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The heavy machine continued through the thick smoke, finding its way down the main hallway of the White House’s first basement. Without warning, the butted front end of the forklift slammed into what Bengazi knew to be the first
set of double doors. The center bar and two doors peeled away from the frame as if they were tin. On the other side of the double doors, there was no smoke. Bengazi’s men immediately opened up with their AK-74s on full automatic as three uniformed Secret Service officers, rushing to head off the security breach in the Treasury tunnel, were caught in the open. The bullets cut them to the ground instantly, and what little life may have been left in them was squeezed away as the forklift rolled over them.
The White House
WARCH STEPPED BACKWARD to cover the president’s retreat. With his gun still leveled on the man across the room, he listened to the frantic radio traffic coming over his earpiece and tried to decide where to take the president. A decision had to be made, either evacuate him from the compound via the south ground’s limo or stash him in his new bunker. Right as Warch reached the doorway to the study, the building was rocked by an explosion.
Aziz had been waiting for the explosion and sprang. Taking a quick step to the side, he grabbed Chairman Piper around the throat with one arm and drew his knife with the other. Aziz stuck the tip of the knife into Piper’s throat, breaking the skin and drawing blood. Careful to keep his head shielded behind Piper’s, Aziz yelled, “Order your men to stop with the evacuation, or I will kill him!”
The request fell on deaf ears. Warch’s primary, immediate, and only concern was the president. Nothing else mattered, especially not the political operative who had brought this snake into the White House. Warch took one final step backward into the study and closed the door to the Oval Office.
Seconds earlier Special Agent Morton had pressed a hidden button in the short hallway. There was a hydraulic hiss, and an entire section of the wall lurched inward, revealing a hidden staircase. Morton started down the steep stairs first, followed by two agents who had the president sandwiched in between them. Valerie Jones, caught up in the human freight train, was grabbed by one of the last two agents and thrust forward.
Warch was now at the top of the stairs yelling, “BUNKER! TAKE HIM TO THE BUNKER!” Warch then stepped into the hidden passageway and sealed the wall behind him. As he started down the stairs, he raised his hand mike to his mouth and said, “Horsepower, from Warch. We are moving Woody to the bunker! I repeat, we are moving Woody to the bunker!”
The group clambered down to the first landing. Waiting for them at the bottom were two Secret Service agents who had just come out the side door of Horsepower. They had already opened the heavy steel door to the tunnel that ran underneath the Rose Garden and over to the mansion. One of them took the lead and started down the next flight of stairs, while the other one waited to cover from the rear.
The caravan, now totaling eleven people, continued into the tunnel. The wide passageway was covered with an ugly brown carpeting. The group raced ahead at a full speed, the agents almost carrying the president. When they reached the far end, they had two choices. They could proceed either up a set of stairs and into the first basement of the mansion or down a short set of stairs on the right. The lead agent hustled down the steps on his right. He came to an abrupt halt at a riveted steel door and punched an access code into the control panel. As soon as he heard the metallic release of the lock, he threw his shoulder into the door and burst into a large anteroom. The first two agents into the room fanned out to the left, and with their guns leveled, they covered a second door to the twenty-by-ten-foot anteroom. As soon as the last agent had cleared the tunnel, the door to it was closed and locked.
Jack Warch pushed his way through the group, grabbing the president firmly by the upper arm. The two large agents who had been glued to Hayes on the way down the stairs and through the passageway moved forward, staying with their charge.
A dazed President Hayes looked to Warch and asked, “What in the hell is going on?”
Warch decided not to answer the obvious and proceeded forward. At the opposite end of the anteroom, Warch approached a large, smooth vault door. The special agent in charge of the presidential detail flipped open the cover to the control panel and punched in a nine-digit code. There was a brief moment of silence and then a hissing noise as the rubber airtight seal on the door contracted. Next, the locking stems retracted and an electric motor began to whine as the two-foot-thick solid steel door swung open, revealing the president’s newly completed bunker.
The White House Mess
ANNA RIELLY WAS standing near the center of the White House mess holding a paper cup of black coffee and listening to Stone Alexander explain why the room was called a mess instead of a dining room. Apparently it had something to do with the U.S. Navy. She was only half listening to Alexander as he rambled on. Two men in dark suits, sitting at a nearby table had caught her eye. They had a police-officer look about them that was common to most of her father’s friends and more than one of her brothers. Almost simultaneously, the two men brought their hands up to their ears and held them there. Rielly guessed from the gesture that they must be Secret Service. She was about to turn her attention back to her tour guide when the two agents abruptly stood and raced across the room with their weapons drawn.
Oblivious to what had just transpired not more than twenty feet away, Stone Alexander continued with his oral dissertation on the West Wing. Being new to the job, Rielly wasn’t sure if what she had just witnessed was normal, but common sense told her that law enforcement officers didn’t draw their weapons unless there was a good reason. Rielly looked around the room and concluded from the some of the faces she saw that she wasn’t the only one who had noticed the brandishing of firearms.
Rielly set her coffee down and looked at Alexander. “I think there’s something going on.”
Alexander looked down at her and smiled. “Don’t worry; I have that effect on a lot of women. You’ll get used to it.” It was apparent from the full-fledged grin on Alexander’s face that he found himself quite amusing.
Rielly shook her head. “Jesus, do you ever give it a rest? I’m talking about those two guys who just ran out of here with their guns—”
An explosion rumbled from somewhere in the building and stopped the young reporter in midsentence. The noise was so startling, and out of place, that Stone Alexander flinched and spilled half of his coffee down the front of his shirt. The next brief moment seemed like an eternity. Everyone in the White House mess froze with the same wide-eyed look, and then the silence was shattered by loud cracks of gunfire.
The Executive Mansion
MUAMMAR BENGAZI slammed on the brakes, and the forklift came to a skidding halt in the first basement of the Executive Mansion. He could hear the higher pitch of the ATVs’ engines not far behind. Bengazi swiftly jumped to the ground and ran through a door to his left. Bounding up the stairs two at a time, he kept his AK-74 aimed upward as he climbed. The two men who had fired the RPGs followed close behind. When they reached the first landing, the door above them opened and two uniformed Secret Service officers rushed into the stairwell with their pistols drawn. Bengazi unleashed a quick burst of bullets, striking both men in the chest and sending them backward. The fallen officers blocked the door from closing, and as Bengazi reached the last step, he rolled a smoke grenade and then a fragmentation grenade into the hallway.
The double explosion was followed by a chorus of screams and falling debris. Bengazi and his men burst from the stairwell through the thickening gray smoke and began firing their weapons in all three directions. With their gas masks secured, they moved unhindered by the smoke toward the South Portico. Bengazi grabbed another grenade from his vest and yanked the pin. Fifty feet ahead, directly down the hall, was the Palm Room—the same room the president walked through every morning on his way to the Oval Office. Bengazi threw the grenade forward and ducked into an alcove on his right, while his men took shelter in a doorway on the left. There was a clinking noise as the grenade hit the tile floor and then a glass-shattering explosion as it detonated. Bengazi rushed forward again; every second was precious. As he reached the Palm Room, he turned the corner and a
lmost tripped over a bloody Secret Service officer, who lay dying on the floor, his body eviscerated by shards of glass. Bengazi looked through the shattered windowpanes out onto the South Lawn and saw four black-clad men running toward him, their machine guns searching for a target.
They belonged to the Secret Service Uniformed Division’s Emergency Response Team or ERT, and they had been expected. Bengazi raised his weapon to take aim at the lead man, but before he had a chance to dispose of him, the officer was struck by a high-velocity round that separated a large chunk of his head from the rest of his body. Within seconds the other three Secret Service officers were all lying on the ground, either dead or dying.
Bengazi was happy to see that Salim Rusan was doing his job. From his spot on the roof of the Washington Hotel, Rusan was to cover Bengazi and the others as they broke out into the open for the West Wing.
Bengazi yelled over his shoulder, “RPG!”
While he searched the South Lawn for more targets, one of his men stepped to his side with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher steadied on his shoulder and dropped to one knee. The man sighted in on the double doors at the other end of the Colonnade. The clicking of the trigger was followed by a low swooshing noise and another deafening explosion. Bengazi broke into a full sprint along the Colonnade, his AK-74 aimed at the burned and smoking entrance to the West Wing.
The Oval Office
THE FLOOR SHOOK, and several chunks of plaster fell from the ceiling of the Oval Office. Rafique Aziz had his back pressed against the fireplace and was holding Russ Piper tightly at knifepoint. The loud cracks of rifle fire told him his men were close. Aziz was enraged with himself for letting the president get away. He had been so close.
