Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

Zarif told himself this woman would not be working all day today and tomorrow as she had planned. When she learned that her husband had been blown to a thousand pieces, she would probably never work again.

At eleven a.m. the two men were picked up by two more Maldonado operators from Guerrero who didn’t know the city as well as they should, and they made a few wrong turns on their way to their destination. Emilio yelled at them from the back and the men yelled at him. Zarif was unnerved by the two men’s disheveled appearance and their utter lack of knowledge of the city, and he worried his entire plan to make a new life for himself in the safety of North Korea could be derailed by these uncouth cowboys getting pulled over by a cop on the way to the assassination.

Zarif had nothing on his person that would incriminate him. He just carried his mobile phone, the long-range cordless phone he’d use to trigger the bomb, and the rechargeable batteries that went into it, which he kept outside the unit so that it did not accidentally send a signal and detonate the bomb too early. But he knew he might get questioned by the police if these fools drew attention to themselves, and the police would quickly find he was foreign and detain him.

Despite Zarif’s concern, they made it to their destination without incident. At the scene, crowd-control barriers had already been erected, and at the street market on José J. Herrera, enough of a crowd had formed close to the barricades that Zarif decided he didn’t want to get any closer. The police were already in place at the barricades, and although the Iranian didn’t think he looked much different from the Mexicans around here—he was dark-complexioned and he wore a dark beard and mustache—he did not want to put this belief to the test and ruin his chance at a comfortable retirement on a beach full of beautiful Asian girls.

So Adel Zarif and Emilio stayed back and out of sight, but this was no threat to their plan, because they did not have to get any closer to detonate the bomb.

Another Maldonado man, Emilio said his name was Gordo, was already positioned across the street, close to the barricades at the other side of the intersection. He had a near-perfect position and line of sight on several blocks of Vidal Alcocer because there was a large parking lot to the north that gave him unobstructed views. He also had an iPad with which he would film the arrival of the presidential motorcade, and transmit it instantly to Emilio’s iPhone.

Once the two presidential limousines were in front of the stone façade of the parking garage, Zarif would call the phone attached to the IED.

Gordo was going to die in the blast; Zarif had calculated this fact the second he saw the image on Emilio’s phone, but he said nothing to Emilio.

While they were strolling around the market killing time, Emilio said, “The others will wait for the explosion to attack.”

Zarif did not understand. He cocked his head to the side. “What others?”

“Twelve men from Guerrero are taking part in the attack. They are waiting in the area. They all have cuernos de chivo .”

“What is that?”

Emilio thought for a moment. “Goat horns.”

The Iranian still had no idea what the Mexican was talking about.

“You know . . . AK-47s. A couple of guys have RPGs, too. Once the bomb goes off they will come out of the crowd and start shooting.” Emilio grinned. “It’s gonna be crazy.”

Zarif was furious. “No one told me about this.”

“Relax. It is good. They will make sure Ryan is dead.”

“No, they won’t. They will be seen in the crowd before the President comes, and someone will warn the Americans.”

Emilio tried to wave away the comment, but Zarif demanded to speak to the Maldonado cell leader. After a few minutes more trying to allay Zarif’s fears, Emilio finally dialed a number on his mobile phone and spoke to the man on the other end for a minute. Finally, after a conversation translated by Emilio, Zarif persuaded the cell leader to have the Maldonado men back out of the crowd and move one block east of the motorcade route. He explained that once the explosion rocked the street, they could run one block and shoot up the scene to their hearts’ content.

The cell leader put his men in four pickup trucks and parked them on Nicolas Bravo, with orders to wait for the big bang and then race to the scene. Two trucks would hit the motorcade from the southeast on José J. Herrera, and two more from the northeast on Nacional.

Zarif felt like these men were going to race up to the site where Jack Ryan already lay dead, and then do nothing more than get themselves massacred by the hundred or so cops and Secret Service agents who were still alive. But that wasn’t his problem. He felt better now that there would be no tip-offs to the coming event, so he and Emilio stepped into a Starbucks, ordered iced coffees, and sat down to watch the video feed on his phone.

The Iranian had command-detonated devices by watching video cameras, but he was pretty sure this was the first time anyone had assassinated a world leader via iPhone.

57

Air Force One touched down at 12:05 p.m. The pilot brought the aircraft to a predetermined point on the tarmac and then the mobile stairs were driven up. Quickly a red carpet was rolled out, and members of a forty-man honor guard took their positions on either side.

Bomb squad personnel, K9 teams, counterassault SWAT officers, and hundreds of other American security forces representing a half-dozen federal agencies were already at the airport; they’d arrived more than a week earlier with the advance team or else on one of the four C-141 cargo aircraft full of men and equipment that had landed the day before.

Dozens of Secret Service agents fanned out around the aircraft, among them Lead Advance Agent Dale Herbers, who took a position watching the expanse of Benito Juárez International’s tarmac along with the rest of the team. His advance work was now complete, and normally he would be moving on to his next location immediately, but the security needs here in Mexico required him to stay for POTUS’s arrival and motorcade to the Palacio Nacional and then his hotel.

Twelve minutes after landing, Lead Protection Agent Andrea Price O’Day exited the aircraft and walked down the stairs. She took up a position at the foot of the stairs, and seconds later, President of the United States Jack Ryan emerged from Air Force One and headed down himself. There was no music for him—this was not an official state visit but rather an official visit, which was one step down and less full of pomp and circumstance.

Still, Ryan was greeted at the bottom of the stairs by the Mexican foreign minister and a few other high-level functionaries, and while he stood there talking, mostly through an interpreter, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Horatio Styles quietly came out of the airplane and descended. He followed the President in the receiving line, and then headed for the limo with Ryan and O’Day.

The Beasts were parked back to front, and small flags of Mexico hung from poles on the fenders. It was de rigueur on foreign trips to display the local flag on the President’s vehicle as a show of respect. The limo in front was positioned just beyond the honor guard, and the back door to the rear limo was lined up perfectly with the red carpet and the door was open. O’Day stood at the door while Ryan folded his six-foot frame into the vehicle, and after Ambassador Styles entered the back of the big black limo, she shut the door and ordered her team to the cars.

O’Day got in the front passenger side of Ryan’s limo, next to driver Mitchell Delaney. Two agents rode on the running boards of the vehicle as it rolled forward in the motorcade, but they would hop off and get into a chase car at the airport’s exit.