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“Medic! Help!” I yelled up at the chopper.
“No time,” Leroux said as I knelt to help him. He took one of his blood-covered hands off his wound and pointed toward the huge sniper rifle.
“If you don’t get help, you’re gonna die, Matt.”
“No, the president is. You have to save the president,” he said.
“But—”
“There’s no buts!” he screamed, his face clotted with pain. “Get over to that corner of the roof and drop that son of a bitch! Shoot the bastard!”
I ran across the roof with the rifle. At the corner of the crazy old building was an actual battlement like you’d see on the top of a rook chess piece. I set the huge rifle into the battlement’s chest-high indentation and looked up through the scope.
Even at this lower angle, I still couldn’t see the shooter in the window. Just the crazy Chinese screen, the little curtain, the ladder in the gap between them. There was no target!
I glanced down to the street as a roar came from the crowd. It was the president’s limo. One of the Secret Service agents was at its rear, opening the door.
“No! Get back!” I screamed. But I knew it was fruitless. He couldn’t hear me over the crowd and chopper rotor wash.
There was no more time.
Do or die.
I looked back up at the glassless window two blocks to the east and I knelt as I put the rifle to my shoulder.
Chapter 97
In one oiled, pistonlike motion, the British assassin cleared the brass casing of the bullet with which he’d just gutshot the cop out of the chopper and reclosed the Enfield rifle’s blue steel bolt.
He’d been alternating his aim from the limo to the chopper from the moment it arrived. He didn’t know how the sniper team had spotted him, but they had. When he had looked back up from the limo a moment before, the two-man team had both of their scopes on him.
Reorienting on his target, he watched in the scope as the other cop scurried and ducked behind one of the Armory roof’s battlements a split second before the British assassin was going to blow his brains out.
Smart man, he thought. Run for your life.
When he looked back down at the limo, there was a Secret Service agent at its rear, ready to open the door. Buckland was coming out.
There still was a chance.
The British assassin adjusted the Enfield a millimeter down as the president stood up from behind the limo door and stepped onto the sidewalk.
He sucked in his breath, held it.
Just as he slipped the center of the Gothic cross reticle onto Buckland’s head, he saw the muzzle flash from the Armory’s roof.
The .408 CheyTac round traveling at thirty-five hundred feet per second came in at him just under his own rifle. As it struck home, it cut a perfectly circular groove through the bones of the ring and pinkie fingers of his left hand, holding the Enfield’s stock.
Then it bored a perfect quarter-size hole through the center of his chest cavity and blew his spine and heart and much of his back out across the wall behind him.
Epilogue
Chapter 98
A week later, Old Glory snapped in the wind along with the coattails of the honor guard, standing out on the grass as the marching band played the national anthem.
When it was established that we had, in fact, somehow managed to still keep our flag waving o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave, at least for the time being, there was much hooting and cries of “Let’s go! Let’s go!” from the field and the stands.
We were at Fordham Prep’s famous homecoming Turkey Bowl game against Xavier, and Mary Catherine and Seamus and all my kids and I went nuts as Brian and Marvin took the field with the rest of the Rams for the kickoff.
