“We have to be sure.”
“I am sure.”
“You’re underestimating him.” She mashed a button on the edge of the conference table, connecting her to Air Force One’s airborne communications center. “This is the national security advisor. The president wants current status on operation Three Kings.”
The Marine colonel on the other end answered immediately. “Stand by one, ma’am.”
Metzger checked his watch. “The first bomber should almost be to its target. The other two are airborne by now, as well.” He lit another cigarette.
The colonel’s voice sounded from an overhead speaker built into the ceiling of the president’s cabin. “Ma’am, aircraft one is inbound to target, twenty-seven minutes from release. Aircraft two and three are en route to their release points… Aircraft two will reach its target in…” A pause. “… twenty minutes. Aircraft three will reach its target in seventeen minutes.”
“Have there been any attempts to recall the aircraft?” Jessie asked.
“Ma’am?” the colonel answered, obviously confused. He knew only the president could order a recall. There had been no such order given.
“Has anyone tried to interfere with this strike!”
“The missions are progressing as planned, ma’am. No deviations.”
“Thank you, Colonel. Keep us apprised.” She closed the comm channel and turned to the general. “Okay, we know it wasn’t a recall code. But what could it have been for?”
“It really doesn’t matter,” Metzger said, glancing at his watch again. “There’s no stopping them now.” He smiled, thin lips sliding back to reveal small, yellow-stained teeth.
If it was a code between the president and the vice president, Jessie thought, there has to be something happening right now that we’re not aware of. She’d devoted her life to this very moment, the moment when the world would fall into an unrecoverable state of chaos, and she, and those like her, would enable the end of one chapter in history and the start of another.
So, so close.
But something was wrong.
She could feel it.
She couldn’t let it fail now.
She turned to the president and pulled the vial from her blouse pocket, along with another surgical glove.
“How many of those things do you have?”
She ignored Metzger and placed an entire drop into her palm.
Andrew struggled to turn his head to face her, his eyes blank, expressionless. His mouth hung open in a drug-induced sigh.
She tilted his head back and with her thumb and index finger, spread his right eyelid wide open. The eye lolled lazily in the socket, unfocused.
“What are you doing? You’re going to push him over the edge!”
“No. No, I’m not. He needs more… persuasion.”
“We still need him,” Metzger said. “He has to be able to function.”
“He’ll sleep after I get what I want. He’ll be fine.” Jessie held her hand over the president’s open eye and tilted her palm. The drop trickled off the glove and into his eye. She closed the eyelid and held it closed.
She quickly repeated the procedure with his other eye.
The drug quickly entered Andrew’s bloodstream. Jessie had never used this much of the substance before.
“It’s time to talk to me, Andrew, time to tell me the truth.” She kissed his slack, open mouth. “Tell me what you meant, Andrew… What did you tell her? She’s a threat, Andrew. You need to stop her.”
The president slowly raised his head and opened his eyes. The blankness was gone. They were clear and focused.
“Jessie?”
“That’s it… Tell me, Andrew, tell me now…”
Metzger tossed his half-burned cigarette onto the floor and quickly lit another. He leaned back against the cabin and checked his watch for a third time.
Twenty minutes until their time would finally come. Three American cities would soon be incinerated by nuclear weapons.
He watched the second hand sweep across the face of his watch.
There really was no way to stop it now.
CHAPTER 65
“Excuse me, Admiral?”
“What is it, Colonel?”
“We just received an urgent message from Cutter.” Cutter was the code name for the vice president.
“Cutter? Did you happen to ask her why the living hell she’s taken her aircraft off of her prescribed orbit? I can’t keep track of all the aircraft in my airspace with her roaming around on her own and disregar—”
“Sir, you need to see this.”
Keaton Grierson took the message from the colonel’s hand and quickly read it.
The simple, five-letter word immediately chilled him.
When he’d been stationed in Omaha, Nebraska, as part of USSTRATCOM a few years before, he’d run across the term Aksarben a few times. Apparently, it was the name of an old 1920s Omaha indoor horseracing track that had been used for different sporting events in the city over the years. Aksarben, it came to dawn on him, was Nebraska spelled backwards. He’d thought the trick was quite humorous.
This, however, was not.
The message spelled out S-U-T-O-P. POTUS — the acronym for President of the United States—spelled backwards.
Only one person could release this message.
And it had only one meaning.
“Is this verified, Colonel?”
“Yes, sir. Verified. The vice president is coming up on a Flash Immediate Decision Conference within the minute.”
“Jesus Christ. Where are the B-2s right now?”
“Aircraft one is nineteen minutes from release over Minneapolis-St. Paul, aircraft two is twelve minutes from release over Oklahoma City, and aircraft three is nine minutes from release over Little Rock.”
There’s not enough time. “Colonel, I want every fighter in the air that’s close enough to intercept vectored toward those three B-2s now!” He stood and headed toward the conference room two doors down from his office, the colonel a step behind. “Supersonic, weapons hot. Firing orders will come from me. Understood?”
“Most of them aren’t armed for air-to-air, Admiral. They’re striking the—”
“They can ram the friggin’ B-2s if they need to!”
“Got it, skipper.”
Grierson made it to his conference room just as the vice president flashed up on his screen.
“Gentlemen.” Allison wasted no time. “The president is under duress. I have reason to believe that General Thad Metzger and Ms. Jessie Hruska have compromised the president. A short time ago, I challenged President Smith using the Eagle Seven Four codes, and he responded with the duress phrase. This has been verified by my onboard controllers. Because of this, I am exercising my authority under the 1974 Emergency Wartime Command and Control Act, effective immediately. Your orders are to take all necessary and prudent action to stop operation Three Kings.”
The act was devised shortly after the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Its purpose was to provide a check and balance over the control — and more importantly, the use — of nuclear weapons. The theory was, a president whose mental faculties were less than reliable — as Nixon’s reportedly were during the Watergate scandal and the days leading up to his resignation — had to be watched like a hawk when it came to using the “nuclear football.” Under the original version of the act, the vice president could keep the president from executing the nation’s nuclear forces if he or she thought the president was acting irrationally. Over the years, the act had been changed to prevent a president under duress from executing nuclear forces; the only way a president’s order could be countermanded would be by a code phrase passed to the vice president from the president. The act was known only by the president, the vice president, and a few select military officers in key positions. The SUTOP message was the end result — a simple five-letter phrase that meant the president was under duress, and the orders he or she had issued were not to be followed. It was one of the most highly classified secrets the nation possessed.