than three feet from him, he stumbled again, and I thought he was about to take the hit of his life right there on M Street.
CHAPTER 107
The guy up on the snowbank shot at Sampson when less than a foot separated Sampson from the bulldozer blade. The bullet hit the upper back part of the blade, ricocheted, and shattered the bulldozer’s windshield.
The machine lurched hard left, as if the driver had ducked and pulled the steering wheel. Now the blade was coming right at me from about fifty feet away. I got to one knee and then up to my feet, gasping at the pain shooting everywhere around my right shoulder.
Gun.
The butt of my Glock was right there in the snow, the barrel buried all the way to the trigger. I grabbed at it with my left hand and pulled it from the snow as the bulldozer closed on me. I heard someone shoot, and someone scream.
I stood unsteadily, my right arm swinging stupidly at my side. But my survival voices were taking over:
But then a louder voice screamed,
The bulldozer was right on me then, no more than ten feet away, and I was sure my entire body was about to feel like my right shoulder. But then it dawned on me that the driver could no longer see me, that the blade was blocking him, that he was driving blind.
I jumped. The upper corner of the blade just missed my head. I landed, jumped again, pivoted, hoping to aim the gun at the driver and tell him I’d shoot if-
Sampson’s gun went off behind me. I heard the bullet ping inside the cab. The driver did what I absolutely did not expect. He jumped out of the cab, landing awkwardly in the snow about three feet away, while the bulldozer kept on, climbing the snowbank on the median strip, headed toward an office building across the street.
I raised my gun at the one-eyed man even as he raised his gun at me.
CHAPTER 108
Our weapons were less than two inches apart. The one-eyed terrorist and I were in a Mexican standoff that looked like a no-winner for me any way it went down. If he pulled the trigger, I was dead. If I pulled the trigger, my barrel would explode and I was dead. Maybe he was dead too, but I was definitely in a black body bag with a grieving wife and family.
The man’s uncovered eye was wide and glistening. “Inshallah!” he whispered to me.
I got it. We were both in the hands of God now, about to discover His will.
The sound of the bulldozer crashing into something was followed by a gunshot that came from behind and above me. Both the driver and I instinctively cringed and ducked, but I recovered much quicker.
My arms were longer than his. I probably had three, four inches of reach on him. My right arm was useless, but my left had been bent as I aimed my plugged gun at him, not extended at all.
My left hand jabbed at him, setting him up for a straight impossible-to-deliver right cross. Instead, I slapped the side of his pistol hard to his left with the barrel of my gun and then stepped into his very, very large blind spot.
The terrorist shot wildly. Sampson fired at virtually the same time, and I heard the sound of a hit and the cry of a wounded man somewhere up on the snowbank before I chopped down with my pistol, hitting the man right in the bandages, right on the bone above the socket of his scalded eye.
His knees left him, and so did everything else. He crashed onto his side, out cold.
CHAPTER 109
A week later, it was raining and warm; the deep freeze that had gripped the city so severely was gone, and the snow had turned into slush and puddles. But that would not stop me from taking my wife out for dinner and dancing on New Year’s Eve. We were going to double-date with John Sampson and his wife, Billie. We’d done it up right, rented a car and driver to chauffeur us to our dinner at the rooftop-terrace restaurant of the W Hotel-best view in the city-and then across the river to the Havana Breeze Latin Club in Fairfax for a little salsa, a little merengue.
Why not? We were all in a mood to celebrate, and a jazz club just wasn’t going to do it. After all, we’d not only put Hala Al Dossari and her coconspirators in prison, we’d also foiled their ultimate plot, which was a doozy.
Documents that we’d discovered in the terrorists’ van laid out the plan: The stolen chemicals were to be held for twenty-six days in a basement apartment Nazad had rented on Capitol Hill. Early on the morning of January 20, Nazad, a trained chemist, would mix the organophosphates in a rented five-hundred-gallon water tank. Then he and his accomplices would put the tank full of the crude nerve-gas agent in the back of a pickup truck and skirt the closed roads in the city until they got upwind of the Capitol.
Then they would all don masks, do the final mix, and spray the chemicals up into the prevailing winds, in the hope that the toxic vapor cloud would drift over the massive crowds gathered on the National Mall and across to the back steps of the Capitol, where the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court would be swearing in the president of the United States.
It was so crazy, it might have worked. Hundreds, maybe thousands might have died. The president might have died, and the justices, and every member of Congress. It was so crazy, I didn’t want to think about it anymore, I decided at around six that New Year’s Eve as I waited in the kitchen for Bree to finish with her hair and finally choose the dress she was going to wear for our big night out on the town.
My younger son, Ali, and Jannie and Ava were devouring a plate of fried rabbit, one of my grandmother’s specialties. Ava had balked at the idea at first, but once she saw Jannie and Ali tearing into it, she’d tried it, and now she was on her second piece.
“Good, huh?” I asked.
“Better than good,” Ava said. “I had no idea rabbit could taste this amazing. Like chicken, but way, way better.”
“It’s the buttermilk,” Nana Mama said, looking pleased as she scrubbed out the cast-iron skillet she’d used to fry the rabbit. “I soak the meat in buttermilk overnight to make it tender like that.”
“Damon’s gonna be mad when he hears you made fried rabbit
“Damon could have stayed home until tomorrow,” my grandmother responded. “He chose to go back early.”
“To get ahead on his studies,” I reminded her.
“Can’t fault him for that,” Nana Mama allowed. “But even the best choices sometimes have adverse consequences.”
“Like missing fried rabbit,” Ali said.
Nana smiled and pointed at her great-grandson. “See there? Always said you were a smart, smart boy.”
Ali grinned from ear to ear and reached for the last piece of rabbit, but Ava got to it first. He groaned.
“I’ll split it with you,” Ava said.
My grandmother squinted in my direction. “How you doing?”
