15
Oaks felt nauseated.
He heard the words but they didn’t compute. It wasn’t possible. How could it be? He had known Jim MacPherson most of his adult life. They had been through so much together. They had served side by side through perhaps the most difficult eight years of any American administration, at least since FDR’s tenure during World War II or Lincoln’s term during the Civil War. Terrorists had tried to take them both out multiple times, and nearly succeeded. But MacPherson couldn’t really be dead. Not now. Not at the pinnacle of his career.
Hadn’t they just turned a corner in the global War on Terror? Weren’t things starting to get better? With Russia neutralized, along with Iran and Syria, the world was getting quiet. Or quieter, at least. Wasn’t it?
And then it suddenly struck him. It wasn’t just MacPherson who had been killed in the blast. The First Lady must be dead too, and the MacPhersons’ daughters. Bob Corsetti. Jackie Sanchez. The entire leadership of the Republican party.
Oaks unfastened the top button of his dress shirt. He was having trouble breathing. His pulse was racing. He could barely grasp the magnitude of what was happening to his country. But the death of so many of his friends made it personal. If Washington was gone, so was Marsha Kirkpatrick at State. Scott Harris at FBI. Ken Costello at the NSC. Danny Tracker at CIA. All their staff. The entire White House staff. They were gone. All of them. He would never see them again. It was more than he could bear, but General Briggs didn’t give him time to mourn.
“Sir, I know it’s a lot to deal with,” the four-star said, empathy in his voice. “But there’s more I need to tell you.”
“Lieutenant, could you give me some air back here?” Oaks asked the lead pilot. He took a few deep breaths and tried to steel himself for what more was coming.
“Continue, General,” he said after a few moments. “I’m listening.”
Or trying to, he said to himself.
“Sir, once you’re on board Air Force One, we’ll feed you live satellite images of each of the affected cities, beginning with Los Angeles. I’ll put my experts on a videoconference to walk you through the specifics and answer every question you have. After you board, you’re going to be met by the chief U.S. district judge out of Jacksonville. I don’t have her name in front of me, but you’ll have a full dossier on her in a few minutes. She is going to administer the oath of office. We need a commander in chief immediately, sir. We’re going to war.”
“With whom, General?” Oaks demanded. “Who’s behind all this?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Briggs conceded. “Not yet. But I will soon. And when I do, I’ll give you a package of possible response options. For now, though, that’s getting ahead of ourselves. First things first. I’m so sorry to have to say this, but as best as we can tell at the moment, you have virtually no Cabinet to speak of, sir, and most of the National Security Council is dead as well.”
Oaks gasped. It wasn’t possible.
“You’re absolutely certain, General?” he asked. “Couldn’t any of them have survived?”
“No, sir, I’m afraid not,” Briggs said. “All but two members of the Cabinet were in D.C. at the moment of impact, and D.C. is gone. The White House has been completely destroyed. So have the Capitol, all of the Cabinet agencies, the Supreme Court, the FBI building. They’re gone. All of them. And Washington’s going to be uninhabitable for a century, sir, maybe longer.”
Oaks was certain he was going to be ill. He motioned to Caulfield — horrified by the bits and pieces of news he was overhearing — to get him a bottle of water as quickly as possible; then Oaks peered out the window and noticed that they were on approach not to the Jacksonville International Airport as he had expected but to the Naval Air Station, a few miles away.
All nonessential air and ground traffic had been shut down. A detachment of heavily armed Marines was moving rapidly to boost base security, and Oaks noticed that Air Force One and an unmarked Gulfstream jet were already out on one of the runways, flanked by two F/A-18 Hornets, armed with air-to-air missiles and ready for emergency takeoff. He wasn’t sure why the Gulfstream was there, but he didn’t have much time to think about it either.
He took the bottle from Caulfield’s hands, drank a third of it in a matter of seconds, and then asked, “Who’s left?”
“As far as we know, sir, only Secretaries James and Trainor are left,” the four-star continued. “Secretary James is in Boston. The SecDef is still inbound from Tokyo.”
“We need to move Lee James out of Boston—fast,” Oaks said. “I want him in a secure military facility ASAP.”
“I’m already on it, sir,” Briggs assured him, then quickly explained that in accordance with the administration’s top secret “continuity of government” plan, he had ordered Secretary James to be evacuated immediately and taken to Mount Weather, the classified underground emergency operations center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia, about seventy-five miles from Washington, D.C.
Mount Weather had been built in the 1950s for government leaders to run the country from in case of a nuclear war with the Soviets. Oaks had actually been there through numerous crises, including the Day of Devastation. He’d also run countless COG drills from there, as had Secretary James, and both knew its layout and capabilities well.
Briggs also reminded Oaks that as per the continuity of government plan, the secretary of defense was being routed to Site R, or Raven Rock, the site of the Alternate National Military Command Center, located along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, not far from Waynesboro and about ten miles from Camp David. From there, Secretary Trainor and his team would be able to run the Defense Department’s state-of-the-art underground war room as they ramped up for a nuclear revenge scenario Briggs had already dubbed “Operation Reciprocity.”
“What’s the status of the primary war room?” Oaks asked.
“The Pentagon was badly damaged, sir,” Briggs noted. “The only survivors we know of were those who were actually in the NMCC when the missile hit. I’m in contact with them but their communications systems aren’t working well. They’re understaffed. Shell-shocked. They’ve got serious radiation leakages, and it’s not clear if they’re going to be able to contain—”
“General Briggs,” Oaks suddenly interrupted, “are you telling me the Pentagon’s billion-dollar, nuclear-blast-proof war room isn’t functional?”
“Not the way it was designed to be, no; I’m afraid not, sir,” Briggs replied. “That’s why I’m sending the SecDef to Raven Rock.”
Oaks shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “How long until Trainor’s in place?”
“Another few hours, sir,” Briggs said. “But Secretary James’s plane should be wheels up in a few minutes. He’ll be secure at Mount Weather in an hour.”
“I want them both to have fighter escorts,” Oaks ordered.
“Done.”
“Good,” Oaks said. “And I want a full ground stop — no planes in the air unless they’re military or are authorized by you or Secretary Trainor. Got that?”
“We’re on it, sir,” Briggs said. “It’s going to take some time to implement. We currently have more than three thousand flights in the sky and FAA headquarters is gone. So is the Transportation Department. We’re having to contact each airport and regional air traffic control center individually. We’re telling everyone to get their planes on the ground within thirty minutes.”