The Last Air Force One Read online

  Ultimately, Dutch admitted to himself that he couldn’t conquer all the variables by raiding storerooms at Air Force Bases. There were hundreds of necessary items the Air Force had no reason to stock, like solar panels, portable generators, freeze-dried food, field toilets and family-sized tents.

  He would need to bet it all on some strategy of survival other than becoming frontier settlers. Setting up an entire farm, like a modern-day homesteader, wasn’t going to be possible. Not now…

  In a storeroom beside the armory, Dutch and Teddy found Doom and Bloom STOMP med kits, stashed away in a locker reserved for pararescue training. They rushed to the base PX and loaded up on military fatigues in their sizes: boots, socks, underwear, feminine hygiene products, and toilet paper. Dutch sped through the cosmetics section and picked up hair dye for himself and Sharon. Then he grabbed a beard trimmer, not sure if he would have electricity to even run it. In a flash of guilt, Dutch insisted on leaving his credit card with the befuddled cashier as they hurried out the door, running against the clock.

  They made their last stop at the airman survival container and stocked up on compact water filters, one-man tents, knives in various sizes, flashlights, radios that Dutch didn’t how to use, mace and Meals Ready to Eat.

  The MREs presented a particular challenge. Dutch compared their weight with the practical limitations of airplane cargo and concluded that he had a problem. To Dutch, the meals seemed to weigh well over one pound each, and they would add up very fast.

  He knew he wouldn’t be abandoning Robbie Leforth, nor Janice Foster, at Offutt Air Force Base, no matter Sam Greaney’s push to get rid of the chief of staff. The same would go for another half-dozen of the team aboard the plane. His new “family group” numbered around ten people, and that would add up to thirty MREs per day or at least nine hundred pounds of MREs per month. If they were stuck in the boonies for a year, they would have to pack over twenty thousand pounds of food—much more than Dutch imagined a Boeing 747-8 could carry and still get off the ground.

  Dutch called ahead to the pilot and asked.

  “Sir,” the pilot replied, “we can carry a hundred tons of whatever you want. Ten tons won’t be a problem.” Dutch jumped behind the wheel of the Humvee and sent the supply officer to track down twenty pallets of MREs and a forklift and meet him at the plane.

  As Dutch crossed the basics of survival off his hurried list, he returned to thinking about his long-term strategy. How could his family enter a fresh, belligerent world with a decisive advantage? How could he trade the next fifteen minutes for a plan that would catapult his loved ones ahead of the curve?

  Dutch made a hard U-turn, bumped over the curb and onto the grass, then went back the way he had come. A Humvee going the other way slammed on his brakes to avoid a collision and gave the president a hearty middle finger out the window.

  “Sorry, pal,” Dutch apologized out loud. His son couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of an enlisted man giving his Commander in Chief the bird.

  “I’d bet he’d be horrified if he knew who you were,” Teddy said.

  “Maybe not today. There are a lot of Americans who’d probably love to see me crucified right now,” Dutch finally spoke the truth to himself, and his son.

  No matter what happened now, and no matter how much virtue and honor he had intended, he would forever be the president who presided over the greatest horror to ever touch the United States of America.

  22

  Dutch and Teddy had returned to the armory, much to the shock of the enlisted man standing behind the front counter. Two hours before, his superior officers had helped the president. Now, they were tied up at the base gate practicing riot control. The young airman would have to handle the scenario by himself. Noticing the young man’s discomfiture, Dutch jumped ahead of the stress he could see painted across the young man’s face.

  “Feel free to take pictures with your phone so you’re not held responsible for what happens next.”

  The young enlisted man nodded and went to work helping Dutch and Teddy demolish their stores of weapons and ammunition.

  Dutch first had the young airman set aside all the firearms and ammunition he thought they might need for base defense. Then Dutch grabbed every weapon they could lay hands on, including belt-fed machine guns, links, grenades, cleaning kits, tactical flashlights and every remaining case of ammunition in the building.

  The more he thought about it, the more Dutch figured that military firearms might be worth their weight in gold. While Dutch hadn’t planned well enough to own a farm or a cattle ranch, he could do the next best thing: work for a farmer or rancher to keep land and animals out of the hands of the lawless. If the civilized world failed completely, a truck full of military weapons and ammunition could probably be traded for hundreds of acres of arable land, complete with wells, herds of beef cattle, horses and farm equipment. Dutch knew it was a guess, but it was his best stab at getting ahead in a world where people no longer respected property rights. Even in that world, no sane person would walk into machine gun fire to steal a cow.

  Dutch would bring the guns, and maybe the gunmen—thinking of his secret service detail—and given the right rancher or farmer, he might be able to strike a mutually-beneficial partnership.

  The idea of himself cruising the countryside as a gunman made Dutch feel like a macho-fantasy fool, but he looked across the base at the smoke hanging over Omaha and he suddenly didn’t feel quite so foolish.

  Dutch heard the artificial click-hiss of a cell phone camera and turned to see the young airman taking snapshots of the president in front of the Humvee, now bristling with gun barrels, poking out in every direction.

  “Just so they don’t think I took the guns for myself,” the airman explained feebly.

  Dutch laughed and shook the young airman’s hand. He would’ve loved to say something presidential in that moment, but he felt more like a pirate than a president, leaving the base security with less than half their ammunition and a small percentage of their guns. Dutch hoped they would no longer need them after he took to the air and the angry crowd disbursed.

  “I hope I didn’t leave you guys in a bad way,” Dutch apologized, nodding toward the Humvee.

  “We’re good, sir. We have more cases of ammunition in a bunker on the far side of the airfield. I’ll pull together a work detail and resupply the armory as soon as you leave. Don’t worry about us, sir. We’ll defend our base.”

  Dutch sighed, wondering if they really would. He doubted their fuel reserves would last more than a month, the generators running night and day. Without food shipments coming from the outside, the base would quickly burn through their stores of fresh food and MREs. While foraging on their base, Dutch estimated that Offutt had a couple hundred pallets of Meals Ready to Eat and those would disappear fast with almost 9,000 servicemen and women, plus dependents, relying upon them as their only source of food.

  No matter how strong or prepared, everyone would suffer given the collapse of modern civilization. Even in the middle of Oklahoma, Dutch guessed that Offutt Air Force Base probably got half their food from Mexico and California, which might as well be on the dark side of the moon now that trucks weren’t running. In a thousand ways, no one had contemplated since the Great Depression, modern man would be sucker punched over and over with critical needs they had long forgotten in the comfortable haze of global shipping and Amazon Prime.

  Even the American military.

  23

  While Dutch gathered supplies, Sharon McAdams had been working through the complement and crew of Air Force One, leaving most of them at Offutt Air Base and keeping only those people absolutely necessary to a recovery of the United States. Some had resisted the idea of leaving the President’s side. Others had been more than happy to get off the sinking ship. One despondent man had been driven to self-destruction already. The blood stain still hadn’t been washed out of the carpet in the office section of the plane.

  As the plane prepared
to depart, Sharon debriefed her husband in the Oval Office.

  “Sam Greaney showed up with five support men instead of the four you agreed to,” Sharon said, her shoulders pitched forward in aggravation.

  Dutch sighed. He would love nothing more than to kick Sam off the plane, his resignation letter in hand. The trust between the two men had taken serious hits in the last few days, and it would most likely never recover—no matter how successful they were in restitching the fabric of the nation.

  But the trouble of replacing Sam at this point was far greater than the trouble of making their strained relationship work. Dutch owed it to America to put aside his annoyance with the man and to get both their backs behind the work at hand. Restoring the broken union would require the military, and nobody understood the moving parts of the military better than Sam Greaney.

  “It’s okay. Let it be,” Dutch tried to assuage her concern, though he knew it to be futile. Sharon kept her own counsel, and if she were uncomfortable with a scenario, nothing Dutch could say would make much difference.

  “Jeff Crane’s wife and daughter died in a looter attack in Fairfax,” Sharon reported, her eyes turning down at the corners.

  Dutch closed his eyes and laid his head back against the office chair, picturing the woman and her child perishing in a state of fear and violence, not fifteen miles from the White House.

  “My God, Sharon. I should’ve done more…the worst part: I don’t even know who Jeff Crane is.”

  “He’s the lead pilot, Dutch. He’s been flying us in Air Force One for two years.”

  “Okay, yes. I apologize. I wasn’t thinking straight. Of course, Colonel Crane. How is he holding up?”

  “He’s a patriot. He does what he must for his country… just like you.” Sharon reached over the desk and put her hand on Dutch’s. “Did you get done what you needed to do at Offutt?”

  They both knew what he had been doing and they both were reluctant to say it out loud—as though thinking of their family while the country suffered was a dirty secret. “Yes, I did. Teddy and I gathered what we could. I hope we didn’t leave the base short.”

  “It’s just an insurance policy, Dutch. Now you can focus on just one thing: fixing what is broken. Right?” Sharon looked him in the eyes, still holding his hand, lending him some of her iron strength.

  “Yes. Let’s get to work. Did Robbie make it back aboard?”

  “Of course he did. A thousand horses couldn’t pull him away from your side.” Sharon smiled. “I think he’s a new man now that he’s had a shower.”

  “Are we fully resupplied?” Dutch asked. In these two hours, she had become the head of the logistics team aboard Air Force One.

  “Yes. They’re loading the last of the pallets you sent, and then we’ll be ready to take off. Can I get you anything before they make us put on our seatbelts?”

  “Did the flight attendants stay with the plane?” Dutch raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  “Nope. We’re a skeleton crew now. We have our pilot, co-pilot, Sam Greaney and his men, our family, Robbie and Janet, and your secret service detail…I couldn’t get them to stay at the airbase no matter how hard I argued.”

  “Men and their duty…” Dutch said, his own sense of duty inspired by the commitment of his protective detail. “Let’s get America back.”

  24

  Revived and recommitted, Dutch’s team reconvened in the conference room the moment Air Force One reached cruising altitude and resumed its racetrack loop around the troubled American skies.

  “First,” Dutch ordered, “what’s our command and control plan from here? We can’t stay in the air forever. The base commander at SAC told me the network of U.S. air bases is running low on maintenance and pre-flight personnel for the refueling flights, and that they might not be capable of sustaining midair refueling much longer.”

  Sam Greaney stood and pointed toward the Southwestern quadrant of the map. “I’ve taken the liberty of sending a regiment of M1 Abrams main battle tanks from Fort Bliss to meet us at Cannon Air Force Base, about a hundred miles east of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The location is far enough away from population centers that we won’t be forced to spend a lot of energy protecting our command and control base. The tanks should be more than enough protection. Also, winter won’t be a problem that far south. We can dig in at Cannon and re-establish control with a maximum amount of resource and a minimum amount of friction.”

  “All right.” Dutch pushed the meeting forward. “Please give me a report on foreign threats and enemy activity.”

  Sam Greaney addressed the small group seated around the conference table. “We still have no actionable intelligence that indicates any one foreign instigator over another. We’re operating on the theory that the Russians launched the power grid hack, but it could’ve been the North Koreans or even the Chinese. The Iranians and Saudis are bludgeoning one another back to the time of Mohammed, so I really doubt either of them had grand designs on destroying the U.S.”

  “Is anyone approaching our territory?”

  “Well,” Sam rubbed his chin. “The Chinese are putting to port in a fairly heavy way, but everyone’s putting their naval forces to port, given the new war in the Middle East and global instability in general. The Russians are sailing everything they have, which wasn’t much anyway. I’m sure their subs are on station off the East Coast, but they would do that in any DEFCON 2 scenario. Our subs are sitting within firing range of Moscow.”

  “And the rest of the world?” Dutch asked.

  “As expected, the Indians and Pakistanis are massing on their borders. With our forces pulling back, that was inevitable. In Europe, not surprisingly, we’re seeing the same kind of civil disorder we have here. What’s strange is that some of our bases in Germany and France are reporting sectarian violence from Muslim immigrants directed at Americans. It’s not anything we can’t handle, but it’s odd that the attacks are happening in a semi-coordinated manner so quickly after the collapse of the markets. The remnants of ISIS and ISIL are being invigorated by our misfortune, it appears. And there’s a level of organization I wouldn’t have predicted.”

  “Thank you, Sam. There’s not much we can do on the international front. Let’s focus on getting the U.S. back on its feet. Robbie, tell me where we’re at with the power grid.”

  “We’re dead in the water, sir. It’s been seven days since the cyberattack, and our entire team of NSA programmers addressing the hack is down to two guys who live at the office. I have no idea how the power companies’ programming teams are holding up. They’re probably gone, if I had to guess. Since two days after the attack, our programmers have been turning into ghosts—poof. I can’t hardly blame them. Driving to work in D.C. has been tantamount to surviving Mad Max. It’s not something we can reasonably ask Millennial programmers to do. Our two-week estimate for defeating the hack assumed that all teams would be working full time. We were able to maintain that level of response for about thirty hours, then people started calling in sick. Then they quit answering their phones. Sir, there is no chance we’ll get the grid back up until we’ve restored civil order.”

  “That’s your department, Sam.” Dutch turned toward the big LCD screen. America was entirely black, the power outage universal. “I’ll state the obvious: the map’s not looking good.”

  Around the major cities the red had consumed all green—any pockets of civil order created by troops had been lost, and troops had pulled outside the big cities. The orange military markers all hovered around the areas of civil disorder.

  “We’ve consolidated our remaining troops around the twelve largest cities, and we’re cordoning them off rather than trying to stamp out civil disorder one flash point at a time. Our troop numbers have declined from over four hundred thousand to under two hundred thousand due to sky-high desertion rates, especially among married servicemen. Our troops aren’t stupid—they know that without the banks there won’t be paychecks. These soldiers are witnessing the worst o
f the civil disorder firsthand, and many of them are vanishing in the night to return to their families. Sometimes they’re taking war materiel with them. But I’m highly confident that we’ve shaken off the strap-hangers, and now we’re working with hardened men of duty, especially the officers. The remaining generals and colonels are my guys now, and they know how to execute orders.”

  25

  “What’s the plan, then?” Dutch wondered aloud. “How do troops holding outside the cities help us restore civil order?”

  Sam Greaney pointed to Chicago where the red area of civil disorder looked like an octopus reaching inland from Lake Michigan. “For example, we have troops blockading Chicago and Milwaukee at bridges on the interstates here, here, here, and here.” Greaney pointed to a dozen or more choke points along the major interstates where the red octopus suddenly stopped its reach from the inner bergs of Chicago. “It’s not a perfect barrier, but we’re holding in the majority and we’re stopping all vehicle traffic. By setting up check points and dealing with lawless people one group at a time, we’re containing the civil disorder and keeping it from spreading into the heartland.”

  A jolt of electricity went up Dutch’s spine and his ears started to ring. “Sam…it looks like you’re creating hell-holes where Americans are being sent back to die. Is that what I’m hearing?”

  The Secretary of Defense sighed and set down his coffee mug. “Dutch. They’re dying anyway. We’re over a week into mass violence and hunger, particularly inside the urban areas. They’re dying from violence. They’re starting to die from failure of sanitation. They don’t have any food. Pretty soon, they’ll be dying from the cold.”