Down alongside the runway beside the Port Authority building, the presidential motorcade was assembling. Even from a couple thousand feet, I could make out the military armor–plated limo they called the Beast, which the president would ride in. There were actually two of them. In front and back of the huge Cadillac limos were over a dozen other black Suburbans that would carry other White House officials and the Secret Service CAT tactical guys. Ahead of the feds was the NYPD-provided sweep team, a highway unit car in front of an NYPD Intelligence Division command car in front of a bomb squad vehicle and a tow truck.
As we waited and hovered, huge, seemingly too-close passenger aircraft flew in and out of JFK what seemed like every five seconds. Listening to the pilot’s hectic radio sizzle, I started to get nervous. There were a lot of chefs here in this rapidly developing situation, a lot of stress and amped-up emotion. It was precisely at times like this that mistakes happened, I knew. When, say, a new air traffic controller gets ahead of himself and decides to shift a hovering PD chopper right in front of an incoming DC-10.
“There she is,” the pilot said suddenly over the headset as he pointed to the left.
And there she was.
I sat gaping at Air Force One, coming in from the east for a landing.
The sight of the iconic aircraft struck a strangely powerful emotional chord with me. Was it patriotism? A sense of hope? Of vulnerability? My memories of 9/11?
Whatever it was, I suddenly felt like I was a Boy Scout again. Like I should salute the plane or maybe recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
God bless America, I prayed silently to myself as the huge aircraft gently touched down on the runway below.
Please.
Chapter 4
The blind was the size of a jail cell.
It had the feel of a jail cell as well, with its concrete ceiling, the rear concrete wall, the cold concrete floor. The blind’s sidewalls and the front were made of plywood that was spray-painted black on the outside to fit in with the industrial roof space’s black painted concrete. In the forward plywood wall was a hole the size of a computer monitor with a black piece of cloth duct-taped over it.
The assassin checked his watch, then pulled the curtain off and looked down into the angled eyepiece of his Swarovski ATX hunting telescope.
The first thing he noticed as he looked out on the world was the morning’s air quality. It couldn’t have been better. It was a cold twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit and bright and clear as freshly Windexed Waterford crystal. Good bombing weather, he thought. Both the wind direction and speed were perfect, a light, gentle, eight-miles-an-hour west-southwest at his back.
From his perch fifty stories up looking east, the view field in the scope offered the clearest, most incredible view of Manhattan north of the Empire State Building. One could actually make out the curvature of the earth there in the distant horizon of Queens.
He panned the scope north to south across the gray carpet of building tops, the 59th Street Bridge, the black obelisk of the Trump World Tower. He stopped when he got to the Chrysler Building; that was on his right. It was so close and vivid in the advanced optics of the four-thousand-dollar scope that it seemed like, if he wanted to, he could reach out and prick his thumb on the glistening silver needle of its spire.
He panned the scope back a skosh to the left, and then angled it slightly down and thumbed the zoom.
Then, a few moments later, there it was in glistening focus. The target. The reason he’d been pissing into Gatorade bottles for the last two days.
The United Nations building.
Technically, the iconic glass skyscraper was called the United Nations Secretariat Building. In his scope, the sparkling rectangle of blue glass was so sharp-edged it looked two-dimensional, like a shiny forty-story glass playing card stuck into First Avenue.
He zoomed and tilted lower again and framed in his kill zone.
The bookends were the edge of the Secretariat building’s concrete sidewalk guard shack on the left and an apartment building on 43rd Street on the right. The in-between target zone was a segment of the UN building’s iron-gated circular driveway and reflecting pool. He centered the scope over the fence just to the right of the building’s front door entrance, where the VIP cars stopped.
The target zone had already been ranged in with a PEQ laser sight at a little under thirteen hundred yards away. The bullet path would be a descending one on a slight diagonal, right to left, approximately one cross street block in width. Because of the diagonal, the kill gap was tiny, a thin slot between a residential building on the corner of Second Avenue and 43rd and the north edge of an old prewar building called the Tudor Tower that was on the cross street directly across First Avenue in front of the UN.
Threading that needle would have been bad enough, but adding to things was a jutting roof structure on the UN’s Permanent Mission of India building between Third and Second on the north side of 43rd Street. By his calculations, his descending bullet would have to clear it by less than half a foot on its way downrange to the target.
Another X factor was some small American flags on a lamppost at the dead end of 43rd and First Avenue that the bullet had a chance to deflect off. But the worst of all was the sculpture in the pool in front of the UN building itself. The damn sculpture drove him nuts. It was called Single Form, an abstract, ugly twenty-one-foot piece of bronze that looked like a giant dog tag that could potentially be between him and the presidential limo.
If all went well, he would have maybe three seconds to get the shot off as the president went from the armored car to the front entrance of the building. Three seconds to gauge and sight and squeeze. Three seconds to hit a hole in one from atop a five-hundred-foot cliff thirteen football fields away.
He took his eye off the scope and checked on the electric blanket wrapped around the barrel of the long dark rifle resting on its bipod beside him.
Some guns are quite beautiful, but his world-famous thirty-pound Barrett M107 mounted with Zeiss 6 – 24 x 72 scope was about as elegant as a bulldozer. It was almost five feet long with the suppressor. Even its ammo was huge and clunky. The ten .50-caliber BMG API (armor-piercing incendiary) rounds loaded into its detachable box magazine were each over five inches in length and weighed over a quarter of a pound.
But what it lacked in form, it made up for in function, and then some. The Barrett was technically known as an anti-matériel rifle. With confirmed kills at over twenty-five hundred yards, it could shoot through one inch of armor plate or a foot of concrete.
Some might think that a Barrett loaded with APIs was a bit overkill, and that, say, a .300 Winchester Magnum or .338 Lapua round fired from a lighter rifle would have been adequate. And it might have been, but for the cold weather conditions. Because even with the warming blanket, he would be firing from essentially a cold bore, which sometimes reduced the range considerably.
Besides, this wasn’t some match event. He was only going to get one shot if he was lucky, and he had to maximize every possibility that he would kill what he hit.
There were two, maybe three other people in the world who would even think of attempting the incredible shot. But he wasn’t attempting it. He was going to do it.
He would kill the president not because he was the best shot in all the world, he knew.
He would kill the president because he was the best shot who had ever been.
The assassin removed the electric blanket and clacked back on the Barrett’s bolt slide, jacking the first huge .50 BMG into the chamber.
The bullet would be put in a museum when all was said and done, he realized as he glanced at the long gun. Maybe even the Smithsonian.
He pictured visiting it one day with a grandchild, seeing it there like a relic or a moon rock in some crowded gallery.
He was a very visual thinker and he smiled as the image of a huge mushroomed .50 mounted in a shadow box lingered in his mind.
It warmed him to think that the work of his precious h
ands would be preserved forever and ever under thick panes of alarmed glass.
Chapter 5
We arrived in Manhattan five minutes in front of the motorcade.
It was incredible how fast the limos and SUVs moved through Queens, somewhere between seventy and eighty miles an hour. Well, I guess not that incredible, since they had every highway and byway blocked off and the entire road to themselves.
They were supposed to have taken the Van Wyck to the Long Island Expressway to the Midtown Tunnel, but at the last second, they had changed their mind about the tunnel for some reason, and now they were due to come into Manhattan over the 59th Street Bridge in a minute or two.
We were pointing west in a low thousand-foot hover somewhere over Yorkville just to the west of the bridge, waiting on them. In the helicopter, I sat to the pilot’s right, and on my right was the east side of Manhattan’s endless wilderness of buildings and windows. Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, the green mat of Central Park ahead.
Due to the helicopter’s vibration, a high-powered spotting scope was pretty much useless, so I was using just a pair of 10-power binoculars to scan the windows and rooftops. It was a beautifully clear day, hardly any clouds in the cold blue sky.
I had my gloves off, and I blew on my hands from time to time to warm them. The pilot’s heater blew on the upper half of me, but beneath the metal footrests, it must have been open in places because my feet and lower half were freezing.
“What’s the range on the inner perimeter around the UN again?” I said as I stared down at the congested Monopoly board of buildings.
“A thousand yards,” said Greg, the sniper, over the chopper’s interphone.
Three thousand feet, I thought, looking down. The UN was to our left, between 42nd and 43rd Streets on First Avenue. Cross street blocks were each two hundred fifty feet, I knew. So that meant what? The interior scan perimeter was twelve blocks north and south from around 30th to 54th Street, and then west to Lexington.
How many windows in that area had a vantage on the sidewalk in front of the UN? I thought, looking at grid after building grid of them. Too many to count, let alone watch. Plus a sniper would be far back in a room, probably up on some platform, and would need only a slit of an opening.
“Wait. I see something,” I suddenly said, scanning over by Park Avenue. “Go over to Park by the MetLife Building.”
“Where?” said the pilot.
“The MetLife Building,” I said, pointing to the left. “That big fifty-story headstone-looking thing on Park Avenue.”
“Are you crazy? That’s too far out,” said Greg.
“I don’t care. I saw something, some movement,” I said as we flew closer.
“Where?”
“Underneath the rim of the roof, that black area beside the sign where the satellite dishes and equipment are.”
After another minute, I heard Greg, the sniper, laugh.
“What’s the power on your glasses?”
“Ten,” I said.
“Here. Use mine, supercop. They’re a sixteen,” he said, shoving his binocs at me. “We can call off the air strike. I think we’re good.”
Just as I looked, something dropped out from underneath the rim of the massive office building and unfurled.
Greg continued cracking up as I saw the red tail feathers and realized I was looking at a hawk.
Chapter 6
In the blind, the assassin put on his noise-canceling headphones and knelt down on the wood pallet platform beside the Barrett.
He lay prone and scooted in around the humongous rifle, embracing it like a lover at a picnic. He nestled the gunstock into his right shoulder joint ever so gently, like a newborn that needed a burp. His cheek went to the cold plate, his palm to the grip, and his finger to the metal comma of the trigger.
As he always did, he first closed his eyes and tried to actually physically feel the tension draining from his body as he breathed. With every release of breath, he envisioned it as a warm, glowing liquid spilling out of his pores through his clothes and flowing over the platform’s sides.
He went through his checklist. Perfectly relaxed, naturally aligned, and oriented to the target. Check, check, and check.
He opened his right blue eye an eyelash length from the polished curve of the Zeiss’s scope, his focus and concentration tightening like a slipknot. In the scope, the universe condensed itself into a circle picture of a sidewalk guard shack, an iron fence, a circular driveway, a reflecting pool, and a bronze sculpture.
His body was perfect stillness. His mind was perfect visual awareness. He was entering the zone. He could feel it. He was dialing it in.
Flashing lights crossed the meridian of his scope as the motorcade pulled up in front of the building. The lead vehicles slowed, and the huge presidential limo slipped in through the UN’s opened gate. He tracked it around the circular drive, all the way around the pool, and watched as it stopped well before the entrance to the right of the sculpture.
The doors popped a split second later, and there he was. Voilà! Like a rabbit out of a hat.
It was the new president, Jeremy Buckland, his famous face coming out of the car, dead center into the cross of the scope’s reticle.
The assassin held himself. He was in the midst of inhaling a breath, and he needed to wait for his exhale, for that still zone between the oxygen coming in and the carbon dioxide going out, where everything leveled so he could squeeze.
He never got there.
It just happened. Something happened.
There was a bluish-gray blur in the scope, and the president was gone.
What?!
He looked up over the rim of the scope.
It was a helicopter. A helicopter had come from nowhere and was now level with his position. He hadn’t heard it approach because of the headphones.
The Bell 412 had police markings and was twenty feet out off the building’s edge, pointed directly at him. There was a cop in it next to the pilot, pointing binoculars, again, right at him through the hole in the blind. The cop was looking right into his face.
The assassin stared in horror for a moment, then did the only remaining thing he could do.
He shifted to his left and center-sighted the huge Barrett rifle onto the helicopter and squeezed the trigger.
Chapter 7
It was one of those surreal moments when you say, Wait—this is impossible. I’m dreaming.
I’d just told the chopper pilot to head in closer on the east side of the MetLife Building for a second look, when under the rim of the roof, I spotted something with the binoculars.
It wasn’t movement this time, but a box, a weird black box tucked in behind a bunch of wires and a satellite dish. The pilot moved a little more to the left, and through a slit in the box’s front I suddenly saw what was inside.
It was a man.
Behind a rifle.
He was wearing earphones over a black balaclava ski mask and black coveralls, and he was lying prone beside an enormous black rifle.
I had just enough time to drop my jaw when he swung the rifle right at us.
“Sniper!” I yelled at the moment the muzzle flashed.
A second later, the entire helicopter’s glass canopy shattered and cold air was rushing in my face, and we were spinning crazily. You could tell right away that there was something very wrong with the chopper. It felt incredibly top-heavy, hanging down and over to the right side as we wheeled and wobbled. An alarm was sounding in the console over the suddenly much louder whumps of the overhead rotor. All I could do was sit there and panic as, outside the shattered windshield, the sky and the buildings whipped past in a chaotic blur.
I looked up and saw the hole in the cabin ceiling spilling oil. Then I turned to my left toward the pilot to see him fighting with the joystick.
“My eyes! I have glass and blood in my eyes! I can’t see!” he said, and then there was a horrendous metal groaning, and I rocked hard in my seat and blasted the side of my h
ead against the cabin’s bulkhead as we suddenly smashed into something and rolled over to the left.
“What happened? What happened?” yelled Greg in my ear as a horrible metal snapping sound came.
I learned later that it was the rotor and tail blades snapping off as they hit the concrete deck of the MetLife Building’s roof, where we’d just crash-landed. Somehow, I quickly unstrapped and got my door open and dropped over and out between the toppled helicopter’s skids. Greg, the sniper, was right on my heels, and a moment later, we pulled the bleeding pilot out and ran away from the still-whining, smoking chopper as fast as we could.
Not yet truly believing we were still alive, we found a stairwell door and opened it and set the injured pilot on the landing as we watched the chopper, spinning and smoking at the edge of the MetLife Building’s roof. I looked out at the incredible skyline of Manhattan behind it as I shook my head. If I hadn’t already believed in miracles, I would have been converted right then and there.
“There is no way in hell we should still be alive,” Greg said as we heard a click. It was a door, a door opening in the stairwell one floor below us.
Greg and I turned from the chopper and looked in over the stairwell’s railing.
And saw the guy.
The guy in the balaclava—the assassin—standing there one floor below us, staring up.
Chapter 8
When I saw that the shooter had something down behind his leg, three things happened at the same time.
I grabbed Greg by the back of his vest, I started to backpedal, and there was a shot.
We tripped over the still-sitting pilot’s legs and landed back out on the roof. I pulled myself up and drew my Glock. I was about to help Greg up when I saw the hole between his nose and cheek and the blood spray on the concrete beneath his head.
He was dead.
My heart jackhammering in my chest as I wondered what in the name of God Almighty was going to happen next, I pointed my Glock straight at the stairwell doorway. I walked around the pilot as he crawled back out onto the roof, and I quietly stepped into the stairwell and took a deep breath and peeked back over the railing, Glock first.