Harold Baxter grabbed Maureen and pulled her down beneath the clergy pews.
Brian Flynn raised a rocket launcher and took aim from the pulpit.
The rear door of the carrier dropped, and fifteen men of the 69th Regiment, led by Major Cole, scrambled over the door and began fanning out under the choir loft.
Frank Gallagher was speaking to the Cardinal when the sound of the exploding doors rolled through the Cathedral. For a moment he thought the bombs beneath him had gone off, then he recognized the sound for what it was. His chest heaved, and his body shook so badly that his rifle fell from his hands. He lost control of his nerves as he heard the reports of rifle fire in the Cathedral behind him. He let out a high-pitched wail and ran down the sacristy steps, falling to his knees beside the Cardinal. He grabbed at the hem of the red robe, tears streaming from his eyes and snatches of prayer forming on his lips. “God … O God … Father … Eminence … dear God …”
The Cardinal looked down at him. “It’s all right, now. There … there …”
Colonel Logan rose quickly through the carrier hatch and rested his automatic rifle on the machine gun mount in front of him. He peered into the darkness as he scanned to his front, then saw a movement in the pulpit and zeroed in.
The First Squad, including Bellini and Burke, had risen up in unison from behind the balustrade, rifles raised to their shoulders.
Abby Boland saw the shadows appear along the ledge, black forms, eerie and spectral in the subdued light. She saw the tiny pinpoint flashes and heard the silencers cough like a roomful of old people clearing their throats. She screamed, “George!” Sullivan was intent on the transept doors opposite him but looked up when she screamed.
The Third Squad had burst out of the attic and occupied Farrell’s triforium. They lined up along the parapet and searched the darkness for targets.
Brian Flynn steadied the M-72 rocket as a burst of red tracers streaked out of the commander’s hatch of the carrier and cracked into the granite column behind him. He squeezed the detonator. The rocket roared out of the tube, sailed over the pews with a fiery red trail, and exploded on the sloping front of the armored carrier.
The carrier belched smoke and flame through ruptured seams, and the driver was killed instantly. Logan shot up from the hatch, flames licking at his clothing, and nearly hit the overhang of the loft. His smoking body fell back toward the blazing carrier, spread-eagled like a sky diver, and disappeared in clouds of black smoke and orange flame.
The First and Third ESD squads in the triforia were firing into the candlelit Cathedral, the operating mechanisms of their rifles slapping back and forth as the silencers wheezed, and spent brass piled up on the stone floors.
Abby Boland stood rigid for a split second as the scream died in her throat. She got off a single shot, then felt something rip the rifle from her hands, and the butt rammed her face. She fell to the floor, picked up a rocket, and stood again.
Sullivan fired a long automatic burst into Farrell’s triforium and heard a scream. He shifted his fire to the triforium where Gallagher had been, but a single bullet hit him squarely in the chest. He tumbled to the floor, landing on his bagpipes, which emitted a sad wail that pierced the noises in the Cathedral.
Abby Boland saw him go down as she fired the rocket across the Cathedral.
Bellini watched the trail of red fire illuminating the darkness. It came toward him with a noise that sounded like a rushing freight train. “Duck!”
The rocket went high and exploded on the stonework above the triforium. The triforium shook, and the window above blew out of its stone mullions, sending thousands of pieces of colored glass raining down in sheets past the triforium to the sanctuary and pulpit below.
Bellini’s squad rose quickly and poured automatic fire onto the source of the rocket.
Abby Boland held a pistol extended in both hands and fired at the orange flashes as the stonework around her began to shatter. The loud pop of a grenade launcher rolled across the Cathedral, and the top of the balustrade in front of her exploded. Her arms flew up and splattered blood and pistol fragments across her face. She fell forward, half blinded, and her mangled hands clutched at the protruding staff of the Papal flag. In her disorientation she found herself hanging out over the floor below. A burst of fire tore into her arms, and she released her grip. Her body tumbled head over heels and crashed into the pews below with a sharp splintering sound.
Pedar Fitzgerald’s dead body took a half-dozen hits and lurched to and fro, then fell against the keyboard and produced a thundering dissonant chord that continued uninterrupted amid the shouting and gunfire.
Flynn crouched in the pulpit, fired long bursts at Farrell’s triforium, then shifted his fire toward the vestibules where the men of the 69th Regiment had retreated from the burning carrier. Suddenly the carrier’s gasoline exploded. Flames shot up to the choir loft, and huge clouds of black smoke rose and curled around the loft. The National Guardsmen retreated back farther through the mangled doors onto the steps.
Bellini leaned out of the triforium and sighted his rifle almost straight down and fired three shots in quick succession through the bronze pulpit canopy.
Flynn’s body lurched, and he fell to his knees, then rolled over the pulpit floor. Bellini could see his body dangling across the spiral stairs. He took aim at the twitching form. Burke hit Bellini’s shoulder and deflected his shot. “No! Leave him.”
Bellini glared at Burke for a second, then turned his attention to the choir loft. He saw a barely perceptible flash of light, the kind of muzzle fire that came from a combination silencer/flash suppressor and that could only be seen from head on. The light flashed again, but this time in a different place several yards away. Bellini sensed that whoever was in there was very good, and he had a very good perch, a vast sloping area completely darkened and obscured by rising smoke. Even as he watched he heard a scream from the end of the triforium, and one of his men fell back. He heard another moan coming from the opposite triforium. In a short time everyone was on the floor as bullets skimmed across the ledge of the balustrade a few feet above their heads. Burke sat with his back against the wall and lit a cigarette as the wood above him splintered. “That guy is good.”
Bellini crouched across from him and nodded. “And he’s got the best seat in the house. This is going to be a bitch.” He looked at his watch. The whole thing, from the time Logan had hit the doors to this moment, had taken just under two minutes. But Logan was dead now, the National Guardsmen were nowhere to be seen, and he had lost some good people. The hostages might be dead, the people in the crawl space weren’t reporting, and someone in the choir loft was having a good day.
Bellini picked up the field phone and called Fifth Squad in the corridor off the sacristy. “All the bastards are dead except one or two in the choir loft. You have to go for the Cardinal and the two hostages under the pews.”
The squad leader answered, “How the hell do we rush that gate with the Cardinal hanging there?”
“Very carefully. Move out!” He hung up and said to Burke, “The sniper in the choir loft isn’t going to be easy.”
The ESD men from the Fifth Assault Squad moved out of the octagon rooms on both sides of the sacristy gate and slid quickly along the walls, converging on the Cardinal.