Tidal Rip (10 page)

Spill-back. Washington rush-hour traffic jams are infamous. Still, you’d think that with carpooling, and gas rationing, in a residential neighborhood…

Jeffrey glanced behind him. He saw the town car with Wilson and Ilse, and the other police car, and craned his neck to see behind him more. Past the rear of their little motorcade, in the far intersection, was a fire engine—a long and heavy ladder truck. No sirens, but its flashers rotated as if it was returning from a run.

In front of Jeffrey’s car, the cement mixer hadn’t moved. The big hopper holding the wet cement continued to revolve. The red and yellow of the hopper, the bright red of the fire truck, and the flashing lights of the fire truck and the police cars gave the scene a strangely festive look. Jeffrey turned and watched as six firemen dismounted and opened equipment bays in the side of their truck.

Jeffrey’s heart leaped into his throat as his bodyguard shouted into a walkie-talkie. The firemen now held assault rifles and rocket launchers. Three more armed men left the cement mixer’s cab. They took up firing positions under the massive vehicle.
Things
hit the front of Jeffrey’s car with terrible force. Jeffrey and his father flinched and ducked.

Despite himself, Jeffrey looked up. The glass was pockmarked but the bullets hadn’t penetrated the armored windshield—yet. Now Jeffrey recognized the unmistakable rapid-fire
boom-boom-boom
of AK-47s. He saw glass in the police cars shatter, the cars jumping and sagging as their tires were ripped to shreds. The policemen tried to shoot back, using their riot shotguns and pistols. The noise of the firefight grew. It was a very uneven contest. Bullet-riddled men in blue collapsed to the asphalt, writhing in expanding pools of blood.

CHAPTER 5

S
it tight,”
Jeffrey’s driver shouted. “We’re armored all around!” A voice crackled over the bodyguard’s walkie-talkie, something unintelligible to Jeffrey.

“Christ,” Jeffrey’s father said as he stared back at the fire engine. “He’s aiming a rocket launcher.”

Jeffrey saw a fireman crouch on the ladder truck. He held a long tube over one shoulder. At the front of the tube was the bulge of an ugly warhead. It looked like an RPG-7, Russian made—aged, like the attackers’ rifles, but flooding the world’s arms markets and impossible to trace.

There was a flash and a blast of smoke and dust. The warhead tore at Jeffrey’s car, skimming over the intervening vehicles.

Jeffrey heard a ripping sound overhead. The incoming rocket missed the top of his car by an inch and kept going. As Jeffrey watched, it hit the cement mixer in the side.

There was a deafening concussion and a flash of searing flame. Shrapnel flew, pelting other vehicles, breaking windows in nearby buildings, chipping bricks on their facades.

The hopper of the cement mixer continued to revolve. There was a four-inch hole in its side, and wet gray concrete poured from the hole as the hopper turned around and around.

Bullets continued to crack through the air. Jeffrey’s car jumped with every impact. He saw the fire truck taking hits, and silvery dents appeared in the red of its sheet-steel side. Pedestrians on the sidewalk cowered, pinned down; some were trying to use their phones, but hysterical fumbling and frustrated rage seemed to show that the cell phones were jammed. Both sides of the street were littered with now-abandoned civilian cars.

One of the attackers climbed higher on the fire truck with another rocket launcher, trying to get a better shot at Jeffrey’s vehicle.

Jeffrey’s bodyguard saw it too. He hefted his Uzi and did a calculation. Enemy bullets were grazing the auto from both front and behind—to crack the door invited instant death.

Just one of those rocket-propelled shaped-charge warheads will turn this car into an inferno.

A wounded cop emptied his revolver at the enemy with the rocket launcher. The launcher fired at the same time the man who held it fell straight back off the truck. The warhead came in at an angle, barely missing the left side of Jeffrey’s car.

The warhead detonated against the pavement. The blast lifted Jeffrey’s town car violently. It bounced down on its reinforced suspension. Jeffrey’s arms and legs felt numb from the punishment. His ears ached from the noise. The side windows of his car on the left were pitted by sharp steel fragments, and the glass was partly obscured by soot. Other autos—private cars and taxis—were starting to burn.

“We can’t take any more of this,”
Jeffrey’s father said.

Again the bodyguard’s walkie-talkie crackled.

“Sit
tight,
” the driver yelled. “Help is coming!”

Jeffrey watched in horror as a spray of bullets ricocheted off Ilse’s and Wilson’s car. He saw the headlights shatter, chrome molding twist and break, sheet metal tear, and fiberglass fracture. The whole vehicle shivered on its springs.

The sound of firing suddenly intensified.

The three men under the cement mixer turned and aimed the other way, away from Jeffrey. The ground around them was slippery as concrete continued to pour from the hopper—it still rotated mindlessly, coated more and more by the clinging goo.

Those three attackers opened fire again, shooting at something or someone on the far side of the cement mixer, where Jeffrey couldn’t see. There was another hard concussion. The three attackers disintegrated. Fresh concrete quickly covered the gore. The hopper finally stopped; the cement mixer’s powerful diesel engine was burning now, and soon the entire front of the truck was engulfed in roaring red flames. The flames reached threateningly for the fuel tank down behind the cab; the tank was leaking from shrapnel punctures. Jeffrey felt the radiant heat through the windows of his car.

More AK-47 slugs came at the back of Jeffrey’s car. The attackers were smashing their way through the rear windshield, concentrating their fire in a single spot. Bullets chewed and chipped at the armored glass.

A handful of men in black uniforms ran from around the far side of the cement mixer. They took up positions and began to engage the attackers on the ladder truck.

Friendly troops. Who are they?
Their only insignia were small American flag patches on their sleeves.

The smoke of burning rubber and diesel was thick. The stench of it got into Jeffrey’s car.

The men in black combat fatigues advanced steadily. Some fired their weapons on full automatic while others dumped empty magazines and reloaded their assault rifles. The weapons didn’t look at all like M-16s. They had boxy optical sights, with a little video imagining screen and mirrors to see around corners. The men worked their way up the street. They shot and moved with skill, darting from cover to cover, advancing relentlessly.

A rapid-reaction force. Are there enough of them?

AK-47 rounds from the fire truck poured in Jeffrey’s direction. Bullets hit the back bumper and pounded into the trunk. The vehicle jolted with each heavy impact.

“Jesus,” Jeffrey’s father said under his breath. Streaks and puffs of dark smoke drifted everywhere outside.

The friendly troops worked their way past Jeffrey’s car, closer to Ilse’s. Now Jeffrey saw they wore thick flak vests and ballistic-ceramic battle helmets, and talked to one another by tactical radio with microphones next to their lips.

Jeffrey looked around. He saw a young woman lying on the sidewalk, curled up and clutching at her abdomen. There was a lot of blood, and she looked pregnant.

One of the friendly troops shouted something. Jeffrey read his lips. “Grenade!”

The man aimed a grenade launcher at the ladder truck. The launcher was clipped beneath the barrel of his rifle. The launcher and rifle kicked. There was another tremendous concussion—against the side of the fire truck.

Jeffrey saw his chance. He unlocked the door and dashed from the car.

“What the—” the bodyguard shouted. Jeffrey couldn’t hear the rest. Ricochets screamed; rifle reports were much louder outside the car; the smell of burning things was awful. There was more blood on the woman’s dress already, and Jeffrey needed to drag her behind good cover and stop the bleeding fast. The bodyguard opened his door enough to take aim across the top of the town car. He emptied his Uzi at the ladder truck. Hot spent brass flew everywhere.

A man in black ran up to Jeffrey with his rifle held at port arms. In that fleeting instant Jeffrey saw that a wire ran from the rifle to a computer pack on the soldier’s thigh; he also wore a keypad strapped to his forearm; there were tiny disk and rod antennas on his shoulders over his flak vest.

With his left hand the soldier grabbed Jeffrey by the front of his uniform, throwing him backward into the car and slamming the door.

The soldier screamed to Jeffrey’s driver. “Go! Go!
Clear out of here!
”

Jeffrey landed with his head in his father’s lap. His father looked down at Jeffrey and his expression seemed to say he wasn’t sure if his son was very brave or incredibly stupid. Jeffrey sat up and refastened his seat belt.

Bullets continued to snap in all directions. The attackers were putting up a stiff resistance. The friendly counterattack began to slow down—the closer the engaging troops got to the fire truck, the more lethal was the return fire from the assassins dressed as firemen.

“How the
fuck
are we supposed to clear out of
this?
” The bodyguard cradled his smoking Uzi, and now the stink of burning inside the town car was very strong.

Jeffrey saw what he meant. On the near side of the street was a row of apartment buildings, beyond a line of parked cars. On the opposite side of the town car sat all the abandoned and shot-up cars in the other lane of traffic on the two-way street. Beyond those were more parked cars by the other sidewalk—that most had near-empty tanks because of the fuel shortages was the only thing that kept the whole street from becoming one huge gasoline-fed conflagration.

Beyond that far sidewalk, Jeffrey saw a wrought-iron fence. Beyond the fence the ground dropped off too steeply.

“Hold on,” the driver said. He did something with the gearshift.

He began to make a broken U-turn, forcing other autos out of the way. The transmission protested, but gradually the town car worked itself sideways. The car backed up, smacking into cars parked on the same side of the street, in front of the buildings.

The driver floored the accelerator, in very low gear. He aimed at the narrow space between two cars left in the street. The town car elbowed them aside, but then the engine stalled from the effort. More smoke from everything burning stained the windows with oily yellowish soot. More bullets smacked and pitted the window glass. It was becoming harder and harder to see outside. Jeffrey caught glimpses of another wave of men in black, except these sported white armbands with big red crosses, and their helmets bore red crosses in circles of white. They carried not weapons but heavy satchels of combat first-aid supplies. These men crouched near the wounded, opened their satchels, and went to work fearlessly under fire.

Jeffrey’s driver restarted the engine and backed up, very hard. Jeffrey and his father were thrown around against their seat belts. The driver changed gears and pressed down on the gas. The town car lurched forward, smashing into two parked cars on the opposite side of the street. There was a screech of smoking rubber, and for an endless moment the armored town car didn’t move.

Then the two parked cars were shoved up onto the sidewalk and out of the way.

The town car flattened a stretch of the wrought-iron fence. The car began to run downhill, accelerating. Jeffrey looked back. The tires—designed to be bullet resistant—were throwing up divots of grass and clods of earth. Jeffrey saw the car with Wilson and Ilse following him, looking banged up but intact.

The cars rumbled down the slope at a frighteningly steep angle. Bushes were dragged under the car and spat out behind. The noises of shooting receded, but the fight they’d left behind seemed barely diminished. Jeffrey spotted people in the park, hiding behind pathetic cover, benches or sapling trees. Some of the people had children with them, or dogs.

The cars leveled off and made a tight turn and accelerated; the going was very rough. They were on a path in Rock Creek Park—here the park comprised the sides and bottom of a wide and deep ravine. Both town cars continued along the pavement of the walking path as fast as they possibly could. Rock Creek was close beside.

Jeffrey heard sirens now. On the opposite side of the ravine, a parkway paralleled the creek. A parade of police cars, fire engines, ambulances was trying to catch up with Jeffrey. But they were out of reach. To Jeffrey’s immediate left was the twenty-foot-wide creek, water churning in its rugged course. The creek was lined with stands of trees too old, too sturdy, to smash through.

Jeffrey’s driver pressed on hard. Outside the battle-scarred windows, tree trunks and overhead branches went by in a blur. The cars zoomed under the high archways of road bridges carrying cross streets above the park. They reached a place where the ravine’s bottom narrowed, and the sidewalk they’d been using came to an end.

“Shit!”
the driver shouted. He slammed on the brakes and the car slewed sideways. Jeffrey’s bodyguard yelled into his radio; the voice that answered from somewhere safe was maddeningly calm.

The way ahead was blocked by thick felled trees. Behind the trees were men in green Park Service uniforms. The men were unpacking rocket launchers.

They expected this to be our escape route all along…. The first wave didn’t get us, but this one will. We’re sitting ducks.

To the right was the rising embankment, hopelessly steep. To the left, still, were trees and creek, an insurmountable barrier. Just behind Jeffrey’s car, the one with Wilson and Ilse, with their own driver and bodyguard, also fishtailed to a halt.

If the armored town cars tried to turn around they’d just give better broadside targets. If they tried to flee in reverse the rocket launchers couldn’t miss.