Brown, Dale - Independent 04 (36 page)

           
“You got something to say, Al, say
it,” Hardcastle said. “Spill it.”

 
          
“Sir?”

 
          
“You’ve
been scowling and shaking your head at me and Marc all night, Vincenti, but you
haven’t said a word,” Hardcastle said. “You got some baggage to unload, so do
it.”

 
          
“I
don’t have anything to contribute here.”

 
          
“Bullshit.
I’ve got you here for a reason,” Hardcastle said. “You read the report.”

 
          
“I
gave you my comments, sir.”

 
          
“Nice,
polite, Air Command and
Staff
College
point paper,” Hardcastle said. “Standard
responses. Pretty disappointing.”

 
          
“I
guess I’m just not politically savvy, Admiral.”

 
          
“I
don’t need your political savvy, Al,” Hardcastle said. “Task Force 2000 and
Colonel Sheehan handle that for me.”

 
          
“So
what do you need, sir?”

 
          
“I
need you to tell me if I’m right, if I’m close, or if I’m full of shit, Al.”

 
          
“I’ve
already commented on your plan.”

 
          
“So
I’m right, then,” Hardcastle said. Vincenti was about to speak, but remained
silent. “So I’m not right,” Hardcastle concluded. “So which is it, Al? Am I
close or full of shit?” Vincenti stared at Hardcastle, obviously trying to
decide what the politically correct answer to
that
question was. “Goddammit, Vincenti, I was told you weren’t one
for holding back, that you spoke your mind. So let’s have it.” “Sir, I’m not
really qualified to tell you how to run this.” “It’s about Linda, isn’t it,
Al?”

 
          
Vincenti’s
frown deepened, and darkened. “What are you talking about, Admiral?”

 
          
“Linda
McKenzie. She’s dead, and you think it’s your fault.”

 
          
The
rest of Hardcastle’s staff had stopped talking and had turned to watch this
exchange.
“Sir,
” Vincenti said,
looking Hardcastle right in the eyes. “With all due respect, you don’t know
shit.
”

 
          
“Linda
was your wingman.”

 
          
“Stop
calling her by her first name like yo'u knew her, Admiral. She’s Major McKenzie
to you.”

 
          
“Whose
fault was it that you launched with defective nightvision goggles?” Hardcastle
asked. “Whose fault was it that Linda was allowed to close in on Cazaux without
her checklist completed? Whose fault was it that she was allowed to approach
too close to an armed and dangerous suspect?”

 
          
“I
don’t have to explain anything to you, Hardcastle.”

 
          
“I
don’t think she should have even been on alert with you, Al,” Hardcastle went
on, taking a step towards Vincenti, who was now, Sheehan noticed with some
alarm, within arm’s reach. “I think you’re a piss-poor flight leader, Al. How
in hell could you let Linda fly with you after you’d been screwing her?”

 
          
A
half-dozen bodies moved in unison at that last comment, like runners leaping
off the starting block. Vincenti lunged for Hardcastle, Sheehan lunged for
Vincenti, and the other staff members dropped notebooks and laptop computers
and leaped to their feet in surprise. Vincenti got his hands on Hardcastle’s
shirt, but Sheehan looped his arms over Vincenti’s from behind, and the two Air
Force officers were evenly matched. Hardcastle simply smiled, allowing Vincenti
to shake him and rage: “You pompous arrogant
asshole.
” Sheehan dragged Vincenti away from Hardcastle and
steered him against the pool table. He was angry at Vincenti for daring to
raise a hand toward Hardcastle, but he was even more surprised and angry at
Hardcastle for speaking that way to the Air Force pilot. “Knock it off!”
Sheehan shouted. His anger turned on Hardcastle, as it should be: “Admiral, you
were out of line.”

 
          
“Yes,
I was, and I apologize,” Hardcastle said calmly to

 
          
Vincenti.
“But I’m also correct, aren’t I, Al?” No response, only a glare. “Talk to me,
Al. You’re the key to everything I’m trying to do here. Talk to me, damn it.”

 
          
“Why
the hell should I trust you, Hardcastle?” Vincenti shouted. “What are you
trying to do here? What’s your game? Who gave you the right to poke your nose
in any of this?”

           
“I’m here because I’ve got a big
mouth, Al,” Hardcastle said evenly. “I’ve got a colorful past, and people listen
to me because I entertain them with my attitude and my showmanship. But I’m
really here because I care.”

 
          
“
Bullshit
, ” Vincenti said. “You’re here
because you can get some press for yourself and this Project 2000 crap.”

           
“Yeah, I’ve got some ideas that I
want everybody to hear,” Hardcastle admitted. “I get shut off and shut down
because no one wants to hear my side—they’d rather hear the watered- down,
everything-is-beautiful rap coming from the White House. Yeah, I want press for
the Project 2000 Task Force because they believe in what I believe in and they
have the financial resources I don’t. But I’ve got an agenda, Vincenti, and
that is a
strong national defense
,
pure and simple. I’m here because this incident is just another example of
government
inaction,
another consequence
of a weakened military.”

           
“I’ve heard your big plans
already—on TV, in the papers, on the radio, at the speeches,” Vincenti said.
“But frankly it’s all garbage, because you don’t know what you’re talking
about. You made the same damned mistake with the Hammerheads, Hardcastle. But
you were too wrapped up in how important you were, with deploying these
big-assed air ops platforms, with putting up all these radar balloons, to
understand the basic concepts. You had the authority to launch air defense
units for your missions, Hardcastle, but did you ever ask an air defense puke
how to set up a proper air sovereignty order of battle? You had your Coast
Guard guys and your Customs Service guys out there, but did you ever bring an
air defense guy on board as part of your staff? Hell no.”

 
          
“I
had Air Force representatives on my staff—”

 
          
“Sure—for
AW ACS and OTH-B, not for the guys who really knew the air sovereignty game, us
pilots in the field,” Vincenti said. “You sucked up almost the entire E-3 AWACS
fleet on drug-interdiction stuff, and you took over all the long-range
over-the-horizon backscatter radar ops, but you never employed the F-4s,
F-106s, F-15s, and F-16 air defense fighters for your operations except when
that crazy bastard Salazar used military hardware on your platforms. Plus you
spent billions on all that fancy hardware, when all the time you had the best
pilots and the best planes in the business already in place.”

 
          
Marc
Sheehan stepped forward toward Vincenti. “I think you’ve said enough, Colonel
Vincenti.”

 
          
“No,
let him finish, Marc.” Hardcastle smiled. “I want to hear this. Go ahead, Al.
Continue. You don’t like it. Tell me why.”

 
          
“Because
you’re doing it half-assed, that’s why,” Vincenti said. “You did it half-assed
wrong with the Hammerheads, and you’re doing it half-assed now. You’re still
thinking two-dimensionally, still thinking in razzle-dazzle terms instead of
strategic, layered, logical, multilayered structures. You had fancy, expensive
tilt-rotors and drones and a few helicopters and boats, and almost nothing
else. When your aviation units got into trouble, when the politicians believed
your air units couldn’t do the job, your whole infrastructure was weakened and
your organization collapsed. Hell, your air units were properly doing their
job, and one lousy lawsuit, one lousy smuggler, in which just one of your air
units was involved, brought down your entire Border Security Force in no time
flat. Why? Because your basic organization was built on one foundation—your air
units.

 
          
“The
same thing will happen with your current plan,” Vincenti went on. “Your current
plans are based on air units like the F-16 and F-15 fighters. But an expert can
easily blow holes in this plan, and I think Cazaux is smart enough to get by
even the toughest air patrols. You wouldn’t even survive a comparison between
now and your disbanded Hammerheads.” Vincenti glared at Sheehan, then at
Hardcastle. “I thought you guys were supposed to be smart. You’re advising
future presidents, formulating policy and laws, spending hundreds of millions
of dollars, and you can’t even see how fucked up you are.”

 
          
“Then
help me fix it,” Hardcastle said. “Help me create a system to stop terrorists
like Cazaux.”

 
          
“You
don’t have the guts,” Vincenti said. “All I see is a bunch of bureaucrats
jockeying for position. You throw your beach parties and press conferences and
fund-raisers, but when it comes time to actually put the hardware on the line,
you back off. I’m not going to waste my breath on a bunch of politicos whose
only goal is to rack up percentage points in the polls or electoral votes.”

 
          
Sheehan,
who had stepped away for a few minutes, came back and said, “Sir, we got a call
from Vice President Martindale. He’s on his way back from
San Francisco
now. Cazaux hit another airport.
Memphis
International. Just a few minutes ago.
They’re saying the death toll could be in the thousands this time.”

 
          
“Oh,
my God ...” gasped Hardcastle.

 
          
“He
got a call from the President, Admiral,” Sheehan went on. “He wants you and
your staff to report to the White House immediately. They want a complete
briefing on your plans to set up an air defense network in the
United States
.” “Jesus . . . Marc, phone the flight crew,
get the Gulf- stream ready to go, drop me off at base ops, and get the
investigation team together right away,” Hardcastle said. He turned to
Vincenti: “Al, you’re with me.”

 
          
“I’m
not cleared to leave the base, Admiral.”

 
          
“I
just cleared you,” Hardcastle said. “You’re a member of my staff, effective
yesterday, and the President has just ordered you to
Washington
. We’ve got about five hours for you to tell
me precisely what I need to do to make my air defense plan airtight. Let’s go.”

 
 
          
The White House Cabinet Room The Next
Morning

 
          
“W’ve
got only one thing to say to you, Admiral Hardcas- I tie,” Deputy Attorney
General Elizabeth Lowe said an- Mgrily, dramatically waving a bound report in
her hand, then tossing it on the Cabinet Room table in disgust just as. the
door leading to the Oval Office opened and everyone got to their feet. “You
must be totally insane, or at the very least so ill-informed as to defy reason
and logic.” She saw the President of the
United States
stride in, then said to him, “Mr.
President, I can’t believe you even allowed that crackpot in this room at a
time like this.”

 
          
“Allow
me to respond to the Deputy Attorney General’s statement, Mr. President—on the
record,” Ian Hardcastle said, a slight, challenging smile on his face.

 
          
“This
meeting
will
come to order,” the
President’s chief of staff said. Lowe quietly took her seat with the others
after the President was seated, glaring angrily at Ian Hardcastle. What he did
not know was that Elizabeth Lowe, one of the President’s most capable political
insiders, had met personally with the President just before the meeting and had
already been instructed as to how this meeting was going to proceed—her tirade
against Hardcastle was part of a hastily but carefully rehearsed trap for
Hardcastle and his cohorts.

 
          
The
members of the Executive Committee on Terrorism, the group responsible to the
National Security Council and the President for all antiterrorist matters, had
assembled in the White House Cabinet Room to receive the latest briefing on the
hunt for Henri Cazaux. The ECT was composed of senior officials from the
Departments of Treasury, Justice, State, Defense, Transportation, and Energy,
along with representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency and the
National Security Council staff. Because the President had convened this
meeting at the White House, most of the Cabinet itself was present along with
their ECT representatives, so it was a tight fit in the Cabinet Room.

 
          
This
was just the latest crisis in what seemed like an Administration plagued by
problems from the very beginning, starting with a furor over the President’s
attempt to drop the ban on gays in the military, to his health care package, to
problems within his own White House.

 
          
His
wife, for instance, known around town as the Steel Magnolia, was conspicuously
absent from this and other meetings as of late. A formidable woman who was
highly intelligent and, for a while, almost inseparable from her husband, the
Steel Magnolia had recently been devoting all her time to extricating herself
from a shady real-estate deal that was now threatening to turn into a
Watergate-sized problem for the Administration. Things weren’t helped when her
own counsel killed himself.

 
          
But
even now, in the midst of a major domestic crisis, the President hardly had
time to worry about his wife. There were far bigger problems at hand for this
poor boy from what many had laughingly called a hillbilly southern state. This
current crisis might be the final straw for his Administration. Depending, of
course, on how he handled it.

 
          
Joining
the President, the ECT members, and Hardcastle were Colonel A1 Vincenti;
Colonel Marc Sheehan, Hard- castle’s aide; and Deborah Harley, who was cleared
to come to this meeting as an assistant to Hardcastle but who was in reality an
executive assistant to Kevin Martindale— the former Vice President was not
invited to attend this meeting, but he made sure he had his spy in place. If
the President or his staff knew about Harley, they did not seem to care.

 
          
Vincenti’s
face looked grim as Lani Wilkes, the director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, began the briefing with a rundown of the attack on
Memphis
International
Airport
last evening. He could all-too-easily
envision the two airliners barreling in toward the airport, then raining
devastation on hundreds of innocent people below. Thankfully, the death toll
was not as high as in San Francisco— over two hundred dead and over five
hundred injured, mostly at the Universal Express super hub facility—but
Vincenti felt responsible for each and every one of their deaths. When he
looked up, he saw a few of the ECT members looking back at him, and he felt
that they were silently accusing him of not stopping Cazaux when he had the
chance.

 
          
Hardcastle
looked at the oval cherry table, his hands folded in front of him, with a
stony, neutral expression; Sheehan was watching the southern President (who was
popping M&Ms into his mouth from ajar on the table) and Hardcastle, waiting
for the sparks to fly. “We’re assisting the local authorities in hunting down
the aircraft,” Judge Lani Wilkes was saying, “but the attack on the airport
knocked out all the radar control centers in the entire region—both Approach
and Center radar control centers are located at Memphis International—and we
couldn’t track any of the aircraft.

 
          
“Our
best lead right now circles on aircraft dealers in the south and southeast,
particularly ones handling civil and military-surplus cargo aircraft. But there
are two hundred and thirty such dealers and brokers in the region; plus, getting
a plane from Central or
South America
flown into the southern
U.S.
is too easy. Getting warrants to search
each establishment will take time. We—”

 
          
Hardcastle
let out an exasperated sigh at the mention of warrants. A few eyes darted in
his direction, but Hardcastle did not speak and no one else said a word.
Wilkes, pretending she did not notice, continued, “Sir, I’ve said this before:
we can’t let our concern over Cazaux’s attacks force us to degenerate into
simply lashing out at every hint of criminal or suspected terrorist
activities—it’s stretching my manpower too thin, and it’s creating more panic.
We’ve got every available federal agent involved in this manhunt. I’ve got
agents in
Mexico
and
Canada
. I’ve diverted extra agents to four different locations following up
investigations on suspicious explosions, and each one has come up with nothing.
The Bureau has investigated over one hundred bombings in the
United States
just last month, and none of them were tied
in to Cazaux.”

 
          
“But
now Cazaux’s finally gone over the edge, and I believe we’ve got to investigate
each incident,” said Transportation Secretary Ralph Mersky. He turned to the
President and said, “Mr. President, under the Federal Aviation Regulations,
I’ve had the FAA close
Tucson
International
Airport
because a suspected terrorist incident is
under investigation—we think Cazaux was flying on a commercial airliner, and he
was afraid of getting caught and killed some airline service workers to make
his escape. By. the law, I should close every other major airport near any of
these other suspected terrorist incidents as well— whether or not Judge Wilkes
believes they have anything to do with Cazaux. But I’ve had meetings with every
major air carrier in the country, and to a man they’ve pleaded with me not to
shut down the airports.”

 
          
“What
in hell would you expect them to say?” Deputy Attorney General Lowe
interjected. Under the National Security Act of 1949, the Deputy Attorney
General of the
United States
was the most senior manager of any domestic
terrorism crisis. Elizabeth Lowe was a hard-nosed Army veteran, attorney, and
Washington
lobbyist—perfectly suited for the job of
dealing with the exclusive men’s domains of defense and antiterrorist strategy
and response. “They need to keep making money, and they’re willing to bet other
people’s lives on the long odds that Cazaux will strike anywhere else but
their
location or
their
planes.”

 
          
“I
know that, Liz,” Mersky shot back, “but I need the White House’s direction on this
one.” To the President, he continued: “We’ve already enacted Level Three
security, which deals primarily with terrorist threats such as bombs in
baggage, sabotaging planes at the gate, car bombs near terminals, that sort of
thing. The law says I must enact Level Two security measures at all airports
that carry more than eighteen passengers per plane if terrorist activity is
suspected in the vicinity or on a national level, Mr. President.”

 
          
The
President of the
United States
, sitting half-slouched at his big desk in
the Cabinet Room, looked as if sleep and he were complete strangers. He was
tall, young compared to recent Chief Executives, well-built and handsome, with
prematurely gray hair that was thick and bushy. But the dark bags under his
eyes from lack of sleep, and the wrinkles around the eyes caused by stress and
squinting at reports and televisions without using his glasses, made him look
considerably older. He wrapped his big hands around a coffee cup and took a
sip—cold again. He let the cup rattle back onto its saucer, popped some more
M&Ms into his mouth (his affection for junk food was legendary), then
drawled, “Ralph, it doesn’t sound like this Level Three protects anyone if
Cazaux drops a damned bomb on their heads. Why hasn’t stricter security been
set up already?”

 
          
“Sir,
the reason is that we have
no
procedures for dealing with air raids against major airports inside the
United States
except for closing them down,” Mersky said.
“We have Civil Defense procedures drawn up thirty years ago for use in case of
Soviet air raids, and even then they mostly deal with evacuation, medical care,
restricting access to navigation facilities—”

 
          
“So
the only option we have right now is to close the airports until we track this
Cazaux down?” the President asked incredulously. God, how he hated these
meetings without his wife present. That fucking real-estate deal was consuming
all of her time, time that she could have been spending helping him. Damn her.
They should have never invested in that fucking land in the first place. Oh,
well. They’d just have to live with it. And he, unfortunately, was having to
live without her at a time when he needed her most—like now. “Hey, you don’t
need to be a rocket scientist to understand what a disaster that would be.
Remember how disrupted everything was when American Airlines’ flight attendants
went on strike. Remember the panic? Jesus. I want to hear more options.” He
turned to Hardcastle, Vincenti, and his Secretary of Defense, Dr. Donald
Scheer, and said, “Admiral Hardcastle, I asked you to come down here because
I’ve heard of your”—he took a moment to consider his next words, then decided
to just say it—“genius, concerning this disaster.

 
          
“I
don’t agree with it, and I frankly suspect that much of it stems from your
political agenda with the Project 2000 Task Force and Vice President
Martindale’s campaign,” he continued. “We don’t need partisan politics
interfering with this investigation. I think the little stunt you orchestrated
in the Senate to step into the middle of the FBI’s investigation of the
San Francisco
attack was a cheap, dirty trick to take
advantage of the situation to promote your own agenda.”

 
          
“Except
Cazaux
did
strike again,” Hardcastle
pointed out bluntly.

 
          
The
President spread his hands and nodded. “Yes, he did,” he drawled. “I thought
he’d be long gone, but he’s not, and he’s got to be dealt with. And you offered
your technical assistance, which I deeply appreciate.” He picked up
Hardcastle’s point paper on the air defense emergency and added angrily, “But
showing this report to the press at the same time as handing it to me stinks.
The American people see you on TV promoting this plan, and they cling to it
because it’s a ‘do-something, do-anything’ move. It makes me question your
motivation here, Admiral: do you really want to help me solve this crisis or
are you just pushing a political agenda?”