William Tyree - Line of Succession

A hard heel to the chest knocked the General’s wind from his body, and he remained on his back trying to get air into his lungs. Carver grabbed his right arm and pulled it straight back toward him, out of its socket. He stepped over Wainewright and did the same to his left arm. Wainewright’s upper limbs fell to his sides like wet noodles.

The General had no more fight in him, but Carver wasn’t content to let him live. A man like Wainewright was always dangerous. Even if the ragtag alliance of forces outside were able to defeat the Ulysses troops, and the military fell in line behind Eva’s successor, Wainewright could still brew up a world of trouble from a prison cell. He would still have the sympathy of thousands of officers in key positions across the military.

Carver removed the damaged glass top from the coffee table and held the jagged end vertically over Wainewright’s neck — an improvised guillotine. “Don’t!” Wainewright rasped. Carver raised the sheet of heavy glass four feet into the air and let it fall. A wave of warm blood drenched Carver’s pant leg as the General’s severed head rolled to the side.

Intermittent explosions and gunfire on the surrounding streets and rooftops slowly crept back into Carver’s consciousness. He heard boots on the paved walkway just outside the Oval Office and turned to see uniformed Secret Service units running past the south-facing windows.

He exited the east door and walked out into the Rose Garden. Smoke was gradually clearing on the South Lawn as SWAT units replaced Ulysses soldiers atop the Treasury Building. At the edge of the Rose Garden, uniformed Secret Service pulled the crew from the M1 tank’s charred turret.

His heart jumped as he recognized the first figure to emerge from the tank. It was Julian Speers, followed by a very alive Eva Hudson. She never had been in the Beast. It had been the decoy all along.

Carver felt pain shoot up through his groin. He limped through it. His shoulders were full of knots and his neck was stiffening badly. He was bleeding, but he didn’t know where the blood was coming from.

A team of ERTs met him at the lawn’s edge. Carver told them that there was a gas leak in the mansion. He told them there were armed Ulysses soldiers on the lower levels. He said that Special Agent Rios was inside and was likely in need of a coroner.

He heard none of their questions. He felt none of their hands as they probed his injuries. He just kept lurching through the wisps of smoke that swept like dirty fog across the lawn. He glimpsed Dex Jackson, then lost him in the haze. His eyes roamed the grounds for a soft, shady place to lie down, vaguely aware that the sound of gunfire on the surrounding streets was growing more sporadic. A light breeze blew, sending a welcome chill through his blood-soaked clothing.

The U.S.S. Ronald Reagan

The Mediterranean

An explosion lit up the night sky just 100 yards from the U.S.S. John Kerry, one of four destroyers floating between the Ronald Reagan and the hundreds of Israeli vessels carrying refugees. Captain White saw the flash in the distance out the bridge observation windows. Only an hour earlier, White and his direct reports had been listening to the VOA news coverage from the Lincoln Memorial. But the broadcast had been suddenly interrupted with commercial-free classic rock.

Captain White turned the radio down as the Kerry’s CO, Commander Deke Perkins, hailed the Rear Admiral on the radio: “Fishing boat just rammed the ferry closest to us. It’s listing to stern. Tons of passengers are jumping overboard.”

“ Copy that, Kerry ,” came the Admiral’s response. “ Monitor and keep your distance .”

“Negative,” Perkins said. There was a small boat circling and shooting the survivors. “This is a rat kill.”

“ Repeat, monitor only. ”

“Negative,” Perkins replied.

“ You’re disobeying a direct order ?” came the Admiral’s retort. “ You better get your dress whites out, Commander Perkins. I’m penciling in your court martial, son. ” There was no response from Perkins, who turned the Kerry and began steaming toward the floating inferno.

Less than two minutes later, the ship’s radio sounded again. White answered, expecting an earful from the Admiral. The voice on the other end was unfamiliar to him. “Captain White,” the voice said, “this is President Eva Hudson. I’m with Defense Secretary Jackson.”

“Captain, the Admiral has been relieved of duty,” Dex said. “The President is directing our armed forces to provide immediate military assistance to Israel. You are to engage the Iranian air and ground units with indiscriminate force. Do you understand?”

When White issued the directive over the ship’s PA, the crew’s elation could be heard from every corner of the ship. Operation Wailing Wall was a go.

NINE MONTHS LATER

Eastern Cape, South Africa

6:45 p.m. local time

Carver drove through scattered rain over twisting one-lane mountain roads. The rental car’s GPS was useless, and his phone hadn’t gotten signal since leaving Johannesburg early that morning. He stopped for directions often. This was not only because there were so few road signs in the rural Eastern Cape. It was also because most of the people he asked for directions had never been more than 20 miles from home.

As night fell he listened to African pop music to stay awake. The highway became a series of mesmerizing canyon switchbacks that hugged steep cliffs without so much as a single guardrail. Ten hours after leaving Johannesburg International Airport, he got petrol in Stutterheim, a sleepy little town in the heart of farm country, and went on through the hilly, golden boondocks toward the backwater village of Kei Mouth on the eastern shore.

The last terrestrial radio station fizzled out as he entered the former Transkei, land of the Xhosa tribe. Xhosa children bartered beaded necklaces for candy bars as he waited twenty minutes for a single-car ferry to take him across the Kei River.

Carver entered the village two hours later. There were few services in town, and the few that existed had posted signs saying CLOSED FOR WINTER in English and Afrikaans. Business windows — all of them — were dark. Finally he spotted the sign that read BED AND BREAKFAST that had been included in the intel report. He turned down a spooky-looking street that led to a gray cement building. This was supposed to be the place. It had better be, Carver thought. He had come a very long way from Washington under completely unreasonable time constraints.

He shut off the car engine and opened the car door. A pack of dogs raced out from under the front steps. Skinny, tenacious mutts. All bones and teeth. In the face of a hard drizzle, Carver fended these hounds of hell off with the car door, bonking their bony heads with it as they bit and tugged at his left ankle. He felt the familiar warm trickle of blood dampen his sock. Barking in the distance spared him further bloodshed as the pack suddenly broke away, howling at breakneck speed down the street he had driven in on.

“We’re closed!” yelled a woman’s voice from the motel office. She spoke from behind a screen. She sounded American. Good. This was definitely the place.

He unfurled himself from the car, smoothed the wrinkles in his gray suit and approached the building with his hands in the air.

“I’ll shoot,” the voice warned.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Carver said as he measured his approach. He stood several feet from the door and could only make out a shadow in the dense screen door. “It’s Madge, right?”

More silence. Then the voice said, “I suggest you get back in the car.”