Trent Warner had been dozing on his stateroom’s cot when this call arrived. He snapped awake instantly upon hearing the gravelly voice of his SIOP advisor, his mind already considering the manner in which they’d react to this serious infraction.
“Who’s the call directed to?” he queried.
“Iron Man One,” answered Hewlett.
“Shit!” cursed the Chairman.
“Major, tap the call, and quietly assemble the security team. We’ll meet at the forward entry area.
And let’s pray that someone up there is only schmoozing with an old friend on Uncle Sam’s dime.”
“… I’ll try to get that information to you. General … So I understand, sir. I’d rather not reveal their names at the moment, but rest assured that they’re trusted members of the battle staff…”
Coach got the impression that Spencer appeared to be genuinely stunned by their accusations, and if he was in fact a coup insider, he was certainly doing a superb job of expressing his shock. The General was in the process of relaying his own suspicions regarding the Chairman’s actions of late when Coach noticed a newcomer at the head of the upper-deck stairway. One glimpse at the pistol this individual carried in his right hand was all Coach needed to abruptly disconnect the line. He was just hanging up the handset when the head of the airplane’s security team emerged from the stairs, followed by Major Hewlett and the Chairman.
“Sergeant, arrest that man!” ordered the Chairman, pointing at the stunned pilot.
Coach tried his best to control his pounding pulse, and he raised his hands overhead and addressed Admiral Warner in his most innocent manner.
“Excuse me, sir. Did I do something wrong?”
“How about treason for starters!” replied the Chairman, who beckoned toward Coach and spoke to the security man.
“Sergeant, handcuff the Major and hold him in protective custody in my stateroom until further notice.”
“Sergeant,” countered Coach, “it’s Admiral Warner who’s to be arrested. As aircraft commander, I officially charge the Chairman with complicity to carry out a coup against the government of the United States of America.”
A look of confusion momentarily crossed the Sergeant’s face, and the Chairman alertly retorted, “Sergeant, I said to handcuff Major Foard and to detain him in my stateroom. The man’s delirious, his paranoid rantings the byproduct of Russian misinformation.”
The barrel-chested security man had no choice but to carry out the Chairman’s instructions, so he handcuffed the pilot’s wrists behind his back and prepared to escort him down the stairway.
Coach knew that it would be a waste of energy to further resist, and he looked at the Chairman and shook his head.
“Admiral, why don’t you admit to yourself that the game is over? I know all about your involvement with the assassination of the President and the attempted murder of Andrew Chapman.
You might lock me away, but rest assured that I’m not the only one in a position of power who knows about your misdirected coup attempt.”
“From what little I’ve heard already, it appears that you’ve already managed to pass on quite an earful to General Spencer,” revealed the Chairman, an icy coolness to his glance.
“I’m certain that the good General will be fascinated to hear all about your nervous breakdown. Major. Do you promise to go quietly, or must we incapacitate you with a narcotic?”
Coach reluctantly bowed his head, signaling his wish to proceed without further resistance. As he was led down the stairway, the Chairman looked at his SIOP advisor and discreetly whispered:
“Major, before I attempt damage control with the good General, I think it’s time to contact the U.S.S. Truman. Under the circumstances, I feel it’s only prudent that both Nightwatch and Iron Man One have a proper escort, and a flight of Tomcats should be sufficient. Then we’d better get Lassiter to take Foard’s place inside the flight deck, and find out who the hell the Major’s been working with inside this airplane.”
Chapter 42
Thirty years of military service had done little to prepare Lowell Spencer for the perplexing situation that he currently faced. He had just completed the second of two bizarre phone calls, both of which had originated from Nightwatch 676.
The first of these calls was made by the 747’s senior pilot.
Spencer knew Major William Foard personally. He was a likable young man, with a propensity for wire-rimmed sunglasses and unauthorized headgear. Both of them had been B-52 commanders in the earlier stages of their careers. Although the General had never flown with Foard, for the Yale graduate to go from nuclear-armed bombers to an important assignment such as Nightwatch spoke well for his many talents.
With such vast responsibilities to shoulder, Foard wouldn’t be the type of person prone to baseless accusations. That was only one of the reasons Spencer had listened closely to the wild tale he had hurriedly related — a story purporting that Admiral Trent Warner was currently attempting to orchestrate a coup d’etat.
According to Foard, it was the Chairman who was responsible for killing the President and attempting to assassinate the Vice President, who was still alive in the Missouri Ozarks and running for his very life.
Foard had also stated that he had solid proof that the Chairman had recently contacted his fellow coup forces in the Ozarks, and had also alerted various military units throughout the CONUS. And to take this wild tale one step further, he claimed that Warner had also created an SIOP file, in which both the Ozarks and the airspace above Iron Man One’s patrol sector off the coast of Georgia were to be targeted by a pair of the U.S.S. Rhode Island’s Tridents.
Before he could learn the grounds for Foard’s accusations, the pilot had abruptly signed off, leaving Spencer seated at his console inside TACAMO’s battle-staff compartment, scratching his head in pure bewilderment. There was always the possibility that Foard was telling the truth — that his facts were accurate — and that a coup was indeed being orchestrated by Warner aboard Nightwatch. Coach could also be the victim of misinformation.
Or he could have snapped.
It was this latter condition that Trent Warner had just called to warn him about. During the course of this curt, one sided conversation, the Chairman revealed his reluctant decision to have Foard placed in protective custody because of a complete nervous breakdown.
Spencer cautiously acknowledged the receipt of a recent phone call from Foard. He also admitted that the pilot had made some pretty wild accusations. To appease the Chairman, he readily accepted his apology for Foard’s aberrant behavior, and they signed off without further mention of the entire incident.
In his thirty years of Air Force service, he had certainly seen his fair share of men who had taken the sudden, unexpected plunge into insanity. No matter the stringent, psychological tests that all pilots had to pass both before and after they received their wings, the pressures of the Cold War had broken many a bomber pilot’s spirit. Perfectly sane one moment, completely deranged the next, they suffered the cost of doing business under stress levels that no man was impervious to.
Foard could very well have succumbed to the enormous pressures of his job, and this breakdown could have generated the paranoid delusions he had so passionately warned about. Yet what if he hadn’t gone insane and the coup was real? Was Trent Warner trying to pull the wool over his adversary’s eyes?
Spencer couldn’t forget how unwilling the Chairman had been to place the blame on the Russians for assassinating the President. He had even balked at accusing the Russians of colliding with the U.S.S. Rhode Island, and had subsequently resisted altering the nation’s alert status in the face of these belligerent acts. Was the reason for his hesitance based on an unwillingness to go to war with Russia for acts that his own forces were responsible for? Spencer hated the idea of having to even consider such a distasteful scenario, though he’d be negligent for ignoring it completely.