William Tyree - Line of Succession

Moments later, he was amazed to see the Beast crawl, blistered and smoldering, from the haze. A chunk of its front-end was twisted and cockeyed, and the length of its chassis was crooked, but the long black behemoth was intact and still moving, albeit much slower.

What it couldn’t take was another hit. So why weren’t those tanks closing ranks to protect Eva’s car?

The Javelin anti-tank missile operator held the launcher vertically and looked to be reloading. Odds were slim that Ellis was going to be able to pick him off from her perch on the Eisenhower rooftop.

“Stay under the desk,” Carver told LeBron. “If I’m not back in five minutes, hide in the Rose Garden.”

Clutching his M4, Carver exited the office’s east door and sprinted into the Rose Garden in a low crouch. He scurried to the very edge of the foliage, closing within about 110 yards of the Treasury Building. Without a scope, this was going to be an awfully hard shot with the rifle he had. Getting closer would mean running in the open grass. It would be suicide.

A fusillade of small arms fire peppered the motorcade as five other shooters came to the roof’s edge. One of the black sedans burst into flames and veered off on a collision course with the Eisenhower Building. Two others closed in towards the middle, as if to shield the President’s car from the shooters. One of the M1 tanks followed accordingly.

Raising to one knee, Carver took aim at the missile operator. The enemy had completed the reload and was already lining up the Beast in his viewfinder for a second shot.

Like Ellis, Carver aimed slightly above his target, correcting for distance, and switched his carbine from double-shot bursts to single-shot mode. He exhaled and pulled the trigger.

The soldier leaned sideways, drooping unnaturally as the 5.56mm round ricocheted off his clavicle and lodged within his left lung. The launcher fell from his hands and hung on the roof’s edge. A nearby soldier lunged for it, getting a hand on the device as the others came to his aid.

The replacement soldier managed to launch the missile. It hit the Beast squarely, engulfing the lawn once again in a fiery explosion. Carver feared the worst. There was no way the car could have withstood a second hit.

Judging by the way the Ulysses soldiers were pumping their fists, he was right. Carver wasn’t about to give these bastards a chance to enjoy their apparent victory. Having found his range, Carver now switched the carbine back to fully automatic and let loose with several bursts into the cluster of troops. Two Ulysses soldiers fell immediately and the others melted away from the building’s edge.

Meanwhile, a cauterized M1 tank — it had been grazed in the second hit on the Beast — rolled ever closer, seeming to slouch across the final fifty yards of lawn toward the West Wing. Its unscathed counterpart slowed to its side, as if hoping to draw hostile fire.

Peering through a cloud of dissipating smoke, Carver finally saw a welcome sight — a half-dozen armored SUVs bursting over the South Lawn fencing that the M1 tanks had so effectively crushed. He recognized the plates as those of the uniformed Secret Service, heavily armed units of highly trained White House police officers. Considering that Wainewright had relieved them of duty just thirty-six-hours earlier, Carver was surprised that any of them were sober enough to drive, much less fight.

Even if they had managed to kill Eva, perhaps they had at least repelled a full-scale Ulysses occupation.

It was then that Carver remembered the phone in the Oval Office, and his proclamation that Agent Rios, who at this moment was ready to sabotage the gas piping in the boiler room, should destroy the mansion if he didn’t answer the land line on the executive desk. Unfortunately, Carver knew Rios to be a man of his word.

Carver got to his feet and raced back through the Rose Garden. Even over the roar of persistent fighting on 17th, the phone’s distinctive old-world ring could be heard from well outside the open French doors. Carver rounded the corner, sprinted inside and lunged for the phone. “Carver,” he spat into the receiver as LeBron poked his head out from under the desk. The line was dead.

“Run!” he screamed at LeBron as he tried to raise Rios on his cell phone. The kid rose up but was paralyzed at the sight of the approaching tanks. “Now!”

LeBron sprinted out to the relative safety of the Rose Garden just as Carver heard the northwest Oval Office door open behind him.

He swiveled around to reach for his M4, which he had laid on top of the Executive Desk. He was too late. General Wainewright stood across the room with an antique Colt.45 pointed straight at him. The Stars and Stripes journalists stood wide-eyed behind him.

Wainewright flashed an irritated smile as he spoke. “Step away from the Resolute Desk.”

Carver couldn’t help but laugh. He was obviously about to be shot. God forbid he might bleed on the General’s future desk. “Resolute?” Carver quipped. “You’ve given the desk a name?”

“Idiot,” Wainewright snapped. “The desk was named in the nineteenth century. Fact: the desk was carved from the timbers of H.M.S. Resolute , an abandoned British ship discovered by Americans. Queen Victoria was so grateful for the find that she presented the desk as a gift to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880.”

“Hayes, huh? I think your obsession with assassinated Presidents borders on unhealthy.”

Wainewright took aim and pulled back the revolver’s lever.

The floor trembled. The old mansion let out a moan. Carver smelled gas. Pipes rattled within the walls. Dust fell from the ceiling. Special Agent Rios had come through after all. Carver smiled, knowing that even if he died, he would take the General with him.

The floor bucked beneath the General. Losing his balance, he groped for the journalists. Both braced themselves against the room’s north wall. The floor rippled again, sending a ten-foot stretch of copper pipe jutting up violently through the floorboards. An eruption of yellow and blue flame gasped from the fractured pipe, setting fire to a wall tapestry and both journalists’ uniforms.

The sprinkler system instantly sprang to life, emitting bursts of water from the ceiling so powerful that they stung Carver’s neck and face. Rios had grossly underestimated the mansion’s ability to protect itself from sabotage. The fire was doused immediately, and everyone and everything in the Oval Office was drenched. The General held onto the chaise as the building shuddered once again and the room filled with smoke. Carver seized the opportunity, grabbing the M4 from the desktop. Holding the weapon at his hip, he fired as Wainewright lost his balance on the hardwood floor, felling both of the fire-bitten journalists standing behind him.

He turned the muzzle toward Wainewright, but the wet carbine jammed. Carver found himself looking down the barrel of Wainewright’s Colt.45. The General squeezed off a round at close range that grazed Carver’s neck, unleashing a geyser of blood. The wounded agent vaulted over the desk and tackled the General.

As tiny aftershocks rumbled throughout the mansion, and the sprinkler system streamed bruising ropes of water from above, Carver kneed the general in the solar plexus and immobilized his shooting hand by stepping on the soft underside of his right forearm. Wainewright rocked his legs up under him and sent the more agile but smaller Carver head-first into an exposed piece of pipe.

The mansion’s sprinkler system finally let up. Carver dropped to the soggy carpet and swung his legs clockwise, sweeping the old warhorse off his feet. Lincoln’s opera glasses slid from his pocket onto the glass coffee table as he fell. Carver followed up with a left-right combination to Wainewright’s face. Crimson blood sprayed from the General’s broken nose.