Bennett could see the leading edge of the mobs coming at them from their right, from the direction of the Great Mosque and the Sayed Hasem Mosque. So as the motorcade roared out of the gates, they turned left and shot up Omar El Mukhtar Street through a blizzard of bullets and smoke. They didn't get far.
Away from the epicenter of the gun battle, huge crowds now jammed the streets around the Fras Market, despite the intensifying rains. People were chanting something. Some were burning American flags. Some began firing pistols at the convoy, or in the air. Others started heaving rocks at the American vehicles and swinging at the windows with baseball bats.
"Halfback, take the next right," Banacci shouted into his microphone.
"What? Say again, say again," Lake yelled back, barely able to hear above the rain, the deafening chants and continual bursts of gunfire.
"Right — break right — at the next street. Go, go, go."
The lead Suburban was only moving at maybe fifteen or twenty miles an hour. In a few seconds, they'd be completely engulfed by the mob and unable to move.
"Let's go, let's go!" Banacci screamed. "Run them down if you have to, Halfback. Let's get the hell out of here. Step on it."
Lake glanced up at his rearview mirror. Had he just heard right?
"We're not gonna make it!" Bennett yelled.
"He's right, Kyl, gun it," Banacci demanded. "Move it. Let's go."
They didn't have a choice. If he hesitated, they'd be dead.
As he approached the corner of Al-Mukhtar and Bor Saaid Streets, Lake stepped on the gas and plowed through a half dozen militants. McCoy grabbed the handle over the passenger-side door as Bennett tried to follow the path that Lake was blazing. He could hear screams outside. He saw the metal trashcan just before it smashed against the passenger-side window. Snapshot rocked violently as they hopped the curb, smashed the rear end of a taxi and blasted through a glass bus stop in their way.
The first story flashed on the Reuters wire at 10:19 a.m. Gaza time.
"Paine, Arafat Dead; Gaza Erupts."
AP's story moved one minute later—"Suicide Bomber Kills U.S. Secretary of State." The first update posted three minutes later—"Palestinian Security Chief Blows Up Peace Process; Dozens Feared Dead, Wounded." Still, none of the wire service stories matched the imagery beamed around the world by the television crews still alive at the scene.
Marsha Kirkpatrick studied the eyes-only e-mail from State.
She didn't quite know what to make of it. Most state-run television networks throughout the Arab world — including Al Jazeera — were covering the secretary's arrival live when the suicide bombing occurred. None of those networks had pulled the plug on the transmissions from Gaza. They were still broadcasting the live, horrifying images.
The implications of that intrigued Kirkpatrick. Millions of Arabs had just seen Yasser Arafat's own security chief assassinate the father of the Palestinian revolution. They'd just seen dozens of Palestinians slaughtered by a fellow Palestinian. No matter what kind of conspiracy theories Arab state-run news-papers might write tomorrow, people were seeing the truth right now.
What did that mean? What kind of effect might that have? There was too much else to concentrate on for the moment. But Kirkpatrick made a mental note and stuffed the report in a file. There was something there, something she was missing. She was just too tired, too busy to figure out what.
"Look out!" screamed Ibrahim Sa'id.
Through the pouring rain and fogging windows, Sa'id could see a masked gunman in a black hood — fifteen, maybe twenty yards ahead — raise an AK-47 and open fire. He screamed, sure they were all dead. But he couldn't look away. Round after round came straight for their faces and smashed into the front windshield. The bulletproof glass splintered wildly but didn't shatter. Beside him, Galishnikov's heart was racing. His hands were clammy. The air conditioning was on full blast to suck out the rapidly rising humidity. But Galishnikov could still feel the sweat running down his back.
Bennett didn't blink, didn't flinch. He gunned the engine and headed straight for the guy. Flames and smoke were pouring from the barrel of the machine gun, but none of the rounds were penetrating their mobile fortress. Bennett's skin turned cold. He saw the gunman's bloodshot eyes go wide, then disappear under the hood.
Lake focused on the road ahead of him, quickly becoming a river of rain. It was almost impossible to see now. Thunder kept crashing overhead and lightning ignited the skies like a strobe. Lake sped down Bor Saaid Street, looking for a way to outflank the mob and cut left, back toward the Mediterranean. That was escape plan "Alpha Bravo" — the plan they'd mapped out back in Washington.
The first flash traffic didn't move until 10:27 a.m. local time.
It was Jake Ziegler's job to nail down precisely what was going on and feed a continuous stream of data and analysis back to CIA headquarters at Langley and the White House Situation Room. But that was easier said than done.
They were experiencing the classic fog of war. Reports were pouring in from his slim but growing network of agents and informers. But everything was so chaotic. What was real? What was reliable? It was hard enough to establish hard facts in these first few minutes of the crisis. Establishing what any of it meant was nearly impossible. And the clock was ticking. Headquarters had already called twice. The DCI would be briefing the president soon. They needed something fast.
Thirty-seven, fluent in Arabic, and the father of a four-year-old daughter, Ziegler had been working undercover in Gaza for only eighteen months. The work was brutal. Long hours, low pay, high stress. But it kept his mind off the searing pain of his divorce.
Technically, he was an analyst, reporting to the CIA's DDI — deputy director for intelligence — not the DDO, the deputy director for operations. But just before his wife had filed for divorce — a divorce he angrily maintained was not his fault and was fighting in family court back in Montgomery County, Maryland — he'd been assigned to slip into Gaza incognito. His mission: to bring coherence to a heretofore woefully inept CIA intel-gathering and analysis operation.
For years, Langley had simply relied on Israeli and Egyptian intelligence, to the extent that it was provided, to understand Gaza. But the president and the DCI had insisted that if a serious Israeli-Palestinian peace process were to ever really get under way, they'd need a far better ground operation and listening post than they'd had up until then. That certainly meant ELINT, electronic intelligence. So nearly $25 million had been covertly invested in outfitting Gaza Station as a state-of-the-art)oint CIA-NSA operations center underneath an abandoned hotel just outside of Gaza City.
They also needed a far better network of HUMINT, human intelligence— i.e., agents and informants. That would take time. Lots of it. But it had to start somewhere.
So Jake Ziegler — the Agency's best Palestine analyst — was given less than seventy-two hours to kiss his wife and baby girl good-bye and hook up with a navy SEAL insertion team that would slip him unnoticed into the Strip in the dead of night to establish a beachhead and start feeding Langley information it could really use. It was the assignment of a lifetime, and he threw himself into the work.
For eighteen hours a day for the past three and a half weeks, Ziegler and his brilliant but miniscule and overworked team had been working to get ready for Bennett's trip. And they'd blown it. They'd completely missed the attacks that were coming. They'd been blindsided, and the cost was incalculable. Numb didn't even begin to describe how Ziegler felt at the moment. His career was over. But he still had work to do.