The Threat

They were alone on the trail. All he had to do was grab a fallen limb and brain the lying, adulterous son of a bitch. BS Bob, as the opposition called him, their commentators hammering it over and over into their programmable listeners. Or go for the pistol in the satchel. Getting even — wouldn’t that be worth dying for?

He stood rooted, sick and trembling.

De Bari turned his head, as if he could sense his thoughts. Their eyes met. Then the president looked away, and resumed the climb.

Dan hiked after him, feeling sweat break all over his body. Feeling as if he could not stand one more hour of breathing. Why didn’t anyone notice he was losing his grip, running off the rails, going just plain bughouse? He tried looking away. Lagging back. Thinking about how the shadowing sun embossed every bole and twig with cold pewter light.

Finally the shakes eased. He took a deep breath of cold air. Pulled it in slowly, so he could taste it around his tongue. Mint. Pine. Melting snow. Then let it out. Another. That was better.

He didn’t really want to kill the man climbing laboriously ahead of him, panting, his once-white Adidas coated and slipping in the mud.

But he couldn’t take much more of this either.

18

ASMARA, ERITREA

The familiar parching heat, glaring sun, pale dust of the Middle East. He stood watching the huge white-and-blue aircraft float down toward a runway he’d paced for hours that morning, inspecting for potholes, rocks, foreign objects, or anything suspicious.

The wheels touched, and kissed up smoke. And the chest-shaking roar of the immense engines reversing into braking thrust was met by an even greater thunder from hundreds of thousands of throats, a surging sea that broke and recoiled, walled from the heat-shimmering tarmac by lines of troops and armor, weapons pointed at the hungry and desperate.

As desperate, in a different way, as the De Bari administration, now trapped in a firestorm of criticism. The major indexes had hit new lows. A scandal was brewing in the Department of Education. Even the vice president was speaking out against Bob De Bari now, whose poll numbers had dropped into the thirties.

Dan had followed it on the BBC, and what little he’d heard through staff channels. But he couldn’t say he did so with any interest. It felt distant, or he felt distant. He really couldn’t say he cared.

* * *

Colonel Gunning had put him on the advance party for Adamant Black. “Adamant” was the code word for a presidential foreign visit. Since Air Force One would be taking off in less than a month, that meant he was playing catch-up from the start.

In his first meeting with the Air Mobility Command at Andrews, they’d told him a presidential visit was the equivalent of a medium-sized military intervention. The numbers were staggering: a thousand people, 180 airlift and aerial refueling missions, maintenance support teams, medical evacuation units. Actually it was

a military operation, run by the Defense Department according to an order that included all the concepts of operations, logistics, command and signal sections, and minute-by-minute schedules he was familiar with from other operations. It would have struck someone who hadn’t operated in a joint planning environment as insanely complex, anally specific, and neurotically over detailed, down to the thickness of the railings on the reviewing stands, ground loading for the helicopter dome shelters, and specs for the plugs on the microphones. But he’d plunged in, sleeping on the cot in the PEOC, pulling work over him like a sheltering blanket.

Along with the two 747s, Air Force One and Two, Adamant Black included three C-5 Galaxy heavy lift air transports carrying two presidential limousines, the Roadrunners, the command vans, a specially equipped ambulance, and hordes of other vehicles for staff and support. One airlifter carried Marine One and its escort aircraft. There was medical staff. Press corps. Comm staff. Valets, negotiators, advisers, stewards, area specialists, hairdressers … nearly two hundred security people, both uniformed and plainclothes. “Blacktop” alone, the Secret Service foreign mission personnel, consisted of fifty agents and four vans of equipment.

The advance party left at D minus six. Dan kept in constant phone contact with Charlie Ringalls. The little westerner was the go-to guy on presidential travel, though Dan had to consult with Holt and the first lady’s people too, as she was coming along.