by Mark Greaney
Once the two presidential limousines were in front of the stone façade of the parking garage, Zarif would call the phone attached to the IED.
Gordo was going to die in the blast; Zarif had calculated this fact the second he saw the image on Emilio’s phone, but he said nothing to Emilio.
While they were strolling around the market killing time, Emilio said, “The others will wait for the explosion to attack.”
Zarif did not understand. He cocked his head to the side. “What others?”
“Twelve men from Guerrero are taking part in the attack. They are waiting in the area. They all have cuernos de chivo.”
“What is that?”
Emilio thought for a moment. “Goat horns.”
The Iranian still had no idea what the Mexican was talking about.
“You know . . . AK-47s. A couple of guys have RPGs, too. Once the bomb goes off they will come out of the crowd and start shooting.” Emilio grinned. “It’s gonna be crazy.”
Zarif was furious. “No one told me about this.”
“Relax. It is good. They will make sure Ryan is dead.”
“No, they won’t. They will be seen in the crowd before the President comes, and someone will warn the Americans.”
Emilio tried to wave away the comment, but Zarif demanded to speak to the Maldonado cell leader. After a few minutes more trying to allay Zarif’s fears, Emilio finally dialed a number on his mobile phone and spoke to the man on the other end for a minute. Finally, after a conversation translated by Emilio, Zarif persuaded the cell leader to have the Maldonado men back out of the crowd and move one block east of the motorcade route. He explained that once the explosion rocked the street, they could run one block and shoot up the scene to their hearts’ content.
The cell leader put his men in four pickup trucks and parked them on Nicolas Bravo, with orders to wait for the big bang and then race to the scene. Two trucks would hit the motorcade from the southeast on José J. Herrera, and two more from the northeast on Nacional.
Zarif felt like these men were going to race up to the site where Jack Ryan already lay dead, and then do nothing more than get themselves massacred by the hundred or so cops and Secret Service agents who were still alive. But that wasn’t his problem. He felt better now that there would be no tip-offs to the coming event, so he and Emilio stepped into a Starbucks, ordered iced coffees, and sat down to watch the video feed on his phone.
The Iranian had command-detonated devices by watching video cameras, but he was pretty sure this was the first time anyone had assassinated a world leader via iPhone.
57
Air Force One touched down at 12:05 p.m. The pilot brought the aircraft to a predetermined point on the tarmac and then the mobile stairs were driven up. Quickly a red carpet was rolled out, and members of a forty-man honor guard took their positions on either side.
Bomb squad personnel, K9 teams, counterassault SWAT officers, and hundreds of other American security forces representing a half-dozen federal agencies were already at the airport; they’d arrived more than a week earlier with the advance team or else on one of the four C-141 cargo aircraft full of men and equipment that had landed the day before.
Dozens of Secret Service agents fanned out around the aircraft, among them Lead Advance Agent Dale Herbers, who took a position watching the expanse of Benito Juárez International’s tarmac along with the rest of the team. His advance work was now complete, and normally he would be moving on to his next location immediately, but the security needs here in Mexico required him to stay for POTUS’s arrival and motorcade to the Palacio Nacional and then his hotel.
Twelve minutes after landing, Lead Protection Agent Andrea Price O’Day exited the aircraft and walked down the stairs. She took up a position at the foot of the stairs, and seconds later, President of the United States Jack Ryan emerged from Air Force One and headed down himself. There was no music for him—this was not an official state visit but rather an official visit, which was one step down and less full of pomp and circumstance.
Still, Ryan was greeted at the bottom of the stairs by the Mexican foreign minister and a few other high-level functionaries, and while he stood there talking, mostly through an interpreter, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Horatio Styles quietly came out of the airplane and descended. He followed the President in the receiving line, and then headed for the limo with Ryan and O’Day.
The Beasts were parked back to front, and small flags of Mexico hung from poles on the fenders. It was de rigueur on foreign trips to display the local flag on the President’s vehicle as a show of respect. The limo in front was positioned just beyond the honor guard, and the back door to the rear limo was lined up perfectly with the red carpet and the door was open. O’Day stood at the door while Ryan folded his six-foot frame into the vehicle, and after Ambassador Styles entered the back of the big black limo, she shut the door and ordered her team to the cars.
O’Day got in the front passenger side of Ryan’s limo, next to driver Mitchell Delaney. Two agents rode on the running boards of the vehicle as it rolled forward in the motorcade, but they would hop off and get into a chase car at the airport’s exit.
In front of the presidential limo was the other Beast, and in front of that a dozen black Chevy Suburbans carrying Secret Service, White House, and Department of State personnel. Ahead of these were Mexican police cars, some dozen in all, and at the very front of the convoy, twenty-one Mexican Federal Police motorcycles rumbled through the intersections, all of which had already been blocked off with more police.
Behind the President’s vehicle came two Suburbans ferrying close protection agents, then three specially outfitted Suburbans carrying the counterassault team. These vehicles all had open back gates full of armed men scanning both sides of the road, and they had hatches on the roof they could use to stand and fire from above. A fourth counterassault vehicle carried more heavy weapons and security equipment for the SWAT officers.
After this main security contingent came the Roadrunner, the unofficial name given to the Mobile Command and Control Vehicle, a Suburban filled with high-tech communications equipment that allowed the President and his team secure comms even while driving in foreign countries.
After the Roadrunner were two white sixteen-passenger media vans, then another twelve SUVs and sedans carrying more VIPs. All of these vehicles were already full, as the press and other staff traveling with the President had deplaned before the President.
The U.S. contingent of the motorcade was thirty-five vehicles, but the Mexicans added more than eighty, most in the form of uniformed Federal Police on motorcycles.
In the lead media van, sixteen reporters from print, television, and wire services sat crammed together. In the middle of the first row behind the driver, twenty-seven-year-old CNN reporter Jill Crosby checked the service on her mobile phone. She was new to international travel, and although she’d been told she’d have no more trouble getting a signal in Mexico City than she would at the Washington Bureau where she worked, she needed to confirm it for herself.
She breathed a sigh of relief when her phone displayed four bars, a full-strength signal.
She’d never traveled with the President before and she had no plans to call anyone other than her boyfriend this afternoon, but she wanted to be ready for anything. That was her mantra, and it had gotten her this far. After all, you didn’t make it this high in CNN at such a young age, assigned to an international flight aboard Air Force One, without working your ass off and leaving nothing to chance.
—
In the backseat of the Beast, Ryan and Styles drank bottled water and discussed protocol, but only for a short time, because the President wanted to hear another of the ambassador’s old war stories. The Marine had been in Grenada, and in Panama, and he’d finished his military career fighting in the Middle East. He wasn’t one to offer up long tales about past action, espec
ially not to the President, who had his own fascinating history that was somewhat longer than the younger ambassador’s, but Ryan had been a Marine himself, and he peppered Styles with questions about his time in the service like a fascinated college student.
—
It was 2:18 a.m. in Pyongyang, North Korea, but General Ri Tae-jin wore his full uniform, and he sat at his desk in his office in the Reconnaissance General Bureau. Across the room was a thirty-two-inch CRT television tuned to the American television news station CNN. With the general in his office was a female translator, herself in the green uniform of the Chosun Inmingun, the Korean military. She had been ordered here with no explanation of why she was to sit with the general throughout the early morning and provide running translations of U.S. television news.
Right now the station was running its noon news hour, a story about flooding along the Ohio River. The translator gave the information to Ri quickly and confidently, but other than to verify her ability as a translator, the general wasn’t interested. His mind was racing now, thinking about the importance of the next few minutes.
He had entered into this operation with doubt and anger, but as the scheme had progressed, as the pieces fell into place with the finding of the assassin in Syria, and as he’d heard reports back from his agents in Mexico City who were secretly monitoring the actions of the Maldonado cartel, he began to become cautiously optimistic about the entire enterprise.
And when the American President stole the mineral refinery equipment two days earlier, indicating to all he knew Ri’s operation to build the processing plant directly correlated with the operation to obtain ICBM technology, General Ri knew Fire Axe—his operation in Mexico City—had to succeed for his operation in Chongju to succeed.
As if by curse or by fortune, one scheme folded into the other.
For Ri to live . . . Ryan had to die.
He held a hand in the air, stopping the translator’s work in mid-sentence. Ohio could drown or wash away, Ri could not care less.
“You may pause until the important news comes on the air.”
The translator swallowed uncomfortably. “Apologies, Comrade General. How will I know what is important?”
Ri’s sad eyes blinked and brightened, and his nearly perpetual frown curved upward. “You will know.”
—
As the Beast made a left off Costa Rica onto Vidal Alcocer, Ryan waved to a small crowd behind a barricade. Most seemed happy to see him, but a few angry-looking people, young males and females, waved a banner that he was not able to read.
Ryan turned to Styles. “I bet the Maldonado killing in Acapulco gave you a few headaches.”
Styles said, “Speaking as ambassador to Mexico, I confess it was a difficult time diplomatically, at least in our dealing with the general public, since the Maldonado brothers did enjoy some popular support around portions of the western regions of the country.”
Ryan nodded.
“But if I might be allowed to speak as a Marine for a moment.”
“Please do.”
“That son of a bitch needed to go.”
Jack nodded again.
Styles leaned forward. “I understand totally if you are not at liberty to say, Mr. President. But I sure would be curious to know if we, in fact, had operators on the ground in Acapulco.”
With a dry look Ryan replied, “Can neither confirm nor deny, Ambassador.” And then he finished the line with a little wink.
Styles turned to look out the window. “You just made my day, Mr. President.”
—
Four blocks away, two men, one Mexican and in his twenties, the other Iranian and in his forties, sat at a small round table in the back corner of a Starbucks, both men leaning over a mobile phone. The older man held a white cordless telephone in his hand, but it was hidden under the table, resting on the backpack between his feet. Anyone paying attention might notice both men were perspiring, but the other patrons of the shop were engrossed in their own conversations and work.
Adel Zarif watched the video feed intently, hesitant to blink lest he miss the first limousine. Gordo moved the camera around more than Zarif would have liked, and the image shook and jerked as the crowd around the man at the barricade jostled him to get their own cameras up and into position.
But Zarif thought it was a gift from Allah that the image on Emilio’s little phone settled down and centered perfectly just as a black Suburban passed in front of the wall, and the first big black limousine passed, its Mexican hood flags whipping in the breeze.
At the back of the Starbucks, Adel Zarif muttered softly to himself, “Allahu akbar.”
At the same moment, his tablemate, the Maldonado man Emilio, simply said, “Come mierda.” Eat shit.
Zarif pressed the button on the phone and connected the call.
Even here in the Starbucks, more than three blocks away, the explosion was deafening.
58
A dark gray cloud covered everyone and everything.
The entire street, the side streets around, the edge of the street market on the west, and the open parking lot on the east—everything in a twenty-five-yard radius from the blast site—was completely obscured by smoke and dust and tiny airborne particles of concrete.
Many outside the impenetrable cloud for another twenty-five yards in all directions were dead or dazed or disoriented by the force of the blast. Eardrums were stunned and ringing. Equilibrium was disrupted by the concussion.
Another twenty-five yards in all directions was consumed by wrecked vehicles or other confusion. Shrapnel this far out still caused death, windows were shattered, car alarms blared.
No one screamed for several seconds, the confusion and disbelief overpowering the natural sensation of fear.
Secret Service Agent Dale Herbers was one of five men in a Suburban six vehicles ahead of SWORDSMAN. The blast behind them had sent debris raining down on the roof of his SUV, but the driver looked back in his rearview and prepared to stomp on the gas. If they were under attack, the first rule was to get POTUS out of the engagement area as quickly as possible.
But the sheer size of the rolling cloud of destruction behind him caused him to doubt standard protocol. Would the Beast even be able to roll out of the kill zone?
The driver called into his mike, trying to find out what he needed to do, but he did this simultaneously along with thirty other agents, and his transmission was walked over.
Herbers was the lead agent in the vehicle, so in the absence of any other instruction, he knew he’d need to lead the four men with him. He realized from the size of the blast that his vehicle might possibly be the closest to the President that had not been destroyed. But there was no way he was going to order his driver to back into the cloud to go looking for SWORDSMAN, because for all he knew, the President was lying injured in the street.
Instead, Herbers made a brave call. “Pull over to open the lane, then everyone bail, cover, and evacuate!”
The driver raced the vehicle to the side of the six-lane road, giving as much open space as possible for any cars behind to continue on if they were able. The five agents then unloaded quickly, drawing their SIG Sauer pistols as they did so. This action put them in danger, of course, but there was no way they were continuing on without knowing if the Beast was operable or even intact. And all Secret Service agents knew their primary job was to cover and evacuate the principal, so Herbers and the others began sprinting toward the massive gray cloud.
Almost instantly Herbers saw his call to pull to the side of the road was folly. Nothing was going to be rolling to the south on Vidal Alcocer. They passed wrecked Suburbans, lying on their sides or perpendicular to the traffic lanes, windshields shattered, tires ripped apart and smoking. These SUVs weren’t moving without a dozen men pushing them out of the way, and there was no time to stop for that until SWORDSMAN was safe.
On his right a crowd that had gathered behind the barricades on José J. Herrera looked like a massive tangle of prostrate bodies. Herbers slowed here to train his gun on any potential threats, but the only movement he saw was a little writhing and staggering by a few survivors in the midst of the stillness of death in the crowd.
A voice came through his earpiece, shouting something that seemed like it was a warning, but right now it seemed as if one hundred car alarms blared in a half-dozen different singsong keys, each bleat trying to shout over the other, and Herbers couldn’t make out the call.
He saw no threats, so he turned away from the crowd and continued on toward the last known location of the Beast, running flat out in his dress shoes and business suit. His earpiece mike was alive now with calls, but he hadn’t heard a word from O’Day, the President’s lead agent.
Just as he reached the edge of the thick cloud of smoke and ran into it, he heard pounding gunfire behind him. Even before he turned around, he recognized the weapon from its distinctive sound. It was an AK-47, a rifle carried by no one in the Secret Service or in the Mexican federal forces. He shouted into his wrist mike at the same time as dozens of other men and women. “Contact!”
Instantly he heard the high-pitched snapping of bullets flying past him in the street, coming from the direction of the crowd.
—
In the back of the smoke cloud, an entire city block from where Herbers now stood in the street hunting for the source of the gunfire, Secret Service men who were still alive stumbled from their vehicles and began moving toward the cloud. They had no choice but to dismount, because burning vehicles in front of them blocked the way. The Roadrunner was down and on its side. No one had climbed out of it yet, though it had been a full thirty seconds since the massive blast.