Full Force and Effect

58

A dark gray cloud covered everyone and everything.

The entire street, the side streets around, the edge of the street market on the west, and the open parking lot on the east — everything in a twenty-five-yard radius from the blast site — was completely obscured by smoke and dust and tiny airborne particles of concrete.

Many outside the impenetrable cloud for another twenty-five yards in all directions were dead or dazed or disoriented by the force of the blast. Eardrums were stunned and ringing. Equilibrium was disrupted by the concussion.

Another twenty-five yards in all directions was consumed by wrecked vehicles or other confusion. Shrapnel this far out still caused death, windows were shattered, car alarms blared.

No one screamed for several seconds, the confusion and disbelief overpowering the natural sensation of fear.

Secret Service Agent Dale Herbers was one of five men in a Suburban six vehicles ahead of SWORDSMAN. The blast behind them had sent debris raining down on the roof of his SUV, but the driver looked back in his rearview and prepared to stomp on the gas. If they were under attack, the first rule was to get POTUS out of the engagement area as quickly as possible.

But the sheer size of the rolling cloud of destruction behind him caused him to doubt standard protocol. Would the Beast even be able to roll out of the kill zone?

The driver called into his mike, trying to find out what he needed to do, but he did this simultaneously along with thirty other agents, and his transmission was walked over.

Herbers was the lead agent in the vehicle, so in the absence of any other instruction, he knew he’d need to lead the four men with him. He realized from the size of the blast that his vehicle might possibly be the closest to the President that had not been destroyed. But there was no way he was going to order his driver to back into the cloud to go looking for SWORDSMAN, because for all he knew, the President was lying injured in the street.

Instead, Herbers made a brave call. “Pull over to open the lane, then everyone bail, cover, and evacuate!”

The driver raced the vehicle to the side of the six-lane road, giving as much open space as possible for any cars behind to continue on if they were able. The five agents then unloaded quickly, drawing their SIG Sauer pistols as they did so. This action put them in danger, of course, but there was no way they were continuing on without knowing if the Beast was operable or even intact. And all Secret Service agents knew their primary job was to cover and evacuate the principal, so Herbers and the others began sprinting toward the massive gray cloud.

Almost instantly Herbers saw his call to pull to the side of the road was folly. Nothing was going to be rolling to the south on Vidal Alcocer. They passed wrecked Suburbans, lying on their sides or perpendicular to the traffic lanes, windshields shattered, tires ripped apart and smoking. These SUVs weren’t moving without a dozen men pushing them out of the way, and there was no time to stop for that until SWORDSMAN was safe.

Here and there a few men had climbed out of the damaged vehicles, but Herbers also saw bodies in the road and slumped over steering wheels.

On his right a crowd that had gathered behind the barricades on José J. Herrera looked like a massive tangle of prostrate bodies. Herbers slowed here to train his gun on any potential threats, but the only movement he saw was a little writhing and staggering by a few survivors in the midst of the stillness of death in the crowd.

A voice came through his earpiece, shouting something that seemed like it was a warning, but right now it seemed as if one hundred car alarms blared in a half-dozen different singsong keys, each bleat trying to shout over the other, and Herbers couldn’t make out the call.

He saw no threats, so he turned away from the crowd and continued on toward the last known location of the Beast, running flat out in his dress shoes and business suit. His earpiece mike was alive now with calls, but he hadn’t heard a word from O’Day, the President’s lead agent.

Just as he reached the edge of the thick cloud of smoke and ran into it, he heard pounding gunfire behind him. Even before he turned around, he recognized the weapon from its distinctive sound. It was an AK-47, a rifle carried by no one in the Secret Service or in the Mexican federal forces. He shouted into his wrist mike at the same time as dozens of other men and women. “Contact!”

Instantly he heard the high-pitched snapping of bullets flying past him in the street, coming from the direction of the crowd.

In the back of the smoke cloud, an entire city block from where Herbers now stood in the street hunting for the source of the gunfire, Secret Service men who were still alive stumbled from their vehicles and began moving toward the cloud. They had no choice but to dismount, because burning vehicles in front of them blocked the way. The Roadrunner was down and on its side. No one had climbed out of it yet, though it had been a full thirty seconds since the massive blast.

The members of the counterassault team who had not died in the explosion or were not now wrapped up and disoriented in the dark cloud raced forward with their M4 rifles, desperate for any information, either through their eyes or through their headsets.

In the smoke, guns swung around in all directions looking for targets, and men reached out in vain, trying to find anyone or anything close by to help orient them.

Suddenly, seconds after the sound of AK fire south of their position sent the men scrambling, more gunfire erupted from the north, behind them. It was more automatic AKs along with staccato snaps from handguns as Secret Service agents returned fire.

The counterassault men at the northern edge of the cloud turned to engage two pickup trucks approaching from a side street, but the smoke and dust behind them enveloped them as the cloud grew.

Over the sound of the new multidirectional gunfire a single screamed report filled every earpiece, headset, and vehicle radio of the massive Secret Service contingent.

“RPG!”

Jack Ryan opened his eyes and blinked away what he thought were tears. He brought his hand to his face and rubbed it, and he noticed his glasses were gone. He pulled his hand back and saw he was bleeding from his head.

He was wholly unaware there had been an explosion. He saw no flash, he heard no loud noise. He wondered if they had been in some sort of traffic accident. Right now he was only aware that he lay awkwardly on his right side, his legs higher than his head. Ambassador Styles’s body was crumpled next to him. There was little light, which was odd, because the last thing he remembered from before he blacked out was that it had been a beautifully sunny afternoon.

The Beast was upside down, this became clear after a few seconds more, but even through the vehicle windows all he saw was a deep gray, as if they had somehow crashed into a dark lake.

That couldn’t be. He wondered if he was dazed, so he shook his head to clear it, and only then did he feel the dull but pervasive pain on his right side.

“Mr. President?”

“Yes, Andrea. I’m okay.”

He wasn’t okay, but he was alive, and Andrea Price O’Day was in the front seat, herself upside down. She needed to hear his voice, so he complied.

Now Ryan reached forward and put his hand on the back of Horatio Styles. He was lying almost flat on the limo’s ceiling, and he wasn’t moving. Ryan meant to give him a shake to wake him up, but when he did so the man’s head lolled to the side, facing Ryan’s. His eyes were open and his pupils rolled back. Ryan could see his neck was broken.

“Styles is dead!” he called to O’Day, but she was transmitting on her mike and she did not respond.

Ryan heard gunfire outside the limo now, and it sounded like it was coming from two directions. A larger explosion, this sounded like an RPG hitting a vehicle, came from close behind.

O’Day said, “We’re staying in the vehicle. We’ve got oxygen and armor, and as long as we…” She stopped talking.

Jack rolled himself onto his left side now, and then onto his knees. He felt like his right arm was not cooperating, but it was there, still in his suit and not gushing blood, so he wasn’t sure what his problem was.

He looked up to Andrea and then he saw why she stopped talking. Smoke began filling the interior of the car.

She turned to him. “Listen carefully. Stay where you are. I’m coming around to your door.”

She didn’t wait for Ryan to respond. Instead, she kicked open her front passenger door, rolled out onto the ground.

Ryan called out to the driver now. “Hey, Mitch! You okay? We’ve got to go!” The man hung upside down from his seat belt. He turned his head toward Ryan, but he did not reply.

Andrea appeared at Ryan’s window. She yanked hard on the upside-down door and it opened with a creak.

Ryan rolled out onto the street now; he was surprised to find the limo had been thrown all the way to the curb, probably twenty feet from where it had been in the middle of the road.

Ryan coughed out the smoke he had inhaled inside the vehicle, and then he began to stand. O’Day shielded him against the side of the limo, kept him on his knees, and he looked around for the first time. Two men in the tactical gear of the counterassault team came running through the thick smoke, their weapons high and their laser targeters cutting through the cloud like lightsabers. They formed on Ryan and they, too, made a cordon around him, and tried in vain to scan for targets in the massive amount of smoke and dust.

A third special agent, this one in a suit and tie, appeared. His face and leg were covered with blood but he was ambulatory, and he opened the driver’s-side door of the upturned limo to help Special Agent Mitch Delaney out, but Ryan saw the man was heavily disoriented from the impact of the flipping limo.

O’Day was calling for a vehicle, any vehicle, to make its way slowly into the blast zone, through the half-dozen or so burning pieces of wreckage, and up to the Beast. She had to evacuate SWORDSMAN, preferably in something armored, but at this point she’d settle for anything with four wheels and a motor.

Ryan tried to pull out Ambassador Styles, but the agents around him kept him covered tightly. The smoke was obscuring their view of the attack that was taking place from two compass points, and this added to the confusion, but it was also obscuring the attackers’ view of the blast area, so they couldn’t possibly know the President was more or less out in the open, kneeling at the curb.

And then, from the south, came a racing, hissing sound that approached through the smoke. No one saw it, and no one identified it in time to do little more than crouch.

The RPG hit the side of the limousine and exploded, throwing everyone around it to the ground.

The two sixteen-passenger media vans had been well behind the explosion, but still the shock wave shook the vehicles on their chassis, and debris pounded them and cracked the windshields in several places. The windows along the passenger sides were shattered when the rearview mirrors were struck by flying debris and went flying into the sides of the vans. The incredible sound of the detonation and the subsequent impacts of shrapnel and car parts sent the passengers covering their heads and scrambling to get low.

The driver of the lead van was a member of the White House press office and not a trained security agent, but he’d been told what to do in an emergency. He was to get off the road, out of the way of security forces ahead of his van if the decision was made to retrograde out of the area, or of those behind the van if they needed to come up and assist.

Ten seconds after the explosion, however, he had not moved at all. Both of the van’s front tires had been eviscerated by high-explosive shrapnel from the rear artillery shell that had torn across the road.

Four media personnel in the first van had been cut by broken glass, and more were disoriented by shock, but CNN press-pool reporter Jill Crosby was unhurt. She was sitting in the second row of seats, just to the left of Fox reporter Jeff Harkes. Harkes caught a face full of glass, and while he grabbed at a vicious wound just over his right ear, Crosby climbed over his legs, grabbed the door latch, and flung it open. While others in the vehicle either tended to one another’s injuries or tried to get out of the van, Jill Crosby ran toward the smoke-obscured scene ahead.

She’d just pulled her phone out of her pocket and dialed into CNN’s Atlanta headquarters when the gunfire started. She arrived at a damaged Suburban that had been knocked ninety degrees and now faced west on the north-south thoroughfare. She ducked low and ran past the SUV, and on the other side of this she saw an identical Suburban fully engulfed in flames.

An explosion erupted near her, knocking her to the ground. She did not recognize that she had almost been blown apart by an RPG, so she climbed back to her feet and ran forward. All around her now there was more and more shooting.

She entered the thick wall of gray smoke just as her producer answered on the other end.

“It’s Crosby! The presidential motorcade is under attack! We’ve got to go live!”

Two counterassault team officers raced past her with their guns at their shoulders, and then they disappeared into the smoke in front of her.

Herbers had given up on getting to the President; his job now was to suppress the hostiles in the two pickup trucks on the southern side of the engagement zone. The vehicles had pulled right into the crowd of dead and wounded. Herbers lay flat in the street and engaged the driver of one of the white pickups as the man shot his AK while crouched behind his car door, incorrectly thinking it to be suitable cover. Herbers and another agent dumped round after round of .40-caliber ammo through the thin sheet metal, killing the man.

He’d heard the transmission from O’Day saying she had SWORDSMAN at the Beast, but the Beast was down. She’d called to the second limo to have it come to her, but Herbers had yet to hear a response.

He didn’t allow himself an instant to think about what had gone wrong. That would come later, much later, and it would come only for those who managed to survive the firefight. So he emptied his magazine at the threats on the side street, reloaded, and racked his pistol’s slide to engage some more. Just as he brought it back up on a target, he saw a flash of light in the shade on the far side of José J. Herrera. Instantly the flash grew in size, and he realized he was looking at a streaking rocket-propelled grenade. It raced five feet off the ground, shot directly over his head as it passed into the smoke behind him, and then he heard the impact of an explosion.

He hoped like hell the RPG hadn’t just hit SWORDSMAN’s damaged limo with the President of the United States standing next to it.

Herbers opened fire at the source of the launch, a man standing alone with an empty rocket tube, sending the man to cover.

Then he started looking around for a vehicle. He knew the President couldn’t wait around in the kill zone any longer. A Suburban with a broken windshield was upright on good tires in the road, just fifty feet away. He saw a Secret Service agent slumped over the wheel, and another man lying facedown outside an open rear driver’s-side door.

Herbers leapt to his feet and started running for the black SUV.