White: A Novel (43 page)

“Is that all of it, then?” the president asked. “Did they use everything they had?”

“Too early to tell,” Chase explained. “The air force has a WC-135W called Constant Phoenix, which they are bringing in to measure the fallout.”

Venable thought for a moment, then nodded as if agreeing with himself.

“I’m not waiting for the next attack, Andrea,” Venable said. “It’s time to hit back at these animals before they . . .”

“Hit back at whom?” she argued. Chase had seen this coming from the start. “You know the stakes here, David. We don’t even know who’s responsible yet.”

“Local news stations just received claims of responsibility,” a voice called out. It was Havelock, crossing from the door. He had the chairman of the joint chiefs in tow. “Same tape, same language. There’s no doubt about it, Mr. President. These are the same murderous sonsofbitches we’ve been dealing with all along.”

“We can’t go to war on claims of responsibility,” Chase objected. “We’re talking about a potential World War Three, for God’s sake!”

“There’s more,” Oshinski said. “NSA has picked up specific overhears of conversations between the Saudi foreign minister and Prince Abdullah. They talk in some detail about the attacks.”

“What detail?” Chase asked incredulously. “I thought they were using the Quantis phones, that we couldn’t intercept them.”

“These were open-line conversations,” Havelock said.

“Open line? Why?” Chase continued. “Why would they talk openly about something we’ve already threatened them over? What did they say? Did they admit responsibility?”

“No, not exactly,” Havelock replied. “It was less specific than that. No smoking gun, but they had details that haven’t made press reports yet.”

“They have a world-class intelligence service,” Chase argued. “They could have gotten this information from a dozen different sources.”

Venable began to pace. The room hummed with activity around him.

“All right,” he said finally. “I don’t know the exact process, but I’m making the call. I want two strategic targets inside Saudi Arabia. Military installations with low probability of civilian casualties—don’t want anyone playing up Middle Eastern sympathies.”

“Al Qaeda training facilities,” Havelock suggested.

“What al Qaeda training facilities?” Chase asked. “Do we know of any?”

“No, but that’s the beauty of classified information,” the national security advisor responded. “We can claim whatever we want. Who’s going to prove different?”

Chase laughed indignantly, but Venable seemed to buy the suggestion. He stiffened with a confidence none of his advisors had seen since the crisis began.

“Four warheads,” he ordered. “The smallest tactical weapons we have. We’re going to end this right here and now.”

“I’m afraid it’s not exactly that easy, sir,” Oshinski told him.

“What do you mean? As president I have full authority to . . .”

“We have our NATO allies to consider,” Chase pointed out. “We have to make arrangements to notify them.”

“And we have to move our delivery platforms into position,” the general said. “We have the USS
Intrepid
moving south from the Suez Canal, but they can’t launch until we assume a safe standoff in the Indian Ocean.”

“There are homeland security considerations as well,” Chase argued. “We’ve got to anticipate the possibility of an escalated response. That could lead to martial law—a mobilization of the DEST bird, Gatekeeper. We have to coordinate eighteen thousand local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. We’ve got to give FEMA time to engage civil defense operations and prepare possible evacuation contingencies for NACAP as well as New York and Los Angeles. I imagine we’re going to have to bring the Fed into this, too; we can pretty much guarantee a run on banks.”

“We can’t ignore our embassies and military stations overseas,” the chairman added. “We have to change our war footing to DEFCON Four. That takes some time.”

“And the Secret Service is not going to allow you to stay here, David,” Havelock said. “Not now, especially.”

“What do you mean?” Venable asked. “Beechum is already out at that Mount whatever it is. Where do you . . . they . . . propose I go?”

“Kneecap,” Oshinski responded. “At least that’s what we used to call it. It’s an airborne command and control center designed to keep you above the fray during the initial stages of nuclear war.”

“Nuclear war?” Venable asked. “What nuclear war? I’m talking about limited strikes against known al Qaeda targets.”

“We have to anticipate a response,” Havelock argued. “CIA analysts have modeled scenarios like this. They predict that the Arab world will view any unilateral strike as an attack on Mecca and react behind a unified front. We have to expect potential reciprocation from North Korea and Iran. The Palestinians will jump on this with both feet. Al Qaeda will whip up a holy war frenzy throughout the Pacific rim, Europe, and Africa.”

Venable shook his head. He still hadn’t been in office for a month, and he was ordering the first nuclear attacks since 1945.

“I can’t just stand here idly by while they destroy us. Can I?”

No one responded. The overwhelming gravity of the president’s question had rendered them numb.

SATCH, WHO HAD
been a municipal engineer before he became a Phineas priest, had no trouble finding his way around Washington’s Dalecarlia Water Treatment Plant. Though bigger than the one in his home city of Birmingham, this plant worked exactly the same way. Raw water from a natural source—in this case the Potomac River—flowed through massive induction aqueducts into sedimentation basins, which allowed gravity to settle particulate matter into sludge beds.

From there, water passed into multimillion-gallon clear wells, then through additional filters to a chemical treatment facility where everything from fluoride and hydrated lime to flavor-enhancing charcoal and sulfur dioxide was added. Only then was the final product stored in underground basins for distribution.

This, Satch knew, was where the system stood most vulnerable. Each year, the Army Corps of Engineers dumped almost four thousand tons of lime, eight thousand tons of alum, two thousand tons of chlorine, and forty tons of copper sulfate into the water supply. Dumping in two black boxes full of cesium powder and rice-sized cobalt surgical implants would take just moments.

Posing as water-quality inspectors, the Cell Six operator and his all-too-stoic partner bluffed their way into the automated chemical treatment facility. Everyone knew that inspectors worked alone to protect the integrity of their methods, and these two men had both the credentials and the jargon. In the time it took them to dump their deadly additives, the regular night crew made a fresh pot of coffee.

Good thing, Satch thought, as he poured himself a cup and an extra for the woman at the gate. There was cause for a congratulatory drink after months of preparation and a flawless execution.

“Cream and two sugars,” was all he said. Caffeine was the one vice he allowed himself. He never had cared much for anything stronger.

ANY HOPES JEREMY
had of quickly escaping died with the bullet wound in his thigh. He had managed to staunch the bleeding, but only while sitting down. He knew that once he got up and started moving, the wound would open again, and that was if he managed to get out of the car—an unlikely scenario. Caleb kept the semiautomatic pistol in his lap, out of sight to passersby but very deadly to his FBI passenger.

“How did you know about us?” Caleb asked after he had driven about ten minutes.

“Money,” Jeremy responded. He stared out the window, trying to memorize landmarks. His familiarity with Washington was limited to the maps and addresses the FBI undercover briefers had given him. “You’d be amazed what turns up when you drag a five-dollar bill through a trailer park.”

Caleb said nothing. The man’s emotions seemed every bit as colorless as his skin.

“Do you think God really won’t hold you accountable?” Jeremy asked. He felt no thirst for conversation, but it took his mind off the awful pain in his thigh.

“God?” Caleb said. Jeremy’s suggestion struck him as absolutely ridiculous. “We are his warriors. His arm against the Philistines. He’ll reward us with eternal salvation for what we do.”

Jeremy tightened the pressure on his wound.

“You kill innocent women and children to get to heaven?”

“So that millions of others might live,” Caleb argued. His tone changed noticeably. “War always has its casualties. Imagine how many will die if we allow the Muslim dogs to go on with their terror, massacring people in the street. How long will we last as a Christian people, allowing them to breed among us, to work their way into our communities? You think they care about the American way of life? They despise us, and they won’t stop until we’re all dead.”

“So you align yourselves with them?” Jeremy asked. “You do their bidding here in your own country, where they can’t work on their own?”

Caleb turned his eyes from the road. He looked at Jeremy more out of curiosity than animus.

“Is that what you think?” he asked. A smile broke out across his face. “Maybe we overestimated you. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

Caleb put on the brakes and turned left onto Everest, a street lined with freestanding single-story homes. It was a well-kept neighborhood defined by 1970s architecture, chain-link fences, and mirror-globed birdbaths.

“What’s this?” Jeremy asked.

“You wanted to see your family, didn’t you?”

Caleb punched a garage door opener and turned into a shallow driveway. The door opened and then closed behind them.

“My family?” Jeremy asked. The possibility seemed too good to be true. “You’re bringing me to my family?”

“Of course,” Caleb said, shutting down the motor. The door to the house opened, and another man emerged with a short-barreled shotgun. “It’s the only way we can get you to tell us what we need to know.”

THE SECRETARY OF
DEFENSE
had managed to escape Washington in a helicopter. He was a top military leader, after all, a man responsible for maintaining the national security in a time of crisis. He came and went by chopper all the time.

“What a cluster, huh?” the SECDEF spoke into his intercom. His administrative assistant sat beside him in the MD-530 “Little Bird,” shaking his head. He was a former military man, but he had never seen anything like this.

Three hundred feet below them, a long string of vehicles wound their way west through the rolling hills of western Virginia. Black Town Cars and limousines, personal vehicles, and Humvees—anything big enough and fast enough to carry representatives of the legislative, judicial, and executive branches out of Washington. The nation’s political elite was racing along Route 50 toward a future they still didn’t understand.

“Looks like the OJ chase,” the man responded. Black Secret Service Suburbans and police cars led the entourage, with CNN and FOX satellite trucks bringing up the rear. MSNBC wasn’t far behind.

“I guess our unnamed secure location isn’t going to be unnamed for long.”

The SECDEF shook his head. Despite the hermetic seal around Mount Weather, there was no way to camouflage the rapid mobilization of Washington’s designated survivors.

“We’re two minutes out, sir,” the MD-530 pilot advised. “We’ll be going in hot.”

The SECDEF looked ahead through the snow-covered hills as the highly maneuverable helicopter bobbed up and down, flying nap of the earth.

“What did you tell your family?” he asked.

“I told them I loved them,” the aide responded.

“Yeah, me too,” said the SECDEF. The sick feeling in his stomach told him that wouldn’t be enough.

“DADDY! DADDY!”

Caroline looked up from the cellar floor and thought she was seeing some kind of hallucination. It couldn’t be Jeremy.

But it was.

“Everything’s gonna be all right, sweetie,” the HRT sniper said in a calming voice as Caleb and the guy with the shotgun followed him down the cellar stairs. “Daddy’s here.”

Maddy stood up and ran to him, grabbing Jeremy around the legs as she had after so many previous missions. This time her hug sent shudders of pain through his body, though, and he almost buckled.

“Easy, baby,” he said as the shotgunner pushed him forward. “You just wait over by Mommy for now, all right?”

Maddy backed away, stained with blood from where the wound had opened up and begun to trickle onto the concrete floor.

“You’re bleeding, Daddy!” Maddy called out. “What did you do to my daddy, you ugly pirate?”

The little girl launched herself at Caleb, pounding at him with her fists, but the one-eyed albino simply swatted her away with the back of his hand. He hit the girl hard, knocking her to the cold cement floor.

“Maddy!” Caroline called out. “Come over here!”

Jeremy motioned with his head, and Maddy backed away, red in the face, with her little fists still balled in defiance.

“It’s gonna be OK.” Jeremy smiled. “But, honey, you’ve got to do what your mom says.”

COLONEL ELLIS HAD
waited thirty years for this day. All the planning, the sacrifice, the praying and soul-searching had led him to what his military comrades referred to as zero hour. This was the realization of a complex, audacious dream—a battlefield epiphany that even now he had no interest in questioning.

“Lead, follow, or get out of the way,” his first drill instructor had beaten into his “brain housing group.”

Well, he had never been one to follow.

Runway Two-three East,
Ellis reminded himself, looking for signs of activity. Virtually every contingency had been checked and double-checked. As in any operation, there was potential for disaster, but precious little here. That was the beauty of the leaderless resistance model. Even if the enemy caught an individual member, they simply didn’t know enough to compromise the larger organization.

The colonel checked and rechecked his equipment.

Take care of your gear and your gear will take care of you,
the instructors had said all those years ago. It was the simple advice that stuck in the mind of an eighteen-year-old orphan who wanted nothing in the world more than a cause worth dying for.