Transfer of Power

IRENE KENNEDY sat at her elevated position in the control room with a phone to her ear. On the other end of the secure line. General Campbell was explaining Lt. Commander Harris’s plan to send in a small team of demolition experts to clear the path for the strike teams. Kennedy was not excited about the plan at first, that was until Campbell explained to her that Harris and the three men he had chosen had all succeeded in accomplishing what seemed to be the most difficult aspect of the operation during a training operation with the Secret Service some eight years earlier. She still wasn’t crazy about the idea, but the fact that they had already proven they could do it went a long way.

As Kennedy listened to the general fill her in on the other aspects of the plan, her concentration was broken by a flurry of motion and voices from the two rows in front of her when she looked up, she almost dropped the phone. The monitors that were showing the pictures that Rapp had already provided were now crystal clear, and smack dab in the middle of the big board was a picture of a shiny silver door that could be nothing other than the one to the president’s bunker.

Campbell repeatedly called Kennedy’s name. After the third or fourth time it registered, and she said into the phone, “He did it.”

“Who did it?” asked a slightly irritated Campbell.

“Mitch did. We have a picture of the bunker on the board.”

Kennedy paused for a second while one of her people pointed to his own headset and spoke to her. Kennedy clutched the phone and said, “You’d better get back here right away. We have Mitch on full audio from his Motorola, not the field radio. I think he’s taken out the jammer. Hustle back. I have to let Thomas know.” Without waiting for a response from Campbell, Kennedy hung up the phone and quickly dialed the extension for her boss. At the same time she riffled through a stack of papers.

Stansfield answered on the second ring, and Kennedy could barely contain her excitement.

“Thomas, Mitchell has taken out the jammer. We have him on full audio, and we’ve picked up two more surveillance feeds.”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Stansfield calmly replied.

Kennedy hung up the phone and put on her headset as she called out Rapp’s code name over the microphone hanging in front of her lips. She came across the document she was looking for, a list of numbers provided by Secret Service Director Tracy.