To Hardcastle’s surprise, Wilkes let her service revolver roll on her trigger finger, barrel pointing upward. “Wilkes, don’t do it.” Hardcastle groaned. “He’ll kill me anyway.”
“Freeze! D.C. Police!” they heard.
The plainclothes D.C. Police officer had chugged his way over to the monument, drawing down on Cazaux. Cazaux instinctively raised his pistol toward him… and Hardcastle reached up and grabbed his right wrist, shoving it upward. The officer fired, but he was too far away and missed. Cazaux shrugged out of Hardcastle’s grasp with ease and fired three shots at the officer, two rounds hitting him in the chest. Wilkes dropped to one knee, swinging her service revolver back up.
Cazaux aimed…
… and they fired simultaneously.
Three .45 caliber rounds hit Wilkes, one in the shoulder and two in the chest; two .38 caliber rounds hit Cazaux in the stomach and left shoulder. Wilkes collapsed onto'her back and was still. Cazaux stood there, a hand over the stomach wound, but he was still standing. He swung his pistol down at Hardcastle, but suddenly his knees gave way and he went down on one knee. Realizing he was really hurt, Cazaux stood up shakily, ignoring Hardcastle, and started running south toward the Sylvan Theater and the Tidal Basin. He started to pick up amazing speed. Before Hardcastle could react and reach for one of the Steyr rifles, Cazaux had almost reached Independence Avenue and was lost in the darkness.
Hardcastle’s first thought was to go after Cazaux, but not with three wounded officers around him. The D.C. Police officer was dead. Lani Wilkes was alive but hurt very badly. “I was on the way to the White House… heard the radio call… where… where’s Cazaux?” she gasped.
“He got away,” Hardcastle said. He tried to stuff a handkerchief into one of the wounds and tried to compress the other with his bare hand — the bleeding was serious.
“Don’t… don’t let him get away, Hardcastle, damn you…”
“Lie still, Judge. Help is on the way,” Hardcastle lied.
“Violence… this violence is sickening,” Wilkes gasped. “When will it end? When will it… ever… end…?” And her voice trailed off into a whisper, then nothing.
“Shit!” Hardcastle swore aloud. “You bastard!” He turned to retrieve his Steyr bullpup rifle, and found Harley on her feet, headed toward him. “Deborah, stay down.”
“Is she dead?”
“She’s hurt badly. The cop is dead,” Hardcastle said. “I’m going after Cazaux. Stay here and see if you can help Wilkes.”
“No way. Where did he go? I’ll call it in.”
“Call it in, but you’re—” He turned and looked toward the Lincoln Memorial as the loud scream of an airliner got closer and closer. “Oh, my God, there it is!” Hardcastle Shouted, pointing toward the Iwo Jima Memorial. “It’s headed this… Jesus, Deborah, get down, get down!” Harley ran over, grabbed Wilkes by the arms, and dragged her behind the Washington Monument to safety…
… just as all hell broke loose.
Near the Iwo Jima Memorial
That Same Moment
Just as the 747 was north of the Iwo Jima Memorial and over the interstate, Vincenti closed his eyes and flew his F- 16 Fighting Falcon into the right rear portion of the fuselage, between the wing trailing edge and the forward edge of the horizontal stabilizer.
The impact sliced off most of the 747’s rear empennage, and it nosed over, then tumbled, the crushed F-16 adding its own remaining jet fuel vapors to the tremendous explosion over the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. The airliner impacted just east of the Rock Creek Parkway, on the interchange west of the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery complex, tumbling end-over-end in a tremendous flaming fireball two hundred feet high. The bulk of the burning wreckage missed the Lincoln Memorial by less than four hundred yards, spraying burning metal, fire, and destruction across the Reflecting Pool, across the Kutz Bridge, and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing Building on the east side of the Tidal Basin, destroying everything in its path.
With a terrific mushroom-shaped cloud of fire, the Francis Case Bridge exploded when it was hit by the wreckage, but it stopped the careening hulk from tumbling any farther. Flying debris and burning fuel spread out in a half-milewide, two-mile-long fan, spraying buildings from the Smithsonian Institution and the Energy Department all the way to South Capitol Street with an incredible firestorm. In less than two seconds, almost two square miles of the District of Columbia was on fire.
Near the Washington Monument
That Same Moment
Hiding behind the square stone face of the Washington Monument, their breathing rapid and shallow, hands and legs shaking, eyes staring in tenor, Hardcastle and Harley tried to close their eyes, then found they couldn’t bear to not watch, and they waited for the fires to engulf them.
The crash was utterly devastating.
Hardcastle caught a glimpse of the huge white 747 just to the right of the Iwo Jima Memorial. It appeared to be landing except that it was moving at an incredible speed, the engines shrieking louder than at takeoff, the landing gear up. And, of course, there was no runway in front of it, only the three-mile-long Constitution Gardens and The Mall.
But then Hardcastle saw a blur, a streak of light to the 747’s left, then a brief puff of fire, and suddenly the huge airliner simply dropped out of the sky right before him, like a huge pelican diving for a fish in the Potomac. The cloud of fire and debris obscured all view in that direction, and that’s when Hardcastle dove for cover, holding Harley close to him as if to shield her from the awful concussion that he knew he had no power to stop. The terrible sound of wrenching steel and Capitol-sized flames hissing in the humid night air moved across and seemingly over them at tremendous speed. Hardcastle always remembered the slow-motion TV shots of plane crashes, but of course they. always slowed the images down so you could somehow savor or try to analyze the crash, and the airliner had to be moving well over three or four hundred miles an hour when it hitthe ground. The earth rumbled with the force of a hundred earthquakes; the lights around the Washington Monument exploded as if being shot out by machine-gun fire. The air felt hot and electrified, as if they were standing in front of a steel smelter, and a sudden windstorm sucked the air out of their lungs as a huge mushroom-shaped blob of air was consumed in the fire.
But they didn’t die.
Hardcastle stayed put for what seemed like a long time, and finally looked up when he heard a large piece of debris fall close by. His and Harley’s bodies were, surprisingly, still whole. He crawled around the north side of the monument and peeked westward.
It was raining burning debris and slippery moisture that Hardcastle knew was jet fuel, not rain. The stricken 747 had somehow careened around to the south, between the Lincoln and Washington monuments, across the middle of the Reflecting Pool, coming to rest in a massive flaming pile beyond the Tidal Basin. The sky was glowing far to the southeast with several fires, but Hardcastle did not see the massive Dresden-like firestorm he was expecting. By just a few hundred feet, the 747 had miraculously missed most of the important government buildings and monuments.
“It’s over,” Hardcastle said to Harley, who had gotten to her feet and followed him around the Washington Monument to inspect the destruction. “I think Vincenti rammed jt. I thought I saw either a missile or an F-16 itself hit the. 747 just before it cleared the Potomac.”
“My head is still ringing,” Harley said. “I’ve never heard or felt anything like that before in my life.” She walked around the monument, her eyes tracing the destructive path of the stricken 747. “Didn’t I see Cazaux running in that direction?”