The Omega Covenant

by Richard Holcroft

  “Which makes it kinda useless... but I’d just as soon have it with me anyway.”

  “I’ll have a car reserved in your name at the airport Hertz counter. Just don’t mention my name. They’re not real happy about the shot-up Mustang returned to them with blood spatter all over the interior.”

  6

  New York City, June 28th

  Helen Seitz was running late–unusual for her, since she was generally the first person to show for work each morning and one of the last to leave at night. The hours she put in at the money management firm for which she worked were long and arduous. But she found it mostly challenging and expected to be considered for a promotion at the mostly male firm in the next twelve months.

  She had an important client meeting scheduled at noon but just couldn’t seem to get it together that day. She hadn’t slept most of the night, and when she finally did fall asleep, she couldn’t drag herself out of bed until long after the alarm had gone off. Helen wondered if it had been stress that caused her the aches and pains she’d experienced the past few months–which was one reason she’d been convinced to take a brief vacation to Hawaii two-plus weeks ago. She’d enjoyed her time away from the big city but was back to dealing with stress again and wondered if being at a high-powered money management firm was what she wanted after all.

  Fact is, she’d felt worse since she’d been back from vacation and didn’t know why. The dull ache she felt in her back and arms yesterday would not go away despite popping a couple of Tylenol every few hours. A cup of tea was all she could stomach for breakfast, but it would have to do. Helen thought she also might have a slight fever but didn’t have time to check. Why bother, anyway? she thought. Her scheduled client meeting would go a long way toward determining her future with the firm, so she couldn’t stay home to nurse herself back to health, no matter how bad she felt.

  The meeting went as well as expected, though she felt even worse as the day wore on. Co-workers advised her to leave work early, but she still had a few more accounts to go over and several phone calls to make. She decided to gut it out the next few hours. Besides, if she could get through the day without puking and get a decent night’s sleep, she was convinced she’d be able to shake off whatever it was that caused her to feel so rotten. Must be the flu, she convinced herself. There was a lot of that going around.

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  Thirteen-year-old Bobby Dodd vomited every couple of hours and wasn’t getting any better. He’d miss another day of school and was in danger of failing at least English and maybe social studies, too. His father lived out of town, so he was no help, and his working mom couldn’t afford a babysitter every time Bobby felt ill. So it was easier for her to skip work that day and make up for it by working overtime. Her job as a waitress in a mid-town coffee shop didn’t pay much, but she felt lucky to even have a job considering she was a high school dropout with few prospects and no health insurance.

  At least Bobby’s fever had gone down a bit during the night; she was thankful for that. Two days at 102 degrees had her worried. She’d taken him to a small emergency care facility the day before, but other than giving him drugs to mask the pain in his arms and bring down his fever, there wasn’t much more the doctor on duty could do for him.

  Bobby claimed he felt fine when he returned from a week’s vacation with his father and stepmother. But eight days after he got home, intense pain developed in his chest and arms, followed by a fever a day later. Now, as he lay dozing on the living room sofa, his mother saw a slight rash on his forehead she hadn’t noticed before.

  She immediately called their family physician to make an appointment, but while she was on the phone, Bobby made another mad dash for the bathroom. The next few minutes of coughing and retching were all the single mother could take.

  That’s it, she thought. Time to go to the hospital. Something is very wrong with my child.

  7

  White Sulphur Springs, WV, July 1st

  General Reid Halperin paced the tiled veranda outside the Greenbrier’s main dining room and checked his watch. It wasn’t like Admiral Scovell to be late, but then it was a long drive from DC, and there could have been any number of problems along the way.

  A vacation haven for the wealthy and elite, the Greenbrier Resort, tucked away in the Allegheny Mountains four hours from DC, also had a long history of covertness and discretion. For much of the Cold War, it had been the site of a secret bunker stocked with a six-month supply of food, pharmaceuticals, and other supplies for members of Congress in case of emergency–a nuclear Armageddon, specifically. To this day, the resort remained a favored destination for Capitol Hill power brokers and politicians who preferred no one know why they were there, or with whom they were meeting.

  It’d been weeks since they received their reassignments from DOD, and Major General Halperin and Rear Admiral Thomas Scovell were still outraged. Halperin had been dismissed as commander of US Air Forces in Japan and assigned to deputy commander of Air Forces in Kuwait; Scovell was removed as commanding officer of the Navy’s mighty Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean–considered the most powerful maritime strike force in NATO’s arsenal–and assigned to his new position as Chief of Naval Air Training in Pensacola. Both slap-in-the-face assignments, they felt, after thirty-three and thirty-five years of faithful and distinguished service, respectively, and they weren’t handling it well.

  Reassignments of other flag-rank officers from the Pentagon’s Office of Personnel were just as outrageous, many thought. Together they amounted to mass demotions at an unprecedented, almost daily, rate, as part of the president’s sudden and controversial shakeup of high-level military officers–payback, some felt, for not telling him what he wanted to hear.

  Aside from a few senior members in the CIA’s clandestine services branch, only a handful of people in Washington knew about that day’s meeting between Scovell and Halperin. And the president wasn’t one of them.

  Just before three in the afternoon, Scovell strode onto the veranda. Halperin and Scovell had known each other for years, both socially and professionally. They’d served together at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and met, along with their wives, away from the Pentagon on numerous occasions. They greeted each other warmly with handshakes and back patting and then took seats at a small glass-top table in the corner of the dining room.

  They spent the next half hour reviewing their heady years together at the Joint Chiefs–the Gulf War, ongoing threats from Iran, long hours drafting contingency plans for every likely conflict proposed by the war plans office–before Halperin took a large gulp of water and changed the subject to the purpose of their meeting.

  “It’s time, Tom” he began, “and there’s no turning back.”

  Scovell nodded. They both realized that if the plan failed and they were caught, it meant a long prison sentence for each of them, at the least, and possibly even execution.

  “We agree the president has done all he can to eviscerate our military,” Halperin continued. “His failure to stand up to Russian Premier Sokolov and the mullahs in Iran proved how weak and inexperienced he is. Negotiations with Sokolov are about to begin on a disarmament pact, and the premier will almost certainly maneuver us into a deal we must not and cannot accept. I fear the worst, Admiral–and the worst spells disaster for all of us.”

  The tall, silver-haired Scovell listened carefully, then leaned forward. “I’m totally onboard with this. Our military has become a damned social service organization under this administration and not an effective fighting force. We spend more time and money on humanitarian operations and disaster relief than we do on tactical training.” He shook his head and clenched a fist. “Millions pissed away on biofuels research when we can’t even provide decent medical care for our returning vets.”

  Halperin agreed. “Environmental cleanup, medical treatment, you name it–all worthwhile efforts for an obscure UN organization, I suppose, but not for our once-mighty US military.” He paused for emph
asis and added, “I doubt you’ll find ten high-ranking officers in our armed services today who feel he’s up to the task of being president.”

  “Damn right. We’ve had periods in the past when our military leaders disagreed with their commander-in-chief over how to run a war–Kennedy and LBJ over Viet Nam, Carter with Iran, Obama and ISIS–but nothing approaches what we’re experiencing now. He and the extremists around him who think everyone would get along if America just played nice… but unfortunately the world isn’t like that.”

  Halperin nodded. “Besides destroying our military, he has plans to dismantle the CIA–concentrate intelligence gathering within the National Security Agency and White House and make the agency an irrelevant, worthless afterthought.”

  “He’s made no secret of it.”

  “I thought we’d learned our lesson after 9/11,” Halperin continued, “that our intelligence agencies should be allowed to do their jobs without interference from Congress; that our president needs to remain strong in the face of growing threats from every piss-ant country around the globe and surround himself with seasoned foreign policy veterans unafraid to make the tough decisions. Instead, this administration has proved so inept it defies description.” He pounded his fist on the glass table. “Our enemies see us as weak and ineffectual. The few remaining friends we have around the world view us as dithering, fingers-in-the-wind politicians who can’t be relied upon to lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.”

  Scovell nodded in agreement as Halperin continued. “We’ve lost half our allies, and the president’s actions in Syria alone are sufficient for impeachment. Every intel agency in the free world advised us to stay out of the conflict, since neither side could be trusted. Yet McHugh got us into a war with enemies of the US on both sides, which ended in disaster.” The admiral looked off in the distance, his face flushed with anger.

  Halperin paused as the waiter brought their double bourbons and water and retreated back across the veranda. Then he added, “It’s time for a change.”

  Admiral Scovell thought for a few moments. “The only question I have now is how the electorate will respond. McHugh, after all, is still relatively popular with the voters.”

  Halperin shrugged in disgust. “Damn the voters. His approval ratings are high because of his personality, not his policies. His policies have been a disaster. Most everyone I know has had it with the idealistic, impractical approaches he takes toward issues they’re most concerned about. With no military background, little political experience, and no interest in foreign policy, he still insists everything run through the Oval Office, so he can claim to be involved. Then he lets his cabinet members make the tough decisions, so he can plead ignorance if the decision backfires.”

  Scovell nodded. “Plausible deniability.”

  Halperin smirked briefly before he turned serious again. “Qualities that register with the fawning media and McHugh’s adoring voters unrelated to his performance as president: two terms as governor; he and the First Lady an attractive couple involved in the arts, White House dinners with Hollywood types–damn fluff that doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Right. A traitor to our military and country. The vice president is a ten times stronger supporter of our armed forces than the president will ever be.”

  “McHugh’s got NATO worried sick he’ll enter the upcoming round of treaty negotiations with Russia and China willing to make major concessions on everything from nukes in Iran to missiles in Europe.” He looked around to make sure there was no one on the veranda close enough to overhear them. “Sokolov will play him like a fiddle, and it won’t be pretty.”

  “And while they won’t say it publicly, German and French leaders will welcome the change in presidency, once new leadership is in place.”

  “Hell, yes,” Halperin said and took a gulp of his bourbon. “The best scenario, of course, would be for him to resign. The bureau has enough information on him now they could blackmail his ass and get him to do much of what they wanted.”

  “If Hoover still headed the FBI, that’s exactly what’d happen.”

  “True, but that was a long time ago... and we don’t need Hoover. Half of Washington already knows about McHugh’s lady friends and shady associates, so those revelations wouldn’t do much to change voters’ minds.”

  Scovell shrugged. “I’m not so sure–especially considering his friends’ ties to radical Muslim groups. McHugh’s also got health problems he doesn’t want public.”

  “Who wants their president negotiating with Sokolov when he’s high on steroids or dulled by painkillers half the time?”

  The admiral stiffened and sat back in his chair. “It’s immaterial at this point, anyway. The operation has begun. If all goes as planned, the political landscape in Washington will be a hell of a lot different a few weeks from now.”

  Halperin removed a sheet of paper from inside his suit jacket and spread it out on the table in front of them. He tapped his finger on the handwritten notes. “McHugh is scheduled to give the keynote address to the Pan-Asian Trade Council in Honolulu thirteen days from now. Before that, a speech on Kauai and a launch at the missile range. We should be getting a detailed itinerary from our source in the presidential detail in a matter of days. But rest assured our partners have thoroughly vetted our agents in Hawaii and are ready to act given the word.”

  8

  Kauai, July 2nd.

  Tom Shannon flew in that afternoon on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles. He called Marchetti from the airport and suggested they meet that evening at the St. Francis to knock down a couple of beers. Marchetti agreed and told him he’d ask Janine to join them. She accepted and promised she’d reserve a table in the main dining room for eight o’clock.

  Tom was first to arrive. The maître d’ escorted him to a table next to a large bay window overlooking the beach. Janine and Marchetti joined him a few minutes later, and Marchetti introduced the two of them. Marchetti thought Tom looked healthy and fit, considering what he’d been through the past two months: a door-activated bomb that blew him off his feet, a semi-auto rifle round that ripped through his shoulder, several cracked ribs, and a lacerated skull–all compliments of a terrorist group planning to bring down an airliner inbound to DFW.

  Janine ordered a pupu platter of coconut battered shrimp, Macadamia nut hummus, and other assorted appetizers along with a couple of bottles of Napa Valley chardonnay. After they’d ordered their meals, Tom dove into the appetizers like he hadn’t had a morsel in days.

  “How’d you enjoy the helo tour of Na Pali,” Janine asked Marchetti, “before everything went south that night?”

  “It was spectacular. And your pilot friend, Keith, seems like a really good guy. Ever since my time in the Marine Corps, I’ve hated choppers–consider them the aeronautical equivalent of a horror movie: You know something’s going to go wrong, you just don’t know when.”

  Tom nodded and said, “We air force guys referred to them as ‘a bunch of metal circling an oil leak.’”

  “That bad, huh?” Janine said and laughed.

  “Everything went smoothly, though,” Marchetti said, “and Keith made it enjoyable.”

  The three continued chatting about life on Kauai and Janine’s college experiences rooming with Vicki. To Marchetti’s and Tom’s mild surprise, she revealed that Vicki hadn’t been the hard-driving, career-chasing journalism student they might have expected. Rather, a fun-loving coed who barely made it out of bed most Mondays for an early-morning broadcasting lab. Since graduation, however, Janine had become aware of how strictly business Vicki had become–dedicated to her craft and always looking for the next big story.

  Marchetti observed Janine and Tom getting along well, and Janine made it clear she was glad Tom was there to help.

  “Tom and I have talked it over and decided to stay on Kauai for a while,” Marchetti said with a slight smile. “We’ll see what we come up with, but no promises, except we’ll give it our best shot.”

/>   “Thank you both. That’s all we expect,” Janine said, sounding relieved. “We’ll do whatever we can to give you what you need–security, contacts, transportation, you name it.”

  “A room and rental car for each of us will do for now,” he said.

  After some initial hesitation about accepting Janine’s request, Marchetti had to admit she was right about the shooting. He had a score to settle with someone who’d nearly killed Vicki, and remaining on the island for a couple of weeks might be the best way to find the persons responsible.

  Marchetti gave Tom what they knew about Bradley Vaughn’s crash.

  Janine carefully placed the fork on top of her half-finished Caesar salad and slid her plate off to the side. “Brad had always been respected by fellow journalists, but he attained a lot of influence, both in Washington and nationally, as a result of the Post series on General O’Neil, which led to the general’s dismissal.”

  Marchetti added, “It may actually have started before that. General O’Neil made a lot of enemies in Washington when he disagreed publicly with administration policy regarding Iran. Insiders were out to get him.”

  Janine nodded. “Brad suspected the real reason O’Neil was dismissed was that he planned to blow the whistle on a cover-up by CIA agents in Afghanistan involving the torture of al Qaeda suspects. O’Neil was ordered to keep his mouth shut–with the order coming straight from the president.”

  Tom whistled softly. “That’s what you call pressure.”

  “No kidding,” she said. “Unfortunately, it didn’t end there. Brad told me his next series would deal with an even bigger cover-up involving the CIA director. If I had to guess, I think that’s what sealed his fate. He was on his way to interview a couple of people here on the island important to the story when he died in the crash.”