The Paris Protection

by Bryan Devore

  A staggering explosion eclipsed the gunfire below. Only a few gunshots followed, then complete silence. It was David’s flash grenade, which he wouldn’t have used unless he was out of bullets. But she couldn’t imagine what he might use it for, other than a desperate attempt to stun a few men before the rest swarmed in and killed him. The details didn’t matter, and she didn’t want to visualize the scene anyway. All she knew was that the flash grenade meant that David’s fight had ended. He was gone. She was alone.

  Tears welled in her eyes as she fought to keep climbing. The president was growing unbearably heavy.

  She heard shouts below. Someone shined a flashlight up the tunnel, but she had already pulled the president too far up to be seen from the bottom. Then someone fired a few shots up the shaft. She heard bullets ricochet off the lower ladder and metal ledges of the tight walls below. But since they couldn’t see this far up, these may just have been tentative shots, on the off chance that she and the president were in the shaft.

  After the shots, more yelling echoed off the hard concrete and stone. Then she heard footsteps coming up the ladder.

  She couldn’t climb at anywhere near the speed of the unencumbered men beneath her. Within a minute or two, they would reach her. The only advantage she had was that, for the moment, they didn’t know whether she and the president were in this shaft. As long as she didn’t make much noise, they might not fire any more shots until they got close enough to discover her. With no other options, she slogged on, pulling the president up rung by rung, resting briefly after each exhausting pull but growing steadily weaker.

  With so much at stake, she felt on the verge of panic. The Service had trained her to react instinctively to threats, to keep focused even in the most extreme moments of intense pressure. But those conditioning exercises on the rope lines, and the mock attacks on the training motorcade or the one-third replica of Air Force One at the Beltsville facilities, had never lasted two exhausting hours.

  Suddenly, it dawned on her that the steel rungs felt colder than they had only ten feet lower. And the air was cooler. The cold from the snowy Paris night must be sinking down the shaft toward her. The street must be right there, just above them—ten feet, maybe less. For so long, her eyes had been looking down or at the ladder or studying the president, that for the past half minute of climbing she hadn’t found the extra strength to tilt her head back and look up.

  Now, with the president pinned to the ladder, she turned her head sideways and looked up and through the darkness at the dot of faint blue light above. It was so small and round that it looked as if the opening to the shaft were still a hundred feet above her. She could never make it that far; she simply hadn’t the strength.

  She wanted to scream in anger, to cry and shriek at the unfairness. She wanted to curse the heavens and renounce her God for betraying her . . . and to beg her country’s forgiveness and tell her unconscious president the shame she felt at having failed to protect her.

  But just at that moment, when she had lost hope, she saw a snowflake. And another—big, fluffy flakes. Only a few seconds later, one landed on the tip of her nose—a fleeting pinprick of cold.

  No snowflake could have fallen a hundred feet to reach her. And it couldn’t have glimmered so, like a tiny falling flare. A simple snowflake had shown her that there was a world above to climb to. For what it had revealed was not the shaft’s end a hundred feet above, but the small thumb-size hole in a manhole cover less than ten feet above.

  Rejuvenated by hope and focused by fear, she lifted the president and climbed higher. The pain seemed to leave her muscles as if they, too, now understood the importance of what she was desperately trying to do. The metal was getting very cold. She could now hear sounds from the street: a honking horn, voices chattering, heels clicking across cobblestones. The blue spot of light flickered occasionally as feet shuffled over the hole, kicking puffs of snow down toward her.

  She pinned the president to the ladder and locked her legs to take off some weight. By holding the side of the ladder with the same arm that crossed the president’s chest and under the left armpit, she freed up her other arm and reached up to the manhole, now just a foot above her. She could hear traffic and shoes clomping along the sidewalk above, and people speaking fast in happy French voices as they strolled past.

  The iron disk between her and Paris felt hard, cold, and impossibly heavy. She repositioned her hold on the president to give her a little more leverage with her legs and pushed with everything she had, but the heavy iron disk didn’t budge a millimeter. Perhaps it was frozen to the metal rim that held it, perhaps even bolted down to the street. Or perhaps she was just too weak from the climb to continue holding the president while dangling from a ladder and pushing up against an eighty-pound slab of metal that people were walking on.

  She wanted to cry out for help through the little rectangular hole in the center of the manhole, but she feared giving herself and the president away to the assassins blindly climbing up from below. Even if her cries made it through that little hole and were heard by someone on the noisy street above, they could never lift the heavy cover and pull the president up before her pursuers reached her.

  So instead, without making a sound, she stuck her index and middle fingers through the hole in the cover. Those two fingers were the only hope she had left. Her arms and legs were now quivering from holding the unconscious president. The strain was becoming too much. Somehow, she had pulled the president up this high, but now there was nowhere else she could go. Stopped by a cursed inch-thick metal plate, which in this moment may as well be the marble slab above the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the Champs-Élysées. Tears welled in her eyes as she suppressed the urge to scream out for help and instead fluttered her fingers through the hole, feeling the soft, cold snowflakes on her fingertips.

  She felt her muscles weakening. She didn’t know how much longer she could hold the president. Oh, please, God, she begged, praying that someone on the sidewalk would see her two fingers sticking out of the little hole that so many were walking past.

  Please, God.

  But no one walking past noticed her minute, desperate plea for help. She could hear the clatter of the men below, feel the jarring vibrations, as they charged up the ladder

  Tears welled in her burning eyes. Please, God, just a little help. We’ve sacrificed so much. Just a little help . . .

  She closed her eyes, fighting against the last fading of her strength. No matter how weak she became, she would never let go of the president. She would hold on to the ladder for as long as she could before her strength gave out, but even then, even if she couldn’t hang on to the ladder, she would not let go of the president. If it came to that, she would fall to her death while still clutching her protectee, but she would never let her die alone.

  With her eyes still closed, she wiggled her two freed fingers again in the falling snow of Paris. Then, as her hope faded toward the certainty of death and failure, she half heard the foreign voice of a distant deity above the darkness. An astonished voice . . . then another. And another. Something soft touched her two fingers. Fur, like angora gloves. Then cold skin. She was light-headed and half drifting toward eternal dreams when she opened her heavy eyelids and saw strange wide eyes, peering at her with excited disbelief and fascination through the little hole in the iron slab.

  She put her lips to the hole. “Help me,” she whispered weakly. “Help me.”

  Frantic French voices spoke with excited urgency as a small crowd began to work at moving the manhole cover. Something pushed in through the hole—the end of a tire iron. Then came scraping and tugging at the heavy iron lid, struggling to jar it loose.

  She could no longer focus on the men in the darkness below, crawling up toward her. Her focus was on holding the president tightly to her as random citizens of Paris fought to free the stubborn lid.

  Then it moved a half inch. She felt a surge of anticipation, of hope. The circula
r metal slab rotated slightly. Then it stopped rotating, jostled subtly, and tipped up enough for half a hundred fingers to curl under the dark edge. And her eyes blurred with tears when, together, those fingers slid the heavy manhole cover away to reveal an orange night sky above the city, with fat white snowflakes falling through it. And concerned faces came forward from the crowd that now ringed the opening.

  She shifted her weight to her left foot, which was one rung higher than her right. And with the last of her strength, she gave the president one final lift of a few feet.

  “Take her,” she commanded.

  A dozen arms reached down like tentacles, instinctively feeling for something to grasp. Hands tightened and grabbed the president and lifted her up and away.

  Seeing those gorgeous hands lift the president into the snowy Paris night, Rebecca felt an overwhelming relief. Her protectee was out of the nightmarish tunnels, but not yet out of danger. Rebecca could still hear the men thumping and banging their way up the ladder from below. She had done all she could, and now she hadn’t the strength to climb an inch higher.

  Her chin fell weakly to her slowly heaving chest, and her eyes caught faint movement in the darkness below. The men below her would be here in maybe twenty seconds, maybe sooner. She didn’t have weapons to fight them, or the strength to run from them. Her grip on the ladder was beginning to slip, and she realized that if she fell, she would hit the top man on the ladder. The domino effect would send her and everyone below her down the shaft to the rock floor seventy feet below.

  It was the only way she could protect the president.

  Her consciousness drifted and seemed to float above her body. She had pushed herself to the limit to save the president, and now all she had to do to seal her country’s victory was to let go of the ladder. Her face hardened, and her breathing calmed. Memories flashed through her mind like rapid lightning strikes: watching her father come home from work in his policeman’s uniform when she was a little girl . . . hiking a mountain trail with her three older brothers . . . pulling an exhausted swimmer out of Lake Dillon . . . beholding the Rocky Mountains from the summit of Mount Evans.

  With her feet still on the rung, she let go of the ladder and arched backward.

  Then, just as her spent legs buckled enough for her feet to slip into the open air, something grabbed her. Hearing excited voices, she opened her eyes and saw three men, lying outstretched over the manhole, holding on to her with all six of their lowered arms.

  “Tout va bien, mademoiselle. Nous sommes là,” one said. It’s okay. We are here.

  She tried to focus her half-open eyes.

  The men had caught her as she fell back off the ladder, and now they lifted her closer to the rim of the manhole. As she rose, other arms grasped her and gently lifted her out of the darkness and onto a spread trench coat on the snow-covered sidewalk. Beside her, she saw the president, lying on the other half of the trench coat.

  A man from the gathering crowd seemed to notice the US Secret Service pin on her shirt. Looking at her, then at the unconscious woman beside her, he murmured, “Mon Dieu. Le président américain . . .” His eyes widened. “Le président américain!” he repeated more loudly.

  Others followed his stare and gasped in turn. A wave of shock and disbelief and excitement rippled out from the crowd’s nucleus as, for a moment, all the faces stared in silence at the unconscious American president, lying bruised and bleeding, with frazzled hair, small cuts on her face, and a tourniquet on one arm. She was covered in a film of dirt, which was now growing wet from the soft, white snowflakes.

  Rebecca’s voice broke the silence. “Cover the manhole.”

  Only some in the crowd even acknowledged that she had spoken. Most were still stupefied to find they had hauled the US president out of a hole in the street. No one moved.

  “Cover the manhole,” she said again, louder now, pointing weakly. “Close it! Ferme-le!” she ordered. “Ferme-le!”

  A woman in the crowd must have registered the concern on Rebecca’s face, and repeated the frantic command to a group of men around the manhole. “Ferme-le! Ferme-le!”

  The men, prodded into motion by the woman’s tone, moved as if they, too, could suddenly sense the danger.

  The men spoke to each other with decisiveness and urgency. “Dépêchez-vous! Couvrez le trou! Vite!”

  Rebecca, lying only five feet from the hole, watched the men intently. The cold snow on her face was reviving her. Something about being on the sidewalks of Paris with the president . . . something about the uncontrollable factor of crowd control with no other agents to secure a rope line . . . It went against all her Secret Service training. Something about the men who were still climbing up the shaft with the sole objective of killing her president.

  The men hunched over and dragged the heavy iron lid back toward the round black hole in the street. It grated across the concrete.

  “Quickly!” she yelled. “Vite!”

  As the men reached the manhole, they paused to adjust their grips on the thick iron disk. A careless move could cost a finger. As they fought it back into position, a flash and a loud bang erupted from below, and one of the men fell back onto the street, a piece of his head missing.

  A wave of screams ran through the crowd. Many scurried away, tripping and crawling over each other in panic and fright. Some stepped back from the hole but then hesitated to run as they realized that the American president still lay unconscious on the sidewalk, with only one exhausted, unarmed Secret Service agent to protect her.

  Rebecca had been trained to protect the president alone as well as with a team. In training, a crowd was always viewed as cover for a potential threat, and the crowd itself as a potential threat. So she was surprised when a number of Frenchmen rushed over to her aid and frantically asked her permission to lift and carry the president away.

  She nodded.

  Three men lifted the president. And three others lifted her, because she had been slow to sit up and hadn’t shown them that she had even the strength to stand.

  There couldn’t be much time before the gunmen reached the street level.

  The manhole cover had come so close to sealing the terrorists’ only remaining path to the president. But she had come too far, suffered through too much, witnessed too many sacrifices by others, to fail now.

  With only open sky above her now, the radio transmitter David had given her would work. As the men carried her and the president away, she spoke into the radio. “This is Special Agent Reid! I’m with POTUS! Located along an open street around pedestrians! Use the tracer to locate POTUS! Armed hostiles encroaching! Emergency secure POTUS! All ops! I repeat, POTUS is open and hit, with hostiles lighting up! I need an Em Sec now!”

  Seconds went by, but support was out there somewhere. Then, finally, she heard a voice from the radio.

  “Reid, this is Commander Jacobs. Trace confirmed! Interception in two minutes! Hold on! We’re coming!”

  The tears came again. She had known they would be out there, looking for them, listening.

  But just as she felt relief wash over her, a gunshot cracked through the air. One of the three men carrying her fell and flopped spastically on the cobblestone street. With the man down, the others stopped carrying her. But the three carrying the president kept going, even faster now, until another shot rang out and one of those three fell.

  People ran screaming, stumbling this way and that, scrambling for cover. She had been dropped near where the president now lay, and amid the confusion, she crawled the few feet that separated them. The men who had been carrying them stayed close, some to watch over them, others to check on their two countrymen who lay sprawled on the cobblestones.

  More gunshots begat more screams. Still lying on the ground, Rebecca leaned up against the unconscious president to shield her from bullets as best she could. Looking through the scampering legs from her low vantage point, she saw a half-dozen other legs, moving purposefully
toward her.

  The three men were only seconds from reaching her and killing the president.

  As the feet came closer, she was about to plead to the few men still around her for help. Then something strange happened. Several in the crowd stopped running away. She could scarcely believe her eyes when a dozen unarmed Frenchmen ran screaming at her attackers.

  The three gunmen turned toward the men and fired, and half the Frenchmen fell. But the remaining six charged forward, as if aware that their chosen course was now irreversible. They lunged forward and tackled two of the three gunmen, sliding as they fell onto the snowy sidewalk. But the third attacker seemed faster, stronger, somehow more determined than his comrades. He shot a man dead in mid lunge, then whipped his arm around another man’s neck and pivoted. The courageous Frenchman fell dead on the snow.

  As Rebecca watched, the assassin turned from his kills and strode toward her and the president, not pausing to help his two colleagues who were now being pummeled. Others from the crowd had sneaked forward and sealed the manhole. And others were throwing whatever they had—keys, coins, a shoe—at the last attacker still moving toward her. It was the same tall, swarthy man with shoulder-length hair that she had first seen in the hotel stairway and, later, on the roof. After all that had happened on the rooftop, she had trouble believing he was still alive.

  Rebecca rolled the president onto her side, with her back to the assassin. She heard sirens in the distance—not only the high-low claxons of the Paris police, but also the rampant chirp and scream of the presidential motorcade’s Secret Service team. Help was on its way, but it would be too late.

  She curled her body around the president, protecting every vital part of the woman against a distant shot from this last attacker. And she prayed. She prayed that somehow, the response team from the US Secret Service or the Paris police or the military would arrive in time. She prayed that someone from the crowd would break through and be able to stop the last attacker. And she prayed that no matter what happened in the next half minute, no matter the cost, the president would somehow survive.