Oath of Office

by Jack Mars

  “Are we in position to do that?” Susan said.

  “Yes.”

  Susan nodded and swallowed. “Okay.”

  All around her in The Room, video screens on the walls and laptops on the tables showed footage of the walls surrounding Qafa prison in the shimmering Iraqi desert. It was early evening there, the light was just beginning to fade, but the air was still hot. Boom microphones picked up the shouted chant of the prisoners inside those walls. All the guards had left, pulling back to the several hundred yards from the walls.

  “What does it mean?” someone said from behind Susan.

  “It means God is great,” Kurt Kimball said. “Or, depending on the translation you prefer, God is the greatest.”

  “What does it mean to us?”

  Kimball shrugged. “It means the prisoners know something is up. These guys are ISIS. Some of the Iraqi guards are sympathizers. A rumor started going through the camp a couple hours ago that we were going to release them.”

  “Where are we with the terror cells?” Susan said.

  Kimball glanced down at his tablet. “Using information from Luke Stone’s contact, a man who calls himself Rick, we’ve pinpointed sixty-three possible terror cells throughout the United States, as well as the apartments, empty buildings, storefronts, mosques, and especially warehouses they may be operating from. Only nine of these are located in what we would call major cities, including Atlanta, Philadelphia, Houston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Brooklyn, Miami, and Newark, New Jersey. All the same, we have SWAT teams from local law enforcement, as well as teams from FBI and ATF, prepared to raid all sixty-three facilities at the same time.”

  “Do we even know who this Rick person is?” Richard Monk said. “Have we figured that out?”

  Susan almost cringed at the sound of Richard’s voice. He had a problem with Stone. That much was clear. Whatever Stone did or said, Richard wanted it to be wrong.

  Kimball shook his head. “No.”

  “Then how can we believe what he’s telling us?”

  Kimball stared at Richard. “I’m not at liberty to discuss that in this venue.”

  On a few of the video screens, the image suddenly changed. Now a slightly blurry feed appeared with the face of Brooklyn Bob on it. He was laughing and talking with someone off screen. As he talked, the image sharpened. He held a satellite phone in his hand. He punched in a few numbers.

  “It’s eleven fifty-eight,” Kimball said. “Bob’s call will come through any second.”

  “Have we heard anything from Stone?” Susan said.

  “No, and we won’t. As you know, in case anyone is intercepting our communications, we’re keeping total radio silence until his mission is over.”

  “I know,” she said. “I just thought maybe it was already…”

  The speaker phone device on the conference table began sounding its musical tone.

  “This is Bob,” Kimball said to the room. “I want complete silence in here. Personal devices off. No one speaks except me, and possibly Susan. If I hear your voice, I will have your ass. I promise you that.”

  Kimball looked at someone in the back of the room. “Ready? Three, two, one…” He made a hand gesture as if welcoming a guest.

  Brooklyn Bob’s voice filled the room. “Hello, my fellow Americans. Are you there?”

  “We’re here, Bob.”

  “I figured I’d wait until noon. But then I figured why bother? What’s two minutes between friends? By now you’ve either done what you’re supposed to do, or you’ve prepared yourselves for the worst. I understand your guards have deserted Qafa prison. Are you prepared to open the gates?”

  “We are,” Kimball said.

  “Good. It’ll take some time for me to confirm that you’ve done it.”

  “Bob, we have a live video feed,” Susan said. “We can send it to you, if you can receive it. That way you can see exactly what we’re doing in real time.”

  Brooklyn Bob’s eyes widened. He smiled. “Is that Susan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Susan, I’d love to watch your video. Please do send it to me. Maybe after all this is over, we can get on a private line and chat about it. You can beg me for your daughter’s life, and I can… oh, I don’t know.”

  Susan suppressed an urge to cry out her daughter’s name. She knew all along that even if she released the prisoners, they would never let her daughter go. They would make her beg. They would make her grovel. And still, it wouldn’t matter. They would kill her anyway. Oh, God.

  If she could only turn back the clocks somehow, to a time before this horrible series of disasters had begun. She would change it. She would never have taken the oath of office. She would never have agreed to become Thomas Hayes’s running mate in the first place. She would never have been Vice President. She would never…

  “Video is on its way, Bob,” Kimball said.

  On the screen, Bob looked away from the camera for a moment. His phone went silent and he spoke a few words to someone in the room with him. Then his sound came back on and he looked into the camera again.

  “We have the video. I can hear the brothers chanting to Allah. It’s a beautiful sound.”

  “Listen to this sound,” Susan said.

  Right on cue, the sound on the video feed changed. The chants were quickly drowned out, replaced by a growing roar. The camera man zoomed out, showing more of the area surrounding the prison. In a few seconds, a plane appeared. It was black, flying low, but still several thousand feet in the air. The plane had a bubble shape, almost like a flying saucer.

  Something began tumbling from the bottom of it. Lots of little somethings. Dozens of them. The plane glided past, the little black somethings falling away behind it. The first ones hit the walls of the prison, the ones following landing dead in the center of it. Explosions rocked the compound. The camera shook from the concussions. Bright red flames flickered and dust clouds rose.

  “That’s a B-2 bomber,” Kurt Kimball said. “It’s dropping five-hundred-pound Mk-82 Snake-eye bombs. The B-2 carries a payload of eighty bombs. Looks like it just put most of its load smack in the middle of your friends.”

  As Susan watched, a second B-2 passed overhead. It released its bombs over the prison, as the first had done. They fell, seemingly backward and away from the plane. The bombs dropped in a fiery rain, most of them landing inside the prison. As the explosions subsided, another plane appeared. Then another.

  Kimball ran a hand across his throat. Abruptly, the footage of the prison disappeared.

  “Seen enough, Bob?” Susan said. She couldn’t resist speaking to him now. The bombing had been her idea. They wanted to kill people? We could kill people, too.

  During the long hours of waiting, the policy had become clearer and clearer to her. They would not bend to the demands of maniacs. It was out of the question. As long as she was alive, as long as she remained President, her government did not negotiate with terrorists.

  Brooklyn Bob seemed shaken for the first time. “You people are animals,” he said. “I guess this means one of your great American cities must be destroyed. And Susan, your little daughter is going to die.”

  “You know what, Bob?” Susan said. “So are you.”

  She glanced at Kurt Kimball. “Are we locked on?”

  He nodded. “We are.”

  “Do it.”

  Over the conference call speaker, a sound grew louder and louder. On the video screen, Brooklyn Bob’s eyes grew very wide. His line went dead as he looked at the ceiling above him. He raised his arms over his head. The video image began to shake. Then it froze.

  Then it went dead.

  Static showed on the video feed.

  “Can we confirm anything?” Susan said. She felt numb. It seemed like there was no blood in her legs at all. She would remember the look on Brooklyn Bob’s face for the rest of her life. She would never forget it. She never wanted to forget it.

  Brooklyn Bob died in a panic.

  An
aide had given Kimball a pair of headphones. He listened. He looked at the room. “It’s a direct hit on the house where Bob’s satellite phone was located.”

  A small cheer went up throughout the room.

  Susan raised her hands to tamp it down. “It’s a little premature, people. We’re not out of this yet. I want every single one of those sixty-three suspected terror cells raided. Starting now.”

  She took a deep breath. The Room became a storm of movement all around her. But in her mind’s eye, all Susan saw was beautiful Michaela.

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  9:01 a.m. (12:01 p.m. Eastern Time)

  Los Angeles, California

  He was coming very fast.

  The wind whistled in his ears. His own reactions seemed slow. It had been too long. The building seemed to be quite a distance away, and then it was RIGHT THERE. He flew headfirst, but he was having trouble keeping his head up. He couldn’t see clearly.

  If he missed that roof, there was nothing but skyscrapers ahead of him.

  Trudy’s voice inside his helmet: “Luke! Pull the cord! Pull the cord!”

  He did as she said. Instantly, he decelerated. His chute pulled his upper body backward, kicking his legs in front of him. Even so he was still coming fast. He pulled the auxiliary chute, slowing even more.

  In front of him and below, a man moved along on the walkway of the crane. The man held a gun in his hand, and he was headed toward the forgotten bundle that Luke knew was Michaela. Luke steered his chute toward the man.

  He was going to hit hard.

  A burst of automatic gunfire sounded.

  Duh-Duh-Duh-Duh-Duh-Duh-Duh

  Luke looked, hoping to see the chopper. No. Far below, men on the roof had pulled their weapons, and were firing this way. He felt the breeze from their bullets. Nothing hit him. Lucky. Then his chute tore, automatic fire ripping it open. He heard it go rather than saw it.

  Suddenly he dropped.

  Between his shoes he saw the crane arm, and then nothing but open space. Everything seemed to swim and spin. The crane arm rushed up. It came at him on an angle. The man on the walkway was just below him. Luke fell too long and he was sure he had missed the whole thing. Then he hit like a meteor.

  Luke crashed into the man, harder than hard. The force of it sent the man over the low metal railing.

  The man fell away screaming, but then his scream suddenly cut short.

  The railing caught Luke in the stomach and his air whooshed out. He slid, grabbing madly for anything. The rail jammed into his armpits, his hands found grips, and he held on for dear life. The iron walkway shook all the way up its length, and for a second he thought his extra weight would bring the whole thing down. It didn’t. His weight was nothing to that crane.

  Luke pulled himself over the railing and collapsed to the deck, tangled in his chutes. He gave himself a moment to let his wind come back. The cool metal slats pressed against his face. He was shaking a little, but not bad. He was alive and the chase was still on. He groped his way to his feet. He needed to move fast.

  Another burst of gunfire came, an angry blat.

  Luke ripped the chute off of his head. He looked down. The Little Bird was directly below him. If he had missed the walkway, he would have dropped straight through the chopper’s spinning blades. That was where the guy who had fallen must have gone.

  Aboard the chopper, Ed was at the door, ripping up the guys on the roof. He sprayed them with automatic fire. Luke watched them fall to pieces.

  The walkway began to shake. Twenty yards away, two men were climbing past the operator’s cabin and onto the long working arm. Luke was still wrapped up in the parachute. He reached inside his wingsuit, looking for his knife.

  The men ran toward him, guns in hand. They barely noticed Luke, their eyes focused on Michaela. She was the task. Kill the girl. Luke was an afterthought.

  The first one tried to leap over him. Luke timed it, then lunged upward with all his might. The man crashed into him and fell to the metal grating. They landed together in a tangled pile. Luke was behind the man. He pushed a hand out of his suit and grabbed the man by his hair, but the man flipped Luke over his shoulder.

  Luke went head over heels and landed on his back with a thud. The man who had flipped him rose to his knees, just as the second man fired. The bullet blew through the man’s chest. Luke saw the exit wound erupt, all blood and organ meat, heart and lungs. The man fell on top of Luke, his face all blank eyes and open mouth.

  Luke had one free hand. He pushed the corpse aside and struggled to his feet.

  The second man faced him with the gun. The man was ten feet away. Luke blocked the metal walkway, but he might as well have been wrapped in a tortilla. He was hopelessly tangled in his colorful parachute. And he was nearly helpless. He had no way to lunge at the man. He would never close the distance in time.

  They stood, facing each other hundreds of feet in the air. Behind the man, Luke saw the blue ocean and the curvature of the Earth at the far horizon. The wind whistled around them.

  The man pointed his gun at Luke’s head.

  “Drop the gun and I’ll let you live,” Luke croaked. He was conscious of being almost unable to speak. He was conscious of being the only thing standing between this man and Michaela.

  The man grunted. It was nearly a laugh. “You’re bluffing. You have nothing to kill me with. And you’re delaying my work.”

  “It’s over,” Luke said with as much force as he could muster.

  “It’s over for you,” the man said.

  Suddenly, the man shredded apart in a blur of blood and bone and gore. His head practically separated from his body. What was left of him fell to the walkway in a bloody ruin. Pieces of it dripped through the grating.

  Luke glanced to his right. The chopper hovered there, Ed in the open doorway with his smoking M4.

  Luke shrugged. “Or you,” he told the dead man.

  “Luke?” a voice said inside his helmet.

  “Ed?”

  “Yeah, man.”

  “How are we looking, Ed?”

  “Well, there are a lot of dead bad guys on that roof. I don’t see anybody else, but there could still be a few inside the building. I wouldn’t dilly-dally if I was you.”

  “You got me covered?” Luke said.

  “If it moves, it dies. Anything that isn’t you.”

  “Rachel, where can you land that thing?”

  “There’s plenty of room on the roof, but we’ll hover until you get down there. No sense being a stationary target for anyone who might show up.”

  “How do I get down?”

  “You see that tower the operator’s cab sits on?”

  Luke glanced down at it. Sure, it was like a tall steel cage. “Yeah.”

  “That’s a staircase.”

  “That’s a long way,” he said.

  He could hear the smile in her voice. “It’s either that or jump ten stories. We’ll wait for you either way.”

  Luke found his knife and cut away the remaining parachute. Then he shrugged out of the backpack and ripped away the wingsuit.

  He turned and made his way back to the little girl.

  She was alive, kicking her legs, making some sound behind her gag.

  He kneeled beside her. He didn’t want to touch the suicide vest. Trudy and Swann would have to walk him through taking it off of her. He just wanted to make sure she was okay first.

  “Michaela,” he said, “I’m going to take your gag off, but I don’t want you to scream. I’m not going to take your blindfold off yet.”

  He might not take it off until they reached the roof. It was a long way down.

  “Okay? I don’t want you to scream. Nod if you won’t scream.”

  The girl nodded.

  Luke removed the gag. Michaela shrieked like nothing Luke had ever heard. The piercing sound of it went on and on.

  When she was done, Luke cut her arms free. Michaela hugged him just like a little girl would do, and
not at all like an eleven-year-old big girl. She squeezed herself tight to him, her arms wrapped around his neck. She kissed him on the cheek and whispered in his ear.

  “Am I safe?”

  Luke nodded. “You’re as safe as can be. We have a little bit of a walk to get downstairs, but it’s perfectly safe.”

  “I want my mommy.”

  Luke smiled. He looked out at the vast world around him.

  “Your mommy sent me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  The man’s name was Adam.

  They called him that because he was the first man hired for this job.

  He stood on a catwalk two stories above the floor of the small warehouse, and watched the action below. It was a dusty old warehouse, and looked like it hadn’t been used in years. It was full of hospital gurneys, organized in neat rows. There were ninety-six gurneys in total. All but a dozen had someone lying on them.

  The people on the gurneys, the vast majority of them young Arab men, were volunteers for the cause. Each one was connected to an IV drip, with a clear fluid inside the plastic bag.

  Bustling around the volunteers were six people, four men and two women. In sharp contrast to the volunteers, who wore normal street clothes, the six people in question wore white laboratory gowns, goggles, ventilator masks, rubber gloves, and booties on their feet. They were the workers.

  The workers had been selected for their ability to give simple injections. Their job was to hang an IV bag, attach it to a needle, inject each of the volunteers, then to monitor the situation while the fluid in the bag slowly entered the volunteer’s system.

  It was a simple job. Any blood bank worker or hospital blood technician could do it.

  Adam was feeling well-rested and ready to move on. He had inspected this warehouse upon his arrival in Los Angeles, and then spent the past couple of days in a hotel room, ordering room service and watching television. He had spent much of the day yesterday watching coverage of the Ebola crisis in Charleston.

  Perhaps the attack hadn’t gone as well as his employers wanted, but it was still quite an effective operation. Many had died. The city had plunged into chaos, and there was an icy sense of fear throughout the entire nation. And if it wasn’t as dramatic or as devastating as some had hoped, was that Adam’s fault? Hardly. He had done everything they asked of him, and had done it well.