The Last Air Force One Read online

  When air conditioners ground to a halt in Orange County and L.A., on top of the problems with the stock market, some urban Californians took to the streets looting and rioting, with social media accelerating the civil unrest into another iteration of the L.A. riots.

  At that juncture, the details got fuzzy for Dutch, which was a sure sign that someone in the chain of bureaucracy had been obfuscating his information. Dutch’s money was on the latest loud-mouthed, Hollywood actor-slash-governor of California. He and Dutch hadn’t seen eye-to-eye, even though the President was raised in rural California before being swept away by the Ivy League scene on the East Coast. The President had grown up in the tiny mountain town of Bishop, California, a far cry from the metropolitan scramble of Oakland, where the California governor went to high school.

  Somehow, in a heavy-handed attempt to make sure that the coal supply was restored to the power plant in Utah, the Governor of the State of California sent National Guard vehicles into a neighboring state to see that the coal arrived.

  By some perverse stroke of luck or genius, the militia group in Delta captured the California National Guard’s advance force and blockaded the town. Dutch didn’t know if anyone had died in the conflict, but he knew that once the Delta Desert Patriots pointed guns at American servicemen, there had been no turning back for the little town and its erstwhile patriots. As far as Dutch knew, the town and the power plant were still locked down by camouflaged radicals.

  This morning—which seemed like yesterday to Dutch—there had been so much crisis on his desk that he hadn’t had time to address the militia group seizing control of a town and a power plant. Before he could get to it, someone rushed into the Oval Office and turned on Fox News, where Dutch and his staff witnessed the first nuclear weapon ever used against the United States of America.

  Dutch could follow the bouncing ball from the Saudi Arabian attack, to the failure of Union Pacific Railroad, to the shutdown of the power plant. He could even see how the destruction of a major oil pumping station and tanker loading facility in the Middle East could cause the stock market to hiccup. Many corporations had been flying high for years on cheap gas. Expensive gas would hit a lot of stock prices.

  But how did a small militia in a tiny town in Utah come to play such a pivotal role in escalating civil disorder in Southern California? What the hell did any of this have to do with the nuclear attack in L.A.? Could the Iranians have mounted the nuke attack in L.A. as a follow up to the Saudi nuke? Why would one be a dirty bomb and the other be a fission bomb? And why would the bombs be three days apart?

  Now in his mid-sixties, President Dutch McAdams had seen his share of weird chains of events. Life is long and strange, he liked to say. Not every puzzle piece fit into a puzzle. Random chance resulted in peculiar, sometimes spooky combinations, like the triggers that started World War One or even the financial collapse of 2008; Black Swan Events, as economists liked to call them.

  People imagined that random chance played out more evenly than it actually did. While flipping “tails” ten times in a row was unlikely, in practice, it happened surprisingly often. Human history flipped tails ten times in a row with regularity, and then mankind paid the price with interest.

  There might be no connection whatsoever between the two nuclear devices. Or it might be a nefarious plot. Or it all might be a series of hapless accidents. Dutch might find the link tomorrow or he might never find it. Even the president wasn’t omniscient, he knew all too well.

  But Dutch had been elected by the people of America to diagnose problems and fix them, and he would be damned if he wouldn’t do exactly that.

  4

  Dutch awoke at 5 a.m. on Air Force One, his cell phone vibrating, overfull with an alarming stream of text messages.

  After hours of pawing through unsatisfying slivers of news, he and Sharon had finally called it a night. They continued their three thousand mile circuit over America that would keep them away from the coast, where an enemy submarine could conceivably shoot them out of the sky. As soon as the military had more solid answers on the attack, they would return home to Andrews Air Force Base and Washington D.C.. The glamor of the airplane had already worn off and Dutch yearned to be on the ground.

  To his knowledge, they had never done this before—moving a president to “WarFlight Status” during a heightened threat. President Bush had spent only three hours in the air after the 9/11 attacks, and that had been to get him from a grade school in Georgia to Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska.

  Dutch lifted his window shade and looked out into the still-dark morning sky, the slight orange scrim of dawn etching a line to the east of their flight path. Two red lights blinked in the distance, probably the E-4B Nightwatch that served as a flying command center in case of nuclear war. Thank God the secret service hadn’t dragged him onto that plane instead of Air Force One. He and Sharon would never have gotten a good night’s sleep in the super-spy command center. It would’ve been worse than trying to sleep in a hospital.

  The President’s cell phone buzzed again. Dutch kicked himself for getting talked into accepting an iPhone. His staff now controlled his attention 24/7. At least prior to the phone, they had to wait for him to wake up in the morning before giving him his marching orders. Now they could reach into his sleep and jerk him back to reality whenever they saw fit. So many people relied on him, Dutch was afraid to turn the damn thing off, even at night.

  It didn’t matter anyway. He had barely slept, feverish with concern over the nuclear attack and the civil disorder in California. His mind had been flipping bits of information until the wee hours of morning, hungry to connect the dots.

  Dutch hunted around blindly in the dark stateroom, trying not to wake Sharon, until he found his reading glasses on the nightstand next to the bed.

  “Jesus, God in Heaven,” he swore, reading the first text on his phone.

  “What’s wrong, Dutch?” Sharon asked, startling awake.

  “Homeland Security thinks we’re being hit with a cyberattack. Power plants along the east coast are now having problems. When people start waking up in the east, we could be in for more power outages.”

  “Who?”

  “Who’s attacking us? We don’t know, but the usual suspect would be Russia. They’ve probed our power systems before and they managed to shut down Ukraine’s power grid a couple years ago.”

  “Why would they hit us?” she asked, sitting up in bed.

  “The Russians are like that. If they sense weakness, they don’t let the opportunity pass them by, even though tanking our economy would likely tank theirs.” Dutch moved around the room, searching for clothes. Sharon turned on the reading light to make it easier for her husband to dress.

  “Will we retaliate?”

  Dutch chuffed. “Not unless we have proof, and I’m guessing we have bigger fish to fry today. Six metro areas in California rioted through the night. California State Guard is having trouble putting down the civil disorder. Apparently, only sixty percent of their guardsmen showed up for duty last night. They’re not sure how many more will make it in today.”

  Dutch slipped on a clean undershirt and pulled on a track suit he found in a drawer. Like everything else in their life, someone had thought through this potential outcome ahead of time and stocked the presidential suite with clothes for he and Sharon.

  He brushed his teeth and waded into the early morning maelstrom of the conference room, his gray and white streaked hair sticking up in the back.

  “What’s the situation?” Dutch took note of the staffers who had probably been awake most of the night, or at least since Homeland called in the cyberattack. His entire staff, plus the Attorney General, were present.

  SecDef Greaney wasn’t there, but Dutch doubted he had slept much either, not with a cyberattack underway. As suspected, Sam Greaney appeared in the doorway sipping a mug of coffee. He had probably been upstairs in the communications center.

  “Good morning, Mister President
,” Robbie, his chief of staff, began the brief. “As you saw in my text, Homeland Security detected a virus working its way through our power companies and their transfer points starting at 3:35 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Homeland is organizing a response, but the virus has been self-replicating, and we can assume that it’s present in every power grid system across the nation and the eastern half of Canada.”

  “Have we launched our counter-measures?” Dutch had been briefed on a possible cyberattack on the power grid, and he knew that Homeland Security had prepared a defensive response.

  “Well, this virus caught Homeland doing a scheduled update on their systems. They won’t be back online until 8 a.m. Eastern. By then, the worm may have generated too many iterations in the system to isolate it.”

  Dutch glowered. “Why the HELL did DHS run a system update the night after a nuclear strike against the country?”

  Robbie quailed at the unusual display of anger. “I’m sorry sir, but nobody in management told the programmers to hold off on the computer update. Those programmer guys kind of live in their own world. They will eventually eradicate the virus, but it won’t be as quick as if we’d responded immediately. Homeland anticipates about fifteen days of power interruptions before they get it under control.”

  Dutch dropped into one of the chairs around the conference table.

  “What else?”

  “California is requesting federal troops. Last night, they reported rioting and looting in…” Robbie looked down at a list he’d written on a yellow legal pad, “Los Angeles, Santa Ana, Sacramento, Oakland, San Jose and San Diego. They’re due to report in at 8 a.m. Pacific to assess damage and to discuss rules of engagement, but the governor forewarned us that they would be requesting federal troop support.”

  “Careful,” Zach Jackson, Attorney General, interrupted. “Congress altered the Posse Comitatus Act during the Bush administration and then repealed it. We don’t have the same free hand that they had back in the Los Angeles riots.”

  Dutch narrowed his eyes but said nothing.

  “That isn’t all, Mister President,” his chief of staff turned to Sam Greaney, as though they had already discussed the next piece of information. “Other cities are experiencing sympathetic riots based on what social media is calling ‘racially-biased distribution of electrical power.’ They’re convinced that the power companies are channeling available electricity to white, upscale neighborhoods, and they claim to have proof in the form of videos posted on Facebook, Instagram, Twitch and Twitter. We’re getting reports of minor looting last night in nearly every major metropolitan city in the United States. Tonight, it might get worse.”

  “Let me make sure I’m getting this straight,” Dutch bristled. “Cities without interruption to their electrical service are rioting because of some racial bias bullshit in other cities that they heard about on Facebook?” He leaned forward in his chair, fury now coming off him in waves.

  “Yes, sir. The movement already has a name.” Robbie looked down at his notes. “They’re calling it ‘Fair Power.’”

  Dutch threw himself back in his chair. “People are probably dying from radiation poisoning from a nuclear attack on our country, and people in Chicago are rioting because they think some races are getting more electricity than others in Los Angeles? Is that what I’m hearing you say? Because this is not how America responds to an attack on our soil! We proved that with 9/11.”

  The president’s staff shuffled their feet and looked anywhere but at their leader. Most of them were younger than Dutch by a fair margin. Two people in the room were Millennials. It seemed that the only person in the Oval Office who didn’t understand how much America had changed since 9/11 was The President of the United States.

  Sam Greaney sipped his coffee, still standing in the hallway, leaning against the bulkhead of the airplane.

  Dutch calmed himself and turned toward his secretary of defense, the closest person to his age in the conference room. “Sam. What do we know about the nuke?”

  “Well, Mister President, we know it was a baby nuke, probably something from when we were making devices that could fit into a piece of luggage. We have a location on all of ours, so that leaves a short list of possible provocateurs. It’ll take some time to winnow down the list. We’re spinning up ospreys this morning out of Twentynine Palms with Marine Corps radiation experts and flying them to ground zero in L.A.. We can’t get anything into Los Angeles that wasn’t already there by ground because half of Southern California is trying to drive out of the state, all at the same time. And the majority of cars will be running out of gas en route. It’ll take weeks to clear the blocked roads.”

  “What do we know about the people, Sam? How many died because of the bomb? What’s our radiation exposure?” Dutch fired back.

  “Hardly anything, really. Our best guess right now is that we might have lost eighty people, mostly those in boats and others who crashed their cars because of the flash. The California civil authorities are barely picking up their phones in the Los Angeles area, presumably because the place is like Mogadishu right now. We’d love a chance to get some eyes on Los Angeles Harbor from the Coast Guard, but they’re scrambling to put together a HAZMAT team from Monterey four hundred miles to the north. There used to be a Coastie HAZMAT team in Los Angeles Harbor, but less than half those guys are answering their phones, and the Coast Guard base got blown all to hell by the blast. The Coast Guard uses union dock workers to get their boats underway, and you can bet dollars-to-donuts that none of those union guys are going to show up right after a nuke. Cell service in L.A. is working fine, actually, but a lot of people aren’t answering their phones right now. They’re busy freaking out, I guess.”

  “So, we won’t know the radiation exposure until your team from either Monterey or Twentynine Palms gets there?”

  “Correct, Mister President. But the winds are favorable—SoCal is getting Santa Ana winds, which are hellacious for wildfires, but good for fallout. We’re speculating that most of the particles from the nuke are blowing out to sea. The bad news is that the civil disorder in town has sparked fires that are now blowing into full-fledged wildfires.”

  “I know we already deployed FEMA to the site. When do they arrive?”

  Silenced stretched until the president gave in. Apparently, nobody wanted to vouch for FEMA.

  “Robbie, will you please find out where FEMA is? Americans might be dying from radiation exposure as we speak. I want to know how long it’ll be before we turn this thing around.”

  “Yes, Mister President,” Robbie vacillated between leaving the Oval Office or staying to take further orders.

  “All bullshit aside, Mister President,” Sam Greaney took another sip of his coffee. “FEMA’s not going to get into L.A. anytime soon. Their air assets are skeletal, and they can’t do anything without semitrucks. There’s not a single road in or out of Los Angeles that isn’t choked, balls-to-butt with abandoned vehicles, or will be by this afternoon.”

  The attorney general spoke up. “I’m concerned about the Marine Corps radiation team flying into L.A.. Will they be armed? Their presence might be construed as a violation of the Insurrection Act if they conduct an armed mission within the U.S.. There’s a small carve out in the law for using federal troops to secure fissionable materials, but I’ll have to check on that…”

  “Zach,” the president talked over the top of his attorney general. “We’re friends, right? So you know I mean it with respect when I tell you to shut the fuck up. I need you to be less of a lawyer and more of a patriot right now.”

  5

  “I sure as hell hope you have solutions, Sam, because I’m sick of dead ends and colossal fuck ups,” the President continued his tirade as soon as the door to the Oval Office closed behind his retreating staff. Sam Greaney, Secretary of Defense, braved the President’s meltdown without any apparent bump in his blood pressure.

  The plane did a small shudder, causing Sam to steady his coffee to keep from spi
lling it on the president’s rug.

  “I have solutions, Dutch, but you’re not going to like them,” the SecDef drawled.

  “I’m up for absolutely anything that saves lives and gets us back on our game. Are you going to hit me up about counter-strikes against the Russians?”

  “No, Mister President. That’s the long game. We don’t have the luxury of playing the long game right now. Nothing we do against the Russians is going to stop the virus that’s already in our computers, and I doubt the Russians will mount an analog attack. They don’t need to do anything more. We’re doing a great job of screwing one another on Facebook and Insta-whatever.”

  “Then what’s next on your list?”

  “I’ve already given the Fifth Fleet a warning order that they’ll sail for the states in five days and the Third Fleet is already steaming for home in Southern California. I’m frankly more worried about the inner-city riots. In my mind, they’re the critical threat.”

  Dutch always had a sneaking suspicion that Sam Greaney was a bit of a racist, so he cocked his ear, preparing to take this next part with a grain of salt.

  “I believe we might be facing a social media, psych warfare attack from our enemies. Probably Russia. Maybe China. Quite possibly both. This bit about ‘Fair Power’ reeks of a social media play by the Russians. They pit us against each other on issues of race or hashtag-blah, blah, blah and we never fail to take the bait. Most Americans strut around thinking it was our idea. The CIA knows for a fact that the Russians are manipulating us through social media, but we just don’t know how much.”