The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

'Yes, I do, sir.'
'I'm sending the Vice President up on the primary. You send a spare down here.
You can land it at Hagerstown, can't you?'
'Yes, sir, we can use the Fairchild-Republic airfield, where they used to build
the A-10s.'
'Okay, do that. It'll take me an hour to get to Andrews, and I cannot afford to
waste an hour. It's my job to settle this thing down, and I need that hour.'
'That , sir, is a mistake,' Fremont said in the coldest voice he had. It would
take two hours to get the aircraft to central Maryland.
'That may be, but it's what I'm going to do. This is not a time for me to run
away.'
Behind the President, Pete Connor and Helen D'Agustino traded a baleful look.
They had no illusions on what would happen if there were a nuclear attack on the
United States. Mobility was the President's best defense, and he had just thrown
that away.
The radio message from Camp David went out at once. The Presidential helicopter
was just crossing the Washington Beltway when it turned and went back southeast.
It landed on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Vice President Roger
Durling and his entire family jumped aboard. They didn't even bother strapping
in. Secret Service agents, with their Uzi sub-machineguns out, knelt inside the
aircraft. All Durling knew was what the Secret Service detail had told him.
Durling told himself that he had to relax, that he had to keep his head. He
looked at his youngest child, a boy only four years old. To be that age again,
he'd thought only the day before, to be that age again and be able to grow up in
a world where the chance of a major war no longer existed. All the horrors of
his youth, the Cuban Missile Crisis that had marked his freshman year in
college, his service as a platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne, a year of which
had been in Vietnam. War experience made Durling a most unusual liberal
politician. He hadn't run from it. He'd taken his chances and remembered having
two men die in his arms. Just yesterday, he'd looked at his son and thanked God
that he wouldn't have to know any of that.
And now, this. His son still didn't know anything more than that they were
getting a surprise helicopter ride, and he loved to fly. His wife knew more, and
there were tears streaming from her eyes as she stared back at him.
The Marine VH-3 touched down within fifty yards of the aircraft. The first
Secret Service agent leaped off and saw a platoon of Air Force security police
marking the way to the stairs. The Vice President was practically dragged
towards them, while a burly agent picked up his young son and ran the distance.
Two minutes later, before people had even strapped in, the pilot of the National
Emergency Airborne Command Post – Kneecap – firewalled his engines and roared
down runway Zero-One Left. He headed east for the Atlantic Ocean, where a KC-10
tanker was already orbiting to top off the Boeing's tanks.
***
'We have a major problem here,' Ricks said in the maneuvering room. Maine had
just tried to move. At any speed over three knots, the propeller screeched like
a banshee. The shaft was slightly bent, but they'd live with that for a while.
'All seven blades must be damaged. If we try for anything over three we make