“Look, Mr. President!” Cyndi Hewitt was pointing to the muted video screen in the corner of the Oval Office. “The idiot dictator is on the air again.”
“Sound.” Mack ordered, and a Secret Service agent complied.
“We are extremely disappointed at this time with the actions of the American administration.” The dictator’s voice contained a forceful anger. “Not only has there not yet been a response to our demands concerning the diplomatic derecognition of the criminal state of Israel, as the freedom-loving masses of the world have demanded, but also tonight, US Navy warplanes are at this very hour violating the sovereign, territorial airspace of the Islamic Republic of Indonesia.” The dictator slammed his fist onto his desk. “This must stop!” He held his arm up, as if glancing at his watch. “Your time is almost up, Mr. President. My patience is running out!”
Chapter 20
San Francisco
1:00 p.m.
All units, be on the lookout for a U-Haul truck, Florida license MNL 742, on the move in the San Francisco metropolitan area. If this unit is spotted, do not engage. Maintain surveillance. Report coordinates immediately. This vehicle is believed to be carrying weapons of mass destruction, and interception efforts must be coordinated with the US military.”
Sergeant John King, California Highway Patrol, was just finishing his Big Mac, and was swallowing a gulp of Diet Coke when the U-Haul passed him on his left.
Florida tag!
“Dispatch. One Adam Fourteen. Please repeat the tag number on that U-Haul.”
“Adam Fourteen, roger that. That’s Florida MNL, as in Mike November Lima, 742.”
King blinked his eyes and rechecked the tag number. His heart rate shot into a rapid pound. “Dispatch, please be advised that I have a visual contact on subject vehicle. Headed north at thirty-five miles per hour.”
Creech Air Force Base
Indian Springs, Nevada
1:05 p.m.
From his duty station at the 17th Reconnaissance Squadron at Creech AFB about thirty miles northwest of Las Vegas, LCOL Blake Winters, a fifteen-year F-15 pilot who had served combat tours in Iraq but was hoping to get more stateside time just before his retirement so that he could watch his son play high school football, was sipping bottled water, his eyes glued on a live, aerial view of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
Winters was one of the “older” fighter pilots the Air Force had put in its new drone program, perfect for those who had put in many years in the cockpit and who were not quite ready to hang up the wings just yet. The MQ-1 Predator was the most famous drone in the Air Force, after gaining popularity in the Iraqi theatre of operations in the early 2000s. The Predator was armed with two laser-guided AGM 114 “Hellfire” surface-to-ground missiles, and when it was flown over the Iraqi war zone, the Predator allowed pilots back in the United States to operate the aircraft by remote control from the ground thousands of miles away. It also allowed them to conduct aerial surveillance, and to strike and destroy enemy targets on the ground.
Winters had put the pilotless bird in a broad, looping circle over the bridge at fifteen-hundred feet, between Marin County on the north side, and Fort Point on the San Francisco side to the south.
So far, there was just traffic flowing back and forth, and glistening blue water under the huge, burnt-orange suspension bridge.
Just above the video feed from the drone were live video images from two other drones, one over a smoldering Philadelphia and one over Washington, where shadows were beginning to lengthen on the east coast. The other drones were being flown by two other pilots, one sitting to Winters’ left and one to his right.
The headset on Winters’ ears squawked with static, and then the sound of the controller’s voice.
“Predator 2. Creech Control. Be advised that target has been spotted by civilian law enforcement ground unit. Stand by for coordinates…” Winters felt sweat on his palms. Even sitting on the ground over five hundred miles to the southeast of the target, without even the specter of a dogfight with an enemy jet, the warrior’s edginess set in his body. The consequences of failing were not lost on him. “Okay, coordinates are northbound on the Embarcadero between piers thirty-eight and thirtytwo. Speed approximately fifteen miles per hour.”
Winters typed in the location, which instantly gave him the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. “Okay, I’m going in for a look. Stand by.” He set the coordinates onto automatic pilot, turning the Predator slightly to the southeast.
The White House
4:10 p.m.
His tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up, the secretary of defense rushed into the Situation Room, where Mack had reestablished himself after spending the last couple of hours in the Oval Office. “Mr. President! We think we’ve located one of the U-Hauls!”
Mack looked up. “Talk to me.”
“Trying to get it up on the screens now!” Secretary Lopez said, as a couple of marine corps intelligence officers fiddled with some knobs under two of the flat-screen monitors on the wall beside the conference table.
“Got it!” one of them said, and stepped back.
An aerial shot of traffic flashed on the screen. At the bottom of the screen, the words superimposed USAF PREDATOR 2/Aerial San Francisco Live 1310 PST/1610 EST. The shot zoomed in closer and showed what seemed to be a single U-Haul van from the top. It was surrounded by slow-moving traffic, jammed between two vans, one green and one white.
“That’s it, Mr. President.” The defense secretary was pointing to the screen at the U-Haul.
“My recommendation is that we take it out,” Admiral Roscoe Jones said.
“Don’t we need to get a Blackhawk helicopter in place to take it out?” Mack asked.
“No sir,” Jones said. “The Predator has two Hellfire missiles under the wings. We can take it out on your command.”
Mack looked at the screen. Traffic had ground to a halt.
“Where is it in San Francisco?”
“He just came onto the Embarcadero, Mr. President. They’re at the intersection of the Embarcadero and Washington Streets,” the secretary of defense said. “Have the pilot pull the shot back and pull back in,” he said to one of the marines wearing a headset. The marine mumbled into the headset and the camera pulled back, showing the piers lining the glistening waters of San Francisco Bay to the right, and several green parks along the Embarcadero to the left. The shot triggered Mack’s memory that the Embarcadero was the main road that paralleled the tip of San Francisco’s thumb-shaped peninsula all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge.
“Now here’s the Embarcadero snaking along San Francisco’s waterfront,” Admiral Jones said. “From this point, he’s only about five miles from the bridge, and luckily he’s in slow-moving traffic, which gives us a slightly easier target.”
“Zoom back in,” the defense secretary ordered. The marine repeated the order into the headset and instantly, the Predator was beaming back close-ups of the U-Haul, which had a minivan to the left and was to the rear of an SUV. The CHIPs car was about three cars behind it.
“Logistical details aren’t my specialty,” Mack said, “but wouldn’t we have a better chance of protecting these folks in the cars beside and in front if we had a chopper swoop down in front of the U-Haul and just fire a machine gun through the glass?”
“Actually, Mr. President,” Admiral Jones said, “the HARM missile is laser-guided and is more likely to land on target. Yes, we could lose some people in the adjacent cars because of the explosion, but machine-gun fire from a moving chopper could easily go off target and kill civilians too. Plus, there’s a chance that if we miss, or if he sees the chopper come into view, he could detonate the nuke before we take him out.”
Secretary Lopez spoke again. “I recommend that we take him out now, Mr. President. On your order. We’re running out of time.”