“Fuck! This shit hurts!”
“Hold on, pal,” the senior cop, a three-striper, said. “It looks like it hit a vein.” He pulled back the stained cloth and probed the wound, feeling the dime-size fragment under the flesh.
“To hell with it,” Art shouted, pulling away. The handkerchief fell to the sidewalk.
The amount of fire from above dropped off. Art looked around again and could see muzzle flashes from only one weapon, but the rapid crack-crack of the long guns high above picked up, peppering the window where the lone source of fire was coming from. Puffs of reddish dust spurted from each impact on the brick frame.
“You guys game?” Art asked, seeing that they were. “Let’s lay some fire on.”
“Gotcha,” the sergeant answered, looking back at his two subordinates and motioning to a white Caprice behind the bronze sedan. Its roof had been opened like a sieve, and its windows spiderwebbed. “On my go.”
Art brought his gun up. “Ready cover.”
“Go!”
The two patrolmen, one still in his peaked cap, sprinted low the forty feet to the cover of the big car. Art and the sergeant stepped from the corner and fired up into the window. It was a long shot for a pistol, but the rounds were meant mainly to discourage. “Out!”
Both men returned to cover, ejected their spent magazines, and inserted fresh ones. The two cops were holding their guns above the trunk in two-handed grips, but not firing. Then it was clear why.
“It’s quiet,” the sergeant observed. He wasn’t exactly right. A lone Service rifleman was squeezing off rounds into the windows, which were all shattered, leaving only frames between the stone columns.
Art looked around the corner’s edge carefully. He saw two black suited Service men moving along the sidewalk against the wall of the 818, their guns trained upward. They weren’t the two who had rolled out of the Suburban. Those two were still at the vehicle’s edge, aiming up, one apparently trying to clear a jam.
For a few seconds it was quiet, almost silent except for the crackling of the burning car in the Hilton’s drive.
Then it seemed like the lights went out.
The blast threw Art back, though it was mostly a reflexive act. He landed on the sergeant as the thunder of the explosion rumbled in the street and shattered what appeared to be every window in the nearby buildings. He didn’t know how he ended up lying facedown very close to the wall — the sergeant must have rolled him there — but it surely saved his life, considering the shower of glass that rained down from above. Smoke and dust were everywhere, turning day to near night, and the sound of debris impacting the obscured area reminded Art of marbles falling into a cardboard box.
He pulled himself up and was joined by the sergeant. Both saw the pair of patrolmen and the Service agent prone in the intersection, raising their arm-covered heads to see what had happened. They were okay. Art came to a crouch and peered around the comer, rising to full upright at the sight before him. A full four floors of the 818 had been blown out onto the street below, two above and one below the fifth, covering and crushing the Suburban and both men near it. He couldn’t see either man, or the two who were about to enter the building, but they could only be under the massive pile of rubble, made up of both the building and its contents. The cop behind him said something into his radio, but Art couldn’t tell what. The smoky, fog-like haze that filled the space between the buildings on each side of Seventh glowed with light from the flames that were licking slowly from the gaping wound on the face of the 818.
Slowly, the police officers with Art began to converge on the piles of rubble, some trying in vain to find a sign of life. They worked without fear. Nothing on the fifth floor could have survived the massive blast.
“Goddammit!” Art swore aloud, safing and holstering his gun before turning to walk back to his car. Along the way, without even knowing it, he stepped on his mirrored aviator sunglasses, which lay in the street, crushing them to bits.
Bud DiContino brought his head up and was nearly trampled. Four Secret Service agents hurdled him where he lay on his Anvil. My ribs!
Outside, or inside — he couldn’t tell which — was mayhem. There was no glass wall where one had been, and no dull metal window frames. Only the heavy support columns, stripped of their decorative covering, were intact. The presidential limo was nosed into one directly in front of Bud, twenty feet away. Its roof seemed strangely ballooned upward and there were no doors on the passenger side, or any windshield, or any windows at all. Everywhere, though, there was glass: tiny blocks of the shattered shatter-resistant panes that had been walls. And there was smoke. Bud saw, cocking his head to the left as he came to his knees, that the chase limo—I was supposed to ride in that car—was burning furiously, sending a chute of black smoke along the roof of the covered drive. Only a little entered what had been the lobby, but it was enough to make the Deputy NSA cough for fresher air.
The four agents who had passed him only seconds earlier were half carrying, half dragging a hideously injured body into the lobby. Another agent was pulling the young Air Force officer carrying the ‘football’—the nondescript case that carried the codes required for the president to initiate a nuclear release — away from the front of the room. His arm was injured, and he was furiously trying to pull a small lever on the case just beneath the handle. The agent, also injured, heeded the officer’s command and pulled the lever. An audible pop came from the case, and then fine streams of black smoke, as the codes were destroyed.
Bud cringed visibly. The Air Force officer had just given command of the nation’s nuclear arsenal to another officer, an Air Force general, high above the plains of middle America in one of the Looking Glass command aircraft. It was an act authorized by only one occurrence: the death of the president.
Bud got to his feet, wanting to see if anyone was left alive, but his endeavor was cut short by an anxious pair of Secret Service agents, both of whom had carried the body in.
“Mr. DiContino, we have to get out of here.”
“Is that…?” Bud couldn’t finish the question.
“Yes, sir…dead. The chief of staff, too. And General Paley. Now let’s move!” It was not a choice, Bud knew, as the burly agent spun him around and practically carried him down the hallway by the collar. Ahead was another agent, gun drawn, clearing the way, and behind, though Bud could not see them, were the other two carrying the body of the president.
Praise Allah!
He prayed silently, thanking the Great One for bringing success to his operation, though it was only the beginning. There was much yet to be accomplished, much that could still go awry. But he had faith, as his mentor had in him, and worry would do no good. As it was, his comrades had penetrated the den of the Great Satan and exacted the first taste of revenge. The television news showed the scene over and over, obviously taken by a very lucky cameraman outside the hotel — lucky not because he got the pictures, but to be alive, as evidenced by the shrapnel-caused crack in the lens and his close proximity to the explosions. Many had been killed, some innocents, and that was expected. Many more would die before all was done.