The Paris Protection (15 page)

“COVER! COVER!” Alexander yelled.

More agents surrounded the president.

The PPD and remaining CAT agents unloaded a storm of bullets at the door, and the crackle and pop of gunfire resounded across the roof.

Then, to the horrified shock of everyone on the roof, a missile from a shoulder-mounted surface-to-air rocket launcher flew out of the blown doorway and hissed across the roof toward the White Hawk.

Immediately, fifty red heat flares shot out the sides of the White Top as the computer’s defensive systems sensed laser lock and automatically dispersed its key antimissile defenses. But the system was designed for higher flight than the bird’s current twenty-foot hover, so many of the hot flares fell onto the rooftop around the agents. The missile hit a flare and exploded only a few dozen feet from the White Hawk, hitting the side with shrapnel and pushing it sideways in the air until it was now hovering out over the edge of the roof and no longer in any position to land.

“RPG!” a number of the agents yelled simultaneously.

Rebecca had seen the missile blaze out of the darkened doorway, but she had no idea how far back into the stairs the man had been when firing it.

She fired more shots in through the doorway but quickly ran out of rounds. Standing on her feet to make herself part of the protective shield of agents crowded around the president—who was still held to the ground—she slapped a fresh magazine into her pistol. Two other CAT agents were laying down intensive fire on the doorway. If anyone had had a hand grenade, they would have thrown it into the doorway, but agents in the PPD and CAT didn’t carry such explosive devices, because of potential risk to the president.

There was a pause in the firefight, and she heard John yell the command to cover-and-dash POTUS back toward their stairwell. The agents already standing and firing scrunched into an even tighter human wall, and those covering the president on the ground remained hunched over as they stood and lifted the president off the roof deck. Then they surged back toward the stairwell, shielding the president with two rows of interlaced agents: those on the outside firing at the opposite door while those on the inside pulled and pushed their tiptoeing protectee across the roof.

A second RPG hissed out of the doorway and across the roof at the White Hawk. And again the loud popping sound rattled in the night as hundreds of red deflector flares shot out from the side of the helicopter. The RPG exploded twenty feet from it, closer than the first rocket had. And again the helicopter was thrown sideways, farther still from the roof. Again some of the flares rained down on the agents, mixing with the snow. Rebecca could feel their heat all around her. Two agents fell to the ground, screaming from their burns. And through everything, she heard the president let out a sharp cry of panic.

“Stairs! Stairs! Stairs!” Alexander was yelling, though she couldn’t see where he was.

The White Hawk’s tail was smoking, but it continued to hover just to the side of the roof, as if refusing to leave the president no matter how much abuse it took. The King Stallion drew in closer. Rebecca saw two more CAT agents sliding down the fast rope toward the roof, when a third rocket shot out of the doorway and cut up into the air, exploding into the King Stallion’s tail. Almost immediately, the giant bird fell into a slow, uncontrolled spin. The two CAT agents on the fast rope were thrown sideways and disappeared over the far edge of the roof. She didn’t hear a scream from either man as they vanished from sight. The King Stallion began to lose altitude as it spun, drifting toward the roof.

“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.”