Transfer of Power

THE TWO SEALS trudged forward through the ventilation duct in complete darkness. Craft in the lead and Shultz close behind. This is what they had trained their whole lives to do.

There wasn’t a Special Forces operator in the service worth his salt who wouldn’t have given his left nut to be in their position.

All the push-ups, early morning runs, icy swims, hour upon hour of target practice, live fire drills, parachute jumps that ran into the triple digits-it all came down to this.

“Apprehension” was a word that didn’t belong in their vocabulary. Maybe “caution” from time to time, but not “apprehension.” These men relished the task before them and knew all too well what the stakes were. Death was a distinct possibility. They had seen team members die in both training and covert operations. That was the life they had decided to live, and there wasn’t a day they regretted the decision.

The younger Craft was in the lead because he had asked to be. The two SEALS were now experiencing the same problem that Rapp and Adams had.

The closer they got to the White House the worse their radio reception became. Like the two that had gone before them, they had removed their earpieces after a while because the static became so bad.

It had not occurred to anyone, either at Langley or at SEAL Team Six’s mobile command post, to have Shultz and Craft string along a phone line-a military practice that had been commonplace for almost a century, but had gone by the wayside with the recent onslaught of high-tech radios and billion-dollar satellites. Events had progressed too quickly, and a low-tech solution to a critical battlefield problem had been missed.

Craft was glad he had remembered to put on his elbow and knee pads before being lowered into the ventilation duct. He had about thirty pounds of gear on his body and was pulling another thirty behind him via a rope. Wiggling like a reptile, he could move only four to six inches at a time, and his elbows were doing most of the work.

The two men moved quietly for the most part, the only real noise coming from the equipment they dragged behind them. The noise wasn’t much, no more than that of a shirt sliding down a clothes chute. It was hard to tell how far they had gone, but to Craft it seemed as if they were nearing the end. He stopped momentarily and looked behind him. All he found was more blackness and the sounds of his swim buddy squirming his way forward. Craft decided to shed some light on the situation. Turning onto one side, he extracted his pistol, a Heckler & Koch USP.45 ACP.

Attached to the pistol was both a cylindrical suppressor and a laser-aiming module. Craft turned on the laser, and the red dot bounced off the walls of the duct. Aiming the pistol straight ahead. Craft found the end of the shaft not more than thirty feet away.