Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

Once inside the plane, Ryan reached out to the wall to hold himself up, and his knees gave way.

Dr. Maura Handwerker was waiting at the entrance and she caught him. She had already moved many items out of the small but well-equipped medical office right next to the hatch and into the President’s suite in the nose of the aircraft just a dozen feet away. Here there was more room for SWORDSMAN to lie down, and more room for Handwerker to do everything she needed to do short of X-rays, which, if necessary, could be done in the medical office.

Ryan was carried gingerly into his suite, and then laid on his back on the bed. His face was ashen from the pain and the mild shock, and blood was smeared from scratches on his forehead. Immediately Handwerker and her nurse for the trip, an Air Force critical-care nurse, began cutting off his suit with fabric shears.

Arnie Van Damm wasn’t along for the trip. Instead, his assistant chief of staff, a fresh-faced thirty-three-year-old named David Detmer, stood far back out of the way of the medical professionals. Still, he was in earshot, so when Ryan started shouting out his name, Detmer leaned his head into the suite.

“I’m here, sir!”

“Secure phone!”

“The Vice President has been told. He’s on his way back to Washington from California.”

Ryan shook his head, causing him a fresh jolt of pain. “I need Arnie. Then Cathy.”

Dr. Handwerker glared at Detmer, because she couldn’t glare at the President. She did say, “Mr. President, I need you to lie right here for now and relax. You have a broken collarbone, and likely a broken wrist. We’ll want to give you an MRI to see if you have a concussion, but that can wait till we’re back in D.C. For now we will go under the assumption that you do have a concussion, so we’ll want you to stay flat on your back.

“We’ll immobilize your arm, and this will help with the shoulder pain.”

“Okay, but I need to make some calls.”

“Sir, first I need to debride your wounds and clean them up. I need to better immobilize—”

Arguing with the doctor had the effect of clearing Ryan’s head a little. “Doctor, I won’t stop you from doing your job, but you have to let me do mine. Right now President Volodin in Russia, as well as a few other crazies, need to know I am still on the damn job!”

Handwerker took cold compresses from a chest she’d rolled into the room before the President arrived. She wrapped them around his left wrist. Without looking up she said, “Someone hold the phone for him, he can’t use either of his hands right now.”

A headset was attached to the secure cabin phone, and Detmer connected with Arnie Van Damm. He struggled to make his way around the Air Force nurse and put the headset on Ryan’s head.

Jack coughed, then said, “Arnie?”

“Jesus, Jack, how are you?”

Ryan winced with the ice-cold compresses on his injured left wrist. “Andrea’s hurt. Mitch Delaney’s dead. Ambassador Styles, too. That kid that just joined the detail . . . Philip something.”

“I’m sorry. How are—”

“Philip Weingarten. Couldn’t have been thirty years old. I saw him facedown in the street.”

“How are you ?”

Jack answered distractedly. “I’ll be fine. What have you done?”

“Your National Security Council is convening in the PEOC. The Vice President is on his way back from California.”

The PEOC was the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a nuclear strike–proof bomb-shelter version of the Situation Room.

Arnie continued, “A CNN reporter on the scene said you were dead. It went live on air and it’s all over social media, but no one else has taken the bait. As soon as I heard you were alive, I contacted the head of their news division on his cell phone and said he needed to walk that back right now. He thought I was spinning him, the son of a bitch. I told him he either retracted that bullshit story or I’d see he was blamed for the attack if the Russians decide to spin up a full-on invasion of central Ukraine.”

While Arnie was talking, Ryan could feel the aircraft accelerate on its takeoff roll. He didn’t think they could have closed the hatch three minutes prior, and already they were hurtling down the runway. No one in the room around him bothered to strap themselves in, they were all too busy working. He had the sense that his legs were cold, and he thought that meant his pants had been removed, but lifting his head to look down would have been too painful, so he just lay there, staring at the ceiling.

Arnie said, “MSNBC is reporting that the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic State, and the Taliban have all taken credit for the attack.”

Ryan replied, “You need to make a statement. Let everyone know I’m alive.”

Arnie said, “Getting the press in the briefing room. I’ll go on as soon as I get off with you.”

Just then, a mobile phone was passed into the President’s suite from the hallway. One of Ryan’s young aides called out, “It’s the First Lady, Mr. President!”

Jack told Arnie to hold and he waited for someone to remove the headset and hold the mobile phone to his ear. He turned his head to get situated better, and he hissed with the new onset of agony in his shoulder. Covering quickly, he said, “Hi, honey. I’m fine. I was just about to call you, I’m sorry.”

“I needed to hear you, Jack. I love you.” Ryan could hear the pain and terror in Cathy’s voice. “Now put me on with Dr. Handwerker.”

He wasn’t surprised his wife wasn’t going to rely on him to relay his condition. She knew Jack wasn’t a physician, and she also knew he would sugarcoat any serious issue. Before he sent the phone on he said, “Do the kids know?”

He was talking about Kyle and Katie, but Cathy would know this. “They don’t. They were on a field trip when it hit the news up here. The Secret Service has them on their way to the White House. I’ll need to tell them something when I get there.”

“Tell them I’m coming home.”

“Who did it, Jack? Was it Maldonado?”

“Not a clue. I don’t even know what happened. We were riding along, and then I woke up in a heap. I’ve got to run. Passing you to Maura.”

He turned his attention back to Arnie now. Though he’d been on the verge of shock just minutes earlier, the familiar aspects of doing his job, managing crises, delegating responsibility, all cleared his head. His pain had not dissipated, but his brain had something else to focus on. “What are the Russians doing?”

“Full alert.”

“That’s it?”

“They have bombers skirting Alaskan airspace, but that happens on a good day.”

“Yeah. I want a briefing from SecState and SecDef within the hour.”

“It’s all taken care of here.”

“No, Arnie. They need to be on the phone with their counterparts in the UK, Russia, China—”

“Jack! They’ve already started that. We’re taking care of the immediate fires here. The world is going to hang on while you get patched up.”

Jack all but ignored him. “I want you to make a list. I will work the phones all day and talk until I lose my voice. I need to let everyone know I am strong and in charge.”

Dr. Maura Handwerker said, “I’m sorry, Mr. President. But you are going to need to rest.”

“I need to make a statement, too. Live. On camera. We can’t wait to land, we need to do that from the plane.”

Ryan saw his doctor above him glance over at the nurse. They didn’t say anything, they focused on placing compresses on his shoulder, but he understood the look.

Ryan forced himself to look down. His shoes were on the floor and his black slacks had been sheared off, bloody gauze covered his lower right leg. His suit coat and dress shirt were gone as well, and his right arm was being held close to his body by the nurse, who was prepping Ace bandages to wrap it. His left arm was by his side, covered in compresses. He could feel the scratches on his face that had gone unattended because they were down at the bottom of the priority list.