The assassin felt her staring. His eyes broke from the TV.
“Hungry?” he said in Bosnian-accented English. Angie nodded. He scooted closer and pulled back the tape covering her mouth. He spooned a sardine into her in a dispassionate, measured rhythm.
They had not planned on taking a prisoner. In fact, the client had said nothing about the Secretary of Defense’s family being aboard the little sport fishing boat. Dex Jackson was supposed to be alone. In the heat of the moment, Elvir had decided to save Angie’s life for fear that he would not collect his money otherwise. In Bosnia, where he had been a teenager during the civil war, there were sometimes financial penalties for inflicting collateral damage.
Besides, his employer had proved to be extremely particular. Given the very unusual nature of the assignment, he felt sure that they would not want Mrs. Jackson to die. He had vague hopes of earning some type of bonus for his heroism.
Suddenly, his prisoner’s face was on live television. The anchor on TV put on a sympathetic face: “Though our focus has been on the drama of the multiple attacks today, our thoughts at this hour, by the way, are of course with all the victim’s families. In a new development, we have word that Secretary of Defense Dexter Jackson and his son LeBron Thomas Jackson are at Bethesda Naval Hospital being treated for a routine medical evaluation after gunmen attacked their boat in Chesapeake Bay. The White House has confirmed that his wife was killed in the attack.”
Angie recognized the photo of herself. It had been taken at the Foreign Correspondents’ Press Dinner a year earlier.
Elvir turned up the volume. “You see?” he said. “Everyone thinks you are dead.” They continued watching as the anchor eulogized her, detailing her years working as a policy analyst in the Pentagon before meeting and ultimately marrying Dex Jackson. “You should be happy,” Elvir said. “He’s saying such nice things. How does it feel?”
Angie didn’t have to think about her answer. “Like being buried alive.”
Over West Virginia
8:45 p.m.
The Ulysses helicopter approached slowly, uncertainly. The pilot was under strict orders — no running lights, no searchlights and no radio. The sliver of waxing moon illuminated nothing but a vast sea of cornstalks. Dex and LeBron were still in their boating clothes. “I thought you said we were close,” Dex croaked.
“Sorry, Mister Secretary,” the pilot said. “We’re hovering over the coordinates CENTAF sent us, but I can’t see anything.”
Nearly as soon as he spoke a helipad lit up directly beneath them. Thousands of cornstalks fanned as they descended. By the helipad’s dim glow, Dex could make out the outline of a tiny building surrounded by farmland. There didn’t seem to be any roads.
The helipad dimmed as soon as the chopper landed. Two Ulysses soldiers wearing night vision goggles appeared and opened the doors. “Welcome Mister Secretary,” they said as Dex and LeBron exited. In near darkness, the soldiers led them down a short, narrow path lined on both sides by cornstalks. There they entered the concrete structure and stood in front of two chrome elevator doors. There were no exterior buttons. Dex put his hand on his son’s shoulder as they waited. The boy shrugged him off.
The doors opened. General Wainewright stood before them, wearing the same elegantly decorated military dress uniform that he had worn to the White House earlier that day. “Welcome to Rapture Run,” he said.
Dex and LeBron stepped inside the elevator. The soldiers held the pilot back, although there would have been plenty of room for everyone. The doors closed and the elevator began to descend.
Dex braced himself as the elevator vibrated and groaned ever lower. “Where the hell are we?”
“This is Site R.”
“Site R? What happened to Raven Rock?”
“You’ll find that this facility is a major upgrade.”
Dex grunted disapprovingly. “How is it that the Secretary of Defense doesn’t know about the construction of a new emergency bunker?”
“Don’t take it personally. Google Maps doesn’t even know about it yet.”
The elevator doors opened to reveal a cavernous underground defense operations center. The room was easily the length of a basketball court and three stories tall. Touch-screen monitors built into the walls tracked troop and weapons movements around the world. Dozens of uniformed Ulysses communications personnel sat at workstations around the room.
“Sweet Jesus,” Jackson said. “It’s as big as NORAD.”
“You have no idea. We carved the command room out of an old Cold War missile silo that the Soviets never got wind of. The facility joins up with a natural cave to the north and a retired coal mine ‘bout half a mile south. We could keep an entire brigade down here for years if we needed to.”
Dex took note of all the Ulysses uniforms in the room. “General,” he said, “I don’t see many regular military personnel.”
Wainewright smiled. “Dex, you’re a Republican. You of all people should appreciate that the private sector will outperform the public sector every single time.”
The General motioned for Corporal Hammond, one of the few regular military personnel in the bunker, to come to Dex’s assistance. Hammond carried a titanium briefcase with one hand and saluted with the other. “Secretary Jackson,” he beamed, knowing nothing of Angie Jackson’s disappearance into Chesapeake Bay. “Happy to see you safe and sound, sir.”
Hammond. The imbecile that was responsible for all this. Dex clinched his fists and took a swing.
Dex’s right hook connected with the Corporal’s left eyebrow, sending him to the deck with a rivulet of blood trickling into his eye.
Wainewright shoved Dex backwards. “What’s gotten into you?”
“This is the little prick that called me on the boat. He told me to stay put. That hesitation killed my wife.”
“The Corporal here was just the messenger, Dex. He had no way of knowing.”
Hammond got to his feet, wiped the blood out of his eye and swallowed hard. “I’m sorry about your loss,” he said. “I really had no idea.” The Corporal plopped the briefcase atop a workstation and opened it, revealing several dozen phones with the names of their owners written on sticky notes. “I’m afraid I need your phone, Mister Secretary.”
“You don’t know when to quit, Corporal.”
“He’s not trying to antagonize you,” the General explained. “There are no personal phones allowed down here. Not that you could get reception anyhow.”
Jackson reached into his pocket, produced his phone, and grudgingly handed it over. LeBron’s phone — outfitted with little grips for playing video games, tucked into the carrying strap on his backpack — didn’t escape the Corporal’s prying eyes.
“Sorry, kid,” Hammond told LeBron. “Rules are rules.”
Dex’s jaw tightened. “He’s just a kid.”
“Let him be,” Wainewright cut in. “He lost his mother today.”
The Coal Mine
8:47 p.m.
After spending six gut-busting hours in a Ulysses Bradley armored vehicle that chugged along at sub-highway speeds, Julian Speers was led into an abandoned coal mine that had been fitted with blast-proof shielding. There the Ulysses soldier that had donated his gym clothes bid him good riddance and passed him off to a pair of MPs that led him down a long, gradually sloping tunnel. They passed through two additional sets of shielded doors and took an elevator and a rail car through what the MP described as the “ass end of the bunker.”
They finally came to the Rapture Run command room. The cavernous operations center had the same awe-inspiring effect on him as it had on the other two hundred personnel that had first passed through its doors that day.