The five men ran down the corridor and swung onto the escalators. The escalators had been shut down by security personnel. That was something they hadn't anticipated, not that it mattered. They quickly ran up the two flights, then turned to their left. The stalled escalator was the only form of resistance they met. What Germany had proved in Poland in 1939, what Saddam Hussein had proved in Kuwait in 1990, is that there is no effective defense against a well-planned lightning strike. There's only recovery and then a counterattack. And in this case, neither would be of any use.
Less than ninety seconds after turning off First Avenue, the five men were inside the heart of the Secretariat Building. They ran alongside the tall windows that overlooked the courtyard. The fountain had been shut down to allow clear visbility into the Secretariat windows. Traffic had been stopped, and tourists were being herded onto side streets. Police and security forces were everywhere now.
Seal off the building, contain the problem, Vandal thought. They were so damned predictable.
There were also several guards running toward them. The three men and one woman were wearing bulletproof vests and listening to their radios. They had their guns drawn and were obviously headed toward the Security Council chamber, which was on their right. They had probably been sent to evacuate the delegates in case that was the target.
The young guards never made it. Upon seeing the intruders, they stopped. Then, like any soldier or police officer who had never been in combat, they snapped into the only thing they knew: training mode. From the United Nations security force manual, Vandal knew that in a showdown situation, they would attempt to spread out and present a less concentrated target, take cover if possible, and attempt to disable the enemy.
Georgiev and Sazanka didn't give them the chance. Firing their Uzis from the hip, they sliced across the guards' thighs and dropped them virtually where they stood. Guns and radios clattered on the tile floor. As the wounded guards moaned, the two men walked on, firing a second burst into the head of each one. They stopped a few yards from the bodies. Georgiev picked up two of the radios that had skidded across the floor.
"Come on," Vandal said and hurried on.
Barone and Downer joined him, and the five men continued forward. Now the only things that stood between them and the Security Council chambers were four dead guards and a blood-slicked floor.
NINE
New York, New York Saturday, 7:34 P.M.
All the parents in the correspondents' area heard and felt the crash downstairs. Since there were no windows in the room, they couldn't be sure exactly where or what it was.
Paul Hood's first thought was that there had been an explosion. That was also the conclusion of several parents who wanted to go and make sure the children were all right. But Mr. Dillon walked in then. The guard asked everyone to stay where they were and to remain calm.
"I just went across the hall to the Security Council," Dillon said. "The children are fine. Most of the delegates are also there waiting for the secretary-general. Security personnel are on the way to evacuate the kids, the delegates, and then you folks. If you stay calm, everyone will be fine."
"Do you have any idea what happened?" one of the parents asked.
"I'm not sure," Mr. Dillon said. "It looks like a van ran through the barrier and into the courtyard. I could see it out the window. But no one knows--"
He was interrupted by several pops from below. It sounded like gunfire. Dillon got on his radio.
"Station Freedom-Seven to base," he said.
There was a lot of yelling and noise. Then someone on the other end said, "There's been a breach, Freedom-Seven. Intruders unknown. Go to Everest-Six, Code Red. Do you have that?"
"Everest-Six, Code Red," Dillon said. "I'm on my way." He clicked off the radio and headed toward the door. "I'm going back to the Security Council chambers to wait for the other guards. Please, all of you--just stay here."
"How long until the other guards arrive?" one of the fathers shouted.
"A few minutes," Mr. Dillon replied.
He left. The door shut with a solid click. Except for shouts from somewhere outside the building, everything was quiet.
Suddenly, one of the fathers started toward the door. "I'm going to get my daughter," he said.
Hood stepped between the larger man and the door.
"Don't," Hood said.
"Why?" the man demanded.
"Because the last thing security, medics, and fire personnel need is people getting in the way," Hood said. "Besides, they called this a code red situation. That probably means there's been a major security breach."
"All the more reason to get our kids out!" one of the other fathers said.
"No," Hood replied. "This is international soil. American laws and niceties don't apply. The guards will probably shoot unidentified personnel."
"How do you know that?"
"I worked for a federal intelligence agency after I left Los Angeles," Hood told them. "I've seen people gunned down for being in the wrong place at the wrong time."
The man's wife came over and took his arm. "Charlie, please. Mr. Hood is right. Let the authorities handle this."
"But our daughter is out there," Charlie said.
"So is mine," Hood said. "And getting myself killed isn't going to help her." It hit him just then that Harleigh was out there, and she really was in danger. He looked at Sharon, who was standing to the right, in the corner. He walked over and hugged her.
"Paul," she whispered. "I--I think we should be with Harleigh."
"We will be, soon," he said.
There were footsteps in the hall followed by the distinctive phup-phup-phup of an automatic. The shots were followed by clattering, cries, shouts, and more footsteps. Then the hall was silent.
"Whose side was that?" Charlie asked no one in particular.
Hood didn't know. He left Sharon and walked toward the door. He crouched low in case someone fired and motioned for everyone in the room to stand back, clear of the door. Then he reached up and slowly turned the silver knob. He eased the door open.
There were four bodies lying in the corridor between the correspondents' room and the Security Council. They belonged to UN security personnel. Whoever had shot them was gone, though they'd left bloody tracks in their wake. Tracks that led to the Security Council.
Hood experienced a strange flashback. He felt like Thomas Davies, a firefighter he used to play softball with in Los Angeles. One afternoon, Davies had gotten a call that his own home was burning. The man knew what to do, he knew what was happening, yet he couldn't react.
Hood shut the door and walked toward the desks.
"What is it?" Charlie asked.
Hood didn't answer him. He was trying to get himself moving.
"Dammit, what happened?" Charlie shouted.
Hood said, "Four guards are dead, and whoever shot them has gone into the Security Council chambers."
"My baby," one of the mothers sobbed.
"I'm sure they're all right for now," Hood said.
"Yeah, and you were sure they'd be all right if we stayed in here!" Charlie yelled.
Charlie's rage brought Hood out of his shock. "If you'd been outside, you'd be dead now," Hood said. "Mr. Dillon wouldn't have let you into the chambers, and you'd've been killed with the guards." He took a breath to calm himself. Then he slipped his cell phone from the pocket of his blazer. He punched in a number.
"Who are you calling?" Sharon asked.
Her husband finished entering the number. He looked at her and touched her cheek. "Someone who won't give a shit that this is international territory," he replied. "Someone who can help us."
TEN
Bethesda, Maryland Saturday, 7:46 P.M.
Mike Rodgers was going through a Gary Cooper phase. Not in his real life but in his movie life--though at the moment, the two lives were entirely codependent.
Op-Center's forty-five-year-old former deputy director, now acting director, had never been confused
or insecure. He had his nose broken four times playing college basketball because he saw the basket and went for it, damning the Torpedoes--as well as the Badgers, the Ironmen, the Thrashers, and the other teams he played. When he'd served two tours of duty in Vietnam and commanded a mechanized brigade in the Gulf War, he was given objectives and had met them all. Every damn one of them. On his first mission with Striker, to North Korea, he'd kept a fanatical officer from nuking Japan. When he returned from Vietnam, he'd even found time to get a Ph.D. in world history. But now--
It wasn't just Paul Hood resigning that depressed him, though that was part of the problem. It was ironic. Two and a half years ago, Rodgers had found it difficult to report to the man--a civilian who had been attending fund-raisers with movie stars while Rodgers was chasing Iraq out of Kuwait. But Hood had proven himself a steady, politically savvy manager. Rodgers was going to miss the man and his leadership.
Dressed in a loose-fitting gray sweat suit and Nikes, Rodgers shifted carefully on the leather sofa. He slumped back slowly. Just two weeks before, he'd been captured by terrorists in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. The second- and third-degree burns he'd suffered during torture were still not completely healed. Neither were the internal wounds.
Rodgers's gaze had wandered. He looked back at the TV, profound sadness in his light brown eyes. He was watching Vera Cruz, one of Cooper's last films. He was playing a former Civil War officer who went south of the border to work as a mercenary and ended up embracing the cause of local revolutionaries. Strength, dignity, and honor--that was Coop.
That used to be Mike Rodgers, he reflected sadly.
He'd lost more than some flesh and his freedom in Lebanon. Being strung up in a cave and burned with a blowtorch had cost him his confidence. And not because he'd been afraid to die. He believed passionately in the Viking code, that the process of death began with the moment of birth, and that death in combat was the most honorable way of reaching one's inevitable end. But he was nearly denied that. Extreme pain, like a high fever, robs the mind of orderliness. The calm and collected torturer becomes the voice of reason and tells the mind where to touch down. And Rodgers was perilously close to that point, to telling the terrorists how to operate the Regional Op-Center they'd captured.
That's why Rodgers needed Gary Cooper. Not to heal his soul--he didn't think that was possible. He'd seen his breaking point, and he could never lose that knowledge, that awareness of his own limitations. It reminded him of the first time he twisted his ankle playing basketball and it didn't heal overnight. The sense of invulnerability was gone forever.
A broken spirit was worse.
What Mike Rodgers needed now was to try to prop up the confidence his captors had taken from him. Fortify himself enough to run Op-Center until the president decided on a replacement for Paul Hood. Then he could make decisions about his own future.
Rodgers looked back at the TV screen. Movies had always been a haven for him, a source of nourishment. When his alcoholic father used to punch the hell out of him--not just hit but punch, with his Yale class ring--young Mike Rodgers would get on his bicycle, go to the local movie theater, pay his twenty-five cents, and crawl into a Western or war film or historical epic. Over the years, he modeled his morality, his life, his career after the characters played by John Wayne and Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster.
He couldn't remember a time when any of them came close to breaking under torture, though. He felt very alone.
Coop had just rescued a Mexican girl who was being abused by renegade soldiers when the cordless phone rang. Rodgers picked it up.
"Hello?"
"Mike, thank God you're in--"
"Paul?"
"Yeah. Listen," Hood said. "I'm inside the United Nations Correspondents' room across from the Security Council chambers. Four guards have just been gunned down in the corridor."
Rodgers sat up. "By whom?"
"I don't know," Hood said. "But it looks like the people who did it went inside."
"Where's Harleigh?" Rodgers asked.
"She's in there," Hood said. "Most of the members of the Security Council and the entire string ensemble were in the chambers."
Rodgers grabbed the remote, switched off the DVD, and turned on CNN. Reporters were live at the United Nations. It didn't sound as if they knew much about what was going on.
"Mike, you know what the security setup is here," Hood said. "If this is a multinational hostage situation, depending on who the perpetrators are, the UN could argue about jurisdiction for hours before they even address the issue of getting the people out."
"Understood," Rodgers said. "I'll call Bob and put him on this. Are you on your cell phone?"
"Yes."
"Keep me apprised when you can," Rodgers said.
"All right," Hood replied. "Mike--"
"Paul, we're going to take care of this," Rodgers assured him. "You know there's usually some kind of cooling-down period immediately after a takeover. Demands stated, attempts to negotiate. We won't waste any of that time. You and Sharon just have to try and stay calm."
Hood thanked him and hung up. Rodgers turned up the volume on the TV, listening as he rose slowly. The newscaster had no idea who had driven the van or why they'd attacked the United Nations. There had been no official announcement, and no communication from the five people who'd apparently gone into the Security Council chambers.
Rodgers shut off the television. While the general headed to his bedroom to dress, he punched in Bob Herbert's mobile phone number. Op-Center's intelligence chief was at dinner with Andrea Fortelni, a deputy assistant secretary of state. Herbert hadn't dated much in the years since his wife was killed in Beirut, but he was a chronic intel collector. Foreign governments, his own government, it didn't matter. As in the Japanese movie Rashomon--which was the only thing besides sushi and The Seven Samurai that Rodgers enjoyed from Japan--there was rarely any truth in government affairs. Just different perspectives. And professional that Herbert was, he liked having as many perspectives as possible.
Herbert was also a man who was devoted to his friends and coworkers. When Rodgers called to tell him what had happened, Herbert said he'd be at Op-Center within the half hour. Rodgers told him to have Matt Stoll come in as well. They might need to get into UN computers, and Matt was a peerless hacker. Meanwhile, Rodgers said that he'd call Striker and put them on yellow alert, in case they were needed. Along with the rest of Op-Center, the elite, twenty-one-person rapid-deployment force was based at the FBI Academy in Quantico. They could get to the United Nations in well under an hour if necessary.
Rodgers hoped the precautions would not be necessary. Unfortunately, terrorists who started out with murder had nothing to lose by killing again. Besides, for nearly half a century, terrorism had proven impervious to conciliatory, United Nations-style diplomacy.
Hope, he thought bitterly. What was it some play-wright or scholar had once written? That hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent.
Rodgers finished dressing, then hurried into the fading light and climbed into his car. His own concerns were forgotten as he headed south along the George Washington Memorial Parkway to Op-Center.
To help rescue a girl from renegades.
ELEVEN
Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland Saturday, 8:37 P.M.
Forty years ago, at the peak of the Cold War, the nondescript, two-story building in the northeast corner of Andrews Air Force Base was a ready room. It was the staging area for elite flight crews known as the Ravens. In the event of a nuclear attack, it would have been the job of the Ravens to evacuate key government and military officials from Washington, D.C., and relocate them in an underground facility in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
But the ivory-colored building was not a monument to another era. There were gardens in the dirt patches where soldiers used to drill, and the seventy-eight people who worked here were not all in uniform.
They were handpicked tacticians, generals, diplom
ats, intellience analysts, computer specialists, psychologists, reconnaissance experts, environmentalists, attorneys, and press liaisons who worked for the National Crisis Management Center.
After a two-year tooling-up period overseen by interim director Bob Herbert, the former ready room became a high-tech Operations Center designed to interface with and assist the White House, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Interpol, and numerous foreign intelligence agencies in the management of domestic and international crises. However, after single-handedly defusing the crises in North Korea and Russia, Op-Center proved itself uniquely qualified to monitor, initiate, or manage operations worldwide.
All of that had happened during Paul Hood's watch.
General Mike Rodgers stopped his Jeep at the security gate. An Air Force guard stepped from the booth. Though Rodgers was not in uniform, the young sergeant saluted and raised the iron bar. Rodgers drove through.
Although it was Paul Hood who had run the show, Rodgers had been a hands-on participant in every decision and in several of the military actions. He was eager to handle the crisis at hand, especially if they could work this in the way he knew best: independently and covertly.
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