ONE
The iconic blue-and-white whale that was Air Force One coasted smoothly down the glidepath toward Joint Base Andrews. The skies over Maryland had cleared from an earlier overcast and the sun was poised on the western horizon, a fitting ending to a grueling day that had begun here twelve hours earlier.
President Elayne Cleveland stared vacantly out the oval window beside her. The great chrome-lipped engines reflected the last glimmers of daylight. The terrain below gained definition, small farms giving way to pocket neighborhoods as the city came nearer. In the gathering darkness, traffic on the distant Beltway necklaced the capital in red and white light.
“At some point there has to be a sacrifice, and we all know who’s got the target on his back.”
Cleveland blinked. Her eyes came back inside. Reluctantly, she tried to process what her Chief of Staff, Ed Markowitz, had just said. He was sitting across from her in a plush aft-facing chair. After the long day he looked no different than he had at the outset, his usual wonkish self: rumpled tweed jacket, bifocals, unkempt hair, and of course the ever-present secure tablet computer. She wondered if Ed, even as a child, had ever gazed out a window and let his thoughts wander.
They’d departed Andrews at daybreak that morning, destined for a long-deferred tour of a new Kansas semiconductor plant. Bringing tech production back to America was one of the few areas on which the parties could agree. After that had been lunch with the governor of Iowa to promote a robotics research initiative. Altogether, it was a pathetic, and all too obvious, attempt at normalcy after weeks of relentless crises. At every stop the reporters had been ruthless, shouting questions that had nothing to do with silicon wafers or AI. Try as she might to lead the country forward, the recent series of attacks against American interests had become a political black hole, an inexorable force that dragged her away from anything productive.
The chain of disasters had begun six weeks ago, and was now referred to by the media as March Madness. First, an Air Force reconnaissance plane had crashed in the Arctic, the wreckage landing on Russian territory. Almost simultaneously, a Navy guided-missile destroyer had sunk in the Black Sea. Both tragedies occurred under suspicious circumstances, and both involved loss of life. Rumors swirled that Russia was responsible. As commander in chief, however, Cleveland could not retaliate based on rumors. She needed hard facts, and while intelligence reports left no doubt that the acts were intentional, attribution for them had proved harder to nail down. Worse yet, making public what they did know would be the world’s worst poker move. Which meant her only play was to duck the questions and promise “a full and thorough investigation” by the nation’s already embarrassed intelligence agencies. More attacks followed, putting America on the precipice of World War Three, yet Cleveland found herself mired in political quicksand, and with a window for action that was closing fast. She had so far managed to keep America out of a shooting war with Russia, but her poll numbers were dropping like a free-falling anvil.
“Thomas is a good man,” she replied, referring to CIA director Thomas Coltrane. “He’s done nothing to shake my faith.”
“I would never argue otherwise, but we were caught flatfooted. Our intelligence agencies are still drawing blanks. The perception is that they’re failing us in our time of need. America was attacked, and we can’t even figure out who was behind it.”
“It’s not for lack of trying. People at the CIA have risked their lives to get to the bottom of this—one man in particular.”
“True, but unfortunately that’s not something we can share. The operator you’re referring to is an off-the-books asset—he’s not even a U.S. citizen, for God’s sake. And if Congress finds out you authorized the agency to send a gun-for-hire downrange…”
The president stared at Markowitz as his words trailed off into the recirculated air. A biting reply began to rise, but then she thought better of it. Ed had been with her for seven years now, first in the Montana governor’s mansion, and now in the White House. Was the pressure getting to him? Or is it getting to me?
“The midterm elections are closing in,” Markowitz pressed, “and the Democrats are baying for a response. Needless to say, national security is not ground we can afford to concede.”
“Nobody is conceding anything. Intelligence work takes time.” Cleveland spoke from a position of authority—after graduating from college, she had done a stint in the Army Reserve as an intelligence officer. “What’s on my calendar tomorrow?” she asked, ready to change the subject.
Markowitz finger-tapped on his tablet. “The standard morning briefings until ten, then you meet with the vice president to discuss border controls.”
“I thought he was in Asia.”
“He got back this afternoon.”
She had put Vice President Lincoln Quarrels in charge of the southern border. It was a thankless job, and a problem that had been festering for decades. In Cleveland’s view, it wasn’t a uniquely American issue, but rather a regional manifestation of what was happening across the globe. With the world increasingly divided into haves and have-nots, the exodus of the downtrodden had become a torrent. For America, having oceans on either side and a prosperous Canada to the north, the problem was simply hyper-focused.
The president massaged her temples, feeling the onset of a massive headache. Her eyes went back to the window but snagged on her reflection in the inner pane. Her brown hair, styled dutifully this morning, was drooping after the long day. Even in the ghosted image she could see bags under her eyes. Cleveland rarely found time for diversions of vanity, but the thought of a morning makeover crossed her mind.
The ground seemed to rush up suddenly and the great jet settled onto the runway. Its cantilever landing gear, and two of the finest pilots in the Air Force, bonded for a glass-smooth landing. Elayne Cleveland had never come to think of the White House as home, not really, but it was a place where she could rest. The finest bed-and-breakfast in the world.
Runway lights flashed past the window, the time interval between them lengthening as the great plane slowed. She heard the smartphones of staffers chiming notifications in the adjoining cabin. All of it brought her back to reality, and the idea of an early makeover tomorrow vanished.
There’s just too damned much to be done.
* * *
Five minutes later, Elayne Cleveland was descending red-carpeted stairs to the tarmac. She took care not to stumble—there were only a handful of cameras in the press pen today, but any misstep would go viral within minutes. Such was the aquarium she lived in.
She saluted two airmen at the bottom of the stairs and made a sharp turn toward her connecting flight: the Sikorsky VH-92 known as Marine One. The scrum of reporters was a hundred yards away, and Cleveland pretended not to hear their shouted questions, most of which had to do with the deplorable state of U.S.-Russia relations. Markowitz shadowed a few steps behind her, and nearing the helicopter she paused to let him catch up.
“Are you going to ride back to the White House with me?” she asked.
“Not tonight. I arranged for a car to take me straight home … Julie and I have plans to celebrate our anniversary. But if you need me for something—”
“No, no,” Cleveland said, cutting him off. “Have a nice time, and give Julie my best. I’ll see you in the morning.”
She turned away, forced a smile, and waved at the distant press gaggle. Cleveland strode as energetically as she could toward the idling helicopter, and at the steps of Marine One she exchanged another salute, this with a young Marine, before disappearing inside.
TWO
As the four-billion-dollar Boeing 747–800 known as Air Force One crouched on the ramp, its engines ticking away heat from the long flight, and while the most expensive and finely tuned helicopter on earth prepared to deliver the president of the United States the final eleven miles to the White House, a far more ordinary aircraft circled lazily in the humid evening air twelve miles to the east.
The weary Cessna 172 Skyhawk had been purchased thirty days ago for the price of a good used car. It was a cast-off trainer from a North Carolina flight school, and with three inspections pending, antiquated “steam-gauge” instruments, and more than a few dents and dings, the aircraft was fast nearing the end of an exhausting service life. Aside from the fact that it achieved flight, the tiny four-seater was to the aircraft at Andrews what an abacus was to a supercomputer. It had no satellite navigation, no secure communications, no electronic self-defense measures. The only air conditioning involved cracking the side window open, and even that did little to flush out the dank odors inside: forty years of nervous sweat, vomit, and spilled fuel.
The Cessna’s two occupants were crammed shoulder to shoulder in the tiny cockpit. They had to nearly shout to be heard over the engine and slipstream noise. Yet if the aircraft itself was a bare-bones platform, its two-person crew leveraged technology that hadn’t existed when it was built: one cell phone and an excellent pair of low-light optics.
In the right seat, doing the flying, was a middle-aged Hungarian. His name was Lazlo, and his meaty hands held the yoke with all the deftness of a prisoner gripping the iron bars of a cell door. Hamfisted though he was, Lazlo was a reasonably experienced pilot, with two thousand hours of flight time in various general aviation aircraft. How he had ended up here, floating a quarter mile above the exburbs of Washington, D.C., was nothing less than a testament to his tenacity. He had grown up in a rough quarter of Budapest where he’d learned to fight, first on the streets and later in the bars. A year in a Hungarian prison did nothing to soften his rough edges, yet it also gave Lazlo time to contemplate. All around him he saw men on the same track he was running, many of them years farther along. A scarred and defeated bunch, they sat hunched in their cells, posturing and scheming, and performing prison tattoos on one another with shaking hands. Sensing fate bearing down, Lazlo came to the realization that only drastic measures would alter his own future, and he committed to the most divergent path he could imagine: on the day of his release, he would join the army.
He made good on the promise. To his benefit, public records in Hungary were aspirational at best, and when the recruiters didn’t ask about his stint as a guest of the state, Lazlo didn’t bring it up. He served in the infantry for three lusterless years, mostly staying out of trouble. Near the end of his service commitment, a short-lived fling with a flight instructor piqued his interest in aviation. Lazlo then made the second good decision of his life: he used his meager savings from the army to take a few flying lessons.
Soon, however, the old ways began to claw back. Lazlo’s first flying job, hauling overnight air freight for a fledgling cargo company, was both exhausting and ill-paying. His second, hauling heroin for the Slovakian mafia, was an improvement on both counts. Yet it also, predictably, introduced considerable new risks.
Lazlo’s smuggling career ended as most did, badly and on the run from the law. A forced landing near the Moldovan-Romanian border—contaminants in the fuel system, he suspected—had left an undamaged Pilatus PC-12 and nine million dollars of uncut Afghan heroin on a highway median. Fortunately, the forced landing took place in the middle of the night, and Lazlo was able to escape before an epic morning traffic jam ensued. His run of good luck over, the incident put him squarely in a crossfire: on one side was an embarrassed Romanian police force, on the other a furious Slovak capo. Lazlo made his way to Ukraine, and it was there that a bolt of providence intervened.
Her name was Magda.
In the course of his brief smuggling career, Lazlo had made a few runs for the SIS, the Slovak Information Service. SIS was Slovakia’s one-stop shop for foreign and domestic intelligence. It was also the kind of agency that considered engaging the services of a discreet pilot-for-hire well within bounds. Hiding in Ukraine after his forced landing, Lazlo had called his SIS contact and explained the situation. He’d only met her once before, and on that night, a year earlier in Bratislava, she’d been a vision in black: shapely jeans, leather top, and the barest outline of a holstered Beretta Nano on her ankle. As it turned out, on his night of desperation, Lazlo’s call to bargain for an extraction from Ukraine had found Magda herself at odds with her employer. Money had gone missing from an SIS account she’d overseen, and certain government ministers, for whose benefit the setup had been arranged, were outraged.
One very pretty head was about to roll.
The next morning Magda and Lazlo, both viewed as deserters by their respective employers, rendezvoused in Lviv. By the end of the day a partnership of necessity was born. Magda purchased a small aircraft, using a stack of U.S. dollars taken from a bulging suitcase, and Lazlo assumed the controls to fly them south.
So began their vagabond relationship. The pair crisscrossed the Mediterranean and Africa, seeking out odd jobs that matched their respective skill sets: Lazlo could fly virtually any small aircraft, while Magda had a brimming list of contacts and extensive training in photo-surveillance. It turned out to be a lucrative niche in a conveniently gray world. Cashed-up oligarchs spying on rivals, oil companies looking for illegal taps on pipelines, governments without the means for an air force searching for rebel camps. For three years the pair made a go of it, building a quiet reputation as private aerial contractors.
Slovakian by birth, Magda was two years younger than Lazlo, and as petite as he was burly. She was also the uncontested brains of the outfit. The partnership eventually took a dual track, becoming both intimate and professional. The question of whether they were married remained a point of contention. There had been a ceremony on a Greek island, performed by a drunken priest on the patio of a pub, which might or might not have been legitimate. Neither of them chased any official document to prove the point, but in their hearts, it was enough. Their professional bond, on the other hand, had never been in question.
Today, Lazlo and Magda were both on edge. This was their first job in America, and while they had accepted it without reservation, lured by a stunning payday, the level of risk was beginning to sink in. Tracking warlords across the foot of the Sahara was one thing. Spying on the president of the United States, on the edge of Washington, D.C., was something else entirely.
Magda sat glued to her binoculars. “Hold steady,” she ordered in her native Slovakian. “The helicopter’s rotors are turning.”
Having been raised on the northern border of Hungary, Lazlo was fluent in the language. He squinted, his eyes canvassing the western side of the distant airfield. In the fading light, he could just make out Air Force One, but not the smaller Sikorsky.
Magda called up her phone’s encrypted messaging app, and typed: Preparing to depart.
The innocuous message immediately showed DELIVERED. Flying a thousand feet in the air, the unobstructed cell signal was stronger here than on the ground. She handed the phone over to Lazlo. The next minutes would be critical and she wanted to stabilize the binoculars with both hands.
“Prepare for the straight-line course,” she said.
They had rehearsed the move before—twice in practice, and also on three live missions that had aborted. The failed missions were no fault of their own, and had been anticipated—it was all no more than a matter of odds. On those aborted attempts, Lazlo had simply steered away to the east, blended into the haze, and returned to the tiny airfield in North Carolina that served as their base. As the Americans were fond of saying: no harm, no foul.
“Can’t we get closer?” Magda complained.
“I told you, it is out of the question. At this range and altitude we are beneath controlled airspace. That is the only way we can navigate freely, without interference from the air traffic controllers.”
Lazlo had plotted the geometry carefully during the planning stage. The Cessna’s present orbit put them just high enough to get what they needed—an unobstructed, if distant, view of Joint Base Andrews. Above them was busier airspace, airline traffic and business jets swarming into Reagan National and Dulles airports. Directly below was half a square mile of freshly turned earth, one more farm field being converted into a package fulfillment center.
They had been circling for twenty minutes, having been forewarned that Air Force One was arriving when its pilots checked in with approach control, Potomac TRACON—Lazlo had that frequency tuned in to the Cessna’s secondary VHF radio. Their pretense for being where they were depended on who was asking. The flight plan he’d filed implied they were on a cross-country training flight, a round trip out of Plymouth Municipal Airport in North Carolina, with a stop for fuel in southern Maryland. He’d told the mechanic back in North Carolina that he and Magda were headed out for the aviation equivalent of a date, the standard “hundred-dollar hamburger” that included the cost of fuel at some remote airfield.
To the air traffic controllers on VHF-1—they were not under direct control, but had requested traffic advisories—Lazlo explained that they were orbiting in their present position for some photo-surveillance work. Such flights were less common than they had been ten years ago, before the advent of drones, yet there was still some market for it—real estate developers, mostly, yearning for high-resolution overheads of their trophy projects. That this was the fourth time Cessna NUX52 had set up orbit over the same construction site in the past three weeks only backstopped the lie further.
Magda watched as Marine One’s rotor blades accelerated to a blur. Soon the aircraft lifted off and banked north, which she relayed to Lazlo.
He released the control column momentarily, and with sausage thumbs pecked out a message: Leaving now.
This was the critical juncture. From Joint Base Andrews to the South Lawn of the White House was a mere eleven miles—roughly a five-minute flight for the big Sikorsky. Magda kept her eyes glued to Marine One, shifting occasionally to search for the others that would join in the next moments. Helicopters, for the most part, flew low and slow, and that made them vulnerable. To enhance security, the VH-92 that carried the president always merged with a group of identical aircraft. Same model, same paint scheme, same squadron. The number ranged from two to four, this variance itself another random element—the Secret Service strove for every variable it could get.
Equally unpredictable was the route the formation would take to reach the South Lawn. Lazlo and Magda had been told there were six tracks in all, and that the pilots had the authority to choose one at will. They had no idea where their employer had gotten this information, or if it was even true, but the tracks on the three aborted missions had correlated with the chart they’d been given. The problem they faced today, as it had been from the outset, was that the attack could only be configured for one particular route. On the previous runs they had struck out.
Copyright © 2023 by Ward Larsen
