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There was more radio chatter, and then horns and sirens were honking outside in the street. The blasting and bleating were head-splitting. Like the heralding of the end of the world.
Buckland turned in his seat and could see that they were reversing the entire convoy. Through the blur and motion, he could also see people on the street and sidewalk standing frozen in sheer panic. People everywhere with hands to their mouths, standing as still as model people in a train layout.
He put his hands to his own mouth, wondering suddenly if this was it. If he would die now. His mind cleared of everything except how much he missed his wife.
“Where to now? Back to the hotel?” Buckland said as he heard the governor’s wife start weeping.
“Negative. The situation is too volatile, sir,” Foldager said as the limo did a hard sliding lurch to the left and pinned it up Lexington. “We are going to go to our fallback, Sanctuary One.”
“Sanctuary One?” asked Huxley-Laffer.
“Park Avenue Armory, ma’am. That’s our fallback position. You’ll all be safe there until we get this thing sussed out.”
Chapter 93
Thirty seconds before the impact, we had heard a blast of sudden screaming chatter on the radio.
From the Black Hawk hovering over 57th and Lex, we had actually witnessed the whole scene unfold. The blue dump truck crashing through the barrier on 54th and then hurtling down Lex toward the 52nd Street motorcade route like a bat out of hell.
Once the dump truck had swerved at 53rd and entered the building, I thought the driver was ditching it, that it was over. But when I saw the truck exit the other side of the block-wide building on 52nd and smash through the sidewalk barrier into the first limo, my hands went to my mouth, and all I could hear was someone on the radio crying “No! No! No!”
The next long minute reminded me of 9/11—that same helpless, terrifying feeling of how something impossible can be happening right before my very eyes—as smoke and dust billowed up o
ut of the narrow slot of the Manhattan street.
An absolute chaos of radio chatter and people screaming followed. When it subsided a little, we got the word. It had been the dummy limo!
Leroux, beside me, gave me a painful high five. Buckland was fine!
We were immediately assigned to provide air cover as Buckland was transferred to Park Avenue Armory, at 67th Street, the predesignated secure area.
We zipped up and then tilted down over the MetLife Building just in time to see the presidential limo come out in reverse from beside the Waldorf and haul ass north up Park Avenue.
It was a truly terrifying sight. The limo had only two SUVs flanking it. At every cross street, it seemed like some new threat would suddenly emerge—another truck, or who knew what the hell else.
“They’re going to take Bronco in through the back southwest corner of Sixty-Seven and Lex,” Leroux told me as we came to a still hover over the massive castlelike building that was Park Avenue Armory.
I vaguely remembered that the old redbrick building was used for art shows and events now, but it had in the Civil War era been a barracks that housed horses and soldiers.
“Look sharp, Mike. I got seven to eleven. You take from one to five,” Leroux said to me as he got on his spotting scope. “Remember, anything up to two thousand yards.”
Under the hard flutter of the rotors, I stared down at the limo, then out at the Upper East Side’s daunting number of surrounding buildings. The rooftops and terraces and window after window after window.
Chapter 94
Five hundred eleven yards and one hundred forty feet above the corner on 67th Avenue, the British assassin lay prone on his elevated shooting platform, breathing calmly, stilling himself.
He’d removed the glass of the living room window, and he was happy for the cold air that blew in and cooled the sweat on his brow.
In front of the now glassless window was a decorative Asian bamboo folding partition, and above it was the valance of a curtain covering the top of the window. In between the two was his blind’s offset shooting slit. He could shoot down through the slit without being spotted from the outside.
The British assassin thought that with its highly varnished walnut stock and blue steel barrel, the L39A1 Enfield English sniper rifle up on the small tripod before him was a glorious Stradivarius of a gun. It was loaded with ten soft point .303 British rounds, a favored cartridge of choice for many deer hunters because of its high twist rate and excellent penetration.
The locked and loaded bolt-action rifle had been fitted with what was simply the finest high-precision riflescope in all the world, a German-made Schmidt & Bender PM II.
He didn’t know if it was an intentional nod to the bloody medieval history of the fatherland or something, but to him, the intricate mill marks along the S & B’s reticle gave it the distinct look of an elaborate Gothic cross.
The red intersection of that cross was dead-centered now on the sidewalk at the southwest corner of 67th and Lexington.
