“What the hell is he doing?”
“That’s not KLM! Look!” the junior officer pointed. Directly over the field, the 747 banked left, clearly under precise control, all four engines whining with increased power. Then the two looked at each other, knowing exactly what was going to happen, and knowing that there was literally nothing that could be done. Calling the base commander was just a formality that would not affect events at all. They did that anyway, then alerted the First Helicopter Squadron as well. With that, they ran out of options, and turned to watch the drama whose conclusion they’d already guessed. It would take a little over a minute to conclude.
Sato had been to Washington often and done all the usual tourist things, including visiting the Capitol Building more than once. It was a grotesque piece of architecture, he thought again, as it grew larger and larger, and he adjusted his flight path so that he was now roaring right up Pennsylvania Avenue, crossing the Anacostia River.
The sight was sufficiently stunning that it momentarily paralyzed the Secret Service agent standing atop the House Chamber, but it was only a moment, and ultimately meaningless. The man dropped to his knees and flipped the cover off the large plastic box.
“Get JUMPER moving! Now!” the man screamed, taking out the Stinger.
“Let’s go!” an agent shouted into his microphone, loudly enough to hurt the ears of the protective detail inside. A simple phrase, for the Secret Service it meant to get the President away from wherever he was. Instantly, agents as finely trained as any NFL backfield started moving even though they had no idea what the danger was. In the gallery over the chamber, the First Lady’s detail had a shorter distance to go, and though one of the agents tripped on the step, she was able to grab Anne Durling’s arm and start dragging her away.
“What?” Andrea Price was the only one to speak in the tunnel. The rest of the agents around the Ryan family instantly drew their weapons, pistols for the most part, though two of their number pulled out submachine guns. All of them brought their weapons up and scanned the yellow-white corridor for danger, but there was none to be seen.
“Clear!”
“Clear!”
“Clear!”
On the floor of the chamber, six men raced to the podium, also scanning about with drawn weapons in a moment that millions of television viewers would fix in their minds forever. President Durling looked at his chief agent in genuine puzzlement, only to hear a screamed entreaty to move at once.
The Stinger agent atop the building had his weapon shouldered in record time, and the beeping from the missile tracker told him that he had acquisition. Not a second later he loosed his shot, knowing even then that it didn’t matter a damn.
Ding Chavez was sitting on the couch, holding Patsy’s hand—the one with the ring now on it—until he saw the people with guns. The soldier he would always be leaned into the TV to look for danger, but seeing none, he knew that it was there even so.
The streak of light startled Sato, and he flinched somewhat from surprise rather than fear, then saw the missile heading for his left-inboard engine. The explosion was surprisingly loud, and alarms told him that the engine was totally destroyed, but he was a mere thousand meters away from the white building. The aircraft dipped and yawed slightly to the left. Sato compensated for it without a thought, adjusting trim and nosing down for the south side of the American house of government. They would all be there. The President, the parliamentarians, all of them. He selected his point of impact just as finely as any routine landing, and his last thought was that if they could kill his family and disgrace his country, then they would pay a very special price for that. His last voluntary act was to select the point of impact, two thirds of the way up the stone steps. That would be just about perfect, he knew ...
Nearly three hundred tons of aircraft and fuel struck the east face of the building at a speed of three hundred knots. The aircraft disintegrated on impact. No less fragile than a bird, its speed and mass had already fragmented the columns outside the walls. Next came the building itself. As soon as the wings broke up, the engines, the only really solid objects on the aircraft, shot forward, one of them actually smashing into and beyond the House Chamber. The Capitol has no structural steel within its stone walls, having been built in an age when stone piled on stone was deemed the most long-lasting form of construction. The entire east face of the building’s southern half was smashed to gravel, which shot westward—but the real damage took a second or two more, barely time for the roof to start falling down on the nine hundred people in the chamber: one hundred tons of jet fuel erupted from shredded fuel tanks, vaporizing from the passage through the stone blocks. A second later it ignited from some spark or other, and an immense fireball engulfed everything inside and outside of the building. The volcanic flames reached out, seeking air and corridors that held it, forcing a pressure wave throughout the building, even into the basement.
The initial impact was enough to drop them all to their knees, and now the Secret Service agents were on the edge of real panic. Ryan’s first instinctive move was to grab his youngest daughter, then to push the rest of the family to the floor and cover them with his body. He was barely down when something made him look back, north up the tunnel. The noise came from there, and a second later there was an advancing orange wall of flame. There was not even time to speak. He pushed his wife’s head down, and then two more bodies fell on top to cover them. There wasn’t time for anything else but to look back at the advancing flames—
—over their heads, the fireball had already exhausted the supply of oxygen. The mushrooming cloud leaped upwards, creating its own ministorm and sucking air and gas out of the building whose occupants it had already killed—
—it stopped, not a hundred feet away, then pulled away as rapidly as it had advanced, and there was an instant hurricane in the tunnel, going the other way. A door was wrenched off its hinges, sliding toward them but missing. His little Katie screamed with terror and pain at all the weight on her. Cathy’s eyes were wide, looking at her husband.
“Let’s go!” Andrea Price screamed before anyone else, and with that, the agents lifted every member of the family, carrying-dragging them back to the Longworth Building, leaving the two House members to catch up on their own. That required less than a minute, and then Special Agent Price was the first again:
“Mr. President, are you okay?”
“What the hell ...” Ryan looked around, moving to his kids. Their clothing was disheveled but they seemed otherwise intact. “Cathy?”
“I’m okay, Jack.” She checked the children next, as she had once done for him in London. “They’re okay, Jack. You?” There was a thundering crash that made the ground shake, and again Katie Ryan screamed.
“Price to Walker,” the female agent said into her microphone. “Price to Walker—anybody, check in now!”
“Price, this is LONG RIFLE THREE, it’s all gone, man, the dome just went down, too. Is SWORDSMAN okay?”
“What the hell was that?” Sam Fellows gasped from his knees. Price didn’t have time even to hear the question.
“Affirmative, affirmative, SWORDSMAN, SURGEON, and—shit, we don’t have names for them yet. The kids are—everybody’s okay here.” Even she knew that was an exaggeration. Air was still racing past them into the tunnel to feed the flames in the Capitol building.
The agents were recovering their composure somewhat now. Their guns were still out, and had so much as a janitor appeared in the corridor right then, his life might have been forfeit, but one by one they breathed deeply and relaxed just a little, at the same time trying to focus in on what they had been trained to do.
“This way!” Price said, leading with her pistol in both hands. “RIFLE THREE, get a car to the southeast corner of Longworth—and do it now!”
“Roger.”
“Billy, Frank, take point!” Price commanded next. Jack hadn’t thought she was the senior agent on the detail, but the two male agents weren’t arguing. T
hey sprinted ahead to the end of the corridor. Trent and Fellows just watched, waving the others on their way.
“Clear!” the one with the Uzi said at the far end of the corridor.
“Are you okay, Mr. President?”
“Wait a minute, what about—”
“JUMPER is dead,” Price said simply. The other agents had heard the same radio chatter and had formed a very tight ring around their principal. Ryan had not and was still disoriented and trying to catch up.
“We have a Suburban outside!” Frank called. “Let’s go!”
“Okay, sir, the drill is to get you the hell away from here. Please follow me,” Andrea Price said, lowering her weapon just a little.
“Wait, now wait a minute, what are you saying? The President, Helen—”
“RIFLE THREE, this is Price. Anybody get out?”
“No chance, Price. No chance,” the sniper replied.
“Mr. President, we have to get you to a place of safety. Follow me, please.”
It turned out that there were two of the oversized vehicles. Jack was forcibly separated from his family and pushed into the first one.
“What about my family?” he demanded, now seeing the orange pyre that had been the centerpiece of America’s government only four minutes earlier. “Oh, my God ...”
“We’ll take them to—to—”
“Take them to the Marine Barracks at Eighth and I streets. I want Marines around them now, okay?” Later, Ryan would remember that his first presidential order was something from his own past.
“Yes, sir.” Price keyed her mike. “SURGEON and kids go to Eighth and I. Tell the Marines they’re coming!”
His vehicle just headed down New Jersey Avenue, away from the Hill, Ryan saw, and for all their sophisticated training the Secret Service people were mainly trying to clear the area.
“Come around north,” Jack told them.
“Sir, the White House—”
“A place with TVs, and right now. I think we need a judge, too.” That idea didn’t come from reason or analysis, Jack realized. It just came.
The Chevy Suburban headed well west before turning north and looping back toward Union Station. The streets were alive now with police and fire vehicles. Air Force helicopters from Andrews were circling overhead, probably to keep news choppers away. Ryan got out of the car under his own power and walked within his protective ring to the entrance of the building where CNN operated. It was just the closest. More agents were arriving now, enough that Ryan actually felt safe, knowing how foolish that feeling was. He was taken upstairs to a holding room until another agent arrived with someone else a few minutes later.
“This is Judge Peter Johnson, D.C. Federal Court,” an agent told Jack.
“Is this what I think?” the judge asked.
“I’m afraid so, sir. I’m not a lawyer. Is this legal?” the President asked.
Again it was Agent Price: “President Coolidge was sworn by his father, a county justice of the peace. It’s legal,” she assured both men.
A camera came close. Ryan put his hand on the Bible, and the judge went from memory.
“I—state your name, please.”
“I, John Patrick Ryan—”
“Do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.”
“Do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States ... and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.” Jack completed the oath from memory. It was little different, really, from the one he had sworn as a Marine officer, and it meant the same thing.
“You hardly needed me at all,” Johnson said quietly. “Congratulations, Mr. President.” To both men it seemed an odd thing to say, but Ryan took his hand anyway. “God bless you.”
Jack looked around the room. Out the windows he could see the fires on the Hill. Then he turned back to the camera, for beyond it were millions, and like it or not, they were looking back at him, and to him. Ryan took a breath, not knowing that his tie was crooked in his collar.
“Ladies and gentlemen, what happened tonight was an attempt by someone to destroy the government of the United States. They killed President Durling, and I guess they killed most of the Congress—it’s too soon, I’m afraid, to be sure of much.
“But I am sure of this: America is much harder to destroy than people are. My dad was a cop, as you heard. He and my mom were killed in a plane crash, but there are still cops. A lot of fine people were killed only a few minutes ago, but America is still here. We’ve fought another war and won it. We’ve survived an attack on our economy and we’ll survive this too.
“I’m afraid I’m too new at this to say it properly, but what I learned in school is that America is a dream, it’s—it’s the ideas we all share, it’s the things we all believe in, most of all it’s things we all do, and how we do them. You can’t destroy things like that. Nobody can, no matter how hard they might try, because we are who and what we choose to be. We invented that idea here, and nobody can destroy that either.
“I’m not really sure what I’m going to do right now, except to make sure my wife and children are really safe first, but now I have this job, and I just promised God that I’d do it the best way I can. For now, I ask you all for your prayers and your help. I’ll talk to you again when I know a little more. You can turn the camera off now,” he concluded. When the light went off, he turned to Special Agent Price.
“Let’s get to work.”
Tom Clancy, Debt of Honor
(Series: # )
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