The back doors of the limousine flew open. The Secret Service agents hustled the president out and quick-stepped to the chopper.
Alex stood by the driver’s side of the door and watched the president disappear up the ramp. Her eyes drifted to the vehicle. Battered chassis, cracked windows, shredded tires. How had it had gotten there? And she realized she was trembling, at least inside. She looked everywhere for Robert but didn’t see him. A horrible feeling swept her, a fear and anxiety unlike anything she had previously known.
“Oh, God, please…,” she heard herself mumbling
A man appeared next to her. He identified himself as the ranking Secret Service agent on the tarmac.
“You drove?” he asked.
“Yeah. I drove,” she said flatly.
“Good job! Orders are to get all our people out of here as fast as possible. We’re not waiting for anyone.”
“I’ll stay here. I-”
“Get in the chopper,” he said.
“I-”
“Get your ass in the chopper! Orders! There’s only one seat left!”
“Okay.”
She took a step. He reached out and put a hard hand on her shoulder. “I’ve never seen you before, but you sure done good today.”
“Thanks.”
She turned and ran to the ramp. The ramp came up practically while she was still on it. She found the remaining seat on the helicopter and slid into it. Seconds later, the helo lifted off.
Her head was pounding. Her insides were ready to explode. Though no one could see it, fear riddled her and she kept repeating prayers in her head. The gun weighed heavily in her pocket and the images of the carnage on the ground in Kiev kept spiraling back to her, as did the visions of the two faceless men she had shot.
She closed her eyes, drew a breath, prayed that Robert had gotten out the same as she had, and she opened her eyes.
She hadn’t realized it, but she was sitting right across from the president, who was staring at her.
The chopper lifted higher into the sky and headed for Air Force One, which was just a few minutes away at the international airport at Borispil.
Her heartbeat plunged back into double digits. The president nodded gently at her. “Thanks.”
“Yeah,” was all she could say.
She tried to look out the window but there was no visibility. She remembered the dark clouds that had covered Kiev on arrival and realized that was exactly where she was right now.
On the flight to the international airport, no one spoke. What was there that could be said after what everyone had witnessed, after what had happened?
Alex leaned back and closed her eyes. Her hand drifted to her neck, searching for the small cross to touch, to massage.
Somehow somewhere in all the horror, the chain must have broken. The cross was gone. It wasn’t in her blouse or anywhere on her or on the floor of the chopper.
It was just plain gone.
FORTY-FOUR
The president boarded Air Force One at Borispil amidst vast confusion. Alexandra found a seat by herself in the passenger section.
She closed her eyes, and much as she had done before leaving on this trip, she tried to disappear into prayer, beseeching heaven that what had happened back in Kiev hadn’t looked as bad as she thought it had.
Sometimes prayers are answered. Other times they are not.
Much of the time, human events have no order, no logic, no good side. They can only be as good as is made of them afterward.
So it was today.
The flight back to Washington was fourteen hours. Before arrival, news of the terrible toll on the ground in Kiev had made its way through those survivors on Air Force One.
There were already forty-two confirmed fatalities on the ground. Injuries were still being tabulated.
Seven were members of what appeared to be a filorusski assassination squad.
Twenty-three were Ukrainian civilians, including eleven Foreign Service nationals who worked for the embassy.
Twelve remaining casualties were American citizens.
Of those, seven were embassy employees whom Alex didn’t know.
Then there were the five whose names did mean something to her.
The ambassador, Jerome Drake, was dead.
So was Richard Friedman, her control officer.
The note taker from the meetings, Ellen Higgins, had come out at the last minute to get a look at the president and take a photograph. She too had been killed.
So had Reynolds Martin, a.k.a., “Jimmy Neutron,” who, along with another agent, had immediately blocked access to the president when the first RPG had landed.
That left one casualty, of which Alex was informed an hour before landing in Washington.
Special Agent Robert Timmons, partnered with Reynolds Martin, had been the other agent to immediately protect the president. He too had been hit with shrapnel at the outset of the attack. And he too had died on the spot.
FORTY-FIVE
In a private room at Josephs Air Force Base when Air Force One returned to Washington, spokes people for various government agencies had sought to give out proper information updates and make some sense out of chaos and tragedy. Meanwhile, Secret Service agents in Washington, picking up the fallen standard, whisked the president to the well-fortified compound in the Catoctin Mountains of western Maryland.
In a first-floor corridor at Josephs, banners welcoming home the travelers were torn down and replaced with long sheets of paper. Magic markers were stuck with Velcro to the wall under the paper, so that anyone could write tributes to those who had died in Kiev.
Then, in the tragedy-numbed days after Kiev, Alex assumed the role of a widow to her late fiancé. She phoned his parents in Michigan and broke the horrible news to them, rather than have them hear it from someone they didn’t know. She talked to a small crowd of distraught Secret Service employees who had gathered on the tarmac in Washington when Air Force One returned. The death of her own fiancé barely sinking in upon her, she shared what Robert had told her to say if disaster struck, that he had died doing what he had wanted to do, that he had given his life in service to a country he loved.
News media made much of Alex’s personal story. They wanted to talk to her. So did the radio and TV talk shows. Publishers contacted her about possible books.
She wanted none of it. Fame, if that’s what it was, had been thrust upon her at a terrible price. She declined all the offers. She tried to disappear from public view, but reporters waited for her at Treasury and at her apartment complex. With the loss of the man she had so deeply loved, all sense, color, and flooring dropped from her days.
She was put on mandatory administrative leave with full pay. She was debriefed several times, by Treasury, by the FBI, and by Michael Cerny.
Then, a week after her return to the United States, Alex flew to Michigan for Robert’s funeral. Like Kiev on the day he died, it was bitterly cold. The arctic wind swept down from central Canada to drop the entire state well below freezing. But it felt even colder because Robert’s parents had to do what no parent should ever have to do: bury a son.
Robert Timmons’ parents stood in the front row of two hundred mourners at the graveside in a snowy Lutheran churchyard in Saginaw. The sky was clear, but the air was touched with ice. The sun ducked in and out from the occasional cloud.
Alex stood beside her slain fiancé’s parents. Robert’s father managed to hold his emotions together. His mother had stopped trying. Alex had cried so much in the last seven days that, for this day at least, for this particular service, she had no tears left. She still had a deep hollow feeling, one of shock and disbelief.
She felt betrayed. Betrayed by life, betrayed by God, betrayed even by the people she had worked for. Betrayed by her own emotions. She had allowed herself to love, and now, with the same passion that she had loved, she felt the loss of Robert.