“I appreciate your confidence, sir. And to tell you the truth, I’m not the best of sailors anyway. Hell, that’s why I joined the air force.”
Morrison laughed and turned his steely gaze directly on Thomas. “Have you talked with your brother since he left for New York this morning?”
“I was going to try to reach him right after seeing you, sir.”
“Well I just got off the horn with him, and that bit about champagne and caviar was all in jest. He’s up to his thick neck in work, coordinating the arrival of the various security teams, verifying the identities of a group of last-minute crew replacements, and even trying to track down the source of a suspected onboard case of salmonella poisoning. And Vince will really start earning his pay when the heads of state start arriving.”
Morrison redirected his line of sight to the opposite side of the helipad and proceeded to change the subject. “Now where in the hell are those frigging grounds keepers with the security fence? I’ve got Marine One landing here in a little less than ninety minutes, and a President who’s just decided to say his goodbyes to the entire country from right out here on the South Lawn.”
The amplified crash of a cymbal seemed to underscore Morrison’s passionate rantings. Yet before the SAIC could respond to this unwanted noise, he received a call on his two-way radio’s clip-on earpiece.
Thomas watched as he pressed the miniature transmitter closer to his ear. Whatever he was hearing caused a look of serious surprise to fill his face, and Morrison peered up anxiously into the sky.
As Thomas followed his gaze, it didn’t take him long to spot the object responsible for Morrison’s anxiety. Circling directly above them, smack in the middle of one of the most restricted air corridors in the country, was a sole red and white, single-engine Cessna. Thomas guessed its altitude to be about 5,000 feet, and he wasn’t all that shocked when Samuel Morrison cried out to him.
“Lord almighty, this is all I need! Come on, Thomas. Let’s get up to the White House roof. If this gets dicey, I’m going to need to call on that air force air-traffic-control expertise of yours.”
Though Thomas was a good ten years younger than Morrison, when the ex-Green Beret took off running toward the White House, it took a full effort on his part to keep up with him. They sprinted across the South Lawn at full stride, taking the stairs leading up to the South Portico two steps at a time.
Morrison didn’t seem the least bit winded as he halted briefly on the exterior porch and took yet another scan of the sky. Thomas found himself gasping for breath as he stopped alongside Morrison. He looked skyward himself. The plane was still there, turning lazily in a tight circle, and if anything, its altitude appeared to have further dropped another 500 feet or so.
“Damn!” cursed Morrison. “You think our bomber has a pilot’s license, Thomas? I just hope to God it’s some idiotic sightseer because there’s no way I want to get Two Putt down in the box for this.”
Morrison was referring to the President’s subterranean fallout shelter.
Rarely used now except for infrequent exercises, the box was one of the few areas of the White House that Thomas had yet to visit.
The roof of the Chief Executive’s mansion was another story, Thomas having visited it in the past month during a routine inspection. The only difference was that then he was able to access it via the elevator, and not the steep enclosed stairway he soon found himself climbing.
At the top a short access way led out onto the roof. It was cooler there in the open air. Thomas was able to regain his breath while they made their way over to the steel-and-glass guardhouse. This structure served as the roofs operations center and, depending on the level of alert, a pair of uniformed Secret Service personnel were always stationed there.
This standard watch had already been reinforced by another nine agents of a special-response team. Having just arrived on the roof themselves, they were hard at work setting up their equipment. This gear included a suitcase sized SATCOM uplink, various visual amplification devices, and a variety of weapons.
Amongst this latter group, Thomas identified one of the weapons being hurriedly assembled as a Heckler and Koch PSG-1 sniper rifle. At the sniper’s side, a trio of agents were preparing their dark green Stinger missile canisters for launch.
The aircraft responsible for all this frantic activity was still clearly visible in the blue sky above them. To examine it in greater detail, Thomas accepted a pair of Zeiss binoculars from Matt Durham, the special agent in charge of the rooftop operations center. Thomas had served in the air force with Matt, and with the powerful binoculars now nestled up to his brow, Thomas focused on the airplane, all the while listening to Matt’s running commentary.
“So far we’ve been unable to either ID the aircraft or spot its serial number. The local airports have no record of it, and whoever’s flying that sucker is either deaf, experiencing radio problems, or is purposely refusing to answer us.”
Thomas estimated that the plane was somewhere between 4,500 and 5,000 feet. From what he could see of its fuselage, it looked ordinary enough, no different from the thousands of similar Cessnas that flew out of airports throughout America.
“Hasn’t National been able to make contact with them?” asked Morrison, binoculars glued to his own brow.
“That’s a negative, sir,” Durham answered. “National, Andrews, and Dulles have all had the plane on radar for the last fifteen minutes.
But all of them are still experiencing tower communications problems as a result of the unusual sunspot activity that NASA warned us about last week.”
“Sunspot activity?” Thomas repeated, his line of sight still riveted on the circling Cessna.
“That’s affirmative,” said Matt. “It seems we’re entering the next eleven-year, active-sunspot cycle with a wicked geomagnetic storm that’s wreaking havoc in our atmosphere.”
Thomas now knew the most probable reason for the uncommon air-traffic pattern over his brother’s house the day before, and he listened to Samuel Morrison’s skeptical reply.
“Sunspots aren’t the reason for that Cessna’s presence up there. Even without a radio warning, every licensed pilot in America knows that buzzing the White House is strictly verboten. My gut tells me that the occupants of that plane have a surprise in store for us, and I want to be ready for it. What are our options, Durham?”
The forty-two-year-old Indiana native lowered his binoculars before answering. “We can continue closely monitoring the Cessna, with the hope that this is all nothing but an innocent sightseeing flight, and that they’ll soon lose interest and leave the area. Or, in our next level of response, we launch our F-16s, and escort them out of the zone in that manner. And then I can always deal with the matter on my own, by having one of my men take out the Cessna with a Stinger.”
“Damn!” cursed Morrison. “I’ve got Marine One due here shortly, a presidential press conference on the South Lawn, and the First Kid’s birthday celebration to consider. If it were any other time, I might suspect tourists, but not today. Durham, call Andrews and get those F-16s in the air.”
Before Matt could carry out this directive, Thomas informed him that the tense situation was about to take an unexpected twist. His binoculars still trained on the Cessna, his words of warning were prompted by the sudden opening of the plane’s fuselage door, and the appearance inside of a fully equipped parachutist.
“We’ve got a jumper!” he shouted.
No sooner were these words spoken than the figure leaped out of the airplane. Thomas followed this descent, looking on as the freefaller’s body rushed toward terminal velocity. Just when it looked like the jumper wouldn’t have enough time to safely engage the chute, it popped open with a long snaking coil of line. A bare 3,500 feet above the South Lawn, the chute finally inflated. Thomas identified the rectangular canopy as being an MC-4 ram air model.