by Sean Parnell
The residents of Arlington had never heard a machine gun firing in their neighborhood before. It sounded like a nail gun on speed. Nor were they prepared for Dasha’s response, which was to have his men stick the barrels of their AR-15s through the holes in the western wall of the warehouse and open up on the three-story condominium next door. Windows exploded, children were being smothered on the floors by their screaming parents, one man leaped from his second-story balcony into the condo’s swimming pool.
“Go! Go! Go!” Smokey spun around and yelled to his team, and they sprinted across McConnell Avenue to the south side, stacked up in a crouching posture, and moved forward in a quick step like a long green-and-black centipede bristling with weapons.
With Steele bringing up the rear of the assault element—at which point he realized that he hadn’t even donned a spare helmet—all of his thoughts were of Lila Kalidi, the wire stitches tearing at his shoulder, and his wounded pride that he’d let her escape and hadn’t finished her off. A man was lying out there dead in the street, which wouldn’t have happened had he killed her, or so he thought.
When they reached the corner of Shillings, the gunfire from inside the warehouse suddenly ceased, Meat Loaf stopped wailing, and an eerie silence swept over the streets glistening with glass and brass shell casings. The morning air smelled like coffee, blood, cordite, and sweat. The HRT operator just in front of Steele said, “Well, we’ve got ’em contained. They’re not going anywhere.”
And at that moment, there was a ripping vehicular motor scream, the front of the warehouse seemed to explode, and a giant black Lenco BearCat armored assault vehicle rammed down the double front doors like a landing ramp on an LST at the Normandy invasion. The welded steel slabs of the doors crushed Terry Palamino’s corpse to bloody butter as all nine tons of BearCat bounced over him, made a screeching turn to the left, and zoomed down McConnell Avenue.
The HRT operators threw themselves to the sidewalk and rolled up tight to the condominium walls. There was no point in shooting at the racing monster, because they knew their rounds would just ricochet wild, and the only one who was back on his feet within half a second of the BearCat passing by was Eric Steele.
He chased it, though he didn’t expect to catch it. He raced past First Cash Pawn and yelled to Goodhill and Ralphy, “On me!”
They followed him on foot as he pounded across South Van Dorn, heading for Allie’s helo, whose blades were already starting to whip into a blur. Allie knew a shit show when she saw one.
“Where the hell are we going, Steele?” Ralphy called out in a wheezing screech.
“Home Depot,” Steele yelled back, and kept running.
Chapter 48
Alexandria, Virginia
Allie pulled pitch and yanked the helo off the ground while Ralphy’s legs were still hanging out of the cargo compartment. Steele and Goodhill had beaten him to the bird, leaped inside, and spun around to haul him in. But Allie waited for no man, and Ralphy was still screaming while they got him onto a bench.
Steele grabbed a headset off a fuselage hook and jammed it onto his head while Goodhill slammed the cargo door and Ralphy hugged his laptop and tried to breathe again. Steele pushed the mic module to his lips, thumbed the transmit button, and spoke to Allie.
“Home what?” she said.
“Depot.”
“We’re going shopping now?” She was flying from the left seat and pulled her helmet off. Her blond hair went wild in the slipstream rushing through her window and she crowned it with a headset like Steele’s. “How’re we gonna find that?”
“There’s one in every town,” Steele said as he whipped out his cell and thumbed the search engine.
“They’re heading north toward the city, Steele,” Goodhill shouted. He had his face pressed to the cargo-door window and wasn’t wearing a headset, but he could see the BearCat racing north on Van Dorn, with a line of police cars wailing behind it. “Know where they’re going?”
“I got a good idea,” Steele said, then he jumped off his bench, fell to his knees behind Allie’s seat, and shot his right arm over her shoulder. “Right there! See it? Big orange sign, about one klick east.”
Goodhill turned from the door window, found another headset nearby, and jammed it onto his bald head. He reached out for Steele’s shoulder, pulled him around, and then they were both on their knees on the helo’s floor, face-to-face.
“What’s your plan, kid?” Goodhill said.
“That BearCat’s got a snorkel.”
“A what?”
“A breathing pipe, rigged for deep water or chem-bio. I saw it sticking up from the roof.” Steele pulled the M26 grenade from his jacket pocket, showed it to Goodhill, and put it back again.
“You’re outta your mind.” Goodhill looked up at the ceiling, where a fast-rope pintle mount was rigged, but there was no rope attached to it, and no fat coil in the compartment either. “And we got no rope.”
“We don’t know what’s in that truck, Blade,” Steele said. “Could be half a ton of ammonium nitrate. They’re headed for the cathedral. We both know that.”
“My money’s on you, kid,” Goodhill said. “Let’s do it.”
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Ralphy groaned from his bench, but no one heard him.
It was closing in on ten o’clock in the morning. In Washington, President Denton Cole’s casket had already reached the National Cathedral, wheeled on a fine black horse-drawn caisson, and followed by a single, magnificent, black cavalry steed, riderless and with a pair of boots turned backward in his stirrups. From the steps of the Capitol and all the way up to the church, thousands of mourners had lined the chilly but sunny streets, as the fifes and drums bleated and rolled, and nearly all of the Free World’s leaders, and many of the not-so-free, walked and now filed into the magnificent building in solemn, silent procession.
The parking lot of Home Depot, which the franchise shared with the Trade Center Shopping Village at 400 South Pickett in Alexandria, was already packed with cars. There was nowhere for Allie to set the helo down, so she hovered the skids one foot above the roof of a Ford F150 while Steele and Goodhill slid down the truck’s windshield and over the hood onto the asphalt, and then helped Ralphy down. Shoppers stopped and gawked as if the helo were a pterodactyl and they were all tourists in Jurassic Park.
Steele grabbed Ralphy by his Disney jacket and pointed across the lot to a Shell station.
“Ralphy, get over there and bring us back a can of gas,” Steele shouted under the spinning helo blades. “Show them the bird, tell them it’s a national emergency, but don’t come back without it.”
“Okay, okay.” Ralphy took off and Steele and Goodhill sprinted for the store’s main entrance.
“Rope,” Steele said on the run. “Seventy-five feet.”
“Quarter inch or half?”
“Half, if you can, and work gloves.”
“Roger.”
They split up by the cash registers inside and Steele whipped his head around until he saw the sign for tool rentals. He ran into the small showroom, where an older man was manning the deposit desk.
“Got a gas-powered chainsaw?” Steele asked.
“Right over there on the wall.”
Steele ran over and was just about to pull the chainsaw down when he realized it wouldn’t cut steel, and instead grabbed a Hilti PRO gas concrete saw with a fourteen-inch circular blade. He yanked it off the hook, called “Thanks,” and ran out the tool rental exit door.
“Hey! What the hell?” The counter man chased after him. “You gotta pay up front for that, buddy!”
But Steele was already climbing back up onto the F150, tossing the saw into the bird, and crawling inside. Goodhill showed up seconds after with a seventy-five-foot coil of half-inch Manila twist rope and a pair of work gloves, which he’d blatantly shoplifted. Then Ralphy arrived, panting and hauling a red plastic two-gallon gas can, but he couldn’t climb up onto the hood of the truck, so Goodhill had to climb
back down and shove Ralphy’s butt up into the helo. They took off again while the pickup truck’s wide-eyed owner stood there below, snapping pics with his cell phone.
Steele jammed the headset back on as he opened the concrete saw’s gas cover and Goodhill filled it from the can, remarkably not spilling a drop.
“Haul ass, Allie,” Steele said through his mic.
“I love it when you talk sweet to me,” she said, but she dipped the nose and raced the bird north over Arlington at less than a hundred feet, spooling it up toward 120 knots, while Ralphy gripped his bench with both hands and babbled prayers.
Steele shed his jacket, got rid of the Kevlar vest, zipped the jacket back on, stood up in the middle of the cargo compartment, spread his feet, and gripped the pintle above with his hands. Goodhill unwound part of the rope, took out his folding knife, sliced off a fifteen-foot strand, and went to work.
“Swiss seat?” he yelled at Steele.
“Yeah, with a chest knot.”
“I got a visual,” Allie said in Steele’s headset. “They’re in Arlington on 395, two miles out with about nine cruisers behind ’em, but I don’t think they’re going for the Pentagon.”
“Nope,” Steele said. “Close the range, Allie.”
“I’m already choking the throttle, baby.”
Goodhill looped the fifteen-foot rope around the back of Steele’s waist, braided the two ends in front, dropped them both inside his thighs, fed them up through the rear waistband again, and yanked hard until they sliced up into both sides of his crotch, making a primitive sling for his butt. Then he braided them again in front, tied them off with a square knot and two half-hitch “keepers” to lock the whole thing in place. He cut off the long ends, tossed one away, looped the other around Steele’s chest under his armpits, and tied it so tightly Steele coughed.
“Can you breathe?” Goodhill shouted.
“No.”
“Good.”
Goodhill then slid the end of the remaining sixty feet of rope down through the front of Steele’s chest loop and tied it off to the Swiss seat with four hitches. He fed the rest of it through the pintle above, pulled his gloves on, and shot Steele a thumbs-up.
Steele slid the cargo door open on the starboard side and the compartment roared like a hurricane. He sat down at the lip of the deck, dragged the saw over to his side, stuck his face and his legs out, and was instantly whipped by the roaring wind, his cheeks flapping like a dog’s poking his head from the family sedan. They were thundering along at a hundred feet and the BearCat was racing up the highway toward Washington about two hundred feet in front of their nose.
“They’re going for the Fourteenth Street Bridge,” Allie said.
“I see that,” Steele shouted in the corkscrewing wind.
“That’s your only shot, Steele,” she said. “After that I got structures up ahead, like maybe the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument. Nothing major, but ya know . . .”
“Oh my Jesus.” Ralphy had crawled to the opposite cargo door, which was still closed, and smeared himself against it like a cartoon cat. His hair was doing crazy things in the windstorm.
“Shove over,” Goodhill shouted at Steele and squeezed himself down on the deck beside him.
“Put me on the left side of the truck roof,” Steele said to Allie. “Snorkel’s on the right front corner.”
“I’ll be happy if I don’t smack you into a pylon,” she said, but she dipped the Bell’s nose and crawled it forward and down, its twin turbines screaming, and then the BearCat loomed so large below, to Steele it looked like they were going to smash into it like a wrecking ball. Just behind them the police cruiser sirens were warbling like banshees. Out in front, somehow the bridge had been cleared of all traffic, maybe by roadblocks, but Steele didn’t know or care.
They were just above the roof, maybe at eight feet, when the BearCat’s heavy round tank hatch swung open. It clanged back on its massive hinge in the wind, and one of Lila’s killers popped up with his AR-15 and whipped it around at the helo. Steele threw himself backward while Goodhill blew the man’s face off with his short-barreled twelve gauge, and when Steele sat back up again Goodhill growled, “Miami Vice, my ass.”
Someone inside the BearCat yanked the hatch closed again. Then Goodhill jumped back up inside the helo, hauled on the rope through the pintle until only ten feet of it was left to Steele, whipped the slack around his waist, braced his feet on the floor, and yelled, “Now!”
Steele tore his headset off, gripped the saw, and dropped to the helo’s skid. Then he jumped from that, fell six feet, and bounced at the end like a puppet. Right away he started spinning, because he couldn’t touch the BearCat’s roof with his boots and the wind was whipping his flailing legs. He saw the black blur of the upthrust steel snorkel as it came around for the sixth time, and he jammed the circular blade of the saw against it to halt his spin. Then he yanked the starter cord with every muscle in his right arm and it roared to life, spewing blue smoke, and it ground through the pipe in a shower of sparks until the top six inches with its sealed vent cap went tumbling away in the wind.
Steele hurled the saw over the side of the bridge, where it flipped end over end and splashed in the river. He yanked the grenade from his jacket pocket, pulled the pin, let the spoon fly off, and dropped it down the snorkel like a mortar shell.
He looked up at Allie, thrust a thumb high in the sky, and his chest felt like it was going to burst as she pulled pitch hard, banked to the left, and within two seconds had him at four hundred feet.
The BearCat didn’t just explode. It seemed more like it disappeared in an enormous cloud of black dust, as if it had been carved from charcoal. Steele didn’t know there were nine men aboard wearing suicide vests, but the sound was unearthly, like someone ripping a gigantic sheet of Velcro, and the flash was like videos he’d seen of Hiroshima. The concussion smacked him like an iron skillet. It left one concrete buttress of the bridge flank completely blown away, a huge black smoking hole in the road, and nothing else but a few clumps of bloody flesh and one lazily rolling fat black tire.
Goodhill hauled Steele back up into the bird. He fell on his face and just lay there for a good fifteen seconds. Then Allie turned around and tapped her earcup. Goodhill handed Steele his headset and he sat up, smeared it on, and looked over at Ralphy, who was white as a sheet and shaking like he’d just been Tasered.
“Steele, you copy?” It was Smokey the HRT team leader.
“Yeah, good copy,” Steele said.
“My SAW gunner hit one of your jihadis, and his asshole buddies left him behind.”
“Yeah? So?”
“We just talked to him,” Smokey said. “Hate to ruin your day, Hotshot, but your girlfriend wasn’t in that truck.”
Chapter 49
The National Cathedral, Washington, D.C.
The tubby nun appeared at the rear fountain entrance of the cathedral once more, and standing there were the two Secret Service agents and the K-9 cop who’d been there two days before.
This time, however, Lila Kalidi had no intention of performing a smell-test run. Her typewriter case was packed with twenty pounds of cellophane-sealed Semtex, a detonator and digital timer, and her brown woolen cloak was lined with ten more cellophane-wrapped Semtex bricks, replacing the previous foam stuffing that had made her look porcine. The nontraceable vintage of the plastique had already proved that its vapors wouldn’t trigger the German shepherd’s olfactory nodes, so she was certain that once again, she’d pass right by.
There was a cordon of uniformed cops lining the south side of the circular drive at the cathedral’s rear, and inside the fountain quadrant, the two Secret Service agents saw “their nun” smiling and blessing the policemen. A white-shirted lieutenant turned around and one of the agents signaled to wave her through. The services would soon be ending. The choir inside, 120 strong, was singing “The Navy Hymn,” and already the scores of male and female law enforcement officers were stretching
and yawning with relief that the whole thing was almost over.
Lila crossed from the drive, through the granite archway, and into the fountain enclave. The water was sailing up from the steel black rose, spraying a lovely rainbow in the late-morning air and cascading down into the elliptical pool, adding the sounds of a waterfall to the magnificent choral voices echoing from the church’s cavern of stone.
The two agents and the cop had receded partway behind a buttress, so they could smoke without supervisory disapproval. But they were still guarding the plain wooden door that led to the underground chapels, and she couldn’t just pass them without being sniffed. She smiled, and stopped, and with the typewriter case clutched in her left hand said, “Good morning, my valiant young countrymen.”
“Morning, Sister,” the senior agent said as he dragged on his Marlboro. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait till this whole thing’s over. Won’t be long.”
“Oh, that’s no fuss at all,” Lila said.
But then she realized something was wrong. The dog had risen from sitting next to his policeman handler and was straining at his leash, his black nose aimed at her case. A flood of heat rose through her neck and she realized she’d made a mistake. It wasn’t the Semtex. It was the detonator, which had a minuscule amount of fulminate of mercury inside its cap, and no doubt the dog had been trained to hit on that.
Sure enough, he whined, and then sat. His handler looked down at the dog, his brow furrowed under his cap, and then he looked back up at Lila.
“Oh,” she said with a beatific smile, “it must be my sandwich,” and she reached inside her cowl, pulled out a Smith & Wesson M&P Shield 9 mm pistol with an Obsidian 9 silencer, and shot each man point-blank in the face and the dog in the top of his skull, before he could even whimper.