“Call Jack and Stan and have them meet me downstairs,” the President continued. “Alert conference.”
“Situation Room?”
“No. The bunker.”
The military operator hit a button on his communications console, sounding an alarm.
5
The Westchester School in Bedford, New York, was a public charter school, one of America’s finest. Sachs sent Jennifer here because she didn’t want to compromise herself as a champion of public education by enrolling her daughter in a private school. But she couldn’t find an acceptable public school in Washington. So Aunt Dina and the Westchester Middle School seemed to be the answer, even if Jennifer called all public schools, local or charter, “government schools.” Only now, Sachs wondered if she had sacrificed her relationship with her daughter on the altar of her idealism.
The verdict was waiting for inside. A sullen Jennifer, arms folded across her chest, sat in the office of Principal Mel Boyle. The school clock said 11:44, a few minutes faster than her own watch, so Sachs was running eight minutes late. Eight minutes of hell from the look on Jennifer’s face.
“So why aren’t you in Washington, putting other children first?” Jennifer asked without looking up.
“Shhh,” Sachs replied with a smile. “Mom’s playing hooky.”
Principal Melanie Boyle, a Barbie blonde in slacks and heels, walked in. “Nice to see you again, Madame Secretary.”
“Principal Boyle,” Sachs said, greeting her.
“Doctor Boyle,” the principal corrected her. “Everybody’s gathering in the gymnasium. We so appreciate your visit, although I wish it were under better circumstances.”
Sachs didn’t know if Boyle meant her impending job execution or if she was referring to Jennifer. “Is there a problem?”
Boyle slid a file across her desk. Sachs could see the big fat “F” circled in red. “This is Jennifer’s U.S. Constitution final,” Boyle explained. “Not only could she not name all of the current members of the president’s Cabinet, she couldn’t even name one. Not even the Secretary of Education.”
Boyle raised a perfectly waxed eyebrow.
Sachs studied the exam for a minute and then put it down.
“Well, I’d probably miss that one, too, if the answer wasn’t me,” she said. “But you know all the rest, Jennifer. What’s going on?”
“Globalization,” Jennifer said with all seriousness. “The U.S. Constitution is obsolete. To quote Socrates, I’m not a New Yorker or an American, but a citizen of the world.”
If Principal Boyle wasn’t just as serious as Jennifer, Sachs would have burst out laughing. But she kept a straight face and addressed her daughter. “Maybe, darling. But most of the world’s democracies have constitutions based on oursunless you want to live in a police state, and condemn the rest of humanity to the same fate, you’d better learn which way is up.”
“What planet are you from, Mom?” Jennifer made a dramatic, sweeping gesture with her hand, the back of which still bore an admission stamp from some event. “Look around you. Have you seen this government school? This IS a police state. My Bill of Rights didn’t keep the government from sucking in your tax dollars, nor Ms. Boyle from opening my private locker and going through my diary, or kicking me out of the school dance last Friday.”
“School dance?” Sachs repeated, looking at Jennifer. “You never told me about a dance. Did you go with —”
“She was wearing thong underwear,” Boyle declared, cutting her off. “Highly visible underwear, I might add.”
Sachs stared at her 13-year-old daughter, trying to process this ambush of zingers from Boyle. “You were wearing a thong?”
“Well, duh.” Jennifer was non-apologetic. “Everybody at the dance could see my thong after Ms. Vice Squad here lifted up my skirt.”
Sachs stared at Boyle. “You looked under my daughter’s skirt?”
“Whatever,” said Jennifer. “Can we get going already?”
“We should move along,” Boyle helpfully agreed, clearly looking to delay the inevitable, ugly parent-teacher conference with Sachs. “Everybody’s in the gymnasium.”
Sachs looked at both of them, not sure whom she was more furious at. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s not keep them waiting. I’ll deal with you later, ladies. Both of you.”
6
President Rhinehart and his military attache hurried down a long sub-basement corridor beneath the East Wing. At the end of the corridor stood a Marine guarding a steel door. Rhinehart slid a security card through an electronic key slot next to the door. The red light turned off. A green light flashed on. There was a beep and a loud click. The vault opened.
Inside the bunker, the White House Chief of Staff, National Security Adviser and assorted military aides were arguing around the conference table. They rose in unison when the president entered and looked around.
Rhinehart said, “Where’s Bald Eagle?”
“The Central Locator said all eighteen designated presidential successors were due in town for the speech,” said Stan Black, his Chief of Staff. “So I sent the Secretary of Defense to a base inspection in California.”
As he spoke, the Marine stepped inside and closed the vault door behind him with a definitive thud, sealing them all inside.
“Lucky for him,” Rhinehart mumbled.
Jack Natori, his National Security Adviser, said, “We’ve got the Pentagon on speaker, Mr. President.”
Rhinehart said, “What the hell is going on, Bob?”
General Sherman’s voice boomed on speaker. “NEST teams picked up trace uranium in the Metro railyards where a security guard was found de this morning by D.C. police,” Sherman said. “It matches the SS-20 core profile. We think the SS-20 or, more likely, its warhead, came into Baltimore on a freighter and then was offloaded to the train to D.C.”
“Where is it now?”
“God knows. Probably in some van cruising the streets as we try to get a lock on its location.”
Rhinehart took a breath. This was real. “What else are we doing about it, Bob?”
“Everything, including preparing for a detonation,” Sherman said. “Army and Air Force choppers at the Pentagon heliport are airlifting 44 selected personnel. The civilians will go to Mount Weather to establish a new government. The military officers are heading to Raven Rock to conduct the war.”
“That’ll take thirty minutes,” Rhinehart said. “I thought we only had five.”
Natori checked his watch. “Four minutes now.”
Rhinehart said, “The vice president is taking my chopper to Andrews right now.”
Natori shook his head. “He’ll barely get off the ground before we disappear in a mushroom cloud.”
The military attache then placed the football on the table, dialed the combination and removed a binder — Federal Emergency Plan D.
Rhinehart stared at it for a long, hard moment. He forgot what the D actually stood for, but it always made
