Alex gunned the engine and found it responsive. “Hang on!” she ordered.
She remembered the route from the airport. She put the vehicle in gear. There was a crunching impact under the tires and she knew she was driving over the fallen bodies of the two men she had shot. In the backseat, radios crackled as the agents gave their location as well as Einstein’s.
She sped out of the square. Other security vehicles fell in stride with her. She got out of the square and hit the main roads. There was still a mass of confusion, people dazed and gawking, others fleeing, some sitting by the highway in tears.
From somewhere there was a final explosion, and the car shuddered as if it had been hit again with fragments of metal. A new crack appeared on a rear window.
The vehicle now had a slight wobble to it, which told her that the wheels had been hit. She wrestled with the shuddering steering wheel. The car went into a skid at about fifty miles an hour, but she turned into it and pulled the vehicle out.
She hit a straight section on the motorway. The president started to sit up and look around, immensely shaken and surprised to be alive.
In the rearview mirror, other American vehicles were not far behind. Coming up on them, however, a brigade of four motorcycle riders. Friendly or enemy? No one knew.
“I got four outriders,” she said to the agents behind her. “I don’t know who they are!” She was doing seventy miles an hour and the riders were rapidly overtaking them. Four of them!
She heard the window go open directly behind her. The sound of the wind was deafening. Sirens blared everywhere. One of the Secret Service agents leaned out the vehicle from the chest up, brandishing his machine gun, looking for more trouble, waiting to see if there was the slightest hostile sign from the riders.
They were in Ukrainian military uniforms and were easily doing a hundred miles an hour. The radio in the car crackled.
“They’re ours! They’re friendlies!”
“I don’t trust anyone,” the second agent said.
The riders came up to the car. The agent leaning out the window had his automatic weapon trained on the nearest one. But the leader of the motorcyclists gave a friendly hand sign and pointed toward the airport. They were there to lead the way, or at least said they were. Alex maintained her speed. The motorcycles went on ahead and formed a wedge.
Gradually, the sound of gunfire ceased. Alex drove for seven minutes. She hit the access road to the airport. There, on a heavily guarded tarmac up ahead, sat the president’s backup helicopter.
Uniformed American soldiers indicated the way for the limousine. Alex drove the vehicle directly toward the chopper and brought it to a halt fifty feet away. The rotors were already noisily spinning. The air was filled with the sound of engines, distant sirens, and violent curses.
The back doors of the limousine flew open. The Secret Service agents hustled the president out and quick-stepped to the chopper.
Alex stood by the driver’s side of the door and watched the president disappear up the ramp. Her eyes drifted to the vehicle. Battered chassis, cracked windows, shredded tires. How had it had gotten there? And she realized she was trembling, at least inside. She looked everywhere for Robert but didn’t see him. A horrible feeling swept her, a fear and anxiety unlike anything she had previously known.
“Oh, God, please…,” she heard herself mumbling
A man appeared next to her. He identified himself as the ranking Secret Service agent on the tarmac.
“You drove?” he asked.
“Yeah. I drove,” she said flatly.
“Good job! Orders are to get all our people out of here as fast as possible. We’re not waiting for anyone.”
“I’ll stay here. I-”
“Get in the chopper,” he said.
“I-”
“Get your ass in the chopper! Orders! There’s only one seat left!”
“Okay.”
She took a step. He reached out and put a hard hand on her shoulder. “I’ve never seen you before, but you sure done good today.”
“Thanks.”
She turned and ran to the ramp. The ramp came up practically while she was still on it. She found the remaining seat on the helicopter and slid into it. Seconds later, the helo lifted off.
Her head was pounding. Her insides were ready to explode. Though no one could see it, fear riddled her and she kept repeating prayers in her head. The gun weighed heavily in her pocket and the images of the carnage on the ground in Kiev kept spiraling back to her, as did the visions of the two faceless men she had shot.
She closed her eyes, drew a breath, prayed that Robert had gotten out the same as she had, and she opened her eyes.
She hadn’t realized it, but she was sitting right across from the president, who was staring at her.
The chopper lifted higher into the sky and headed for Air Force One, which was just a few minutes away at the international airport at Borispil.
Her heartbeat plunged back into double digits. The president nodded gently at her. “Thanks.”
“Yeah,” was all she could say.
She tried to look out the window but there was no visibility. She remembered the dark clouds that had covered Kiev on arrival and realized that was exactly where she was right now.
On the flight to the international airport, no one spoke. What was there that could be said after what everyone had witnessed, after what had happened?
Alex leaned back and closed her eyes. Her hand drifted to her neck, searching for the small cross to touch, to massage.
Somehow somewhere in all the horror, the chain must have broken. The cross was gone. It wasn’t in her blouse or anywhere on her or on the floor of the chopper.
It was just plain gone.
FORTY-FOUR
The president boarded Air Force One at Borispil amidst vast confusion. Alexandra found a seat by herself in the passenger section.
She closed her eyes, and much as she had done before leaving on this trip, she tried to disappear into prayer, beseeching heaven that what had happened back in Kiev hadn’t looked as bad as she thought it had.
Sometimes prayers are answered. Other times they are not.
Much of the time, human events have no order, no logic, no good side. They can only be as good as is made of them afterward.
So it was today.
The flight back to Washington was fourteen hours. Before arrival, news of the terrible toll on the ground in Kiev had made its way through those survivors on Air Force One.
There were already forty-two confirmed fatalities on the ground. Injuries were still being tabulated.
Seven were members of what appeared to be a filorusski assassination squad.
Twenty-three were Ukrainian civilians, including eleven Foreign Service nationals who worked for the embassy.
Twelve remaining casualties were American citizens.
Of those, seven were embassy employees whom Alex didn’t know.
Then there were the five whose names did mean something to her.
The ambassador, Jerome Drake, was dead.
So was Richard Friedman, her control officer.
The note taker from the meetings, Ellen Higgins, had come out at the last minute to get a look at the president and take a photograph. She too had been killed.
So had Reynolds Martin, a.k.a., “Jimmy Neutron,” who, along with another agent, had immediately blocked access to the president when the first RPG had landed.
That left one casualty, of which Alex was informed an hour before landing in Washington.
Special Agent Robert Timmons, partnered with Reynolds Martin, had been the other agent to immediately protect the president. He too had been hit with shrapnel at the outset of the attack. And he too had died on the spot.
FORTY-FIVE
In a private room at Josephs Air Force Base when Air Force One returned to Washington, spokes people for various government agencies had sought to give out proper information updates and make some sense out of chaos and tragedy. Meanwhile, Secret Service agents in Washington, picking up the fallen standard, whisked the president to the well-fortified compound in the Catoctin Mountains of western Maryland.