The Kennedy Endeavor (Presidential Series Book 2) Read online

  “And our Generals, comrade?” Khrushchev probed.

  “What of them?” Mikoyan stalled, understanding the question completely.

  “How do we rein them in?”

  “It is best to feed a hungry pet before it turns on you,” Mikoyan said.

  “Feed it too much and it thinks you are the pet,” Khrushchev noted. “Berlin. We will let our pets play in Berlin and see what Kennedy does. And then . . .” the Premier trailed off. “And then, we shall see. But it is a very dangerous game we are playing now. Much more dangerous than any Comrade Stalin ever participated in. He did not have nuclear weapons.”

  “I don’t think he would have done anything different,” Mikoyan said.

  “And that, my old friend, is the second time you’ve been wrong during this ride,” Khrushchev said as the limousine came to a halt and guards opened the doors so they could board the flight back to Moscow. “Everything is different.”

  Chapter Five

  The Present

  Ducharme knew he should sleep because he was going to hit the ground running when they arrived in Iraq. The F-22 was racing eastward, across the Atlantic at over Mach 2 with KC-10 tankers stationed along the route for refueling. They’d arrive in the Middle East in just a few hours.

  “Have you got a specific destination for me, sir?” the pilot asked over the intercom. He was just the back of a helmet to Ducharme. The man’s voice was calm, as if a run like this was something he did every day. Piloting the only F-22B, maybe that was the case. Ducharme assumed there were people who had to get places in a hurry besides him.

  “Give me a minute,” Ducharme said.

  He accessed the comm link and brought up a connection to the terminal Turnbull had given him. He typed in his query.

  >DESTINATION?

  Turnbull was on station, as Ducharme expected, with an immediate reply.

 
  >STATUS OF TARGET?

 
  “Al Asad,” Ducharme said over the intercom.

  “That place was shut down,” the pilot said. “Marines pulled out at the end of 2011, stripped everything they could take with them.”

  “Looks like it will be open again.”

  “Roger that,” but there was a note of skepticism in the pilot’s voice. “Relax and enjoy the flight. I’d send the flight attendant back to you, but things are a bit tight.”

  “Haven’t these planes been grounded because the pilots black out?” Ducharme asked.

  “I’ve heard that story,” the pilot said. “Haven’t experienced it myself. Here’s hoping it doesn’t happen on this trip.”

  “What’s your call sign?”

  “Stretch.”

  “Paul.”

  “Nice to meet you, Paul. Most of my passengers don’t talk much.”

  “Doubt I will either,” Ducharme said. “I’ve got to get some rest. Not that I’m being rude.”

  “I’ll try and stay awake up here.”

  Ducharme leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He thought of Evie quoting Clausewitz. He hadn’t known her long, but he had a feeling he didn’t know her at all.

  “Hey, Stretch,” Ducharme said.

  “Yo.”

  “Women don’t make any sense, do they?”

  “Sure don’t. That’s why I like flying. The machine does what you make you do. Except this lady. It has blacked out pilots and we still don’t know why. A test pilot and one of our own have been killed. So this little baby can be quite the bitch and do the unexpected. Much like a woman.”

  Much like combat, Ducharme thought, and with that came the realization he wasn’t that much different than Evie Tolliver after all.

  *****

  Haney rappelled down the rope into the facility, his headlamp lighting the way. He assumed he had some time before the next, and most likely larger, group of Kurds showed up. It was strangely calm and quiet in the bunker as he rotated his body and his feet touched. He unclipped from the rope. Reaching into his small pack, he pulled out a flare.

  He lit it and tossed it to the center of the bunker to get a more accurate assessment of what was here. The single missile was in the exact center. The other five were on flatbeds tightly parked to one side. There were various crates, boxes, and barrels scattered about. The bodies lay where they’d been executed half a century ago.

  There were two trucks, large ones. One had a crane on the back, the other a large square box about eight feet square. Haney went over to it. The box was centered on the back of the truck, made of a dull grey metal. Pulling himself up, Haney ran his hand over it.

  Lead.

  A door like that on a safe was facing to the rear. Haney pulled out his radiation detector. Nothing, but that was apparently the purpose of the box. Had the plutonium cores been removed from the bombs and stored?

  Haney knew the answer as soon as he thought it—if that had been the case, he would have gotten no reading at all. He turned the detector toward the missiles and was rewarded with a reading, indicating some cores were still in the bombs.

  The flare sputtered and went out.

  Haney switched on his headlamp and went over to the flatbed. He climbed up onto it, going to the nosecone of the missile.

  He checked the time. While he had the Geiger counter, he didn’t know squat about nuclear materials or weapons. Other than they created a lot of destruction when they went off. He’d received a briefing on the counter and told what was a safe level, but he had no idea what would happen if he opened up the nosecone and tried to get the warhead out. Or if he even could get the warhead out, although he imagined the truck with the crane was for that—not that it would run after so many years.

  Haney made his way back to the ropes and quickly chumared his way back to the pipe, then rapidly crawled out into the open air. Night had fallen and the temperature was dropping. Haney shrugged on an extra sweater, then turned on his Satphone.

  *****

  There was a bloodstain on the floor where Major Elizabeth Peters, U.S. Air Force, and part of the next wave of Philosophers, had died. And plywood covered the window where Lieutenant General Atticus Parker (U.S. Air Force, retired), one of the Philosophers, had thrown himself out rather than give up information to the Surgeon, the Cincinnatian’s assassin.

  For Evie Tolliver, they were stark reminders of the seriousness of the battle between the two groups, and a contrast to their current cooperation. She and Burns were in Philosophical Hall on Fifth Street in Philadelphia. Its only other neighbor on the block was Independence Hall, where tourists flocked every day. This building was partially open to the public, but like Anderson House in Washington, that was only a cover for the real purpose: the headquarters of the inner circle of the American Philosophical Society, which Evie by default and death, was now the Chair.

  “Not exactly an encouraging venue,” Burns noted.

  “On the contrary, Mister Burns,” Evie said. “We are surrounded by history dating back to the founding of the country. Almost every notable American of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was in this room at one time or another.”

  “I meant the blood and the window.”

  “Of course,” Evie said, indicating she’d barely noticed either. “If we’re going to get answers,” Evie said as she walked over to the desk, “this is the place.” She put her briefcase down. “I’ve got McBride’s thumb drive, and there’s lots on it we need to read, but haven’t had the time. But the library here, both electronic and actual documents, can’t be accessed any other way than in person. The mainframe here is shielded from the outside world.”

  “The Surgeon was a nut job,” Burns said, indicating the slashed painting behind the desk of Thomas Jefferson. The one next to it, of Alexander Hamilton, was untouched.

  “It’s a shame,” Evie said as she pulled out her laptop. “That painting is one of only two copies that the artist, Thomas Sully, painted off his original of Jefferson. The original is at We
st Point, in the new Jefferson Library, and the surviving copy is at the University of Virginia.” She shook her head at the irony. “The two colleges Jefferson founded, both with purposes seemingly far apart, yet not so distant when one understands his motives. West Point was the first Military Academy and UVA the first university in the United States founded without religious affiliation.”

  “I thought Jefferson didn’t like the military,” Burns said, having picked up snippets of history the past few days. “Why’d he start up a college for it?”

  “Because he was a realist,” Evie said. Unlike Ducharme, who’d spent more time with her, Burns hadn’t learned yet to be careful of opening up the spigot of knowledge in her brain. “Jefferson deeply distrusted a standing army, but he recognized the need for one. He wanted to keep the officer corps from being filled with sycophants and men aligned with one party or the other. So in 1802, as President, he established the United States Military Academy at West Point, requiring the Corps to be made up of young men from all over the country, via allocated appointments through the federal representatives of all parties. It was actually a rather ingenious design to make sure the Corps represented the entire country.

  “It’s worked so far, since the United States has never experienced a coup, although it has experienced a Civil War where fifty-five of the sixty major battles had graduates of that same Academy commanding on both sides.”

  That gave Burns pause. “That many?”

  “Almost the entire officer corps of the small standing army before the Civil War was West Pointers, most of them blooded in the Mexican War. Almost every West Pointer, both graduate and cadet, from the South chose to go with state over country and joined the Confederacy. Lincoln had even offered Lee command of the Union Army before he decided to side with Virginia.”

  “To side with slavery over freedom,” Burns said.

  “It’s not that black and white, if you will excuse the poor pun,” Evie said.

  Before she could continue, Burns cut her off. “I don’t think I can. Say what you will, but this is a subject on which we have differing perspectives.”

  “Agreed,” Evie said and continued as if his comment wasn’t even a speed bump in her train of logic and history. “It was perhaps the greatest failing of West Point, one that has barely been acknowledged, that so many of its cadets and graduates broke their oath to the Constitution at the start of the Civil War. It’s also why the war was so long and bloody. Officers were fighting classmates who’d sat in the same tactics class with them. More important, they all knew each other. They knew their strengths and weaknesses not only as officers, but as people.”

  “Do you think that could happen again?” Burns asked.

  “Most people believe it’s unthinkable, but given the right set of circumstances, I think we could see great turmoil in our country. Although state’s rights aren’t argued as fiercely as they were then and moral and economic aspects of slavery aren’t an issue, you need only to look at Texas to see a grassroots movement for secession. Hamilton and Jefferson worked hard to prevent such an event, and that’s our job now.” She pointed at the desk. “They brokered The Jefferson Allegiance right at this very spot. But while that was, and has been, an excellent check on the possibility of an Imperial President, it did not address slavery or state’s rights. So both issues turned out to come home to roost a generation later. The Founding Fathers were smart men; they knew the festering tumor they were choosing to ignore. They decided they needed a country first, before those issues got dealt with. It was a fateful decision, one that their children and grandchildren had to resolve with blood.”

  “But now we’re dealing with something different,” Burns said.

  Evie opened her laptop and turned it on. “Americans tend to wave the Constitution about and act as if it were written in stone, but the Founding Fathers—no Mothers by the way, a big mistake—had assumed that it would be changed over time as the world changed. Possibly even done away with and replaced. Jefferson, in particular, believed that the country needed to reinvent itself every generation or so. He’d be appalled that we’re still operating off that same document, although we have added to it over the years. But for us, in the twenty-first century, to be arguing using words over two centuries old, strikes even me as a bit archaic.”

  “The Bible is older than that and people all over the world use it as the word of God. Same with the Koran.”

  “And they’re arguing about the interpretation and going to war over it,” Evie noted. “At least they’re saying it’s the word of God. The Constitution is most definitely the word of men, and not divinely inspired. And men, by the way, who were not representative of their society. They were quite slanted toward the wealthy and land-owners. Also, throw in a few criminals, particularly smugglers, and that’s who wrote the document on which we base our country. Hancock, who signed the Declaration of Independence so boldly, was a well known smuggler and instigator of not only the Boston Tea Party, but bankrolled many other protests that supported his illegal economic agenda. He was even charged with smuggling, but was successfully defended by John Adams and acquitted of the charges.”

  Burns was beginning to learn what tapping Evie’s font of information brought forth, but he found it fascinating.

  Evie shook her head. “We live in a very different world than they did over two hundred years ago. They couldn’t have conceived of nuclear weapons and the Cold War. And now the War on Terror.”

  Burns was looking at the other paintings as her computer booted up. “An interesting group of people.”

  Members of the Philosophical Society stared down at them from their perches on the wall. Benjamin Franklin, who founded the APS in 1743. His goal had been to further science in the colonies, another thing that had morphed over the years into something very different. There was George Washington, a member of both the APS and SOC, a man who could walk a razor’s edge with a smile on his face and keep both sides happy. John Adams and James Madison, two more of the early Presidents. There were poets, like Robert Frost, and scientists, like Charles Darwin, indicating the wide range of interests the early Society displayed. Lewis and Clark were inducted as soon as they returned from their journey west.

  Her computer ready, Evie opened a drawer and unreeled a USB connector and plugged it into her computer. “You can use that desktop,” she said, indicating a flat screen monitor and keyboard set on the other side of the desk. “I’ll send you the excerpt from McBride’s history about Kennedy and the Jefferson Allegiance so you can get up to speed on what we already know.”

  Burns sat down and activated that computer.

  Evie’s screen blanked for a second, then the crest of the Society, featuring a Native American and a Colonist greeting an ancient Greek with a globe, sextant, and open book in between them. Along the bottom was the motto of the APS: Nullo Discrimine, which meant We Are Open To All.

  At the very bottom of the screen was another saying in Latin: Scientia in Bello Pax. Science in War is the Guarantee of Peace. The motto of the supposedly defunct Military Philosophical Society, which had been founded at West Point in 1802, the same year the Academy was founded. According to history, it was shut down with the War of 1812, but Sylvanus Thayer, the Superintendent of the Academy and considered the ‘father’ of the institution, took it underground and thus began the secret arm of the APS, of which Evie was now the leader.

  Evie plugged McBride’s thumb drive into its slot and accessed the file on The Jefferson Allegiance. She copied the two excerpts about Kennedy into a document and then sent it over the system to McBride’s computer.

  “You’ll like the first section,” Evie said. “It’s about your founder, J. Edgar. And McBride wrote it like a work of fiction because he planned someday to perhaps publish it, even though he knew, deep inside, most of this information can never be made public. It was a dream of his to be a novelist. It’s a bit out of order for what we’re looking for, occurring after the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile
Crisis, but it’s a good starting point for you.”

  Then she got to work, doing a search on the rest of the thumb drive and the Philosopher’s on-line archives for more information about Kennedy, the Jupiter Missiles, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Sword of Damocles.

  Burns opened the document and immediately became immersed in the history:

  22 March 1962

  President John F. Kennedy, as was the custom for his lunches with J. Edgar Hoover, had the Oval Office emptied of everyone, even his brother Robert. To Kennedy, today was looking to be a particularly odious session as Hoover was carrying a particularly thick file.

  Kennedy had been advised by Eisenhower to continue a tradition begun by FDR: inviting the head of the FBI to lunch at the White House every month. It was under the principle of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. Since taking office, Kennedy had stretched the interval out to every two months, and he was hoping he could eventually go without seeing the grotesque man at all. Bobby wasn’t happy about the luncheons much either, because technically Hoover worked for the Attorney General, although the man never acted like he answered to Bobby. Or even the President, Kennedy reflected as he sat on the couch across from Hoover, a low, ornate, coffee table between them, Jackie’s choice.

  Hoover dropped the thick file onto the coffee table with great relish. Kennedy didn’t rise to the bait. Instead he waited as his secretary refilled his coffee cup, offered some to Hoover, and then departed. Kennedy took a sip of coffee and waited some more, refusing to descend into Hoover’s gutter.

  “Interesting wiretaps,” Hoover finally said. “Should I set the stage for them?”

  Kennedy shrugged, knowing the old man would say what he wanted regardless. His back was killing him and he shifted, trying to adjust the brace strapped around his body. He glanced at his watch, thinking ahead to his schedule for the afternoon.