by Bryan Devore
He had the roof secured. The sky was dark, with thick snowflakes swirling in the unsteady rooftop air currents.
A crackling voice in his earpiece said, “This is Marine HMX-one-four-seven, inbound toward Zenith. ETA forty-five seconds. Do you copy?”
He couldn’t resist the urge to do a little fist pump at the news. Marine HMX-1 pilots could do an emergency exec lift in less than sixty seconds on arrival. And once the president was inside one of the most technologically advanced helicopters in the world, flown by one of the best pilots, she would be safe and moving fast away from the threat.
He turned toward the president, who was staring at him with wide eyes from the center of her protective huddle. “Ma’am, your ride’s on the way. We’ll have you out of here in less than two minutes.”
As he said this, a bright light beamed down on them from the gigantic White Hawk helicopter.
Bringing his wrist to his mouth, he said, “Copy that. Protection has Firefly ready for exec lift.”
“Roger, White Knight,” came the reply in his earpiece. “Wheels down in thirty seconds.”
“Copy thirty seconds,” John replied.
Back behind the approaching helicopter was another dark shape, and he recognized the enormous King Stallion support helicopter.
“Stay sharp,” he yelled into his communicator. “Use visual signals.”
The White Hawk emitted a steady roar as it lowered toward them. The tight area of the rooftop posed an additional challenge for the team as their comms were drowned out by the two GE-T700 turboshaft engines, each generating nearly two thousand shaft horsepower. The four main rotor blades created the illusion of a translucent disk fifty feet in diameter, fixed above the long green body.
“Reid reports ha—” The voice in his earpiece became lost in the noise. It was all but impossible to hear communications at this point. The White Hawk was now hovering twenty feet off the roof and slowly rotating to land between the large ventilation fans protruding from the building.
“What?” John yelled into his wrist communicator. “Repeat!” He covered his earpiece with his palm.
“Reid re—”
“You get that?” he yelled at Stone, only a few feet away.
“Something about Rebecca!” Stone shouted back while stepping closer. His tie whipped across his chest.
“Where is she?”
“Don’t know! I think another agent said she saw something!”
“Saw what?”
“Don’t know!”
“Doesn’t matter!” John said. “We’re out of time! Move POTUS the second the tires reach touchdown!”
Everything was blowing around them, whipping jackets and ties. John’s eyes stung from the hard downdraft and biting snow. The command center was still down. He couldn’t hear anything from Rebecca or any other agent not on the roof. He had no idea what was happening below him. They were pinned up here, and this was their last chance to get the president to safety.
This had to happen now, and perfectly. There was no time left, and no room for error.
31
LEGS BURNING, KAZIM RACED UP the stairs, exhorting his men to keep up.
As he rounded the north twenty-sixth-floor landing, two agents burst through the door up ahead of him. Their heads jerked toward him, but before they could get their guns around, he fired twice, and they died.
He reached the locked steel security door at the top of the stairs. Pulling the eighteen-inch crowbar from his pack, he stabbed the end between the door and the frame. He pulled backward, and the thin aluminum frame warped and bowed before a sharp pop told him the locked bolt had snapped away from the insert.
The door swung open.
He pushed through to the next level, and the men followed as he made a patting gesture with his hand, signaling them to move quietly. They were less than thirty seconds from action.
Up the final flight, now above the twenty-seventh-floor penthouse residence and any routinely known or visited portion of the hotel, he knelt on the large service landing just inside the final door—the door he had thought about for months after he and Maximilian began plotting the final movements in this operation of a lifetime. Years of strategizing, preparing for the moment when they could attack. A hundred scenarios discussed, five cities identified and scouted, narrowing down to Paris once the economic forum was announced. A dozen locations planned for, contingencies considered. And with the tunnels mapped, they had waited until their scouts marked the hotel that the Secret Service advance team had probed two weeks before the American president’s arrival. And it all came down to this one door—and what he would find on the other side of it.
Because he was the youngest, his brothers hadn’t lived to see the warrior he would grow into and the power he would command. They hadn’t seen that his destiny would be greater than all of theirs had been in Iraq. But they were watching him now. He could feel their presence, and it gave him strength.
The other men now joined him and set the two heavy cases beside him on the top landing. Eleven men and one door. Snapping back the hard metal clamps, he opened both cases.
Pointing at the two men he had chosen as best qualified for the task, he gave the order. They were darker skinned than he, and he knew little about their personal lives other than they came from somewhere in North Africa, perhaps Libya. The army Maximilian had created seemed to be a hodgepodge of mercenaries from many parts of the world. It was not the sort of group Kazim was used to, having spent most of his warring days as an insurgent soldier against the invading American military in Iraq. But these men were strong fighters and technically proficient in their specialized skill sets. So as he watched the two men quickly assemble the weapons, he was confident that when the time came, they would not fail the mission.
He could hear the low, pulsing beat of at least one helicopter approaching on the other side of the door. Without actually opening the door, he turned the handle and moved it out a few centimeters, just to make sure it wasn’t locked. Cracking the rooftop door made the sounds outside suddenly louder and more distinct, and he now believed he could hear two separate helicopters. One would be the green White Top that served as Marine One, and the other would be either a support helicopter or some military attack craft to provide cover for the American president.
His heart raced. The helicopters meant that Maximilian’s plan had been right. The American president was either on or near the rooftop.
Looking back at the two men, he said, “Twenty seconds.”
They both nodded without looking up from arming their two shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.
Kazim could hear one of the helicopters lowering toward the building while the other sounded as if it was hovering higher and to one side.
“Ten seconds,” he said. He had been waiting more than ten years for this moment. “Five seconds. Are we ready?”
“Almost . . . yes.”
They stood up, each with a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenade launcher resting on his right shoulder. Two muscular men knelt beside them with a few extra rockets, preparing to load them as needed. Behind them were the rest of Kazim’s men, each hugging his assault rifle and staring forward with fiery courage, eager to destroy the Americans.
His breathing deepened like that of a warrior staring at the enemy army across the field of battle. It felt as if the body needed the heart to pump harder, the blood to flow faster, so that the mind could comprehend the death and mayhem it was about to charge into.
“Remember,” he said to the men, “what we do in the next few minutes, we do for our children and the children of all our brothers and sisters across the world. For those not yet born, and to honor those who have died over the years fighting this enemy.”
And so Kazim pushed the door open to unleash the attack. But just as it opened a few more inches, bullets snapped and sparked off the metal frame.
32
REBECCA RACED UP THE FINAL flights of the
south stairwell. She had to warn John about the attackers’ position and movement. The feeling that the president’s safety could rest solely on her slender shoulders spurred her to a level of effort she had never known. Her legs seemed to have grown stronger as she pounded up the staircase so fast that she was practically falling forward. Her right hand grasped the end of each level’s metal banister, her arm whipping her around, launching her toward the next level up.
She could no long rely on her training to give her the emotionless reactions she needed to protect the president. Attacks never went on this long. In the history of the United States, no president had ever been under attack for anywhere near sixty seconds, let alone five straight minutes and counting. The value of the conditioned training was rapidly deteriorating because the moment of reaction had passed. The crucial first three to four seconds were long gone, and the chaos and fear had begun to settle in as the attack wore on with no end in sight. Her skills, also acquired through training, were as sharp as ever, but her emotions were becoming harder to control, so that she found herself once again digging deep for strength.
Pushing around the twenty-sixth-floor entrance, she saw the landing above, and the two agents in suits with their black P229s pointed at her.
“White knight!” she yelled. “It’s Reid! Where’s Alexander?”
“With POTUS!” one of the agents yelled back.
She took the steps up to them two at a time. “My radio’s out. Tell him there’s a breach on the north stairwell. At least a half-dozen men ascending fast, possibly to the roof. Heavily armed. Well trained.”
The closest man raised his wrist communicator and relayed the message.
“They have the roof secured,” the second agent said.
“These guys are going to hit them harder than they expect,” Rebecca said. “They move like a military tactical team. We can’t risk the exec lift on Marine One.”
“The hawk’s already here,” the man said. “Landing right now.”
“Oh, God,” Rebecca said, racing past them.
She ran up the final flight to the open steel door twenty feet up. She could feel the icy air from outside and see snowflakes wafting in through the opened door. Counting the seconds, she knew how long it had taken her to run across the twenty-third floor, and how long it would take the attackers to recover from the flash grenade and continue their race to the top.
Reaching the top step, she raced out the doorway and onto the rooftop. The air was freezing, and she could hear the low, rhythmic rumble-whop-whop-whop of a big helicopter. A group of men had formed the inner layer of the protective bubble near the doorway, and there was the president, in the center of the huddle. Other agents were spread across the roof. She didn’t see David, but there was Alexander, waving at the countersnipers on the far edge of the roof and radioing something in his wrist communicator.
“John!” she yelled, but the White Hawk’s racket obliterated her voice. “John! North door!”
Several other agents turned to look at her, trying to understand what she was saying. She was now thirty feet from them. One of the countersnipers started toward the north door, probably because of the message she had gotten to John through the agent in the stairwell, perhaps for other reasons. But the countersniper carried a high-velocity, long-range rifle that wouldn’t fire rapidly enough to stop more than one of the attackers before they killed him. Countersnipers weren’t equipped for close combat.
The White Top was twenty feet off the deck and would be down in a few seconds. Once on the ground, it would be without its air defenses and completely vulnerable. The HMX-1 support King Stallion helicopter was hovering about a hundred feet diagonally above and right. Although Rebecca couldn’t see clearly through the snowfall, she knew that at least three or four CAT agents would be strapped in the open door of their bird, with Knight’s Armament SR-16 assault rifles, providing cover from the air.
“Gun right!” she yelled, but the noise from the helicopter drowned out her shout, and without a working radio she had no way of cutting through the White Top’s noise.
There was no time. She went down on one knee, pulled her pistol, and aimed through the snow at the north door, across the roof. Snow was being blown violently in all directions by the White Hawk’s powerful blades, and her hair whipped about her head as if in a blizzard. Narrowing her eyes, she thought she saw slight movement at the door—a subtle shift in the gap between door and frame.
Controlling her breath, she started firing.
Her shots sparked all around the door.
“Gun right! Gun right!” she yelled again, knowing that she now had the attention of everyone on the rooftop. The countersnipers each dropped to one knee and aimed at the doorway. The agents around the president had instinctively covered her at the sound of shots, while the agents on the outside ring of the protective bubble stood tall and squared their bodies toward the threat, pistols raised, in muscle memory drilled in from a thousand training exercises.
The White Top, which had been hovering just twenty feet above the roof while gradually turning to line its tail for landing, now seemed to hesitate. The HMX-1 support helo—the sixteen-ton King Stallion—tilted in the air to better align itself above the far corner of the roof. Rebecca’s focus was on the door, which had remained half open without any more activity for perhaps five seconds. But out of the corner of her eye, she saw the center slide-bottom drop door open in the belly of the King Stallion. Then a fast rope fell out of the drop door, and a second later, the first CAT agents came sliding down it to the rooftop.
The Secret Service and Marine Corp position around the president was getting stronger. But the PPD agents seemed unsure, despite all their training, of the best course to take for protecting the president. Their training told them to cover and go with POTUS, but go where? The fire, which they had just escaped from, was still climbing up through the hotel. The only escape route now was on Marine One. So they held their position, even though every nerve and fiber of their being wanted to move POTUS to a position of greater safety.
Rebecca stared hard at the door.
Three CAT agents sprinted across the roof, toward the door, with their high-powered automatic assault rifles up. The White Hawk hovered motionless in the air until the landing site could be secured. The King Stallion hovered over the far corner.
The CAT agents were yelling commands into their headset microphones, which were linked into the comms with the Secret Service, the Marine Corps, and the Pentagon. She wished desperately to know what everyone was saying to each other, and again cursed her broken radio.
The agents neared the north doorway. But before they could open it, a grenade bounced out. A frozen second cut through the air before the grenade exploded in a quick, sharp flash that killed the three CAT agents and blew the door off one of its hinges.
“COVER! COVER!” Alexander yelled.
More agents surrounded the president.
The PPD and remaining CAT agents unloaded a storm of bullets at the door, and the crackle and pop of gunfire resounded across the roof.
Then, to the horrified shock of everyone on the roof, a missile from a shoulder-mounted surface-to-air rocket launcher flew out of the blown doorway and hissed across the roof toward the White Hawk.
Immediately, fifty red heat flares shot out the sides of the White Top as the computer’s defensive systems sensed laser lock and automatically dispersed its key antimissile defenses. But the system was designed for higher flight than the bird’s current twenty-foot hover, so many of the hot flares fell onto the rooftop around the agents. The missile hit a flare and exploded only a few dozen feet from the White Hawk, hitting the side with shrapnel and pushing it sideways in the air until it was now hovering out over the edge of the roof and no longer in any position to land.
“RPG!” a number of the agents yelled simultaneously.
Rebecca had seen the missile blaze out of the darkened doorway, but she had no idea how far bac
k into the stairs the man had been when firing it.
She fired more shots in through the doorway but quickly ran out of rounds. Standing on her feet to make herself part of the protective shield of agents crowded around the president—who was still held to the ground—she slapped a fresh magazine into her pistol. Two other CAT agents were laying down intensive fire on the doorway. If anyone had had a hand grenade, they would have thrown it into the doorway, but agents in the PPD and CAT didn’t carry such explosive devices, because of potential risk to the president.
There was a pause in the firefight, and she heard John yell the command to cover-and-dash POTUS back toward their stairwell. The agents already standing and firing scrunched into an even tighter human wall, and those covering the president on the ground remained hunched over as they stood and lifted the president off the roof deck. Then they surged back toward the stairwell, shielding the president with two rows of interlaced agents: those on the outside firing at the opposite door while those on the inside pulled and pushed their tiptoeing protectee across the roof.
A second RPG hissed out of the doorway and across the roof at the White Hawk. And again the loud popping sound rattled in the night as hundreds of red deflector flares shot out from the side of the helicopter. The RPG exploded twenty feet from it, closer than the first rocket had. And again the helicopter was thrown sideways, farther still from the roof. Again some of the flares rained down on the agents, mixing with the snow. Rebecca could feel their heat all around her. Two agents fell to the ground, screaming from their burns. And through everything, she heard the president let out a sharp cry of panic.
“Stairs! Stairs! Stairs!” Alexander was yelling, though she couldn’t see where he was.
The White Hawk’s tail was smoking, but it continued to hover just to the side of the roof, as if refusing to leave the president no matter how much abuse it took. The King Stallion drew in closer. Rebecca saw two more CAT agents sliding down the fast rope toward the roof, when a third rocket shot out of the doorway and cut up into the air, exploding into the King Stallion’s tail. Almost immediately, the giant bird fell into a slow, uncontrolled spin. The two CAT agents on the fast rope were thrown sideways and disappeared over the far edge of the roof. She didn’t hear a scream from either man as they vanished from sight. The King Stallion began to lose altitude as it spun, drifting toward the roof.