William Tyree - Line of Succession

He punched his code into the door and it pushed open. At the second entry point, he held his right eye up to the retina scanner. He had performed the routine so many times in the past several hours that it was practically second nature.

Unlike the tunnels linking Union Station with the Eisenhower Building, there was no emergency lighting. “Light ‘em up,” Carver said as he waved his phone to reveal the claustrophobic passageway. “Don’t worry — you can’t make any calls down here, which means Ulysses can’t track the signal.” They all pulled out their phones except Angie, who had lost hers in Chesapeake Bay three days earlier.

This stretch of tunnel was six and a half feet high, providing barely enough headroom for Carver and Speers, and just four-feet wide. The floor was a mixture of hard-packed clay and mud, and the roof and sides were lined by oven-baked bricks and mortar. Many of the bricks had crumbled away from the walls during the past 150 years, forced out by tree roots that, at some places, had grown completely across the width of the tunnel.

Speers stumbled in the half-light, then recovered and set a pace that he hoped his sore feet could handle. He and Carver walked up front, with Eva in the middle and O’Keefe prodding Angie Jackson along in the rear.

“I’ve heard rumors about these tunnels,” Eva said as they trudged along in the near-darkness. “I thought they were a myth.”

“Nixon actually believed the Russians were going to park a sub in the Potomac,” Speers explained. “He spent millions linking Lee’s tunnels to the ones under the city.”

“Who else has the code?” Carver asked.

“The question is, who that has the code is still alive?”

“Correct.”

“Besides me? Hector Rios. And General Wainewright.”

They heard the rats long before he spotted them. Thousands of tiny clawed feet swarming the tunnel walls, squeezing in and out of the cracks and breaches that had been created by tree roots and seismic tremors. Carver shined his cell phone light ahead and waited for the wave of vermin to pass.

They moved on, the blue glow of their cell phones lighting only four or five feet in front of them at any time. The tunnel floor gradually became an ankle-deep sludge that grew several inches deeper with each passing minute. But it was much wider now. Up to 10 feet wide in some places. Carver welcomed the elbow room. But not the water.

“I don’t like the looks of this.”

“It goes under the Potomac,” Speers explained.

“The Holland Tunnel goes under the Hudson. But it doesn’t leak.”

“You try getting budget to waterproof a tunnel that nobody ever uses.”

“Get us out of here alive,” Eva chimed in, “and I’ll give you as much budget as you need.”

They kept moving, slowly and without much speaking, as the water levels continued to rise. Something swam against Carver’s leg. He decided not to say anything to the others.

He could not get his mind off the fact that General Wainewright had a code. If they were caught in a narrow section of the tunnels, they would be easily trapped, unable to flee or fight. Carver was not afraid of dying.

Carver believed in the afterlife. He was sure that his soul would be separated from his body and ascend to some blissful spirit world where Mormons and Athiests and Muslims and Jews would comingle with scant memory of what had divided them on Earth. But his greatest, most irrational fear lay in the mechanics of the soul’s journey. When exactly did the soul separate from the body? Could it move through solid rock, or did it need a clear path to ascend to some unseen parallel universe? He did not want to die here, in a tiny tunnel far below ground. He did not like the idea of his soul roaming these dark tunnels for all eternity, endlessly looking for a way out.

“Where is my son?” Angie suddenly cried out. The voice loosened Carver from his own obsessions. He looked back. Angie was hyperventilating and her eyes darted around at frightening speed. This was someone who belonged under a psychologist’s care. O’Keefe had been at her side since they left Fort Campbell, and the wear and tear was starting to show in her face.

“My turn,” he said as he took Angie’s arm. “We’re getting closer with every step,” he told her. His voice seemed to soothe her. “We need to keep going.”

O’Keefe took the point. She drew her weapon. They kept moving.

The Pentagon

6:35 a.m.

From their private conference room adjacent to the NMCC, Wainewright and Farrell heard a wave of applause, followed by several ear-piercing whistles. The Generals burst into the room to see what good fortune had come their way. They found Dex Jackson standing in the middle of the NMCC, surrounded by Pentagon communications staffers who were lining up to shake his hand.

“Genius PR,” Farrell whispered into Wainewright’s ear. “Genius!”

During the past seventy-two hours, the Joint Chief’s communications department — under the careful guidance of General Wainewright — had remade Dex from a bully Defense Secretary into a sympathetic hero who had lost his wife in the attacks but managed to save his son. Having been only drip-fed meaningful crisis information, and cut off from any other people-related stories that made for riveting television, the networks had lapped up every morsel of Dex’s fabricated plight for survival in Chesapeake Bay. Dex Jackson was a household name. Wainewright would have what he wanted — a popular President that he could control.

“Back to your stations,” Wainewright called to the staffers. As the applause petered out, Wainewright put on his best smile and crossed the room to shake Dex’s hand. “You had us worried,” he said.

“I need to see LeBron,” Dex said. “ Now .”

Wainewright guided him into the conference room. General Farrell opened a silver titanium briefcase containing a tablet computer. Farrell switched it on. A time-stamped digital photo of LeBron appeared. It had been taken not thirty minutes earlier. The image had all the charm of a jailhouse mug shot, down to the dazed, depressed expression on the boy’s face.

“He’s waiting for you,” Wainewright said. “Do what you promised, and you’ll see him.”

“And my wife?”

Wainewright shook his head. “In heaven, Dex. Where else?”

“I’ve heard different.”

“You know, Dex, being a bachelor and the leader of the free world at the same time could have its upside. There’s a lot of pretty White House interns who would give it up for a night in the Lincoln Bedroom.”

Dex lunged at Wainewright’s jugular with both hands. Farrell sprung into action, ramming his shoulder hard into Dex, managing to knock the much larger Defense Secretary off balance and into the door. A groundswell of boots pounded the floor outside.

“We’re okay!” General Wainewright shouted through the door as he slicked his hair back with his hand. “Everyone back to their stations!”

Dex freed himself from Farrell’s grip and retreated to his corner of the room. “All this will come to light,” he said. “You’ll be tried for treason.”

Wainewright touched the photo screen and dragged his finger across it, grossly enlarging LeBron’s face. “I don’t think so. Your first act as Commander-in-Chief will be to direct the National Archives to seal all documents and testimony pertaining to this crisis for fifty years.”

Then General Farrell slid a yellow forty-six-page document in front of him. It was a supply order totaling $272 million in communications and security equipment for Ulysses to use in creating Rapture Run. It had Dex’s signature on it, as well as that of Ulysses CEO Jeff Taylor. Dex remembered signing a document much like it more than a year earlier. He remembered Corporal Hammond bringing it to him personally, telling him that the order was for Raven Rock. He was accustomed to signing entire stacks of multi-million dollar contracts at a time, and he had undoubtedly signed this one after only a quick skim. It was all too easy for Dex to imagine how the Joint Chiefs would use it to prove that Dex had conspired with Ulysses to build the secret operations center without the National Security Council’s permission. He figured it was just one of many smoking guns they would hold to his head if he chose not to cooperate.