Chain of Command - Softcover

Weinberger, Caspar; Schweizer, Peter

3.47

66 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743437748 ISBN 13: 9780743437745

Publisher: Pocket Star, 2006

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In the wake of a series of terrorist attacks on American soil, a group of high-ranking, right-wing government officials plots a staged presidential assassination in the hopes of eliminating anti-government militias, but when the plan goes awry, special agent Michael Delaney uncovers a terrible truth. Reprint.

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About the Author:

Caspar Weinberger served as secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan for more than six years. After leaving the Pentagon, he became publisher and chairman of Forbes magazine. The author of Fighting for Peace, an account of his Pentagon years, and coauthor of The Next War, an analysis of the U.S. military after the Cold War, he died in 2006.

Peter Schweizer is a writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times and Foreign Affairs. His previous books, including Friendly Spies and Victory, have been translated into several languages.

Chapter One

Camp David Presidential Retreat, Maryland Forty-six Minutes Earlier

Michael Delaney sometimes had his doubts about people. But a gun? No doubts there. A gun would never lie to you, would never tell you it loved you and then leave you for somebody else, would never take your kids away, would never flatter you and then stab you in the back. You treated a gun right and it would be your friend forever.

Back in his drinking days, Delaney used to riff on this particular subject after he'd gotten eight or ten fingers of single malt in him. It had been kind of a joke, but kind of not.

But not now. Right now it was not funny at all.

Once you made friends with a gun, you knew that gun better than you knew your own brother. And the gun in his hand was a stranger.

Just minutes earlier Secret Service Special Agent Michael Delaney had awakened to the irritating pulse of his alarm clock. Usually the clock was just a safety. Normally he woke up precisely ten minutes before he had to get up, a skill he'd developed back in the Special Forces, when snatching the maximum amount of sleep from a mission was nearly as important as knowing how to shoot your weapon.

Today, though, he woke with a fuzzy, aching head and a mild case of nausea. There had been a time when that happened a lot. But he hadn't touched a drink in eighteen months. So there had to be another explanation.

Michael Delaney had been sleeping in Walnut, a small cottage in the staff area of the Camp David compound. The room looked like 1950 -- lots of dark wood, a brass lamp, twin bed, an ancient space heater humming under the frost-rimed window. Camp David had been hit with an unseasonably early snow the day before, and through the window he could see that more snow had hit the ground overnight. The tall black pines were heavy with white.

Delaney took a quick shower, started pulling on his clothes, and tried to replay the previous night's events in his mind. He had a vague recollection that his team had been notified just before he went to bed that VPOTUS would be arriving for an am meeting with POTUS. As a member of the presidential security detail, that meant a frenzied morning of work for Michael Delaney. Since 9/11 the already pressed Secret Service had found itself in a pressure cooker. Threats running the gamut from the usual kooks, to domestic terrorist organizations, all the way up to Al-Qaeda had increased alarmingly. The pace of the work seemed to grow more intense by the day.

Why was his memory so vague?

Someone was banging on the door. "Delaney!" It was Mark Greene, head of the presidential detail.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," he called.

"WHMO just called. They're pushing up the meeting to seven A.M. Get a move on."

Delaney grabbed his Uncle Mike holster, swung it over his shoulder, snapped the quick release buckles, then drew his Beretta 9 mm and pulled back the slide three-quarters of an inch. It was a mechanical routine that he went through every day of his life, checking to make sure a round was chambered.

Which is when the cold sweat hit him.

There was a round chambered, yes, the brass cartridge gleaming dully in the dim light of the cabin. But something wasn't right. When you'd pulled back her slide, what, a thousand times, when you'd put ten or fifteen thousand rounds down her pipe, when you'd personally filed and sanded her sear and her trigger so she broke smooth and pure as the stem of a champagne flute, when you'd eased untold numbers of patches down her bore, spoiled her with several gallons of Hoppe's #9, when she'd led you unerringly to the X ring more times than you could count...well, you knew her. You just did.

And the sticky, nasty, crunchy, grabby action of this gun's slide? No. Absolutely not. It was not his weapon. The action of the Beretta in his hand was strictly factory.

More banging on the door. "Delaney! Now!"

When Delaney tried to pierce the fuzz in the back of his mind in order to come up with an explanation of how this fresh-out-of-the-box hunk of steel had ended up in his holster, he drew an absolute and complete blank.

"Now!"

There was no good reason why somebody else's weapon was in his holster. But there was no time to think. It would come to him in a minute -- there had to be a rational explanation, didn't there? -- and then when things slowed down later in the shift, he would get the matter squared away.

He charged out the door, found Mark Greene standing in the snow. Greene, a smart, smooth-talking veteran of the Secret Service, stood in the snow outside the cabin.

For a moment Delaney considered telling him about the strange weapon switch, but Greene spoke first. "You're running late. I'll shadow POTUS. Take one of the guys from uniform and run the perimeter."

Ordinarily doing a perimeter check in calf-high snow would have been anything but welcome. But today Delaney was glad for the opportunity to try and get a handle on what had happened the previous night. The good news was that nothing ever happened at Camp David. Several years earlier, a couple of bored sentries had taken a potshot at an eight-point buck, setting off a mad scramble by the Secret Service -- but that was about as exciting as it got.

The snow had stopped falling in the Catoctin Mountains sometime in the night, but the six-inch blanket of white deadened the sound of the forest around them. The Camp felt unnaturally still and silent. Delaney trudged quickly past the presidential lodge. The lights were on, and through the window he caught a brief glimpse of the man himself, peering out the window. Delaney was struck by the president's grim expression. President Fairbank was usually upbeat and cheerful -- almost inhumanly so -- and so the dour, apprehensive look on his face was surprising. The curtain fell back, and Fairbank disappeared.

Delaney proceeded another fifty yards along the path until he reached Elm, a small cabin that was serving as a temporary command post for the Secret Service. There he found two supervisors from the uniform division behind a security video console.

Despite its rustic appearance, Camp David was crammed with state-of-the-art electronic security features. In addition to several hundred marines available for sentry duty and a phalanx of Secret Service agents, four squads of navy antiterrorism units were on standby, just a three-minute chopper ride from a nearby facility. Hidden in the trees and the rocky ground of the compound were motion detectors, cameras, and a host of other sensors. To protect from an air attack, a phased array radar system tracked flights in the vicinity, its signals linked to two batteries of Patriot surface-to-air missiles. Portable Stinger missiles were also kept at fingertip readiness.

Delaney informed the duty officer of his assignment.

"Take Harrison." The duty officer, a red-faced Texan, pointed his thumb at a burly African-American named Blip Harrison who was nursing a cup of coffee over in the corner of the room.

"Anything I should keep an eye out for?"

The duty officer shrugged. "Other than snow ninjas?"

"Meaning what?" Delaney said.

"This doggone snow," the duty officer said irritably. "It's weighing down the branches of all these pine trees, then the branches break and fall down, and the motion sensors go nuts. We've had nine false alarms since midnight."

"You're sure they're false alarms?" Delaney said. The appearance of the strange pistol in his holster had him on edge.

The operator gave him a hard look. "Of course we are. We sent a team out every time. No footprints, no nothing."

There was a certain amount of resentment toward Delaney on the presidential detail. Delaney had once been a rising star in the Service and leader of the vice presidential detail -- before the incident which almost destroyed his career -- and some of the middle rankers felt Delaney thought he was too big for his boots.

"Ready, Blip?" Delaney said.

Blip Harrison, the burly black Secret Service agent, rose and headed silently for the door. Built solid and straight, he was one of the best in the division. His friends called him Blip because he had spent time in the navy as a radar technician.

The two headed out of the cabin and walked east along a wide and rocky path, then made their way through a cluster of hardwood trees. They caught a glimpse of a whitetail running off into the trees, nostrils steaming in the frigid air. In the distance they heard the thump-thump of helicopter blades, signaling the arrival of the vice president.

For the next twenty minutes the two men trekked through the woods of fir, poplar, and pine, following the route that George Bush Sr. used to jog. The trail took them along the perimeter of the 125-acre retreat near where Jimmy Carter used to ski and along the twenty-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire that encircled the compound. They passed by the helicopter landing pad where the vice president's helicopter, Marine Corp Two, was now standing, then headed down the horse trail built during the 1980s to accommodate Ronald Reagan's love of riding.

Delaney made conversation with the genial Harrison, gently probing to see if the uniformed agent could shed any light on what, if anything, had happened to Delaney the night before. Delaney was concerned about the possibility -- however distant -- that he had drunk so much that he'd blacked out. He'd had more than a couple of blackout drunks in his life, though not for a long time. Harrison, however, didn't indicate that anything unusual had taken place the night before.

By seven-fifteen the sun was peeking over the eastern lip of the Catoctin Mountains, bathing the woods in a golden light, and Delaney still was no closer to figuring out the mystery of the strange gun under his coat than he had been half an hour earlier. It was a glorious morning, and everything along the southern perimeter appeared to be secure. As the duty officer had said, falling branches cracked and thumped occasionally in the woods. But other than that, the air was silent.

The two men looped back through a thicket of hedge growth and headed back toward...

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