Line of Succession: A Thriller Read online

  The codename appeared on his screen. “The flight plan is Slasher,” Dobbs said. “Slasher.”

  “Copy that CENTAF,” came Marine One’s reply. The pilots had each of the routes committed to memory. No written or electronic flight plans existed.

  Flight plan Slasher took Marine One due north, where it would be joined in mid-air by three identical VH-71 Kestrels all bearing the Marine One paint and insignia. These helicopters were decoys. The choppers flew in a pattern that was similar to cards shuffling in and out of a deck. From the ground, it was virtually impossible to tell which chopper carried the President.

  Precisely one minute later, Dobbs tracked a pair of F-35s launched out of Langley to enforce the six-mile no-fly radius that was enforced around Camp David when the POTUS was in residence. A former combat chopper pilot himself, Dobbs viewed this as critical, since there were typically dozens of civilian aircraft that unwittingly penetrated Camp David airspace each year. From the moment the escorts joined the group, it would be only minutes before the entire group cleared the I-495 beltway and flew at low altitude over the rolling hills of Maryland.

  The route now set, Major Dobbs removed his headset and looked over his crew. He frowned at the less than bumper crop of controllers. Most of these recruits had been in less than a year. Some were trainees that had no business here. All the experienced controllers were either on duty overseas or aboard aircraft carriers and AWACS planes. Still others had left to work for Ulysses. CENTAF was stretched thin, just like everyone else in the military.

  Dobbs’ red phone rang. He knew immediately from the urgent voice on the other end that this wasn’t a drill. He listened wordlessly, hung up, and turned to the room of controllers.

  “Car bomb in Monroe, West Virginia,” he barked. The controllers stared back at Dobbs blankly, unsure what a car bomb had to do with airspace security. “Assume threat level red,” Dobbs said. “Keep the first shift patrols up,” he said, referring to the fighter planes that, since 9/11, had been timed with the early a.m. wave of passenger jets rolling out of Regan National Airport, Dulles, BWI, Boston Logan, Newark, JFK and LaGuardia. The idea was to have a critical mass of fighter jets on the east coast in case of attack. They were prepared, if necessary, to intercept hijacked planes at the times of heaviest traffic. “Scramble the second crew to fill the gaps.”

  The controllers got on the radio and began notifying their patrols. Dobbs put on his headset and radioed the news to Marine One, advising them to pick up their airspeed and watch their altitude.

  Frederick County, Maryland

  11:07 a.m.

  The forest was dead silent save for a very distant rumble of road noise that appeared only as gusts of breeze blew from the southwest. Chris Abrams and his four-man USOC crew were positioned roughly twenty yards apart, high in the canopies of beetle-ravaged hickory trees. The men had backpacked into the Maryland woods the night before, dressed as average weekend warriors looking for a trout stream and a place to camp. But in actuality their packs contained cordless drills, tree stands typically marketed to deer hunters, climbing spikes, MREs and, most importantly, shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. At an awkward five-foot long and thirty-six pounds each, the missiles were carried in hard shell fly rod cases that had been substantially enlarged and elongated for the mission.

  Abrams listened intently for the sound of rotors. At a quarter past the hour, flight plan Slasher was due to bring the President’s helicopter directly overhead. With five shooters and four helicopters, Abrams had eliminated the need to identify Marine One from its decoys. They would simply destroy all of them.

  At six-foot-six, Abrams was easily the crew’s tallest member. And as his sleeveless vest revealed, he also appeared to be the most ripped. But in actuality, Abrams wasn’t as healthy as he appeared. His body fat was perilously low, and in addition to adjusting the medication that kept the HIV virus in check, his doctor had just put him on a ten thousand calories-per-day diet – as much as some Olympic athletes. He was one of the few 34-year-old men in America for whom dessert was a necessity.

  A Carolina Wren landed in the tree next to Abrams and launched into a loud, looping melody. Abrams shook his head and rubbed his shaved scalp. A reasonably quiet forest was essential to the mission. The rust-bellied, notoriously high-decibel wrens had pumped out a bumper crop this year all over the Southeastern U.S., and Abrams had brought a pump-action air pistol specifically for this reason. He pulled it out for the sixth time this morning, pumped it several times, leveraged it at the wren’s white eye stripe and fired a pellet deftly into it. The songbird tumbled from the tree, gasping and fluttering on its way to rest in a heap of feathers beside the others that Abrams had killed that morning.

  At exactly 11:10 a.m., Abrams pulled out a cocktail of HIV and metabolism-slowing medicine. He swallowed the four pills without water and pulled out a protein packet, knowing it might be at least two hours before he would have time to eat again. He was already thinking about his next meal. He wanted to celebrate. He wanted short ribs from Rocklands Barbecue over on Wisconsin Avenue, where the smoke coming off the grill was so powerful that you would smell like barbecue for two days. It was the best barbecue in D.C. The best anywhere.

  But Rocklands was off-limits now. Earlier in the year, Abrams had eaten there every time he went to the city to meet his Pentagon contacts. The last time, the server had surprised him by asking to put Abrams’ picture on the wall. He said that the staff had taken to calling Abrams “Trip,” short for “Triplicate,” because he always ordered and ate three courses. But Abrams didn’t let them take his picture. He wouldn’t even tell them his name. He just took his three bags and got the hell out of there. After that, he never visited anyplace more than once, no matter how good the food was.

  Now the faint mechanical humming – like a thousand far-away bees – registered in Abrams’ eardrums, growing louder by the second. To Abrams’ trained ear, it was the unmistakable sound of four VH-71 Kestrel helicopters flying in formation. They were slightly ahead of schedule. He stuffed the granola bar in his pocket and readied himself.

  “I hear rotors,” Abrams said in Muskogee into the Bluetooth on his lapel. He repeated the phrase to make sure there were no misunderstandings. His four-man crew each knew only about fifteen hundred words of Muskogee, and he was far from fluent himself.

  While these woods were typically unbearably thick with foliage in summer, this area had been chosen specifically for its thin canopies, the result of a beetle blight the year earlier that had killed off about half the area’s hickories. Abrams had been assured that Marine One would fly directly overhead. They were just outside the six-mile no-fly zone, so they were unlikely to be spotted by patrolling F-35s.

  Abrams listened closely, timing the growing decibel level of the rotors with his watch. “They’re coming too fast,” he said in broken Muskogee. He and his men had trained in these very woods during two previous Presidential fly-overs. During those sessions, the President’s airborne convoy had flown 120 mph at most. He could only assume that some other part of the operation, which he had been in the dark of, had tipped Marine One off.

  The rotor sound grew loud enough for all five men to hear it. Timing would be critical. Given the choppers’ low altitude and relatively high speed, they would have a second or less for the Stinger to lock onto its target, emit its distinctive high-pitched buzz, and pull the trigger. Plus, they would have to fire at roughly the same time, ensuring that all four VH-71s were destroyed. There would be no opportunity for second chances. Should one missile strike a target too early, the other heat-seeking Stingers could converge on the exploded target, or worse, the real Marine One could release its anti-SAM countermeasures and escape amidst the mid-air fracas.

  He stashed his air pistol, pulled out his field scope and watched as his men took the Stingers out of their five-foot long tubes, rose on their tree stands, placed the Stingers on their right shoulders, and pointed them skyward. Abrams’ was like all the others, except fo
r one detail – he had a tiny camera mounted on his scope.

  “Get ready boys,” Abrams growled in Muskogee. “Here they come.”

  Aboard Marine One

  11:07 a.m.

  “This is Santa Monica and Seattle all over again!” President Hatch complained into his skyphone. He had just learned of the bombing in Monroe. Dressed in a tweed blazer and dark denim jeans – Camp David attire was decidedly informal – the President sat aboard Marine One en route to meet the Iranian Ambassador. They were accompanied by three identical VH-71 Kestrels flying in an inverted V formation. To minimize their exposure, the pilots were maxing out at 190 mph and flying so low that they practically skimmed the tops of the power lines.

  The unlucky bureaucrat on the receiving end of the President’s rant was Homeland Security Deputy Director Devon Davis. Davis was on vacation in Fort Lauderdale, and had only learned of the incident seconds before the President himself. Davis’ boss had been fired after the Seattle car bombing earlier in the year, and Davis was the Acting Director until a replacement was found.

  “Mister President,” Deputy Director Davis said as he tried to get off the phone, “I’ll call you as soon as I have details.”

  “You’ve got a helluva nerve. Don’t you dare cut it short on me at a time like this.”

  “Sorry, Mister President. It’s just that –“

  “Any intel pointing to Iranian involvement in this?”

  “Not that I know of, sir. Do you have reason to believe they did? “

  “Let’s just say the timing is odd,” the President replied, thinking of the sudden, out-of-nowhere request by the Iranian Ambassador. So far, Eva was the only cabinet member whom he’d alerted about the meeting with the Iranians, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to explain it to the very green Davis now. He hung up and looked out the window as Marine One banked at high speed.

  His phone rang again. It was Julian Speers. “Congressman Bailey is dead,” Speers blurted out. “He was killed in the blast.”

  The President was stunned. “I just got off the phone with Homeland Security. They’ve got nothing on that.”

  “I was there!” Speers shouted so loudly that the President had to pull the phone away from his ear. “I’m ninety-eight percent sure. The explosion was so big. Nothing could’ve survived that.” President Hatch got a breathless earful as Speers confessed that he had disobeyed the order to take a vacation, and had instead gone down to Monroe this very morning to talk to Congressman Bailey.

  “God Almighty, Julian. Don’t go rogue on me. I need you.”

  “I’m sorry. I can explain.”

  “Never mind. Where are you now?”

  “Headed back to the airport. Sir, I don’t want to sound paranoid, but maybe we should operate from Site R.” Site R was codename for Raven Rock, the not-so-secret, but still virtually impenetrable emergency bunker in Maryland.

  “Negative. Meet me at Camp David.”

  “I’d like to check with Agent Rios on that. I’d like to get his opinion about heading to Site R.”

  The President signed off tersely, privately fearing Speers was right as usual. He knew that if he had followed his Chief of Staff’s advice more often, the administration would probably be in better shape. His main problem with Julian was that he made decisions from a position of fear. But as the President was learning, the world had devolved into a state where fear-based problem-solving was often the best approach.

  He looked out the window and saw the green Maryland hills below blurring past. He turned to the Secret Service agent sitting in the seat beside him, and wished the man was Eva. She would know how to approach the meeting.

  “Incoming!” the pilot suddenly shouted over the cabin radio. Deafening missile warning alarms sounded. Marine One jerked wildly left. The President grasped for something to hold onto.

  A brilliant white flash blinded him temporarily. One of the decoy choppers had been hit. The President watched as the Marine One clone flying next to them jerked right to evade a SAM.

  Time slowed as the President watched the adjacent Kestrel’s rotors slice into Marine One’s aft, sending the treetop-level craft spinning downward through the hillside vegetation. A vision of his late wife was suddenly thrust upon him. She was sickly and cross. He tried hard to summon an image of her face in the good times, before the cancer. A laugh. A smile. He couldn’t. His thoughts turned to that gray winter day in Northern Virginia at Sovereign Hills Cemetery. Eva had been there, standing on the other side of the casket with the others from his Gubernatorial staff. He remembered the pre-inscribed, double-wide headstone.

  Jan Tolle Hatch

  Loving Mother

  Born: 1960

  Died: 2009

  Isaac Samuel Hatch

  Governor of Virginia

  Born: 1961

  Died:

  The idea that they would someday be interred side-by-side had comforted his wife in the days before they passed. But Hatch had never been at peace with it. The pre-inscribed headstone seemed to beckon death.

  A wave of compressed air knocked Marine One sideways. Kevlar air bags deployed in a protective cocoon around him. He was completely insulated as the smoldering chopper jounced manically through several poplar trees to the ground.

  The President blacked out as he hung upside down by his safety belts. The air bags shrank magically away. The luxury helicopter cabin the President had known was reduced to a series of highly protective roll bars, not unlike the sand rails he had raced as a boy. The roll cage was in a patch of underbrush, and there was no sign of the Secret Service agent who had sat next to him, the pilots or any other part of Marine One.

  Smoke wafted through the roll cage along with the scent of burning fuel and fiberglass. The smell brought him awake. The President blinked. Sharp pain bolted through his neck and shoulders, but he could move. He was alive.

  It took several seconds for the President to realize that he had survived a deliberate attack. The Ambassador had set him up. There was little question about that.

  He imagined a group of young Iranians, or other extremists from the Allied Jihad, perhaps in the U.S. on student visas, searching for him in the woods. He needed to get as far away from the wreckage as possible.

  He pawed at the release button on his safety belt. It was jammed. He reached into his tweed blazer and found a pen. He pushed the tip out and tried using it to trip a bit of exposed spring in the belt buckle. Nothing worked.

  Two quick bursts of gunfire echoed through the forest. The President smiled as he recognized the sound of an American-made M4 Carbine.

  During his first term, members of the Secret Service’s uniformed Emergency Response Team had taught him basic survival tactics in the unlikely event that he was caught without protection in a hostile environment. He had forgotten most of it by now, but one thing that had stuck with him was the difference between the sound of American-made M4s versus the developing world’s weapon of choice, the AK-47. “If you hear an AK,” he remembered one of the ERTs telling him, “run like hell or go into deep hiding if you can. If you hear M4s, stay put. Help is nearby.”

  He expected the gunfire was from Ulysses’ Camp David unit, and that they were already hunting down the assailants. Last year, when the need for highly skilled special ops soldiers had broken out in the Central African Republic, General Wainewright had informed him that none were available. The last remaining Special Forces group that was not deployed was Marine Security Company, Camp David, a unit in which each solider was hand-picked from infantry, then sent through a rigorous program of psychological and physical tests to qualify for Marine Security Training in Chesapeake, Virginia. Wainewright told him that since there had never been an incident at Camp David, apart from accidental civilian aircraft fly-overs, MSC-CD’s skills were being wasted there. He suggested that the unit be deployed to the combat zone, while Camp David security should be left to a joint effort between senior Ulysses USA employees and the Secret Service. The President had agreed, an
d he was anticipating seeing members of that highly paid Ulysses unit any moment now.

  He hung helplessly from his safety belts for another minute, his ears attuned to a crackling forest fire that seemed to be getting closer. Finally, he heard rustling and footsteps. He remained perfectly still except for the heaving of his lungs.

  Then, he heard conversation – two men, somewhere behind him. They were speaking a language that was nothing like any foreign tongue he’d ever heard before. He held his breath and pulled his limbs close to his body, as if to make himself smaller, less visible.

  A pair of American-made hiking boots stepped directly in front of the roll cage. The upside down President strained his neck to see Chris Abrams’ face staring directly at him. It hurt to hold his neck this way. He dropped his head for a moment before taking another look.

  Abrams wasn’t wearing a Ulysses uniform, but he was holding an M4. “Mister President?” Abrams said in perfect English.

  The President relaxed and let his head hang. “Thank God,” he said upon hearing Abrams’ decidedly American accent. “What happened to the others?”

  “You’re the last of ‘em,” Abrams replied.

  Always the politician, President Hatch thought carefully about his response. He imagined this moment would be re-enacted in a movie someday. “Well I hope you’re a Democrat.”

  “No sir,” Abrams replied, “I’m not.”

  He waited until the President strained his neck to look up again. Then he shot him twice in the face.

  Chesapeake Bay

  11:09 a.m.