In the Weeds Page 12

  At the far end of the long runway—0900 hours and already shimmering in heat haze—a black dot headed straight in. It rapidly expanded to the massive 747 of Air Force One. A brief puff of smoke as it touched down and the tires jumped from hanging still in the air to spinning at a hundred and fifty knots…and the President was down.

  While the plane taxied, her phone rang, it was the WHMO group call.

  “Everything fine here on Air Force One,” Steve reported.

  “Motorcade is good,” Tish waved from where she was hanging out with Colby’s Counter Assault Team guys—eight tough-as-hell dudes and a slender Goth in equally black clothing.

  “Looks like you found some guys.”

  “Oh, they’re so sweet!” From what Ivy could see at a distance, it looked as if the most lethal assault team on any security detail anywhere didn’t mind at all being called sweet. At least not by a woman as cute as Tish.

  “HMX-1 helos are clean,” Colby’s voice was heavy, like a hammer spiking the last nail into a coffin and ending all further conversation.

  They all signed off as the 747 rolled to stop and things began happening very fast.

  Before, she’d always been in her place: pilot, crew, something.

  This time she could simply stand and watch the logistics with no defined purpose herself.

  Almost identical in size, there couldn’t have been two more different aircraft.

  The Air Force gray C-5 Galaxy’s bulk squatted low on its wheels. The high wing reached out from atop the fuselage and angled down, giving the plane a slightly sad and droopy aspect. The tail ramp and nose still gaped open, making the aircraft appear to be no more than a hollow tube. It looked every moment of its thirty years of hard service.

  Air Force One might be the same age, but it was in sparkling condition, sporting the brilliant blue-and-white of the presidential livery. Its wings, attached to the bottom of the fuselage, angled up with perky energy still raring to go. It even bore the Seal of the President close by the President’s door as a stamp of hard-won pride. The luxury aircraft rolled to a stop near the gathered HMX-1 helicopters and the stairs were lowered as an honor guard formed up around the aircraft.

  The press and Secret Service agents poured down the rear stairs like an untidy river that splashed against the pavement. The press hurried to the bottom of the President’s forward stairs as if they hadn’t just been on a two-hour flight with him. Of course they were only rarely let out of their rearmost compartment in flight and perhaps the President hadn’t visited them this time. How much could have happened in a two-hour flight that they demanded a comment since the boarding press conference? This was the leader of the world’s most powerful nation, so perhaps a lot.

  The Secret Service dispersed in a much more orderly fashion: some to surround the base of the President’s stairs, a few to the HMX-1 aircraft, and others to the motorcade vehicles that had been delivered yesterday.

  Colby met up with another dog handler near the lead Beast limo. She recognized Clarice Carver, the President’s driver. That must make the man and dog beside her Jim Fisher and Malcolm. The English springer spaniel and Rex had a slightly longer conversation than Rex had with the Marine Corps dog at Anacostia, but Rex broke it off first.

  Two Secret Service agents and a dog. They made a sweet family…a sweet family that had saved the President’s life during an attack on his motorcade.

  What had she done so far? Been aboard for the first-ever downing of an HMX-1 helicopter was her high-water mark. So to speak.

  “Hi!”

  If Ivy hadn’t been a Marine, she’d have jumped out of her skin.

  “He is awfully handsome, isn’t he?” Dilya continued blithely as she looked over at Colby. She’d popped up as if teleported in.

  Zackie was circling Dilya’s knees, pausing to sniff Ivy’s, then circling back the other way once she reached the end of her leash. She vibrated with nervous energy.

  “You have slept with him by now, haven’t you?” Now those mysterious green eyes were inspecting her.

  Ivy nodded before she could stop herself.

  “Was it wonderful?” The girl sighed like a hopeless romantic.

  “Worth waiting for.” An answer which surprised her. She’d barely seen Colby since joining the Marines. But if last night and this morning were any measure, he was absolutely worth waiting for. At least the sex. The man she still knew almost nothing about. Well, she did, but—

  “Waiting,” Dilya sighed. “I get so tired of waiting. I’m like the only senior girl in the whole high school who hasn’t made it with a boy yet. You have no idea how completely scared they are when I tell them I work at the White House with the President. I’ve barely even been kissed.”

  Ivy could only raise an eyebrow at Dilya in surprise. First, she was a beautiful and exotic young woman. Second, this was way more information than—

  “Not even that, really. A peck on the lips doesn’t count, does it? Especially not when it was only an excuse to grab my breasts. Maybe some nicer boy would come near me if I had only sprained Kevin Gerber’s wrist,” she offered a heartfelt sigh. “But I broke it. Actually, both of them.”

  Ivy couldn’t help remembering Gregor’s fumbling efforts during her own first time. If the event itself hadn’t been so painful, she might be remembering the fingerprint bruises that had taken days to stop showing on her own breasts, hurting long after any other pain had been forgotten.

  Then Dilya’s smile turned wicked. “Wearing dual casts, I bet he couldn’t masturbate for months.”

  Ivy could only laugh.

  “Did you know it only takes seven pounds of pressure to break a wrist, but nine pounds to break a nose? I looked it up. Maybe if he tries it again, I’ll see if fifteen pounds is really enough to break his neck,” she continued in a happily conversational tone.

  “I’d stick with breaking wrists.” Maybe this slender and pretty girl did know how to break necks. Actually, by Dilya’s age, she was well on her way to a second black belt and had been trained to not break someone’s neck in sparring practice. How far she’d come from seventeen to arching against Colby’s glorious body like a wild thing.

  “Right. Less jail time.” Dilya nodded as if filing away the information. “Oh! Here we go.”

  Dilya hopped aboard the helicopter just as the President strode up followed by a pair of top advisors. They were deep in conversation.

  Ivy had meant to be gone before the President’s arrival, but now she was standing close beside the door of his White Hawk, opposite the Marine Corps crew chief who was supposed to be there. Too late to do anything else, she saluted as the President strode up.

  “Two Marines,” President Zachary Thomas stopped and returned their salutes. “You guys have to stop doing this or I’ll get a swelled head.”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” she and Sergeant McShea responded in unison.

  Crap! She was in battledress uniform. Not her dress blues. Not even her service uniform. She wanted to melt right into the pavement and disappear. She wasn’t supposed to be meeting the President on this trip. She was supposed to be an observer tucked out of sight on a decoy helo. Except she wasn’t. She was here.

  The President almost stepped past—maybe he hadn’t really noticed her and this would pass unremarked.

  Then he glanced down at her shoulder boards. “A major guarding my door. To what do I owe the honor?”

  “Inattention, sir.” Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. “I’m supposed to be over there,” she nodded toward the second alternate aircraft. “I was distracted for a moment.”

  “By Dilya, I noticed. She’s good at that. The little sprite wanted to see the launch so badly, I couldn’t turn her away.”

  “Something we have in common, sir.” And if the President thought Dilya was still some cute little girl, he wasn’t paying attention.

  He smiled down at her, “Major…?”

  “Ivy Hanson, sir. White House Military Office Liaison for HMX-1. At your service.” She remained
at rigid attention.

  “Carry on, Major Hanson. Glad to have you aboard. Wait…” he narrowed his eyes for a moment. They were mid-brown, going with his dark-brown hair. Gray was already starting around his temples. “Hanson? You were on that flight that went down yesterday. Why don’t you take the seat opposite me? I’d like to hear about yesterday’s events first hand.”

  “There was only one true eyewitness, sir,” she waved toward Colby, who was standing by the helicopter she was supposed to be on.

  “Bring him along,” the President climbed aboard.

  Unsure what else to do, she waved Colby over to join them.

  He looked down at Rex uncertainly. She gestured again and Colby finally joined them with his dog leading the way. Rex sniffed the President, accepted a pat on the head, and looked about for something else to find that might earn him a treat. She’d already learned to recognize how he thought. She wished Colby was even half as transparent.

  “Special Agent…?” President Thomas greeted him.

  Colby, apparently comfortable in any environment, corrected the President. “Lieutenant, sir. Special Agent is for the protection service. I’m just a dog handler for the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service. Colby Thompson, and this is Rex.”

  “I’ve seen you on my lawn a number of times.”

  “Four years, sir. Since it was President Matthews’ lawn. Rex and I love that patrol. We’re typically out by the fence when you arrive or depart.”

  “Better than crashing into the Potomac?”

  “That had its moments as well, sir.”

  Wasn’t Colby ever nervous? This was the President of the United States he was talking to and he sounded as if he was at a baseball game. Whereas she’d crashed and burned like an early Redstone rocket—which didn’t fit the metaphor at all no matter how true.

  The President waved them all aboard.

  Unlike the Sea King helicopters, where the President had his own entry, everyone except the pilots used the main door. A two-panel swing-aside, like an armored, glossy-green French door, opened in the side of the helo.

  Colby waited as if his feet were riveted to the runway. He couldn’t seem to lift them as the two advisors and Ivy climbed nimbly aboard and all settled on the bench seat running along the far side of the aircraft. For them it was an everyday occurrence. He’d just met the President for the first time about ten seconds ago.

  He checked in with Rex, who seemed to be breathing just fine. Show off!

  President Zachary Thomas looked at him and smiled. “Nerves?”

  “I had them once upon a time, but they don’t seem to be working at the moment. I suppose that nervous systems are like that.”

  “Try stepping on one of these birds as the President. That’ll jangle your brain worse than a cattle stampede.”

  “Suppose it would, Mr. President.” Up close and personal he was no less daunting than he was on television or chatting with the press gaggle on the South Lawn. His casual-Coloradan attitude was even more obvious in person. Colby climbed aboard, careful to sit in the armchair facing backward rather than the one with the Presidential Seal. Rex settled on Ivy’s feet, as well as those of the other two advisors seated beside her. The aisle was narrow between the sides of the two armchairs and the bench seat; Rex filled it completely and none of them would be moving their feet anytime soon.

  The President settled into the armchair opposite Colby’s.

  Only then did Harvey Lieber, the head of the Presidential Protection Detail, climb aboard. His scathing look at Colby as he attempted to step over Rex without banging his head on the ceiling, which was only about four-six high, was worthy of a carnival contortionist attempting to turn himself into a pretzel. Then he had to step over Zackie, who had curled up between Dilya’s feet directly behind the President.

  When he finally made it into his seat at the very rear of the aircraft, the look he gave Colby was unreadable. Did he now work for Harvey and was he now Number One on Harvey’s dogshit list? Or was Harvey upset with dogs aboard Marine One in general? Or… Harvey was much easier going than Captain Baxter, but he hadn’t risen to the head of the PPD by being a candy-ass either. Yeah, they needed to straighten all this out, but this probably wasn’t the moment. No more likely than straightening things out with Ivy…ever.

  Last aboard was McShea.

  That’s what finally broke Colby’s petrification.

  The crew chief stepped aboard, knelt very formally to close the doors behind him, then attempted to move to his seat at the very front of the aircraft. Rex had only partially blocked the rearward aisle, but he completely filled the forward aisle. The crew chief, so immaculate in his dress blues, had clearly never dealt with eighty-seven pounds of German shepherd cluttering up his aircraft.

  Rex huffed grumpily when Colby signaled him to sit up. Then he simply laid his big head in Ivy’s lap, huffed out a breath, and waited for the crew chief to get by—the equivalent of an exasperated doggie eyeroll.

  McShea balanced himself with one white-gloved hand on Colby’s shoulder—that he dug in hard enough to claim payback, but not hard enough to show any real anger.

  Everyone finally settled, and the rotors began spinning to life.

  “So I hear that you didn’t enjoy your first flight on my helicopters,” the President began.

  “Oh, Rex enjoyed the swim well enough. And we finally found Ivy’s cover when they fished the helo out of the Potomac, so it could have been worse, sir.” It was a little tricky to recall that the man sitting so casually across from him was the Commander-in-Chief and that Colby would probably be better off if he kept his mouth shut.

  Over one of the President’s shoulders he could see Harvey watching him intently. Over the other, he could just make out Dilya’s grin. That gave him a little courage.

  “You saw the F-14 model that took out the helo?”

  “Yes, sir. And two people on the jogging path did as well so I’m fairly sure I wasn’t hallucinating. It was a quiet morning in the park until we crashed in, so they are the only other witnesses. They saw it moving fast and low, barely five feet above the river. I saw it just for the instant before it smashed into us. Climbing hard from our rear quarter. It was a good line of attack. A real pro job from what I would know. General Arnson agrees with me, especially as we weren’t exactly standing still.”

  “Defense suggestions?”

  Colby could only blink in surprise. “Sir, I’m sure that people far more qualified than myself have been studying that closely for the last twenty-one hours.”

  “They have. Defense suggestions?” And the steel tone of an ex-Air Force CSAR captain turned Commander-in-Chief brooked no evasion. Combat Search and Rescue meant that he’d been as exceptional as the HMX pilots in his way.

  Colby watched out the window for a moment as they climbed aloft while he considered it.

  The helo tilted its nose down to gather more speed and the President—seated toward the rear from Colby’s position—now seemed to loom above him, even larger than life. They turned west and for just a moment he had a clear view of Kennedy Space Center. Scattered around its base were samples of their work. Instead of a car lot, they had massive rockets, as big around as a house and twice as long. His view of the launch pads were fast dwindling in the distance.

  He glanced at Ivy, who was twisted around to stare raptly out the window behind her. She really should have gone to space…but then they never would have run into each other again.

  Colby did his best to look thoughtful until the space port was dwindling behind them.

  “What do you think—Ives?” He barely remembered in time that she hadn’t been real happy about his calling her Saint Ives. She’d be even less happy if he did it in front of the President, as her instant scowl proved.

  “She’s much better at this kind of thing that I am, Mr. President.”

  Ivy was going to kill him. She hadn’t paid any attention to the conversation. How many times in her life would she get to see
Kennedy Space Center from the air? One. And now Colby had hung her out to dry in front of the President—and she was about to make a second impression even worse than her first.

  Colby was a dead man. But he spoke again before she could decide whether to go straight to murder or implement some torture first.

  “How do you stop radio-controlled models and drone attacks?” At least he gave her the damn question again.

  “FCC,” she responded without thinking.

  “You mean the FAA. The Federal Aviation Administration,” Colby tried to correct her.

  “No,” Doofus! Her, not him. FAA was exactly what she’d meant, but that’s not what had come out.

  Assume your mistakes aren’t mistakes until proven otherwise. Admit your mistakes, but a Marine Corps officer’s brain is often right for reasons you may not understand at first. McKinnon’s Law.

  “No, I meant the Federal Communications Commission.” Now, why had she thought that? “Restriction and jamming of radio frequencies. The FAA was caught flat-footed when the hobby drone market blew wide open. The old radio-control law—if it’s below this size, that speed, so many feet altitude, we’re just going to ignore it—was allowed to hold control for too long. Now they’re trying to regulate something that has already slipped out of the box. Shut down their frequencies. Jam them just like we do with cell phones in combat areas to keep the enemy from remotely triggering explosives. Same idea, different frequencies.”

  “Told you she was smart. All I could think to do was sic Rex on them.” Colby actually had the temerity to wink at the President.

  She’d felt like she was babbling. There was something else there, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure out what it was.

  The President glanced over his shoulder at Harvey Lieber.

  “We already do this on the motorcades,” Harvey responded. “The Watchtower SUV that travels second behind the limos serves precisely that function.”

  “Shit!” Ivy remembered what she was missing. She scrabbled at her belt and shoved Rex aside so that she could rise enough to scramble forward to kneel between the pilot’s seats.