Charlie certainly wanted to claim this credit, but he still had some questions about how it would actually play out—and until those were sorted, he wasn't about to shoulder the trouble.
Taking advantage of the break, he quietly went to find his daughter.
He was aware that Bella had certain extraordinary abilities.
At first he really hadn't known, but after so many years living together, telltale signs kept surfacing in one way or another.
If nothing else, Bumblebee and Ironhide at home had both been sweet-talked back by Bella.
Not long ago he'd even caught sight of the Divine Dragon, which had grown so familiar with the household it couldn't be bothered to hide anymore. And three days ago he'd found a cloak in the house wrapped around a big cauldron, drifting back and forth. He had no idea what that was about—only that all these bizarre things came from his own daughter.
"That tunnel we escaped through with President Sawyer back then—think it still works?" he asked his daughter in a low voice.
The tunnel? Bella, busy soothing Little Elsa, didn't catch his meaning at first; it took her a moment to catch on. He must mean the tunnel they'd fled through from the White House bunker. Back then Bella had pinned the whole thing on Kennedy, insisting it was the tunnel Kennedy had used to sneak Marilyn Monroe into the White House for their trysts. Whether that was actually true—well, nobody would ever know now.
That tunnel didn't actually connect to the White House bunker; she'd forced the link with a spell.
Seeing her old man itching to try, she scratched her head. "The tunnel's exit at the Lincoln Memorial should be sealed off by now, but... let me go take a look."
She and Natasha took the baby and hurried to the Lincoln Memorial to check.
The old exit had indeed been sealed; from the outside there wasn't the faintest sign of it.
She didn't touch the exit. Instead she had Natasha watch over her body while she used Astral Projection to slip underground and inspect the entire tunnel.
The sealed-off stretch wasn't large—under five meters (about sixteen feet) start to finish; a few strokes of a shovel would break through.
What Bella was really there to see was the section of tunnel leading to the bunker.
That stretch ran a straight-line distance of over a hundred meters (more than three hundred feet). Back then she'd borrowed a path through the Dream World to cross it—truly ignorant and fearless in those days. Thinking about it now, it had been dangerous enough.
She couldn't have the rescue troops travel through a dream passage.
In her soul-state, Bella went to look at the other end of the passage. At the moment all the attackers were over in the bunker's command center; the tunnel exit held only a few broken bookshelves, tucked out of the way, with no one paying it any mind.
She cast a fifth-level spell, Transmute Rock to Mud, and forced a clean bore through the entire passage.
The concrete along the way silently turned to soft mud, which she carried off with Teleportation. She weathered the newly opened passage to match the style of the old one, so it looked as though it had been dug out by hand.
She camouflaged the entrance, dusted the freshly opened passage with a layer of dust, and—satisfied there was no trace left—returned to her body.
While Bella was digging tunnels and covering her tracks, the meeting at the Pentagon was still going on. It was now ten-twenty.
Counting from seven-thirty that evening, when the White House fell, their meeting had run a full three hours! There wasn't much time left!
Old Willy had drunk four pots of coffee. The angel had healed his body, but an old man's bladder control leaves something to be desired—not entirely physical, more a matter of nerves—so he made trip after trip to the bathroom. He wasn't sleeping when he should have, and his body clock was in disarray. In the end Old Willy even dropped a big one in the Pentagon restroom!
All that sacrifice, and the upshot was they hadn't hashed out a damn thing.
Old Willy's mind wandered, and he thought of Benjamin Asher—tied up by the attackers for over three hours now. He wondered whether they even let the man use the toilet.
The Pentagon's rescue plan for the President and the officials was still stuck in its early stages. At the current rate, they wouldn't have anything worked out in under a week!
The attackers, on the other hand, were making good progress. From the captured Army Chief of Staff, they'd extracted the first set of codes for the Cerberus control system.
Then, from the bunker's command center, the attackers sent a command to NORAD.
"Cerberus codes? What are those?" Charlie asked.
The Army deputy chief of staff wore the expression of a man badly constipated, but he answered honestly enough. "A highly classified military protocol. The President had it set up specifically to keep the nuclear arsenal from being seized by terrorists—a safety-lock system bundling control, lockdown, self-destruct, and other commands together."
Charlie ran his eye over everyone's faces and realized the whole room seemed to know about this. He was the only one who hadn't.
"The Pentagon didn't report this to Congress, apparently?"
Congress? Who the hell cares about Congress! Military matters—why should we tell you people anything? The Army deputy chief of staff scoffed inwardly, but he'd never dare say it out loud. He bowed his head and pretended not to have heard.
Old Willy helped explain. "The enemy has one set of codes now. And the two men holding the other two sets—the Secretary of Defense and the President—are both in enemy hands. So..."
"What happens once the enemy has the codes?" Charlie asked, a note of urgency in his voice.
Director Jacobs answered gravely, "The enemy can destroy our nuclear weapons. Worse—they could make them detonate inside the silos."
"Detonate? Just detonate?" Charlie was thunderstruck. What kind of genius design was this? Was the person who dreamed it up brain-dead? Self-destruct meant a straight-up explosion? If those went off, there wouldn't even be an America left to fall apart!
Another hour passed—the fourth hour since the attackers stormed the White House—and Old Willy could barely keep his eyes open when the CIA and FBI finally joined forces and confirmed the leader's true identity.
The leader was a member of a Korean radical faction, named Kang Yeonsak, who early last year had masterminded the bombing of the British consulate in Seoul. He counted as a recent up-and-comer among the Korean radicals, and the American side knew very little about him—which was why it had taken four whole hours to pin down his identity.
Soon the attackers took control of the second set of Cerberus codes as well.
Charlie truly couldn't sit still any longer.
The moment he got word from Bella, he stood and cut off the Army deputy chief of staff and a Navy vice admiral, who were still going in circles about that C-130. They'd been chewing on the same topic, back and forth, for four hours straight!
"I've confirmed that the White House tunnel can be used. If none of you object, I'm willing to go to the site and direct the rescue of President Asher."
The generals, killing time bickering, just stared. Soldiers stay out of politics; they couldn't care less. But the few remaining government higher-ups were mortified, exchanging glances. Do we really need the Democratic presidential candidate to rescue the sitting Republican president?
It was too humiliating for words! How about we just let Benjamin Asher die and be done with it?