“Dios mío,” he mumbled in awe. Zarif didn’t know what the kid expected, but it clearly wasn’t anything like what had just happened.
He turned back to Zarif and picked up his pace. “My God. That was big, man.”
Zarif didn’t hear any shooting until they had walked another half-block, but when the crackling gunfire came he was pleasantly surprised. He knew the sound of an AK, and he heard multiple Kalashnikovs open up; their machinelike cyclic thumping mixed nicely with the dozens of car alarms and the thundering of helicopters overhead.
A scene of utter chaos had erupted, and that was even before the first crash of an RPG explosion.
Both men were picked up in the truck by the two Maldonado cowboys who had dropped them off over an hour earlier, and they began driving back to the safe house to the north.
Secret Service Agent Davis Linklater straddled the President of the United States in the backseat of the Suburban. He ran his hands all over Ryan’s body, under his coat, and along his back. Ryan winced when Linklater felt his right shoulder, and the seasoned special agent saw the President’s pupils lose focus.
“Where do you hurt, Mr. President?”
Ryan looked around him, and turning his head caused a blinding pain in his right shoulder. “Yeah,” he responded.
“Where, sir?”
Ryan looked down at his left wrist, it was swollen. “My wrist.” After a moment he said, “I think I broke my shoulder, too.”
Linklater felt a little more, this time closer to Ryan’s clavicle.
Ryan cried out. “Damn it, Link!”
“Collarbone,” Linklater said.
Ryan nodded distractedly. “Andrea? How is Andrea?”
The agent replied, “I honestly don’t know, Mr. President. We’re going to take care of you, get you to the aircraft, and get home.”
“We can’t leave Andrea and—”
“There are hundreds of law enforcement and first responders back at the scene. They will take good care of her, I promise.”
“I want you to find out.”
“I will… when we are on board Air Force One.”
Lead Secret Service Agent Dale Herbers was behind the wheel, and he was damn glad he’d been here in town for a week already. He knew his way back to the airport without even having to look at the GPS, and this was good, because the GPS had been knocked off the windshield and was now nowhere to be found. He was well off the motorcade route, trying to skirt around the heavy traffic that had been created when the route was reopened to traffic after the motorcade had passed.
He raced through intersections at high speed, honking his horn. This vehicle wasn’t armored, but it did have strobing blue lights, and he ran them continuously as he drove.
Herbers made a hard right to move parallel to gridlocked Eje 2 Norte Transval, and immediately he heard about it from Linklater.
“Smooth, Dale! He’s got fractures! Unknown internal!”
“Okay!”
There were four armed men in the car in total; Herbers, two shooters from the counterassault team, and Davis Linklater, one of SWORDSMAN’s protection detail. When they left the ambush site, Linklater and the two shooters had been in back with the President, but one of the CAT agents had climbed up into the front passenger seat, kicking all the other agents in the head with his shiny black combat boots in the process. Now he rode shotgun with his assault rifle over the dashboard scanning left and right, and in the back, the other black-clad agent with a carbine was on his knees next to Linklater and SWORDSMAN, facing the rear window and watching for any threats on their tail.
While Linklater attended to SWORDSMAN, Dale Herbers found himself running comms as well as driving, which wasn’t optimal at all, but he wanted the shooters in the car concentrating on watching for threats.
Herbers had called out his location to the rest of the detail, and by now mobile Secret Service agents were racing to catch up with him from behind, fortifying the protective bubble around Air Force One, or else in vehicles heading out of the airport to meet the Suburban along the way.
Over a dozen Mexican Federal Police motorcycles had managed to keep up with the black Suburban as it left the blast zone, and two more Suburbans full of special agents were a few hundred yards back and blasting through lights and stop signs to stay with the evac.
In the backseat Linklater had finished his initial assessment of his protectee, and he called it in to the aircraft so Ryan’s personal doctor, Maura Handwerker, would be ready for him when he arrived.
When Linklater finished with his transmission, Ryan reached out and grabbed the lapel of his suit coat. “How many dead, Davis?”
“I don’t know, sir.” He shook his head. “A lot.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
“I was in the chase car two back from you. It was an IED. The SUV in front of me was down. I didn’t see anyone bail. I saw Ambassador Styles. He appeared deceased. The driver of your vehicle… he was deceased.”
Jack shut his eyes. “Delaney.” Mitch Delaney had been on his detail for two years. He’d been alive when Ryan saw him, but that was before the RPG struck the Beast.
“Yes, sir.”
“What else did you see?”
“CAT came up and wasted a bunch of fuckers. Sorry, sir. Just a little adrenaline.”
“It’s okay, Davis,” Ryan said as he patted the man’s lapel back in place. “Whoever they were, they were most definitely fuckers.”
60
Jill Crosby had spent the past minute and a half lying flat on the ground next to the Mobile Command and Control Vehicle that everyone called the Roadrunner. A fierce gun battle raged all around her. She’d been on the other side of the vehicle when the Suburban raced backward along the sidewalk to the upturned limousine and then continued backward behind her, so she’d seen none of that.
But even if she had not been shielded from the SUV, she still might have missed it, because her eyes were fixed firmly on the wreckage just seventy-five feet away. It was the Beast, it was split in half and burning, and smoldering, charred bodies sat in the backseat.
This was Crosby’s first time in the presidential motorcade, and she had no idea there were actually two identical limousines. She was certain the vehicle in front of her was the one the President had been traveling in.
The gunfire and explosions abated after two minutes, and almost immediately after that she saw Secret Service men in dark suits and sunglasses race to the burning limo in the middle of the road and begin spraying it with fire extinguishers. Other CAT men appeared and covered them, unsure if there were any more threats in the buildings.
The fact there was such an effort to put out the fire convinced her of what was going on. She had no doubt in her mind she was looking at the bodies of U.S. Ambassador Horatio Styles and President of the United States Jack Ryan.
She filmed it all with her camera phone, but when she heard a voice on the phone’s speaker, she quickly brought it back to her mouth, ending the shot.
She’d wanted to send a live video feed from her phone to be broadcast, but the producer told her to just record for playback so they could control what made it on the air.
The anchor in Atlanta set up the phone call quickly on live TV. “CNN’s Jill Crosby is on the phone with us from the scene in Mexico City, where the presidential motorcade has just come under attack. Jill, are you there?”
“I’m here, Don. I am in the center of a continuing, protracted ambush of the presidential motorcade. There was a bomb or a missile, some sort of massive explosion, and that was followed quickly by more shooting and smaller explosions. The motorcade stopped moving, so I left the press-pool van to try and get through the smoke to see the President. I saw wreckage and bodies, and then I had to take cover where I am right now.”