Alternities (55 page)

“Senator Endicott was a highly motivated individual with special knowledge of the gate house,” Tackett said. “No one else on the evac list could have done what he did.”

“You want me to write it off as an aberration, an exception—”

“Mr. President, there was nothing wrong with our security at the gate house. We think of the Cambridge as our back door, and we keep it locked up tight. The problem was this morning I had to throw the front door wide open. I’ve got a hundred and sixty security breaches camped out on the ninth floor. I assure you they don’t usually get in that easily.”

“You knew they were coming. You should have made better provisions for internal security—”

Tackett fumed.
It would help if you wouldn’t sabotage the ones we do have, you son of a bitch—

“—I assume you’ve already taken steps?”

Monaghan answered, “I’ve placed a Special Forces team on each floor, in the main corridor.”

“Fine.” Robinson glanced at Tackett and thought better of voicing his next thought. “To other matters. Just before coming in here, I received a discouraging report. One of our patrol planes has disappeared off Puget Sound. It may have been shot down by a missile from the Russian sub it was tracking. And according to a CIA intercept, civil defense ‘drills’ have been scheduled for tomorrow morning in Moscow and several other major Russian cities—that’s the middle of the night here.”

That conformed in every detail to what Tackett had heard on the recordings being made for him in the signal shack. But it did not explain why so far none of the conversations captured had been between the President and his Secretary of Defense. Robinson had talked to Rauche, to other members of the Joint Chiefs, to Madison, to the head of the FNS—but not to O’Neill, the man he had proclaimed would be his eyes in Washington.

“It’s starting to look more and more like there’ll be fighting,” Robinson was saying. “In all good conscience, I don’t think that we can sit still and let ourselves be caught here. Starting at midnight, I want Alpha List moved to Alternity Blue.”

And you’re number one through the gate, Tackett thought. He made one more attempt to catch Robinson in a lie. “Mr. President, does the Secretary of Defense agree with that evaluation?”

But there must have been something in the way he asked it that betrayed his suspicion, for Robinson answered the accusation behind the question. “I don’t know, Albert,” he said somberly. “The fact is that, at the moment, I’m without Gregory’s counsel. I’m sorry to have tell you that the Secretary suffered a stroke overnight.”

A lie to cover another lie, Tackett thought bitterly. O’Neill had anticipated his own disappearance, just as he had predicted everything else. Wheels were turning—the great steel wheels of a war juggernaut hurtling out of control.

“He’s in Georgetown University Hospital, under wraps, very weak,” Robinson continued. “Bill thought we should try to conceal from the other side the fact that we’re without him. I suppose I carried the deception further than strictly necessary. My apologies, Albert.”

“We can’t have the Russians thinking we’re weak, Albert,” Rodman said. “You understand that.”

“Yes,” Tackett managed to say.

“We just need to hold together, all of us,” Robinson said, backing away toward the door. “We’ll come through this, Albert, and we’ll be stronger for it.”

He nodded, not trusting his voice. Thoughts in turmoil, he sat woodenly in his chair as Robinson and Rodman retreated from the room. Would it be such a tragic thing if Moscow were transformed into radioactive sludge? And after so many years of playing by pragmatic rules, why should covert action—even on this scale—suddenly make him queasy? How much did it matter who threw the first punch, after all?

Slowly, his thinking crystallized. It did matter, somehow. There was something cowardly about throwing a rock at a bully and then running to your mother’s skirts. Even if you took a beating, you had to stand your ground and finish what you started. Honor. There was a question of honor involved.

It mattered, too, because Rathole had perverted the organization he had worked so hard to build. Everything the Guard was, everything they had done, had been done to strengthen and secure, not an individual, not a government, but a country, a people, a tradition. Yet Robinson had co-opted the Guard into helping him endanger what they previously had struggled to protect.

Monaghan was eyeing Tackett with a troubled gaze. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes,” Tackett said. “Something’s very wrong. We’ve been badly used, Bret. And I’ve been trying too hard not to see it.”

“Oh.” There was a pregnant pause. “Do you mind letting me in on it?”

“Do you mind being shot for treason?”

Monaghan blanched momentarily, then moved closer. “What’s going on, Albert?”

“I’m serious. In a showdown between the President and me, which side do you want to be on?”

Monaghan crossed his arms over his chest. “Albert, I’ve got a lot of friends who aren’t going to get anywhere near that gate tonight. I’m scared to death for them. If you’re talking about something that might save their lives, I want a piece of it. What do you want me to do?”

Tackett looked up with grateful eyes. “Help me stop a plane.”

The senior communications specialist was playing cribbage with one of his technicians when Tackett appeared in the communications center. Tackett chased the technician away and dragged the comspec into the privacy of a glass-walled booth.

“We’re going to find out how good you are, Zack,” Tackett said.”

“What do you need, Director?”

“I need to talk to Europe.”

“That’s easy. We’ve got international access through the transatlantic phone cables.”

“That’d have to be patched through a local switching center, right?”

“Well, sure.”

“That’s no good, then. This has got to go through. I need something that can’t be jammed or cut off.”

“Then there isn’t any way.”

“There has to be.”

“The only medium with no middlemen is radio. We’ve got shortwave, because of Defnet—five thousand watts worth. We can flood any channel from 3 megahertz to 30. It’s a long bounce, but they’ll hear us all the way to the Ukraine. But radio can always be jammed. And if you’re looking for something private, look somewhere else.”

“Who listens? Do you know who’s on what channel, worldwide?”

“Not every little one-watt transceiver. But we’ve got a directory of the major players. This building is a hell of an antenna. We do a lot of listening when we have the time. Who do we want to talk to?”

“The Kremlin. The Soviet high command. Any military units that could relay a message to them. Their Atlantic task force, whatever.”

He whistled. “I didn’t think we were going to get directly involved in that.”

“We need to, now.”

The comspec’s jaw dropped. “Son of a bitch. Did they knock out Washington?”

“Not yet,” Tackett said. “And if you do your job, maybe they won’t have to. Do you know the Soviet frequencies?”

“Sure. They’re in the book.”

He reached in his pocket. “I want this message to go out immediately, repeated at one minute intervals,” he said, unfolding a half-sheet of paper and handing it over. “Notify me immediately if there’s any response or acknowledgment.”

Blinking, the young man looked up from the paper. “Are you sure about this, sir?”

“Yes. Will you know if you’re being jammed?”

Zack nodded, swallowing hard.

“I’ll want to know about that, too. As soon as I’m gone. Special Forces is going to seal off this floor. I want this place locked up tight. No one gets in or out. Ditto for traffic. Everything incoming is embargoed, starting now. Nothing interferes with this, do you understand?”

“Yes—”

“Then move, boy, move. It’s getting late in the day.”

Thirty thousand feet above the choppy waters of the Baltic, the modified VC-24 bearing the bomb in its belly bored on through the darkness toward Moscow.

Its pilot, an eleven-year CIA veteran named David Matthews, used a light touch on the controls to keep the heavily laden plane in the center of its invisible lane in the sky. The copilot, as fluent in Russian as he was in the workings of their four-engined metal condor, quietly monitored the radio while idly scanning the blackness below for the running lights of freighters and fishing boats.

They had every reason to think that the hard part was over. It had been almost two hours since the switch had been made, in the cloud-shrouded skies over the Norwegian Sea. Approaching from the southwest, flying a mere hundred feet off the water, they had seen the Soviet airliner go down, a fiery ball falling ten thousand feet through the blackness to the sea.

How many other eyes also saw it and knew it for what it was, they had no way of knowing. Nor could they know if the key British air traffic control center had experienced the brief power failure intended for it, blinding controllers to the switch. They could only do their part: switch to the destroyed plane’s frequencies, activate their identification transponder, climb to altitude, and hope.

The first hour had been the most tense. By the time they reached the Norwegian coast, they were beginning to feel confident enough to flash smiles and thumbs-up signals across the cockpit. They acquired Copenhagen air control, were handed over to Leningrad, all without incident. Ten minutes ago, the lights of Stockholm, looking like a carnival in the night, had slipped by just to the south.

Then, without warning, the copilot sat up suddenly and grabbed for a clipboard. One hand clamped the headset cup to his ear, closing out the noise of the cabin, while with the other hand he wrote furiously on the blank page.

“What’s going on?” asked Matthews.

The copilot shook him off, continuing to write. When he was done, he snapped the pencil back into its holder and stared at what he had written. “This just came over the Soviet A channel,” he said. “ ‘To General Secretary Kondratyev, Minister of Defense Pokryshkin, Commander in Chief of the Voyska Protivovozdushnoy Oborony Strany, units of the Soviet military everywhere: Warning. A United States military aircraft disguised as a Soviet commercial transport will attempt to detonate a thermonuclear bomb over Moscow—’ There, it’s starting again, plug in, you can hear it yourself.”

Reaching out with his left hand, Matthews complied. He heard, “—will attempt to detonate a thermonuclear bomb over Moscow. This plane may already be in the air, following a direct commercial route from a West European city, with a scheduled arrival at a Moscow airport at or near 8 a.m. Moscow time. This is an unauthorized mission. Do not delay. Locate, intercept, and destroy this aircraft immediately.”

“Jesus Christ,” the pilot breathed.

“I don’t believe it. They sold us out,” the copilot said, still staring. “What the hell do we do now?”

Matthews glanced down at his flight plan. “We keep going.”

“An hour and twenty minutes to go. We’ll never get there. We’ll never even get to the border. Do you know how many fighters there are at Tallinn? How many SAMs between here and Moscow?”

“I don’t care,” the pilot said firmly. “We keep going. You didn’t expect to live forever, did you? We’re supposed to deliver this package to the Kremlin. And it’s going to take a missile or a recall in God’s own voice to stop us.”

The clock on the etagere read 11:15 when Tackett walked into his office without knocking, Monaghan and the commander of Guard Special Forces trailing in his wake. They found Rodman alone there. The chief of staff jumped up from his chair and scowled at the intrusion. “What’s going on, gentlemen?”

“Where’s the President?” Tackett asked.

“Down the hall, with Janice and the family, preparing for the move.”

“You’d better go get him,” Tackett said.

“Why? What’s happening?”

“Just get him.”

By the time Rodman returned with Robinson, Tackett had cleared his desk of foreign matter and reclaimed it as his own. Neither the act nor the symbolism escaped notice.

“What’s going on here, Albert?” Robinson asked darkly. “Shouldn’t you be downstairs making sure that everything’s in order?”

“There isn’t going to be a move, Mr. President.” Tackett said, meeting his gaze squarely.

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s very simple. No one is going through the gate. No one. Not you, not me, not those people on the ninth floor. We’re not going to drive your getaway car—sir.”

“Now, just a goddamned minute,” Rodman snapped. “This is the President, goddamn you. You can’t do this.”

“I already have,” Tackett said, settling into his chair. “This isn’t the White House, Bill. These are my people. There’s a hundred soldiers guarding the gate house—on your advice. Communications are locked up—you can’t make so much as a lunch reservation without my permission. I say there’s not going to be a move, and I can make it stick, believe me.”

“You don’t understand what you’re doing,” Robinson said, a red flush climbing his neck. “You little bastard, you’re fucking with our lives. You in a hurry to die, old man? You want to stay here and be part of tomorrow’s sunset?”

Tackett glanced across at the clock. “It’s eleven twenty-five. I figure that gives you at least a half an hour to stop anything you feel you need to stop. You were going to wait around to make sure that it came off, weren’t you? I don’t think you would have wanted to miss your moment.”

Understanding dawned in Robinson’s eyes.

“Yes, I know about the plane,” Tackett added. “Secretary O’Neill told me. Which reminds me—where is he, really? Dead or just tucked away somewhere?”

“He should be dead,” Rodman muttered. “I should have killed the sonofabitch.”

A hard ugly look had taken over Robinson’s features. “I’m not going to stop a damned thing,” he said. “How do you like that, old man? We’ll stay here together and watch it all happen. How many bombs do you think they’ll drop on Boston? Half a dozen at least, wouldn’t you say? You little shit, you can’t stop anything. You can’t save anything. All you can do is kill more people. You think I’m afraid to face what I’ve done? By dawn either we’ll both be dead, or I’ll be the President who chopped the Reds off at the knees. You lose both ways, asshole.”