“Yeah, I’ve got some ideas that I want everybody to hear,” Hardcastle admitted. “I get shut off and shut down because no one wants to hear my side — they’d rather hear the watered- down, everything-is-beautiful rap coming from the White House. Yeah, I want press for the Project 2000 Task Force because they believe in what I believe in and they have the financial resources I don’t. But I’ve got an agenda, Vincenti, and that is a strong national defense, pure and simple. I’m here because this incident is just another example of government inaction, another consequence of a weakened military.”
“I’ve heard your big plans already — on TV, in the papers, on the radio, at the speeches,” Vincenti said. “But frankly it’s all garbage, because you don’t know what you’re talking about. You made the same damned mistake with the Hammerheads, Hardcastle. But you were too wrapped up in how important you were, with deploying these big-assed air ops platforms, with putting up all these radar balloons, to understand the basic concepts. You had the authority to launch air defense units for your missions, Hardcastle, but did you ever ask an air defense puke how to set up a proper air sovereignty order of battle? You had your Coast Guard guys and your Customs Service guys out there, but did you ever bring an air defense guy on board as part of your staff? Hell no.”
“I had Air Force representatives on my staff—”
“Sure — for AW ACS and OTH-B, not for the guys who really knew the air sovereignty game, us pilots in the field,” Vincenti said. “You sucked up almost the entire E-3 AWACS fleet on drug-interdiction stuff, and you took over all the long-range over-the-horizon backscatter radar ops, but you never employed the F-4s, F-106s, F-15s, and F-16 air defense fighters for your operations except when that crazy bastard Salazar used military hardware on your platforms. Plus you spent billions on all that fancy hardware, when all the time you had the best pilots and the best planes in the business already in place.”
Marc Sheehan stepped forward toward Vincenti. “I think you’ve said enough, Colonel Vincenti.”
“No, let him finish, Marc.” Hardcastle smiled. “I want to hear this. Go ahead, Al. Continue. You don’t like it. Tell me why.”
“Because you’re doing it half-assed, that’s why,” Vincenti said. “You did it half-assed wrong with the Hammerheads, and you’re doing it half-assed now. You’re still thinking two-dimensionally, still thinking in razzle-dazzle terms instead of strategic, layered, logical, multilayered structures. You had fancy, expensive tilt-rotors and drones and a few helicopters and boats, and almost nothing else. When your aviation units got into trouble, when the politicians believed your air units couldn’t do the job, your whole infrastructure was weakened and your organization collapsed. Hell, your air units were properly doing their job, and one lousy lawsuit, one lousy smuggler, in which just one of your air units was involved, brought down your entire Border Security Force in no time flat. Why? Because your basic organization was built on one foundation — your air units.
“The same thing will happen with your current plan,” Vincenti went on. “Your current plans are based on air units like the F-16 and F-15 fighters. But an expert can easily blow holes in this plan, and I think Cazaux is smart enough to get by even the toughest air patrols. You wouldn’t even survive a comparison between now and your disbanded Hammerheads.” Vincenti glared at Sheehan, then at Hardcastle. “I thought you guys were supposed to be smart. You’re advising future presidents, formulating policy and laws, spending hundreds of millions of dollars, and you can’t even see how fucked up you are.”
“Then help me fix it,” Hardcastle said. “Help me create a system to stop terrorists like Cazaux.”
“You don’t have the guts,” Vincenti said. “All I see is a bunch of bureaucrats jockeying for position. You throw your beach parties and press conferences and fund-raisers, but when it comes time to actually put the hardware on the line, you back off. I’m not going to waste my breath on a bunch of politicos whose only goal is to rack up percentage points in the polls or electoral votes.”
Sheehan, who had stepped away for a few minutes, came back and said, “Sir, we got a call from Vice President Martindale. He’s on his way back from San Francisco now. Cazaux hit another airport. Memphis International. Just a few minutes ago. They’re saying the death toll could be in the thousands this time.”
“Oh, my God…” gasped Hardcastle.
“He got a call from the President, Admiral,” Sheehan went on. “He wants you and your staff to report to the White House immediately. They want a complete briefing on your plans to set up an air defense network in the United States.” “Jesus… Marc, phone the flight crew, get the Gulf- stream ready to go, drop me off at base ops, and get the investigation team together right away,” Hardcastle said. He turned to Vincenti: “Al, you’re with me.”
“I’m not cleared to leave the base, Admiral.”
“I just cleared you,” Hardcastle said. “You’re a member of my staff, effective yesterday, and the President has just ordered you to Washington. We’ve got about five hours for you to tell me precisely what I need to do to make my air defense plan airtight. Let’s go.”
PART 3
The White House Cabinet Room
The Next Morning
“W’ve got only one thing to say to you, Admiral Hardcas- I tie,” Deputy Attorney General Elizabeth Lowe said an- Mgrily, dramatically waving a bound report in her hand, then tossing it on the Cabinet Room table in disgust just as. the door leading to the Oval Office opened and everyone got to their feet. “You must be totally insane, or at the very least so ill-informed as to defy reason and logic.” She saw the President of the United States stride in, then said to him, “Mr. President, I can’t believe you even allowed that crackpot in this room at a time like this.”
“Allow me to respond to the Deputy Attorney General’s statement, Mr. President — on the record,” Ian Hardcastle said, a slight, challenging smile on his face.
“This meeting will come to order,” the President’s chief of staff said. Lowe quietly took her seat with the others after the President was seated, glaring angrily at Ian Hardcastle. What he did not know was that Elizabeth Lowe, one of the President’s most capable political insiders, had met personally with the President just before the meeting and had already been instructed as to how this meeting was going to proceed — her tirade against Hardcastle was part of a hastily but carefully rehearsed trap for Hardcastle and his cohorts.
The members of the Executive Committee on Terrorism, the group responsible to the National Security Council and the President for all antiterrorist matters, had assembled in the White House Cabinet Room to receive the latest briefing on the hunt for Henri Cazaux. The ECT was composed of senior officials from the Departments of Treasury, Justice, State, Defense, Transportation, and Energy, along with representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council staff. Because the President had convened this meeting at the White House, most of the Cabinet itself was present along with their ECT representatives, so it was a tight fit in the Cabinet Room.
This was just the latest crisis in what seemed like an Administration plagued by problems from the very beginning, starting with a furor over the President’s attempt to drop the ban on gays in the military, to his health care package, to problems within his own White House.
His wife, for instance, known around town as the Steel Magnolia, was conspicuously absent from this and other meetings as of late. A formidable woman who was highly intelligent and, for a while, almost inseparable from her husband, the Steel Magnolia had recently been devoting all her time to extricating herself from a shady real-estate deal that was now threatening to turn into a Watergate-sized problem for the Administration. Things weren’t helped when her own counsel killed himself.