by Ben Coes
He glanced down. The wound was leaking blood.
He picked up the cell.
“Doctor?” he said, coughing.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“No,” said Dellenbaugh.
“How bad is it bleeding?” said Scott.
“Bad,” said Dellenbaugh.
“That’s okay,” said Scott. “Now take off your shirt. As much as it hurts, you need to press it against the wound. Hard.”
Dellenbaugh tried to unbutton his shirt, but he couldn’t. His fingers were numb.
“Push it hard,” said the doctor. “As deep as you can.”
“I can’t get my shirt off. I can’t feel anything,” coughed Dellenbaugh.
“What floor are you on?”
Dellenbaugh watched as the cell dropped to the floor. He stared at the open wound in his stomach until, at some point, with the doctor’s frantic shouting in the background, his eyes shut and he again fell into unconsciousness.
55
9:10 A.M.
MANDARIN ORIENTAL HOTEL
COLUMBUS CIRCLE
NEW YORK CITY
Tacoma tapped twice on his ear as he pulled on a pair of running shoes and an orange T-shirt. He moved to a wall of mirrors and put his thumb against a digital reader and the door opened up.
“Tracer code,” said Tacoma.
“Identify.”
“NOC 887–01.”
“Hold.”
Behind the doors was a weapons cache. A small closet held an array of weapons: submachine guns, shotguns, automatic rifles, handguns, knives, axes, and machetes.
Another wall was covered in shelves that held various other pieces of equipment and gear, including vests, communications devices, night and thermal optics, passports, cash, sanitized credit cards, and leather satchels full of gold Krugerrands.
Tacoma holstered a P226 beneath his left armpit and another at his waist, in back. He picked up an MP7 and threaded a silencer into the muzzle.
He pulled on optics and then a tactical vest, and stuffed it with mags.
Then he heard a scream—
Through the terrace window.
He crossed the apartment and walked out onto the penthouse slab of granite and steel, an aerie forty-six floors above the city. He put the optics to his eyes and looked down from the terrace. He watched as a woman ran down Fifty-ninth Street. He saw a police cruiser. Then he heard automatic gunfire—loud steel thuds from a high-powered rifle.
Through the optics he saw two gunmen run from the shadows holding AR-15s. They killed the woman, blowing slugs into her body as she ran.
He watched as they started firing at the police cruiser. Then turned and shot at anything in sight—cars and trucks, people on the sidewalk—killing everyone they could.
A gunshot from a car felled one of the gunmen, but then another gunman emerged from somewhere and he pumped bullets into every vehicle he could. Another gunman came from a side street and soon they were spraying bullets across Columbus Circle, at vehicles and storefronts.
Tacoma stepped inside and dropped the MP7 on a chair. He walked to a mirrored bar area. He reached in and found a small screen, and pressed his fingertip against it. A moment later, the floor in the middle of the room started moving, sliding slowly apart, as a set of blue lights suddenly emanated from the space in the floor. A few seconds later, after the floor had opened up, two walls arose from the concealed space beneath the floor.
He heard a voice:
“Rob, it’s Bill,” said Polk.
“Hey Bill,” said Tacoma. “What were the explosions?”
“The tunnels into Manhattan were blown up,” said Polk. “The bridges are immobilized. They’re cutting off Manhattan.”
“Who?” said Tacoma.
“Hezbollah. They activated some kind of operation, like nine/eleven,” said Polk. “Cabbies, unemployed, grifters, Uber drivers. They’re isolating the president.”
The concealed space beneath the floor held a half dozen sniper rifles along with a pair of surface-to-air missiles and a MANPAD.
Tacoma picked up a sniper rifle, a Howa HCR with a twenty-six-inch barrel. He slammed in a mag of 6.5 Creedmoors.
Tacoma heard shouting and gunfire. He went to the terrace and looked at the street below. Enemy gunmen wandered purposefully, looking for people to kill. The air was smoky, and the aroma of explosives had started to waft over the city. Tacoma could smell it. It was a sour, chemical stench he didn’t recognize, mixed with smoke and fire.
Tacoma positioned the rifle on the steel railing. He screwed a bipod atop the railing for added precision. He took aim at one of the gunmen. He was walking near the Central Park side of the fountain at Columbus Circle. Tacoma paused an extra moment, then pumped the trigger. The slug hit the terrorist in the side of the head, kicking him sideways as his skull was destroyed, brains and skull dumping red into the fountain.
“Bill, I’m at Columbus Circle and there are hordes of active shooters just walking down the street, killing people.”
“I know.”
“So what’s the plan?” said Tacoma.
“The president is at the United Nations,” said Polk. “There is no plan other than try and get him out.”
Tacoma swept the rifle and locked into the second Iranian, standing on Fifty-ninth Street. By the time he realized what had happened to his cohort, Tacoma pumped the trigger and sent a bullet at him, striking him in the chest, dropping him to the street in a clump.
He scanned for the third killer, but he was gone. Still, he’d dropped a pair of the motherfuckers.
Tacoma stepped back inside his apartment as he waited for Langley. He went back to the wall of equipment. He pulled on a tan-and-black camo tactical vest then started filling the pockets with magazines. He found a set of optics and pulled them down over his head, around his neck.
He heard more gunfire and sprinted back to the terrace. He saw four men stalking down the street, shooting at cars.
He put down the Howa and picked up the AR-15.
Tacoma set the fire selector to full auto as he stepped to the railing and took aim, then started firing. The gunfire was like an eruption, and the crew of terrorists turned and looked up as Tacoma mowed them down in a fusillade. It was a challenging distance, but he made up for it by firing large amounts of steel, quickly. It was impossible for any of them to return fire. He homed in on one of them, crouching near a curb, pelting the man and spraying red across the street. When the mag clicked empty, Tacoma ejected it, then slammed a new mag in, flipped the fire selector to semimanual, and killed the remaining men with a series of well-placed triple bursts.
“Do you want me to go to the UN?” said Tacoma.
“Yes, start moving over there,” said Polk.
56
9:11 A.M.
OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF STAFF
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
King stood behind his desk. His office was crowded with people. In addition to Calibrisi and Bruckheimer, Dale Arnold, the secretary of defense; White House national security advisor, Josh Brubaker; FBI director, Dave McNaughton; and several key White House and National Security Council staffers were there. There were at least a dozen individuals.
King had lost contact with the president. His face was pale. He stared down at a triangle-shaped phone console.
Meanwhile, a pair of bright, wide LCD screens covered one of the walls. Each was tied into various law enforcement, military, and intelligence feeds. The right screen was a checkerboard of real-time video from NYPD, including stationary video cameras and body cameras. It was a cross-section of mayhem, and it provided a good proxy for what was happening street-level across Manhattan.
Gunmen moved through New York City. The cameras all showed a similar scene: young Iranian men with rifles and submachine guns, running down Manhattan’s sidewalks and streets, shooting whoever and whatever they could, as well as scenes of NYPD engaging in firefights, citizens running for their lives, an
d traffic jams everywhere.
The left screen showed live video from the air.
King could see what was occurring from behind his desk. The on-the-ground video streams all showed gun battles. The other screen was a macro perspective, and it was shocking because the four explosions—and their smoky, fire-crossed aftermath—could be seen from afar. It was like watching a forest fire. The views were dramatic but antiseptic. Where the four tunnels into Manhattan connected with the island itself, billowing, round clusters of black, orange, red, and gray fire were blossoming into mushroom clouds.
An NSC algorithm meshed the two views, and part of the left LCD displayed Manhattan from above, with the aggregation of on-the-ground active shooters, NYPD, and FBI, with the four bright red circles irradiated in green, emphasizing the heat.
The view essentially incorporated everything that was possible to know, at least visually, in terms of the attack on Manhattan.
Dale Arnold, the secretary of defense, approached King.
“Adrian, this is an attack on the United States by Iran,” said Arnold. “We need to fight back.”
“Yeah, no shit,” said King.
“I’m talking about Pearl Harbor,” said Arnold quietly.
King looked at Arnold.
“I know what the fuck you’re talking about,” said King. “Are you recommending dropping a nuclear bomb on Tehran?”
“Yes,” said Arnold, leaning in across King’s desk. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. If the president is still alive, it might save him.”
King stared blankly at Arnold.
“Look, even if I knew the fucking nuclear codes, Dale, which I don’t, I have no idea what to do with them,” shouted King, gesticulating wildly, “and guess what, I don’t know the fucking nuclear codes! I’m not authorized, nor are you! Oh, by the way, we don’t have a goddam vice president, so if anything happens to President Dellenbaugh, guess what? Then we got some left-wing nutjob from Massachusetts running our country!”
Everyone in the room suddenly looked at King.
He pointed at the screen. “This is a fucking shit show,” he said.
“Which is why we need to strike back right now,” said Arnold. “They are literally trying to kill our president, if they haven’t already. To not respond will show pathetic weakness.”
“Sorry, Mr. Secretary,” said King. “But right now our focus is on New York, on the president, on killing the active gunmen, and on rescue efforts for anyone in the tunnels. After we get through this, as far as I’m concerned, we can turn Tehran into a glow-in-the-dark kitty litter box, but right now we need to get President Dellenbaugh out of there.”
“Understood,” said Arnold.
King hit his phone console.
“Get me Anna Lungren,” said King.
A few moments later, the face of Anna Lungren, the NYPD commissioner, appeared on one of the screens. She was standing in some sort of control room filled with dispatchers and walls of LCD screens. It looked chaotic, like a hospital operating room.
“Give me the status, Anna,” said King.
“Adrian, we’re assessing this at five hundred to six hundred active shooters on the island of Manhattan,” said Lungren. “The tunnels are heavily damaged. It will take months to get through the debris. The bridges are intact but absolutely immobile for vehicles. Traffic isn’t moving, and people are getting out of their cars and running for New Jersey, Queens, and Brooklyn. You get the picture.”
“What about the UN?”
“We’re encountering fierce resistance,” said Lungren. “They have tiers of gunmen. They’re running a geographic matrix. They appear to have taken control of all entrances to the facility. I just read a sheet on my first team that got close. We suffered heavy casualties.”
“Hold on for a second, Anna,” said King.
“Got it,” said the NYPD commissioner.
King looked at Calibrisi, who was studying the screens from one of the wing chairs in front of King’s desk, which he’d turned around to face the wall of LCDs. Calibrisi had a disbelieving but calm look on his face. King nodded to Calibrisi. Calibrisi stood up from the chair and followed King into the corner behind his desk, out of earshot.
“What do we do?” said King.
“NYPD needs to focus on the active shooters,” said Calibrisi. “If NYPD, or even the FBI, are in charge of saving the president, he’ll die. That’s just my opinion, Adrian. Let them focus on killing the active shooters.”
King walked back to the screen:
“Anna, you need to focus on the active shooters,” said King, “and humanitarian shit.”
“What are you saying?” said Lungren.
“I’m saying, back the fuck off the UN,” said King. “You have five hundred active shooters running around killing people, not to mention a shitload of corpses all over the place, in the tunnels, on the bridges, sidewalks. You have a fucking shit show on your hands. We need to divide and conquer. Let us handle the president. If we can’t get him, I’ll call you.”
“I’m with you,” said Lungren, “but I want to be in constant communication.”
“Only you,” said King. “And if you violate that I will come down hard on you.”
“I understand, Adrian,” said Lungren.
“Thanks, Commissioner.”
King pressed the console, shutting down the conversation. He looked at Calibrisi.
“So how the hell do we get Dellenbaugh?” seethed King.
“I scrambled SEAL Team 4,” said Calibrisi. “Two choppers from the Eisenhower. They’re on the way.”
57
9:12 A.M.
WESTIN NEW YORK GRAND CENTRAL
212 EAST FORTY-SECOND STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Rokan glanced nervously out the window as sirens wailed from NYPD cruisers on the streets below. He saw smoke in the distant sky, but he didn’t stand up.
Rokan was seated at a desk in the hotel suite. He studied the screen on the laptop. It displayed a digital pyramid, green digital lines against a black backdrop. The three-dimensional pyramid rotated slowly. Each of the three faces of the geometric structure contained numbers that were constantly changing as they filled in each face of the three individual triangles. The numbers moved quickly up toward the peak of the pyramid, and when they got to the top, suddenly all three triangles were wiped clear—and then the numbers reappeared at the base of the pyramid.
As the digits started scrolling up the faces of the triangle anew, Rokan studied the patterns. He learned to understand the speed of the scroll, and looked for patterns.
He typed a four-digit sequence as the pyramid rotated, and the face of the pyramid flashed yellow and became solid. As the second triangle came into view, with its scrolling numbers, he watched as they filled in the upper part of the triangle—then he saw something and typed, this time six digits. The second triangle went yellow and became solid. By the time the third triangle face rotated, the numbers had scrolled within a few levels of the top of the final triangle.
The pyramid was a digital simulacrum of the Federal Reserve. Rokan had created it so as to simulate the governors’ room at the Fed; the room, and more importantly the system, he was about to attempt to break into. It was his best approximation of the sophisticated algorithm by which the U.S., and specifically the four governors of the Fed, managed America’s financial reserves. Rokan knew that if Mansour’s men could get him inside, that he would then face the hardest challenge. For once inside the governors’ room, he would be faced with the complex matrix that the four governors were faced with every day.
Each triangle face of the pyramid represented the holographic chute of digits by which the Fed governors moved money digitally. When he succeeded in turning the screen yellow, it meant that he’d seen the pattern and then been able to insert a “kill” or “self-destruct” code.
He would only need to do it once, but by creating the simulacrum, Rokan had trained his mind to recognize the ever-changing digital algor
ithm by which the Fed managed the assets of the U.S. government.
His abdomen shot a burst of pain up through his chest and he shut his eyes and tried not to scream or even moan, not even a whisper. He was dying, he knew, but only Mansour knew. Rokan would not show the pain or weakness.
Rokan looked at his watch and stood up, shutting the laptop, grimacing as he held the back of the chair.
Just one more hour, he thought, just a little while longer.
He walked to the door and stepped into the hallway, just as a voice came over the corridor alarm system.
“This is an emergency broadcast. Please stay in your rooms.”
58
9:14 A.M.
PRIVATE RESIDENCE
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
King left the busy room alone and walked through the West Wing, then took the elevator up to the private living quarters of the Dellenbaugh family.
The first lady, Amy Dellenbaugh, was in the kitchen.
“I need to talk to you.”
Amy’s face furrowed in emotion.
“What is it?”
“New York City was just attacked,” said King. “We believe it’s Iran. Suicide bombers. They blew up the tunnels into the city. They have active shooters running around.”
She stared blankly at King.
“The president is in danger,” said King. “I want you to be aware of it.”
“What do you mean ‘in danger’?”
“They’re going after the president,” said King. “They’re attempting to trap him at the UN. We’re extracting him.”
“When?”
“As soon as the helicopters get there.”
“Why not immediately?” said Amy.
“They’re in the air,” said King. “Two Black Hawks are in the air, filled with Navy SEALs. We’ll remove him from the rooftop. I’ll keep you posted, Amy.”
59