“We’re good, sir. We have more cases of ammunition in a bunker on the far side of the airfield. I’ll pull together a work detail and resupply the armory as soon as you leave. Don’t worry about us, sir. We’ll defend our base.”
Dutch sighed, wondering if they really would. He doubted their fuel reserves would last more than a month, the generators running night and day. Without food shipments coming from the outside, the base would quickly burn through their stores of fresh food and MREs. While foraging on their base, Dutch estimated that Offutt had a couple hundred pallets of Meals Ready to Eat and those would disappear fast with almost 9,000 servicemen and women, plus dependents, relying upon them as their only source of food.
No matter how strong or prepared, everyone would suffer given the collapse of modern civilization. Even in the middle of Oklahoma, Dutch guessed that Offutt Air Force Base probably got half their food from Mexico and California, which might as well be on the dark side of the moon now that trucks weren’t running. In a thousand ways, no one had contemplated since the Great Depression, modern man would be sucker punched over and over with critical needs they had long forgotten in the comfortable haze of global shipping and Amazon Prime.
Even the American military.
23
While Dutch gathered supplies, Sharon McAdams had been working through the complement and crew of Air Force One, leaving most of them at Offutt Air Base and keeping only those people absolutely necessary to a recovery of the United States. Some had resisted the idea of leaving the President’s side. Others had been more than happy to get off the sinking ship. One despondent man had been driven to self-destruction already. The blood stain still hadn’t been washed out of the carpet in the office section of the plane.
As the plane prepared to depart, Sharon debriefed her husband in the Oval Office.
“Sam Greaney showed up with five support men instead of the four you agreed to,” Sharon said, her shoulders pitched forward in aggravation.
Dutch sighed. He would love nothing more than to kick Sam off the plane, his resignation letter in hand. The trust between the two men had taken serious hits in the last few days, and it would most likely never recover—no matter how successful they were in restitching the fabric of the nation.
But the trouble of replacing Sam at this point was far greater than the trouble of making their strained relationship work. Dutch owed it to America to put aside his annoyance with the man and to get both their backs behind the work at hand. Restoring the broken union would require the military, and nobody understood the moving parts of the military better than Sam Greaney.
“It’s okay. Let it be,” Dutch tried to assuage her concern, though he knew it to be futile. Sharon kept her own counsel, and if she were uncomfortable with a scenario, nothing Dutch could say would make much difference.
“Jeff Crane’s wife and daughter died in a looter attack in Fairfax,” Sharon reported, her eyes turning down at the corners.
Dutch closed his eyes and laid his head back against the office chair, picturing the woman and her child perishing in a state of fear and violence, not fifteen miles from the White House.
“My God, Sharon. I should’ve done more… the worst part: I don’t even know who Jeff Crane is.”
“He’s the lead pilot, Dutch. He’s been flying us in Air Force One for two years.”
“Okay, yes. I apologize. I wasn’t thinking straight. Of course, Colonel Crane. How is he holding up?”
“He’s a patriot. He does what he must for his country… just like you.” Sharon reached over the desk and put her hand on Dutch’s. “Did you get done what you needed to do at Offutt?”
They both knew what he had been doing and they both were reluctant to say it out loud—as though thinking of their family while the country suffered was a dirty secret. “Yes, I did. Teddy and I gathered what we could. I hope we didn’t leave the base short.”
“It’s just an insurance policy, Dutch. Now you can focus on just one thing: fixing what is broken. Right?” Sharon looked him in the eyes, still holding his hand, lending him some of her iron strength.
“Yes. Let’s get to work. Did Robbie make it back aboard?”
“Of course he did. A thousand horses couldn’t pull him away from your side.” Sharon smiled. “I think he’s a new man now that he’s had a shower.”
“Are we fully resupplied?” Dutch asked. In these two hours, she had become the head of the logistics team aboard Air Force One.
“Yes. They’re loading the last of the pallets you sent, and then we’ll be ready to take off. Can I get you anything before they make us put on our seatbelts?”
“Did the flight attendants stay with the plane?” Dutch raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“Nope. We’re a skeleton crew now. We have our pilot, co-pilot, Sam Greaney and his men, our family, Robbie and Janet, and your secret service detail… I couldn’t get them to stay at the airbase no matter how hard I argued.”
“Men and their duty…” Dutch said, his own sense of duty inspired by the commitment of his protective detail. “Let’s get America back.”
24
Revived and recommitted, Dutch’s team reconvened in the conference room the moment Air Force One reached cruising altitude and resumed its racetrack loop around the troubled American skies.
“First,” Dutch ordered, “what’s our command and control plan from here? We can’t stay in the air forever. The base commander at SAC told me the network of U.S. air bases is running low on maintenance and pre-flight personnel for the refueling flights, and that they might not be capable of sustaining midair refueling much longer.”
Sam Greaney stood and pointed toward the Southwestern quadrant of the map. “I’ve taken the liberty of sending a regiment of M1 Abrams main battle tanks from Fort Bliss to meet us at Cannon Air Force Base, about a hundred miles east of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The location is far enough away from population centers that we won’t be forced to spend a lot of energy protecting our command and control base. The tanks should be more than enough protection. Also, winter won’t be a problem that far south. We can dig in at Cannon and re-establish control with a maximum amount of resource and a minimum amount of friction.”
“All right.” Dutch pushed the meeting forward. “Please give me a report on foreign threats and enemy activity.”
Sam Greaney addressed the small group seated around the conference table. “We still have no actionable intelligence that indicates any one foreign instigator over another. We’re operating on the theory that the Russians launched the power grid hack, but it could’ve been the North Koreans or even the Chinese. The Iranians and Saudis are bludgeoning one another back to the time of Mohammed, so I really doubt either of them had grand designs on destroying the U.S.”
“Is anyone approaching our territory?”
“Well,” Sam rubbed his chin. “The Chinese are putting to port in a fairly heavy way, but everyone’s putting their naval forces to port, given the new war in the Middle East and global instability in general. The Russians are sailing everything they have, which wasn’t much anyway. I’m sure their subs are on station off the East Coast, but they would do that in any DEFCON 2 scenario. Our subs are sitting within firing range of Moscow.”
“And the rest of the world?” Dutch asked.
“As expected, the Indians and Pakistanis are massing on their borders. With our forces pulling back, that was inevitable. In Europe, not surprisingly, we’re seeing the same kind of civil disorder we have here. What’s strange is that some of our bases in Germany and France are reporting sectarian violence from Muslim immigrants directed at Americans. It’s not anything we can’t handle, but it’s odd that the attacks are happening in a semi-coordinated manner so quickly after the collapse of the markets. The remnants of ISIS and ISIL are being invigorated by our misfortune, it appears. And there’s a level of organization I wouldn’t have predicted.”