“And make sure that such a summons is made quite public,” Hardcastle interjected.
“All such summonses are a matter of public record, Admiral,” Wilkes said, not bothering to hide her contempt. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…” Just then her pager went off, and she went over to a nearby office phone on the conference room table. “Director Wilkes… a what? When…? I’ll be right down… no, I don’t want to deploy BLACK TI… I said, I’ll be right down.” She slammed the phone down and hurried to the door.
Both Hardcastle and Harley were on their feet — by the look on Wilkes’ face, they both knew something terrible was wrong. “What is it, Judge?” Hardcastle asked.
. “Nothing… I’ll brief you later.”
“Receiving a recommendation from your command center to deploy BLACK TIGER is not exactly ‘nothing,’ Judge,” Deputy Chief U.S. Marshal Landers pointed out. “What’s BLACK TIGER?” Hardcastle asked.
“That’s none of your concern” Wilkes warned.
“BLACK TIGER is the classified code name for the joint federal and military team designed to protect the capital,” Harley said to Hardcastle. “In peacetime, it’s mostly to protect against rioters and civil unrest. The Attorney General is the commander; senior representatives are from the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service — Bill here is the Marshals’ rep — the Secret Service, and the two-star commanding general of the Military District of Washington, plus other military reps. There was an attack somewhere in the capital — wasn’t there, Judge Wilkes?”
“Deputy Landers, you’re with me. You two, I’ll talk to later,” she said, and hurried off. Landers gave Harley a friendly squeeze on the arm and followed Wilkes to the underground FBI Emergency Operations Command Center.
Suddenly, outside the open conference room windows, they saw a flash of light, like a huge flashbulb going off, followed seconds later by a loud rumble that was like a short, sharp crash of thunder. They all went to the window. The flash had come from the south, in the direction of The Mall, but they could see nothing.
Hardcastle was reaching for the phone to call his assistant Marc Sheehan: “That wasn’t thunder — it reminded me of a bomb attack in San Salvador I witnessed once,” he told Harley. “Something’s going on out there near The Mall.”
“Forget the phone call — let’s get out of here,” Harley said. “Talk on the way. We’ll take my car.”
Aboard the E-3C AWACS Radar Plane Leather-90
“MC, Comm, we just lost contact with the Hawk unit at East Potomac Park.”
Milford was dumbfounded. The fake Executive-One- Foxtrot was less than thirty miles away from the Capitol, and at the exact point where the medium-range air defense units would have engaged, they went off the air. First the fighters launching from Andrews were destroyed, then the Integrated Command Center at Andrews that had overall control of the Hawk and Avenger units around the city, now the close-in Hawk radar system.
The Avenger units — if there were still any Avenger units down there — were virtually blind. The gunners on the Avengers had IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) interrogators, so they could pick out any aircraft that was not squawking air traffic control codes, but the tracking sensors on the Avengers had limited range. Even if they spotted the fake Executive-One at the absolute maximum range, they would have only a few seconds to attack before the plane got within range. The Stinger missile was designed to attack targets flying less than two hundred knots airspeed— the fake Executive-One was flying almost twice that speed.
“Status of the runway at Andrews?”
“Closed, sir,” Tate reported. “There are only two other fighters assigned there; neither are ready to fly.”
“Status of the Patriot batteries? Any of them operational?”
‘The Patriot site at Dulles was destroyed by commandos,” the Senior Director responded. “The site at Fort Belvoir is not damaged, but it was decommissioned this morning and was ready to road-march in the morning. It won’t be able to respond.”
Milford checked the radar display with an almost feverish feeling of helplessness and dread. He had nothing to respond with, nothing. A single F-15C fighter carrying one Sparrow radar-guided missile had launched only moments ago from Langley Air Force Base, near Hampton, Virginia, but even at fuel-sucking afterburner power it would take about ten minutes to fly within missile range of the fake Executive-One. Two fighters had launched from Atlantic City, but they would not be in range for almost fifteen minutes.
Not only that, but now they had a new concern. That VFR slow-moving plane from Maryland was right on the outskirts of Andrews Air Force Base’s Class B airspace, about sixteen miles southeast of the capital. It had not announced itself on any emergency frequency, was not squawking any transponder codes, and it had not deviated from course one bit to try to avoid any restricted airspace. It was dead on course — for the capital. It had been marked now as “Bandit-2,” but like the fake Executive-One, they had no way of stopping it.
“Comm, MC, get me the White House, Capitol, and Pentagon communications centers, Flash priority alert,” Milford said. “If you need to get their damned attention, tell them the capital is under attack.”
“MC, Comm, National Command Authority Joint Emergency Communications Network, call sign ‘Palisade,’ button four,” the communications officer said just seconds later. “No problem at all convincing them something’s going on.”
“Go ahead, Leather-90, this is Palisade.”
“Palisade, this is Milford, Mission Force Commander Leather northeast sector, we have an unidentified aircraft inbound, about four minutes north… make that three minutes north of the capital.” Milford found himself hyperventilating, and he consciously slowed his breathing and got his voice back under control. “I have declared an air defense emergency for the Washington and Baltimore Class B airspace. Be advised, all of my air defense systems have come under simultaneous terrorist attack in the past few, minutes, and I have no aircraft or ground-based systems left-. | to respond. I recommend the Leadership be notified and I they evacuate to underground shelters. I am also tracking a j slow-moving target sixteen miles southeast of the capital at li fifteen hundred feet, groundspeed one hundred knots, ETA to the capital about twelve minutes. We have not been able to contact either aircraft; they are hostile, repeat, hostile aircraft. How copy?”
“Leather, I copy all, stand by.”
The response was almost instantaneous: “MC, SD, Marine Two and two other helicopters airborne from Anacostia,” Tate reported. “Three aircraft launching from Quantico.” The Anacostia Naval Station, just a few miles south of the capital, is a satellite base for HMX-1, the Marine Corps unit that flies VIP-configured helicopters from Quantico Marine Corps Air Facility, including Marine One and Marine Two, which carry the President and Vice President, to reduce their response time to the capital. Obviously, the senior director at the National Command Authority Joint Emergency Network command post was trained not to take any warning or threat lightly. The helicopters would touch down on the south lawn of the White House to take the President or Vice President; other helicopters would land on the east side of the Capitol to take any members of Congress or any justices of the Supreme Court to safety, if it was necessary. Others would land near the FBI Building, Justice Department, State Department, and the Pentagon, all to ensure that the most senior members of government, if they were still in the capital, would be safe.