Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

“Styles is dead!” he called to O’Day, but she was transmitting on her mike and she did not respond.

Ryan heard gunfire outside the limo now, and it sounded like it was coming from two directions. A larger explosion, this sounded like an RPG hitting a vehicle, came from close behind.

O’Day said, “We’re staying in the vehicle. We’ve got oxygen and armor, and as long as we . . .” She stopped talking.

Jack rolled himself onto his left side now, and then onto his knees. He felt like his right arm was not cooperating, but it was there, still in his suit and not gushing blood, so he wasn’t sure what his problem was.

He looked up to Andrea and then he saw why she stopped talking. Smoke began filling the interior of the car.

She turned to him. “Listen carefully. Stay where you are. I’m coming around to your door.”

She didn’t wait for Ryan to respond. Instead, she kicked open her front passenger door, rolled out onto the ground.

Ryan called out to the driver now. “Hey, Mitch! You okay? We’ve got to go!” The man hung upside down from his seat belt. He turned his head toward Ryan, but he did not reply.

Andrea appeared at Ryan’s window. She yanked hard on the upside-down door and it opened with a creak.

Ryan rolled out onto the street now; he was surprised to find the limo had been thrown all the way to the curb, probably twenty feet from where it had been in the middle of the road.

Ryan coughed out the smoke he had inhaled inside the vehicle, and then he began to stand. O’Day shielded him against the side of the limo, kept him on his knees, and he looked around for the first time. Two men in the tactical gear of the counterassault team came running through the thick smoke, their weapons high and their laser targeters cutting through the cloud like lightsabers. They formed on Ryan and they, too, made a cordon around him, and tried in vain to scan for targets in the massive amount of smoke and dust.

A third special agent, this one in a suit and tie, appeared. His face and leg were covered with blood but he was ambulatory, and he opened the driver’s-side door of the upturned limo to help Special Agent Mitch Delaney out, but Ryan saw the man was heavily disoriented from the impact of the flipping limo.

O’Day was calling for a vehicle, any vehicle, to make its way slowly into the blast zone, through the half-dozen or so burning pieces of wreckage, and up to the Beast. She had to evacuate SWORDSMAN, preferably in something armored, but at this point she’d settle for anything with four wheels and a motor.

Ryan tried to pull out Ambassador Styles, but the agents around him kept him covered tightly. The smoke was obscuring their view of the attack that was taking place from two compass points, and this added to the confusion, but it was also obscuring the attackers’ view of the blast area, so they couldn’t possibly know the President was more or less out in the open, kneeling at the curb.

And then, from the south, came a racing, hissing sound that approached through the smoke. No one saw it, and no one identified it in time to do little more than crouch.

The RPG hit the side of the limousine and exploded, throwing everyone around it to the ground.

—

The two sixteen-passenger media vans had been well behind the explosion, but still the shock wave shook the vehicles on their chassis, and debris pounded them and cracked the windshields in several places. The windows along the passenger sides were shattered when the rearview mirrors were struck by flying debris and went flying into the sides of the vans. The incredible sound of the detonation and the subsequent impacts of shrapnel and car parts sent the passengers covering their heads and scrambling to get low.

The driver of the lead van was a member of the White House press office and not a trained security agent, but he’d been told what to do in an emergency. He was to get off the road, out of the way of security forces ahead of his van if the decision was made to retrograde out of the area, or of those behind the van if they needed to come up and assist.

Ten seconds after the explosion, however, he had not moved at all. Both of the van’s front tires had been eviscerated by high-explosive shrapnel from the rear artillery shell that had torn across the road.

Four media personnel in the first van had been cut by broken glass, and more were disoriented by shock, but CNN press-pool reporter Jill Crosby was unhurt. She was sitting in the second row of seats, just to the left of Fox reporter Jeff Harkes. Harkes caught a face full of glass, and while he grabbed at a vicious wound just over his right ear, Crosby climbed over his legs, grabbed the door latch, and flung it open. While others in the vehicle either tended to one another’s injuries or tried to get out of the van, Jill Crosby ran toward the smoke-obscured scene ahead.

She’d just pulled her phone out of her pocket and dialed into CNN’s Atlanta headquarters when the gunfire started. She arrived at a damaged Suburban that had been knocked ninety degrees and now faced west on the north-south thoroughfare. She ducked low and ran past the SUV, and on the other side of this she saw an identical Suburban fully engulfed in flames.

An explosion erupted near her, knocking her to the ground. She did not recognize that she had almost been blown apart by an RPG, so she climbed back to her feet and ran forward. All around her now there was more and more shooting.

She entered the thick wall of gray smoke just as her producer answered on the other end.

“It’s Crosby! The presidential motorcade is under attack! We’ve got to go live!”

Two counterassault team officers raced past her with their guns at their shoulders, and then they disappeared into the smoke in front of her.

—

Herbers had given up on getting to the President; his job now was to suppress the hostiles in the two pickup trucks on the southern side of the engagement zone. The vehicles had pulled right into the crowd of dead and wounded. Herbers lay flat in the street and engaged the driver of one of the white pickups as the man shot his AK while crouched behind his car door, incorrectly thinking it to be suitable cover. Herbers and another agent dumped round after round of .40-caliber ammo through the thin sheet metal, killing the man.

He’d heard the transmission from O’Day saying she had SWORDSMAN at the Beast, but the Beast was down. She’d called to the second limo to have it come to her, but Herbers had yet to hear a response.

He didn’t allow himself an instant to think about what had gone wrong. That would come later, much later, and it would come only for those who managed to survive the firefight. So he emptied his magazine at the threats on the side street, reloaded, and racked his pistol’s slide to engage some more. Just as he brought it back up on a target, he saw a flash of light in the shade on the far side of José J. Herrera. Instantly the flash grew in size, and he realized he was looking at a streaking rocket-propelled grenade. It raced five feet off the ground, shot directly over his head as it passed into the smoke behind him, and then he heard the impact of an explosion.

He hoped like hell the RPG hadn’t just hit SWORDSMAN’s damaged limo with the President of the United States standing next to it.

Herbers opened fire at the source of the launch, a man standing alone with an empty rocket tube, sending the man to cover.

Then he started looking around for a vehicle. He knew the President couldn’t wait around in the kill zone any longer. A Suburban with a broken windshield was upright on good tires in the road, just fifty feet away. He saw a Secret Service agent slumped over the wheel, and another man lying facedown outside an open rear driver’s-side door.