“It’s not in the constitution,” Speers replied. “The line of succession comes from an act of Congress, specifically President Truman’s Succession Act of 1947.”
The room phone rang. Corporal Hammond put the receiver to his ear and answered in a low murmur. “Put me through to the President,” the shrill voice demanded. Hammond turned to the room. “Excuse me, gentlemen. As luck would have it, Treasury Secretary Hudson is on the line. Shall I put her on speaker?”
“Negative,” General Wainewright said.
Circling overhead, Eva Hudson was a passenger in a small Air National Guard helicopter whose pilot was searching desperately for the landing pad. “I’m tired, I’ve been shot at, I’m starving and generally annoyed that nobody bothered to tell the Security Council about the new Site R,” she complained to Corporal Hammond. “Transmit landing coordinates right now, Corporal!”
Hammond turned again to the room and said, “Secretary Hudson is requesting permission to land, sirs.”
“Tell her to hold,” Jackson said, feeling the dark joy that came with keeping the late POTUS’ girlfriend at bay.
“Are you there?” Eva demanded.
“Yes ma’am, I’m here,” Hammond replied into the phone.
“Someone tried to kill me today, Corporal. I’m not in a patient mood.”
“I’m doing everything I can,” Hammond said as the Joint Chiefs’ conversation swirled behind him.
“Corporal,” Eva said, “I am a sitting member of the National Security Council! My secret service escort was recalled to Washington, and I practically had to hijack this aircraft to get here! I demand to know why I wasn’t informed of the new bunker location!”
Hammond put the phone on mute and watched the debate around the eight-sided table. “With all due respect,” General Farrell said to the group, “during a time of war, I’m not inclined to take orders from a glorified banker.”
“If it’s not in the constitution,” Dex interrupted, “then there’s wiggle room.”
Speers wasn’t about to give in. “That would be for the Supreme Court to decide,” he argued.
“We don’t have that kind of time,” Wainewright said.
Hammond pointed at the ceiling. “Sirs,” he cut in. “Permission to light up the landing pad so that Secretary Hudson can land?”
“Negative.” Wainewright snapped. “Divert her to Fort Campbell. We’ll be in touch.”
FORT CAMPBELL
10:25 p.m.
Eva’s chopper landed amongst an expanse of identical battleship grey buildings. Like all U.S. military bases tonight, Fort Campbell was on alert. Even at this hour, armed troops walked the fenced perimeter in the distance.
There was no welcome party. A lone officer wearing a short sleeve khaki utility uniform stood in the wet-hot Kentucky night. His hair was gray and his lips were pursed, and he was surprisingly pear-shaped for a former Green Berets. Had it not been for the brass birds on his lapels, Eva would have taken him for a career enlisted man.
He held his hand out to shake hers. “Colonel William Madsen,” he said. “Garrison Commander. That means I run this place.”
“Eva Hudson,” she said. “Treasury Secretary.”
“You need no introductions,” Colonel Madsen drawled as he led her across the heliport to a modest single-story command post. “I’ve never met a celebrity,” he added, eyeing her in wonder. Eva had heard that one before, but she still hadn’t devised a polite reply. She just held her tongue.
As they walked, Eva tried all the speed dials on her phone. The President wasn’t answering. Speers wasn’t answering. The Vice President wasn’t answering. Even her little sister wasn’t answering. She had only been able to raise her rather useless deputy secretary, who along with every other federal agency employee, had been told to stay away from the federal offices until the threat level slid back down to orange.
They entered the command post and began down a hallway lined with framed photographs of past Garrison Commanders. “First time on a military base, Miss Hudson?” Colonel Madsen said.
“Hardly.” As a child, Eva’s Air Force father had dragged her all over the world, but it wasn’t worth getting into with the Colonel. “And please address me as Madam Secretary.”
“Fine, Madam Secretary,” he said. “Will you be needing an office?”
“I’ll be needing much more than you have.”
“I know you think you’ve been exiled to the boonies, but we think we’ve got some of the finest Intel resources in the armed forces.”
Eva stopped. “Intel? I thought this was a combat training base.”
“That’s what we’re known for. But last year we inherited some Army Intel brain trust from Fort Huachuca and now we’ve got the Feds working a joint op too.”
“No offense, but why here?”
“This is a bureaucrat-free zone. We focus one hundred percent on disrupting the enemy. Our people go out and execute. We’re players, not planners.”
“Can I have a look?”
Madsen pointed down the hall to the briefing room, where Agent Carver’s linguists were filing out into the hallway. “Couple feds are working on that Allied Jihad suicide tape.” Eva looked through the glass and recognized Agent Carver. Though she didn’t know him by name, she had seen him leaving the Oval Office with Julian Speers on at least two occasions.
She stopped in her tracks at the sight of the tall, lanky man with dark hair and wire-rim glasses. Her arms were instantly covered in goose bumps that prickled to the point of being painful. She turned to Madsen. “Nico Gold.”
“You oughtta be on a quiz show,” Madsen said. “World’s most notorious hacker, right here on the base. Not many people remember his case.”
She cocked her head to read the twin tattoos on Nico’s forearms that read EVA. “I’d say he remembers me too.”
*
In the briefing room, the incredulous Agent Carver asked Nico to repeat himself for the third time.
“This code you’ve been trying to crack,” Nico repeated as patiently as he could, “it’s not a code. It’s a language, y’see?”
“No. I don’t see.”
“Muskogee. A Native American language. An oral language. The thing is, nobody speaks it anymore. The actual tribe died out decades ago.”
Carver’s face was suddenly full of malice. He stepped into Nico with both hands and lifted him by his shirt collar, throwing him back against a table. ”You knew what it was right off, didn’t you? Back in Virginia. You knew!”
“How could I?” Nico said as he tried to fight Carver off. “You gave me those crappy transcripts, remember?”
O’Keefe pushed her index and middle finger into a pressure point just below Carver’s right shoulder blade. His left arm suddenly dropped to its side. O’Keefe easily pulled him off, smiling at the perfect execution of a move she’d learned in her weekly jujitsu class.
Carver smiled too, despite the lingering pain. O’Keefe had only been taking those classes for a few weeks.
“You,” she chastised Carver, “behave!”
She turned to Nico. “Now explain. Slowly. You said it’s an oral language?”
“Was.The last survivor was coaxed into transcribing a phonetic version for archival purposes. No small feat. Muskogee is full of smacking sounds and tongue clicks and guttural sounds.”
“Yet you claim that you can read it. Explain.”
“Back then I was looking to develop a new programming language. Something spybots couldn’t recognize. I saw a writeup about Muskogee in a linguist’s community site. I ended up bribing a professor just to get a photocopy of it. Guess I wasn’t the only one in the world with that idea.”
Carver’s left arm was still tingling from O’Keefe’s pressure point move. He rubbed his forearm back and forth, coaxing the feeling back into it. “Just tell us how this relates to the codes.”
“Look, it’s an old trick. Some coder adopts an obscure tribal language with a completely alien syntax. Like when the Americans used Navajo against the Japanese in World War Two. The Japanese went the rest of the war trying to figure out this impossible code, which was really a Native American language with a sentence structure unlike anything they’d ever seen. Same idea here. You were busy cracking a code, when all you had to do was learn Muskogee.”