She abandoned the search as two men came charging forward, shouting something.
Still kneeling, Neeley pulled up the thumper and fired.
The round was one she’d labored over: a mixture of small fléchettes and buckshot, in effect making the result a very large and lethal shotgun shell once fired.
Both men went down.
Neeley slowly got to her feet. She heard panicked voices calling out in a mixture of languages: Arabic, Pashto, and a range of others.
“Brennan!” she called out.
Someone fired from a window in the nearest barracks, the round wild and ricocheting off rocks. Neeley broke open the thumper and loaded a different shell, high explosive. She fired, the round going through the window, and the shooter wasn’t a problem anymore.
The resulting explosion blinded out the goggles for a moment.
“Brennan!”
“Here.”
Neeley followed the voice.
“Who are you?” Brennan asked. He was standing by the gate for his cage. “Let me out. Please.”
“Where is Pinnacle?”
“Oh,” Brennan wailed. He beat his fists against the side of his head as if he could smash the truth that was being forced out. “The Dark Side. It’s the Dark Side.”
“Dark Side of what?”
“Yucca Flats, Nevada. East of it. In the Nevada Test Site. No one can go there.” He giggled. “Actually, no one thinks they can go there, but you can.”
“What exactly is Pinnacle?”
And when she heard the answer, Neeley knew this was a much bigger problem than they’d thought.
Chapter 13
Of course, problems come in threes, or at least twos. Rarely onesies.
Major Truman Preston could hear the First Family screaming at each other and could care less. What worried him was that the White House was in lockdown, the president seemed a bit off his rocker, and he couldn’t get an outside line on his Department of Defense — issue cell phone. He needed to check in with his supervisor at the Pentagon, but neither cell nor landlines were working.
So he sat on the second floor of the Residence, tucked away in a corner, a position he was more than used to, and held the football on his lap. Forty-five pounds of deadweight, with the emphasis on the dead. The surface of the case was dinged and battered and bruised from years of traveling. The damn case was older than he was. You’d think someone would have made the decision to swap the old thing out for a new case. Although the interior was updated with the latest electronics, never the outside.
Tradition mattered, even in apparently trivial ways.
Despite the turmoil raging and the lack of communication, Preston was his usual calm self because they didn’t fob off forty-five pounds of worldwide destruction on people who panicked easily. He’d already had a Top Secret clearance from his work in the army. Then he had to get a Yankee White clearance in order to even be near the president, but that wasn’t that hard because it required an SSBI — Single Scope Background Investigation — same as his TS had.
But then had come the psych screenings. Don’t want a loon or potential loon carrying the football.
Don’t want someone who runs around the aisles of Air Force One screaming, “We’re all going to die,” when they encounter heavy turbulence. Or like that guy in Aliens who kept whining. Preston would have put a bullet in that fellow right from the start.
In essence, as the not very good joke went, they were looking for the human equivalent of yellow dog, a Lab that could sleep at the president’s feet with its tail in the fire and show no sign of concern.
Nope, nothing much bothered Truman Preston.
But the sight and sound of the First Family raging at each other made him a bit uncomfortable. The First Daughter, Debbie, had just stormed away from her parents, dragging a Secret Service agent by the tie into her bedroom, door slamming shut behind them. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear they were having loud, angry sex, with her parents still right next door accusing each other of all sorts of things — the stuff people really only said to each other in that last argument before divorce, when darkest feelings and truths were uttered that one could never come back from.
Except a lot of people in the House were confronting each other, just like the First Couple.
And people were running about. That was the most disturbing thing. No one ran in the White House. Not even children, although he’d heard that Kennedy’s kids had, but look how that turned out for all of them. It only took a few weeks here before everyone took on the slow, purposeful stride of power the White House exuded and they became part of the conveyor belt.
Yet he’d just seen a junior press secretary being chased by a pair of Secret Service agents as she tried to wedge open a window and climb out. They’d grabbed her, kicking and screaming, back to the others on the first floor.
So people running in the White House was not something Preston had planned for today and he, more than anyone else in the building, thought of life as a plan. A slow, deliberate relay in which he carried the baton for a while and then passed it off at the end of his shift and then got it back. Routine. Normal.
One thing he was certain of: It wasn’t going to hell in a hand-basket on his watch.
He heard the president scream at the First Lady that she was a castrating bitch. A vase came flying out of the open door to their room and Preston ducked as it shattered on the wall near him.
That, too, was not normal. Preston had been around the president and his wife for four years and the harshest thing he’d ever heard the old man say was, “Gosh darn, double toothpicks!” Preston had no clue where it came from, but it meant POTUS was upset. But now they sounded like two sailors on shore leave. And that vase had been around since Dolley Madison (he remembered every detail of his in-briefing to the building, another trait necessary to his job), so there was something up with that. The First Lady had a fit if it was even turned in the wrong direction, and now she had just smashed it.
Reluctantly but realistically, Preston got up and moved farther away, out of the thrown porcelain line of fire. (There was a lot in that room.) He wasn’t sure where was safe right now in the White House, but any place was better than where he had been. He felt a physical wrenching in his gut, a loneliness, as he moved away from the man whom he never left while carrying the football.
The football seemed heavier than usual and the room seemed to close in on him, but no one had prepared him for this. He took a seat farther down the hallway and fidgeted.
“Major Preston.”
A lesser man might have startled at the quiet voice just behind him, as if she’d snuck up on him. He recognized her and knew she always moved quietly. She had so little presence few ever noticed her, but she carried that big book, and because he carried the big briefcase, he’d felt a kinship from afar.
“Yes, ma’am?” There was also the fact that during that in-brief, he’d been told that she was the only person he was never, ever to interrupt when the president was with her.
“But what if—” he’d started to ask, and he’d been cut off at the knees.
“NEVER!”
So who the hell was she?