by Bryan Devore
“Stairs! Stairs! Stairs!” Alexander yelled again.
At that moment, Rebecca saw the attackers emerge from the far doorway. They screamed like savages, ready to die killing the president, just as the PPD agents were ready to die protecting her. Because there were already so many agents in the human sphere surrounding the president, Rebecca’s training told her to focus on hitting the attackers as hard as she could. Again she stopped running and started firing. Half the agents still on the roof did the same, and several attackers fell. But as accurate as the PPD agents were with their pistols, the attackers had automatic weapons. All the CAT agents had been killed, and they were the only Secret Service people carrying assault rifles. The PPD agents had only their semiautomatic pistols. And because of this disparity in firepower, many of those agents now fell.
Rebecca fired at the attackers even as the King Stallion came closer to the roof in a flat, whirling spin. Smoke now blended with the snow flurries. She aimed and fired, aimed and fired, dropping a target with each shot. She knew it was only by luck or God’s grace that she hadn’t been hit in the storm of bullets flying past her.
While firing on the attackers, again she saw the man with shoulder-length hair she had seen in the stairwell. For a split second, their eyes met, and she thought that she saw in his expression a sense of surprise and recognition. She aimed at him and fired several rounds. Though she wasn’t the best shot in the Service, she was good enough, and she had him in her sights, just as she had the last two men, who were now dead. But to her amazement, he ducked, like a fighter slipping a punch, and slid away from her sights just before she pulled the trigger, as if he had known the precise moment she would fire and where the bullet would go. It was an impossible, unnatural movement, with a speed and grace she had never seen before.
She steadied herself to fire again, but she had lost him in the melee. Just then something hard pushed into her from the side, grabbing her, almost pulling her toward the stairwell. Looking up, she saw David, herding her off the roof as he fired at the attackers with his free hand.
“Back inside!” he yelled over the gunfire and the roar of the incoming helicopter.
In that instant, she realized that only ten to twenty seconds had elapsed since the King Stallion was hit—five to ten seconds since POTUS was rushed off the roof and back into the stairwell. During those chaotic seconds, she had lost all sense of time. Everything had happened in slow motion. Only David, pulling her away from the rooftop bloodbath, had snapped her mind back into the reality of the moment.
The falling King Stallion was making a louder, much higher-pitched sound now as its pilots pushed the controls to their limits in the desperate attempt to avoid crashing on the roof.
“The other men!” she yelled at David, who was still pulling her toward the door.
“No time!”
He fired three shots, killing two more terrorists, before pulling her in tight to his chest as they both fell through the open stairwell doorway. A half second later, the King Stallion crashed onto the rooftop. It made a grinding metallic scream when it hit, followed by a sharp pop and a whump! as the fuel tanks exploded, spreading a marsh of flames across the rooftop.
After falling into the landing at the top of the stairwell, Rebecca pushed herself up to her knees, head still lowered.
She heard David ask, “Are you okay?”
“Where’s POTUS?” she replied.
She felt his hands reach under her arms and across her chest to help lift her to her feet. Once on her feet, she looked back around the doorjamb, out at the roof. The King Stallion was in flames, along with nearly the entire roof. The White Hawk was smoking and hovering farther away than before. She didn’t know its flying condition, but it didn’t look good. Bodies of agents and terrorists were strewn all over the rooftop. Nothing moved except for the snow and the low blue and yellow flames from the helicopter crash.
“Where’s POTUS?” she asked again. She pointed to her wrist and made a crossing motion to let him know that her comms were dead.
“Twenty-fourth floor,” he said, touching his earpiece to listen. “Four floors below us, moving down fast.”
“To where? There’s fires on the ground floor and climbing up.”
“Well, POTUS can’t stay here!” David yelled. “The roof’s an inferno like the ground floor. The White Top isn’t safe anymore, and it would be impossible for an exec lift anyway.”
“They’ll never make it down the stairway!” she yelled. “I ran into them on the other stairway heading up. How long until you think they control both stairwells? POTUS will be trapped!” Stepping forward, she grabbed his wrist and brought it up. “This is Reid to Alexander! Do you copy?”
She watched David for any expression indicating he had heard a response from John in his earpiece. After a few seconds, he shook his head.
“Alexander! Do you copy?” she repeated. “Do not take Firefly down stairwell!”
“He’s not replying,” David said. “Command center is down. Our frequency may have been compromised.”
“Oh, God,” she said, taking a second to consider all the factors playing out simultaneously. “We’ve lost control of the lower floors. He’ll never get her out that way.”
“There’s no choice now. He’s gonna try.”
“Come on!” she said. “Before it’s too late!”
She turned and started down the stairs as fast as she could go. And soon she heard David’s quick but heavier footfalls right behind her.
33
JOHN ALEXANDER RACED DOWN THE stairs with President Clarke, with the half-dozen remaining agents packed around her. Her short, straight hair hung mussed and wet from melting snow, and two buttons on her suit jacket had been ripped away, showing more of her blue dress blouse. While pulling her away from the White Hawk’s antimissile flares and getting her off the rooftop, the team had been obliged to yank her around some. Her darkened eye sockets and wide-eyed gaze revealed to him how shaken she was, and he worried about shock setting in. Just when he thought they might get her to safety, the rooftop had turned into a holocaust. And now, as a thunderous explosion rocked and rattled the area somewhere above them, it was clear that they had been lucky even to get her back inside the building.
Colonel Marks, the military aide, was still with them, carrying the football. But the president’s physician was dead. John couldn’t believe that only six other agents had survived the chaos on the rooftop. They had lost the initiative. He could taste a thin flavor of smoke from the fire, which by now must have taken over most of the lower floors. As a former marine and former CAT agent, he would have literally run through fire for his country—but now, as special agent in charge of the PPD, his only responsibility was to keep the president as far from threats as possible.
The hotel’s roof had just become one of the most dangerous places in the building. He had no idea how the attackers had reached it so fast—or how they had even anticipated a rushed exec lift with Marine One. In addition to investigation-and-prevention tactics, the Secret Service’s training focused on the reality that most assassination attempts occurred in less than five seconds from start to finish. A single gunshot, a stabbing, an explosive device. Assassination attempts that lasted this long—ten minutes since the Crash POTUS alert—were basically unheard of. Many in the PPD were dead. Most of the CAT agents were separated from POTUS by the fire. And the blazing rooftop prevented them from getting POTUS onto Marine One. It was the ultimate nightmare scenario: no clear escape route and no safe zone in which to secure POTUS. The protective bubble was small and thin. With only a handful of agents, he had to assume they were now heavily outnumbered—something almost unthinkable in the meticulous planning and preparations conducted by the Secret Service.
It seemed as if his only course of action was to risk taking her down the stairway—toward attackers and the fire. The path terrified him, but he saw no other options.
But before he could go any farther
, he needed to check that President Clarke hadn’t been hurt during the rooftop attack. He ordered everyone to stop the descent. Pointing for the six PPD agents to cover any threats above or below them in the stairwell, he said, “Are you okay, ma’am? Are you hurt anywhere?”
“I’m okay,” she said. Her voice quavered, and her hair was awry and her face streaked with soot, but she appeared unharmed.
“You didn’t get burned?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re not bleeding?”
“No.”
He quickly looked at her head and neck and felt around her sides and stomach and back for any trace of bleeding that she may not have registered. It was risky pausing the escape for even ten seconds, but after what they had just been through, he had to check her before continuing. Everyone on the roof was likely dead, and they now had no way out without getting closer to the ground-level attackers and the fire.
After verifying that she had sustained no serious injuries, he pointed to the three agents a few steps up, indicating that they would continue evacuating the president down the remaining thirteen flights, toward the south-side exit, where they might find a way to get her near the limousine. If they could just get to the part of the first floor that wasn’t being overrun by the attackers or the fire, then they could get support from CAT and the emergency response team, giving them at least a slight chance for a Stagecoach evac.
Eight minutes had elapsed since the command center stopped communicating with the entire protection team over the encrypted channel. This gave John the horrible feeling that the on-site command center had been compromised. The team should have reestablished communications by now.
A female voice yelled down at him, “John! Wait!”
Spinning to train his weapon on the unseen voice more than a flight above them, he yelled, “White knight!”
“Red knight!” the voice yelled down. “Red knight! Agents Reid and Stone!”
Rebecca and David! They had survived the rooftop attack. Relieved at having two of his best young agents back with the president, he said, “We’re taking her all the way down the stairs. A two-agent rotating scout sweep of each floor’s doorway in front of POTUS as we descend. Everyone else forms a tight-package protective bubble. If we’re lucky, we can make it to Stagecoach. But we have to go now.”
“You’re taking her down?” Rebecca said.
“The rooftop is in flames,” John said. “The White Top is damaged and can’t do the exec lift. Backup White Tops can’t be here for almost fifteen minutes, and we can’t wait that long—especially if the roof keeps burning and the attackers keep climbing.”
“But you’re taking her down? Toward the hostiles and the fire?”
“We don’t have a choice,” John said. “And we don’t have time!” He motioned for the other agents to enclose the president and start their final rush toward whatever chaos awaited below.
“Wait!” Rebecca yelled. “There’s another way!”
“Where?”
“The cargo lift.”
He shook his head. “All the elevators would have automatically gone to the first floor when the fire alarm went off.”
“No,” she said, “not so. The advance team shut down the cargo lift a few hours before the president arrived in Paris,” she said. “We wanted to minimize entrance points to the top floors, so we locked it and limited access to the other service elevators.”
“Tell me you froze it up here,” John said.
“No, but we did lock it on the bottom level. Not on the first floor, like the other elevators after the fire alarm. It’s on sublevel four—locked manually, so the fire alarm won’t have moved it.”
“Can we call it up here?”
“No, but we can climb down the shaft. Nothing will block our way until we reach it in the basement. From there, we can find a way out with the president. The fire’s going to move up faster than it moves down. And the attackers will move up with it. We’ve already seen that from the men on the rooftop. They must have been planning to trap us with the fire and then hunt down the president. They wouldn’t know about our locking down the cargo lift. They would never expect us to make it past them, unseen, into the basement levels. From there, we can find an exit from the hotel.”
“We can’t risk taking the president down a high ladder on the side of an elevator shaft,” John said.
“Can we risk taking her through a firefight?” Rebecca asked. “We obviously can’t keep track of all their men. The fire’s spreading. The elevator shaft is concrete and will shield us from it as well as any place in this building. It’s our only way out that might avoid the attackers and the fire.”
“She could fall,” John said. “One slip, and it’s all over.”
“I can do it,” the president said.
They both turned and gave her an appraising look.
“Ma’am, it will be dark,” John said. “It could be slippery, the metal ladder could heat up if the fire is close on any of the floors, and smoke could come into the shaft and blind us and choke us before we get halfway down.”
“Right now I feel like we’re playing into the terrorists’ hands,” President Clarke said. “Let’s do something they don’t expect. Let’s take back the initiative.”
John glanced at the faces around him. From David to Rebecca, to Colonel Marks with the football, to the other six PPD agents, and finally to President Clarke. He saw strength and determination in all of them.
They were just below the fourteenth-floor stairwell door, and the two agents providing the scouting motioned that it was clear. Since the president was only a few steps up, he didn’t have the agents lift her.
“This way, ma’am,” he said, motioning for the scout agents to hold open the hallway door. Then he gestured for Rebecca to lead the way onto the floor, with David and another agent, and take them to the cargo elevator shaft.
As they raced down the hallway, the other agents formed a tight cluster around the president. John made sure he was always directly to her right so that, if necessary, he could pull her to the ground with his left hand and fire his P229 with his right. He even asked the military aide to run behind them and do whatever he could to act as a human shield for the president if they should come under attack from the rear.
Everyone in the group seemed prepared to make whatever sacrifice necessary to protect the president. John only prayed that he had made the right decision on how to get the president to safety.
34
MAXIMILIAN HAD HEARD THE SOUND of gunfire over the radio. While simultaneously coordinating the efforts of his men on the ground floor and his small band of fighters flanking down the south stairwell to surround the remaining Secret Service agents, he had also been monitoring Kazim’s critical attack on the roof. If the president escaped on Marine One, all his plans would collapse.
He had radioed to his men to stay away from the windows for the past five minutes—except for the two small groups he had sent to the east and west sides on the seventh floor. He had instructed them to fire their automatic weapons frequently near the windows at various levels of the building. Hannibal was one of the first military generals in history to use deception as a key strategy in war, and it had been a powerful tactic against the Roman army. And like Hannibal, Maximilian knew how the enemy would respond to his maneuvers and deceptions. And part of his deception was to have these half-dozen men fire enough shots near the windows in the middle floors to give outside observers the impression of hundreds more men than he actually had in the building. By placing these men in sections where there was currently no fighting, he could also add another layer of confusion to any French or US emergency response teams trying to evaluate the situation from outside. It was a ruse inspired by Hannibal, who once tied torches to the horns of a herd of cattle and released them down a hill at night to mislead his distant enemy as his army marched another direction in darkness.
He had seen two
helicopters approach from the distance. Kazim had radioed that he was near the rooftop and that he assumed the president was there, too, waiting for her military lift while protected by whatever Secret Service agents surrounded her. Maximilian had watched as those two enormous helicopters emerged through the snow flurries and slowed somewhere above the rooftop, out of his line of sight from the third-floor window. He had warned everyone to stay away from the windows; American countersnipers would have been positioned on surrounding rooftops before the night even began, and now their numbers had surely multiplied.
But he wanted to see where the helicopters hovered.
Creeping along the edge of the window, he stayed close to the wall and tried to look up at the best angle he could manage. He could hear the massive helicopters a few hundred feet above him, one of them the president’s Marine One, and the other a powerful war bird: a King Stallion or a Sea Queen, or perhaps even a deadly Apache.
It had been impossible to hear any gunfire from the rooftop except over the radio, because of all the other shots going off throughout the building. But even though Maximilian couldn’t hear the small-arms fire on the roof, he heard the RPGs exploding. One, then two, and then a third. Sparks flew past the window, looking like a hundred miniature flares. Then flames and large pieces of metal followed the flares. At least one helicopter must have been hit. Then another, bigger explosion sounded, and he thought he felt a shiver run through the building. He wasn’t even sure he felt it—the sound was immense, confusing him momentarily because he hadn’t expected anything big to hit the building.
