Dick Couch: Out of the Ashes

“Please, we’ll come back for him,” she said as she knelt down and tried to coax Megan to come with her.

“My daddy, my daddy,” Meagan wailed.

Suddenly, there was deafening noise from across the stadium. The young woman looked up to see a section of upper-deck seats collapsing onto the lower section, raining concrete, seats, and people, scores of people, down onto the section below.

“There has been a terrorist attack. There may be more attacks. Please evacuate the stadium now. More attacks are imminent. Please leave the stadium. There has been a terrorist attack. There may be more attacks. Please evacuate the stadium now. More attacks are imminent. Please leave the stadium…”

The announcement droned on and on, and as it did, more fans fled toward the exits.

A big man stampeding for the exits knocked down the young woman and Meagan with her. As Meagan looked down, she saw a severed hand covered in blood, like that of a mangled store mannequin. She began to shriek uncontrollably, now clutching the woman beside her.

“There has been a terrorist attack. There may be more attacks. Please evacuate the stadium now. More attacks are imminent. Please leave the stadium. There has been a terrorist attack. There may be more attacks. Please evacuate the stadium now. More attacks are imminent. Please leave the stadium…”

The woman scooped Megan up in her arms and joined the thousands of panicked fans as they continued to empty out of Lincoln Financial Field. They were running for their lives, running for their cars, running anywhere away from what had just happened.

This deadly scene played out not just at the Eagles’ Lincoln Financial Field, but nearly simultaneously in three other NFL football stadiums on that Sunday afternoon in November. The final attack, one that went down as planned about ten minutes after all the others, occurred at FedEx Field in suburban Landover, Maryland, home of the Washington Redskins.

Yet, while numerous panicked fans made for the exits thinking only of themselves, there were also heroics. At the Meadowlands, a biker covered with tats and dressed in Harley leather carried a bleeding woman toward the exit, moving only as fast as his heavy load would let him. At the M&T Bank Stadium, a Ravens fan used her scarf as a makeshift tourniquet to stanch the bleeding of a severely injured fan’s leg. At FedEx Field, a Redskin fan in full “Hog” regalia threw an injured teenager over his shoulder and slowly carried him to the exit.

The explosions were restricted to just those four stadiums, but not the panic. In five other stadiums across the nation, there was nothing but panic. Once the people in the stadiums where the explosions occurred reached safety, they tweeted about the attacks, and fans in other stadiums picked up these tweets. Then the announcing systems in those stadiums began to drone, “There have been terrorist attacks in several NFL stadiums. An attack in this stadium is imminent. Please evacuate the stadium now. There have been terrorist attacks in several NFL stadiums. An attack in this stadium is imminent. Please evacuate the stadium now.” Fans immediately rushed for the exits, and many were trampled in the process.

The death toll was substantial, and while not rivaling the numbers killed on 9/11, the fact that Americans were attacked in multiple cities, and simultaneously, in many ways induced a new, and in some ways deeper, angst. The nation was shocked and gripped with fear.

Throughout the nation, but especially in the national capital region, watchstanders in the White House Situation Room, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the various three-letter agencies, and elsewhere attempted to make sense of the attacks and deal with the ensuing chaos. They all sought to take action. But for the moment, there was nothing to do.

Trevor Harward, the president’s national security advisor, stood outside the Cosmos Club on Massachusetts Avenue in Northwest Washington, D.C., waiting impatiently for the valet to bring his car around. He and his wife had been having brunch with friends in the club’s elegant main dining room when the watchstander in the Situation Room had called him. The conversation lasted no more than 30 seconds, time enough for him to turn white as he rose from his chair. “I’ve got to go. Please excuse us,” was all he said as he headed for the door with his wife in tow.

“I need to get to the Situation Room now,” he said to his wife as he looked right toward 22nd Street Northwest, craning his neck searching for his black Mercedes E550 4Matic sedan to come into view. “I’ll drive, jump out, and then you take the car home. I’m going to be there a while.”

Harward jerked the driver’s door open before the valet could open it himself and shouted to his wife, “Get in.” The tires squealed as Harward mashed the gas pedal and the car bolted away from the curb and headed southeast toward DuPont Circle. He had the Mercedes going seventy by the time they passed the Embassy Row Hotel, just a block and a half from the Cosmos Club.

“Slow down, you’re going to kill us,” his wife shouted as she clutched the car’s dashboard.

“Slow down — I wish! We’ve just been attacked, the president’s on the West Coast, and the fucking vice president is playing golf at the Congressional Country Club way the hell up in Potomac. I’m it for now!”

Harward powered the car into DuPont Circle’s inner loop at breakneck speed, simultaneously punching the accelerator and riding the brake, the Mercedes’ squealing tires startling the small groups of men playing checkers in the shadow of the fountain on this mild fall Sunday. Suddenly, he realized he was in the inner loop and couldn’t turn down Connecticut Avenue. “Hold on,” he yelled to his now panicked wife as he jerked the car’s wheel and lumbered over the curbed barrier separating the circle’s inner and outer loops.

The Mercedes thudded over the barrier and came down hard on its shocks. Horns blared and Harward narrowly missed a minivan.

“Slow down, Trevor; slow down for God’s sake.”

Harward ignored her and stared straight ahead as he pointed the car down Connecticut Avenue. Now sweating profusely and cursing at the cars he had to maneuver around, he barreled ahead at close to ninety miles per hour. Harward slowed, but didn’t stop, as he blew through a red light.

“Trevor, you’re going to kill us. Damn it!”

He continued to stare straight ahead. The sixty-year-old Harward looked the part of a creature of Washington who’d been beat down into submission after decades of too much responsibility and not enough control over policy or his life. Packing 230 pounds on his five-foot eight-inch frame, he was obese. His fashion sense was decades in the past; he was prepped out in his Brooks Brothers blue sport coat, tan cuffed pants, crisp white polo button-down, and blue club tie.

“Get on your iPhone and try to find out something, anything!” he shouted at his wife.

His wife refused to release her death grip on the car’s dash to look into her lap, convinced Harward was going to kill them both.

Harward slowed only slightly as he passed the Farragut North Metro station, and turned right onto 17th Street, now heading due south. He was almost there, only a few blocks from the White House and the West Wing.

As he approached the Corcoran Gallery on his right, Harward slowed and turned hard left on E Street Northwest. He screeched to a halt at the security checkpoint. The uniformed Secret Service guards had been alerted he was coming. He flashed his creds.

“Mr. Harward.”

“She’s with me,” he snapped at the guard, jerking his head toward his ashen-faced wife. “She’ll drop me here at West Exec and then take the car away.”