A car bomb had gone off near the corner of E Street and Seventeenth.
Other agents were reporting machine-gun fire erupting near the fence line along the South Lawn, close to the Treasury Building.
A plane had just entered restricted airspace. It was approaching the White House from the southwest and was not responding to air traffic control commands to divert. Fighter jets were being scrambled out of Andrews, but they were three minutes out.
Marcus headed toward the Entrance Hall, the large vestibule leading to the North Portico. To get there, he had to cross through the State Dining Room, which was being arranged for an event that evening with the Ukrainian prime minister. As he came upon ushers and protocol personnel paralyzed with fear—unsure what to do or where to go—another massive explosion rocked the building. Marcus found himself thrown off his feet by the force of the blast, as was everyone around him. Priceless china, crystal wineglasses, and water goblets smashed to the floor. One of the enormous glass chandeliers came crashing down, shattering into a million pieces.
Marcus checked to make sure everyone was okay. Most were cut and bleeding across the face, neck, and hands. So was he. But they were alive, and to keep them that way, he had to get them moving. He scrambled back to his feet and went to the door as he ordered the staff to run to the southwest stairwell, head to the basement, and take cover in the bowling alley, where they’d be safe.
Once they were in motion, Marcus turned back to the threat at hand. He could feel the adrenaline surging through his system, but it didn’t blur his thinking. He’d been trained to channel it, manage it, control it, and let it create heightened focus in the midst of chaos. He began counting to fifty, a trick he’d learned to slow his breathing and steady his nerves. All stress is self-induced, he reminded himself. It’s in your mind. You don’t need it. Lay it down. Panic is contagious. But so is calm. Stay calm. Do your work. Slow is smooth. Smooth is smart. Smart is straight. Straight is deadly.
Glancing out from behind a pillar, he spotted several young men pouring through the remains of the breached door. All were pulling submachine guns from their backpacks. He had to move now. Pivoting through the doorway, he fired two shots, shifted aim, fired twice more, then shifted again and fired another three shots. In just seconds, he had taken down three assailants. But as he pulled back for cover, the dining room erupted with machine-gun fire. Bullets were flying everywhere, ripping up everything that hadn’t been destroyed by the blast.
Marcus broke right, out of the dining room and into the Red Room. He stopped and fired three times through the open door to the Entrance Hall. He wasn’t sure if he’d hit anyone, but there wasn’t time to check. He ducked behind another pillar to take cover, then radioed the command post with an update on his location and what he was seeing. Then he sprinted through the Blue Room and the Green Room. When he reached the East Room, he paused just before entering and popped out a spent magazine and reloaded. He whispered a quick prayer and burst into the East Room, hoping to outflank the terrorists by coming in behind them. Sure enough, he found two of the terrorists. He also found a group of White House staffers, facedown on the floor, being executed one by one.
Marcus was alone, but he had the element of surprise.
Both terrorists had their backs to him. One held a machine gun and was firing at agents trying to retake the Entrance Hall. The other was wearing a Yankees cap. He held a 9mm pistol and was shooting staff members in the back of the head.
Marcus took aim and fired four rounds in rapid succession. He hit the one in the ball cap in the spine, felling him instantly. He missed the one with the machine gun, though, who now swung around and returned fire. Several of the shots went wild. But two hit Marcus directly in the chest. He was wearing a Kevlar vest, but the impact knocked him off his feet and drove the wind out of him. The terrorist raced toward him, changing out magazines as he approached. Just as he reached Marcus and aimed at his head, the young man’s body was riddled with bullets.
Marcus instinctively covered his hands and face as blood sprayed everywhere. When he finally looked up, a member of CAT—the counterassault team—stood over him. He grabbed Marcus by the hand, pulled him to his feet, and handed him a Heckler & Koch MP5. Marcus nodded his thanks, and the two went hunting.
The firefight that ensued lasted all of nine minutes. That’s what the surveillance video showed, and Marcus would eventually watch it more than a dozen times. In the moment, however, he would have sworn the battle lasted at least forty-five minutes or an hour. Everything seemed to slow. He and the CAT member fired and reloaded, shifted locations, then fired and reloaded again. They kicked away grenades and even lobbed one back. Eventually reinforcements arrived. That’s when the battle turned and finally shut down for good.
By the time the entire episode was complete and the complex had been locked down and fully secured, twenty-two plainclothes agents and uniformed officers of the U.S. Secret Service—plus one CAT member—lay dead. Seventeen more were wounded, twelve seriously. Eleven White House staffers had been murdered, along with six tourists: a Japanese family of four and a retired Jewish couple from Minneapolis.
Nineteen of the twenty terrorists—all from a previously unknown jihadist group from the Philippines—were dead. The twentieth lay in a coma, and doctors at George Washington Memorial Hospital gave him little chance of recovery.
By the grace of God, the president was unhurt. The moment gunshots and explosions began, alarms had sounded throughout the White House complex and his protection detail had immediately moved him down to the bunker known as the PEOC, or Presidential Emergency Operations Center. Simultaneously, the VP had been rushed by his detail through a maze of tunnels underneath the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, then whisked away to a secure, undisclosed location miles away to ensure continuity of government should events at the White House spin even more tragically out of control. The first family had been out of town at the time and were never in danger.
In the days that followed, however, heads rolled throughout the executive branch. The director of the Secret Service was fired. So were his deputy and the shift commander on duty at the White House at the time of the attack. The secretary of Homeland Security was forced to resign, and two inquiries—one by the House Government Oversight Committee, the other by the DHS inspector general—ended up recommending a sweeping reorganization of the Secret Service leadership and its policies and procedures for guarding the White House complex.
Things turned out better for Special Agent Marcus Ryker. After recovering quickly from what turned out to be minor injuries, he and a number of colleagues received both the Medal of Valor and the Distinguished Service Award. These were personally bestowed upon them by the president in a nationally televised ceremony held in, of all places, the East Room of the White House, one week to the day after the attack had unfolded.
Elena and Lars were there, sitting in the center, near the front, in seats chosen by Lars. Sitting with them were Marcus’s mother and two sisters, the entire Garcia family, and Pastor Carter Emerson and his wife, Maya, from Lincoln Park Baptist Church. No one in Washington had been kinder or more helpful to Marcus and Elena in their struggles—and especially to Elena as she battled loneliness and the challenges of raising Lars nearly on her own—than this seventysomething African American couple who had known their own share of hardships in life.
Bill “Sarge” McDermott and his wife also flew in for the ceremony. Pete Hwang and Nick Vinetti and their wives came as well. Bill had retired from the Marines as a full colonel and was now making a mint as an investment banker on Wall Street. Pete was still in the Marines. He’d gone to medical school at the government’s expense and was serving as a staff doctor at the Marine training facility in San Diego. Nick, meanwhile, had retired from the military with full honors, gone to graduate school to study international relations, and then opted to join the Foreign Service. After working a stretch at the State Department, he’d served in various roles at U.S. Embassie
s throughout the Middle East and Asia. At the moment he was serving as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tallinn, Estonia.
Having forged their bonds in battle, the four men had made it a point to stay in touch after going their separate ways. They called and emailed fairly often. They got together every Memorial Day weekend to ride Harleys and raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project. It meant the world to Marcus that they’d all drop everything and fly to Washington at their own expense to be there for him. And it hadn’t even been his idea or theirs. It had been Elena’s.
MOSCOW—17 OCTOBER
From his corner suite, Oleg Kraskin watched the ceremony live on RTV.
All week he had been transfixed by the coverage of the attacks in Washington, the ensuing congressional hearings, the firings at the highest levels of the Secret Service, and the DHS investigation. Privately, he wondered how he would handle a similar terrorist attack, should it ever happen in the Kremlin. He’d done his required service in the army, like every other able-bodied male in the country, and he’d been trained in basic emergency procedures, as all his colleagues had been. But he was not a military man. He had never worked for the security services. He had no idea how he would respond in a real crisis.
Snuffing out one cigarette and lighting up another, Oleg tried to assess how the attacks might affect Luganov’s already-chilly relationship with the American president. Oleg, for all his jet-setting in recent years, had never been to Washington. He had never even set foot in the United States. Since he’d come to work for Luganov, others had handled the American portfolio. That had been fine with Oleg. He had far too much on his plate already, and relations with the Americans had always been considered something of a “holy grail” among Luganov’s team—alluring and intriguing, yet forbidding. The stakes were too high, and the margin for error was too thin.
What intrigued Oleg most as he watched the East Room ceremony was the figure of Special Agent Marcus Ryker. His injuries notwithstanding, he was strikingly good-looking, and at first Oleg wondered if he had Russian roots. He had intense, alert blue eyes, a firm jaw, and short blond hair. He wore a trim navy-blue suit, a white oxford shirt, and a solid burgundy tie. There was something rare in Ryker’s face, in his eyes—something honest, something earnest and trustworthy that appealed to Oleg.
The American president read a prepared statement explaining not only each agent’s bravery under fire but his background. Oleg was struck by the fact that he and Ryker had roughly similar stories. They had gotten married within a month of each other. They each had a son. They had each dedicated themselves to government service when they could have been successful in the private sector. They both worked quietly, in the background, out of the glare of the cameras, serving their national leaders with distinction and honor.
Then the phone rang. It was Luganov, and he needed Oleg immediately.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—20 OCTOBER 2013
“Agent Ryker, the president would like you to join him in the Oval Office.”
The young aide was so earnest and so pleasant, that Marcus—usually a stickler for protocol—asked if Elena and Lars could join him.
“Of course,” the aide said.
“Could our family and friends come too?”
At this, there was a brief hesitation, followed quickly by a warm smile and a nod. “The president wants to personally express his gratitude to you, away from the TV lights. I’m sure he would enjoy meeting the people closest to you as well.”
Soon they were all in the Oval, including Pastor Emerson and Maya, chatting and laughing with the president of the United States and getting their pictures taken with him. That’s when the president decided to make an announcement. As commander in chief, he was taking the liberty of the office to give Marcus a promotion. No longer would Marcus be assigned to the VP. Starting the following morning, he would be assigned to the PPD itself—the Presidential Protective Detail.
The small group burst out in cheers and applause. Marcus beamed. Lars was beside himself with excitement. Marcus’s Marine buddies were elated. They slapped him on the back and offered him hearty congratulations, and they personally thanked the president. Marcus’s mother hugged him. The Garcias seemed less excited. Elena was crestfallen, though she did her best not to show it. Later she would learn that Marcus had known about the promotion for several days but hadn’t said anything. He’d wanted it to be a surprise.
It certainly had been, but not a good one.
Elena had wanted her husband to use this moment to step down from the Secret Service. It was enough, already. Between this and his service in Afghanistan and Iraq, Marcus had cheated death one too many times. As a family, they desperately needed a break—not just a vacation but the opportunity to leave Washington altogether, the chance to move back west and restart their lives together. Elena wanted Marcus to talk to a headhunter, take a six-figure salary doing executive security for a big company, ideally in Colorado. She’d broached the idea a few times, but Marcus either hadn’t understood how important this was to her or didn’t care. This was what made his unwillingness—or outright refusal—to tell her about the promotion in advance such a bitter pill to swallow. Had he really been too busy to share such a huge development? Or was he just trying to avoid the blowback that was sure to follow if the conversation had happened in the bedroom of their apartment rather than the Oval Office?
That night Marcus took the whole group out to dinner at the Willard InterContinental.
It was a four-diamond hotel just around the corner from the White House, and it was a pricey evening. Mr. Garcia pulled Marcus aside at one point and insisted that he pick up the tab. Separately, Bill McDermott did the same. Marcus wouldn’t hear of it. They weren’t together often, he told them. He’d socked away a little money for a rainy day, and this was it. He wanted to treat them. And he had an announcement of his own.
As the dishes were being cleared ahead of dessert, Marcus stood, refilled his glass of champagne, and cleared his throat to get the group’s attention. It wasn’t easy to do. Everyone was chattering about the extraordinary day they’d had. Bill had been regaling them with stories from Marcus’s past that kept them all laughing. Pastor Emerson, a Vietnam vet, had shared about the first time he’d met a president, when Lyndon Johnson visited troops in Cam Ranh Bay. Lars, meanwhile, had been cracking everybody up doing impressions of the president that were frighteningly dead-on. Eventually everyone settled down.
“I’m not the public speaker of this group,” Marcus began to knowing smiles all around, “but I just want to say how grateful I am to each of you. Over the years, you’ve supported me—and heckled and embarrassed me, but mostly supported me. Some of you, especially my mom and Elena and the Emersons here, have prayed for me. For Lars, too. And each of you has been a tremendous encouragement to us over the years. God has been very kind to our little tribe. But for his grace, things could have turned out differently, many times. Yet for reasons only he knows, our Savior has brought me safely here tonight, here with each of you, and this dinner is my way of saying thank you.”
The group applauded warmly, but Marcus was not finished.
“I know words like ‘thank you’ and ‘I’m so grateful’ don’t really suffice,” he continued. “Nor does a fancy meal, even in a hotel as nice as this. Nor will what I’m about to propose, but I’m going to do it anyway. Because you all deserve it, and goodness knows we all need it.”
Everyone looked at each other, wondering if the others knew what in the world he was talking about. Only one of them did.
“I think it’s time for an extended reunion,” he said when the suspense had built to a crescendo. “This group of ours has been through a lot over the years. We’ve been running hard, and I say it’s high time we take a break and savor the many blessings the Lord has given us.”
The group was buzzing now. They all liked the sound of that. Marcus even noticed that Elena, who had not seemed herself all day, had suddenly brightened, at least with cur
iosity.
“What are you saying, Mr. Hero?” McDermott asked.
“Yeah,” Vinetti chimed in. “What exactly are you getting at?”
“Okay, here’s the thing—I’d like to take you all on a cruise,” Marcus said at last. “I’m talking about an all-expenses-paid bon voyage to the Caribbean or Alaska or the Mediterranean. I honestly don’t care where. You vote and pick a week that suits everyone best, and we’ll take care of the rest.”
“We?” Elena asked, as amazed as she was excited yet quickly trying to do the math in her head.
“Your father and I.” He smiled. “We’ve been cooking this up for the last few days. The two awards I received today come with generous bonuses, and what I can’t cover, Dad has offered to cover himself.”
“Really, Daddy?” Elena asked, her eyes welling with tears. “Is it true?”
“Absolutely, sweetheart,” Mr. Garcia said. “Marcus is right; you guys need a break. We all do. Am I right?”
He looked at his daughter, then at Marcus and the rest of the group. The entire party erupted in cheers and laughter and tears and hugs. Bill McDermott, moved by the moment, stood up and offered to cover everyone’s airfare. This triggered another round of whoops and cheers. Elena jumped out of her seat and threw her arms around Marcus and kissed him and cried while Lars did a hilarious happy dance as the rest of the restaurant’s patrons stared on in a mixture of amusement and disdain.
There was just one problem: Marcus Ryker would never make it to the cruise.
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 27, 2014.
That was a Thursday. The Caribbean cruise the Rykers had been planning for months was set to sail from Port Canaveral two days later.