William Tyree - Line of Succession

The grinding roar of metal on asphalt slowly petered out. The pungent odor of jet fuel filled the main cabin, snapping Agent O’Keefe alert. Pink hues of sunrise filtered into the cabin through smashed passenger windows.

Beside her, Angie’s head was cocked back against her seat. Her eyes were shut and her hair was streaked with blood. O’Keefe slowly pushed the bangs back. There were no abrasions. Angie’s eyes flapped open and locked with hers. She was alive. The blood belonged to someone else.

O’Keefe unbuckled her seatbelt and got shakily to her feet. Several chunks of scalp were blown across the seatbacks in the row in front of her. Crimson droplets were spattered on the cabin ceiling. She walked two rows forward and found herself gazing into the top of Elvir Divac’s skull. A seatback tray had sheared it open like a watermelon.

In the window seat, the doctor’s body slumped sideways. His lifeless eyes gazed skyward and the window was a smear of matted blood and hair. One row up, O’Keefe found Colonel Madsen. His eyes were closed. O’Keefe put her index and middle fingers on his neck, hoping for a pulse. His head tipped sideways, resting at an unnatural 90-degree angle atop his shoulders.

She feared more carnage as she wobbled on shaky knees toward the cockpit. Her fears were realized. From behind, she saw the pilots’ arms hanging limply at his sides, elbow joints jutting out his blood-soaked shirt sleeves in a horrific compound fracture. Both pilots’ faces were smashed grotesquely into the instrument panel.

An orange-tanned arm stretched out into view. O’Keefe recognized it as Eva’s. She was alive.

There was one more passenger to account for. Agent Carver had been seated adjacent to Eva. O’Keefe entered the cockpit, afraid of what she might find next. As she rounded the corner, she found him standing in the corner of the cockpit, peering out a tiny clear prism of smashed window. A traffic chopper was hovering overhead.

“Smile,” Carver said to his fellow survivors. “We’re on TV.”

The Willard Hotel

The Iranian Ambassador entered the Presidential Suite wearing a new black silk suit that would have been more appropriate in a European disco. He shook Wainewright’s hand and wasted no time in getting to the point. “I could not risk telephone communications,” he said with precise enunciation. “I received a call yesterday from your Treasury Secretary.”

“Don’t worry about her,” Wainewright gruffed.

“But you leave me no choice. First, you assured me she would be dead by now. Second, the President obviously told her about the Camp David meeting despite my request for confidentiality. Now she is twice as dangerous.”

Wainewright was distracted. The timing of so many things — including the inauguration and shifting of Ulysses forces to additional key posts — was dependent on the carefully timed release of influential information. He glanced at the muted TV, eager to see whether his personal press corp had managed to maintain control over the network news feed.

The Ambassador did not like to be ignored. “General, did you hear me?”

Wainewright’s attention returned to the Ambassador. “You won’t be hearing from Eva Hudson again.”

“I’m delighted to hear that. As expected, NATO is calling on us to stop our invasion of Israel. We are prepared to justify ourselves in this cause, as always, but we cannot afford speculation that there is any connection with the American President’s death.”

“You hope for too much,” Wainewright said. “Fact: Iran’s an easy scapegoat for the world community. Fact: there will be rumors of your involvement no matter how good we are. We have to stick to our assertion that this was the work of the Allied Jihad.”

The Ambassador’s gaze fell upon the dresser, where Lincoln’s opera glasses sat on a folded white handkerchief. “I have an eye for antiques,” he said. “Mid-nineteenth century, yes?”

General Wainewright had never before passed up an opportunity to explain about his prized keepsake, but he had no time for it now. “What about the mountain campaign?” Wainewright said. In exchange for Wainewright’s promise to abandon its pact to defend Israel, the Iranians had promised that elite Iranian troops would invade and destroy Allied Jihad bases in Afpack. Iran had been funding Allied Jihad operations for years, but their offspring had spiraled out of control. Nevertheless, the Allied Jihad were dependent on supplies from Iran, and the Iranians were in a unique position to squash their Afpak capabilities once and for all.

“We have already destroyed nine Allied Jihad camps,” the Ambassador confirmed. “This is only the beginning. Within one week, Israel will be pushed into the sea. And by November, any Allied Jihad camps in the mountains will be exterminated and we will have accounted for ninety percent of its leadership.”

Wainewright glanced at the TV and saw imagery from a live traffic cam aboard a network helicopter. The titles on the screen read LIVE FROM I-495. He grabbed the remote control and turned up the volume.

“Beltway commuters,” the TV anchor said, “ you may want to think about telecommuting today. We are looking at live footage from our eye in the sky traffic cam. This apparently happened just moments ago. We have what appears to be a Gulfstream jet down on the Beltway. Yes, you heard me. A plane crash-landed on the 495 just minutes ago.”

Wainewright’s phone rang. It was Farrell. “We have a situation,” he said frantically.

“I’m watching it now.”

Farrell hesitated. “That’s only the half of it. Our people just went to wake up Dex. He’s not in his room.”

The Beltway

Carver stood in the middle of I-495 as a TV news traffic chopper hovered overhead. Adrenaline blocked the pain from the fractured collarbone he had suffered during the crash. Behind him, O’Keefe and Eva teamed up to pull Angie Jackson from the Gulfstream’s fuselage. Her eyes were vacant and she hadn’t uttered a word since the crash. She was ambulatory, but they were going to have to go at her pace.

They needed a car. It took Carver only a few seconds to spot a prospect: a middle-aged government worker in a navy blue Ford economy car that had slowed down to rubberneck. He was an IRS auditor, which was clear from the Internal Revenue Service badge around his neck. Carver raced across the median and pulled the driver’s side door handle. The door was unlocked, and the auditor was so busy gawking at the plane wreckage that he did not see Carver in time to pull away.

Carver gripped the auditor by the collar of his blue oxford shirt and yanked him out of the vehicle as it continued to roll forward at idle speed. Carver slid into the warm driver’s seat and braked so that O’Keefe could push Angie and Eva into the back seat.

The bewildered auditor regained his balance and began running alongside his car just as Carver began to accelerate. Carver pulled a business card from his jacket pocket and handed it to him through the window. “Call my office. We’ll get you a new car.”

The auditor stumbled and fell. He got up, brushed himself off, and held the card in both hands as he read the name aloud: “Ethan Danforth. FutureK Consulting.” He looked up at his ride as it powered away.

Carver struggled to weave the American-made economy sedan through the light dawn traffic. The engine was sluggish and the handling was an abomination. “We should’ve waited for somebody in a BMW,” he complained.

O’Keefe craned her neck out the rear passenger seat window. “Traffic ‘copter’s following us.”

Carver was in no mood for a televised freeway chase. They careened onto the Georgetown Memorial Parkway off-ramp. The news chopper followed. Carver gunned it, racking his brain for some competitive advantage that a car might possibly have over a helicopter.