“I have the aircraft,” Shaw acknowledged. “You need help? Want to come out of hypersonic range so we can radio headquarters?”
“No … dammit, maybe. Let me think,” Mondy said. Because Aurora developed a very powerful thermal and static electric field around it during its hypersonic flight, it was usually necessary to slow down to Mach-three, the lowest speed possible with the ramjet, to talk to anyone on the radios. Standard procedure was to remain radio-silent during all ramjet operations. In an emergency you stayed hypersonic until you computed an alternate landing site at least five hundred miles away, because it would take that long to slow down, restart the turboramjet engines, and make an approach — and there were only ten approved landing sites in the entire civilized world for Aurora.
“No, stay with the flight plan — but you’ll have to take the plane for the landing, Randy,” Mondy said. “Man, I’m really hurt. That dark spot is getting bigger and darker, and I’m getting a really bad headache. Check all systems again, crew — I’m concerned about that blast affecting our systems.”
“Hell, we’re sixteen miles above and at least six hundred miles away from the location of that disturbance,” Pugh said. “Imagine what it was like for someone on the ground.”
They did not even want to think about that.
TWENTY
Five minutes after the tiny button in the office of the chief of the Presidential Protection Detail, U.S. Secret Service, was pressed, a large green and white helicopter was dropping out of the gray, ice-filled clouds over Washington, D.C., and lowering onto the front lawn of the White House. The helicopter was of course Marine One, a VH-3D Sea King helicopter flown by HMX-1, the Marines Corps Executive Flight Detachment from Quantico, Virginia. The engines were never brought to idle upon landing — the Marine Corps pilots held the helicopter on the ground by brute strength with the throttles just below takeoff power until their very special passengers and their Secret Service escorts were on board. Then the pilots shoved the power back in and lifted off, swooping low over the Ellipse before rapidly climbing. Seconds after clearing the area, it was joined by two other identical VH-3D VIP helicopters, and the three craft shuffled inflight position in a prebriefed sequence until it could no longer be apparent to anyone on the ground which helicopter was really carrying the President of the United States, his wife, and members of his Cabinet and staff.
It was a short helicopter ride to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and a high-speed tactical landing just a few feet from the left wingtip of a Boeing E-4B NEACAP, or National Emergency Airborne Command Post aircraft. The huge modified Boeing 747B, white with a dark blue stripe across the sides with the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in bold letters across the upper half, also had a distinctive bulge on the top of the plane that distinguished this plane from the standard VC-25A Air Force One; the bulge contained a satellite and SHF (Super High Frequency) communications antenna that, along with a two-thousand-foot trailing wire antenna and forty-six other antennas arrayed around the plane, allowed the plane’s occupants to literally talk to anyone in the known world with a radio receiver — even if that radio receiver was aboard a nuclear-powered submarine sitting two hundred feet below the surface of the ocean or in orbit two hundred miles above the Earth. Exactly ninety seconds after Marine One touched down, RAFT-104 (as the NEACAP aircraft was known on an open radio channel) was leaving the ground.
The President, his wife, and their daughter had been securely strapped into plush, high-backed seats in the forward flight crew section of the 4,600-square-foot main deck of the aircraft. The President was a big, handsome young man from what many derisively called a “Deliverance” state — lots of farmers and country folk with the joke being that, as in the movie, the men found the pigs more attractive than the women. He had been one of that state’s youngest and most popular politicians and one of the youngest chief executives of the United States. Despite his frequent campaign and news shots of him jogging around the running track on the South Lawn, he was plainly out of breath after running up the thirty-four steps of the airstair to enter NEACAP. But if it was from physical exertion or from fear of being roused out of the White House by the Secret Service, it was hard to tell. His wife, in stark contrast, was not out of breath one bit. Much shorter than her husband, slim and trim, with professionally lightened, shoulder-length hair and blue eyes, the First Lady was highly intelligent and very much like her husband. It was often said that the combination of this almost inseparable pair was far greater than the sum of their parts. Many couples in the White House had been described as running a copresidency for a variety of reasons, but although she held no official posts or headed any commissions other than ceremonial ones, in this White House there was no doubt that the President and his wife made a very powerful force to reckon with.
Just a few moments after takeoff, the First Lady turned to their lone colleague, Michael J. Lifter, the President’s National Security Advisor, and asked, “What was this about an attack in Europe, Michael? Something happen with Russia and Moldova?” The President’s eyes briefly registered his wife’s question, and there might have been a hint of irritation at her speaking out before he, but he turned toward Lifter and silently awaited his response.
Lifter, just a bit taller than the First Lady, dark and angular, glanced at the communications panel on the table in front of them. “As soon as the air-to-ground channels are open, I’ll get us an update,” he replied, addressing them both. “The word I got was that the Ukraine came under attack by Russian cruise missiles, and that nuclear weapons might be involved.”
“My God,” the First Lady replied. “That’s horrible … it should be confirmed at once. I hope Velichko hasn’t finally gone over the edge.”
“It’ll take a few minutes for the communications group to get connected into the system and a situation report prepared,” Lifter said. He was a former naval officer and a long-time military attaché to the White House, and was very familiar with the interface between the military and civilian halves of the chain of command. Information flowed relatively freely and quickly between military users, especially intraservice, but it flowed less effectively interservice and, in most cases, very poorly between the military and civilian sectors. The First Couple, for example, would never request or accept a standard NMCC SITREP, or National Military Command Center Situation Report — it was so full of abbreviations and acronyms that it would throw both of these Ivy League grads into a royal tizzy. It had to be condensed into a readable, reportable format, and that took time. “Once we’re above ten thousand feet,” Lifter said, adding a definite number that he knew the couple could comprehend, “the crew can unstrap and all stations can hook in. It’ll only take a few minutes.”
While they waited, a crew physician came forward to check the President and the First Lady — he had a history of occasional airsickness — and another crewmember distributed a card with a list of crewmembers on board and facilities ready at the President’s disposal. There was a flight crew of eight — four pilots, two navigators, and two flight engineers in two shifts — a cabin crew of ten, a security crew of ten — all Secret Service, no Marines — a military crew of forty, a secretarial staff of six, a White House advisory staff of eight, a computer operations crew of two, and a medical staff of four. Only the President, the First Lady, and the National Security Advisor had made it to NEACAP when the alarm had sounded. “Aren’t there supposed to be more Cabinet officers on board? What about the Secretary of Defense? Where’s Don Scheer?”