Chapter 2

177 7 0
                                    

President Caldwell ------------->

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Abigail

OVAL OFFICE

                We walked into the Oval Office.  President Caldwell was shaking, visibly.  I walked over to the desk and put my hand over hers. “Ma’am, you called?”

                She looked up like she hadn’t seen me there.  I was standing right beside her.  Next thing I knew, she had her arms around my neck and was sobbing on my shoulder.  I stumbled back two steps, regained my balance and looked at Grim and Fisher.

                “He’s gone, they took him,” she said through the sobs.

                “Who did they take ma’am?” I asked.  I saw the door was still open and instinctively made the hand motion for the door to close.  Then I remembered this was the White House and not Fourth Echelon head quarters.  Grim saw my hand signal and closed the door.  A man walked in just after she closed but he shut the door behind him.

                “Thank god you three came,” he said. “I’m Jet Nansen, SAC of the Presidential Security Detail.  Call me Jet, you must be the three black operators Ms. Caldwell is so trusting of.”

                “I don’t think I would call it trust, but okay.  Jet, what is she talking about?” Grim asked.

                “Her son,” Jet said.  There was a large press mob when it was learned that President Caldwell's only son would be joining the US Army and entering Ranger School.  We ahd recieved his test scores, they were some of the best in his class, we would have tried to hire him, but we needed to see how he acted in the field.  We couldn't take a risk on everybody with good test scores.

                “Ma’am, your son joined the military, he was deployed not kidnapped.” I said.  There had been a small fiasco on whether a Splinter Cell should be sent to secretly protect him.

                “No, this came in twenty minutes ago.” Jet said and pointed a remote at the TV screen.  A video popped up of her son being held captive with the other members of his unit in an underground bunker of some sort.  I didn’t even listen to the message as they pulled him out and shoved him to his knees.  He was bloody and beaten already.  I knew they weren’t exactly going to ask for a ransom, have it paid and release the hostages.

                Grim spoke up before I could. “I need that tape, we can have our Chief Technical Analyst process it and try to find a plausible location for it.”

                “Based off what?  There are no windows, no land marks,” Jet asked.

                “The walls aren’t concrete; that is the natural stone in the region.  Sheila will be able to narrow down where that is and then we can get a satellite repurposed to search the desert for a bunker entrance or for cave entrances.  From there we systematically start narrowing it down until we find it.  Unless of course we can figure out which group this is, and then we have a database that contains the locations of bunkers.” I explained around President Caldwell who was still sobbing on my shoulder.

                “Abby, give her a hug,” Fisher snapped.  I shot him a look.

                “If I can’t call you Sam, you can’t call me Abby,” I said putting my arms around President Caldwell’s shoulders. “We should brief the CIA, FBI, NSA, we will need all the help we can get.   I can see if I can call another JOC briefing,”

Splinter Cell: Chaos TheoryWhere stories live. Discover now