Day of the Delphi (19 page)

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Authors: Jon Land

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THE WHITE HOUSE:
MONDAY, APRIL 18, 1994; 1:00 P.M.
The participants in the Monday-afternoon meeting at the White House arrived at well-spaced intervals and used different entrances so as not to attract attention. Two more had joined the inner circle composed of the President, his chief of staff Charlie Byrne, and FBI director Ben Samuelson.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Trevor Cantrell had been another of the Presidents’ key appointees after an exhaustive and difficult search. The President had not known him personally, but his reputation for toughness combined with being a team player had raised him above the other candidates. Cantrell was below average in height but built like a bulldog. He still had no neck to speak of, although the days that required his marine corps uniforms to be custom-tailored to fit his bulk were gone now. He remained in great shape and only some gentle persuasion on the President’s part had convinced him to finally let his crew cut grow out a little.
The second was Angela Taft, the National Security Advisor who had been passed off as a token appointment by the President’s many enemies; after all, she was black and a woman. But in truth she was immensely qualified for the post. A tenured professor of political science at Harvard, Taft had joined the President’s team during the campaign and had been primarily responsible for the drafting of his foreign policy platform. She was a pragmatist who was beholden neither to partisan politics nor to the media.
The night before the President had traded a few hours of sleep for a careful scrutiny of some videotapes his staff had
assembled for him on Samuel Jackson Dodd. He tried to view Dodd not through the eyes of a politician and the seated president, but as an ordinary, frustrated American would. Undeniably Dodd was making a primitive kind of sense, the kind that would appeal to the many citizens who had joined the ranks of the disenchanted or disenfranchised. That made him an even more frightening figure to anyone who understood the true ramifications of his proposals, what the country would be giving up if they accepted his quick fix. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini had all made similar points prior to their respective reigns. So long as things went well, no one would be complaining. And when things stopped going well and the complaining did begin, the normal historic channels for recourse would no longer be in place.
“All right,” the President started. To Charlie Byrne and the others, he looked like a different man. Recharged and rededicated, no longer beaten. Even reborn. Recommitted in the face of a crisis that made all else that had confronted his administration pale by comparison. Four days ago, he had just about given up. Nothing could be further from his mind now. “You’ve all been briefed on the contents of the tape that came into Director Samuelson’s possession. Ben, why don’t we start with you? That means starting with the man behind what appears to be an attempt to unseat this government.”
Samuelson’s expression was grave. “Sir, I’ve had thirty agents collecting every bit of data on Sam Jack Dodd in existence, and there’s nothing, not a single shred of evidence linking him to some monstrous conspiratorial group.”
“You’re talking about hard evidence, of course,” surmised Charlie Byrne.
“Actually, any evidence at all.”
“We’ve got the tape,” Byrne reminded. “That’s enough for me.”
“Enough to what?” asked the President.
“To arrest the son of a bitch!”
“On what charge?” challenged Ben Samuelson.
“Sedition or treason. Take your pick.”
“Without proof, Charlie, it’s impossible,” the President told him. “We’d never be able to make it stick. Lest we forget, you’re talking about the most popular man in the country. How do you think your suggestion would play in Congress? I haven’t got many friends left there, and arresting Dodd will give my enemies the impetus they need to move with the impeachment proceedings plenty on the Hill have started to mention in private. Beyond that, we’ve got to remember that he’s not in this alone.” The President looked toward Samuelson. “Ben, your report on Cliff Jardine’s murder concluded that it could never have happened in the manner it was carried out given on-site security unless—”
“Unless that security had been compromised.”
“Meaning …”
“My conclusion pertained to a handful of agents.”
“But how much more in this country has already been compromised beyond the Company? In the military, at Defense and State, on the Hill. How many people has Dodd got in his pocket?”
“My feeling, sir,” Samuelson added, “is that it might be the other way around. Daniels’s taped assertions would seem to indicate that Dodd was only the final piece in a huge puzzle, the ‘missing variable,’ I believe was the term used.”
“And why not?” from the President. “He’s the man the people love. The man who’s got his hand on the nation’s pulse, with his goddamn ninety percent approval rating.”
“Then why is he bothering to attempt a forceful overthrow when he can win the next election?” raised Angela Taft.
“Because an election won’t give him the power he wants, craves. This isn’t about winning and losing; this is about redefining the way this country functions. Dodd and whoever’s behind him are convinced that what we’re trying to do just isn’t working anymore, no matter what. He’s after the kind of change even the Constitution wouldn’t allow.”
“A rather large obstacle,” Angela Taft noted.
“Then part of his plan creates a rationale for its suspension, a rationale that has Dodd riding in on the white horse he’s been keeping in the barn just to save the day.”
“All the same, Mr. President,” Angela Taft argued, “this isn’t some Third World country where a coup succeeds if four tanks make it to the palace gates.”
“General?”
Cantrell took his cue. “We may not be Third World, Dr. Taft, but with a centralized seat of power we face many of the same limitations and liabilities. That becomes especially true if the opposition still had the element of surprise on their side. Our response time would indeed be the problem under that scenario. The right men and weapons on the part of the opposition could get the job done before we could mount an adequate counter.” Cantrell paused. “With that in mind, Mr. President, I do have some suggestions.”
“Proceed, Trev.”
“Speculation on unknown variables here seems fruitless. Our focus should remain on those issues where we have a degree of reasonable certainty.”
“I wasn’t sure there were any.”
“There’s at least one, sir: the government cannot be toppled so long as the current administration and Congress is seated. I believe our opposition’s plan began with that awareness and took shape when the means to overcome it was discovered.”
“What are you suggesting, General?”
“In the military, we’d call it Evac. I’m suggesting we strongly consider moving the seated government to designated safe areas.”
Cantrell proceeded to summarize briefly the three primary facilities that were the subject of constant upkeep, but to this point had never once been employed. Mount Weather, located fifty miles northwest of Washington, was built to house the President, justices of the Supreme Court, cabinet members, and other selected officials in the event of a nuclear
war. Each man or woman had already been assigned a pickup point within the capital where they would be flown by helicopter to what amounted to an impregnable, invisible fortress.
The equally secret Site R, just six miles from Camp David near the border of Maryland and Pennsylvania, was the largest of the three facilities. All 265,000 of its square feet were contained underground in the area of Raven Rock Mountain. Site R was designed to house the Alternate Joint Communications Center and the Alternate Military Command Center. Effectively it was envisioned as a wartime replacement for the Pentagon.
The final installation had no catchy code name and was known simply as Greenbrier. It was not protected by huge mountains or vast tonnages of rock as its counterparts were. Instead, Greenbrier was simply a massive cavern near the luxurious Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulpher Springs, West Virginia, a cavern dug out of the ground and well fortified to withstand assault. It had been constructed to house the whole of the Senate and the House of Representatives within its concrete walls. Not only did this require the requisite number of living spaces, but it also called for auditoriums and halls spacious enough to allow for full sessions of both bodies. One of these, known as the Exhibit Hall, was capable of housing a joint session of Congress.
Of course, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, no one in Washington believed any of the three facilities would ever see use. General Cantrell’s suggestion that their utilization might finally come to pass thanks to a force
within
the country seemed the ultimate irony. Perhaps at last one of the greatest wastes of taxpayer money in the nation’s history would actually prove its merit.
“The most fundamental problem,” Angela Taft responded at the end of Cantrell’s discourse, “is one of timing, General. Since we at present have no idea of the enemy’s timetable, how do we know when to press the panic button?”
“And even if we did,” picked up Charlie Byrne, “pressing
it would be tantamount to submission. We’d be running with our tails between our legs.”
“Better than having them blown off, Mr. Byrne,” Cantrell was quick to point out.
“You believe that’s what all this will come down to?” the President quizzed him.
“Sir, what I believe is that our opposition needs to create a state of utter chaos, out of which only they are in a position to restore order. It follows, then, that one of the prime requirements of their plan is to neutralize the chain of command, along with the chain of succession.”
“Short of this Evac, General, is there any defense you can suggest—preemptive or preventive military measures, perhaps?”
“None with anywhere near as high a degree of confidence for success, sir, and they would require an open acknowledgment of what we thought we were facing.” Cantrell leaned forward over the table. “The Seventh Light Infantry has been trained for this kind of eventuality. We could arrange to have units moved into Washington. Back them up with an armored division or two.”
“Washington turned into an armed encampment …”
“I prefer to call it a defensive ring.”
“I don’t think the public would take kindly to setting up a defense against a force we can’t even prove exists. Beyond that, how long will we have to keep the ring in place while facing charges of paranoia and downright incompetence? With enough momentum, such things could bring us down as effectively as bullets.”
“Okay,” Charlie Byrne postulated, “then let me try something else out on all of you: we go public with our suspicions
without
naming names and without calling out the cavalry.”
General Cantrell shook his head demonstratively. “Mr Byrne—”
“Hold on, hear me out on this. Dodd and whoever’s behind him could never accept being exposed. That’s why
both Jardine and Daniels had to die. That’s why we never found the only copy of Daniels’s report and why even the typewriter ribbon on his old Olivetti was changed. As far as the opposition knew, it ended there, and it would have, if not for our friend in the Russian embassy.”
“What’s your point, Charlie?” the President asked.
“My point, sir, is that fear of exposure might be enough to make these sons of bitches pull back. It’s the one thing their plan could never have accounted for.”
“You’re suggesting we should release the tape.”
“It’s all we have,” Byrne acknowledged.
“But it’s not enough,” the President said with grim certainty. “Not to avoid embarrassment and disgrace anyway. Oh, we might be able to delay their plan for a while, leaving ourselves so laughably weak that they might not even have to storm the capital to take over not long down the road.”
“I still think it beats pulling out of the city or sending in tanks to patrol the streets.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Charlie,” the President consoled, “I think you’re on the right track. But to ride it all the way out we need more information, more proof. And that’s why we need McCracken.” He looked at Samuelson. “No luck finding him, I presume, Ben.”
“We’ve confirmed it was indeed McCracken who managed to get the bomb off that American Airlines Airbus en route to Miami on Saturday night.”
“Planted by our enemies to get rid of him, of course.”
“They’re his enemies also, sir. But he left no trail for us to follow once he reached Miami. We’ve left messages at all his drop points and tried unsuccessfully to contact a former intelligence operative who often fronts for him. We even sent a team into the Maine woods to search for an Indian he served with in Vietnam and apparently has continued to work with, also without any results.”
“He’s getting close to them,” the President proclaimed, an edge of hope sliding into his voice.
“We can’t be sure of that.”
“I’m sure. And anyone who’s read as much about McCracken as I have in the past few days would be just as sure. We find him and we find what we need to save this nation from Dodd and company.”

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