Executive Treason (3 page)

Since she joined Lamden’s administration, Meyerson spent nearly every day at the White House. This was her first trip away.

Henry Lamden was taking off shortly, but Meyerson wouldn’t be on the plane. She’d requested a few days in L.A. “Well deserved,” the president acknowledged.

“Good night, Lynn,” the president said without casting eyes on the redhead. “See you back at the ranch Monday. We’ll work on the first town hall meeting. When is it?”

“Fourth of July.”

“I can just imagine the fireworks,” he joked, not at all referring to the celebration. “Now enjoy yourself.” He returned to his reading. “Go.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. I will.” She lingered for a moment. He’s looking tired. Hard week. “You take care, sir.”

He didn’t hear her. Lamden was already deeply absorbed in a summation of upcoming legislation.

Meyerson smiled at the agents standing vigil at the door. “Night.”

“You going for your run tonight?” one Secret Service agent asked.

“Yup. Then I’m cutting loose. Doing Melrose and catching a friend from Vassar at the Sunset Marquis Whiskey Bar.” She didn’t let on that it was really a blind date with a presumably drop-dead handsome aide to the governor of California. But a smile curled over her lips that might have given her away.

“That’s all?” the agent asked like a friend.

She raised her shoulders and gave a coquettish shrug as if to say, it’s too early to tell. Then she told herself, I might not say no to anything.

Cheviot Hills Recreation Park
the same time

Nat Olsen sat facing one of the three basketball courts. A pickup game was in progress on the court closest to him.
Probably lawyers and agents
, he thought. If they were star players in high school, they didn’t look it here. Though it appeared he was following the game with great intent, Olsen didn’t really care. He was focused well beyond the court, to the entrance of the park off Motor Avenue. He checked his watch. A young woman jogger would be along very soon.

Halmahera Island
Maluku, Indonesia

Indonesia, in all its exotic beauty, is also viewed as an outlaw’s paradise. It is the world’s largest archipelago, sitting astride the equator between the Asian and Australian continents. The sprawling nation covers some 3,200 miles of ocean.

The name Indonesia has its roots in Greek: “Indos” meaning Indian and “Nesos” for islands. Two hundred twenty million inhabitants make it the fourth most populated country and the most populous Muslim nation on the face of the earth. More than 17,500 islands rise above the tide. Some are no bigger than a few yards. Others are the size of Spain and California. Only 6,000 are inhabited. Most have little or no infrastructure. Many have yet to be explored.

Indonesia is the proverbial haystack. Anyone trying to hide among its islands becomes the needle.

The southernmost part of Indonesia, the province of Maluku, is comprised of 1,027 volcanic islands and fewer than 1,700,000 people. The vast majority are Muslim.

Not long ago, entire portions of Maluku were “cleansed” of Christians in a holy war staged by a terrorist group known as Laskar Jihad. At its height in the late 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, the movement had 10,000 followers actively engaged in arms smuggling, sniper attacks, forced conversions and circumcisions, and massacres. An estimated 10,000 people were killed in the process. Another 500,000 were displaced. Maluku is now strictly segregated along religious lines.

Today the most feared terrorist network is Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyyah or JI. The group routinely preys on “soft targets”: places where Westerners tend to congregate. It came to international attention after bombings at luxury tourist hotels in Bali in 2002 and Jakarta in 2003, and the Jakarta airport, also in 2003. Hundreds were killed in the name of Islam, mostly Australian and other foreign tourists.

Other terrorist groups also thrive in the region: the Philippines’s Abu Sayyaf, with solid ties to al-Qaeda; a Malaysian Islamist group, the Kumpulah Mujahedeen Malaysia; and homegrown insurgents who operate among the islands with little fear of ever being discovered.

None of the individual cells had the economic or military resources of a country, but for at least ten years, this was not a problem. Strategic strikes throughout the world had proven that open and tolerant societies were extremely vulnerable. Indonesia included.

Although the U.S. State Department designated JI as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, attacks in Indonesia are generally viewed as terrorism only if the victims are foreigners. Assaults against locals don’t receive the same attention from the police, courts, or government, partially out of the belief that further reprisals from Islamic extremists will be worse.

However, the U.S. did send troops to Indonesia to help train the Indonesian Army (TNI) in counter-terrorism techniques. As a result, the TNI intensified offenses against JI strongholds. Laskar Jihad ultimately disbanded, but Jemaah Islamiyyah and other splinter groups continue to thrive, killing and scattering into the thick, mountainous jungles and dark, dangerous caves too numerous to catalogue.

The terrorists live on ransom money, drug sales, and cash from the global terror network, including al-Qaeda sources.

Widespread poverty contributes to further corruption. The police and military are regularly bought off. Lawlessness rules many of the islands. Kidnappings, bombings, extortion, and torture remain the terrorists’ principal tools.

Americans interested in exploring the famed coral reefs of the Maluku Islands are urged by the State Department to seriously reconsider.

Umar Komari, commander of an emerging terrorist fragment October 12, is one of the reasons.

• • •

“Three million! And what do you come back with? One-third?” Komari shouted in Bahasa Indonesian.

Musah Atef offered only a muffled, “I’m sorry, sir,” through the hood over his head. The haggard subordinate was prostrated before his commander. Komari had his foot on his shoulder, his Luger at his temple.

Everything spoke to the Muslim tradition of dominance. Placing a captive on the ground, or putting a foot on him, implied the captor was God. The hood denoted shame for the captive. Fully aware of the cold barrel of the gun, Atef took special care to answer carefully. He had seen Commander Komari kill many hostages without remorse. Now four of his fellow officers watched him, fearing one day they would be in the same position.

“I’m sorry? That’s all you can say?” Komari roared. Even those deeper in the cave would be certain to hear him.

“Yes, sir.”

“The agreement was three million of the infidel’s dollars!” the 47-year-old terrorist leader now whispered in his ear. The amount was not for general consumption, since he planned to skim a percentage as his own. “And you dared return with this?” Komari now shouted. He pressed his foot hard into Atef s shoulder blade, causing the young soldier to cry out and plead for his life.

Now Komari reached for Atef’s backpack and spilled the contents on his back. He didn’t have to count out the twenties—all in U.S. currency—to see how badly he’d been swindled by the corrupt Chinese colonel.

“Huang held a gun to my head just as you do, and he says the Shabu is no good. Low grade,” Atef explained.

“Communist pig!”

“A pig whose paws can finger a gun.”

“And you could not convince him otherwise?”

Atef raised his head as if to look at Commander Komari. “Convince him? No sir. There were only three of us. In the past we met only four of them. But he came out of nowhere in a fast amphibious craft with more men. Maybe twenty. His machine guns and cannons were already aimed at us. They could have blown our cigarette boat out of the water in seconds.”

Komari spit in disgust. He’d been double-crossed, yet lucky to get his men back with at least some of the money. Still, he made Atef believe he would die for not trying harder.

“I should kill you now. That way I won’t have to feed you. Your portions will go to someone deserving to live.”

If he did pull the trigger, only his troops would hear, and that would serve its own purpose. No one else was nearby. Tonight, Komari’s men were huddled in a mountain cave tucked into one of the four backswept peninsulas of Halmahera. Tomorrow they would be at another encampment—always moving, never providing a reliable pattern for the TNI.

Komari had greater knowledge of the North Indonesian island chains than any fisherman who worked the waters. He knew the tides, and which coves were safe and which were not. He also knew the interior trails, virtually frozen in time, where hunter-gatherer tribes lived as they had for thousands of years. And he had faith that he and his men could disappear for years, if need be, just like the Japanese soldier who went undetected on the island of Morotai for twenty-eight years.

Komari cocked the trigger. At the sound, Atef bowed his head and pleaded. “Commander, it was different than each time before. The Chinese colonel broke his agreement with you. It is not my fault.”

“Is it Allah’s will then? You blame Allah?” Komari demanded, calling on the Arab belief that incidences are not a matter of cause and effect, but the will of God.

Atef shook his head.

“Then perhaps you are merely the messenger with the bad news? That our friends who manufacture the Shabu are providing inferior-grade product? That is why I should not end your life now?”

“Yes, sir,” appealed Atef.

“Then go on. Beg for your life. But rest assured, your next words will determine your fate, for you have failed me and all who pray to Allah for the future of our independence.”

“Sir, as Allah as my witness, this is the truth. Colonel Huang claims that not even the weakest can become addicted to our last Shabu. He says he must sell three times as much for the same money to be effective. So he pays us a third of your price. He threatens my head as you do, and he laughs. He tells me that I have a death sentence three ways: by his hand, by yours for not returning with the proper amount, or by the government if they catch me.”

A smile rolled over Komari’s face. He stroked his long, knotted beard. The length was a visible symbol of his faith: the longer the beard, the greater the faith. Commander Komari wore the beard of a truly devoted Muslim. He thought for a moment. Colonel Nyuan Huang was notorious for turning a moment to his advantage. He chuckled.

“Of course. If you had objected, he would have killed you on the spot. If you tried to escape with the drugs, then Huang would have notified TNI patrol boats. Given the right coordinates, they could have tracked you back to our camp. That would have been the other death sentence, right?”

“Yes, commander.”

“And then we all would have been arrested, tried, and executed.”

“Truly.”

Komari was simply reciting Indonesia’s laws regarding capital punishment, inherited from their former colonial ruler, the Dutch. It remains the mandated sentence for drug trafficking, whether opium, morphine, cocaine, or methamphetamine—the Shabu.

Komari was trumped this time. In turn, he would pay his factories less. Commander Umar Komari engaged the safety on his gun and holstered it. Atef took a long, relieved deep breath.

“You may stand.”

Atef came to attention.

“And take off that hood, but remember how it feels.”

The soldier complied, relieved to breathe in fresh air again. His mouth was filled with blood from a broken nose. His beard, shorter than Komari’s, smelled of vomit from his beating.

“We shall check with our labs to see if this is true. Perhaps we shall make a quick, visible ‘corrective step’ to one worker for all to see. What do you think, Atef?”

The man was grateful to have his own life. He knew the best thing now was to agree with his commander.

“Whatever you choose, sir.”

Komari slapped his man on the back. “Ever the diplomat. You shall praise Allah that you have lived to see another day. While you are the messenger with the bad news, you are not responsible for the message. At least not today. We must keep our Chinese friends happy. It is their trade that funds the purchase of our weapons. And soon we will be powerful enough to deliver a message ourselves: a message that will make news, free us from our oppressors, and give Maluku our long-sought independence.”

Atef bowed, patted his heart a few times in thanks, and backed out of Komari’s cave, into the thick of the island jungle. The 2 2-year-old soldier felt the burning stare of his commander as he made for a waterfall to clean up the stench and wash away his fear. He would return. He believed in Komari and the cause of October 12, the date commemorating the glorious attack on Bali. If anyone would lead the charge to Maluku’s independence, it would be Komari. He prayed he’d be alive to see it.

Century Plaza Hotel
Los Angeles, California
the same time

Lynn Meyerson laced up her sneakers and checked herself in the mirror. Her bright green eyes sparkled. She widened them to see whether she wanted to touch up.
Nah
, she thought.
Fine for now
. She reached for her favorite barrette, one made out of an exotic blue-green oyster shell. She twisted her hair into a ponytail, shaped it into a bun, and clipped it up. Finally, Meyerson grabbed some crumpled bills from her purse along with a few other necessities. She stuffed them in her running shorts. The young woman looked in the mirror one last time, searching for the commitment she had made with herself. She saw her own strength and confidence reflected back.

Lynn Meyerson was ready.

So was a man in the park.

The Ville St. George Hotel
Sydney, Australia

Immediately after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, the Australian government invoked the 50-year-old ANZUS mutual defense treaty. ANZUS, an anagram for the three signatory nations—Australia, New Zealand, and the United States—considers an attack on one nation an attack on all. However, the actual status of the treaty has been in question. New Zealand’s refusal to permit U.S. nuclear-powered or armed ships in its ports resulted in the United States revoking its reciprocal ANZUS obligations to that country. Meanwhile regional terrorist attacks in Bali, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and activity in the Solomons, underscored the need for ANZUS protection.

Fear that the discovery of a bomb at Ville St. George might be merely a portion of a larger attack, the prime minister called an emergency cabinet meeting. Depending upon the success of the bomb squad, now at work at the hotel, ANZUS might be activated again.

The Sydney police bomb demolition team was in the storage room. The electrician had been dead-on. The container was suspiciously wedged in the crawl space. Black electrical tape covered what appeared to be a cardboard box. The LED fired a red burst every thirty seconds. There was no reason for it to be transmitting. The device was waiting for a signal.

The first question was, how long? They wouldn’t know until they peered inside through a portable X-ray to determine the power of the storage batteries.

There was another, more critical question: What did the batteries power?

The next steps were textbook. Evacuate the building. Secure the site. Assess the immediate threat. Shield the radio from incoming signals. Disarm the bomb. Remove the explosives.

Space was limited. After the X-ray, it would become a two-person job.

The bomb squad used a Dynalog portable X-ray machine patched into a Sony laptop. It took a non-invasive video in wide angles and close-ups. The first scan, starting from left to right, revealed a package of twenty silver oxide, 1.55 V watch batteries with wires leading to a compact circuit board—instantly recognizable as a receiver. A lead went right to the antennae.

The officer at the monitor shook his head. “This thing could last for years.” That was the unspoken good news. It probably wasn’t intended for detonation tonight.

The next scan showed the really bad news: twenty soft, chalky bars, with the consistency of modeling clay, wrapped in cellophane. Each bar was twelve inches long, two inches across, and one inch thick. No one watching needed any explanation. The contents were comprised of cyclotrimethylene-trinitramine (C3H6N606). Properly manufactured, it went by a much easier name to remember: C-4. There was enough power in the plastic explosives to shoot a fireball through the elevator shafts, weaken the structural integrity of the new hotel, and bring it down.

“Okay, get the shield up, and absolutely no radios in here.”

The SAS commander, Colonel Randolph Tyler, had quietly stepped into the room. He and his men came in unobserved in unmarked vans. The chief of the bomb squad nodded to him and gestured to the screen. They both knew how to read the information. No words were necessary. No one wanted to hear them anyway. The local police and the Australian special forces had trained together.

Tyler signaled to the chief. He came to the opposite corner of the room.

“We’ve got to get a little smoke circulating out in the ether. There’s a lot of press.”

“Yeah,” the Sydney officer noted.

“Let’s cut the electricity to the hotel, starting at the top floors and working down. The emergency lights will go on for anyone still coming down. Then you get word out that a water main has broken under the building. We’ve turned off power simply as a precaution.”

A cover story. Hopefully it would convince anyone with a finger close to the trigger to relax and stay with the plan—whatever it was.

“Good idea.” the officer said.

He spoke to one of his men. Word quickly relayed through the chain of command. While the bomb squad worked to set up the radio shield, Tyler stepped out to make a call of his own. His message would be carried to headquarters, and on to Washington.

Langley, Virginia
George Bush Center for Central Intelligence
Monday, 18 June
the same time

Barely two hours after the box was discovered in the basement of the Ville St. George, and only fifty minutes following the first news report, Jack Evans was on the phone with the head of the Secret Service at the White House. He went right to the point.

“Presley, move Big Sky now.”

“What?” Presley Friedman asked. “He’s wheels-up in another two hours.”

“Move him now!” ordered the director of the National Intelligence Agency.

“Is this…?” The Secret Service chief didn’t get to finish his question.

“Code: Rising Thunder.”

“Copy that. Rising Thunder.” The cryptogram was the president’s own choice for a fast moving emergency.

“Yes,” Evans barked.

“We’ll get Big Sky on his way,” Friedman responded. He was already typing the order into his computer.

The fact that President Lamden was staying in a specially outfitted suite in a Los Angeles hotel was exactly why he had to move. There was an evacuation at another hotel, with a similar suite, also dubbed Rip Van Winkle. That hotel was on the itinerary for President Lamden’s visit in August, set by the Office for Strategic Initiatives.

“He’ll be out in three minutes,” the Secret Service director acknowledged.

“I’ll alert the vice president and the speaker. Call me when he’s cleared the building. Again, when he’s on the road. At the airport and in the air.”

Now Presley Friedman wondered about the exact nature of the emergency. He’d find out soon enough.

Los Angeles International Airport
the same time

Eric Ross had very few of the worries of the average American. His meals were covered. The same for his laundry bills. His clothes were provided. He had a per diem wherever he traveled, and he traveled all over the world without paying a dime to the airlines. It was a perfect deal for a private man with no family and few friends.

But Ross did have responsibility.

Eric Ross was a career U.S. Air Force officer. He served with the Air Mobility Command’s 89th Airlift Wing, stationed at Andrews AFB, Suitland, Maryland. He had high security clearance and access throughout the base. He grunted more than talked, worked more than socialized. Cohorts who’d served with him could hardly say they actually knew Rossy, even after 12 years. But he wasn’t there for his personality. It was for what he could do. Eric Ross supervised the maintenance of the two most important airplanes in the United States: a pair of specially configured Boeing 747-200Bs built at Boeing’s Everett, Washington, plant.

The planes flew with the designation VC-25A and tail numbers SAM 28000 and 29000. In military parlance, SAM referred to Special Air Mission. These were definitely special jets.

When Ross’s boss was onboard either craft, the radio call sign became Air Force One.

This afternoon, the planes were serviced and waiting at a satellite terminal on the ocean side of LAX. The president was in Los Angeles for two days of meetings with Western governors. Ross had to make sure they were ready to fly at a moment’s notice.

Blindfolded, Lt. Eric Ross could successfully inspect the most hidden quarters of his SAMs. Performing specific diagnostic tests in the dark was part of his education. However, Rossy exceeded the minimum standards. He’d been trained behind closed doors by Boeing’s top engineers. He had the reputation for being able to smell virtually any trouble. What he couldn’t personally figure out, he could get help for, day or night, from anywhere on the planet. Ross had direct access to unlisted numbers of people with very special knowledge. Most importantly, he had the guarantee that there would always be an answer.

For years, the 44-year-old, five-foot-ten career officer passed on putting in for a transfer to far easier duty. He said Air Force One was his life. It called out to him. The last three presidents always felt better when they saw his name on the roster, better yet when he accompanied them in the air. And when the current commander in chief, still getting used to the trappings of his flying Oval Office, asked, “Is everything looking okay, Rossy?” the thumbs-up put him at ease.

The confidence came from the sense that these were Rossy’s planes, and his hands-on approach to their care made the whole experience of flying on Air Force One more secure.

If Ross hadn’t put in the 238 miles of wire in each plane himself, more than twice what is found in a typical civilian 747, he certainly acted like he had. They weren’t just wires. They were his wires. And not just ordinary wire at that. These were lifesaving strands, with a shielding over the core to protect the planes’ systems from any electromagnetic pulse—the kind generated by a thermonuclear blast.

Unless he was sicker than a dog, Ross traveled everywhere with the Airlift Wing. The planes couldn’t be serviced by commercial aviation ground crews or even regular Air Force. Security reasons alone made that impossible. That’s why Ross and members of the 89th were so vital.

According to the orders that had come down, the VC-25As were scheduled to depart for Andrews at 2215 hrs. Both planes. These days they always had to be flight worthy, 24/7. One ferried the president; the other was support. Ross couldn’t pilot either 28000 or 29000, but he could ground them with a check mark in the wrong box.

In addition to their actual operation, Rossy had extensive knowledge of the history of Air Force One—actually a misnomer, because the call sign doesn’t belong to any one plane. Air Force One is actually any airplane the president is aboard, whether it’s a 747, an F/A-18 Super Hornet, a S-3B Viking, or even a Cessna. And once a president ceases being a president, through death or resignation, the designation of the aircraft immediately changes.

Such was the case on August 9, 1974, after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger read President Nixon’s formal resignation letter, and Gerald Ford was sworn in as the thirty-eighth president. Air traffic control in Kansas received the radio message from the plane carrying Nixon: “Kansas City, this is former Air Force One, please change our call sign to SAM 27000.”

The lieutenant was not permitted to discuss classified information about the twin jets, or reveal details on anything already on the record. Occasionally, freshmen members of the White House press corps would try. “Come on, Rossy. Where’s the escape pod?” There was none, but he would only smile and shrug his shoulders.

“How many parachutes does this thing carry?” Again, no comment, even though they were not equipped with parachutes. The dangerous slipstream created by the 747 in flight prevented their use.

“What about the range of this thing?”

“I dunno, pretty far,” he offered, even though the reporters could find out on the Internet that the planes were capable of flying halfway around the world without refueling, and with midair fill-ups, they could probably fly indefinitely.

Ross was not known for volunteering much. But he did like telling reporters, “When you really come down to it, my job’s pretty simple. I just have to think about the unthinkable and make sure it doesn’t happen.” For that reason and a hundred others on the official checklists, Air Force One was gassed up and ready to go.

They were happy he was working for the good guys.

Century Plaza Hotel
Los Angeles, California
the same time

“Mr. President, we have to go,” said the lead agent, a 6-foot-tall bulldog of a man. The Secret Service agent closest to the president had gotten the message before Friedman was off the phone with Jack Evans. Word also had been radioed to the Air Force, which urgently launched a pair of F-15s out of Nellis AFB in Nevada. Already aloft were two Navy Super Hornets from San Diego, an E-3 Sentry AWACS Boeing 707/320, and a KC-10 tanker, all flying sweeping figure-eight patterns off the coast. Since 9/11, their contrails created a haunting white web above many of America’s cities; a visible reminder of how the world had changed.

“What the…?” Lamden managed.

“This way, sir.” The agent was absolutely insistent. “We have a situation. We need to leave the hotel immediately.” He took Henry Lamden by the arm, making his intensions perfectly and immediately clear. Another agent fell in step on the other side of Big Sky. The Secret Service had come up with the designation name when they officially were assigned to guard him during the primary elections. It was an appropriate handle for the then-Governor of Montana.

Though they trained for this, Henry Lamden recognized that this was not another drill. This was the first time it really felt like an emergency. His heart quickened.

“Okay, okay. But I need to get….”

“We’ll take care of everything, sir,” the agent answered.

The president’s guard force hurried him out of the secure suite at the Century Plaza Hotel. He noticed that the other agents looked equally as serious as the two men who flanked him.

The freight elevator door was open. Two more agents were posted there. Thanks to the use of an override key, they went down without stopping. Once in the basement, they proceeded along a planned exit route through a myriad of unmarked tunnels that led to a closely guarded garage exit and the waiting presidential limo. Lead and tail cars were already in place. The LAPD escort would have to catch up.

The agents pressed the president’s head down, almost shoving him into his car. A second later they were screaming through the garage tunnels, faster than they’d ever practiced.

From the Reagan Presidential Suite to the backseat of the bulletproof, iron-lined underbelly Lincoln: 2 minutes 45 seconds. Acceptable only because Big Sky was alive, and they were clear of a Rip Van Winkle House.