Sherman turned back to the secure speaker phone to the White House bunker. “Mr. President, we may have made a grave error. The nuke may not have been off-loaded from a Metro train; it may have been on-loaded. We believe that the Pentagon is the primary target, and it will be an underground detonation. That will se us wind shift factoring, but the Metro tunnels will direct the fallout to all nearby stops, including the U.S. Capitol.”
He hung up as a quiet sort of pandemonium filled the emergency briefing chamber during the next minute. No shouting. No shoving. Just an urgent, desperate scramble at the consoles. Nobody was heading for the exits.
“General!” His aide tried to pull him away. “You should get to the bunker!”
“If there’s a nuke on that train,” said Sherman, “those bunker walls might as well be wax paper.”
“What else can we do, sir?”
Sherman held up one finger and picked up the phone. “Get me the National Archives.”
9
More than 200 students from the Presidential Classroom for Young Americans crowded beneath the rotunda around the gold display showcasing the U.S. Constitution. Their teacher read from the archives literature.
“Every night at closing time the documents are lowered into a fifty-ton vault designed to protect them from fire, shock, heat, water and nuclear explosion,” Mrs. Chan recited. “The vault was dedicated in 1952 by President Harry Truman, who called it ‘as safe from destruction as anything that the wit of modern man can devise.’”
Suddenly, from down the corridor came a shout.
“Away from the glass!”
Sergeant Wanda Randolph, head of the Capitol Police’s special reconn and tactics or RATS squad that patrolled the underground tunnels the U.S. Capitol Complex, sprinted across the rotunda’s marble floor, waving her 50 caliber sniper rifle at the screaming, fleeing kids.
She tried to radio her man at the Pentagon as she ran, “Omar!”
“We’re on it, boss,” Omar’s voice crackled in her earpiece. “Get yourself some cover!”
“I got a hole to crawl into,” she said. “Just one more thing.”
Using whatever speed was left from her days as a track star at Howard University, Randolph ran the race of her life toward the display, knocking over two kids.
“Hey!” Mrs. Chan yelled.
Randolph hurdled three kids crouched in front of the display in one jump. She unlocked a switch and breathlessly watched the display case sink into the floor and drop hundreds of feet down its shaft.
10
Colonel Kozlowski and Captain Linda Li jogged across the tarmac to the awaiting Advanced Airborne Command Post. Unlike the tamer, civilian Air Force One, the militarized E-4B jumbo jet, code-named Nightwatch, was built to soar over mushroom clouds.
“I was worried we were going to have to take off without you, sir,” Li said.
“You saved my lifeKozlowski told his diminutive communications officer. “Again.”
Li smiled. “Any time, sir.”
Kozlowski had been staring into the barrel of his gun back at the hotel when the call from Li came in. Out of habit he picked up and heard her clear, chipper voice letting him know there had been a roster change. It seemed that General Marshall was logging a shift aboard Looking Glass that morning, and would the colonel mind reporting to base as a Suburban was waiting for him at the hotel entrance. “Unless you have something better to do, sir,” she added.
Kozlowski had looked down at his gun again. He suspected that Brad Marshall was not why she really called. She was always looking out for him, even though he knew she didn’t approve of his off-duty life. Hell, how did she even know he was at the Hay-Adams? He swore she was psychic. She called it the spiritual gift of discernment. But she had aroused his curiosity. Brad Marshall was never one to languish in obscurity, even for eight hours. So Kozlowski had switched on his gun’s safety and told her he’d be right down.
Now he found that he had arrived in the middle of a full-blown Alert One nuclear situation.
“Where’s the President?”
“No time, sir,” Li said.
Of course not, thought Kozlowski. He himself would never have made it. God bless Captain Li.
The whine of the engines was deafening now as they approached the towering, 231-foot-long plane.
Li shouted, “We have orders to pick up the Secretary of Defense at Edwards AFB.”
Kozlowski nodded as they ran up the hydraulic steps into the belly of the fuselage. They made their way through a long communications section manned by six Air Force officers and then entered the battle staff compartment. Fifteen more officers, conducting their pre-flight checks, saluted.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Kozlowski shouted and strapped himself into a jump seat.
Li plunked down next to him, breathless. The GE 80-series engines wound up into a deep-throated roar and the jumbo jet started moving down the runway.
Kozlowski leaned back against his seat as the plane left the ground. He never felt more alive in his life.
11
President Rhinehart paced the floor in the bunker while his national security adviser gave him the latest.
“Marshall is on Looking Glass, Mr. President.”
Rhinehart nodded. Whatever political challenges the general had presented him, he was a genuine military asset. “And my doomsday plane?”
“Nightwatch just took off from Andrews,” Jack Natori said.
“Send Nightwatch to California to pick up Bald Eagle at Edwards,” said Rhinehart.
At that moment the tumblers in the vault door began to click-clack. Rhinehart and company looked at each other in surprise.
Rhinehart said, “I thought everybeen accounted for.”
“Everybody has been accounted for, Mr. President,” said chief of staff Stan Black.
“Then who’s that?” Rhinehart demanded.
All eyes turned toward the vault door as it slowly opened to reveal the bald, bullet-headed Secretary of Defense, Ryan O’Donnell.
“What have I missed?” O’Donnell asked in response to the incredulous stares.
Rhinehart gasped, “You’re supposed to be in California!”
“My kid’s in the hospital with the flu,” the Secretary of Defense explained. “I was going to catch a later flight. Central Locator said we’re covered.”
There was no response, only horrified expressions around the bunker.
O’Donnell stared back blankly. “What?!”
12
The Blue Line Metro shot down the tunnel, packed with suits and uniforms, all oblivious to the flashing red light behind the front axle of the chassis as the train screeched along the rails.
Inside the cars, faces were buried behind the pages of the Washington Post when the intercom crackled and the conductor’s voice announced:
“Next stop, the Pentagon.”
The caution lights lining the edge of the platform ahead began to blink. As the commuters began to queue up, a beam of light from the Metro stabbed out of the tunnel.
Six Special Forces troops burst onto the platform and fanned out, parting the sea of commuters into waves of panic and confusion. Their commanding officer, Lt. Matt Omar, was once an Azerbaijani national in Baku, trained by the CIA and Oklahoma National Guard to fight terrorists, before Wanda Randolph of the U.S. Capitol Police brought him stateside and helped him become an American citizen. She had argued that anyone already putting his life on the line for America deserved it.