In the next few seconds, dozens of demonstrators raced through the bombed gate — and hundreds more pressed forward, forming a great, seemingly endless flood of men.
Ambassador Arpen paled. His hand rose to his throat, as if he already feared the nature of his death.
“Call someone,” he yelled at his executive assistant the moment the stately, middle-age woman poked her head in the door. “We need protection. Where are the Saudi police? This is U.S. soil. Call them!” he bellowed at her.
You can call till your fingers go numb, Lana thought, but the cork is out of a very unsettled bottle. She didn’t think any police force was likely to jam it back in, certainly not in the minutes — maybe just seconds — that embassy personnel had before the wrath of so many Saudis closed down around them.
She was sure the entire compound was in lockdown, but the mob had already blown open a steel gate. Doors would be the proverbial putty after that. The fact that there were bombs showed that this was hardly a spontaneous demonstration, at least by those equipped with the hardware to penetrate sophisticated U.S. security. Lana had no doubt about the backbone of this operation: AQAP.
One protestor carried a large American flag that was almost fully engulfed in flames. Pieces of the Stars and Stripes broke off as he ran. The flaming swatches had to be burning others in the densely packed horde, but no one dared to put the fire out.
A crude figure of Uncle Sam bobbed above the sea of heads, but other than the posters of Lana and a handful of signs proclaiming the U.S. to be the demon incarnate, there were few other displays of printed animus. Maybe AQAP had made it clear that this would not be a polite protest, but a siege. It sure looked like one.
They hate us.
Lana knew there was no mistaking the depth of ill will. And there would be no escaping the anger. On a government-to-government level, there might be friendship, or at least a relationship of convenience. But the Saudi street wants us dead. That last thought had her shaking her head.
She kept her eye on the ambassador, guessing that whatever security could be spared would try to protect him.
He had taken control of the phone himself, screaming into the mouthpiece the same question he’d yelled at his assistant: “Where are the Saudi police?”
Not here, and not likely to show up anytime soon, was all Lana could think as he slammed down the receiver.
The cyberattacks had shifted the balance of world power with precipitous speed. Former friends — or frenemies, more accurately — were backing away from the U.S. as fast as picnickers from a park skunk. It looked like frenemy number one, Saudi Arabia, was even willing to let Americans…
No, she barked at herself. Don’t even think it. But the stubborn impulse to acknowledge a brutal possibility would not ebb, so she finished her sentence with the succinctness of death itself:… be slaughtered.
Three uniformed men rushed in. “You have to leave,” the first said to the ambassador. “Now!” Not that the ambassador showed any reluctance to flee.
Embassy staff and other security officers also crowded into the office, then proceeded to smash the computers, even the ones on the ambassador’s desk, until the hard drives lay in pieces. They used cudgels that might have been kept on hand for precisely that purpose.
Paper files — no doubt just as damning — were hauled from file cabinets and thrown into shiny metal carts. Documents marked “Secret” fluttered to the floor. No one bothered to scoop them up. It looked like a drill they might have rehearsed many times, but terror had taken over.
“Burn them! Burn them!” a senior embassy official yelled. She looked rattled, wet-eyed, but not as shook up as the ambassador. As the three-man security detail escorted him from his office, he shouted at them, “Don’t let them take me. Whatever you do, don’t let them near me.”
None of the officers responded to him.
“Where are we going?” Arpen now shouted, his voice high-pitched with panic.
“Just keep moving, sir,” was the only response.
The ambassador sounded pathetic to Lana, but she trailed his security team closely. She knew she could not, under any circumstances, fall into the hands of AQAP. Only minutes ago a poster of her had been burned, to the cheering approval of the throng now invading the embassy grounds.
The officers moved the ambassador quickly down the hall. He looked back, spotted her, and yelled, “Go away. Burn files! Do something useful. You’re not coming with me.”
A scant second later, she wished she’d followed his order — instead of him: Five scruffy men with beards burst out of the stairwell and headed straight for them.
“Oh, God,” the ambassador cried, echoing Lana’s thoughts for the first time.
The men had their weapons drawn and overwhelmed the three security officers before they could even draw their guns. The five shoved them aside, along with the ambassador, and grabbed Lana.
“U.S. Navy. We’re taking Elkins,” one of the SEALs announced in a deep Texas drawl. “Out of our way.”
A large man gripped her left arm and hauled her down the hall. The commander caught up and took her right. Two of the SEALs worked the point; one covered them from behind.
“SEALs?” Lana asked the new guy on her right. He seemed to be the commander. “Really?”
“We’ve been called a lot worse,” he responded calmly.
“What about me?” yelled the ambassador, running after them.
“Go away,” the SEAL covering their rear yelled at him.
Lana glanced back as the ambassador tried to push past the officer. Bad move. In a flash he was pinned against the wall.
“I mean it, Ambassador Arpen. This isn’t your show.”
The diplomatic food chain had never been clearer.
“We don’t use elevators unless we have to,” said the commander as they swept her into the stairwell. He was as square-jawed as Superman. He even had a cleft in his chin. “Power goes out, and we have to break out of the damn box.”
They were two floors above ground level. Embassy personnel rushed past them, going up the stairs. A woman shouted, “They’re breaking down the front door.”
When Lana paused to look at her, the commander growled, “Don’t stop!”
As they hit the ground floor, one of the two SEALs on point peered into a lobby with a lavishly tiled blue fountain. Before he could close the door, a dozen Saudis ran into view. They spotted him — perhaps the others too — and sprinted toward them. The SEAL coming up the rear released three tear gas canisters. The rest resumed their downward flight.
She heard the gas hissing above the screams and the thunder of pounding footsteps.
“Go, go, go!” the commander growled.
The two men in the lead threw open the door to an underground area that was bigger than any big-box store in Bethesda. It looked like it had been built for parking, but there were no cars that Lana could see, only evenly spaced concrete pillars.
Now they were running. She was lifted off her feet repeatedly. She knew she had never moved this fast and was unlikely to ever again.
That was when the lights went out. She guessed a main power source had been compromised — by a bomb or a malicious pair of hands. Darkness descended quickly as a clamp. But in startlingly fast fashion the SEALs had headlamps lighting their way.
“We’re big bright targets now, men,” the commander drawled, “so go — go — go!”
“Shit! You hear that?” the man on her left muttered in a thick New York accent.