gone by the wayside with the recent onslaught of high-tech radios and billion-dollar satellites. Events had progressed too quickly, and a low-tech solution to a critical battlefield problem had been missed.
Craft was glad he had remembered to put on his elbow and knee pads before being lowered into the ventilation duct. He had about thirty pounds of gear on his body and was pulling another thirty behind him via a rope. Wiggling like a reptile, he could move only four to six inches at a time, and his elbows were doing most of the work.
The two men moved quietly for the most part, the only real noise coming from the equipment they dragged behind them. The noise wasn’t much, no more than that of a shirt sliding down a clothes chute. It was hard to tell how far they had gone, but to Craft it seemed as if they were nearing the end. He stopped momentarily and looked behind him. All he found was more blackness and the sounds of his swim buddy squirming his way forward. Craft decided to shed some light on the situation. Turning onto one side, he extracted his pistol, a Heckler & Koch USP.45 ACP.
Attached to the pistol was both a cylindrical suppressor and a laser-aiming module. Craft turned on the laser, and the red dot bounced off the walls of the duct. Aiming the pistol straight ahead. Craft found the end of the shaft not more than thirty feet away.
AZIZ PLACED HIS hand on the doorknob and nodded to Bengazi. Bengazi took up a position opposite Aziz and signaled that he was ready. When Aziz opened the door, Bengazi swung his rifle and half of his body into the now open space. Bengazi looked down at the expansive room from a slightly elevated position. A small grated metal landing was just on the other side of the door, and three steps led from the landing down to the stark concrete floor of the boiler room. One dim light off to the left provided minimal lighting. After Bengazi looked from one side of the room to the other, he checked on both sides of the doorframe for more light switches. After coming up empty, he spotted a group of four switches at the bottom of the grated steps. Bengazi moved down the steps and slapped all four switches up with the palm of his hand. The room lit up with powerful overhead lamps.
Aziz stepped onto the landing and surveyed the room, his MP-5 gripped in both hands. He nodded for Bengazi to move out ahead while he slowly came down the steps. Neither man spoke. Bengazi had known Aziz long enough to recognize when he was spooked.
Aziz did not know exactly what he was looking for. As he peered around the room, he wondered if he wasn’t being overly paranoid. There had been very little time for sleep over the last week, and his nerves were getting raw. The truth, however, was that it is impossible to be too paranoid when dealing with the CIA. He should have thought of this possibility earlier, but so much had changed from the original plan. It was a grave oversight on his part. He had been thinking of too many things and spreading himself too thin, but he was focused now.
Nothing mattered more than getting his hands on the president, and if that meant sacrificing some of his assets to secure this area of the basement, it was a gamble that was well worth it.
As Aziz moved across the room, a good ten paces behind Bengazi, his eyes searched the floor for any type of drain, grate, or pipe. While he looked, he wondered how big the sewer pipe must have been in Amsterdam.
Not any pipe would do; it would have to be big, and he doubted that anything big enough to support a human would be running into the “White House.
Aziz was looking under one of the large boilers when he heard a soft whistle from Bengazi. Standing up straight, he looked over to his man, who was standing with one finger over his lips and the barrel of his rifle pointing up.
Aziz stood with his neck craned upward, watching the metal duct that ran from the wall diagonally across the room to some large piece of equipment. Listening intently, he focused everything on the duct. After a short while he thought he saw something, a glimmer off the lights, a buckle in the metal.
Aziz’s brow furrowed. Again he saw something, some type of movement.
Aziz stepped from his cover to get a closer look.
Some twenty feet away Bengazi shook his head at him and tried to wave him back. Aziz ignored him and continued to approach the duct. Finally, when he was directly under the structure, he heard the noise. It sounded like a rat moving behind the walls of an old building. Something was definitely in the duct.
Aziz looked behind him and took several steps back, putting himself in direct line with the length of the duct.
Then, raising his MP-5, he sighted in on part of the duct that protruded from the wall. With the butt of the rifle squeezed tightly between his right shoulder and cheek, he depressed the trigger and unleashed a volley of automatic fire, the heavy rounds slicing through the thin metal with ease.
Nine rounds were fired in total, the noise from the shots careening off the concrete floors and walls, leaving the ears of Aziz and Bengazi ringing. The smell of spent rounds filled the air, and a cluster of shell casings rolled aimlessly about the floor near Aziz’s feet.
Aziz did not move. He stood his ground with his rifle still pointed at the duct, his eyes fixed on the straight line of bullet holes he had just laced into the thin metal. At first there was nothing, no movement and no noise other than the ringing of the shots that had been fired, and then, out of one of the holes, something dark beaded into a droplet and after an eternity it broke free. Both Aziz and Bengazi watched it fall to the ground. The drop hit the gray concrete floor and splashed into a spidered crimson pattern. Without hesitation, both Aziz and Bengazi stepped back and opened up on the duct with a relentless hail of bullets.
THE APARTMENT WAS nice. It had been decorated by his mother.
She had insisted on flying to D.C. to help her son get settled in. Now that Dallas was an important figure in Washington, he’d have to entertain. Mrs. King had loaded up her son with the best that Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and Restoration Hardware could provide.
The two-bedroom apartment in Adams-Morgan cost him nineteen hundred dollars a month, but it was worth it. It was only a couple of blocks away from some of Washington’s best nightspots, there were plenty of women around, and it was close to work.
Dallas King sat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in one hand and the remote control to his TV in the other. He was waiting for the seven A.M. top-of-the-hour CNN news update. Dallas took a sip of coffee and looked down the hall to his bedroom. Through the cracked door he glimpsed the lean leg of his lovely little Asian hostess, Kim. She had been everything he had hoped and then some. After King finished his meeting with Sheila Dunn, he had moved to the bar for one more glass of wine. Someone must have explained to the hostess who he was because she began asking him questions about the crisis. King worked it for everything it was worth, stressing his role as Vice President Baxter’s closest adviser, complaining about the pressure, and finally telling her how much he wanted to be with her. By the time one A.M.rolled around, he had her punched out and on the way to his apartment.
As he sipped his coffee, CNN came back from a commercial break. King turned up the volume and listened to the anchor start off with the lead story of the morning. Footage of a candlelight vigil that had taken place the night before flashed across the screen. The anchor announced that an estimated fifty thousand people had taken part in the silent march from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol. Next came more footage of massive crowds pressing against police barricades in an effort to glimpse the White House. This relatively calm footage was replaced by images of protestors burning American flags in Gaza, the West Bank, Baghdad, and Damascus.
King shook his head and muttered, “If they keep that shit up, we’ll have no choice but to storm the place.”
The anchor and the correspondent talked for almost a minute about the official reactions of governments around the Middle East and then broke away for a live briefing being delivered by Director Roach of the FBI.
Roach stood in front of a Justice Department podium and started out reading from prepared text. The director gestured to an easel on his left, saying, “This is the photo we released yesterday of Mohammed Battikhi- the man we believe to have fired shots from the roof of the Washington Hotel during the opening moments of the attack on the White House. We now know his real name to be Salim Rusan. He is at large and considered to be extremely dangerous. Right now we are offering a one-million-dollar reward for any information leading to the arrest of Rusan and a second individual.” One of Roach’s aides removed the first photo and replaced it with a second of a man wearing a green uniform.
