Chapter 559: The Hunt
Inside the White House, Mike Banning had tied down a little under half the terrorists' manpower across its many rooms, and then James Rhodes caught them with a surprise strike. Just like that, the numbers turned against them.
The firefight lasted less than ten minutes. Seeing every hostage spirited away, they had no choice but to abandon the bunker and fall back toward the surface.
Kang Yeonsak never made it out of the White House in the end. Mike Banning, waiting outside, dropped him with a single shot.
He'd taken several rounds himself. His vest had stopped most of them, but Lieutenant Colonel Rhodes was still walking a little unsteadily now, and the sight of the terrorist leader's corpse left him thoroughly put out. So close! That kill hadn't been his!
"You work for the Treasury?" Watching Mike Banning stand there drenched head to toe in blood, Lieutenant Colonel Rhodes and the soldiers behind him felt a surge of heartfelt admiration. Could this man really be from the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS? Elite beyond anything they'd imagined! They'd heard those taxmen turned downright heroic when it came time to collect!
Fighting with teammates at your side and fighting without them were two entirely different things. Lieutenant Colonel Rhodes had a whole squad with him, and his kill count came out about the same as Mike Banning's all on his own! There was simply no way not to be impressed.
Mike Banning spat out a mouthful of bloody foam. He'd originally been a Secret Service agent, but these days he really did work a desk at the Treasury. In a sense he wasn't so different from Natasha Romanoff, riding a desk in some clerical post over at S.H.I.E.L.D.—both of them the type who could actually fight like hell, yet had been pulled off the front line for one reason or another.
"Yeah, yeah…" He tossed off a couple of noncommittal replies. He could hardly argue when Lieutenant Colonel Rhodes brought up where he worked; he really was a Treasury employee, after all! It was after hours right now, and he'd just stepped out for a stroll and happened to moonlight as a presidential rescuer along the way.
And with that, the whole affair could be considered neatly resolved.
Looking back on it, the sequence of events had actually been quite simple.
At six-thirty in the evening, Benjamin Asher had been welcoming the visiting Prime Minister of South Korea at the White House. At seven the terror attack struck; by seven-thirty the White House had been completely seized. After that the Pentagon started holding meetings—four hours of them! And yet, once Charlie was appointed field commander, it took less than fifteen minutes from start to finish to rescue the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the rest of their party.
On the soldiers' side, two were killed and every last one of the rest was wounded. Not to mention James Rhodes and Mike Banning, who were both soaked in blood; even Ruth McMillan, the Secretary of Defense, had a chunk of flesh torn from her calf by a bullet. The only one who came through without a scratch was Benjamin Asher.
The casualties weren't light, but the operation was an unqualified success. The men who carried it out had done well, and Charlie, as field commander, had earned even greater credit.
To the assembled reporters he held forth at length about how difficult the rescue had been and about various operational details; keeping a low profile didn't square with the values around here. Charlie even brought up what President Sawyer had gone through back in the day, along with his own experiences. You Republicans always used to make such a thing of that, didn't you? Well, now we're all in the same boat!
It hadn't quite reached the level of "nobody knows the White House better than me," but Charlie reckoned his field command deserved full marks.
Benjamin Asher thought so too. With great magnanimity he thanked Charlie, crediting the man's decisive action with saving his life and, in a sense, saving America too, or at the very least preserving the nation's dignity.
Charlie took no part in the follow-up matters. He was a senator; he had a day job of his own.
Maybe the terrorists knew that crowd up on Capitol Hill was good for nothing. The White House, the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial had all taken damage to varying degrees—only the Capitol came through untouched. The next day Charlie went to Congress as usual to shoot the breeze with a pile of his fellow legislators, then arranged to go fishing after work with a few congressmen he got along with.
Benjamin Asher, on the other hand, was miserable.
After the battering it had taken from a C-130, heavy machine guns, rockets, and bombs, half the White House lay in ruins once more. If he wanted to work out of the place, it would have to be renovated all over again. The government had money, but every dollar of it came with a designated purpose—at least as far as the public was concerned—and he couldn't just conjure a fund out of thin air to rebuild the White House.
The only option was to collect taxes, and to do it immediately, right this instant!
He couldn't spare a thought for public discontent now.
Repairing the White House was a trifle; how to handle things with South Korea was the real problem. The Prime Minister of South Korea, who had come to negotiate with him, had been shot dead by Kang Yeonsak. Have the South Koreans send someone else over now? He figured negotiating by phone was the better idea!
After much earnest persuasion from those around him, he came to recognize that his earlier moves had been too rash, and that this was precisely what had driven the radicals to their all-or-nothing gamble. But withdrawing the troops was out of the question—there could be absolutely no compromise with terrorists—so he had no choice but to keep taking a hard line.
Identifying suspected terrorists and striking at terrorists thus became the two most important items on President Benjamin Asher's plate.
The government put up the money and, under the banner of the NSA, poured still more funding into an artificial-intelligence surveillance system in Nathan Ingram's hands called "the Machine," while launching several similar projects at the same time. Benjamin Asher was thoroughly incensed that his own intelligence agencies had needed four whole hours to confirm Kang Yeonsak's identity. Could they possibly go any slower?
Even though security experts voiced their doubts about developing and deploying artificial intelligence, he stubbornly pushed these projects forward.
Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes, who had distinguished himself in the rescue, was promoted to full colonel, transferred from the Army into the Air Force, and dispatched to Stark Industries to serve as the military's representative, handling communication between the armed forces and the weapons manufacturer.
It was an important post, a significant step from being a mere soldier toward the ranks of field-grade command. Once James Rhodes leveraged this experience to make general down the line, his career prospects would be excellent. It was fair to say Benjamin Asher thought highly of Colonel Rhodes.
Faced with the wrath of Daddy America, South Korea promptly backed down. Who knew how they managed it, but Kang Yeonsak's behind-the-scenes backers ended up tied to certain tribal militias in Afghanistan.
Asher seized the moment to withdraw eighty percent of the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea, easing the resentment among their ally's populace, and at the same time the Afghanistan War—four years later than in the parallel timeline—officially kicked off.
He went further still and lifted many of the restrictions President Sawyer had placed on the military-industrial complex. He wanted more weapons, and more powerful ones, to deal with the terrorists!
Bella was very much preoccupied with whoever it was that would summon Dormammu in the future. After reading through the Darkhold fragments she'd obtained from the Volturi family, she'd come to feel that this magic exerted an enormous corrosive influence on the soul. She figured she could readily sense that soul-corrupting influence herself, but for others it was hard to say.
This magic truly was evil. The notion that "magic is neither right nor wrong—what matters is the user" simply didn't apply to the Darkhold. Once someone dabbled in it, faced with such immense temptation, they really could do things beyond all comprehension. Who was the likeliest suspect to summon Dormammu? She didn't need to waste much thought investigating to know it was Kaecilius. It surely couldn't be the Ancient One, could it? If it really were, well, there'd be nothing she could do about that…
The Cauldron of the Cosmos was a divine artifact. With its aid, she quickly picked up Kaecilius's trail. The man had left Kamar-Taj and was now passing himself off as an ordinary person, operating around the Balkan Peninsula. Bella told her wife and child to amuse themselves at home, then took a single step forward and arrived in that small Balkan nation—the place still known at this point as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro.