The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America (26 page)

Colonel DeWitt Green stood at the front of the small briefing room, facing the assembled officers and noncoms of the Fourth Regiment, Eighty-Second Airborne Division. “Our task is very simple,” he said. “Were going to get into the APCs assembled in the company street and hightail it into the capital. When we arrive at the White House, we’re going to deploy around it and not allow anyone in or out.”

He sat down on the desk and dropped the pointer he had been holding to his side. “Now here’s the situation as I know it,” he said. “The House of Representatives is going to vote out a bill of impeachment against the President. The Senate is going to vote to accept the bill. The President will be held under house arrest—not by us—until his trial. Our major function there is to see that nobody gets hurt. Our secondary function, but the one that may cause the greatest bloodshed, is to see that no forces inimical to the orderly process of democratic government break through to release the President.

“Now, some of you may think that this is disloyal, that we are staging a
coup d’état
. It could be looked at that way, but in a larger sense it’s not true. We’re aiding in restoring free elections, and seeing that the continuity of power in the government proceeds as it has since General Washington assumed office in seventeen eighty-nine. Are there any questions?”

Colonel Green looked around at the sea of clean-shaven faces, and they looked back with varying degrees of interest and intelligence. A few of them had already been briefed; some of them had only a vague idea of what was going on, but would have followed him if he’d suggested three-legged races down Interstate 95; and some of them were trying to figure out how it would look in their service records.

Finally one hand went up. A young second lieutenant named Grice. “Yes, Lieutenant?” Green said.

“Ah, it’s about the rest of the division, sir,” Grice said, rising. “Are they involved in this, and what are they going to be doing, sir?”

“They’re not involved,” Green said. “As far as I know, the division will spend a normal Sunday polishing boots and cleaning rifles. We, Lieutenant, are the lucky ones.”

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said, sitting down.

“Okay,” Colonel Green said. “Just follow orders, and see that your men follow orders, and let me do the worrying. If any of you have any doubts about this politically, remember it’s my ass, not yours. You’re doing what soldiers are supposed to do: following the direct orders of your superior officer. You may get shot at, but that’s what your government has been paying you for all these years. Worse, you may have to shoot back at soldiers in uniforms similar to your own. If you must do so, then don’t hesitate; but for the love of God, don’t use your weapons unless you absolutely have to.”

Green looked around. “Is that clear?” When nobody responded, he nodded. “Okay. I assume that means it’s clear. If any of you, for whatever reason, feel strongly about not accompanying us on this jaunt, speak up now.”

An audible silence followed this remark. “Okay,” Green said. “Assemble the regiment, gentlemen; form on the Headquarters Company street and load into the vehicles. Good luck!”

Captain Beddow, Colonel Green’s adjutant, approached him as the group filed out of the briefing room. “There’s something I don’t like, sir,” he said in a low voice.

“What’s that, Frank?”

“Outside this door, Colonel, in two long rows stretching from HQ Company to Con Mess Three, are all the regimental vehicles, all gassed up and ready to go. Climbing into them at this very moment are all the men of our regiment in full battle dress.”

“That’s right, Frank. So—”

”So, Colonel, why isn’t anyone from Division, or from another regiment, or from anywhere else on this goddamn post even curious about what’s going on here on a Sunday morning, when they must know damn well there are no field exercises or maneuvers scheduled?”

Green scratched his jaw. “When you put it that way, Frank, it does seem rather odd.”

“Yes, sir. I think we’ve been set up.”

“Great!” Green turned around and stared thoughtfully at the big map of Fort Bragg posted on the wall behind him. “I think what we’d better do,” he said, “is get out of here quick, and get out of here in an unexpected manner.”

“Yes, sir,” Captain Beddow agreed.

“Okay,” Colonel Green said. “Let’s get going. Pass the word down the line that there may be trouble on the way out; but make sure the men don’t even load their weapons until someone fires on us first.”

“Right, sir,” Beddow said, stepping back and saluting. “How are we going?”

“Right through the main gate!” Green said. He patted Beddow on the shoulder. “Move it, Frank,” he said. “I’ll take the lead APC. Give me about a seventy-yard lead, then bring the column on behind me.”

They went out together and Colonel Green climbed up into the command turret of his APC. “You fellows ready?” he called down.

“Yes, sir,” his driver said cheerfully. “Just waiting for you, sir.”

Green’s APC was fitted out as a communications vehicle, and contained an Army command radio specially modified to use the citizens band frequency Jubilee was sitting on. “Plug me in,” Green told the radio man as his driver brought the APC into lumbering motion. “Jubilee Control, this is Green Leader.”

“We read you, Green Leader.”
It sounded as though it were coming from next door, Green noted. That must be one hell of a transmitter Adams had rigged out.

“Jubilee Control, we’re operational. See you soon, we hope.”

“We hope so too. Good luck, Green Leader.”

Colonel Green gave his driver instructions and then, as the huge APC turned onto C Company Street, he flipped to the command frequency. “Onward!” he said, and then thumbed the switch off.

The APC rounded the next corner and headed toward the main gate, about a quarter of a mile away. There was nobody on the street as they passed the post exchange and the church, Green noted—not a good sign. He watched expectantly as they rounded an ancient grove of pine trees that shielded them from the main gate.

When the firing started, Colonel Green took one look at what was facing them and slammed down the hatch cover. “Put her in reverse,” he yelled at his driver. “Get us the hell away from here!”

Thumbing the radio back on, he took a deep breath. “This is the boss,” he said. “Turn in your tracks, men, and head back where you’ve been.”

“What’s happening?” the voice of Captain Beddow sounded in his earphones.

“Two M-60 tanks bracketing the main gate,” Green said, as a pine tree exploded somewhere to his left. “And what looks like the rest of the division behind them. You were right, son, we’ve been set up. Fall back and re-form at the C Company street.”

When they turned back on the company street, Green popped the hatch and jumped out of his vehicle. A double row of vehicles jammed the street in front of him. The firing had stopped, and there was no sound of pursuit.

Captain Beddow raced over to him from somewhere in the column. “What now, sir?” he asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” Green said. “They don’t seem to be in a hurry to follow us in. We can hold these brick buildings at C Company. We’ll use the APCs as a bridge to connect them.”

“We’ll be trapped in there with no way out if they come after us,” Beddow said.

“There’s no practical way out now,” Green told him. “If I were General Landau, I’d take my time in closing this little trap, knowing the mouse has no place to hide. But I think we can hold out for five or six hours, and that may be helpful.”

“If it’s just a question of holding out, sir,” Beddow said, “we could probably hold out for a week.”

“I think five hours will be long enough to decide the issue. They can keep us here, Frank, but only by staying here themselves. We can effectively keep the division pinned while others decide the, ah, main issues. The trick now will be to see that as few men as possible get killed.”

“Yes, sir,” Beddow said.

“Get that CB rig turned on and inform Jubilee what’s happening here,” Colonel Green ordered.

“Yes, sir,” Beddow said.

Congressman Obediah Porfritt left his house at 8:35 a.m., headed for the clandestine meeting of the House Impeachment Committee. He had spent the early morning at an outdoor pay phone by a gas station. As a result he had only had three hours’ sleep, and may have caught pneumonia to boot. His nose was stuffed, the four aspirin he had taken were doing nothing for his headache, and he couldn’t seem to shake off the morning grogginess and awaken fully. And for this day he would have to be fully awake.

In the briefcase he carried were the detailed particulars of the charges they were going to bring against the President of the United States. And, while his colleagues knew in general what those charges were, some of the details would shock and horrify even those hardened cynics. Political chicanery, no matter how gross, was something they understood. But the indictment against the President charged him with ordering, directing, or condoning acts, for his personal or political gain, that were so far outside the political process as to make a mockery of it.

Porfritt hurried toward his car, clutching his briefcase and hoping that the aspirin would take effect before he had to talk. He was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice the two men who scrambled out of a black sedan at the curb until they had almost reached him. He looked up to find them only a few steps away. They wore dark suits, and had badges of some sort pinned to their jacket pockets. “Congressman Porfritt?” one of them asked as Porfritt looked up.

“Yes?” Porfritt’s heart was suddenly beating very fast.

“We’re federal marshals, sir. We have orders to place you in protective custody. Please come along with us.”

Porfritt dropped the briefcase and ran around the side of his car. One of the marshals cursed and lumbered after him. The other headed around the car from the other side to cut him off.

Seeing that he could never make the driver’s door before they had him, Porfritt raced for the six-foot wooden fence that separated his driveway from his neighbor s. With a strength born of desperation, he pulled himself over the fence and dropped to the other side. His feet tangled up in the bicycle that was resting on the far side of the fence, and he fell heavily on the concrete driveway. The two marshals, proceeding more gingerly, pulled themselves over the fence after him.

Porfritt grabbed the bicycle and ran out into the street with it. Then he mounted it and began pedaling for his life. It had been more years than he liked to think since he had been on a bicycle, but he was relieved to discover that he could still make the machine go in a straight line without falling over.

The two marshals were back on the street now, staring after him. He was about half a block away, and getting farther with every second. In a few seconds he’d be at the corner. Two blocks to the right was a school that took up three blocks. The streets between had been blocked off for cars, but a bike could get through without any trouble. If he could make it that far, he had a chance.

One of the marshals pulled a revolver and, holding it in both hands, leveled it at Porfritt’s wobbling back. A moment later, Porfritt heard the shot and felt a sudden searing pain along his lower thigh, running into his left leg. Then the pain disappeared, but his leg wouldn’t work the pedals anymore. He tried to stay erect, so he could glide around the corner and out of sight, but a haze came before his eyes and the bicycle slowly tipped over.

When they reached him on the ground, his face was white and bright arterial blood was spurting from his leg onto the black asphalt. “You do know,” he said, holding his leg with both hands to try and staunch the flow, “that what you two are doing is illegal.” He took a breath and almost passed out, but it seemed important to him to finish what he was saying. He shook his head to clear it and stared up at the marshals. “It is specifically forbidden by the Constitution,” he said clearly, “to arrest or detain a Member of Congress while Congress is in session.”

“You should have thought of that,” one of them told him, “before you committed treason.”

Porfritt passed out.

Kit pulled his car into the Executive Office Building garage entrance and slid his ID card into the slot to open the gate. Two EPS policemen were loitering inside the gate, and one of them peered through the windshield at Kit and Miriam and then waved them on.

Kit pulled alongside the officer and rolled down his window. “What’s up?” he asked.

“Checking everyone who comes in, Mr. Young,” the officer told him. “Orders. Something’s happening, but they never tell us anything.”

“Don’t feel left out,” Kit said with a weak smile. “They never tell me anything, either.” He drove down the ramp and parked his car on the second level. “Typical, isn’t it?” he said to Miriam. “They put out the guard, but don’t bother telling them what to guard against.” He took the key out of the ignition, dropped it into his jacket pocket, and stared at the whitewashed wall in front of him. “This is it,” he said.

“I keep feeling that there’s been some mistake,” Miriam said, taking his hand. “That any second we’re going to wake up and find that this is a particularly nasty dream. Or that Adams is going to pop out from behind a post and say, ‘Okay, boys and girls, I was just kidding, you can go home now.’ But he isn’t.”

Kit squeezed her hand. “Are you going to be all right?” he asked, peering into her eyes as though he could read the future in their depths.

“No, of course I’m not going to be all right,” Miriam said. “And you’re not going to be all right, and nothing’s ever going to be all right again. But life will go on—for those of us around to live it. Don’t look at me like that. I’ll do fine. I just won’t feel fine.”

“I’d like to say something helpful,” Kit said, “but I have no idea what that would be. We must do this.”

“Of course,” Miriam said. “It is a far, far better thing we do—I love you, Kit. No, don’t say anything. I’d better go now. Take care.”

“I will.” Kit kissed her and watched her cross the car-studded room to the stairway. Then, checking his watch, he locked the car and started in the other direction.

The two women who had volunteered to help Miriam were waiting for her in the Executive Office Building lobby. Their passes, supplied by Adams from some secret cache, had gotten them into the building without problem. The door guard had taken one look at their skirts and blouses and heels and pastel-colored sweaters, and would have passed them in if they had held up bus passes. There were hundreds of women in the building who dressed that way, and it was hard to imagine any of them as a potential security threat.

Miriam led the way, following directions she had learned from Kit. There was supposed to be a man waiting for them, one of Colonel Kovacs’ Special Forces recruits; if he wasn’t there, they were in trouble. She found the stairway and the three women headed downstairs, their high heels clacking on the cement steps.

At the end of the underground corridor two levels down, there was a door marked white house switchboard. A burly man in an ill-fitting blue suit was lounging just outside the door. He looked at them questioningly as they approached.

Miriam smiled at him. “You’re looking jubilant this morning,” she said.

“Right on, lady,” he answered. He gave her the thumbs-up sign, then pushed the door buzzer.

A tinny voice came out of the speaker over the door. “Who is it?”

The man held up a badge to the small peephole in the door. “McKay,” he said. “Special Executive Police.”

The door opened a crack. “What do you need?” a voice asked from inside.

McKay hit the door with his shoulder, springing it open, and then he was inside. The three women were right behind him. There were two men in the room, one sprawled on the floor where McKay’s door-opening technique had thrown him and the other still sitting on a stool in the far corner. They both looked startled, but they moved very carefully since McKay had them both covered with a Mauser machine pistol which had appeared from somewhere under his suit jacket.

The room was a long narrow one with one entire wall taken up with a great series of switchboards, in front of which sat twelve operators who were all frozen in different attitudes of surprise and astonishment.

McKay removed the guns from the two guards, and then herded them and the operators into a large supply closet connected to the switchboard room. He locked the door.

Miriam and her two companions sat at the switchboard and began clearing up the blinking lights.

“White House… I’m sorry, he cannot be reached.”

“White House… I’m sorry, I cannot complete that call.”

“White House… I’m sorry, the information officer is not in at the moment. You wish to verify what rumor, sir? Yes, sir, that is perfectly true. The President has been placed under arrest, and is being held for impeachment. What? No, I’m sorry, but that information is not available at this time. No—he is perfectly all right. Yes—everything is under control. Thank you.”

“White House.”

“Jubilee!”

“Hello, Jubilee. You’re cutting it close. We just, ah, came on shift here.”

“How did it go?”

“No problems, Jubilee.”

“I’m calling you from a pay phone on the Mall The number is four-two-four-nine-five-four-six. If anything erupts, try to call and let us know.”

“Will do, Jubilee.”

“Good luck.”

“You, too, Jubilee. White House, good morning.…”

New York and Massachusetts Avenue come together at Mount Vernon Place. To add to the confusion, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and K streets also feed into this narrow oval.

Major Fitzpatrick had decided that this was the perfect place to set up the command post of his MP brigade. From the north side of the oval he directed his jeeps into the streets and avenues to set up a network of roadblocks. They would create a river of stopped cars flooding back along the twelve streets and stopping traffic in all directions. When added to the fourteen other carefully selected sites, these roadblocks should succeed in freezing traffic all over downtown Washington.

Fitzpatricks first concern was to open a landline between his command post and Jubilee Leader. There was a pay phone near his jeep from which he called a pay phone next to Aaron Adams’ truck; he kept the line open by charging it on a government credit card. “All systems go,” he told Adams. “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I share that hope,” Adams said. “Keep me informed.”

The Special Situations Room, created out of the conference room in the White House bomb shelter, was crowded with communications equipment and the people working it. Every few minutes one of the operators would wave and a runner would take a sheet of paper from him and run it over to an analyst’s desk, where it would join the flood of papers already there. Occasionally, one of the analysts would wave and a runner would take a paper from him to the command desk, where a summary would be prepared to be sent to the President.

At the moment the President was down in the Special Situations Room reviewing his troops. “We’re taking a gamble,” he told Vandermeer as they walked through the underground room together. He smiled his strained smile. “But that’s nothing new for me.”

“That’s right, sir,” Vandermeer said. “Everything’s under control. We’re going to come out of this in good shape—in better shape than we went in. We’ll have the whole country behind us by tonight.”

“All three networks,” the President agreed. “This is prime-time action; they can’t pass it up.”

“That’s right, sir,” Vandermeer said. “What happens here today is going to be seen by everyone in the country.”

The President stopped by a bank of teletype machines. “What’s this?” he demanded.

“We’re surveilling the news services,” Vandermeer explained. “To see if they come up with anything on the coup we don’t have.”

“The bastards,” the President said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

Vandermeer stared at the paper that was just handed to him. “Here’s some good news, sir,” he said. “The protective detention of Congress is going very well.”

“Good,” the President said. “There’s no way those bastards can legalize this thing without Congress. Even if those bastards win, they lose.”

“They can’t win,” Vandermeer said. “I have it all planned. Everything is planned.”

The President stared at Vandermeer, who had a strange expression on his face. He was about to say something when they were interrupted by another message. Vandermeer read it, squinting thoughtfully. “This is it,” he said, waving the yellow sheet in the air. “We’ve broken their back!”

“What? What are you talking about?” The President snatched the paper from Vandermeer’s hand and read it himself.

TOP SECRET BULL RUN

INTERCEPT REPORT, SPEECH

SSR/47/0843

CITIZENS BAND CHANNEL 14

1) JUBILEE COME IN JUBILEE THIS IS GREEN LEADER

2) GREEN LEADER THIS IS JUBILEE

1) JUBILEE IT LOOKS LIKE WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO ABORT AT THIS END. WE HAVE BEEN SURPRISED BY A LARGER FORCE. DO YOU READ? WE ARE STILL INTACT BUT COMPLETELY SURROUNDED. (GARBLE) HOLD OUT FOR A WHILE, BUT NO CHANCE REPEAT NO CHANCE OF BREAKING OUT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND, JUBILEE?

2) WE UNDERSTAND. DO WHAT YOU CAN.

1) SORRY ABOUT THIS JUBILEE.

2) HOLD OUT AS LONG AS YOU CAN, GREEN LEADER, OR UNTIL YOU HEAR THAT THERE IS NO NEED. GOOD LUCK.

1) THANK YOU JUBILEE. GOOD LUCK TO YOU. GREEN LEADER OUT

END

TOP SECRET BULL RUN

“What does it mean?” the President asked. “Who’s ‘Green Leader’?”

“The coup forces—the troops at the Eighty-Second Airborne—are headed by a Colonel Green,” Vandermeer said. “I assume the message means that our surprise was complete and we’ve grabbed them all. I’ll get a message through official channels to Fort Bragg right away and verify, but I’m sure that’s it.”

“Then it’s all over,” the President said.

“Not quite over,” Vandermeer said. “There’s still some mopping up to do.”

“Right,” the President said. “And that’s what we want on every newscast tonight. Get the camera crews out here now, Vandermeer, and start the mop-up now. With any luck we might even make the noon news. Is that Johnny-on-the-Spot Hanes on his way?”

“The Fifth Brigade is proceeding toward the White House,” Vandermeer said. “Hanes estimates another hour, last I heard.”

“Good, good,” the President said. “Let’s go back upstairs to the Oval Office. I have work to do. See that the photographer gets pictures of me working behind my desk.”

“Yes, sir,” Vandermeer said.

Colonel Hanes stared at the street map laid out on the hood of his jeep. “New York Avenue is jammed for blocks,” he said. “Any of our scouts find a way around yet?”