Their dead-set expressions, their dress, their movements. Instantly Carrie Ann knew something was seriously wrong.
The Middle Eastern man was just twenty-five feet away from Carrie Ann when he reached back over his head with both hands and then flung them forward. From each hand she recognized live grenades launching out, over her head and toward the dozens of men and women behind her. The woman standing on the driveway did the same, and one of her grenades arced through the air in the direction of the picnic table bar and Carrie Ann’s own position.
Carrie Ann Davenport turned around, took two steps toward the stunned master’s student, and she tackled him across the top of the table, knocking over bottles and cans and ice and stacks of Solo cups along with them. The two rolled off and over, and had just landed on the ground, he on top of her, as the four grenades exploded all over the garden party.
Screams and yells from the wounded and the panicked, and the chants of “Allahu Akbar” rang above it all, and then Carrie Ann heard the gunfire. From under the picnic table she could see both the attackers moving forward, pistols in their hands, shooting at men and women scrambling away in front of them.
Carrie Ann rolled off the U of M student, hiked her white sleeveless blouse out of her skirt, and reached to the small of her back. She drew a tiny Smith & Wesson Bodyguard .380 pistol, reached over the top of the table, and aimed it at the body of the man walking toward her. She was just about to press the trigger when she recognized the man might have been wearing body armor under his big jacket, so she activated the Crimson Trace laser on the weapon and put the shaking laser dot on his forehead.
The Middle Eastern man fired at someone behind her running away, then he noticed her there, on her knees behind the table, just twenty feet in front of him.
United States Army Captain Carrie Ann Davenport shot the man through the left eye, dropping him to the ground and sending him writhing in shock and agony. She stood up and put another round in the back of his head, stilling him instantly.
A bullet cracked by her left ear and she looked up, saw the black female aiming at her, and then she saw the woman stumble to her right on the driveway and fall down on her side. She’d been shot by a party guest Carrie Ann had been introduced to earlier, a warrant officer and Chinook copilot. He held a Beretta M9 in his hand, one of the pistols given out to military personnel stateside in the last week, by order of the President, to help protect them from terrorists.
Carrie Ann looked back to the woman lying on the driveway, and saw her pistol out of reach; she also saw a small device in her right hand, hanging from a cable run under the cuff of her jacket.
Carrie Ann spun away, dove to the ground, and again tackled the good-looking grad student, who had just begun to climb to his knees. As she covered him a massive detonation erupted behind her, louder than all four grenades going off at the same time, and shrapnel ripped across the backyard. She felt the wind sucked from her lungs, the bits of debris cutting into her legs, and she heard nothing other than the ringing in her ears.
For a time, everything went still, then, over the ringing, she heard the cries and screams ring out anew.
Carrie Ann looked down at the man — she didn’t even know his name — and saw he was alive but out of it, dazed and disoriented.
He looked up at her and blinked. “Are you… okay?”
“I’m fine.”
She rose to her knees, felt blood on her legs, and then pulled herself up to her feet, using the picnic table to do so. There were easily twenty dead or wounded around her, and she staggered into the mass of carnage, hoping to help in some small way.
Somehow, even in the middle of this, she already knew the best way for her to help was to get back into her attack helicopter and wreak some righteous payback for what had happened here just now.
69
Tears streamed down the eyes of Dr. Olivia Ryan, older daughter of the President of the United States, and she fought hard the need to sniff, because it was a sound she did not want to make at the moment. She held her hand in front of her mouth, covering a small amount of the shock and surprise on her face.
And then she nodded quickly, blinking away more tears.
For several seconds she couldn’t take her eyes off the ring in the little box in front of her, and she pried them away only to look into the eyes of her boyfriend, kneeling before her.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course I will!”
Davi stood and they kissed for a long moment, promised each other their undying love, and then she put the ring on her finger. Holding each other they turned and looked out over the rolling hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains that played out in a perfect vista behind the big log cabin: the sunset behind them lit the sky in orange and bathed the green hills below them in soft light.
Olivia squeezed Davi hard, and said, “It’s perfect. Everything… is… perfect.”
As they gazed on at the incredible view through tears of joy, both of their heads swiveled suddenly to the sight of a man in a parachute dropping through the evening air not fifty yards from the rear of the cabin.
The parachutist hit the rolling grassy pasture hard and tumbled head over feet several times, and then his rectangular canopy collapsed on top of him. He crawled up to his knees, tried to control the lines and the chute as it re-formed, and then it pulled taut and started to drag him with it.
Olivia muttered softly, “Is this… part… of your proposal?”
Davi just said, “Uhh… I don’t know what this is.”
A second man appeared in the sky just above the first, and he landed expertly on the struggling man’s parachute, collapsing it and arresting the first man’s slide across the hill below the cabin. The second pulled out of his harness, helped the man on the ground out of his own rig, and then both men noticed the two standing by the swing on the back porch of the log cabin.
Davi stared back at them. “What on earth am I looking at?”
As one, the two men down the hillside drew submachine guns from packs harnessed to their bodies.
“Oh my God!” Olivia shouted. “Back inside! Lock the door!”
Jack Ryan, Jr., recognized his sister as she ran off, and his blood went cold. As Chavez began collecting the chutes he said, “She’s not supposed to be here.”
Ding said, “Get them in a car and on the road in the next five minutes!”
Jack raced up to the back porch of the cabin and pounded on the door. “Sally? Sally? It’s me! It’s Jack! Open up!”
The door opened slowly, and standing in front of him with wide eyes and a baffled expression on his face was Dr. Davi Kartal.
His sister’s boyfriend.
“J… Jack?”
Olivia appeared in the doorway behind Davi, saw her brother, the gun in his hand, the gear on his body. “What the hell is going on?”
Jack looked back out to the trees in the fading light. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Olivia said, “Well, I’m not pulling guns on my sibling!”
“Sorry… I didn’t recognize you at first.” He looked around some more. “Where’s the team? Where is your Secret Service detail?”
“We left them in D.C. It was a pain in the ass to get them to agree to it, but we wanted to be alone.” There was a note of frustration in Olivia’s voice, but it was clear she was astonished that her brother and another man had just dropped from the sky. “Seriously? You parachute? Since when do you know how to parachute?”
“It’s kind of a work in progress. Listen, we have to—”
Olivia held up the ring on her finger. “Davi just asked me to marry him. We were enjoying the moment, and then you dropped in unannounced.”