Warriors (5 page)

The president was very quiet for a long time before he looked up, staring at the secretary, his face a stone mask.

“I know that, Kim. What I said was, I’d like to know what he thought. And I would like to know that, I really would. But he’s dead. Isn’t he?”

“Yes, Mr. President. He is.”

A stunned silence descended.

No one said a word. What more was there to say?

Emily Young, the president’s lovely young personal secretary, could be heard sobbing quietly in dark corner of the room. Emily didn’t think she could take much more of this. She loved the old cowboy. Actually was in love with him. It killed her to see the boss like this, a wounded stag. And all of them, the press, with their goddamn knives out . . . and, like a mule in a hailstorm, he just had to stand there and take it.

She heard the president say, “Emily, for crissakes, will you stop bawling? What the hell is wrong with everybody?”

There was no answer.

The president stood, looked around at all the upturned faces, and said, “Well, thank you everyone. We’ll reconvene in one hour.”

After they filed out, he sat back down again, gazing absently into the middle distance, smoking his Marlboro down to a bright orange coal. He’d never felt so lost and alone in his life.

THE WHITE HOUSE SOUS-CHEF LOOKED
beat.

It was almost midnight on a Friday night and, for Chef Tommy Chow, it had already been a very long week. First thing Monday morning, Matt Lauer and the whole damn
Today
show crew had shown up early for a live broadcast and wanted breakfast. Then the lavish state dinner for the prime minister of England, the Rose Garden luncheon the First Lady held annually for the Daughters of the American Revolution, and on and on, no rest for the weary.

And now he’d gotten a last-minute call from the ranking West Wing staffer saying the president had invited a few of his closest cabinet members for an impromptu breakfast in the morning. Talk about China and North Korea, Tommy imagined. Hell, that’s all they ever talked about lately.

“Go home, Tommy,” one of his guys said. “You look exhausted. We can finish the prep by ourselves.”

“No. I insist. You guys head out. I promised the boss man I’d take care of this breakfast thing and I’m going to do it. Seriously, get the hell out of here and go home to your families, okay? I got no family. Not here in Washington anyway. Leave the graveyard shift to me. Okay?”

“You got it, boss. Have it your way,” the pastry chef said, and they all bolted for the exits.

Chow waited until the last one had left before he began prepping tomorrow’s cabinet breakfast. Huevos rancheros, the presidential favorite, home fries, frijoles refritos with melted Monterey Jack, rashers of bacon and jalapeño-flavored sausage patties, honey biscuits, and hot sauce. Tex-Mex, they called it. Hardly his idea of haute cuisine, but they didn’t care for that much upstairs anymore.

A rueful smile flitted across Chow’s face as he stirred what he privately referred to as his “secret sauce” into the president’s eggs.

The graveyard shift,
he mouthed silently.

Truer words would never be spoken.

Not in this White House, anyway.

C
H A P T E R
  6

A
loud, keening wail suddenly filled the Lightning’s cockpit. Holy mother of God, Hawke thought, he’d just been painted by enemy radar!

He whipped his head around and saw the Chinese SAM missile’s fiery flame signature streaking up toward his Lightning, dead on his six, homing in on the afterburner. By the speed of the incoming, he guessed it to be one of the newer Hong Qi 61s. Where the hell had it come from? Some kind of new Chinese radar-proof shore battery on a nearby atoll? None of his so-called sophisticated gadgetry had even picked the damn thing up!

He hauled back on the stick and instantly initiated a vertical climb, standing the Lightning on its tail and rocketing skyward like something launched from Canaveral in the good old days. He deployed chaff aft and switched on all the jamming devices located in the airplane’s tail section. He was almost instantly at forty thousand feet and climbing, his eyes locked on the missile track displayed on his radar and thermal imaging screens. Its unverified speed, Hawke knew, was Mach 3.

It was closing fast.

The deadly little bastard blew right through his chaff field without a single degree of deviation. The Chinese weapon was not behaving in accordance with MI6 and CIA assessments of their military capability. With every passing second, his appointment with imminent death went from possible to probable. He’d have to depend on the Lightning’s jamming devices and his own evasive maneuvers if he was going to survive this attack.

He nosed the F-35C over and put it into a screaming vertical dive. He was now gaining precious seconds. The Hong Qi would now have to recalculate the target, alter course, and get on his six again. He’d known from the instant the SAM missile appeared on his screen that there was only one maneuver that stood any chance at all of saving him.

A crash dive.

Straight down into the sea.

Hairy, but sometimes effective, Hawke knew from long experience. To succeed, he had to allow the deadly missile to get extraordinarily close to impacting and destroying his aircraft. So close that when he pulled out of the dive at the last possible instant, the nose of his airplane would be so near the water’s surface that the missile would have zero time to correct before it hit the water at Mach 3, vaporizing on impact.

“You’ve got to dip your nose in the water, son,” an old flight instructor had told him once about the maneuver. “That’s the only way.”

The missile had now nosed over in a perfect simulation of Hawke’s maneuver and homed in on the diving jet. He watched it closing at a ridiculous rate of speed.

His instruments and screeching alarms were all telling him he was clearly out of his bloody mind. The deeply ingrained human instinct to run, to change course and evade, clawed around the edges of his conscious mind. But Hawke had the warrior’s ability to erect a firewall around it, one that was impenetrable in times like this.

It was those few precious white-hot moments precisely like this one that Alex Hawke lived for. At his squalling birth, his father had declared him “a boy born with a heart for any fate.” And, like his father and grandfather before him, he was all warrior, right down to the quick, and he was bloody good at it. His focus at this critical moment, fueled by adrenaline, was borderline supernatural . . . his altimeter display screen was a jarring blur, but he didn’t see it; the collision-avoidance alarms were howling in his headphones, but he didn’t hear them. His grip on the stick was featherlight, his breathing calm and measured, his hands bone-dry and surgeon steady.

His mind was now quietly calculating the differential between the seconds remaining until the missile impacted the Lightning and the seconds until the aircraft impacted the sea. Ignoring everything, the wail of the screeching sirens and the flashing electronic warnings, the pilot began his final mental countdown.

The surface of the sea raced up at him at a dizzying rate . . .

Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .

NOW!

He hauled back on the stick.

The nose literally splashed coming up, and he saw beads of seawater racing across the exterior of his canopy. He’d caught the crest of a wave pulling out of the dive . . . He felt the G forces building . . .

You got to dip your nose in the water, son.

Made it.

He barely registered the impact of the missile hitting the water over the roar of his afterburners. But he heard it, all right. He was in the clear and initiating a climb out as he visualized it: the SAM vaporizing upon contact with the concrete hard surface of the sea at such speed . . .

The G forces were fierce. He began his quick climb back to his former below-the-radar altitude.

And that’s when his starboard wingtip caught a huge cresting wave that sent his aircraft spinning out of control. Where the hell had that come from . . . He was suddenly skimming over the sea like a winged Frisbee. He felt a series of severe jolts as the fuselage made contact, and he instinctively understood that the aircraft was seconds away from disintegrating right out from under his doomed arse . . .

He reached down to his right and grabbed the red handle, yanked it, and the canopy exploded upward into the airstream and disappeared. The set of rocket motors beneath his seat instantly propelled him up and out of the spinning cockpit and straight into the black night sky.

Seconds later, his primary chute deployed and he had a bird’s-eye view of his airplane as it metamorphosed into varying sizes and shapes of scrap metal and disappeared beneath the waves.

Along with the five hundred million in the lockbox,
he thought. Not only had his mission just gone straight to hell, it was a very bloody expensive failure.

He yanked the cord that disengaged him from his seat and watched it fall away as he floated down. Moments later his boots hit the water. It was cold as hell, but he started shedding gear as quickly as he could. He was unhurt, or it seemed that way, and he started treading water while his life jacket inflated.
So far, so good,
he thought, managing to keep his spirits aloft surprisingly well for a downed airman all alone in this dark world.

Normally, there’d be an EPIRB attached to his shoulder harness. Upon contact with the water, it would immediately begin broadcasting his GPS coordinates to a passing friendly satellite. Normally, he could just hang out for a while here in the South China Sea and wait for one of Her Majesty’s Navy rescue choppers to come pluck him from the soup and winch him aboard. Normally. But, of course, this was a secret transit and he had no distress radio beacon, no EPIRB. He had exactly nothing.

He knew the water temperature was cold enough to kill him eventually. The thermal bodysuit he wore would stave off hypothermia long enough for him to have a slim shot at survival.

He spun his suspended body through 360 degrees. Nothing of note popped out of the darkness. No lights on the horizon, no silver planes in the sky. Nada, zip, zero. Nothing but the vastness of black stretching away in all directions . . . no EPIRB equals NO hope of immediate rescue. He was some fifty miles off the southern coast of mainland China.

If he was lucky, and he usually was, he was in a shipping channel. If not, sayonara. He looked at his dive watch, whistling a chirrupy tune about sunshine and lollypops. Five hours minimum to sunrise.

He began to whistle a song his father had taught him for use at times like this.

Nothing to do but hang here in frozen limbo and wait to see what happens next.

And maybe pray a little.

C
H A P T E R
  7

I
t’s the president,” the First Lady said, gripping the phone so tightly her knuckles shone bone white through her pink skin. “I can’t seem to wake him up.”

“Is he breathing?”

“Yes, I—I think so. His chest is moving.”

“Don’t worry. We’re on our way up now. The whole team. Stay calm,” Ken Beer, the White House physician, said, and the line went dead.

“TOM,” SHE SAID, SHAKING HIM
by the shoulders. “Tom, wake up, damn it!”

Nothing.

Had he taken something? She scoured the bedroom and medicine cabinet for empty vials. Nothing. She’d seen him depressed before, but the mood swings were getting terrifying lately. Still, suicide? No. Out of the question. He would never do that. Too narcissistic. Far too invested in his place in history and his date with destiny, the showdown with China coming up in Hong Kong next month.

It had been two days since the disastrous meeting in the Situation Room. The entire household was abuzz with rumors about what had really happened in there. Her assistants and household spies were reporting back to her with everything they were picking up. He was drunk. He was stoned on meds. He was losing his marbles. He wasn’t fit to be president.
60 Minutes
was doing a segment called “The Incredible Vanishing President.” He was sick. It was dangerous. He had early-onset Alzheimer’s just like Ronnie Reagan. They had to rally round him. They had to protect him . . .

Blah-blah-blah.

And then her reverie was broken as the private quarters was suddenly full of people. Secret Service, medical techs with defibrillators, portable EKGs, and God knows what all. Ken Beer was running the show, which was good; she’d had total confidence in him since that incident aboard
Air Force One
the year before.

She tried to read something into Ken’s expression, but he had his game face on. All business. He had taken her aside after his initial examination and asked her if she wanted a lorazepam. She’d refused, but wondered if maybe she needed one. He looked so . . . gone . . . lying there, all the IV tubes and EKG wires taped to his chest and—

“Okay,” Ken said, taking her by the arm and walking her quickly into the sitting room where they could speak privately. “Here’s the deal. His vitals are good. Strong. But he’s in a coma. I don’t think it’s a stroke. No coronary issues. I’m having blood work done right now, but I don’t want to wait for it. You with me?”

“Keep talking.”

“Right. He’s going to Walter Reed right now. Okay? That’s the best thing for him. The safest, most conservative option. I’ve already called it in.”

“Is he going to come out of it? The coma?”

“Qualified answer? Yes. He’s going to come out of it. Listen. Don’t you worry. We’ll take good care of him. Do you want to ride in the ambulance with him?”

“Of course I do, Ken. Do you even have to ask me that?”

“Sorry. My mistake. The president’s already on his way down to the South Portico. Let’s go.”

TOMMY CHOW MET HIS U.S.
handler at the Capital Grille for drinks the afternoon the president was admitted to Walter Reed Hospital. The Grille was a mecca for secretaries, staffers, lobbyists, and bureaucrats of every stripe and strata in D.C. Tommy knew one of the Chinese waiters, a guy who always made sure they got a quiet table in the back. Even if they were noticed, and it was very unlikely, a low-level staffer from State and a noncelebrity chef from 1600 having a martini or three wouldn’t cause anyone’s radar to light up.