2
“You guys having an awesome day or what?” asked the young liftie as Scot Harvath and Amanda Rutledge shuffled up to get on the next chairlift. He was referring to the snow that had been falling all day.
“Light’s kinda flat,” replied Amanda.
Scot had to laugh. Amanda was relatively new to skiing, but she was picking up the lingo and the idiosyncrasies of a spoiled skier pretty quickly.
“What’s so funny?” she said as the lift gently hit them in the back of the knees and they sat down, beginning the ride up to Deer Valley’s Squaw Peak.
“You, that’s what’s so funny.”
“Me? What do you mean?”
“Don’t get me wrong, Mandie; your skiing’s come a long way, but you’ve skied, what, maybe five or six times in your life?”
“Yeah, so?”
“And it’s always been that east coast garbage. All ice, right?”
“And?”
“Well, it’s just funny to hear you complaining about the light when you are skiing on snow people would kill for.”
“I guess it is kind of funny, but you’ve got to admit that it’s tough to see anything in this weather.”
On that point, Amanda Rutledge was one hundred percent correct. The snow had been falling steadily for a week. Hoping to indulge his passion for astronomy, Scot had brought his telescope on this trip. The lights back home in D.C. made it impossible to see anything in the night sky. Unfortunately, the weather in Park City had so far refused to cooperate. Today, in particular, it was really coming down. Visibility was extremely low, and the conditions worried Scot enough that he suggested the president and his daughter take the day off and wait to see what tomorrow brought. Regardless of what the head of his advance team had to say, though, the president made it clear that he and Amanda had come to ski and that’s exactly what they were going to do.
Unfortunately for his ski plans, the coalition the president had cobbled together to get his fossil-fuel reduction bill-the bill that signaled a financially devastating blow for the major oil companies, but would breathe long overdue life into America’s alternative-energy sectors-through Congress was starting to crack. The president’s constant hand-holding of key “swing” voters was absolutely necessary if he was to see his legislation through. The predicted turnover in the upcoming congressional election spelled doom for the president’s pet project. The simple fact was that this bill could pass only in this session.
Even though he had already shortened the length of his vacation before leaving D.C., the president was thinking about returning even earlier now. Scot understood the man’s desire to get in as much skiing and quality time with his daughter as possible before returning to the capital.
“Are you dating anyone now?” asked Amanda.
The sudden change of subject caught Scot off guard and pulled his mind back from the president’s problems and the weather.
“Am I dating anyone? Who wants to know?” he teased.
Blushing, Amanda turned away from his gaze, but kept speaking. “I do. I mean, you never seem to talk about anybody.”
Scot started to smile again, but didn’t let her see. He thought she must have been building up her courage all day to ask him.
Amanda had had a crush on Scot ever since he’d become part of daily life at the White House, and everybody knew it. More than once, the president had had to reprimand his daughter and remind her not to distract Scot while he was on duty. Amanda, or Mandie, as Scot called her, was a good kid. Despite having lost her mother to breast cancer only a couple of years ago, she seemed as normal as any other child her age. She was smart, athletic, and would someday grow into a beautiful woman. Scot decided to change the subject.
“That was one heck of a birthday party last night,” he offered.
“It was pretty cool. Thanks again for the CDs. You didn’t have to get me anything.”
“Hey, it was your birthday. The big sixteen. I wanted to get you a car, but your dad’s national security advisor thought that behind the wheel of your own machine, you might be too dangerous for the country. So, the Ferrari will just have to sit in my garage until we can change his mind.”
Amanda laughed. “Not only were the CDs sweet, but I really appreciate the lessons today.”
Before joining the SEALs and subsequently being recruited into the Secret Service, Scot had been quite an accomplished skier and had won a spot on the U.S. freestyle team. Against the wishes of his father, Scot had chosen to postpone college to pursue skiing. He had spent several years on the team, which trained right there in Park City, Utah. He did extremely well on the World Cup circuit and had been favored to medal in the upcoming Olympics. When Scot’s father, an instructor at the Navy SEAL training facility in their hometown of Coronado, California, died in a training accident, Scot had been devastated. Try as his might, after losing his father, he hadn’t been able to get his head back into competitive skiing. Instead, he chose to follow in his father’s footsteps. After graduating college cum laude, he joined the SEALs and was tasked to Team Two, known as the cold-weather specialists, or Polar SEALs.
Scot knew that it was not only his familiarity with Park City, but also his background and experience that were key factors in his being selected to lead this presidential advance team. He also knew that was why President Rutledge had agreed to indulge his daughter’s request for Scot to ski on her protective detail today and give her pointers.
Amanda had been overjoyed, and despite the “flat light,” she felt the day had been perfect.
“You’re an excellent student, so the lessons are my pleasure.” Scot’s radio crackled, interrupting their conversation. He held up his hand to let her know he was listening to his earpiece. Amanda remained quiet.
“Norseman, this is Sound. Over,” came the scratchy voice via Scot’s Motorola. Norseman was the call sign Scot had picked up in the SEALs, which had remained with him ever since. At five feet ten and a muscular one hundred sixty pounds, with brown hair and ice blue eyes, the handsome Scot Harvath looked more German than Scandinavian. In fact the call sign didn’t derive from his looks, but rather from a string of Scandinavian flight attendants he had dated while in the SEALs.
The voice on the other end of Scot’s Motorola identified as Sound, was the head of the president’s protective detail, Sam Harper. Harper had taken Scot under his wing when he joined the team at the White House. The head White House Secret Service agent, whom Harper and Scot reported to, was William Shaw-call sign Fury. When you put Harper together with Shaw, you got “The Sound and The Fury,” and anyone who had ever screwed up on their watch knew exactly how appropriate that title was.
Communications had been fine over the past week, but for some reason the radios had been cutting in and out today. Maybe it was the weather.
“This is Norseman, go ahead Sound. Over,” said Scot via his throat mike.
“Norseman, Hat Trick wants to know how Goldilocks is doing. Over.”
“Mandie,” said Scot, turning to Amanda, “your dad wants to know how you’re holding up.”
When then Vice President Rutledge came into office after having three times been named one of D.C.’s sexiest politicians, the hockey-inspired nickname Hat Trick, meaning three goals, became an inside joke among the people who knew him. Though Jack Rutledge found the media’s focus on his looks somewhat embarrassing, he didn’t object to the nickname, and so, via the Department of Defense, which issues the presidential and vice presidential code names, it stuck. After the president’s wife passed away, word quietly spread among White House staffers that the president would not seek to return to Pennsylvania Avenue for a fourth time. The code name had turned out to be aptly prophetic.
Amanda’s code name, on the other hand, was an obvious call. With her long, curly blond hair, she had been called Goldilocks for as long as anyone in the White House could remember.
“I’m a little hungry, but other than that pretty good,” she said.
“Sound, Goldilocks is shipshape, though she’d like to get into the galley sometime in the near future. Over.”
