State of Siege

EIGHT

Etienne Vandal pulled on his ski mask. Then he turned to receive his weapons from Sazanka, who was in the back of the van along with Barone and Downer. The seats had been removed and piled in a corner of the hotel garage. The windows had been painted over. The men were able to prepare in total secrecy. Barone holstered his own two automatics and picked up the Uzi. He would also be wearing the backpack containing tear gas and gas masks. If it became necessary to fight their way out, they’d have the gas as well as hostages.

It was difficult to twist very far because of the bulletproof vest, but Vandal preferred discomfort to vulnerability. The Japanese officer handed him two automatics and an Uzi.

Downer was kneeling beside the door on the driver’s side of the van. He placed his own weapons on the floor. A Swiss-made B-77 missile launcher lay across his shoulder. He had requested an American M47 Dragon, but this was the closest Ustinoviks could come. Downer had examined the short-range, lightweight antitank missile and had assured the team it would do the job. Vandal and the others hoped so. Without it, they’d be dead in the street. Barone was crouched beside the side door, ready to pull it open.

Vandal had already checked his weapons at the hotel. Now he sat and waited as the van continued to accelerate. It was here at last. The countdown they’d been working for, going over again and again for more than a year. In Vandal’s case, it was a moment he’d been awaiting for even longer than that. He was calm, even relieved, as the target area came into view.

The other men also seemed calm, especially Georgiev. Yet he always came across as a big, cold machine. Vandal knew very little about the man, but what he did know, he didn’t like or respect. Until Bulgaria drafted a new constitution in 1991, it was among the most repressive nations in the Soviet bloc. Georgiev helped the CIA recruit informants inside the government. Vandal would have understood if the man had struggled to overthrow the regime for principle. But Georgiev had worked for the CIA simply because they paid well. Though the goals were the same, that was the difference between a patriot and a traitor. As far as Vandal was concerned, a man who would betray his country would certainly betray his partners in crime. That was something Etienne Vandal knew about. His grandfather was a former Nazi collaborator who died in a French prison. It wasn’t only that Charles Vandal had betrayed his country. He’d been a member of the Mulot resistance group, which had been responsible for stealing and hiding art and treasures before the Germans could plunder them from French museums. Charles Vandal not only turned over Mulot and his team, but he led the Germans to a cache of French art.

They had less than one block to go. A few tourists who were still out at this hour turned to look at the speeding van. The vehicle shot past the UN library building on the south side of the plaza. Then Georgiev raced past the first guard booth with its green-tinted bulletproof glass and bored-looking officers. The booth was located behind the black iron fence, which was separated from the avenue by twenty feet of sidewalk. There were extra guards for tonight’s soiree and the gate was closed, but that didn’t matter. The target area was less than fifty feet to the north.

Georgiev passed the second guard booth. Then, clearing a fire hydrant just beyond, he swung the van to the right and floored the gas pedal. The vehicle shot across the sidewalk, hitting one pedestrian and running him under the driver’s-side wheel. Several others were knocked to the side. A moment later, the van ripped through a yard-high chain-link fence. The sound of the metal scraping the sides of the van drowned out the screams of injured pedestrians. The vehicle plowed through a small garden filled with trees and shrubs, Georgiev steering clear of the large tree on the south side of the garden. A few low-hanging branches from other trees smashed against the windshield and roof. Some branches snapped, others whipped back as the van pushed ahead.

To the north and south, UN police, members of the NYPD, and a handful of white-shirted State Department police were just beginning to respond to the breach. Guns drawn, radios in hand, they ran from the three guard booths along First Avenue, from the booth inside the courtyard to the north, and from the police outpost across the street.

It took just over two seconds for the van to drill through the garden and the row of hedges at the far end. The men in the back of the van braced themselves as Georgiev crushed down on the brake. The garden was separated from the circular plaza by a concrete barrier just over three feet high and nearly one foot thick. The flagpoles, which flew the flags of the 185 member nations, stood in a row beyond the barrier.

Georgiev and Vandal ducked low. They were expecting to lose the windshield. Barone slid the van door open. Sazanka lay down, prepared to spray covering fire if necessary. Downer leaned out over him and pointed his missile launcher at the thick wall. He aimed low to make sure he didn’t leave anything close to the ground. Then he fired.

There was an ear-ringing roar, and then a seven-foot-wide section of the concrete barrier was gone. Several large chunks flew across the plaza like cannonballs, some landing in the fountain, others bouncing across the drive. But most of the wall rose in a wide, fifty-foot-high plume of jagged white shards, then rained down like hail. Behind the wall, five of the tall white flagpoles snapped near the bases. They fell straight and hard and landed on the asphalt with a loud clang. Vandal could hear it even though his ears were still clogged from the explosion.

Even as the bits of concrete were still falling, Georgiev gunned the engine and pushed the van ahead. Timing was critical. They had to keep moving. He roared through the breach in the barrier, clipping the driver’s side on an outthrust of concrete, but didn’t stop. Downer had ducked back into the van, but Sazanka continued to lie in the open side door, ready to fire at anyone who shot at them. No one did. While they were part of the PKO and first conceived of this idea, the men had easily obtained a copy of the United Nations police guidelines. They were very explicit: No one was to act individually against a group. The threat was to be contained, if possible, by whatever personnel were on hand, but not challenged until sufficient units were made available. It was pure United Nations philosophy. It didn’t work in the international arena, and it wasn’t going to work here.

Georgiev headed northeast across the plaza. Though the windshield had shattered, it was still in the frame. Fortunately, there wasn’t much the Bulgarian needed to see. The van shot across the exit lane of the courtyard and hopped onto the lawn that led to the General Assembly Building. Georgiev sped east around the Japanese Peace Bell. As Vandal ducked again, the van crashed through the large plate glass windows that opened onto the courtyard from the small lobby. The van slammed into the statue of El Abrazo de Paz, a stylized human figure “embracing peace” that stood just inside. The statue fell over, and the van rode up on it; that was as far as the van was going. But that was also as far as they needed the van to go. By the time guards and attendees at the delegates’ soiree first became aware of the disturbance, the five men were already out of the van. Georgiev fired a short burst at the guard who was posted outside the corridor that led to the staff elevators. The young man spun and fell, the first UN casualty. Vandal wondered whether he’d get a peace statue in his honor as well.

The five men ran down the corridor and swung onto the escalators. The escalators had been shut down by security personnel. That was something they hadn’t anticipated, not that it mattered. They quickly ran up the two flights, then turned to their left. The stalled escalator was the only form of resistance they met. What Germany had proved in Poland in 1939, what Saddam Hussein had proved in Kuwait in 1990, is that there is no effective defense against a well-planned lightning strike. There’s only recovery and then a counterattack. And in this case, neither would be of any use.

Less than ninety seconds after turning off First Avenue, the five men were inside the heart of the Secretariat Building. They ran alongside the tall windows that overlooked the courtyard. The fountain had been shut down to allow clear visbility into the Secretariat windows. Traffic had been stopped, and tourists were being herded onto side streets. Police and security forces were everywhere now.

Seal off the building, contain the problem, Vandal thought. They were so damned predictable.

There were also several guards running toward them. The three men and one woman were wearing bulletproof vests and listening to their radios. They had their guns drawn and were obviously headed toward the Security Council chamber, which was on their right. They had probably been sent to evacuate the delegates in case that was the target.

The young guards never made it. Upon seeing the intruders, they stopped. Then, like any soldier or police officer who had never been in combat, they snapped into the only thing they knew: training mode. From the United Nations security force manual, Vandal knew that in a showdown situation, they would attempt to spread out and present a less concentrated target, take cover if possible, and attempt to disable the enemy.

Georgiev and Sazanka didn’t give them the chance. Firing their Uzis from the hip, they sliced across the guards’ thighs and dropped them virtually where they stood. Guns and radios clattered on the tile floor. As the wounded guards moaned, the two men walked on, firing a second burst into the head of each one. They stopped a few yards from the bodies. Georgiev picked up two of the radios that had skidded across the floor.

“Come on,” Vandal said and hurried on.

Barone and Downer joined him, and the five men continued forward. Now the only things that stood between them and the Security Council chambers were four dead guards and a blood-slicked floor.