McGrath started to say something, but Carl interrupted him. “Actually, the call has been made, Shirley. You just have to get on board with it or you’re going to die. And that’s not acceptable to me.”
“Or to me,” McGrath said.
“Or to me,” Palmer added.
Mallory’s steel-gray eyes studied Palmer, and finally she nodded. “I know,” she said. “I just…”
Palmer said, “Let us do our job.”
McGrath said, “Are you with me, Shirley?”
She took a deep breath and blew it out, then nodded. “So, what’s the plan at Reagan Airport?”
McGrath said, “Rainman isn’t the only one with high-level military contacts. I have an F-35 inbound, stripped down to the bare essentials. No weapons or ammo. Nothing but extra fuel. Its sole purpose is to get you off the ground as fast as possible and out of missile range.”
Merc Three’s voice came on the comm channel. “Agent Palmer, we’re going to start slowing your train, so get ready to exit in thirty seconds.”
“Copy that.” Palmer turned sideways in her seat and faced Mallory. “Ready, Madam President?”
“Can I say no?”
Palmer smiled, reached into her duffel, and pulled out weapons.
Merc Three dictated the play-by-play. He redirected the TER choppers to the College Park subway stop ten miles away; the APCs increased their leisurely pace to an all-out race to the distant subway stop’s street-level access, and the F-22 fighter made an emergency landing and short-runway deceleration. It taxied into takeoff position and waited, engines still blasting.
In response, Atlas’s heavily armed paramilitary force in civilian clothes suddenly burst from various ambush sites near Reagan National Airport. Plainclothes assassins deployed from the subway station inside the airport terminals and raced outside to a convoy of SUVs that squealed rubber trying to get across town where they assumed their target would board the waiting aircraft.
Three said, “It’s working, Agent Palmer. Enemy units are pulling out of the airport. Your destination is the Crystal City station, the last stop before the train goes into the airport. Prepare to detrain there and meet your transportation topside. Ten seconds.”
Palmer helped the president to her feet. “Aaron, any word on the fighter?”
“Negative,” McGrath said. “I have a full air force squadron inbound in five minutes. We’re as prepared as we can be.”
Merc Three’s voice came on the comm. “Foxtrot Two Two, you are cleared for emergency takeoff, full military thrust. Buster to Angels Ten and maintain overwatch for inbound missile threats. TER Director authorizes weapons free. Repeat, you are authorized weapons free.”
“Copy, full military thrust, proceeding to ten thousand feet, weapons free.”
Palmer quickly attached the M-203 grenade launcher to the PDW and loaded the chamber. Then she slung the duffel across her chest and watched Mallory stand and test her ankle.
The president winced and looked at Palmer. “I’ll be okay,” she said. She nodded at Palmer’s weapon. “You don’t think all of Atlas’s assets were redeployed?”
“Just in case.” Palmer shrugged. “Stay on my six”—she patted her lower back—“and keep hold of the duffel strap so I know exactly where you are by direct contact at all times. We’ll take it nice and slow.”
The train slowed quickly, and she heard Carl’s voice in her ear. “Good luck, Nancy.”
“Carl, you don’t tell someone going into combat ‘good luck.’ You say ‘good hunting.’”
“Okay, well, good hunting. And…survive.” He paused. “Remember, we have a date.”
“Geez, Carl. You had to broadcast that over the comm to everyone?”
Chapter 24
Mallory said, “So, are you going to go out with him?”
Palmer giggled. “Yeah, but I sure wish he hadn’t told everyone. Let’s move.”
Through the subway car’s open door, Palmer scanned the platform with quick glances.
“How does it look?” The president’s voice was shaky, but her grip on Palmer’s duffel strap was strong.
“Looks clear.”
Palmer stood from her squat and took half a step outside the subway doors as the glass windows of the car exploded into shards. A bullet tugged at her collar as she ducked back inside.
The offending weapons must have had suppressors because there was no gunfire accompanying the exploding glass. So she couldn’t tell where the enemy was hidden. She simply reached her assault rifle out the door and launched a grenade round somewhere up the platform to her left, then did the same to her right. The sounds and blast waves of both explosions merged into a single amplified assault on her ears and mind. She fired a half magazine of shells into the fire and smoke to the left and emptied the clip into the fire and smoke and fire to her right.
Palmer replaced the spent magazine, then glanced left and right. No return fire assaulted them.
“Okay, here we go.” She stood and started forward but felt resistance on her satchel strap.
“Wait!” Mallory said. “Is it clear?”
Palmer glanced out again and shrugged. “Looks clear.”
This time they encountered no enemy fire and made their first cover point, a thick concrete pillar, in only a few steps. Mallory hobbled quietly without complaining, but Palmer could tell she was in pain. Her breath hissed through clenched teeth.
“Okay, our next goal is to get through that hallway and up the stairs,” Palmer said. “Cover your ears.”
She yanked a grenade from the dozen she had hooked to her custom utility belt and tossed it into the smoke-filled tunnel, then ducked behind the thick pillar. The blast reverberated throughout the concrete subway platform, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She pulled another grenade and tossed it fifty feet behind her, into the cloud of dissipating smoke, then took another and tossed it even farther into the tunnel ahead of them.
“That should give them a little headache for a bit. Let’s go.”
Palmer glanced forward and back. Soft white light from unseen overhead ceiling panels diffused in the smoke from the multiple explosions.
They were halfway through the tunnel when a large dark shadow loomed up right next to Palmer. The shadow could have been anyone—a disoriented passenger, a police officer, or an assassin. It didn’t matter. He appeared too close to the president, and Palmer couldn’t take the chance of guessing wrong.
The man wasted precious split seconds turning toward Palmer and Mallory, but Palmer made no such mistake. She simply released her grip on the assault rifle tethered around her neck and reached for her combat knife at her belt. In the quarter-second it took Mallory to suck in a breath of surprise, Palmer rammed her blade twice into the side of the man’s face and neck without even looking at him. She had time to wipe both sides of the blade on the man’s sleeve before he fell dead to the concrete deck. She slid the weapon back into its sheath, grabbed her assault rifle, and continued forward with the president still grasping her satchel strap.
Total time from blade out to blade sheathed: one-point-five seconds.
The tunnel ahead of them was shorter than it seemed simply because it was filled with smoke. In reality, it was only twenty feet long and was formed by the platform wall on the left and a dual bank of elevators on the right. As the smoke began to dissipate, Palmer saw that the wall to their left opened up to a hallway with two stopped escalators, one up and one down. They crept up the metal steps as fast as Mallory could move. They stepped around two bodies on the way up, which made Palmer think that a similar duo or trio might have fired at them from the other end of the platform.
Almost as an afterthought, she grabbed another grenade from her belt and tossed it back down the stairs so that it would be beyond the wall when it exploded. She heard a shout, “Grenade!”
Mallory gasped at the explosion and Palmer’s ears rang, but they forged ahead and passed through the one-way exit gates. Palmer saw light through the haze of
the explosions and realized they were exiting onto the street. Through the ringing in her ears, she realized she heard a voice. After a few seconds, she recognized McGrath’s voice.
“…inbound!”
At nearly the same instant, she realized a vehicle was bearing down on them from the right. Palmer pivoted and stitched the driver’s side windshield of the white minivan with a triple tap, then prepared to tackle the president out of the path of the assassin.
“I say again, your evac is a white minivan, inbound.”
“Aw, crap, Aaron! I just killed him.”
The minivan swerved to the right and slid to a stop only a few feet from them. The driver rose up in his seat and elbowed the pickled window glass from the door.
“Get the president onboard, Agent, and let’s get you to the plane.”
Palmer woman-handled the president none-too-gently into the van through the passenger sliding door and the driver sped off with the door wide open.
“I apologize for that,” Palmer said.
The man just grunted. “You missed.” He floored the gas pedal.
“Aaron, what’s our status?” she said.
“We have a fast mover inbound now. It will meet you at the north end of runway one-five-three-three. ETA forty seconds.”
“Forty seconds? There are no access gates, and this van can’t tear through the fence. It’s laced with high-tension security cables to prevent ramming. You know that.”
The minivan sped straight west, then jumped a curb and ended up on a paved road that looked more like a jogging trail. They came out of the trees, hopped another curb, and sped northbound on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. They swerved in tight behind a huge blue garbage truck going at least sixty-five. Black smoke spewed from its front vertical exhaust pipe.
“Agent Palmer,” the driver called. He pointed out the front windshield. “Our gate opener.”
The big blue truck swerved off the highway, over a curb, and rammed straight through the tough perimeter fence, pulling out fence posts for a hundred feet on either side. Palmer’s driver swerved right, and the minivan thumped over the ripped fence. Then the rear and front windows exploded.
With the passenger slider still open, the roar of the garbage truck masked all other sounds, so Palmer wasn’t sure exactly what was happening. As the minivan swerved around the lumbering trash truck, she heard the ping of bullets off metal inside the vehicle and saw tiny explosions of seat stuffing around her. She wrapped herself around the president and tackled her to the floor as the driver got the minivan on the north end of the tarmac. Something punched her hard in the back and she heard her own voice scream in pain, then the bullet impacts faded as the trash truck turned into the path of the fusillade.
She heard McGrath’s voice, Mallory’s voice, and the driver’s voice, but she couldn’t make sense of the words. The president struggled out from beneath her and helped keep her upright.
Mallory said, “I think she’s been shot.”
“Agent Palmer, what’s your status?”
“Hit…can’t…move.” She’d been shot before, sometimes with body armor and sometimes without, but this time was different. This felt different. There was no pain. There was only numbness.
The minivan skidded to a stop, the driver-side sliding door opened, and the driver looked down at her sprawled against the bench seat. She could see in his eyes that she was dead. Her body just hadn’t stopped functioning yet.
Over the net, McGrath said, “Get the president…on…that…jet!”
Palmer sat leaning against Mallory’s lap and she had a clear view straight down the five-thousand-foot runway.
It was empty.
There was no jet.
Chapter 25
Palmer’s open minivan door faced almost directly down the runway. She watched as the driver—she didn’t even know the man’s name—dragged President Mallory over the top of her. There was no time for finesse. Saving the president was the mission. The mission was the only thing that mattered. The mission was everything.
Then she watched a tiny dot coming out of the south, hovering barely a dozen feet over the water of the Potomac River, and closing fast. She had just began to formulate the thought that it would never get to them before the assault force. Then she realized the speck was moving far too fast to be the jet they expected. It was moving too fast to land. What if Rainman had outmaneuvered them, outflanked them? But the dot grew larger very fast as it approached, and she recognized the fuselage and wings of a fighter jet…
…flying ten feet off the deck!
The jet approached so fast—it was flying faster than its own engine noise—that it seemed completely silent as it flashed along the one-mile runway at full military thrust in six seconds flat.
Merc Three’s voice highlighted the inevitable. “Missiles in the air! We have inbound from the northeast at Mach three-point-two. ETA, one minute ten. The air force squadron is engaging the stealth fighter. The Raptor is engaging six bandits.”
The president’s evac jet seemed to float on a pillowy cloud as the vacuum behind it sucked moisture from the air, turned it into mist, and pulled it along its path. In the last few hundred meters, right before Palmer thought the jet was going to blast right overhead, the pilot flared the jet’s nose up to vertical and the aircraft seemed to slide toward them still ten feet off the runway. Palmer could literally see the broad wing base of the jet shudder violently as the jet belly-flopped against the thick air that piled against it. A cloud of condensed air flared from the wings as the jet decelerated through the sound barrier, then an explosion of sounds—the jet’s screaming full-power engines and the thunderclap of its supersonic approach—swept over the minivan. Like trying to swing a flat board through water, the pilot used the maneuver to slow the jet from over a thousand miles an hour to zero in three seconds.
“Five-five seconds. Two bandits splashed. Four remain inbound.”
Palmer had seen Russian MiG air-show fighters do vertical in-place full-thrust maneuvers thirty feet in the air, but she’d never seen it done in a combat scenario. For two seconds, the jet sat still in the air, ten feet above ground, its vectored computer-controlled thrusters keeping it airborne. Then the pilot did a pirouette in mid-air, brought the aircraft level to the ground with landing gear extending, and cut thrust. The jet dropped ten feet and bounced once. The canopy was already halfway open.
Suddenly, the minivan was pummeled by the hurricane-force wind of the jet’s stalling maneuver. Palmer’s head lolled sideways, but not from the blast of air. She was having trouble focusing, staying alert. Still, the spectacle was so sudden, she just then realized that the driver had Mallory halfway to the jet even before it touched down. They were nearly blown over by the blast of air.
The garbage truck swerved into her view and parked right under the fuselage of the jet, and both drivers used it as a platform to get President Mallory into the rear seat of the cockpit.
Wait…if the truck was at the jet, then what was stopping the chase vehicle from attacking? Oh yes, the garbage truck driver must have been armed. Yes, that had to be it. Maybe he had an RPG or something. Or maybe he just ran them over.
“I’ll bet that ruined their day.” Palmer tried to chuckle but couldn’t find the strength.
“Agent Palmer, say again.”
Who is that? Who’s talking to me?
“Agent Palmer, repeat your last.”
She refocused on the jet again. Before President Mallory was even belted in, the garbage truck agent jumped down and drove the big truck away from the jet and toward the rest of the paramilitary force she knew was pursuing them. It roared by her car, but she didn’t have the strength to move her head and follow its progress.
She recognized Merc Three’s voice in her ear. “Five bandits splashed, one remains inbound. One-one seconds.”
She heard an explosion of sound as the pilot pushed his engines to full power for takeoff. The minivan driver still leaned over inside the cockpit
belting the president in, even as the cockpit lowered on him. He dropped to the ground in a hard tuck-and-roll and had just started to race away from the jet as the behemoth roared right over him. The jet thrust extended like an arm of fire out the back end and engulfed the driver in an instant. He was flash-burned and launched by the force out of her view.
With every ounce of her remaining strength, Palmer watched the jet gain speed. Half a dozen heat-seeking RPG rockets flashed into her view from over the minivan, but the jet, under emergency takeoff thrust, shrank into the distance and quickly outpaced the RPGs. In five seconds, the jet was airborne, once again skimming ten feet off the ground.
She saw the stealth fighter’s missile streak downward from high in the sky. Two seconds and it would be all over. There was no way the president’s plane could out-accelerate a Mach Three missile. No way the missile wouldn’t miss.
Chapter 26
Carl and his team watched the satellite view of the airport. The F-35 sped down the runway, airborne after only five seconds.
“Call-sign Air Force One is off the ground,” Merc Three said from across the room.
Carl nodded at the designation of an aircraft carrying the president of the United States. There was a brief flash of mist as the jet blasted through the sound barrier, then Carl could literally see the jet increase speed. It flashed over the end of the runway and out over the river. Had to be going a thousand miles an hour, easy.
The intercept missile vectored in at well over twice that speed. There was no way…
At the millisecond before impact, a single flare popped high and away and a high-intensity heat bloom far hotter than the jet’s engine erupted right behind the jet. The pilot pulled his plane straight vertical in a max climb. The missile exploded in the center of the decoy flare and the president’s jet escaped unharmed.
“Air Force One is undamaged,” said the pilot.
Three answered, “Copy that. Good flying, sir. Proceed to Angels Four-Zero and maintain max cruising speed, heading two-six-zero. Begin radio silence, zero emissions.”
American Terrorist Trilogy Page 84