Pool Report #1
SOS greets local officials as she arrives at something-or-other airport. The ambassador sneezes. SOS says, “Gesundheit.” Ambassador’s aide sneers and shakes head in disgust. Nation is at odds over trade agreement with Germany. SOS waves at people who lined up outside the fence surrounding the tarmac. They are waving American flags and cheering. Everyone scrambles for motorcade vehicles, and entourage pulls away at 10:11 a.m.
It was gripping, scintillating stuff like that. And he had to do it over and over and over again, even when there was even less to say than the faux pas associated with an innocent sneeze.
Today was different.
The bomb blast was sudden and violent. It came without any warning other than the last-second shouting. Peter acted on reflex, diving behind the large sectional sofa in the middle of the conference center lobby. He scrambled on all fours until he could wedge himself under a marble sofa table to shield his body from flying glass and debris.
His duck-and-cover instincts had been developed in press rooms, not on the field of battle. He’d never experienced anything like a bomb blast, but he’d learned to dodge the verbal assaults of DC politicians looking to make an example of a reporter who questioned the veracity of their statements.
From beneath the marble tabletop, Peter turned his head toward the source of the blast, the circle driveway along the front entry. Once a hundred-foot-wide, thirty-foot-tall section of ornate etched glass, it was now broken into a million pieces, with shards of the panes peppering the attendees of the conference.
Peter checked his exposed skin. For a second, he was relieved. He’d avoided the debris from the blast. He glanced behind him. A woman was dying from a piece of glass that had pierced her neck and severed her jugular. Her once pristine white suit was now being splattered with various shades of crimson.
Mayhem reigned in the lobby. Cries for help. Screams of agony. Moans of pain. The roar of human devastation was deafening.
Then came the gunfire.
Shrieks filled the air as hysterical attendees were frightened to the next level of horror. Peter understood their fear because he sensed there was more to come. The bombs were detonated, and then they were done. However, automatic weapons could go on and on until a good guy with a gun kills the bad guy.
Bullets ricocheted throughout the building. Peter set his jaw in determination. He had no intention of dying under the marble console table. He crawled past the now-dead woman in white along the back of the half-moon sectional. He tried his best to keep the sofa between him and the front entry, the source of the rapid gunfire.
He scanned the lobby. Besides the banks of elevators, there was a hallway that most likely led to the conference center’s administrative offices. All the events were to take place on the third floor overlooking the marina below and the Persian Gulf in the distance. He calculated the distance he’d need to cross in the open to make it to the double doors leading down the hallway.
Thirty yards. He could make it.
He listened, waiting for a lull in the gun battle. Maybe the Abu Dhabi police would give an all clear. Or maybe if he waited for just the right time, he’d run out of time.
Peter sprang to his feet and raced along the back of the sofa in a low crouch. He’d made it several paces without being shot when he crashed hard into one of the gunmen. They rolled over and over in a tangle of arms and legs.
The man was as surprised to be knocked down as Peter was to have engaged the killer. Peter’s will to live gave him the edge he needed to grab the man’s weapon and shoot several rounds into his legs.
Then three things happened all at once.
The killer screamed in agony and shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” God is most great! He reached inside his vest and retrieved a grenade. Just as he reached for the safety pin to reveal the striker, Peter shot him in the face. He’d killed someone for the first time.
Well, actually four things. Peter cursed repeatedly. The kind of profanity that someone hurled when both angry and scared.
He gripped the Uzi and pushed himself against the back of the sofa with the heels of his feet. His head and eyes darted in all directions, the barrel of the small rifle following his movements.
To his left, a man tried to run for the same hallway Peter intended to escape through. It didn’t end well. A burst of staccato gunfire erupted and struck him several times in the back. His body was slammed to the marble floor, falling like a glass brushed off the edge of a table. Only, instead of shattering, it just hit the floor with a thud, twitching as it fought for its last breath.
The man’s eyes were open, staring at Peter. They were behaving like any human would when the realization came that they no longer had a functioning circulatory system. Peter had just seen three people die, three more than he’d seen in his lifetime. He physically shook himself to force his mind to focus.
He couldn’t run. The dead man twelve feet away from him proved that. He wasn’t prepared to cower behind the sofa. Another detonation would kill him. Gunfire and the subsequent bullets would rip through the cushions, and he’d suffer the same fate as so many others. He needed a distraction.
Peter had an idea. When he and his best friend growing up, Jimmy Free, used to play hide-and-seek on the grounds of Driftwood Key, Peter would often use coconuts to throw Jimmy off his trail when he was getting too close. He wondered what kind of confusion could be garnered from tossing the terrorist’s grenade.
Gripping the rifle in one hand, he scrambled over to the dead man and carefully pulled the grenade from his left hand. It was shaped like a large Meyer’s lemon not unlike those grown on the key. Even the color was similar.
He held his breath to listen as sporadic gunfire continued. Then he heard the roar of a truck approaching. Was it the police or military? Was it another bomb? He dared not stick his head above the sofa.
Bullets whizzed over his head and pelted the reception table where attendees had been standing moments ago. A woman screamed. And then she was silenced. The gunmen began shouting in Arabic. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, but their tone was clear. Orders were given and then acknowledged. The terrorists were sweeping the enormous lobby in search of targets.
It was now or never. Peter glanced to his right and then to his left. The path to the hallway was unobstructed. To his right, a piano together with the mangled instruments of a string quartet—two violins, a viola, and a cello—lay beside their deceased musical ensemble.
Peter studied the grenade. He didn’t know if it exploded after a certain amount of time or upon impact. He was sure he could work it. Or at least, he hoped he could. If it didn’t explode, he knew he’d be dead seconds after his plan was discovered.
He held the striker lever firmly against the serrated, cast-iron body of the grenade. He set his jaw, pulled the safety pin out with his teeth like he’d seen in the movies, and slung the grenade halfway to where the piano rested on three legs.
The cast iron hit the marble surface with a clank and then rolled against the body of the once beautiful pianist.
“Qunbula—!” The man was shouting grenade in Arabic, but the second word in the phrase never left his mouth. The explosion rocked the interior of the lobby. The blast eviscerated the already dead young woman’s body and sent the piano flying several feet into the air before it exploded, sending keys and strings in all directions.
Peter didn’t watch the result. Like the North Vietnamese tossing a grenade into a Quonset hut without regard to the outcome, Peter bolted across the lobby, zigzagging toward the double doors. Bullets skipped along the marble floor on both sides of him and stitched the doors as he approached. Still gripping the Uzi, he crashed hard through the doors.