Everything that happened seemed to happen simultaneously. The whole moment of terror was frozen into one frame of time.
A blizzard of bone, brains, and blood. Screams.
Cries of pain and terror.
Barked orders from the various security services.
Shots were fired from many directions. Alex couldn’t tell if they were friendly or hostile.
Alex wanted to vomit. Her insides wanted to explode. Instead, she kept moving. She had lost sight of Robert. Americans were calling out, running. Ducking and darting. There was no logic except survival.
Alex continued toward the vehicle that had brought her. She searched the crowd madly for Robert but still couldn’t find him. She thought she saw Reynolds on the ground with a wound, but when she altered her course and ran ten feet in that direction, the man rose and staggered with the help of another man. She was no longer sure what she had seen.
Someone gave a command for all American security people to show badges and ready weapons. She drew her handgun. She moved toward her car.
Then Alex saw that the presidential limousine had taken a direct hit. The driver writhed in the front seat. His face was covered in blood. She knew she couldn’t do anything for him. Half his head was missing. He was still moving, but she knew he would die. She could do nothing.
She ran toward her own vehicle. Bullets were hitting everywhere. She spun around; the wreath lay under a body that looked Ukrainian. She turned in another direction and the complete lack of reality slammed home. Two agents whom she didn’t know had the president between them. They had automatic weapons drawn and were looking for a car to use to escape. The president’s own car had taken a devastating hit. So had the backup limo. They were within ten feet of her, then five, then ran smack into her.
“Here!” she screamed. “FBI!” she shouted, identifying herself. “Here! Here!”
They looked. There was the number-two armored Mercedes, abandoned by the Ukrainians. She threw open the door. The keys were in the ignition. She threw open the backdoor.
The Secret Service agents looked at her and understood. They abandoned their prearranged emergency routines. They just wanted the president out of there. They pushed the president in and covered the president’s body with their bodies.
For a brief moment, Alex surmised that Ukrainian security had been infiltrated by traitors. The RPGs must have been the first line of attack. Gunmen on the ground would probably be the second.
American English: a man’s voice. “Out of the way, lady! Out of the way!” A marine major in uniform-the driver for the Benz-blindsided her, grabbing her shoulder and yanking her out of the way. She hit the ground hard.
Just then, Alex discovered she was right. Combat between forces on the ground. Two men with automatic handguns and ski masks made a move toward the driver’s side of the Benz, confronting the driver.
The marine whirled with his sidearm, but he wasn’t fast enough. The gunmen fired. The marine’s eyes went wide in disbelief as the bullets threw him against the side of the car. The gunmen were only a few feet from the president.
Alex stared at the enemy for less than half a second, understanding the moment perfectly. She raised her Walther. They didn’t expect that from a woman. They turned on her, but turned too late.
She was younger, faster, and smarter, and somehow God seemed to guide her hand. It was Colosimo’s all over again, but this time for keeps.
She fired six shots, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
What happened would replay itself in her mind for the rest of her life, every surreal moment. Before either assassin could fire a shot at her, Alex saw her bullets shatter the front of the one man’s face and rip a hole in his neck. His weapon flew from his hands and he sprawled backward.
She hit the second man in the sternum. He was heavier and stockier, but no match for a.9 mm round, even from her old Walther. He managed to squeeze the trigger of his weapon, but the shots flew into the sky.
Crimson pools burst from his chest as he fell.
She lurched quickly to her feet. The marine was dead on the ground beside her, the left side of his neck and face shot to pulp.
In every direction, everyone was running through a hornets’ nest of automatic weapons fire and rockets. Remaining Secret Service agents closed in on the limousine. From behind her, in the backseat, two Secret Service agents huddled against the president, their weapons up.
One of them yelled, “Driver down! You! Get in!”
She knew this part of the drill too. Service procedure was to get Einstein out of the Red Zone as fast as possible. She turned and looked. The Service people meant her. She should drive.
For a split second, Alex could see the face of the president, as dazed and terrified as the guards. Like any battle, everything had gone exactly to plan until the first shot was fired.
She holstered her weapon and slid into the front seat of the vehicle. The front window was cracked but not shattered. It had been hit hard twice and showed the points of impact. But it had held. God bless Stuttgart engineering.
“I’m FBI!” she said to the agents in back.
“Get us moving!” one of them barked back. “Drive!”
Alex gunned the engine and found it responsive. “Hang on!” she ordered.
She remembered the route from the airport. She put the vehicle in gear. There was a crunching impact under the tires and she knew she was driving over the fallen bodies of the two men she had shot. In the backseat, radios crackled as the agents gave their location as well as Einstein’s.
She sped out of the square. Other security vehicles fell in stride with her. She got out of the square and hit the main roads. There was still a mass of confusion, people dazed and gawking, others fleeing, some sitting by the highway in tears.
From somewhere there was a final explosion, and the car shuddered as if it had been hit again with fragments of metal. A new crack appeared on a rear window.
The vehicle now had a slight wobble to it, which told her that the wheels had been hit. She wrestled with the shuddering steering wheel. The car went into a skid at about fifty miles an hour, but she turned into it and pulled the vehicle out.
She hit a straight section on the motorway. The president started to sit up and look around, immensely shaken and surprised to be alive.
In the rearview mirror, other American vehicles were not far behind. Coming up on them, however, a brigade of four motorcycle riders. Friendly or enemy? No one knew.
“I got four outriders,” she said to the agents behind her. “I don’t know who they are!” She was doing seventy miles an hour and the riders were rapidly overtaking them. Four of them!
She heard the window go open directly behind her. The sound of the wind was deafening. Sirens blared everywhere. One of the Secret Service agents leaned out the vehicle from the chest up, brandishing his machine gun, looking for more trouble, waiting to see if there was the slightest hostile sign from the riders.
They were in Ukrainian military uniforms and were easily doing a hundred miles an hour. The radio in the car crackled.
“They’re ours! They’re friendlies!”
“I don’t trust anyone,” the second agent said.
The riders came up to the car. The agent leaning out the window had his automatic weapon trained on the nearest one. But the leader of the motorcyclists gave a friendly hand sign and pointed toward the airport. They were there to lead the way, or at least said they were. Alex maintained her speed. The motorcycles went on ahead and formed a wedge.
Gradually, the sound of gunfire ceased. Alex drove for seven minutes. She hit the access road to the airport. There, on a heavily guarded tarmac up ahead, sat the president’s backup helicopter.
Uniformed American soldiers indicated the way for the limousine. Alex drove the vehicle directly toward the chopper and brought it to a halt fifty feet away. The rotors were already noisily spinning. The air was filled with the sound of engines, distant sirens, and violent curses.