But not Johnston. He got O-6 pay, straight up.
He turned off the monitor.
All his outside lines were dead, but not before he’d learned that Brennan had been taken to Deep Six, and it was highly likely the First Daughter and General Riggs were infected.
Who knew how far Cherry Tree would blossom?
There was no doubt that the cutoff was the result of the 666 call. DORKA was in external lockdown and when it was unlocked after Cherry Tree burned out here, he was going to be the one in the line of fire. He wore the rank, he was responsible. He’d lived his life by that code.
The White House.
The Pentagon.
This was bad.
Johnston hit the button on the side of his pistol, ejecting the magazine.
He knew he’d never make O-7, get that star. When he’d been given this assignment, running herd on a bunch of geeks, it was implicit. This was a dead-end, an end-of-the-career, get-ready-for-retirement slot.
All the years he’d given the army and this was his reward. To be undone by a bunch of geeks who’d never seen a day of combat.
Johnston took off his coat and carefully hung it on the hanger on the back of his locked door.
Johnston pulled open one of his drawers. He pulled out a single 9mm round.
He’d saved it for more than two decades, from the First Gulf War.
He laughed bitterly over the fact that it was now called the first. What had been the point if they’d had to go back and do it all over again?
This bullet had been in his pistol when he’d left his company CP to take a leak during the heady days when they had the Iraqis on the run.
But not all of the Iraqis had run.
A kid in an ill-fitting uniform, maybe seventeen, but no more, had run into the alley with just a bayonet in hand.
Dick still hanging out, piss dribbling, Johnston had drawn the pistol, finger on the trigger, but not been able to pull it.
It was just a kid. But he kept coming, screaming something, bayonet glinting.
Johnston had still been frozen when the kid stabbed him, knife sliding off the body armor covering his chest and slicing into his arm, causing him to drop the pistol. As the kid stabbed him again, this time in the gut, just below the end of the armor, Johnston had finally reacted, grabbed a piece of cinder block and swinging it, hitting the kid in the head, stunning him.
Then he’d kept swinging until the kid wasn’t moving anymore, his head a bloody pulp.
Johnston had slumped against the wall, bleeding from two stab wounds, the kid’s mangled head cradled in his arms, weeping. For how long he’d never known, but it couldn’t have been long, because he was able to finally compose himself, stand up, zip up, and make it back to his CP, blood dripping from his wounds and his chest and face drenched in the kid’s.
Johnston looked over at the rows and rows of medals lining the jacket chest.
He’d gotten the Purple Heart for the knife wounds and the Bronze Star for killing an enemy combatant in hand-to-hand combat. He still remembered an interesting tidbit about medals, although he could no longer recall the source: Napoleon was credited with inventing the modern version of medals, pieces made of ribbon and metal, awarded for bravery. In medieval days, bravery was rewarded in real terms — with land, with riches, with titles that were worth something. But now a man was supposed to be satisfied with just a piece of cloth?
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. It was what the cloth represented.
Johnston stared at the two ribbons at the top of several rows of awards.
What exactly did they represent?
He hadn’t thought of that incident in Iraq in years. Not consciously. A secret buried deep inside, in the depth of his soul, that he’d wanted no one to ever know about, least of all himself.
It was a visceral revulsion of himself.
The truth.
He pulled back the slide on the pistol that locked it and dropped the bullet in the chamber. Then he hit the release, slamming the receiver in place.
Loading it.
Locked and loaded.
Johnston got up and turned the uniform jacket around, hiding the medals.
Then he put the gun to his temple.
His military aide had stomped out in a huff because General Riggs had just told him he was the most worthless human being ever and to find Brennan. It was strange that Riggs had told the full-bird colonel off like that because, like all aides, he was something important to someone important (a nephew, an important wife, holder of some good blackmail) and that mattered more than if they could do the job.
Still it was kind of funny that Riggs had finally bothered to tell him what he’d always thought. Outside of that aide who had been foisted upon him, every member of Riggs’s inner circle was intensely loyal to him, owing their careers to his rising star. As he went, so went they. They also shared his philosophy that the military needed to be given a freer rein to deal with the problems in the world, that the civilians could fuck up a soup sandwich.
Let the aide sulk. That just proved the point that he was useless, taking things personally. The damn idiot was an aide to the vice chairman of the JCS. Didn’t he realize his ticket was already punched by some rabbi somewhere who had the strings to get him that job? Riggs might be number two in the Department of Defense but he knew who controlled the purse strings and also knew who got the lucrative contracts and could offer jobs to retiring generals to make lots of money.
The game was rigged, and it disgusted Riggs, but like the Robert Heinlein quote hanging on his wall said, “Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet, you can’t win.”
The key, of course, was that each man’s idea of winning was different. Money, unlike most people, interested Riggs not in the slightest.
Riggs prided himself that he’d never been anyone’s aide. He’d worked his way to this position. He was a good soldier and a smart soldier, meaning he did the damn job, not aided someone else to do it. Although, technically, he was number two to the chairman, Riggs was the one who did the real work.
Like the whole Cherry Tree thing. Think the chairman would go within a mile of that?
His intercom crackled. “Sir?” The terse inquiry still emanated hurt feelings.
Fucking loser, Riggs thought. “What?”
“I’ve got news. It’s important.”
“Get in here.”
Riggs shoved the last bit of candy bar into his mouth as the door opened and the colonel rushed in.
“The White House is in lockdown!”
It didn’t occur to him to ask the first question most normal people would ask: Why? “What about the Emergency Operations Center?”
The aide shook his head. “Just the main building. They’ve cut off the East and West Wings. The only news came from McBride — something about a surprise emergency exercise by the Secret Service to test the security system.”
“Bullshit. Where’s Brennan?”
“The Secret Service took him into custody after he attacked the president’s daughter.”
Riggs smiled. “Finally grew a pair, did he?”
But that was also a preemptive strike, he suddenly realized.
It was adding up. They were coming after him. Locking the president in and coming after the only man who could save the country.
“Who’s got the football right now?”
The aide blinked. “Sir?”
“The Duty, dammit.” Said that way, with a capital D, got through to the aide.
“Major Preston, sir.”
Riggs nodded. “Good, good. He’s a good man. Reliable and knows his priorities. He’s one of ours. Where’s the vice president?”