“Roger, sir.”
Dutch hung up the phone, closed his laptop and headed into the presidential suite to check on his wife and daughter.
Both women were sitting on the edge of the bed talking when Dutch entered. Abigail had been crying.
“We’re heading toward southern Idaho, and we’ll land in about two hours. What do you think?”
Sharon nodded approval.
“Abigail was just telling me that Sam Greaney’s men had been preparing to take over the plane since we left Offutt. They had Abby and Teddy restrained in the security section, waiting for the signal from Greaney.”
It made sense. The new men Greaney traded out for his Delta security detail must’ve been plants who’d been on the airplane since D.C., probably sitting in the back posing as staff. That meant Sam had at least seven combat operators on board when they took off. The men must have been standing by since before the California nuke. There would be no other way Sam could’ve had them ready in time to board the plane.
“It makes me wonder if we were the only ones that didn’t see this collapse coming,” Dutch said. “How could Sam have known the threat was so serious?” He scratched his head.
Sharon thought about it. “We were hearing it on the news a few times a week for the last couple years. I couldn’t watch the news without seeing some kind of doomsday scenario: climate catastrophes, credit bubbles, solar flares, volcanos, flu and EMP threats from rogue nations.” She shrugged. “Maybe Sam Greaney was just playing the odds. He wasn’t picking up the tab for having a team of commandos standing at the ready. Why not invest in any possible outcome? Sam Greaney’s not the kind of man who would ever stand by and be happy with your successes, Dutch. I’m sure he always saw himself as the rightful leader of the country… the sociopathic, paranoid bastard.”
The hammering of gunfire echoed down the plane’s fuselage. Dutch motioned for his wife and daughter to stay behind the furniture, and he rushed down the hallway, drawing his handgun from the back of his belt and pulling up short at the cover provided by the bulge of the conference room. The shooting stopped. An eerie quiet descended over Air Force One, broken only by the whine of the engines and the whistle of air escaping through bullet holes.
31
“Report, Agent Brooks,” Dutch called around the corner.
“We’re all good here, sir. They just had a shootout back in the security section. From the sound of it, I believe one of the Army operators had a bone to pick regarding their loyalties and he dropped the hammer on his buddies.”
“Teddy,” Dutch yelled. “Are you okay back there.”
“He’s fine,” one of the operators yelled from the rear compartment. Someone muffled Teddy’s shouts, probably gagging him. “We’ve got things under control. Stay out of this section or the kid dies.”
Dutch rounded the corner and darted into the office staff section. His four secret servicemen crouched behind a desk that they had propped up as a barricade. Sam Greaney sat handcuffed to a chair in the corner, a blank look on his face.
“My moneys on someone having died back there, Mister President. Maybe more than one. Should we consider rushing them, sir?”
“Do we have a solid count?” Dutch asked.
“We did before the shooting,” one of the agents—Dutch didn’t know his name—answered. “There were four men, plus the one we killed on the staircase. Now it could be less. But we could be walking into an even gunfight. And they’re posted up on the hallway. We have to assume they’re some kind of SOF guys, maybe Delta. Maybe former SEALs. Even with only two operators back there, and even if they didn’t have a hostage, the odds wouldn’t be good.”
“Hold position,” Dutch ordered. “We play this out for more time. Has anyone checked on the hole in the plane?”
“I found it. It’s in the outside wall of the staff office,” the lead agent, Brooks, answered. “One of the nine millimeter rounds hit a seam in the aluminum and punched straight through. I tried to plug the hole with a plastic patch and it might’ve helped. But we can still hear the pressure escaping around the patch. The pilot says we can lose pressure like this for maybe an hour before we go hypoxic—maybe twice that if the pilot flies lower. After that, we’ll need to wear the O2 masks. If the bullet had blown out a window… that would’ve been a different story.”
“Someone moved Robbie’s body,” Dutch noted, his voice heavy.
“We moved he and the dead comms guy into the staff office until we can offload them.”
“Gentlemen,” a quiet voice interrupted. The Air Force aide de camp motioned for them to come forward on the plane. “Can I show you something?”
Dutch and the lead agent, Brooks, slipped around the dogleg in the hallway and quietly followed the young Air Force officer upstairs to the comms center.
The three men filed up the narrow staircase and entered a room packed with computer monitors. A few 1980s-era radio sets still held a place on the wall, but almost everything else had been converted into computerized communication transceivers. A door opened at the far end of the comms center and Sharon stepped through from the nose of the plane, the flight deck and the pilots behind her.
Just like Sharon, Dutch mused. Checking on everyone to make sure their needs are being met. She slipped past them while touching Dutch’s arm, and headed down the staircase.
“After the shooting, I poked around the wifi network on the plane and found not one, but two computers still on the network. Both the screens, fore and aft, in the security and passenger compartments aren’t actually television screens. They’re computer monitors. Somebody probably wanted to have more flexibility for presentations, so they installed full monitors. Check it out. That means they have built-in cameras.”
The young officer hit the return key and a rear-facing view of the aft security compartment appeared. Both Dutch and Agent Brooks leaned forward, gobbling up the new information.
“There’s only two of them,” Brooks pointed out. “See that foot on the floor,” he nodded toward a boot poking around a row of airplane seats. “That’s a dead man. Have you seen anyone but these two guys and the hostage?”
“I was only watching them for a minute before I went to get you, so I can’t be sure there isn’t another guy hiding out somewhere. He could be in the john.”
“There’s Teddy,” Dutch touched the screen. The back of his son’s head with his flyaway blond hair poked above a seat. “He’s in a back row, facing away.”
“Here,” the aide de camp hit another key and the view toggled to a head-on shot of Teddy, bound and gagged. “This is the other computer monitor and it’s facing the opposite direction.”
Other than appearing uncomfortable, Teddy seemed fine.
“Okay, gentlemen.” Dutch stood back and folded his arms. “How do we use this information to keep our nation out of the hands of a psychopath?”
32
“Sir. When you loaded the supplies from Offutt, did you requisition any M84 grenades?” Agent Brooks asked, excitement mounting in his voice.
“I have no idea what I grabbed. Are you former military, Agent Brooks?”
“MARSOC Marine, sir. An M84 is a flashbang grenade—it looks like a V8 juice can with a big handle, a ring and a bunch of holes drilled in the sides.”
Dutch remembered the scene at the Air Force armory. “I recall a bunch of little baseball-looking grenades and then some skinny grenades with holes.”
“We can’t use the fragmentation grenades—the ones like baseballs. The overpressure and frag would compromise the hull of the aircraft. I’m pretty sure the flashbang won’t hurt the plane, though.”