War of Eagles o-12 Page 2

  Hood was unreasonably, inexplicably angry at Op-Center for that. Nothing like this had happened when he was mayor of Los Angeles. He got frustrated, yes, with the city bureaucracy but never enraged. But then, his staff in city hall were mostly career politicians more dedicated to themselves, to advancement and power, than to their responsibilities. The people of Op-Center were different. They had to be: they were ready to die for their work. It was as if their dedication, their sacrifice, had given this place sentience, a soul. A target for his frustration.

  Op-Center was not supposed to get sick. The NCMC had been designed to be a constant in a world of changing dynamics and new challenges, with experts in every field and the technology to support their activities. Hood’s people were devoted, and they were the best, but they required a support structure. They rallied after the explosion, but they were not able to do their jobs effectively for over half a year.

  Not that Hood had discussed this with them. It was all rah-rah as technical genius Matt Stoll supervised the electronic recovery and upgrades. There were heavy doses of can do as they borrowed intel and data from other agencies so they could watch national and international hot spots. But through it all Hood was crying inside. Staff psychologist Liz Gordon probably would have told Hood that he was having a serious bout of transference, laying what he felt about his failed marriage onto Op-Center. Sharon Hood had let him down, too, in his mind. She had failed to support his dedication to his career, his responsibility to the staff and the nation.

  Maybe it was true that Hood was shifting his feelings from one situation to the other. It did not change the fact that Op-Center had taken on water, and the man in charge was angry and disappointed.

  To make matters worse, the bailing pail was smaller now. Fewer hands, less money. All Hood had wanted to do this morning was get the place on its feet and running. Instead, he finished his coffee, told his assistant Bugs Benet where he was going, and headed toward the elevator.

  Benet rose inside his cubicle. “Do you know when you’ll be returning?”

  “I don’t,” Hood said. “Tell Ron to start the show without me.”

  “Yes, sir. Good luck.”

  “Thank you.”

  Op-Center was housed in a two-story building at Andrews Air Force Base. During the Cold War, this nondescript, ivory-colored structure was a staging area for flight crews known as NuRRDs — nuclear rapid-response divisions. In the event of a nuclear attack on the nation’s capital, the job of the NuRRDs would have been to evacuate key officials to secret bunkers built deep in Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the downsizing of the Air Force’s NuRRDs, evacuation operations were consolidated at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The building at Andrews was given over to the newly chartered National Crisis Management Center.

  The two floors of upstairs offices were for nonclassified operations such as finance, human resources, and monitoring the mainstream news services for possible hot buttons, seemingly innocent events that might trigger crises. These included the failure of Third World governments to pay their troops, accidents such as a submarine ramming a foreign fishing vessel or yacht — which might not be just a fishing vessel or pleasure cruise, but a spy ship — the seizure of large caches of drugs that could harm the black economy of local provinces, and other potential domino-effect activities.

  The basement of the former NuRRD building had been entirely refurbished. It no longer housed living quarters for flight crews. It was where the tactical decisions and intelligence crunching of Op-Center took place. This executive level was accessible by a single elevator that was guarded on top twenty-four/seven.

  Hood acknowledged the guard with a nod. The red-cheeked kids were rotated every week to keep any of them from being tempted by foreign agents looking for access. Ironically, it was an individual with seemingly perfectly legitimate credentials who had been able to deliver the EMP bomb. In an era when a smart teen with a computer could shut down power grids, phone systems, banks, and military installations, passwords and swipe cards seemed quaint relics of a very distant time.

  Hood stepped into the parking lot. The day was warming quickly. It helped to invigorate him. Hood knew it was partly a radiant effect of all the asphalt on the base, but he let himself think it was the sun. And it was a glorious spring morning, one in which the scent of the flowers that lined the security fence was actually stronger than the smell of the jet fuel coming from the airstrips.

  Hood hoped the day stayed warm and welcoming.

  In Washington, the weather had a way of changing unexpectedly.

  FOUR

  Alexandria, Virginia Monday, 8:11 A.M.

  Morgan Carrie always regarded her career as a classic good news — bad news situation.

  One year before, at the age of fifty-three, Carrie was the first woman to earn the rank of three-star general in the United States military. It was a low-key promotion. The army wished to promote a woman without calling attention to it. As her husband, Georgetown University Hospital neurosurgeon Dr. T. H. Albert Carrie, put it, “They wanted to break the glass ceiling without the sound of shattering glass.” That was all right with the woman. Since she was a kid playing war games with her four older brothers — she was usually the nurse, only occasionally the French Resistance fighter Mademoiselle Marie — she wanted to be the officer she had become. She outranked two of her brothers, both of whom were in the Navy.

  At the same time, the career intelligence officer was passed over to head the National Security Agency in the new president’s administration. Carrie had spent most of her career in Army General Staff, familiarly G2, the last five years as its head. Her office was concerned with all aspects of intelligence gathering, counterintelligence, and security operations. On paper she was more qualified than the man who got the job to oversee the organization that coordinates and executes the activities that protect American information systems and sources and generates foreign intel. But General Ted Dreiser was Air Force, and the new vice president, Bruce Perry, was former Air Force.

  End of story.

  Or so General Carrie had thought.

  At eight P.M. the night before, the woman had received a call in her home in Alexandria, Virginia. She was being summoned to the White House for a short meeting with the president, the vice president, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Raleigh Carew. All she was told was that the president had a question for her.

  A student of the history of American intelligence, Carrie knew that presidents rarely asked idle questions. At the very least, every query they made caused a snap-to ripple down the appropriate chain of command, just in case he decided to follow through. Sometimes, seemingly simple questions caused more dramatic responses. In 1885, President Grover Cleveland summoned Adjutant General R.C. Drum to the Executive Mansion to ask him a question about a foreign military installation. The officer was mortified to admit that he did not possess the information the president required, though he promised to get it. Drum did so and immediately organized the Military Information Division, which quickly grew from a single officer and four clerks to fifty-two officers, twelve clerks, and sixteen attachés. The MID collected data on geography and foreign armies and gave spying instructions to the attachés. The material the MID collected on military assets in Cuba, Mexico, and Samoa saved countless American lives during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

  Carrie’s driver took her to the West Wing, where she met with the three men for a total of ten minutes. There was, as promised, just one question. The president gave her until this morning to answer it. The question was a little larger than she had anticipated, but General Carrie took some comfort from the fact that she had five hours more to answer it than Adjutant General Drum had.

  General Carrie was up before her husband, who was himself an early riser. That was when the doctor usually read his medical journals, from about five A.M. to six-thirty. The sixty-year-old Johns Hopkins graduate believed that a doctor was like a general: having a lot
of degrees, like having a lot of soldiers, wasn’t what made you effective. The trick was having the right ones, the best ones. Dr. Carrie was always on the lookout for those.

  As requested, the general had responded to the president, in writing, by seven A.M. The letter was faxed to the White House and to the Pentagon. Original copies would be hand-delivered later in the day. For now, President Debenport had the answer he wanted. And General Carrie had a little more history in her dossier.

  At seven-fifteen, Carrie received a call from the vice president’s chief of staff. A new driver, a civilian driver, would be coming to get her at seven forty-five. He would be carrying instructions in a sealed envelope. She would have two days to get her footing before meeting again with the president.

  It was all very quick and definitely very gratifying. And through it all, as ever, her husband of thirty-eight years held her sure and steady, as he held a scalpel.

  A nondescript navy blue sedan pulled into the driveway at exactly seven forty-five. The tall, lean neurosurgeon had delayed going to the hospital to hug his wife before she left. The woman, five foot seven and jogging-slender, pressed her head to his chest. He put a big hand around her short-cropped white hair. Morgan Carrie had earned a bronze star for her work with the 312th Evac unit in Chu Lai, Vietnam — where she met her husband — and later ran special intelligence ops behind enemy lines in the Persian Gulf. Yet when her husband held Carrie like this, she felt like an alabaster doll, fragile and fair, and not a commander of fighting men and women. Which was fine. When her husband sat on the sofa with her and watched Italian operas on DVD, he was not a confident surgeon but a teary schoolboy with trembling hands. Forget sex: this comfort level was really what marital intimacy was about.

  The doctor gave his general a parting kiss on the forehead and wished her well. She grabbed her leather briefcase from its spot beside the door. There was nothing in it but pens and a notepad and the originals of her letter. She knew it would not be so empty when she came home. The general stepped into the bright morning. The driver was standing beside the car and opened the door. He introduced himself as Angel Jimenez and told her there was an iced tea in the cup holder in the backseat.

  “How did you know that is my drink, Angel?” the general asked.

  “I sent the question up the ladder until someone knew the answer,” the young man replied.

  “And that person was?” she asked.

  “Actually, General, no one knew. They called your military driver.”

  “I see.” She smiled. “Well done.”

  “Thank you, General,” Angel replied.

  General Carrie slid into the unfamiliar car.

  “There is a folder on the seat for you,” the driver said.

  “I see it. Thank you.”

  The general picked it up. She tore the red paper seal with an index finger. After years of riding in a Cutlass, the Saturn seemed small. Certainly the leather seat needed breaking in. But she did recognize the heavy-bottomed ride as the result of armor plating and the thick windows as bulletproof. She did not know if she were more or less a target than before, but she understood that the precaution was necessary.

  General Carrie looked at the folder. The outside said Eyes Only. Inside were sealed manila envelopes. Each contained a concise dossier on the personnel of her new command. She flipped through them, looking for familiar names. As expected, there were only two: Bob Herbert and Stephen Viens. She knew Bob and his late wife Yvonne from the Middle East, and Viens from his years with the National Reconnaissance Office. Both were solid professionals, though she had heard that Herbert was more of a loose cannon than ever.

  No matter. President Debenport wanted her to reconfigure Op-Center, to run a tighter command. Either Herbert would fall in, or he would be replaced.

  Carrie started scanning the files to familiarize herself with the personnel she would be meeting today. Former political liaison, now deputy director Ron Plummer. FBI liaison Darrell McCaskey. Director of Tech Operations Matt Stoll. Psychologist Liz Gordon. The evaluations written by Paul Hood and his former number two Mike Rodgers suggested that they were all rather individualistic, what the army called rogues.

  Hood seemed to like and encourage that. Rodgers did not. Carrie sided with Rodgers.

  It would be a challenge to bring them around, but that was what Carrie had been waiting for her entire career. She did not intend to blow it. Besides, the general was representing more than just women in her new position. She was also a standard-bearer for the military. It was flattering, it was terrifying, and it was invigorating, all at once. And the only way she would get through this was to remember something her dad, a newspaper editor in Pittsburgh, had told her when she went off to enlist. He knew her better than anyone when he said, “The job is not about you or having something to prove, honeypot. It’s about serving your nation.”

  She began reading the dossiers in greater detail as the car merged smoothly onto the Capital Beltway.

  FIVE

  Washington, D.C. Monday, 8:29 A.M.

  There was an unusual calm in the West Wing as Hood arrived.

  The offices and corridors were never as busy as they were fictionalized on TV, people dashing here and there with purpose bordering on panic. But there seemed to be a bubble around Hood as he made his way through the security checkpoint and was greeted by the president’s assistant executive secretary. Eyes would come near him and then slide away, like sand off a beach ball.

  Maybe it was his imagination. Or paranoia. In D.C., those were not hindrances; they were tools.

  Hood was taken directly to the Oval Office, where Chief of Staff Lorraine Sanders was leaning over the desk, talking with the president. Debenport waved Hood in, and Sanders disappeared into an adjoining office. When she returned, she was followed by a man in a white jacket. He was wheeling a two-tiered brass cart into the room. The wheels squeaked loudly.

  The president rose and offered Hood his hand. Debenport was a slope-shouldered man of average build. He had thinning straw-colored hair and a quick smile. He looked like a country pastor. His centrist views and unflappable nature made him a dramatic contrast to his predecessor, who was tall and dynamic — and had come close to a psychological breakdown from which Op-Center had rescued him. Hood and the NCMC had also been instrumental in helping Debenport get elected, fighting off a threat from corrupt third-party candidate Donald Orr. That battle had earned Op-Center the deadly EMP attack.

  “It belonged to FDR,” the president said, nodding his chin at the cart. “I’m told the president wouldn’t let his staff oil the wheels. They made his own wheelchair seem quieter, more presidential.”

  Hood believed it. On such details were image and power built.

  “Sit,” the president said, gesturing toward a red leather armchair.

  Hood did so. The president waited until Sanders sat before he did. With any other president that would have been a power move. The equation was, “The taller the figure, the greater his authority.” With the former South Carolina senator, it was simply good manners.

  The president asked Hood about his children as coffee was poured and the tray of pastries was uncovered. More politeness, Hood suspected. Until the server was gone, they could not discuss national security matters. Hood told him that Harleigh and her younger brother Alexander were doing well.

  “I can’t believe it’s been over two years since the United Nations siege,” Sanders remarked. She was a lean five-footer with a frowning and intense look. “I was deputy director of the State Department’s New York office at the time. We were working with the FBI to put a SWAT scuba team into the East River when you and General Rodgers ended the siege.”

  “Mike was really the one who ended it,” Hood said. “I was just trying to get my daughter out.”

  Hood’s voice choked as he spoke. He and Rodgers had been through a lot. He owed the general a lot. The men had not spoken for six months, ever since the general had become the head of the military-industrial f
irm Unexus, an international cooperative formed by Australian, British, Russian, and American interests.

  The server left, and the door to the other room was shut. The president took a sip of tea and leaned forward.

  “Paul, I asked you here because I need a favor,” Debenport said. “I need you to take on a project for me.”

  The president had a talent for personalizing things. That made it difficult to refuse a task without insulting him.

  “Mr. President, do you need Paul Hood or Op-Center?” Hood asked.

  “I need you, Paul!” Debenport replied. His exuberant tone was the equivalent of a slap on the back. “I would like you to become special envoy to the president. The position entails international intelligence troubleshooting, unaffiliated with any group but with access to the resources of all of them. Your office would be down the hall from this one, and you would report directly to me through Ms. Sanders, not through the executive secretary.”

  Hood thought the last six months had been a lot to process. This was complete information overload. Hood found himself with a lemon pastry in his hand. He did not remember reaching for it.

  “Mr. President, I’m flattered,” was all Hood could think to say.

  “Then you’re on board?” the president pressed.

  “I’d like to think a bit, sir. This would be a big change.”

  “I need someone now, Paul,” the president told him. “Someone I can rely on. I want it to be you.”

  “What about Op-Center, sir?”

  “No longer your concern,” the president replied bluntly.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “I have given the post to General Morgan Carrie, formerly of G2,” the president said, leaning forward. “Her commission is effective immediately.” Debenport spoke now with some of the steel Hood remembered from his days as chairman of the CIOC. The pastor was gone, replaced by a higher authority.