guys would start a firefight with so many armed troops around. But when he saw the intensity in Lewis’s eyes, he realized that, yes, they probably would. In the final analysis, McGuire wasn’t prepared to gamble his life on the off chance that Lewis and Jefferson were bluffing. “What the hell do you want in Maryland? Who are you guys?”

  Lewis increased the pressure of his gun against McGuire’s ribcage. “We’re the last guys you’re ever going to see if you don’t shut your fucking mouth. Now just do it.”

  The pilot turned to see the three men standing a few feet away from him. Noting the Colonel’s stripes, he offered a stiff salute that was casually returned by McGuire. “What’s up, Colonel?”

  “Special Orders, Captain. Me and these two gentlemen from the FBI are going to Maryland.”

  Doubt crept into the pilot’s eyes. “I haven’t heard anything about Special Orders, sir.”

  “You have now,” Jefferson told him firmly. “Now get the engine running before…”

  He was cut off by the sound of police sirens from behind him. When he turned, he saw that soldiers were flooding out of the airport building, heading towards him, rifles poised.

  Lewis’s and Jefferson’s luck had just run out.

  CHAPTER IXX

  LAST RITES

  “The ego is not master in its own house.”

  (Sigmund Freud)

  FEMA SPECIAL FACILITY, OLNEY, MARYLAND

  “Mrs. Mitchell,” Jo announced as she entered the waiting room, abruptly interrupting whatever dark thoughts the First Lady had been harboring.

  Margaret looked up at the doctor, her eyes full of hope. And then her eyes widened in both recognition and surprise.

  “Jo?” She had met the surgeon on several occasions before, while Lewis had been at Princeton. “What are you doing here?”

  “Ma’am,” Jo said, glancing at a Secret Service agent who was standing post at the door, “I’m going to be operating on your husband. He’s suffered an aortic rupture. Now I’ll level with you. This is not a straightforward procedure. The good news is that because he’s survived this long, his chances are better than would normally be the case for a man of his age. That indicates that the fissure isn’t irreparable.”

  Although Margaret’s previous encounters with Jo had always been in a social environment, the First Lady knew that the young woman standing before her was supposedly one of the best heart surgeons alive.But is she good enough to save Ed?

  As if reading her thoughts, Jo adopted a sympathetic smile. “If anybody can save him, I can.” She was accustomed to breaking bad news to a relative. But telling the First Lady that her husband might die was something else entirely. Jo immediately reproached herself for that thought. She had to be professional; to think of the President like any other patient. Were she to feel intimidated, the results could be catastrophic. As if there hasn’t been enough catastrophe today, she reflected grimly.

  Margaret took Jo’s hand in her own. Her eyes were pregnant with tears. That would’ve amused some of her political enemies in Washington, she thought, had they still been alive. “If we survive this, you have to get back together with Lewis. He’s pulling himself straight again.”

  Jo blinked. Now it was her turn to be surprised. “You’ve seen him?”

  The revelation was delivered with a bitter laugh. “He’s on the E-4 command plane. He was acting National Security Advisor when my husband collapsed. He’s about the only person stopping that madman Nielsen from killing us all.”

  Jo swallowed hard. She’d wanted to call Lewis so many times, just to see how he was doing. And now it seemed that he’d straightened himself out just in time for Doomsday. Her mind swelled with a host of questions she wanted to ask the First Lady, but there wasn’t time. Not now, perhaps not ever. She knew that the President’s odds of survival were falling with every passing second.

  Her voice cracked slightly as she spoke. “I’ll do what I can to save your husband, Ma’am.”

  With that, she donned her surgical gear and entered the theater, hoping that there might be a chance of seeing Lewis again after all.

  First thing’s first though, she told herself. I’ve got a President’s life to save. How about that?

  BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON AIRPORT

  Lewis sprayed half a round of semi-automatic fire at the lines of advancing police and soldiers. The rapid fire made a buzz not unlike that of a chainsaw. He didn’t aim to kill anyone; just to slow them down. The tactic worked. He saw figures ducking for cover. And while they were ducking, they weren’t chasing or gaining ground. Every second of bought time was critical now.

  “Get that fucking engine running,” he yelled behind him at Jefferson, who had bundled McGuire into the chopper as the terrified pilot watched anxiously.

  “This baby’s going nowhere without my right hand man,” the pilot informed Jefferson.

  “Are you kidding?” the Secret Service agent snapped. “You’ll just have to do without him.”

  “No way,” McGuire told him. “Don’t you know anything about flying, Milburn or whatever the hell your name is? This is a Bell 412. Requires a minimum crew of two. Now I only see one. Looks like you’re bang out of luck, pal.” There was no smugness in his tone.

  Jefferson swore under his breath and glanced at Lewis, who was still on the tarmac fighting a rearguard action to repel the growing numbers of troops and police, who were peppering the chopper with sporadic bursts of gunfire. Jefferson aimed his weapon through the door and returned fire, hoping that his contribution might buy Lewis another couple of seconds. He glared angrily at McGuire, aware that both time and options were becoming more limited by the second. He aimed the semi-automatic at the Colonel’s head.

  “Get in the front seat,” he ordered. McGuire opened his mouth to say something, but Jefferson cut him off with a commanding growl. “If you want your head and shoulders to stay attached, get in the co-pilot’s seat before I count to three.”

  McGuire hesitated.

  “That’s a fucking order, Colonel. One…”

  Uncertain whether Jefferson was serious about pulling the trigger, but not wanting to find out, McGuire climbed fore into the co-pilot’s seat, nervously holding his hands aloft.

  “What’s going on up there?” Lewis called over his shoulder just as a hail of bullets whistled past his right ear and ricocheted off the chopper’s steel hull. “Shit!” He instinctively rolled under the fuselage and, laying flat on his chest, squeezed off another volley of shots. The front line of police and soldiers had advanced to a distance of no more than fifty yards. So far, Lewis had deliberately aimed high with his shots. He didn’t want to have to kill anybody - especially fellow Americans - but if they got much closer, he knew he’d have to start dropping them like skittles.

  “I don’t have any flying experience,” McGuire complained to Jefferson in the helicopter.

  The USSS man still had his weapon trained on the Colonel’s head. “Then you’ll just have to learn. Damn quick.” To the pilot: “Okay, now you’ve got a co-pilot. Start the fucking engine.”

  “You’re the guy with the gun,” the pilot shrugged, obediently flicking a sequence of switches. As the engine came to life, he leaned over to McGuire. “Okay, I know you outrank me, Colonel, but not on this baby, okay? When I tell you to do something, you do it without hesitation. That’s if you don’t want to drop out of the sky like a rock through water.”

  Outside, Lewis fired another s
ustained burst of gunfire. He saw two figures - soldiers,good guys - drop to the ground under the impact of his fire. He’d never know who they were or whether they would survive their bullet wounds, but he figured he’d have time enough to worry about that later. Maybe. Sorry guys. You just became another casualty of this damn mess. Just as the thought entered his head, he became aware of the helicopter’s blades whirring into motion.

  Jefferson felt the vibrations of the engine. “Come on,” he yelled at Lewis, “let’s go.”

  The pilot apparently thought the order was directed at him. He immediately pulled back on his joystick, causing the helicopter to rise off the ground.

  “Wait!” Lewis screamed. But the pilot didn’t hear him. “Fuck! Wait!” he yelled again as the chopper began to lift off.

  “Stop the damn chopper,” Jefferson ordered the pilot. “We’ve left a man behind.”

  The pilot either didn’t hear the order or chose to ignore it; Jefferson would never be quite sure which.

  Aware that if he stayed on the tarmac, he was as good as dead, Lewis grabbed the landing rail, gripping it for dear life as the chopper began to climb into the night sky. He knew that, hanging helplessly in mid air, he now made a much easier target for the enemy. That point was emphasized when several bullets slammed into the fuselage, again missing him by mere inches. He thought he felt at least one of them buzz past his right cheek.

  The chopper lowered its nose and powered forward at an altitude of about a hundred feet. Lewis knew that with every yard, enemy gunfire would become less effective and he would make a smaller target. Keep moving, keep moving, he mentally urged the pilot. Within seconds, the Bell was out of range of the weapons still being fired at him. Looking over his shoulder, he could still see muzzle flashes on the ground behind him, but they were becoming more sporadic as the airport’s security forces began to realize that their efforts were futile. Now they would consider alternative ways of catching the renegades. It occurred to him that he had made it through Level Two of his metaphorical video game . He wasn’t terribly keen to see what Level Three had to offer.

  With a helping hand from Jefferson, Lewis hoisted himself aboard the helicopter, landing in a heap on the floor in front of the USSS agent.

  “I’ll hand it to you, man,” Jefferson grinned, visibly relieved to have escaped in one piece. “You’ve gotcajones the size of Nevada.”

  “Don’t get too cocky,” Lewis panted, struggling to regain his breath after the adrenaline rush of the take-off. You’re out of condition, boy,he told himself as he cleared his throat. “Right now, they’ll be looking for us on radar. If they find us, they’ll probably send up an Apache to intercept. If the Apache tracks us down, well, we won’t know a hell of a lot about it.”

  “I thought you said we’d be okay once we got on the chopper,” Jefferson protested in alarm.

  A sly grin. “I lied. Didn’t want to worry you unduly.”

  Lewis pulled himself upright and peered through the front window, sticking his head between McGuire and the pilot. “Take her down to about fifty feet,” he ordered. “That should improve our chances of radar evasion.”

  “And then what?” the pilot asked, too scared to look Lewis in the eye.

  Lewis slapped him on the shoulder like an old drinking buddy. “Maryland, Captain.”

  ABOARD KNEECAP

  “You wanted me, sir?” The Secretary of the Navy said, entering the conference room. He glanced at the two Secret Service agents and the Marine Warrant Officer - who was carrying the nuclear ‘football’ - standing just behind Nielsen. By now, Admiral James Dunster knew of Westwood’s resignation. That made him acutely aware of being the most senior military official on board KNEECAP; a prospect that did not exactly fill him with enthusiasm.

  “Ah, Admiral Dunster.” Nielsen looked up, folding his arms across his chest. “Indeed I did.” He ran his hands through his thin hair, feeling the makings of an imminent migraine. “In approximately twenty minutes, we will be issuing final launch orders to our submarine fleet via the TACAMO aircraft. I want you to run me through the procedure one more time.” He showed no indication of self-doubt, certainly no indication of being afraid. He was dealing with the situation as if preparing for a meeting with a small town Mayor, Dunster thought with no small measure of alarm.

  “You’re still going through with this insanity, aren’t you?” the Admiral said, his tone laced with incredulity. He had hoped that Westwood’s resignation might have shaken up the commander-in-chief just enough to make him reconsider his decision. Obviously, he had been wrong.

  Nielsen rolled his eyes. In fact, the closer the world came to Armageddon, the more arrogant he seemed to become. That was the first sign of a detachment from reality, Dunster knew. He’d seen it happen to commanders before. Better commanders than Nielsen. It occurred to him that granted the power of God, Nielsen had allowed omnipotence to intoxicate his judgment.

  “The procedure, if you please Admiral.”

  Nielsen’s irrationality scared Dunster more than anything he’d ever encountered. But the fact was that Nielsen was the commander-in-chief, and Dunster, at best, was a military advisor. That made any concept of insurrection a constitutional issue. Although Dunster thought he understood the intentions of the men who had penned the American Constitution, he recognized that they hadn’t been in the position of custodians for an entire planet. Sure, the Constitution had served a purpose at the time of its conception, but how did that relate to the nuclear age? Dunster briefly wondered if George Washington or Thomas Jefferson would have worded that sacred document any differently had nuclear weapons been a fact of life in their day. As it stood, Nielsen’s license to issue authorization for a nuclear strike was almost unequivocal under wartime regulations. Under the two-man authorization rule, he still required a Congressional appointee to sanction the launch order (in this case, that would be Dunster’s job), but that was now little more than a technicality at best. For even if Dunster refused, there were others who wouldn’t.

  To resist the will of the commander-in-chief was to defy the Constitution. Even to consider such an act could be considered treasonous. And once that line had been crossed, America might as well become a military dictatorship. Dunster felt that it would take a stronger and better man than he to cross that line. It all came down to one simple fact. He had sworn an oath to the Constitution. To God. An oath that compelled him to obey orders, without question, from his commander-in-chief. And the Nazis “only followed orders” too, didn’t they?

  Perhaps when this thing was over, when he was finally brought before his maker, Dunster would find a way to reconcile his reticence with his conscience. For he knew that were he to disregard his oath, Nielsen would replace him with somebody not quite so reluctant to follow orders. After all, he wasn’t entirely alone in his desire to reduce Russia to a heap of charred ruins. For one thing, he probably had the support of Joe Public, and for another, there were enough surviving Generals in the U.S. military who would not think twice about sanctioning the order.

  The Admiral acquiescently withdrew a plastic card from his inside pocket, his hand trembling slightly as he did so. It was the size and shape of a credit card and, within alternating red and black strips, contained seven groups of alphanumeric codes. Only one of the codes was valid, and only Dunster knew which one it was.

  “You should have an identical card to this,” he informed Nielsen, the tremor in his hands affecting his voice. “When the time comes to issue a launch order, both of us will need our cards to validate your identity to the TACAMO aircraft. Without it, they won’t give us the time of day.”

  Nielsen opened his wallet. His own card was sandwiched between his American Express and Visa Titanium card. He checked it and nodded in comprehension. “Okay. That seems pretty straightforward.”

  “Once we establish contact with the TACAMO aircraft, you will need the SIOP code for the appropriate attack pattern.”

  “I’ve already decided on the code.”
He spoke it slowly, accentuating every syllable. “Bravo Five Foxtrot.”

  Dunster swallowed hard. He knew precisely what that particular designation entailed. It was a code he never thought he’d hear in any other situation but an exercise. SIOP Attack Plan EWO-B5F,his mind translated. Unprejudiced precision nuclear bombing of Russian population centers, industrial centers and leadership bunkers. “Sir,” he said quietly, placing both his hands firmly on the conference table and leaning forward to within a few inches of the Acting President. “Do you realize what that entails?”

  Something reminiscent of a smile flickered across Nielsen’s thin lips. “Of course I do, Admiral. It means that we’re going to demonstrate to the world that America will not be broken. We’re going to change the world tonight.”

  “Let’s just hope that there’s a world left to give a damn,” the Admiral remarked bluntly. “Sir.”

  Nielsen raised his eyebrows at the Admiral. “I sense some reluctance on your part, Admiral. That’s quite okay, you know. If you don’t feel comfortable sanctioning this order, I could find someone who is, and that way your conscience would survive intact.”

  “I know that, sir, and that’s why I have no intention of letting you down.”

  “I didn’t think you would,” the Acting President smiled.

  90thSPACE WING, WARREN AFB, WYOMING

  “Okay,” Pearson sighed. “I’ve told you about my love life. Now you tell me about yours.”