The Paris Protection (35 page)

But it didn’t seem to matter how many men he killed. More kept coming.

The onslaught came faster now, as if each new man rushing into the chamber recognized the urgency required to avoid adding himself to the growing pile of corpses by the entrance. And each man was getting closer before dying.

Then a bullet hit David’s left shoulder and knocked him back against the ground. His left arm no longer worked, and it hurt like hell. Sitting halfway up, he emptied the magazine, and more attackers went down, including the one who had shot him. And on they came. Unable to use his left arm, he released the empty magazine, set the pistol down, and reached for a fresh magazine. But with more men rushing around the corner, he had no time to reload. So he fell to his back, grabbed up the submachine gun beside him, and held the trigger, ripping the air with a jackhammer sound and hitting two more men before killing a third, who came at him from only ten feet away. Then it, too, clicked empty.

Sitting up, he put Rebecca’s loaded pistol and the last magazine in his lap and, leaving his empty gun, scooted backward along the rock floor, toward the far wall of the ancient chamber. He was halfway there when two more men burst into the chamber. Forced to stop, he fired, killing both, but not before a bullet hit him in the side. Wheezing and blinking, he was determined to give Rebecca as much extra time as he could before he died.

He fired a few more shots at the next two men rushing through the opening, but then the pistol clicked empty. Ejecting the magazine, he wedged the gun upside down between his knees to slap in the last magazine. It slid into place as four more men rushed around the corner, firing. A bullet clipped his ear, another sliced into the side of his neck, and another shattered his left collarbone. Wincing from the sudden confusion of pain all over his body, he fell back to the dirt. The room felt smaller and louder as more men rushed in. Unable to look up and see them right away, he blindly fired the last magazine toward the sound.

He knew he had little time left. He had done everything possible to delay the men’s entrance into the room, to give Rebecca more time to get the president to safety. He tried to squeeze the trigger again, but it wouldn’t budge. The action was open, ready to chamber a round that he didn’t have. All his magazines were empty. He was finished.

A half-dozen men were now rushing into the room, coming at him like a horde of barbarians, eager to tear him to pieces. They were close now. He had only seconds left. 

Then Rebecca’s last words before leaving him here seemed to echo in his ears: “
You find a way to stay alive, you hear me?
” 

And so, as the enemy force came on, their bullets pinging and whining off the rock floor and ceiling and the weak wall right behind him, David dropped the empty gun, pulled the flash grenade off his belt, and flicked it against the bullet-pocked wall behind him. Wrapping his good arm over his head to cover his right ear with the shoulder, and his left ear with his fingertip, he pushed with his good leg and rolled toward the wall just before the device went off.

A dazzling flash and deafening explosion blasted through the chamber. The weak wall beside him, its mortar pierced by bullets and eroded over the centuries, cracked and buckled and fell in on David.

As the stones from the wall fell, burying him in rubble, his world went from brighter than the sun to black silence.

His last thought, his last prayer, was that he had given Rebecca enough time.

72

WHEN THE SHOOTING STARTED IN the darkness far below, Rebecca never paused. By turns pushing and hauling her unconscious burden up the ladder, she hooked one leg between the president’s legs and onto a lower rung to momentarily take the weight off her right arm. After taking a few deep breaths to gather her strength, she reached up with her left hand, grabbed the next rung, tightened her grip across the president’s chest and underarm, and pulled up with her right arm while pushing up with her right knee.

Using this technique, she managed to lift the president up the ladder another two feet, just as she had done for perhaps forty feet so far. And as with each of the past dozen lifts, this one, too, ended with her desperately pinning the president to the ladder so she could grab a few seconds’ respite. In her exhaustion, her head jerked forward and her headlamp hit the steel rung and went out. She tried to turn it back on, but it was useless. Now she was in utter darkness, her muscles weakening. Even holding the president against the ladder was draining what little strength she had left. She was terrified of how this might end.

The sound of gunfire filled the vertical shaft. It sounded as though David was giving them hell, but she knew there were too many for him to hold off very long. The ladder rose higher into seemingly infinite darkness. Thoughts of hopelessness wormed their way into her mind, and she fought them off. The streets of Paris were somewhere up there, just beyond her sight.

So she climbed on.

There was no part of her body that didn’t scream in pain. She let out a whimper but immediately gathered her thoughts to move just one more rung upward. And then one more. 

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 circular 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.