The Last Jihad (6 page)

“
Go, go, go,
” he screamed.

Marine Two lifted off into a formation with the three Apache helicopter gun ships hovering overhead, and in a moment they were gone. From the instant Agent Sinclair’s phone had first rung with news of the Code Red, less than three minutes had elapsed.

Now the whole world was about to know almost as much as he did.

Back at the Secret Service command center in Washington, Director Bud Norris saw the CNN feed appear on one of five large-screen video monitors before him and slammed his fist down on the console beside him.

Norris held two phones to his head. One was a secure line to the FBI’s operations center. It was patched through to Director Scott Harris’s bulletproof Chevy Tahoe, racing him back to his office at the Robert F. Kennedy building on E Street, Northwest. The other was an encrypted satellite link to Secret Service Special Agent Jackie Sanchez on the scene in Denver, now in command of the rescue operation and trying desperately to break into the badly mangled, inverted limousine.

As Norris quickly briefed Harris, his eyes fixed on another of the large-screen video monitors before him. This brought him images neither CNN nor anyone else had—a live feed from the Apache helicopter over the crash site. He could see the image of a specially designed “jaws of life” saw now piercing the bulletproof door of Stagecoach. He could see heavily armed agents surrounding the vehicle. He could see firefighters battling the blazing G4. And he could see Sanchez directing the action.

“Jackie,” Norris barked.

“Yes, sir,” Sanchez replied immediately.

“How much longer?”

“Almost there, sir. Stand by.”

His briefcase beeped.

He was getting an email. Bennett grabbed his leather briefcase and fished out his BlackBerry. A breaking news alert from AP. He scrolled down rapidly. “MacPherson Motorcade Attacked by Kamikaze.” Details were sketchy.

A few minutes later, another beep. An update. The Secret Service had just evacuated the vice president from the Naval Observatory. The Speaker of the House had just been awakened by his security detail in Chicago, evacuated in an Air Force helicopter and was now being taken to an undisclosed military base. Cabinet members were being taken to secure, undisclosed locations as a “precaution against any possible further attacks,” according to an unnamed U.S. Secret Service official.

Another beep. Another update. CNN was now reporting the Secret Service was “taking bodies out of the president’s limousine.”

Bodies? Bennett’s throat burned. He suddenly felt nauseated.

“Bob, I’ve got a feeding frenzy here.”

Press secretary Chuck Murray pressed his earpiece closer and stepped off Press Bus #1 for a moment—away from the carnivores within—desperate for something real, something solid from White House chief of staff Bob Corsetti. But with the wind, the choppers and the sirens of emergency vehicles arriving from every direction, he could barely hear a thing.

“What about the president? What? Bob, we don’t have a few minutes. I’ve got a bus full of cell phones about to report he might be dead…I know what he’s saying…I was right next to him…what?…well, I’m seeing the exact same thing…two…what?…yes—two bodies so far…here comes the third right now…who?…OK, fine, I’ll talk to him.”

Murray suddenly realized he’d left his coat on the bus. Drenched with sweat, he was now shivering uncontrollably.

“Hello? Who’s this? Agent Parker, this is Chuck Murray. What’ve we got? I need to know right now—is he dead or alive?”

Bennett’s BlackBerry beeped again—email from London.

“jon—just heard the news…watching cnn…what do you know?…I keep calling your cell phone but can’t get through…call me—erin.”

Erin McCoy was Global Strategix’s international communications director, based in London.

At thirty-one, she was North Carolina-born and raised and the great-granddaughter of a former U.S. Secretary of State, a fact she took pride in and liked to remind Bennett of every now and then. A UNC Chapel Hill grad in economics with an MBA from Wharton, she was feisty, gorgeous, yet also inexplicably single, a fact Bennett liked to remind her of every now and then.

Not that she had much time to date, much less marry. These days she was working around the clock on the Israeli Medexco deal and had fast become one of the most valuable members of Bennett’s team. He punched one button on his phone, and got her on the first ring.

“McCoy.”

“Erin, it’s Jon.”

“You watching this?”

“No—I’m with Roni on the way to the airport. What’ve you got?”

“Not much. Just what’s on TV. We can’t get anybody back in Denver and no one in New York knows anything. You talked to Stu, yet?”

“Just for a moment.”

“And?”

Bennett paused. Should he tell her?

“And it’s bad—the president may be dead.”

Not that she wasn’t already fearing the worst, but Bennett’s words seemed to knock the breath out of her. Silence. Then, suddenly, she reengaged.

“Wait—hold on.”

“What?”

“Fox has pictures—hold on…”

Bennett had been to McCoy’s penthouse office several times and nicknamed it NORAD. High atop London, overlooking the Thames and Big Ben, McCoy and her team had created a high-tech financial war room, wired up with the world’s state-of-the-art communications equipment—from shortwave radios and satellite dishes to high-speed Internet access and fiber optic cables capable of transmitting thirty million phone calls across the Atlantic in a single second.

All of it allowed McCoy and her team to receive instantaneous reports from news services, financial markets, GSX staff, and other sources all over the planet. “Know well the condition of thy flocks,” read the tiny ceramic plaque beside her phones and computer and always-stocked jar of lollypops, all neatly arranged on her massive cherry desk, a desk once used by Churchill when he was a parliamentary backbencher and self-designated rabble-rouser.

Bennett could picture McCoy and her staff, piled into her office in the wee hours of the British morning, simultaneously watching ten wall-mounted TV screens and working the phones.

“Erin? What’ve you got?”

“All right…hold on…uh…they’re zooming in…come on, guys, get it in focus…wait…oh…ohGod…ohGod…”

“What? Erin, what is it?”

Norris didn’t want the world to see anything, least of all these pictures.

He guessed a Fox cameraman had somehow climbed atop his satellite truck, or somehow scrambled atop one of the press buses. Either way, using a high-powered zoom lens, the image he was capturing and beaming to the entire world was now zeroed in on the newly created hole in the side of Stagecoach.

Secret Service agents could be seen beginning to carefully lift another lifeless body—strapped to a wooden stretcher—out of the car. Billowing smoke occasionally obscured the image. But no doubt, this was powerful television—and thus far, an exclusive.

“Sanchez—stop everything—I repeat stop your evacuation
IMMEDIATELY
.”

Norris was screaming into his phone. Stunned, everyone in the Secret Service op center stared at him in horror.

“Nikon One, Nikon One, this is Home Plate—land in front of Stagecoach now. Get on the ground—now. Go, go, go—get on the ground, now.”

Around the world, viewers suddenly found the gripping Fox and Sky News image completely obscured by a rapidly descending Denver police helicopter. The cameraman zoomed out, but to no avail. No camera, no reporter, no one could now see what was unfolding. No one except Bud Norris and his colleagues at the White House, Pentagon, FBI and CIA, that is. The secure images streaming in from the front-mounted video camera on the Apache helicopter still hovering above the scene once again provided them exclusive command of the situation.

Norris finally gave the word and the extraction effort resumed, quickly but carefully. More agents with M-16s moved in to surround the rescue crew. Another ambulance now backed carefully into position, along with Dodgeball, flanked by plainclothes agents brandishing Uzis.

“Sanchez, what’ve you got?”

“Thomas and Stevens are bad,” she told him, referring to Gambit’s two “body men,” the two agents directly assigned to protecting the president’s life. “Both unconscious, massive internal bleeding. We’re about to medivac them out.”

Norris’s stomach tightened.

“Burdett and Rodriquez just came out. Burdett’s unconscious, but stable. Rodriguez is a mess sir, very bad,” Sanchez relayed, referring to Terry Burdett, the president’s personal assistant and Tommy Rodriguez, the limousine driver.

Norris found himself getting angry. Yes, he cared about his own men. Yes, he cared about the president’s staff. But none were his prime concern right now.

“Sanchez, what about Gambit?”

“We’ll know in a moment, sir.”

Marine Two dropped fast and hard onto the South Lawn of the White House.

On the way down, the vice president—code-named Checkmate by his protective detail—could see batteries of surface-to-air missiles out of their casings and ready for action on the roof of the White House and the OEOB. He could also see Secret Service SWAT teams in black battle gear swarming the grounds.

The instant the chopper touched ground, a bulletproof black Suburban raced to its side, the chopper door flew open and Checkmate was thrown into one of the Suburban’s side doors. Agents piled in on top of him and the Suburban peeled out, heading for the Oval Office.

There, a platoon of agents surrounded the vehicle, Uzis drawn. They dragged Checkmate through the Oval Office, down the main hallway of the West Wing, through the doors of a secure stairway, down two flights of stairs, through a password-protected doorway guarded by two armed Marines, down a long corridor and into the PEOC, the nuclear blast-proof Presidential Emergency Operations Center.

Already waiting for him were National Security Advisor Marsha Kirkpatrick, Secretary of State Tucker Paine, and their top aides. All had just landed minutes earlier at Andrews Air Force base from a trip to Moscow. When their security details got the word of the mushrooming crisis, they immediately rushed the high-level diplomatic team to the White House.

The massive, three-foot-thick steel vault door slammed shut behind them. Only then did Kroll send out the word through his wrist-mounted microphone: “Checkmate is secure. I repeat—Checkmate is secure.”

“Director, it’s Mr. Norris on line one.”

By 3:27
A.M.
eastern, FBI Director Scott Harris was back in his seventh-floor executive suite, joined by top aides crackling with nervous energy.

“Bud, it’s Scott. How’s Gambit?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll know more in a minute. What’ve you got?”

“Full metal jacket. We’ve lit up our whole network. Pressing informants all over the globe. I’ve got the field team in Toronto headed to the airport and two more teams heading there from Buffalo and Boston. We just got off the phone with the Canadians. They’re offering us their full assistance.”

“Lot of good it does us now. What’s our tactical situation?”

“You’ve got me. I don’t think we can assume this thing is over.”

“I agree.”

“But I don’t have anything hard yet.”

“They knew the timing, the car, the best moment to strike.”

“They had to have people on the ground.”

“To calibrate a flight from Toronto to be in the right place at the right time? Absolutely. It’s a nightmare. You bet there’s more of them. The question is, where?”

“I can flood Denver with agents.”

“Do it. Send ’em into Colorado Springs and have ’em drive up. I’m keeping DIA shut down for now.”

“Good. We’ll do it. How are you gonna move Gambit? I heard Marine One had mechanical trouble.”

“It does. That’s why we did the motorcade in the first place.”

“You can’t risk the roads now. You don’t know who you can trust out there.”

“I’m going to put him in one of the choppers. Sanchez will fly it out, flanked by the Apaches.”

“And go where?”

“Crystal Palace.”

“Not back to Air Force One?”

“I’m not taking him back there until I know it’s secure.”

“All right. What do you need from us?”

“Just find out who the hell did this.”

“Home Plate, I’ve got Moore,” Sanchez told Norris over her satellite phone.

On the video screen, Norris watched Sanchez move quickly, direct her team, reposition her men, and commandeer the police helicopter. Now he saw Sanchez hand her phone inside Stagecoach.

“John? John, it’s Bud.”

“Hey, boss…” Moore said, groggy and in pain.

“Talk to me, John.”

“Gambit’s safe.”

“Oh my God.”

“He’s got a lot of cuts, bruises, mild concussion. He’s pretty freaked out. We’ve got him on sedatives, and oxygen. We’ve got him immobilized. But we’ve checked him over pretty good, and he’s gonna be OK. Thank God for air bags.”

Five thousand agents and billions of dollars worth of the latest high-tech equipment and a president’s life could actually be saved or lost during a terrorist attack by air bags? After two years off nicotine, Norris suddenly found himself craving a cigarette.