“But the Secret Service is armed with antiaircraft missiles, isn’t it?” one anchor asked.
“If you’ve got an eighteen-wheeler heading for you at sixty miles an hour, and you shoot out one of the tires on the trailer, that doesn’t stop the truck, does it?” the pilot answered, noting the look of concentrated intelligence on ‘
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the face of a highly paid journalist who understood little more than what appeared on his TelePrompTer. “Three hundred tons of aircraft doesn’t just stop, okay?”
“So, there was no way to stop it?” the anchor asked with a twisted face.
“None at all.” The pilot could see that the reporter didn’t understand, but he couldn’t come up with anything to clarify matters further.
The director, in his control room off of Nebraska Avenue, changed cameras to follow a pair of Guardsmen bringing another body down the steps. An assistant director was keeping an eye on that set of cameras, trying to maintain a running tally of the number of bodies removed. It was now known that the bodies of President and Mrs. Durling had been recovered and were at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for autopsy–required by law for wrongful death–and disposition. At network headquarters in New York, every foot of videotape of or about Durling was being organized and spliced for presentation throughout the day. Political colleagues were being sought out and interviewed. Psychologists were taken on to explain how the Durling children could deal with the trauma, and then expanded their horizons to talk about the impact of the event on the country as a whole, and how people could deal with it. About the only thing not examined on the television news was the spiritual aspect; that many of the victims had believed in God and attended church from time to time was not worthy of air time, though the presence of many people in churches was deemed newsworthy enough for three minutes on one network–and then, because each was constantly monitoring the others for ideas, that segment was copied by the others over the next few hours.
IT ALL CAME down to this, really, Jack knew. The numbers only added individual examples, identical to this one in magnitude and horror. He’d avoided it for as much of the day as had been possible, but finally his cowardice had run out.
The Durling kids hovered between the numbness of
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denial, and terror of a world destroyed before their eyes as they’d watched their father on TV. They’d never see Mom and Dad again. The bodies were far too damaged for the caskets to be open. No last good-byes, no words, just the traumatic removal of the foundation that held up their young lives. And how were children supposed to understand that Mom and Dad weren’t just Mom and Dad, but were–had been–something else to someone else, and for that reason, their deaths had been necessary to someone who hadn’t known or cared about the kids?
Family members had descended on Washington, most of them flown in by the Air Force from California. Equally shocked, they nevertheless, in the presence of children, had to summon from within themselves the strength to make things somewhat easier for the young. And it gave them something to do. The Secret Service agents assigned to JUNIPER and JUNIOR were probably the most traumatized of all. Trained to be ferociously protective of any “principal,” the agents who looked after the Durling kids–more than half were women–carried the additional burden of the normal solicitude any human held for any child, and none of them would have hesitated a microsecond to give his or her life to protect the youngsters–in the knowledge that the rest of the Detail would have weapons out and blazing. The men and women of this sub-detail had played with the kids, had bought them Christmas and birthday presents, had helped with homework. Now they were saying good-bye, to the kids, to the parents, and to colleagues. Ryan saw the looks on their faces, and made a mental note to ask Andrea if the Service would assign a psychologist to them.
“No, it didn’t hurt.” Jack was sitting down so that the kids could look level into his eyes. “It didn’t hurt at all.”
“Okay,” Mark Durling said. The kids were immaculately dressed. One of the family members had thought it important that they be properly turned out to meet their father’s successor. Jack heard a gasp of breath, and his peripheral vision caught the face of an agent–this one a man–who was on the edge of losing it. Price grabbed his arm and moved him toward the door, before the kids could take note of it.
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“Do we stay here?”
“Yes,” Jack assured him. It was a lie, but not the sort to hurt anyone. “And if you need anything, anything at all, you can come and see me, okay?”
The boy nodded, doing his best to be brave, and it was time to leave him to his family. Ryan squeezed his hand, treating him like the man he ought not to have become for years, for whom the duties of manhood were arriving all too soon. The boy needed to cry, and Ryan thought he needed to do that alone, for now.
Jack walked out the door into the oversized hall of the bedroom level. The agent who’d left, a tall, rugged-looking black man, was sobbing ten feet away. Ryan went over to him.
“You okay?”
“Fuck–sorry–I mean–shit!” the agent shook his head, ashamed at the display of emotion. His father had been lost in an Army training accident at Fort Rucker, Price knew, when he was twelve years old, and Special Agent Tony Wills, who’d played tight end at Grambling before joining the Service, was unusually good with kids. At times like this, strengths often became weaknesses.
“Don’t apologize for being human. I lost my mom and dad, too. Same time,” Ryan went on, his voice dreamy and uneven with fatigue. “Midway Airport, 737 landed short in snow. But I was all grown up when it happened.”
“I know, sir.” The agent wiped his eyes and stood erect with a shudder. “I’ll be okay.”
Ryan patted him on the shoulder and headed for the elevator. To Andrea Price: “Get me the hell out of here.”
The Suburban headed north, turning left onto Massachusetts Avenue, which led to the Naval Observatory and the oversized Victorian-gingerbread barn which the country provided for the sitting Vice President. Again, it was guarded by Marines, who let the convoy through. Jack walked into the house. Cathy was waiting at the entry. She only needed one look.
“Tough one?”
All Ryan could do was nod. He held her tight, knowing that his tears would start soon. His eyes caught the
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knot of agents around the periphery of the entry hall of the house, and it occurred to him that he’d have to get used to them, standing like impassive statues, present in the most private of moments. / hate this job.
BUT BRIGADIER GENERAL Marion Diggs loved his. Not everyone had stood down. As the Marine Barracks in Washington had gone to a high level of activity, then to be augmented from the sprawling base at Quantico, Virginia, so other organizations remained busy or became busier, for they were people who were not really allowed to sleep anyway–at least not all of them at once. One of these organizations was at Fort Irwin, California. Located in the high Mojave Desert, the base really did sprawl, over an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. The landscape was bleak enough that ecologists had to struggle to find an ecology there among the scrawny creosote bushes, and over drinks even the most dedicated of that profession would confess to finding the surface of the moon far more interesting. Not that they hadn’t made his life miserable, Diggs thought, fingering his binoculars. There was a species of desert tortoise, which was distinguished from a turtle somehow or other (the general didn’t have a clue), and which soldiers had to protect. To take care of that, his soldiers had collected all the tortoises they could find and then relocated them to an enclosure large enough that the reptiles probably didn’t notice the fence at all. It was known locally as the world’s largest turtle bordello. With that out of the way, whatever other wildlife existed at Fort Irwin seemed quite able to look after itself. The occasional coyote appeared and disappeared, and that was that. Besides, coyotes were not endangered.
The visitors were. Fort Irwin was home to the Army’s National Training Center. The permanent residents of that establishment were the OpFor, “the opposing force.” Originally two battalions, one of armor and the other of mechanized infantry, the OpFor had once styled itself the “32nd Guards Motor Rifle Regiment,” a Soviet designa-
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tion, because at its opening in the 1980s, the NTC had been designed to teach the U.S. Army how to fight, survive, and prevail in a battle against the Red Army on the plains of Europe. The soldiers of the “32nd” dressed in Russian-style uniforms, drove Soviet-like equipment (the real Russian vehicles had proved too difficult to maintain, and American gear had been modified to Soviet shapes), employed Russian tactics, and took pride in kicking the hell out of the units that came to play on their turf. It wasn’t strictly fair. The OpFor lived here and trained here, and hosted regular units up to fourteen times per year, whereas the visiting team might be lucky to come here once in four years. But nobody had ever said war was fair.