Emily Strand, his date for the evening, was a stunning blond, almost as tall as President Martin in her heels. She had long, flowing blond hair, and a Hollywood smile. The few times she spoke when a microphone was shoved in front of her, were brief, one-line comments. Phone lines at various news organizations across the country lit up with the same question: “Who is Emily Strand?” Nobody knew.
At 7:30 p.m. the president and his date were on the dance floor at the first of the many balls they would attend that evening, this one at the White House itself. Simon Schmidt, the president’s chief of staff, walked quickly up to the dancing couple and leaned in next to the president’s ear.
Martin looked at his date and said, “I’ll be back shortly, dear.”
He and Schmidt walked to the Situation Room of the White House, the office where sudden national emergencies could be monitored. General Carlo Romero, the staff officer on duty, greeted the president and Simon Schmidt.
“Mr. President, we have an urgent situation at our embassy in Yemen.”
“Please, general, I am not interested in your opinion. Please give me the data to back up your assertion of the word ‘urgent.’ ”
Bartholomew Martin lived by data, by numbers, by measureable metrics.
“Sir, our embassy in Aden, the capital of Yemen, has been attacked.”
“Did we not close that embassy less than a year ago for a similar incident?”
“Yes, sir, but it was reopened three months ago on the order of President Reynolds.”
“Give me the numbers please, general.”
“All 35 staffers at the embassy were killed, including Ambassador Greene.”
“Please hand me my secure phone, Simon,” President Martin said calmly to his chief of staff, “and patch me into General Hugo Scott, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
“Scott here, Mr. President.”
“General, three days ago you gave me a briefing on what we called Code Anchor concerning our contingency plans for our embassy in Yemen. I have one word, general: execute.”
“Mr. President, do you mean a preliminary sortie?”
“General, if I meant part of Code Anchor I would have said it. Execute Code Anchor, the entire Code Anchor.”
“Yes sir.”
***
The first of 10 sorties of five F16s each launched from the Aircraft Carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. As the planes screamed toward their target, the government buildings in Aden, the temporary capital of Yemen, the pilots armed their rockets and bombs. They released their payloads as the planes approached the capital building. The fighter jet sorties were accompanied by 10 cruise missile attacks. Before the third wave of F16s approached the government compound, every building had been destroyed, along with 425 occupants, including the president of Yemen and the mayor of Aden. The scene looked less like a bombing site than a pile of dirt.
***
President Martin calmly walked back into the ballroom, and approached his date, who was being hit on by a secret service agent. After a freezing look from Martin, the agent disappeared into the crowd.
“I’m so sorry, Emily,’ said the president. He looked at his watch. “My goodness, I’ve been gone for a half-hour. Ah, they’re playing my favorite song.”
The singer, who did a perfect imitation of Frank Sinatra, crooned. “I did it my way.”
PART TWO – THE NEW BEGINNING
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction."
Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States
Chapter 63
It happened slowly.
We didn’t notice it at first.
Everything seemed normal, except for small changes.
Then it was over.
We lived in a new country, a new world.
***
Moustaffa al Ishak stood in a 15-foot high tower to survey the training facility. As he looked out over the hundreds of new recruits, his eyes lingered on the beautiful mountains of Afghanistan in the distance. The training camp that Ishak commanded was strictly for fresh recruits to the Islamic State. The 450 young men were raw, inexperienced, and young, with an average age of 19. But the one thing they all had in common was an unwavering devotion to the outer fringes of radical Islam. Many of the recruits would be tagged as future martyrs, suicide bombers for the cause of radical Islam and the Islamic State.
Ishak was pleased with the large cache of weapons he had at his disposal, booty from a raid the previous year on a large American base camp.
He walked over to the firing range, after inserting plugs in his ears. He watched as one recruit after another ran 25 yards at top speed, dropped to his stomach, and opened fire at a target in the distance. He saw ten young men go through this drill.
He then walked over to the physical fitness section of the camp. The temperature was 101 degrees Fahrenheit. The men, arranged in groups of 10, sprinted past him and then lunged up to grab onto the overhead parallel bars. Two of the recruits lay on the side of the field, overcome by heat exhaustion.
He looked at his cell phone, which had just vibrated. It was a text message, from a caller he couldn’t identify. “Enjoy your training, Moustaffa. Enjoy watching your recruits. Enjoy your day, because it will be Not For Long.”
He heard a sound above him in the sky. He looked up, and in the final moment of his life, quickly counted four Predator drone aircraft diving toward the camp.
All 450 recruits and 20 trainers lay dead in the blazing sun.
***
Ali Musharif walked quickly down the street in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn in New York City. He had just closed his halal butcher shop and looked forward to hearing Imam Osama ibn Shafir, his favorite preacher. Shafir was due to speak at the mosque in Brooklyn, although his home location was Hoboken, New Jersey. Shafir’s talk was preceded by the Zuhr or mid-day prayer.
Shafir stood before the crowd of 150 worshippers and smiled. He loved to give speeches, and was famous for his fiery brand of radical crowd-pleasers.
“Welcome inside this sacred ground, my friends, a sacred place because it is free of infidels.”
He noticed three men at the back of the prayer room. As if on cue, they each pulled down a mask over his face. The men then reached under their coats and pointed their M16 automatic machine guns at the backs of the worshippers in front of them.
After they stopped firing, the three men walked calmly toward the back of the mosque where a car awaited them.
Everyone in the mosque lay dead.
Chapter 64
Right after the election I returned to my old firm in Chicago, Blake & Randolph. So I’m back to my lucrative law practice, helping injured people get a few megabucks to help them get over an accident. It feels good to be away from the daily grind of campaigning, and the endless compromises you have to make to get anything done. My campaign for president was a disappointment, to say the obvious. But the attacks on amusement parks and the way Martin capitalized on them made the result predictable. But now I’m enjoying private life. The huge settlement that I got for Diana a few years ago, not to mention my big fee from Al Yamani’s wrongful imprisonment suit made us quite comfortable financially. I should be happy, right?
I was scared shitless.
The changes were slow. If you kept your head down and shut up, you probably wouldn’t even notice what was going on. Like most people, Dee and I read the news every day, and also check out what’s happening on TV. Both Dee and I are politically conservative, although I’m not sure what that means anymore. Both of us have been scouring the Internet for any opinions from our favorite pundits to help us understand our new situation. George Will, one of my favorite political columnists, has written nothing about politics—only baseball, his other passion—for almost a year. I also love the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, formerly a solid, hard-punching analysis of the nation’s situation. Now it’s nothing but fluff and bullshit. Some of our favorite political talk shows, such as The
Five and The O’Reilly Factor are now about as controversial as the morning traffic report. We watched O’Reilly last night and his major guest was a chef—that’s right, a chef—talking about his new Italian food recipe. Rush Limbaugh, the wildly popular radio talk show host with ratings through the roof, has been fired after more than 30 years on the air. He was replaced by a home improvement show. It’s the same thing with the liberal media. MSNBC, a network known for its bias in favor of the left, no longer hosts progressive talking heads. They’ve been replaced by game shows.
Our biggest shock came when Dee’s long-time agent, Suzie Cohen, called and told Dee that she could no longer represent her for her articles or books. Dee had just finished a lengthy feature article for the Chicago Tribune entitled, “What’s Happened to Our Constitution?” Dee is a nationally recognized Constitutional Law scholar. When Dee pressed Suzie Cohen about her refusal to represent her after so many years, Suzie would not say why. She actually hung up the phone on Dee.
I walked up to Dee and put my arms around her. I could see that she was upset about her conversation with her agent—her ex-agent—Suzie Cohen.
“Matt, do you think it’s okay to hug one another?”
“Don’t exaggerate, honey.”
“I’m not exaggerating. I’ve never felt so creepy in my life. What the hell has become of this country? What’s going to become of us? I get nauseous when I think that you could have been our president instead of that insane prick.”
I hugged her again. I figured that our marriage and our privacy are some of the few things left in this weird fucking world.
***
Our intercom buzzed. It was Jerome, our daytime doorman.
“A Mr. Rick Bellamy is here to see you, Matt.”
Rick Bellamy, my old boss, the former Secretary of Homeland Security. He’s a friend and a good guy. But what the hell is he doing here in Chicago?
“Please send him up, Jerome.”
When Rick walked in, Dee and I exchanged hugs with him. Besides being my boss at Homeland Security, our relationship with Rick goes back a few years to when Dee and I were involved in a weird FBI investigation called the Sideswipe Conspiracy.
Rick wore a ball cap, a Yankees sweatshirt, with a light jacket over it. He looked a far cry from his old buttoned-up FBI or cabinet secretary self.
“Pardon my outfit folks, but I’m here in Chicago for an informal visit to my cousin.”
“I didn’t know you had a cousin in Chicago,” Dee said.
“I don’t, Diana. That’s the message I left on our interoffice memos. For some reason, it seemed like a good idea to cover my tracks.”
“How’s your lovely wife, Ellen? Still winning architectural awards?”
“Well she’s taken on a lot of boring assignments recently, government contracts.”
“Rick,” Dee said, “I remember Ellen telling me that she hated to do government jobs. She found them dull and not very lucrative.”
“You missed the operative word, Diana. Ellen’s been given assignments, not commissions or retainers that she got on her own. Assignments. In other words, here’s your next job, do it.”
Dee and I looked at each other. We both understood what he meant.
“So Rick, what have you been doing with yourself since you stepped down after the election?”
“I’m back to practicing law, Matt, not that I ever really did. I got hired by the Wall Street firm of Donnelyn, Jacobs, and Smith. They like the idea of having a former cabinet secretary on their roster. Practicing law is quite a challenge, I find, because lately nobody seems to be able to figure out just what the fuck the law is.”
“I’ve noticed, Rick. Speaking of the law, do you have any idea how or why President Reynolds was arrested. From what I’ve heard, nobody knows where he is or what he’s charged with.”
“Not a clue, Matt. You would think that as a former member of his cabinet, I’d know something, but I don’t.”
“Hey, Rick, besides the arrest of the former president,” Dee said, “have you noticed that things have gotten strange in the past year?”
“Strange isn’t the word, Diana. We find ourselves living in a different country, which brings me to my reason for coming to Chicago. I came here to see you two, and for no other reason.”
Dee and I glanced at each other. Something in the way Rick looked at us was disturbing.
“I’ve always shot straight with you folks,” said Rick, “and I’m not going to stop now. Bottom line, you both need to be careful, very careful. Matt, when you were my deputy you became an absolute pain in the ass with your obsession over the NFL group. You saw them as a threat, a serious threat. More than that, you got the ear of President Reynolds. You convinced him the NFL wasn’t just a useful bunch of anti-jihadi nuts. You sold him on the idea that the NFL was a problem for the United States, not just for radical Islam. He bought your arguments, and I think that’s why he’s under arrest. Dee’s writings, especially her articles, cemented her as a NFL skeptic as well. You both eyeballed them as the bad guys. And then you became candidate for president.”
“So what’s the big deal, Rick?” I said. “So we raised some red flags and asked a lot of questions. What’s the problem with that?”
“The NFL now runs the country, Matt. That’s the problem—your problem, and mine too.”
Chapter 65
Jim Blake, senior partner at Blake & Randolph and Matt Blake’s father, sat in the hallway outside a courtroom at Chicago’s Daley Center. The man next to him was his opposing counsel, Murray Blanken. The case they were trying Young vs. Moretti, involved a car accident where Jim Blake’s client, John Young, was rendered a paraplegic.
“You’re a tough guy to try a case against, Jim,” Blanken said. “I’m happy to still be alive.”
“Well thanks for the compliment, Murray, but let’s get back to what we were talking about. Your client (actually, the client’s insurance company) is willing to settle this for $10 million, correct?”
“Yeah, Jim, unless you want to drag me back in front of the jury and kick some more shit out of me.”
They shook hands. “Let’s go into the judge’s chambers and put this stipulation on the record,” Jim Blake said.
Nothing made Judge Myron Dworkin happier than to see a big case settle before verdict. It avoided all of the post-trial bullshit paperwork, and enabled him to move on to his mounting calendar of cases. But this would be no typical settlement stipulation. This would be something he’d never seen before.
“Have a seat, fellas. Coffee?”
“No thanks, your honor,” they both said simultaneously.
“Then how about a couple of stiff drinks. After what I’m about to tell you, I think you’re going to want something to soothe your nerves.”
They both looked at the judge with furrowed brows.
“I’m about to show you a letter that was hand delivered to me this morning. I understand that every judge in the country is getting one of these today. Let me summarize before you try to rip my head off. As you can see (he handed each of them a photocopy) the heading of the letter says The Committee for Justice, whatever the fuck that is. Calling your attention to the signature line, it’s none other than Bartholomew Martin, President of the United States. To get right to the point, gentlemen, I can’t sign off on your settlement.”
They both stared at the letter, trying to make sense of it.
“To save you from straining your eyes, fellas, this letter says that the settlement details first have to go to this Committee on Justice for approval, and that they will try (I emphasize will try) to get you an answer in 90 days. And it gets even worse, guys. Each of you have to fill out this 50-page questionnaire, answering such questions as the injured person’s race, ethnicity, and even political affiliation.”
“Ronnie, (Judge Myron’s nickname)” Jim Blake said as he slammed his hand on the table. “Sorry your honor.”
“Hey Jim. You can call me Ronnie, but there isn’t a piss l
oad I can do about this nonsense. Jim, you’re a former federal judge, so you can appreciate the bullshit spot I’m in. This fucking piece of paper says that I’m guilty of a felony if I ignore it — Hey, whatever happened to judicial immunity? It also goes on to say that if you guys ignore the 50-page form, you’re guilty of felonies as well. Yes, you heard me, goddam felonies. I feel like I’m the star of a stupidly written science fiction movie. You guys came into this courtroom and busted your asses for your clients, as any pros do, and came to a mutually agreeable settlement. But this piece of shit says I can’t let you come to an agreement without passing it by the fucking Committee on Justice.”
Judge,” Murray Blanken said, “you know as well as we do that this document is unconstitutional. For one thing it impairs the right to contract. It also violates the right to a jury trial under the Sixth Amendment. Give me a few minutes and I’ll figure out a few dozen other ways that this violates the Constitution.”
“You’re right, Murray. A second semester law student could see that this is constitutional bullshit. But it’s over the signature of the President of the United States, and threatens the three of us with felonies if we don’t comply. I think that whatever the three of us thought we knew about the law just got dumped in the toilet.”
The Reformers: A Matt Blake Novel (The Matt Blake legal thriller series Book 2) Page 26