The Kennedy Endeavor (Presidential Series Book 2) Read online

  “How was Philly?” Turnbull had a clean desk. There was no sign Lucius had ever sat in the chair or died here. He’d buzzed Burns in, allowing him through the new security that was now in place inside the Anderson House. Cooperation meant concessions.

  “I saw the blood your Surgeon spilled,” Burns said.

  “She was a bit rash,” Turnbull said. “What did you learn about Kennedy and the Jupiters?”

  “Evie’s working on it.”

  “So you just came here to demand information of me?”

  “If we’re going to exchange information it has to start somewhere,” Burns said.

  “So you figured it would start here?”

  “We think the key to this might be Mary Meyer’s diary,” Burns said. “That’s some information. Kennedy confided in Meyer. He might have confided about the Jupiter missiles and this Sword of Damocles.”

  “Ah,” Turnbull said. “Mary. I met her once. Briefly. I’d just graduated Annapolis. A long time ago, that was. She was attractive, no doubt about it, but she also had something extra, something that every man—and woman for that matter—picked up on. An allure. A combination of beauty, intelligence and insight. Very rare.”

  Turnbull sounded nostalgic, out of character for him.

  Burns didn’t allow that to sidetrack him. “I’m sure Hoover—“

  “Director Hoover,” Turnbull corrected.

  “I’m sure Director Hoover had a thick file on Mary Meyer,” Burns said. “We believe her diary might be the key to figuring out what the Sword of Damocles is.”

  “Apparently the Sword is some out of date missiles in northeast Turkey,” Turnbull said. “And we’re taking care of that problem.”

  “You honestly believe that’s it?” Burns said.

  “No.” Turnbull pointed at one of the seats while glancing at the clock, calculating the time until the choppers out of Iraq reached the Jupiters. Still a while off.

  “Do you have access to Hoover’s files?” Burns pressed.

  “They were destroyed,” Turnbull said. “You know that. Every FBI agent knows that. Hoover died in 1972. Right away, Tolson, his right hand man—“

  “And lover,” Burns interrupted.

  Turnbull shrugged. “I don’t give a shit if Hoover was fucking a goat. He was a dangerous man with his own agenda. Tolson called Hoover’s secretary, Helen Gandy, told her the Director was dead, and without a ‘hope you’re handling this okay,’ ordered her to start destroying Hoover’s files. Since ’57 Hoover had been keeping a set of special files at his office. Ones he didn’t trust to FBI Central Filing. No one—and I mean no one—not even Gandy or Tolson, knew the extent of what was in those files.”

  “We know from our files,” Burns said, “that Hoover blackmailed John F. Kennedy over an affair with Sam Giancana’s mistress.”

  “’Our’ files?”

  “The APS files.”

  “Interesting,” Turnbull said, “although everyone knew Kennedy and his brother fucked around. Trust me, they’d fuck a goat if it stood still long enough. Every great man has a flaw. I’m fine with it being sexual. I prefer that to incompetence. Anyway, Gandy started in on the ‘D’ files. Those were the ones Hoover had already targeted for destruction. Hell, I heard rumors that Gandy and Hoover had begun marking files and destroying some of them well before he died. He was sick for quite a while.”

  “I don’t believe they were all destroyed,” Burns said. “I’ve been around long enough to know that no one in this town gets rid of something they can use. They only get rid of it if it can be used against them.”

  “Slow down,” Turnbull said, once more glancing at the clock. “Tolson was Acting Director for all of one day. Nixon fucking hated Hoover. Hell, every President did. He appointed Gray as director ASAP. Gray went to Hoover’s office where he found Gandy hovering over the files like she owned them. He secured Hoover’s inner office, but not the entire suite, and the files were in Gandy’s outer office.” Turnbull leaned back and put his hands behind his head, lacing his fingers. “This is where the small fuck ups can bite you in the ass, Special Agent Burns. Gray reported to Nixon that the files were secure even though she wouldn’t even let him look in the boxes she had. Everyone was just so happy to be rid of Hoover that they let her take them with her to Hoover’s house.

  “Eventually someone wised up, and while publicly proclaiming that no files had ever been removed from headquarters, they sent people to Hoover’s house to gather back what they should have never let out.”

  “Do you have the files or not?”

  “Slow down,” Turnbull said once more, checking the clock. “You mentioned Mary Meyer, and I’m trying to show how everything in this town connects, all right? They went into Hoover’s house to grab the rest. Juicy stuff. Besides the dirt on the Kennedy brothers, he had the same on Joe Kennedy, their father. He had the dirt on anyone who’d ever gotten a smudge under their fingernails, which is pretty much everyone in this town.”

  Burns sighed.

  “All right,” Turnbull said. “Guess who was spotted carrying boxes of files out of Hoover’s home?”

  Burns thought for a second. “Same guy who grabbed Meyer’s diary. Angleton.”

  “You are good at your job,” Turnbull allowed. “Angleton claimed they were bottles of spoiled wine, which is about the worst cover story I can think of. He was—“

  Turnbull paused as Burns’ phone rang.

  “Burns.”

  Evie Tolliver got to the point. “General Pegram just called me. Satellite surveillance has picked up two Iranian helicopters inbound for Ararat. They’ll be on it at least thirty minutes before our people.”

  *****

  “I’ve got more bad news,” Haney said in response to Turnbull’s message about the Iranians. His fingers were torn and bloody from ripping off the access covers on all six rockets. “There are only three warheads here. Three of the nosecones were empty. It’s obvious someone opened them up after they were in place here. And not carefully.”

  “Did you check the lead box on the back of the truck?” Turnbull asked.

  Haney was standing on the back of the truck. “I’m looking in it right now. Nothing. I’ve got the hatches off and the warheads are ready to be pulled. Going to take more than one man to do that, though.”

  The import of what Turnbull had told him was beginning to sink into Haney’s reality. “Thirty minutes is a long time.”

  “Can you seal the hangar off?” Turnbull asked.

  “I can put covering fire on the way I got in, and only one person at a time can enter that way,” Haney said as he hopped off the back of the truck. He looked to the left. “But if they’ve got any demo, they can blow open the large doors. Going to have to open them anyway to get the bombs out.”

  Haney walked over to one of the flatbeds. A warhead rested in the nosecone. “I’ll figure something out.”

  *****

  Ducharme tapped Cane on the shoulder. The UH-60 was flying fast and low, the Halo behind and slightly above. They were trying to stay under Turkish radar, using the terrain to mask their movement. The Halo pilots trusted the UH-60 pilots with their night vision goggles and advanced navigation systems to keep them from crashing into the ground since they were flying blindly.

  “Iranians will be on our target in five mikes.”

  Cane didn’t seem surprised. It’s a maxim of military operations that once you crossed the line of departure—line of contact (LD/LC)—all plans went to shit.

  “So we’re going in to a hot LZ,” Cane said. “Can you get us any air support?”

  “My contact is working on it,” Ducharme said.

  *****

  The two Chinooks came to a hover, side-by-side, over the edge of the top of the hangar. Dirt blew in the air, swirling about, as the back ramps were maneuvered to a spot just above the ground. The Iranian commandoes rushed off and the two choppers lifted and moved off to land in a level spot a kilometer away to await the order to extract.
/>   The commandoes rappelled down to the ground. While a line of five snaked into the ventilation shaft, others began prepping charges on the two large, rusting doors.

  One of them had a Geiger count out, checking the level of radiation. He gave a thumbs-up to the team leader. “Low level, but something radioactive is inside.”

  *****

  “Hold at all costs,” Haney muttered as he used the crowbar to rip open the casing on one of the warheads.

  He’d heard the faint tremble of helicopters echoing from above. There wasn’t much time. A clanging noise caught his attention and he spun about, AK-47 at the ready. A rope came tumbling out of the hole in the airshaft and a second later a man in camouflage rappelled in.

  He didn’t make it to the ground alive as Haney stitched him with a five round burst. But the Iranians, like trained elite soldiers everywhere, kept coming. Haney took out the second and third, before running out of ammunition. As the fourth and fifth touched down, he slammed home a fresh magazine.

  Tracers slashed by him and he felt the burn as a round cut across the left side of his head, cutting flesh and taking off the top of his ear. Haney tucked the stock of the AK into his shoulder and stood his ground, firing on semi-automatic and carefully. He hit the Iranian who’d wounded him in the chest, staggering the man back, but he didn’t go down.

  Realizing the man was wearing body armor, Haney lifted his aim and put a round into the man’s head, hitting him in the jaw, blossoming bone and blood. He went down this time.

  But the fifth man was now behind the last flatbed, popping up to fire, then ducking back down.

  Gaining time.

  Haney didn’t have time. He knew once the main doors were blown open, this was over. The friendlies were still twenty minutes out.

  Once more channeling his inner Chamberlain, Haney jumped up and then ran along the flatbed and leapt over to the middle one. Then to the one the Iranian was hiding behind. All before he could pop up to fire again. When he did, Haney was above him and the American fired on full auto.

  Dropping the AK, Haney reversed his course and went back to the first missile and warhead. Using the crowbar, he ripped open the bomb’s outer casing.

  *****

  The charges were in place. The Iranian commander gave the order. With a loud bang and a bright flash that slashed through the darkness, they went off. For a long moment it seemed as if nothing had happened. Then, with an accelerating fall, the one door that had been targeted fell outward and hit the ground with a solid thud.

  The commander gave a hand signal for one last check as the rest of the commandoes gathered together for the final assault.

  The man with the Geiger counter stepped into the opening where the door had been, shoulders hunched, expecting a burst of fire.

  What he got was worse.

  The Geiger counter screeched the warning and the man holding it knew he was dead, just by means other than bullet.

  A voice called out of the hangar, first in Persian, then in Kurdish: “Do not enter. You will die of radiation if you enter.”

  Inside the hangar, Haney carried the core of the first warhead in gloved hands over to the truck with the lead box. He dumped it on the back, then went to the second warhead. Now that he understood how the weapon was designed, this one went faster.

  He was tearing through the outer layers of the weapon to the pit, which contained the plutonium. The pit was a solid ball of plutonium shielded by a layer of beryllium. While the metal was brittle and expensive, it was also a neutron reflector. The entire thing had been built at the Rocky Flats weapons plant in Colorado. It’s a testament to the toxicity of plutonium, that even in a shielded environment and under the strictest safety guidelines, that Rocky Flats, despite not having had any plutonium in the site since 1994, is still off-limits and is a game preserve for perpetuity.

  By breaking the protective coating around the pit of the first bomb, Haney had made this location deadly to humans.

  He was holding at all costs.

  *****

  “Lock and load,” Cane shouted, while also giving the hand command for it. “Five minutes out!”

  Muzzles pointed down, the TriOp contractors made ready for battle.

  He leaned close to Ducharme. “What do you have?”

  “The F-22 I came in on,” Ducharme said, “is inbound. Its time on target is four minutes, and it will pave our way in.”

  *****

  Which meant the F-22 had taken off only a few minutes ago and was flying low and fast above the Turkish countryside. It’s special stealth coating and technology allowed it to proceed unseen by radar.

  Stretch was doing the equivalent of driving and texting, except at high speed and with more training. He was entering the grid coordinates of the target, while also heading directly toward it.

  *****

  Outside the hangar, the Iranian commando leader had broken radio silence and was calling back to his headquarters for instructions on how to deal with this unforeseen development. The reading on the Geiger counter indicated that a fatal dose of radiation would be received by anyone who entered the blown door. He had his men huddled behind the one door that was still standing.

  *****

  By breaking radio silence, the Iranians were alerting the Turks that something was amiss in the northeastern part of their country. Alarms were ringing and flight crews were scrambling.

  *****

  In the Anderson House, Turnbull was on the phone with a high Cincinnatian in the State Department, outlining the current problem. The wheels of under the table diplomacy, greased by the power of the Society of Cincinnati, an organization not limited to the United States, began to turn.

  Then he turned back to Burns. “I’ll try to find Hoover’s files…what’s left of them.”

  “They’re probably in the drawer in that desk you’re sitting at,” Burns said.

  “Hoover had a lot of files,” Turnbull said. “And some were destroyed.” He pointed at Burns. “Tell you what. Have Evie—“

  “She’s not your friend.”

  “She isn’t anyone’s friend as far as I can tell,” Turnbull said. “Have Ms. Tolliver check in the APS records for a group called the Peacekeepers. I think they’re very relevant to the current situation.”

  *****

  The bomb bay doors in the belly of the F-22 snapped open.

  “Close enough,” Stretch said, and he hit the fire button, then banked hard.

  A GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb was released from the bottom of the F-22. Small diamondback wings snapped out into place and the missile continued on its journey alone. Stretch had programmed in the grid coordinates for the front of the hangar and internal guidance system in the bomb had it on the correct flight path.

  The GBU-39 was rated with a circular error probability of five to eight meters, which in weapons man talk meant it had a fifty percent chance of coming within that distance of the designated target.

  *****

  “One minute!” Cane yelled.

  The Blackhawk was flying inside a canyon now, walls on either side. The Halo was up higher, above the canyon, tracking the aircraft below.

  Ducharme felt a pounding in his head, the increased blood flow from the adrenaline coursing through his veins, causing spots of pain to flicker.

  It was worse than ever.

  *****

  Stretch had one stop on his way back to Al Asad. He could see the heat signatures of the two Chinooks on his display. His M16A2 40mm cannon was in the base of his right wing. The small door covering the barrel slid open. Finger light on the trigger, Stretch made sure he had a good target, then he fired.

  The cannon had 480 rounds of ammunition, which sounds like a lot to an Infantryman, but for a pilot it meant five seconds worth of firing.

  Stretch used all five seconds, blasting the helicopters into scrap metal and their crews into oblivion. Then he gained altitude and speed and headed back toward Al Asad.

  *****

  T
he GBU-39 made a slight adjustment, then did as advertised, exploding six meters away from the doors of the hangar.

  It was an air burst, designed for maximum damage to personnel and equipment.

  It worked.

  *****

  Inside the hangar, Haney was working on the third core. He felt sick and had already vomited once. He was also tired, more so than he’d ever remembered. Every movement felt like he was deep underwater.

  But he kept at it.

  *****

  The explosion ahead was a flash of lightning in Ducharme’s night vision goggles.

  “Let’s hope that hit the target,” Cane said. Over the team’s net he issued orders.

  The Blackhawk flew around a bend and Cane kicked his fast rope over the edge. Ducharme did the same, wrapping his arms around the thick rope and letting gravity do the rest. He half expected automatic fire to be coming his way, but there was nothing.

  He hit the ground and cleared the rope and the next man was already coming down. Ducharme went to one knee and surveilled the area through his night vision goggles.

  Bodies—mostly parts of bodies—littered the ground. Ducharme spotted the opening to the hangar and headed toward it, only to be grabbed by Cane.

  “Hold on,” Cane said. “I’ve got commo that indicates it’s hot in there.”

  “Hot?”

  “Radioactive.”

  “Shit,” Ducharme muttered. “What are we going to do?”

  “Switch to net three,” Cane said. “The guy inside is on it.”

  Ducharme did as told, and he heard Cane talking to Haney.

  “What’s the situation?” Cane asked.

  “I’ve got all three cores out,” Haney said. “Broke the containment on one. Keep them out. To keep them out.” His voice was barely above a whisper.