The Paris Protection (20 page)

He peered into the blackness, listening for any sound of the enemy.

Raising the pistol, he trained it on the flicker of light he had seen forty feet above. Something metal was moving and casting a strobelike sparkle from the red emergency light farther above. A gun or a wristwatch or a belt bucket—he didn’t know. But it marked one of his enemies. And a few feet to the left of the flickering, he saw a small cloud of dust particles float down through a sliver of light from the elevator shaft. The dust was probably kicked over the edge by a boot sliding to the end of the shaft platform as another enemy leaned over to prepare the second assault on the group below.

He had these two locked in, and he was afraid that they were about to unleash another wave of gunfire on the president. He couldn’t wait any longer. Even though he had only two of them identified, he had to attack the group now. He prayed there weren’t too many, for once he fired even a few shots, his position would be compromised.

He took a breath and exhaled. Then, with his legs and feet braced on the ladder, and his back against the I-beam, he fired.

Men screamed. Then a spurt of flashes flickered in the darkness as shots came toward him in frenetic, misdirected lines. Bullets snapped and pinged off the metal around him. But none hit him. A man toppled into the shaft and slid down like a large bag falling down a laundry chute.

David relied on his instincts for where to shoot. The light coming from the door into the shaft was now enough to show him where the bulk of the group was. Shooting from a low angle, he aimed at waist level in case they should duck or step back. Having studied marksmanship in depth, he knew that from this angle, most missed shots would miss high, still hitting the torso.

Two more bodies fell into the darkness below—one screaming, the other silent.

David’s back hurt, and his legs were weakening. He had been leaning out above the abyss while shooting, and he didn’t know how much longer he could hold the position. But the men kept coming, so he kept firing. He had maybe five or six shots left before he must reload—five or six shots to kill them all.

He kept firing. Men screamed and hurried their shots, and fell and died.

The platform above him went silent. He stopped firing. There couldn’t be more than one shot left in his gun. Steadying his breathing, he watched the dark platform above. Nothing moved. He listened for the faintest sound to tell him if anyone up there was still alive, still a threat. Nothing stirred. He waited, knowing that the greatest threats were the ones not seen. There had to be someone still alive up there. He couldn’t possibly have killed them all.

As quietly as possible, he ejected the empty magazine, pocketed it, and inserted a full one. And he waited. Someone had to be up there still. Like a sniper or a leopard lying in ambush, he slowed his breathing and stood silently in the darkness over the elevator shaft—waiting.

And then he heard a soft rustle. It was the smallest sound, a bare whisper of cloth and rubber on concrete . . . the faintest click of metal. A muted rattle. It was above him now. One man still alive. One target.

He closed his eyes and raised his gun. Focusing on every slight sound, he adjusted his aim to it. Nothing else existed. Only this one shot mattered. Protecting the president was everything. A slight breath escaped the unseen target, making the last sound David needed for the final adjustment. He squeezed the trigger once. From above him came a sharp gasp, followed by the thud of a body and the clatter of a dropped weapon.

Opening his eyes, he listened for any further sounds from above. Nothing. At any minute, other men would likely arrive on the platform. The gunfight had made too much noise, and he assumed that the men had radioed to others in their group during the fighting. He had bought the team the time they needed. Now he must rejoin them as fast as he could and help them escape before more men descended on them.

39

THE GUNFIRE HAD STOPPED, BUT John didn’t dare move. Standing on the shelf by the closed elevator shaft door to the fifth floor, he had one hand on the back of the ladder, the other holding the president against the concrete wall. Rebecca was a level below them. They waited in silence, hearts racing in the dark. He had heard Marks fall to his death. At least five or six bodies had fallen past them, one even clipping the shelf just above them.

“What should we do?” the president whispered.

“We wait.”

“Where’s David?”

He didn’t answer. There was still no sound from above. They could wait thirty seconds more; staying any longer would be too risky. They had to keep moving.

A single pistol shot broke the silence, followed by a distant clank and clatter. For several seconds, no other sound followed.

“All clear!” David yelled from above.

John felt a wave of relief, but it passed—they had to keep moving.

“Okay, ma’am, back on the ladder. Slow and steady, like before. Three points of contact at all times. We’re more than halfway down. Seven more floors down to sublevel three.”

Staying two rungs below her, he focused on every step she took as they made their way down the remaining levels. Rebecca was back on the ladder, too, moving below them. And he could hear David climbing down from far above. It struck him for the first time that everyone else from the team was gone, but he didn’t have time to dwell on it. They still had the president, and right now that was all that mattered.

He noticed some red emergency lights below that reflected off something metal. It could be the top of the elevator. If they were nearing the bottom of the shaft, he wanted to make sure there was nothing threatening.

“Ma’am, please hold,” he said.

She stopped climbing down and leaned her head against the ladder as he pulled his Service-issue miniature Maglite from its case. He was in no hurry to turn it on, but he had to see what the roof was like before moving the president onto it. Shining the light downward, he saw, perhaps ten feet below, the top of the elevator—and the grisly mash of mangled bodies. Blood and viscera were spattered across the roof and several feet up onto the shaft walls.

Stepping down onto the roof, he found it slick but stable. Careful not to slip on the wet surface, he checked to make sure the bodies were all dead. It was a quick check. Then he dragged the bodies and parts to the other side of the attached cables, squeegeeing off as much gore as possible each time. After clearing the area, he opened the top hatch into the elevator car.

“Secure it,” he said to Rebecca.

She had been waiting on the lower shelf, protecting the president while John cleared the roof. Stepping down over the pulped corpses, she holstered her gun and grabbed the sides of the hatch to lower herself into the cargo elevator.

As she climbed inside, John flashed his light onto the side of the shaft where the door led to the hallway. It was closed. He kicked the emergency release lever hard and pulled it back.

“Okay, it’s ready to open,” he said.

Rebecca grunted and heaved against the elevator door, pushing it open while John knelt by the hatch, gun trained above and past her, ready to cover her if they didn’t like what they found on the other side. She slipped through the open door and out into the hallway.

Time felt frozen as John waited, praying he wouldn’t hear gunfire.

She appeared again. “Clear,” she said.

“Okay, ma’am,” John said, looking up at the president. “Please step down onto the edge. Slowly. I’m going to lower you down.”

The president moved away from the ladder and carefully picked the least bloody way toward him. He took both her hands and, spreading his legs over the opening—lowered her down into the elevator. Rebecca helped ease her safely down from inside the car.

“David’s coming,” he said to Rebecca. “Secure her in the hallway. We’ll be right down.”

“What are you doing?” she replied.

“The football is compromised. With Colonel Marks dead and no reason to believe this attack is from a sovereign nation, I’m not about to have one of us keep lugging this thing around. Not with just three of us left to protect her.”

“How long do you need?”

“Not long.”

As Rebecca took the president out of the elevator, he moved to the far corner of the roof and dug through the pile of corpses until he found the briefcase, still attached to Colonel Marks. Besides Marks, John was the only other person around the president who knew the combination to open it.

He knew the protocol intimately. On her first day in office, the president was given a plastic card that had on it instructions and her nuclear launch codes. It was essentially the only thing that she ever carried on her person. Even if someone else had the football and the codes, they still couldn’t launch an attack. The briefcase was used to communicate with the US Military Launch Command Center, at NORAD headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs. The president’s launch codes were only the first of many steps that an actual nuclear launch had to pass through. A number of generals and military commanders were involved in the tightly controlled process. It wasn’t as if the briefcase had a missile launch button. It was more like a sophisticated, superencrypted communicator for the president to signal approval to Launch Command. If anyone else tried to signal with it, the US military at NORAD would use caution in case the device had been compromised—especially during an attack on the president’s life.

But even though there was no threat of the attackers using the Football, it still contained classified information that shouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. He pulled the metallic Zero Halliburton briefcase out of its leather cover and opened it. Inside was the gray communication box with keyboard and display, four red break-plastic cards with sealed nuclear launch codes, a thin soft binder with eighty documents in plastic folders, and the Black Book. The first few pages of the binder were instructions on the communication protocol for using the football to link up with the nuclear launch command center at NORAD. The other documents were detailed inventory and locations of all top-secret nuclear site centers in the United States and Europe—all highly classified information for the US military. And the Black Book, roughly the size of the binder, contained over seventy pages of nuclear retaliatory options.

A clank came from above. He jerked his head up and saw David just one floor up, climbing down the ladder.

“The top’s secure for now, sir,” David said, stepping down onto the elevator roof. “But there could be others soon.”

“Stay there,” John said. Turning back to the football, he removed the plastic launch code cards and the paper manual with the printed classified nuclear site documents. He broke the plastic cards and removed the nuclear launch codes sealed inside them.

“Sir?” David said.

John ignored him, working fast. There wasn’t much time. He set the open briefcase next to him as he cracked open the last two launch codes. Then he reached for the switch to the nuclear communication device.

“Sir! You’re not authorized to do that!”

John looked back and saw that David had removed his gun from his holster but was still pointing it down at his side. John supposed that seeing any unauthorized person messing with a nuclear launch device would be unnerving, even if there was no way he could initiate a launch. Despite all the tensions and horror of this night, he still couldn’t avoid a chuckle. “Relax, rookie. I’m disarming it. I don’t know what this attack is, but I don’t think the president’s going to need to start a nuclear war tonight because of it. Since there’s not many of us left and no clear escape route, I don’t want to risk us getting caught by the attackers with this on the president.”

He smashed the keyboard with the butt of his gun and slipped the leather-wrapped cable off Marks’s wrist. Then, pulling a miniature flare from the military aide’s belt, he popped the cap and lit it. A bright orange glow lit up the inside of the shaft. He used the heat from the flare to set the classified codebook on fire and burn the plastic launch codes into unrecognizable melted globs. Then he handed the football, now containing only the communication equipment with a smashed keyboard, over to David.

“Find a space along the shaft to slide this past the elevator. It’ll land somewhere underneath. That way, they won’t find it, and it’s disarmed anyway. And we can keep moving without worrying about it.”

“You want me to drop the nuclear football down to the bottom of an elevator shaft?” David asked.

“Do it.”

“Holy crap, John! You’re sure?”

John grimaced and nodded.

“Roger that.” 

David leaned back against the dark elevator shaft and dropped the briefcase into the dark gap between the wall and the roof of the elevator car. After a few clattering bangs, he heard it land with a clap on the floor below.

“I can’t believe I just did that.”

“Let’s keep moving,” John said, jumping down into the elevator.

40

PRESIDENT CLARKE WAS PUSHED AGAINST the cold concrete wall in the hotel basement. Agent Reid pressed her into a dark slot, shrouded in shadows and protected from both ends of the long hallway. She watched Reid glance right and left continuously, scanning for any approaching threat. She heard John’s voice through the open elevator door, but he still hadn’t jumped down into the car. The light from the elevator flickered in a jarring, strobe-like pattern, which distracted her more than anything now that the fighting had stopped. The flashing light seemed to be matching the pulse of her heart, or her breathing, or some other internal rhythm within her. She couldn’t explain this bizarre fascination with the light, but she stared at it in what she vaguely supposed must be shock or madness or hallucination. It was a feeling of light-headed euphoria that she hadn’t experienced in over a year. That past moment had marked one of the greatest nights of her life.

A time with her family. 

Flash-flash-flash.
 

A time of celebration.