A better crime to push the panic buttons of middle-class America could not have been devised. The sanctity of home, neighborhood, and family circle had been savagely violated.
The television newspeople, no fools they, played that theme for all it was worth. “Why did he open the door?” one of them asked rhetorically, as if every suburban householder had not done the same thing dozens of times, as if the evil intent of Hopkins’ assailant had been written across his face so plainly it would have still been obvious in the stark shadows of the porch light.
But if you stayed glued to the tube long enough, eventually you were told that the President’s condition was unchanged. The doctor in charge of the President’s medical team held a morning press conference, but only a few minutes of that got on the air. The story of the hour was the killing of the House majority leader.
That was the story of the hour until nine a.m. Eastern time, anyway. At eight fifty-eight five heavily armed men walked into the rotunda of the Capitol building wearing heavy, knee-length coats. They shot the four security guards on duty with pistols before the security men could get off a shot, then extracted Uzis from under their coats and ran along the corridors shooting everyone they saw.
A reporter-camera team setting up to interview the Speaker of the House was the first to get this atrocity on the air, at nine-oh-one a.m., just in time to capture a gruesome vignette of one of the gunmen mowing down the woman reporter, then turning the weapon on the cameraman. As he was hammered into a wall with five slugs in his body the camera fell to the marble floor and was smashed.
A uniformed security guard near the Senate cloakroom was running toward the noise of gunfire with his pistol drawn when he rounded a corner and almost careened into one of the Uzi-toting gunmen. They exchanged shots at a range of five feet. In the roar of the Uzi on full automatic fire the report of the guard’s weapon was lost. Both men went down fatally wounded.
There were four gunmen left alive. One of them charged into a subcommittee hearing room where people were gathering and emptied a magazine into the crowd. The noise of the chattering automatic weapon was deafening, overpowering, in this room which had been recently renovated to improve the acoustics. Only when the trip-hammer blasts ended could those still alive hear the screams and moans, and then they sounded muffled, as if they were coming from a great distance.
The killer stood calmly amidst the blood and gore and groaning victims and changed magazines. He emptied the second magazine into the prostrate crowd and was inserting the third one into his weapon when a guard appeared in the doorway and shot him with a .357 Magnum.
The first two rounds from the revolver hammered the gunman to the floor but the guard walked toward him still shooting. He fired the sixth and last round into the gunman’s brain from a distance of three feet.
Sixteen people in the room were dead and seventeen wounded. Only three people escaped without bullet wounds.
Another of the gunmen was shot to death in the House dining room after he sprayed the diners with two magazines and used the third on the chandeliers. His weapon jammed. He was crouched amid a shower of shattered glass trying to clear the weapon when two guards standing at different doorways opened fire with their revolvers. The man went down with three bullets in him and was shot twice more as he lay on the floor.
One of the gunmen somehow ended up in the old Senate chamber which, mercifully, was empty. Didn’t matter. He stood near the lectern and sprayed two magazines of slugs into the polished desks and speaker’s bench. Then he threw the Uzi down, drew a pistol, and blew his brains out.
The only terrorist taken alive was shot from behind as he ran down a corridor on the second level. He had killed over a dozen people and wounded nine others before a woman guard leveled him with a slug through the liver.
Watching the pandemonium on television — every station in town had a crew at the Capitol within twenty minutes and two of them had helicopters circling overhead — White House chief of staff William C. Dorfman took the first report from the FBI watch officer over the telephone in his office.
“How many of them were there?”
“We don’t know.”
“Have you gotten them all?”
“We don’t know.”
“Casualties?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Well, goddammit, call me back when you know something, you fucking idiot!” Dorfman roared and slammed down the phone so hard the plastic housing on the instrument cracked.
These temper tantrums were a character defect and were doing him no good politically. Dorfman knew it and was trying to control himself. Still …
One minute later the telephone rang again. It was Vice-President Quayle. “I’m going over to the Capitol. I want you to go with me.”
“Mr. Vice-President, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Dorfman replied as he jabbed the button on the remote to kill the TV volume. “The FBI just told me that they don’t know if the guards got all the terrorists. The nation can’t afford to lose you to a—”
“I’m going, Dorfman. You’re coming with me. I’ll be at the Rose Garden entrance in five minutes. Have the cars brought around.”
The line went dead.
“Yessir,” Dorfman said to nobody in particular.
The administration was sitting on a bomb with a lit fuse, Dorfman realized, and the fuse was dangerously short.
Terrorists! Not in the Middle East, not in some Third World shithole that nobody had ever heard of, but here! Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States! The next thing you know wild-eyed lunatic ragheads will be blowing stuff up and slaughtering people in Moline and Columbus and Tulsa. My God!
At least Dan Quayle was smart enough to comprehend the gravity of the situation. That was undoubtedly why he wanted to personally view the carnage at the Capitol, console the survivors, and be seen by the American people doing it. That would help calm all those people from Bangor to L.A. who were right now beginning to feel the first twinges of panic.
Dorfman regretted his first impulse to advise Quayle not to go. Quayle’s political instincts were sound. He was right.
Dorfman called for the cars and had a thirty-second shouting match with the senior Secret Service agent on duty, who didn’t give a tinker’s damn about politics but did care greatly about the life of the Vice-President that was entrusted to his care.
He also took the time to call Gideon Cohen and tell him to meet the Vice-President’s party at the Capitol and to bring the director of the FBI along with him.
Dorfman shared the limo with the Vice-President, who had brought along his own chief of staff, one Carney Robinson, an intense blow-dried type who in his previous life had made a name for himself in public relations.
Dorfman apologized to Quayle for advising him not to go to the Capitol. “This is wise,” Dorfman said. Neither Quayle nor Robinson replied. They sat silently looking back at the people on the sidewalks looking at them.
After a bit Dan Quayle cleared his throat. “Will, use the phone there. Call General Land at the Pentagon and ask him to meet us at the Capitol.”
Without a word Dorfman seized the instrument and placed the call.
Henry Charon woke up a few minutes after ten a.m. at the Hampshire Avenue apartment and made himself a pot of coffee. While he waited for it to drip through he took a quick shower, brushed his teeth, and shaved.
Then he dressed, even putting on his shoes and a sweater. Only then did he pour himself some coffee and turn on the television to see what the hunters were up to.
He stood in front of the screen staring at it, trying to understand. A group of terrorists? The Capitol?
He sat on the sofa and propped his feet on the chair while he sipped the steaming hot liquid in the cup.