Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

Herbers leapt to his feet and started running for the black SUV.

59

Ryan climbed back to his knees for the second time in the past forty-five seconds. His right arm hung by his side, the pain grew by the second, but through the pain he saw Andrea lying faceup on the curb, blood running from her forehead.

He blinked away the grit that had made its way into his eyes and crawled to her; she was just five feet away, but it felt like a mile.

All around him men fired weapons, alarms shrieked; a helicopter had flown so low that it whipped the smoke away in swirling vortexes. Two agents kept their hands on Ryan’s back as they kept their weapons sweeping, occasionally firing, and hot brass clanged on the street. Ryan cradled Andrea’s head in his hands. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was parted slightly. He put his head to her mouth and then to her chest, and he felt and heard nothing.

She wasn’t breathing.

A counterassault officer tried to pull Ryan to his feet now, to bring him back to the relative safety of the upturned vehicle, but Ryan swatted the man’s grip away with his left arm. Then he pinched Andrea’s nose shut and began rescue breathing.

He’d been trained decades ago, but his wife had given him a refresher when Kyle was born, so he knew the fundamentals. He pushed away the chattering gunfire, and even a third detonation of an RPG against the wall of a parking garage nearby, and he continued short powerful breaths into her mouth, followed by one-handed chest compressions.

He was on his third round of breathing when he saw a response from her, just a quick inhalation and an expression of discomfort on her face, but he knew she was alive.

He was about to talk to her when a black Suburban raced backward down the sidewalk and screeched to a stop just ten feet away. Now several CAT officers pulled Ryan away from Andrea Price O’Day.

“Wait!” he shouted, but President Ryan was not in charge.

“We’ll take care of her!” a young agent shouted, pulling the President toward the vehicle.

The back door opened and Ryan was pushed in roughly, while men with body armor surrounded him on all sides. He tried to get a look back over his shoulder at his longtime friend lying motionless in the street, but one of his protection detail was there, almost on top of him, and he shoved Ryan all the way to the floorboard and covered him with his own body.

Ryan screamed in pain.

The agent behind the wheel yelled to the other men, “There’s gunmen and wreckage ahead! Can we go back?”

The two counterassault men had come from behind in the motorcade. “Affirmative! Wreckage on the road for fifty yards, then you are clear!”

Another man shouted, “Punch it!”

The vehicle shot backward, the driver, Special Agent Herbers, looking over his shoulder as he drove in reverse, doing his best to avoid slamming into the stationary vehicles. While he drove, another agent shouted into his headset.

Special Agent Davis Linklater broadcast on the Secret Service net. “SWORDSMAN is mobile! Heading north, everybody get out of the way, and then fall in.” He looked up to Herbers behind the wheel. Herbers was in charge here. “Where we going?”

Herbers didn’t take his eyes off the road behind him. “Airport!” The Suburban sideswiped a burning counterassault vehicle lying on its side, jolting all in the SUV, but it kept moving backward at speed.

—

Everyone in the Starbucks three blocks away had either run outside to see the scene at the far end of the street market or else pushed themselves up to the window glass to look outside.

With two exceptions. Emilio and Zarif walked out onto José J. Herrera and turned left, away from the blast, although the young Mexican walked backward, marveling at the massive cloud of smoke.

“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.