The Last Days

  MacPherson and his team tracked the drama from the Sit Room.

  With the suicide bomber crisis over—at least for now—there was no need to be in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the blast-proof bunker three stories under the White House. They’d be safe where they were. A steward brought in coffee and sandwiches, but no one was hungry. They were listening to a live, secure feed, cross-linked from the Pentagon.

  “Can I talk to them, Bennett and McCoy?” MacPherson asked.

  “Not yet, sir,” said Defense Secretary Trainor, patched in via videoconference. “Let’s give them some time to get their bearings and battle that storm.”

  “Freedom One, this is Striker One Six again, do you copy?”

  Hunt tried to establish contact with the Kennedy, still nearly fifty nautical miles away. Nothing. He checked his radio equipment and made some fast adjustments.

  “Freedom One, I repeat, this is Striker One Six, do you copy?”

  It took a moment. Then a hiss of static and a garbled voice came crackling back.

  “Striker… Six… . Free. …”

  “Freedom One, please repeat. Say again, please repeat.”

  More hiss and static—then a clear channel.

  “Striker One Six, we’re launching two F-l4s to watch your back.”

  That was more like it.

  “Roger that, and thanks, Freedom One. Our feet are wet. We’re coming home.”

  Bennett stared out the window of the Seahawk. They were just four hundred feet above the angry whitecaps, trying to stay under the thick fog without crashing.

  No one said a word for the next few minutes. They simply surrendered to the sounds of the whirling rotors above, the crashing waves below, and the deafening thunder exploding all around them. The chopper continued rocking back and forth, occasionally dropping a good twenty-five or thirty feet in a split second.

  Two F-14 Tomcat Interceptors went to full power.

  Seconds later, they each catapulted off the pitching deck of the Kennedy, one after the other, racing from zero to a hundred fifty miles an hour in just three seconds. It was no night to fly. The pilots didn’t even know who they were risking their lives to escort home. But orders were orders and they were pros.

  The Seahawks were now just thirty miles from the Kennedy battle group.

  But they were absolutely being mauled by the storm raging around them, The winds were gusting upward of sixty to seventy knots. Massive sheets of rain were moving horizontally. Bennett forced himself not to look out the window at the snaking bolts of lightning and the massive black waves.

  Suddenly, warning lights and buzzers filled the cockpit. Hunt checked his istruments and his radar. Then McCoy saw his head jerk back. They had company.

  “Freedom One, Freedom One, this is Striker One Six, we are being painted. Some bogey just locked onto me. What the hell is going on?”

  Painted? Bennett’s eyes opened instantly and he sat up. Someone out there in the darkness had just acquired tone and was preparing to fire their missiles

  at them.

  “Striker One Six, we just picked up two MiG-23s. They’re coming fast and low from the south-southeast.”

  Bennett couldn’t believe what he was hearing. MiGs inbound on their location? Why? Who were they? It didn’t make sense. He leaned into the cockpit to see the blips on radar. Sure enough, they were sitting ducks, Mordechai leaned over with his assessment.

  “Libyans.”

  “You sure?” said Bennett.

  “I’m sure.”

  McCoy agreed. So did the SEALs. It was the only explanation.

  “Freedom One, where’s that cover you promised?”

  “Striker One Six, they’re inbound hot. They should be there any moment.”

  “We might not be—”

  BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP.

  “They fired. One of the MiGs just fired!” yelled Hunt. “Missile in the air!

  Hunt immediately deployed countermeasures and pulled back on the yoke. The Seahawk climbed to three thousand feet, then went into a hard dive as Bennett and the others hung on for their lives. Just before they crashed into the waves, Hunt banked hard right, then hard left, then pulled up and broke right again. Everyone looked left as a Russian AA-10 air-to-air missile sliced by at Mach 4, missing the Seahawk by less than a yard. Even Galishnikov was terrified now, and he lost everything he had on the floor.

  BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP.

  “They’ve locked on again!” Hunt yelled. “They’ve got tone again.”

  They’d been lucky but he wasn’t sure he could pull an evasion like that again.

  Just then the two F-l4s raced by—one to the left, one to the right. A cheer went up in both choppers and Bennett could hear the radio traffic as both pilots locked on to their bogies.

  “I’ve got tone,” said the lead.

  A moment later, his wingman did, too.

  “Fox two, fox two.”

  “Fox two, fox two.”

  Sidewinder missiles exploded out the sides of the F-l4s. A fraction of a second later they could feel the concussion of two massive explosions. The MiGs were history. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief—everyone but Bennett. They weren’t out of this storm yet. They still had to land.

  Bennett could see the landing lights on the Kennedy.

  The navy’s last conventionally powered aircraft carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy was a thousand feet long, twenty stories high, and weighed more than eighty thousand tons. But the waves below were now cresting at thirty to forty feet. Even at three-quarters of a mile out, Bennett could see the four-

  and-a-half-acre flight deck pitching wildly back and forth, between fifteen and twenty degrees at least, making it impossible to stand on the deck, much less land on it.

  But the Seahawks didn’t have a choice. They needed to get down, and fast.

  Bennett watched Hunt wipe the sweat from his face and ready himself for the task ahead. He could hear the confusion of chatter over the radio as the chopper moved into position over the rolling carrier deck. He had no idea how they were going to get down. Even if they did slam the Seahawk down on the deck clean—and at the right moment—what was to prevent them from being thrown overboard and crashing upside down twenty stories below

  The windshield wipers on the Seahawk must have been going Mach 2. It didn’t seem to matter. Still, Bennett could see a member of the Kennedy crew on the flight deck, crawling on his belly toward a mechanical contraption just below them. He was carrying a huge pole with a hook at one end. He wore a helmet and goggles, a waterproof suit, and an orange life vest with a whistle and strobe lights attached. He also seemed to be attached to a lifeline of some kind, though Bennett couldn’t tell for sure. Whatever, the guy was either the gutsiest man he’d ever seen or the stupidest. “What are you doing?’ shouted Bennett.

  “Not right now, sir,” Hunt yelled back, focused like a laser on a procedure he’d trained on at Lakehurst but had never actually done in combat conditions.

  BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP.

  Bennett’s eyes scanned the instrument panel. It couldn’t be another MiG, he thought, not here. He was right. It wasn’t a MiG. It was fuel. Hunt looked at the gauge. It was almost on empty. He tapped it slightly. The needle went down, not up. It didn’t make sense. They’d had full tanks at liftoff. How could they possibly have …

  The gunfire on the tarmac, Hunt thought. The fuel lines must have been . With everything else going on, he hadn’t noticed. But now they were runnining on fumes. He radioed the Kennedy and told them their situation, With both prime ministers onboard, Hunt’s chopper was going to be the first down anyway. But now they were out of fuel and out of time. They had to get on the deck and fast. “Roger that, Striker One Six. Fire when ready.”

  The Seahawk hovered over the carrier, fighting against the crosswinds to stay steady. Hunt punched a button and fired a huge, thick cable down

  toward the deck. It whipped about wildly in the wind and Bennett had no idea
what was going on.

  The man below strapped himself into the mechanical contraption, and lifted the pole into the air. A huge gust of wind almost ripped him off the deck, but the safety tether did its job. Was this guy completely nuts? If a bolt of lightning didn’t fry him, the static electricity being generated by the two fifty-four-foot rotors had to do it for sure. Twice, the pole seemed to explode in sparks and smoke. The guy never let go. A moment later, he successfully hooked the Seahawk’s cable, grounded it, connected it to the mechanical contraption, and scrambled for safety.

  “McCoy, what’s going on?’ Bennett shouted.

  If he was about to meet his maker, at least he wanted to know why.

  “They’re hooking us into the RASTsystem,” McCoy shouted back.

  “What’s that?’

  “Recovery, Assist, Secure, and Traverse—it locks us into the deck of the carrier. Now the pilot’s going to throttle up, and try to pull away”

  “Pull away? What for? We need to land this sucker and get inside.”

  “We will. But the carrier does all the work for us. The cable is attached to a huge machine down below, the bear trap. It’s going to mechanically pull us down onto the deck and lock us there so we can’t be washed overboard.”

  Bennett could hear the engines revving up.

  ” Then why pull up and away?’

  ” ‘Cause if the cable snaps, we need enough power to get airborne again— fast.”

  “Or what?’

  “Or we die.”

  BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP.

  Everyone jumped. Bennett scanned the instrument panel. It was the low-fuel warnings going off again. They were out of time. But it couldn’t be helped. This was the only way down.

  Hunt went to max power and pulled his yoke back. Bennett, McCoy, Galishnikov, and Mordechai grew silent. They could feel the Seahawk fighting to pull away and the carrier’s retracting cable trying to pull the twenty-three-thousand-pound chopper to the deck. The crosswinds were surging against their sides, buffeting them in every direction as Hunt tried to hold steady. The rain and fog were so thick they could barely see outside. All they knew was that they were getting closer. They could feel the intense tug-of-war, machine raging against machine. And then—suddenly—they felt metal smash against metal and the huge metal claws lock on.

  They were down. Hunt shut down his engines. One by one, they crawled out of the chopper doors, clipped themselves onto a safety line, and dropped down onto the greasy, oily deck—down onto their bellies, holding each hook for dear life as the carrier swayed from side to side like a child’s seesaw at the park. Hunt led the way, to show them how. Sa’id went next, followed by his security detail. Then Doron and his Shin Bet agents. Mordechai was next. Then Galishnikov, followed by McCoy, at Bennett’s insistence. The rest of the SEALs brought up the rear.

  It was slow going for all of them. Bennett could see nothing. His face was raw from the driving salt rains. He could barely breathe. The surging winds seemed to suck his lungs dry. He looked back and saw the other Seahawk making its approach.

  Inch by inch, Bennett made his way across the deck. He crawled toward the LSO—the landing safety officer—and the flight deck director, both screaming instructions to him he couldn’t even begin to hear amidst the raging storm.

  His knuckles, clutching the freezing metal hooks in front of him, were white as ghosts. But ten terrifying minutes later, the “point man for peace,” the “two kings,” and what was left of their team made it to the end of the line.

  They were safe. They’d been to hell and back. But they were safe.

  “Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States.”

  The Capitol erupted.

  Both chambers, both parties—ambassadors from all over the world—stood and applauded the president longer and harder than any ovation Bennett or McCoy had ever heard before. The air was thick with emotion, with a sense that they were all witnesses to something dramatic and historic and almost miraculous.

  He couldn’t believe he was there—in the president’s box for the State of the Union. With his mom on one side. And Erin McCoy on the other, more beautiful than he’d ever seen her before. With Dmitri Galishnikov and the SEALs in the row behind him. With the First Lady in the row in front of him—standing beside Israeli prime minister David Doron and his wife, and Palestinian prime minister Ibrahim Sa’id, his wife and four sons.

  Exactly three weeks before, they had landed on the Kennedy. And now they were in the United States Capitol. With the world watching. With U.S. combat operations in the West Bank and Gaza now complete and successful. With a three-year transition accord signed that very afternoon at the White House. With Doron and Sa’id receiving a hero’s welcome. With a sumptuous state dinner planned for the following night. With Yuri Gogolov and Mohammed Jibril now number one and number two on the FBI’s most wanted list, and the Libyan Defense Ministry still smoldering.

  The president’s speech was magnificent. “Shakespeare” had outdone himself. Peace was finally at hand. At the moment, anything seemed possible. And it was surreal. There was no other way to describe it. Simply surreal.

  A motorcade took them all back to the White House. The president and

  First Family invited them all up to the Residence for a post—State of the Union party, and Bennett asked Galishnikov to escort his mom. He had a few things to attend to. He’d be right up.

  “Pssst, Erin, come with me,” said Bennett, as he took her by the hand and led her out to the colonnade by the Oval Office.

  “What are you up to?” McCoy asked. “You’ve been acting strange all night.”

  They walked out to the Rose Garden, covered with snow and twinkling with lights. The air was soft and cool, no wind, not even a breeze. Out in the distance, McCoy could see the Washington Monument. It was still there, still standing strong, unmoved by the violence of the last days.

  “I’m not real good at this,” he said, conceding the obvious. “But here goes. I know we’ve been so busy with everything at Camp David and the State of the Union and all, but I was just wondering …”

  He hesitated.

  Jon Bennett could cut billion-dollar deals and Middle East peace treaties and drive a VW down the Rock of Gibraltar doing forty in the rain, but somehow this seemed hard.

  “You were wondering what?” asked McCoy.

  “I don’t know. I’d just thought, if you weren’t doing anything Saturday night that, perhaps …”

  “Perhaps …”

  “Perhaps you’d let me take you out to dinner somewhere, anywhere you’d like to go. You don’t have to commit to marriage or anything. Just a nice dinner, you know, to say thank you for all I’ve put you through.”

  McCoy couldn’t help but laugh.

  “A suicide bombing, a siege in Gaza, a war on Gibraltar, and a helicopter ride from hell? Yeah, dinner and a movie really ought to cover it, Bennett.”

  Bennett laughed, too, and gently wiped away a snowflake from her cheek.

  “Well,” he said, “at least it’s a start.”

 

 

  Joel C. Rosenberg, The Last Days

 

 

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