The Paris Protection (12 page)

“Where’s the White Top?”

“White Hawk is three minutes out. Supported by King Stallion.”

“How long will you be dark?”

“Four minutes.”

“Do it faster.”

Looking back as he rounded up the next landing, he saw that the president was holding it together. The group was focused, moving up the stairwell as a unit. Every agent was doing exactly as he had been trained.

Into his wrist, he said, “All agents above six, go to Zenith. All on or below six, form block stops in stairwells and engage any hostiles.”

“This is Zenith,” reported a rooftop agent through the radio. “We have three countersnipers and three watchers. Zenith is secure.”

“This is Reid. On twenty-two, north side. Night-watch has thirty station agents between floors one through six, forty between floors six through twenty-six, and now another forty from CAT caught in the first-floor blaze and firefight. Another hundred agents and French police officers are on the third perimeter outside the hotel, but the fire has kept them from entering the building.”

On the past three floors, as they ascended, additional agents had met them, guarding the cracked doors from the hallways, announcing the Secret Service “white knight,” “red knight” emergency code for quick identification. As the protection bubble rushed past, agents would then leave their posts to join it until, by now, some thirty agents surrounded the president.

The White Hawk and King Stallion helicopters should be at the roof in two minutes. The agents’ footsteps pounding up the stairs clattered like hail on a tin roof. The command center had broken down and would be dark for three to four minutes, and he still couldn’t get good intel on the threat.

24

MAXIMILIAN LED FIFTY MEN UP the north stairwell. His group was far below Kazim’s faster-moving team. Like Hannibal at the Battle of the Tagus in 220 BC, he knew that it was critical to control the flow of soldiers—both his and the enemy’s. Hannibal had been a master at military maneuvers, rehearsing advances and flanks and false retreats with tens of thousands of men days before an engagement with the enemy—all to ensure that his army would execute his ingenious plans with perfection once the chaos of battle erupted. It was a strategy that Maximilian had mimicked while training his men during the past six months. Every motion and maneuver had been practiced in preparation for this critical moment in the attack.

Reaching the third floor, he found ten of his advance men stopped in the stairwell just ahead of him. Many more were crowded below him. “You men, secure four and five!” he commanded all those above him except the burly bearded man by the door. Those above turned and raced up toward the next flight. The door man grabbed the handle and yanked it open, and Maximilian stood aside while the others rushed past him and poured into the third floor hallway. Screams echoed, but no shots were fired.

Maximilian now jumped into the middle of the line of men and ran into the hallway. He saw Tomas and Asghar, the Merchants of Death, at the front. The group moved like a pack of wolves, loping past the doors that lined the long hallway. An older man stood in the open doorway of his hotel room, yelling desperately in French to someone still inside. Asghar smashed him in the forehead with a gun butt. A woman twenty yards ahead whimpered softly as she tried to swipe her key card in her door’s electronic reader. Tomas shot her in the neck, spraying blood on the wall as the card reader turned green. She fell to the floor and jerked briefly while men rushed past her toward the midway bend in the corridor, by the elevator bay.

“Hurry!” Maximilian yelled. “The Americans will be fast! Move!”

He had a dozen men with portable fire extinguishers to suppress any fire that threatened to block their movements, and each man on his team had goggles and an oxygen mask for heavy smoke. The blaze was still too far below for much smoke to have reached their level, although the alarm had gone off and filled the hallway with its annoying electronic screech. Several people came out of their hotel rooms, only to be shot in their doorways. The hallway must remain clear for his men to maneuver, and he had no interest in taking hostages. The fire would kill everyone soon enough.

Four scouts had raced ahead of the pack and were already in the south stairwell, two going up and two going down. The main body of men was nearly to that end of the hallway, with five staying behind to keep it secured. Others should now have control of the north stairwell behind them from floors one through five.

In front of the pack, shots went off with a muffled echo, and blood spattered across the outside of the small window in the stairwell door. The door cracked open, and a bloodied scout fell back into the hallway.

“Aytek!” Maximilian called to the man. “Where are they?”

The scout, half dazed, glanced without a word, as if confused to see the rest of the men charging at him. His wide-eyed stare looked somehow puzzled, and blood covered most of his face.

“Where
are
they?” Maximilian yelled as the group neared the end of the hallway.

“Below,” the scout replied.

“How many?”

“Three or four.”

“Keep moving!” Maximilian yelled at his men. He looked at the Merchants of Death and could see their gleaming, eager eyes—one pair brown, the other blue—through the masks. “Fire wave, charge down. Overrun the Americans. Kill them all. They won’t be able to hold the stairwell with just four agents. Charge! Charge to ground floor! Take it and secure it!”

As Tomas and Asghar went into the south stairwell to lead the downward assault, Maximilian held up his hand to stop the second half of the group. “Not too many,” he said. “It’s a bottleneck—could be a trap.”

The dark face of the first man he had stopped stared intently at him. No true warrior ever wanted to be held back from a fight, and that was exactly why Maximilian had chosen these men. But it was also why he always needed to control them, to occasionally hold them back from rushing headlong to a needless death.

“Not yet!” he said to the man and those behind him.

Then he heard shouting and gunshots from the stairwell. It went on for half a minute before lapsing into an eerie silence.

“Scout it,” he said to the man.

The man darted past him and into the stairwell. Maximilian could hear his boots clomping down the steps. Waiting for the report, he tipped his head sideways to make sure there were no problems back down the hallway. Other than the bodies of a dozen hotel guests, everything was open for his men to move through. He then stepped back through the doorway and looked up the south stairwell. The next landing was clear, and the other two scouts were calling down to him that it was clear to the fifth floor. He motioned for more men from the hallway to rush up the stairwell and help the scouts keep the next few levels secure.

Finally, the last man he had sent down rushed back up. “We lost half,” he said, “but all the agents from here to the first floor are now dead. The stairs belong to us.”

“Are Tomas and Asghar alive?”

The man’s eyes smiled. “Nothing can kill the Merchants of Death.”

Maximilian stepped past him into the stairwell and yelled down toward his men. Tomas appeared below, mask off and dangling around his neck. He looked as if killing Americans was great fun.

“How long can you hold the stairs?” Maximilian asked.

“As long as you wish!” Tomas boasted.

“You and Asghar hold this area with the men you have left. I’m sending twenty more down to raise hell on the first floor. Let them pass, but your group stays.”

“We want to raise hell too!” Tomas said.

“You’ll soon have plenty of opportunity,” Maximilian promised. “But right now, keeping the stairs is most important.” He turned back into the hallway and ordered a large group of fighters down to the first floor.

The flank was nearly complete. As he watched more of his men rush into the stairwell, he knew that he had taken control away from the Secret Service. He had the basement, the lower floors on the north side, and now the lower levels of both north and south stairwells. The fire had most of the lobby, with his men now carefully holding flanks on both sides of the spreading inferno. Any agents still alive on the ground floor were outside the ring of fire, pushed away from the critical access paths that could lead up into the building. And with the third floor now under control, he could easily maneuver his men between stairwells, giving them quick access to both sides of the hotel.

He did a call check into his radio. “Ground spot! Any eyes on Medusa?”

“No Medusa,” a voice crackled through the radio. “Confirmed with other watchers. I repeat, no Medusa, no black carriage—nothing!”

Maximilian grinned. The president hadn’t had time to escape the building and must still be somewhere above him, but she would undoubtedly have many Secret Service agents still protecting her. His bold strategic maneuvers had worked. He had systematically removed every path of escape for the president. He had trapped her and cut her off from the bulk of her protection resources, much as Hannibal had done to the Roman garrison at the citadel in Tarentum.

It was now up to Kazim and his special team to finish the mission. They were within minutes of their victory. And he could think of no man more motivated to give the American people a lasting visual nightmare that would break their hearts, crush their arrogance, and forever blind them with impotent rage.

25

KAZIM RACED BEHIND HIS MEN up the north stairwell, shouting, urging them to greater speed. He had twelve men with him, but four were carrying two large cases, which slowed the ascent of the entire team. If he could just get to the roof with at least seven men and the cases within the next two minutes, he could keep Maximilian’s plan on track.

They had just passed the twenty-first floor—only seven more flights between them and their destiny. Maximilian had been brilliant in convincing the men that they would need to sacrifice their lives in order to hit the American government with a decapitation strike. It was a lie, but the other men needn’t know the truth. The only thing that mattered was killing the president. It wasn’t even guaranteed that the president would be taken to the roof, but Maximilian had been adamant: they must take the roof out of the equation either way if their plan was to have any chance for success.

But then, just as he was feeling that nothing could stop them, someone shouted something strange down at them. A faint shadow, cast down from the stairwell above, moved along the wall in front of him. The shout of “White knight!” came again, this time more audibly. It bounced and echoed off the hard concrete and sounded a little high pitched.

Another agent, hiding, waiting to ambush his group.

He motioned to one of his men, and together they darted up the last few steps to the midlevel landing and fired up toward the agent. The figure above had ducked down below the upper banister so fast that Kazim never got a look at them. And just as fast, the agent returned fire from a crouched position above.

Dropping to his chest on the hard concrete steps, Kazim cursed as bullets ricocheted off the steel banister and slammed into the walls. As he rolled to his back, he saw the agent’s muzzle flashes light up the underside of the stairs above.

The agent was very close to him and his men—maybe eight feet away.

He waved for the rest of his men to crawl up toward him. Together, they would cut this agent to pieces in a hail of bullets.

26

REBECCA HEARD THE COMMUNICATION from SAIC Alexander that the direct PPD team couldn’t get the president to the lower floors, because of the fire. He had alerted all agents that they were taking POTUS up twelve flights to the roof, where the White Top was en route to meet and extract her. Three Secret Service countersnipers were stationed on the roof, but most of the agents in the building had been directed to the lower floors during the first attempt to rush the president safely out to the armored limousine. Between the gunfights and the spreading fire on the first few floors, it was difficult to gauge how many agents would make it back up toward the new escape route for the president. Alexander and the bubble team were bringing POTUS up the south staircase, so Rebecca needed to help secure the north staircase until the team could get President Clarke on the roof for a Marine One exec lift.

With her SIG Sauer P229 drawn, she used her shoulder to push the handle, opening the twenty-second-floor stairway door. Almost immediately, a thundering of footsteps came around the stairs just one floor below.

“Stop!” she yelled. “White knight!” The response she needed to hear back was “red knight,” but she wasn’t hearing it.

“White knight!” she yelled again, stopping her descent and leveling her gun at the swarm of shadows coming into view. She raised her wrist microphone to warn the rest of the team of possible hostiles coming up the north staircase, but before she had a chance, the men appeared below and she had to fire shots. Bullets were soon coming at her and ricocheting all around the enclosed concrete stairwell. She returned more fire down at them while falling backward onto the top step of her floor. She fell hard, slapping the floor with her free arm to absorb some of the shock, and rolled back toward the door. All agents were trained to stand tall and advance toward gunfire because it was the best tactic for shielding a protectee. But despite the responses conditioned into her through training, she resisted the automatic reaction to engage the group of men. She could tell she was outnumbered and that this was a threat to the president, so her focus was on warning Alexander of the attackers’ presence.

Rolling toward the door, she wanted only to avoid the bullets long enough to give a situational warning to the PPD team. But when she yelled into her wrist microphone, she couldn’t hear her own relay in her earpiece. Feeling the ache in her lower back, she realized that the encrypted radio clipped to the back of her belt must have gotten crunched when she fell backward to the floor. Now she couldn’t warn the team of this threat that was clearly heading for the roof.