May 1
Aboard Marine One
302 Feet Altitude
Over Newark/Elizabeth, New Jersey
3:34 P.M. EDT
Major Pamela Stack tweaked the helicopter’s collective to align with the Newark airport tower, the two helicopters trailing descending shadows that danced across truck terminals, parking lots, and various industrial buildings.
Among the latter, unnoticed by any aboard the aircraft, was an older brick warehouse—this one, marked by fading letters painted immediately below the large multi-pane windows of the top floor, which spelled out “MERICK FREIGHT & STORAGE.”
• • •
Hakki Akdari stood at the large window, surveying the streets outside. There was no vehicular traffic on the crisscrossing roadways; he craned his neck to peer toward the north.
Still there, still oh-so-watchful, still looking outward in the wrong direction, he told himself, with satisfaction. It is well that I arrived so early.
The roadblocks had been set up by midmorning. In accord with Presidential security protocols, cars and trucks and armed men blocked all access to the areas around Newark airport.
Hakki assumed it was the same at every major airport in the New York area. While it was a reasonable assumption that the President would fly into the city, under the heightened post-attack security it was also reasonable to assume that the specific airport where he would arrive would be intentionally kept secret until the last minute.
Another reasonable assumption would have been that the otherwise-standard practice of a building-by-building search inside the perimeter—impossible in the event, given the time constraints and variety of potential sniper posts therein—could be reasonably ignored in lieu of this area isolation.
And, while I certainly am not privy to any sure knowledge of it, it is also reasonable to assume that others like I are also pre-positioned—today, awaiting our high-value target at Kennedy, at LaGuardia, possibly even at White Plains, Hakki told himself. We are like the drones they send to our skies, lingering and waiting and hungry.
God be praised for the foresight, the wisdom of those who lead us. And I thank Him for my own fate, to have been chosen as the servant whose missile will strike hardest at the Great Satan.
He chuckled.
Those of us who wait elsewhere must wait longer, for other aircraft of lesser importance. But the will of God is eternal, and they too perhaps may have their own chance to serve, on some other day…
He stiffened suddenly. From the corner of his eye, he saw movement on the street below.
It was only a shadow. No, two of them—cast by the twin helicopters which had passed between him and the afternoon sun, in a gliding descent toward where Air Force One awaited.
Hakki felt his flesh tingle, a pleasant sensation, and knew it to be anticipation.
• • •
“ETA for MARINE ONE: thirty seconds,” the earwig crackled, and the senior agent turned to the now-dressed President of the United States.
“Standard drill, sir,” he said. “We’d like you down the stairs ASAP, no wavin’ or handshakin’ or slowin’ down ’til we get you onboard the chopper and out of here, okay?”
The President decided to attempt a joke.
“Can I at least take the time to make sure it’s one of my helicopters?”
“That ought’a be okay,” the agent smiled. “You even get to pick which one to make MARINE ONE, sir. Only two to choose from today, so it ought’a be a pretty easy decision. Long as it’s the closest one, okay?”
They moved to the jet’s forward hatch, waited in a few moments of silence as others in the Presidential Protection Detail formed a tight ring around their charge.
Then the door swung open, letting in a glare of blinding May sunlight that for a moment dazzled the small knot of agents and the President alike.
“RENEGADE on the move,” the senior agent murmured into his wrist-microphone, and the group pressed forward as if one.
• • •
Through the sighting mechanism of the still-inactive laser designator, Hakki watched the group descend, move with surprising speed toward the waiting helicopters.
He strained to pick out his target as the group split and—each figure in a half-crouch instinctive to any who approach whirring rotor blades—climbed into the infuriatingly identical aircraft.
Even at full magnification, I cannot—no, wait. That is he. Entering the helicopter on the right … yes … yes, of that I am certain.
The doors closed without ceremony. Seconds later, in unison, the helicopters shuddered slightly, hovered, then lifted away from the tarmac.
Hakki’s finger lifted and hovered too, poised over the switch that would activate the laser-targeting beam.
His thumb already rested lightly on the missile-firing button.
• • •
The altimeter read-out hit the 300-foot mark, and Stack keyed her microphone.
“DUCK DECOY: confirm. We’re at Cherubs Three,” she said. “You boys set to doe-si-doe with us?”
“DECOY confirms: altitude Cherubs Three,” the other helo escort responded. “Roger that, Major. We’ve got the music playing. Ready to dance, on your mark.”
“Commence maneuver,” Stack replied. “Mark.”
Immediately, both helicopters swayed and dipped and scissored, a 70-knot-airspeed tango that might otherwise have appeared an inappropriate frivolity—certainly, for Marines carrying such an important supercargo.
It was not.
Rather, it was a precisely choreographed and rigorously practiced mid-air dance, an intricate pea-under-the-nutshell sleight-of-hand. The decidedly non-frivolous objective: to disguise to any ground-watchers which of the Marine helos was MARINE ONE, and which were the accompanying decoy birds.
Pamela Stack felt the usual grin tug at her cheeks; while not much of a dancing fan when both feet were planted on terra firma, she enjoyed the in-flight maneuver inordinately.
Bit easier on this understaffed day, she thought to herself. As standard procedure, Presidential flights usually incorporated four or more decoy helicopters.
Today, it’s like an actual dance, with just the two of us. Almost…well, relaxing…
It was on the third flowing jibe-and-gyration of her helicopter when, suddenly, all hell broke loose.
• • •
Hakki snapped on the laser, its invisible, pencil-thin beam lancing out to the loci where the sighting device’s crosshairs intersected the designated target at mid-fuselage.
For an instant, a tiny pinpoint of green lit a corner of the aiming eyepiece: target acquired, missile locked on, all-go for launch…
But just as quickly, the weaving aircraft suddenly dipped lower in his optics, and the green changed to a cautionary yellow, then flickered red.
Hakki cursed aloud, trying to match the rhythms of the aircraft with his sighting joystick, the lock-indicator light strobing in yellow, then a too-brief green, now yellow again—
Green.
Now! his mind shouted…
• • •
The President gripped the armrests tightly; he detested this part of every MARINE ONE flight.
They say Clinton threw up the first couple of times he went through this, he groused, silently. Not Bush though; neither of ’em, in fact. But they were pilots themselves, and probably enjoyed the hell out of—
Claxon alarms froze him, extinguishing the reverie in a flash.
• • •
Laser beams travel at the speed of light—far faster than the missiles that ride along such a beam to reach a target, and a magnitude far too fast for mere humans to react, much less to respond in any meaningful manner.
For that reason, laser detection devices used in military applications are hardwired to automatically counter with one or more of the few countermeasures designed to protect against them.
It is analogous to Scripture, specifically the passage involving the “unclean woman” who covertly touched the hem of the Christ’s robe. At that instant, the Bible relates, “he perceived the power immediately flow out from him.”
Such it is also with military-grade laser detectors. Specifically, such it was when Hakki’s targeting laser “touched” Pamela Stack’s HV-3D helicopter, which was recently ungraded with a state-of-the-art BOLDSTROKE anti-missile system.
Even before the near-instantaneous alarms banshee-wailed, the integrated circuitry of BOLDSTROKE’s sensors had felt the first fleeting pass of Hakki’s laser, flash-activated digital parallax rangefinders, triangulated the intruding laser’s point of origin—all faster than a human eye can blink.
And a microsecond after completing those complex calculations, disdaining even to ask permission from its pitifully ponderous human masters, BOLDSTROKE had loosed its own power, which flowed out from it in a pulsing burst of precisely aimed pure energy toward the detected source—this, in an intensity that rivaled the power of a thousand suns.
• • •
“Threat detected! Laser!” Stack screamed into her microphone, only slightly less loud than the alarm horn that pounded her eardrums. “Breaking left, evasive!”
Without waiting for acknowledgement from her companion helo, Stack thrust the joystick hard against her thigh, stomping the rudder pedal to the floor as her left hand simultaneously twisted the throttle to full power.
• • •
The laser dazzle had already blinded Hakki, his vision extinguished in a blast of crimson that blink-bleached to a chalky gray in the instant it took to flash-char his retinas.
He screamed, the agony intense.
But not before his thumb had twitched.
With the roar of a demon unleashed, the four-foot-long missile exploded from the RBS-70 launch tube, lanced through the thin glass of the window array without ill effect, and corkscrewed into the sky toward its prey.
• • •
BOLDSTROKE detected the missile launch before the projectile had completely cleared the shattered window glass.
Its silicon brain calculated the angle of approach—complicated somewhat by the sharp, evasive bank-and-turn of its host-helicopter, so that the computation took a nanosecond longer than it otherwise would have—estimated in time and space where the impending impact would occur, and automatically initiated the countermeasures available to it.
Among these were flares—good against heat-seeking missiles, useless against their laser-guided brethren, but BOLDSTROKE’s programmers understood the value of even futile gestures during desperate situations—which launched in a divergent pattern as the helicopter twisted away.
Electronic jamming signals also flashed out into the ether—equally useless against laser guidance, though this anti-radar targeting feature had also been code-written into the system as a “Why not?” military-contract provision.
But BOLDSTROKE also lofted aerial smoke bomblets, set on a tenth-of-a-second delay fuse, which created a stutter of small dense clouds in the turning helicopter’s wake.
These, at least, the laser beam could not ignore; nor could a blinded Hakki override it. Instead, to the missile’s seeker-eye, the otherwise ethereal smoke cloud became tangible, a perceived mass as solid as aluminum and steel, a substitute bull’s eye painted brightly with the reflected laser light.
To there, the missile swerved, unerringly bored in upon at a now-supersonic speed, and—at the pre-set distance of its own proximity fuse—detonated in an orange-black mini-supernova.
• • •
The flash of the missile’s explosion lit the cockpit’s interior, and Pamela Stack felt an instant of relief.
Missed us, she breathed, that was a goddamn close—
At that precise moment, the bee-swarm of tungsten projectiles sliced into and through the aluminum skin of her helicopter, the half-inch-diameter balls shredding the instrument console, holing the acrylic windows, vaporizing Stack’s right ankle.
The shotgunlike cloud also peppered the helo’s engine cowling and fuselage—but most critically, its tungsten spheres smashed into three of the five whirling rotor blades. The physics of centrifugal force finished the job, shearing away the thirty-foot blades and pitching the helicopter into a lethal, uncontrollable roll.
Three hundred feet is not far to fall; it took the ruined helicopter less than five seconds.
Long enough, though, for Pamela Stack to hear the screams of all aboard, her own among them.
• • •
“Control, this is DUCK DECOY … MARINE ONE is down … repeat, MARINE ONE … oh, my God … MARINE ONE is down…”