The members of the counterassault team who had not died in the explosion or were not now wrapped up and disoriented in the dark cloud raced forward with their M4 rifles, desperate for any information, either through their eyes or through their headsets.
In the smoke, guns swung around in all directions looking for targets, and men reached out in vain, trying to find anyone or anything close by to help orient them.
Suddenly, seconds after the sound of AK fire south of their position sent the men scrambling, more gunfire erupted from the north, behind them. It was more automatic AKs along with staccato snaps from handguns as Secret Service agents returned fire.
The counterassault men at the northern edge of the cloud turned to engage two pickup trucks approaching from a side street, but the smoke and dust behind them enveloped them as the cloud grew.
Over the sound of the new multidirectional gunfire a single screamed report filled every earpiece, headset, and vehicle radio of the massive Secret Service contingent.
“RPG!”
—
Jack Ryan opened his eyes and blinked away what he thought were tears. He brought his hand to his face and rubbed it, and he noticed his glasses were gone. He pulled his hand back and saw he was bleeding from his head.
He was wholly unaware there had been an explosion. He saw no flash, he heard no loud noise. He wondered if they had been in some sort of traffic accident. Right now he was only aware that he lay awkwardly on his right side, his legs higher than his head. Ambassador Styles’s body was crumpled next to him. There was little light, which was odd, because the last thing he remembered from before he blacked out was that it had been a beautifully sunny afternoon.
The Beast was upside down, this became clear after a few seconds more, but even through the vehicle windows all he saw was a deep gray, as if they had somehow crashed into a dark lake.
That couldn’t be. He wondered if he was dazed, so he shook his head to clear it, and only then did he feel the dull but pervasive pain on his right side.
“Mr. President?”
“Yes, Andrea. I’m okay.”
He wasn’t okay, but he was alive, and Andrea Price O’Day was in the front seat, herself upside down. She needed to hear his voice, so he complied.
Now Ryan reached forward and put his hand on the back of Horatio Styles. He was lying almost flat on the limo’s ceiling, and he wasn’t moving. Ryan meant to give him a shake to wake him up, but when he did so the man’s head lolled to the side, facing Ryan’s. His eyes were open and his pupils rolled back. Ryan could see his neck was broken.
“Styles is dead!” he called to O’Day, but she was transmitting on her mike and she did not respond.
Ryan heard gunfire outside the limo now, and it sounded like it was coming from two directions. A larger explosion, this sounded like an RPG hitting a vehicle, came from close behind.
O’Day said, “We’re staying in the vehicle. We’ve got oxygen and armor, and as long as we . . .” She stopped talking.
Jack rolled himself onto his left side now, and then onto his knees. He felt like his right arm was not cooperating, but it was there, still in his suit and not gushing blood, so he wasn’t sure what his problem was.
He looked up to Andrea and then he saw why she stopped talking. Smoke began filling the interior of the car.
She turned to him. “Listen carefully. Stay where you are. I’m coming around to your door.”
She didn’t wait for Ryan to respond. Instead, she kicked open her front passenger door, rolled out onto the ground.
Ryan called out to the driver now. “Hey, Mitch! You okay? We’ve got to go!” The man hung upside down from his seat belt. He turned his head toward Ryan, but he did not reply.
Andrea appeared at Ryan’s window. She yanked hard on the upside-down door and it opened with a creak.
Ryan rolled out onto the street now; he was surprised to find the limo had been thrown all the way to the curb, probably twenty feet from where it had been in the middle of the road.
Ryan coughed out the smoke he had inhaled inside the vehicle, and then he began to stand. O’Day shielded him against the side of the limo, kept him on his knees, and he looked around for the first time. Two men in the tactical gear of the counterassault team came running through the thick smoke, their weapons high and their laser targeters cutting through the cloud like lightsabers. They formed on Ryan and they, too, made a cordon around him, and tried in vain to scan for targets in the massive amount of smoke and dust.
A third special agent, this one in a suit and tie, appeared. His face and leg were covered with blood but he was ambulatory, and he opened the driver’s-side door of the upturned limo to help Special Agent Mitch Delaney out, but Ryan saw the man was heavily disoriented from the impact of the flipping limo.
O’Day was calling for a vehicle, any vehicle, to make its way slowly into the blast zone, through the half-dozen or so burning pieces of wreckage, and up to the Beast. She had to evacuate SWORDSMAN, preferably in something armored, but at this point she’d settle for anything with four wheels and a motor.
Ryan tried to pull out Ambassador Styles, but the agents around him kept him covered tightly. The smoke was obscuring their view of the attack that was taking place from two compass points, and this added to the confusion, but it was also obscuring the attackers’ view of the blast area, so they couldn’t possibly know the President was more or less out in the open, kneeling at the curb.
And then, from the south, came a racing, hissing sound that approached through the smoke. No one saw it, and no one identified it in time to do little more than crouch.
The RPG hit the side of the limousine and exploded, throwing everyone around it to the ground.
—
The two sixteen-passenger media vans had been well behind the explosion, but still the shock wave shook the vehicles on their chassis, and debris pounded them and cracked the windshields in several places. The windows along the passenger sides were shattered when the rearview mirrors were struck by flying debris and went flying into the sides of the vans. The incredible sound of the detonation and the subsequent impacts of shrapnel and car parts sent the passengers covering their heads and scrambling to get low.
The driver of the lead van was a member of the White House press office and not a trained security agent, but he’d been told what to do in an emergency. He was to get off the road, out of the way of security forces ahead of his van if the decision was made to retrograde out of the area, or of those behind the van if they needed to come up and assist.
Ten seconds after the explosion, however, he had not moved at all. Both of the van’s front tires had been eviscerated by high-explosive shrapnel from the rear artillery shell that had torn across the road.
Four media personnel in the first van had been cut by broken glass, and more were disoriented by shock, but CNN press-pool reporter Jill Crosby was unhurt. She was sitting in the second row of seats, just to the left of Fox reporter Jeff Harkes. Harkes caught a face full of glass, and while he grabbed at a vicious wound just over his right ear, Crosby climbed over his legs, grabbed the door latch, and flung it open. While others in the vehicle either tended to one another’s injuries or tried to get out of the van, Jill Crosby ran toward the smoke-obscured scene ahead.
She’d just pulled her phone out of her pocket and dialed into CNN’s Atlanta headquarters when the gunfire started. She arrived at a damaged Suburban that had been knocked ninety degrees and now faced west on the north-south thoroughfare. She ducked low and ran past the SUV, and on the other side of this she saw an identical Suburban fully engulfed in flames.
An explosion erupted near her, knocking her to the ground. She did not recognize that she had almost been blown apart by an RPG, so she climbed back to her feet and ran forward. All around her now there was more and more shooting.
She entered the thick wall of gr
ay smoke just as her producer answered on the other end.
“It’s Crosby! The presidential motorcade is under attack! We’ve got to go live!”
Two counterassault team officers raced past her with their guns at their shoulders, and then they disappeared into the smoke in front of her.
—
Herbers had given up on getting to the President; his job now was to suppress the hostiles in the two pickup trucks on the southern side of the engagement zone. The vehicles had pulled right into the crowd of dead and wounded. Herbers lay flat in the street and engaged the driver of one of the white pickups as the man shot his AK while crouched behind his car door, incorrectly thinking it to be suitable cover. Herbers and another agent dumped round after round of .40-caliber ammo through the thin sheet metal, killing the man.
He’d heard the transmission from O’Day saying she had SWORDSMAN at the Beast, but the Beast was down. She’d called to the second limo to have it come to her, but Herbers had yet to hear a response.
He didn’t allow himself an instant to think about what had gone wrong. That would come later, much later, and it would come only for those who managed to survive the firefight. So he emptied his magazine at the threats on the side street, reloaded, and racked his pistol’s slide to engage some more. Just as he brought it back up on a target, he saw a flash of light in the shade on the far side of José J. Herrera. Instantly the flash grew in size, and he realized he was looking at a streaking rocket-propelled grenade. It raced five feet off the ground, shot directly over his head as it passed into the smoke behind him, and then he heard the impact of an explosion.
He hoped like hell the RPG hadn’t just hit SWORDSMAN’s damaged limo with the President of the United States standing next to it.
Herbers opened fire at the source of the launch, a man standing alone with an empty rocket tube, sending the man to cover.
Then he started looking around for a vehicle. He knew the President couldn’t wait around in the kill zone any longer. A Suburban with a broken windshield was upright on good tires in the road, just fifty feet away. He saw a Secret Service agent slumped over the wheel, and another man lying facedown outside an open rear driver’s-side door.
Herbers leapt to his feet and started running for the black SUV.
59
Ryan climbed back to his knees for the second time in the past forty-five seconds. His right arm hung by his side, the pain grew by the second, but through the pain he saw Andrea lying faceup on the curb, blood running from her forehead.
He blinked away the grit that had made its way into his eyes and crawled to her; she was just five feet away, but it felt like a mile.
All around him men fired weapons, alarms shrieked; a helicopter had flown so low that it whipped the smoke away in swirling vortexes. Two agents kept their hands on Ryan’s back as they kept their weapons sweeping, occasionally firing, and hot brass clanged on the street. Ryan cradled Andrea’s head in his hands. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was parted slightly. He put his head to her mouth and then to her chest, and he felt and heard nothing.
She wasn’t breathing.
A counterassault officer tried to pull Ryan to his feet now, to bring him back to the relative safety of the upturned vehicle, but Ryan swatted the man’s grip away with his left arm. Then he pinched Andrea’s nose shut and began rescue breathing.
He’d been trained decades ago, but his wife had given him a refresher when Kyle was born, so he knew the fundamentals. He pushed away the chattering gunfire, and even a third detonation of an RPG against the wall of a parking garage nearby, and he continued short powerful breaths into her mouth, followed by one-handed chest compressions.
He was on his third round of breathing when he saw a response from her, just a quick inhalation and an expression of discomfort on her face, but he knew she was alive.
He was about to talk to her when a black Suburban raced backward down the sidewalk and screeched to a stop just ten feet away. Now several CAT officers pulled Ryan away from Andrea Price O’Day.
“Wait!” he shouted, but President Ryan was not in charge.
“We’ll take care of her!” a young agent shouted, pulling the President toward the vehicle.
The back door opened and Ryan was pushed in roughly, while men with body armor surrounded him on all sides. He tried to get a look back over his shoulder at his longtime friend lying motionless in the street, but one of his protection detail was there, almost on top of him, and he shoved Ryan all the way to the floorboard and covered him with his own body.
Ryan screamed in pain.
The agent behind the wheel yelled to the other men, “There’s gunmen and wreckage ahead! Can we go back?”
The two counterassault men had come from behind in the motorcade. “Affirmative! Wreckage on the road for fifty yards, then you are clear!”
Another man shouted, “Punch it!”
The vehicle shot backward, the driver, Special Agent Herbers, looking over his shoulder as he drove in reverse, doing his best to avoid slamming into the stationary vehicles. While he drove, another agent shouted into his headset.
Special Agent Davis Linklater broadcast on the Secret Service net. “SWORDSMAN is mobile! Heading north, everybody get out of the way, and then fall in.” He looked up to Herbers behind the wheel. Herbers was in charge here. “Where we going?”
Herbers didn’t take his eyes off the road behind him. “Airport!” The Suburban sideswiped a burning counterassault vehicle lying on its side, jolting all in the SUV, but it kept moving backward at speed.
—
Everyone in the Starbucks three blocks away had either run outside to see the scene at the far end of the street market or else pushed themselves up to the window glass to look outside.
With two exceptions. Emilio and Zarif walked out onto José J. Herrera and turned left, away from the blast, although the young Mexican walked backward, marveling at the massive cloud of smoke.
“Dios mío,” he mumbled in awe. Zarif didn’t know what the kid expected, but it clearly wasn’t anything like what had just happened.
He turned back to Zarif and picked up his pace. “My God. That was big, man.”
Zarif didn’t hear any shooting until they had walked another half-block, but when the crackling gunfire came he was pleasantly surprised. He knew the sound of an AK, and he heard multiple Kalashnikovs open up; their machinelike cyclic thumping mixed nicely with the dozens of car alarms and the thundering of helicopters overhead.
A scene of utter chaos had erupted, and that was even before the first crash of an RPG explosion.
Both men were picked up in the truck by the two Maldonado cowboys who had dropped them off over an hour earlier, and they began driving back to the safe house to the north.
—
Secret Service Agent Davis Linklater straddled the President of the United States in the backseat of the Suburban. He ran his hands all over Ryan’s body, under his coat, and along his back. Ryan winced when Linklater felt his right shoulder, and the seasoned special agent saw the President’s pupils lose focus.
“Where do you hurt, Mr. President?”
Ryan looked around him, and turning his head caused a blinding pain in his right shoulder. “Yeah,” he responded.
“Where, sir?”
Ryan looked down at his left wrist, it was swollen. “My wrist.” After a moment he said, “I think I broke my shoulder, too.”
Linklater felt a little more, this time closer to Ryan’s clavicle.
Ryan cried out. “Damn it, Link!”
“Collarbone,” Linklater said.
Ryan nodded distractedly. “Andrea? How is Andrea?”
The agent replied, “I honestly don’t know, Mr. President. We’re going to take care of you, get you to the aircraft, and get home.”
“We can’t leave Andrea and—”
&n
bsp; “There are hundreds of law enforcement and first responders back at the scene. They will take good care of her, I promise.”
“I want you to find out.”
“I will . . . when we are on board Air Force One.”
—
Lead Secret Service Agent Dale Herbers was behind the wheel, and he was damn glad he’d been here in town for a week already. He knew his way back to the airport without even having to look at the GPS, and this was good, because the GPS had been knocked off the windshield and was now nowhere to be found. He was well off the motorcade route, trying to skirt around the heavy traffic that had been created when the route was reopened to traffic after the motorcade had passed.
He raced through intersections at high speed, honking his horn. This vehicle wasn’t armored, but it did have strobing blue lights, and he ran them continuously as he drove.
Herbers made a hard right to move parallel to gridlocked Eje 2 Norte Transval, and immediately he heard about it from Linklater.
“Smooth, Dale! He’s got fractures! Unknown internal!”
“Okay!”
There were four armed men in the car in total; Herbers, two shooters from the counterassault team, and Davis Linklater, one of SWORDSMAN’s protection detail. When they left the ambush site, Linklater and the two shooters had been in back with the President, but one of the CAT agents had climbed up into the front passenger seat, kicking all the other agents in the head with his shiny black combat boots in the process. Now he rode shotgun with his assault rifle over the dashboard scanning left and right, and in the back, the other black-clad agent with a carbine was on his knees next to Linklater and SWORDSMAN, facing the rear window and watching for any threats on their tail.
While Linklater attended to SWORDSMAN, Dale Herbers found himself running comms as well as driving, which wasn’t optimal at all, but he wanted the shooters in the car concentrating on watching for threats.