What the devil was that?
A young naval rating thundering down the stairs behind him supplied the answer. “A passenger jet just hit the Fourteenth Street Bridge, sir! Saw it out my window!”
The young man kept going.
Jesus. Thorn stood stunned for a split second and then took off after the sailor, taking the stairs down two at a time. He didn’t stop to think about it. If anybody on either the plane or the bridge had survived the impact, they were going to need help, and soon.
By the time he reached the ground floor, the hallway was filling up with dozens of men and women, most in uniform, some in civilian clothes. All were racing toward the Pentagon’s northeastern exit, the one closest to the crash site. He joined them.
A blinding cloud of thick black smoke hid most of the Fourteenth Street Bridge from view until Thorn crested the highway embankment and gained a clear line of sight. What he saw was worse than anything he had imagined.
Orange and red flames danced across the entire length and width of the span, fed by thousands of gallons of spilled aviation fuel and gasoline. The cars and trucks that had once crowded the bridge were unrecognisable mere heaps and lumps of blackened, torn, and twisted metal. The impact itself had gouged an enormous crater out of the roadway at the midpoint across the Potomac. Only one scorched wing of the passenger jet remained visible obscenely protruding above the water near a buckled bridge support like a giant shark’s fin.
A small cadre of Pentagon security officers, Virginia state troopers, and U.S. park policemen were already on the scene, frantically and futilely trying to fight the nearest fires with handheld extinguishers. More and more civilians from the vehicles bottlenecked on the jammed highway were rushing forward to lend a helping hand.
Against all Thorn’s expectations, there were survivors emerging from the tangled chaos on the bridge. He could see them stumbling and staggering toward safety. Most were bleeding, their clothing in tatters. A few were on fire human torches running madly in agonised circles amid terrifying shrieks and screams. People dashed toward them carrying coats and blankets to douse the flames.
Beneath the smoke pall, the kerosene-stained waters of the Potomac bubbled as debris from the sunken fragments of the airliner’s fuselage broke free and popped to the surface. Bright orange flotation seat cushions, jagged pieces of cabin ceiling insulation, and other unidentifiable odds and ends bobbed in the river.
Thorn came to the western end of the mangled bridge and stopped, staring downward into the black fog, straining to see clearly. Was that someone out in the water, drifting facedown in the midst of all the other debris? He caught a flash of long golden hair and made his decision without conscious thought. Nobody else was in a position to see what he saw or to act in time.
He stripped off his uniform jacket, kicked off his shoes, and dove straight into the Potomac - straight down into the black, icy waters.
For a terrible instant, Thorn feared the frigid cold had paralyzed him that he would never taste the air again. But a single frantic kick brought him to the surface. He sucked in a welcome lungful of oxygen and spat out the sickeningly sweet taste of the jet fuel clogging his mouth and nostrils. Then he started swimming, covering the distance toward the bobbing head he’d glimpsed so faintly with a powerful crawl stroke. As he swam, he tried to keep his bearings with quick glances toward the shattered bridge.
Twenty yards. Forty. He was starting to tire now, weighed down by the cold, the water saturating his shirt and trousers, and the kerosene burning its way down into his lungs. Where was she? Had she already been dragged under?
Thorn pushed a charred seat cushion out of his path and began treading water, pushing himself above the surface as he spun slowly, peering in all directions. There! He spotted the tangle of golden hair drifting just a few yards away.
He lunged out and grabbed the floating woman from behind. With his right arm locked around her chest to pull her face out of the water, he used his left to turn around and kicked out for shore, sculling vigorously against the slow current pushing him down toward the burning Fourteenth Street Bridge. The distance, the icy cold, and the weight dragging at his hip all fused in one long, nightmarish journey without a clear beginning and without a visible end.
Thorn could barely move by the time he reached the shallows. He was only dimly aware of the sudden rush of volunteers who came thrashing into the Potomac to help him out onto the long grass at the water’s edge. He lay shuddering for long moments, gasping for air. When an Air Force sergeant knelt down to drape a spare jacket over his shoulders, he recovered enough to lever himself to his knees.
“What about the woman? Is someone helping her?” he heard himself ask hoarsely.
The sergeant’s face fell and he looked away. “I’m sorry, Colonel,” he said softly. “It was no good, sir. You couldn’t have done anything for her. No one could have.”
Thorn stared past the noncom to where the blond-haired passenger lay faceup, staring blindly at the sky. She was quite young, he realized. And quite pretty. But there was nothing left below her thighs but a few dangling scraps of bloodless flesh.
On the Virginia shore, near the Fourteenth Street Bridge The rescue crews were still hard at it well into the night, working under hastily rigged floodlights to gather corpses and personal effects. Park Police and Coast Guard patrol boats motored back and forth across the searchlight-lit Potomac as they fished more bodies and more debris out of the river. Teams of divers in heavy wet suits were already conducting a coordinated search for the aircraft’s black boxes the 757’s flight data and voice recorders.
Helen Gray climbed wearily out of the official car she’d borrowed and made her way slowly down the steep embankment. The smell of burned metal and flesh hung everywhere in the air, on the roadway, on the grass, and in her clothes and hair. Earlier during that long, terrible day, she’d led a cadre of FBI volunteers in desperate rescue efforts on the D.C. side of the river. Now she’d taken the longer way around via the still-intact Memorial Bridge to find the man she loved.
Exhausted soldiers still plainly shaken by what they had witnessed directed her toward a small clump of senior officers gathered near the water’s edge.
One, a gray-haired Navy captain, nodded when she asked after Peter.
“Colonel Thorn? Yeah. He’s around here somewhere, ma’am.” He looked up, squinting further down the riverbank against the floodlights. Then he pointed toward a lone figure staring out across the water. “That’s him.”
Helen nodded her thanks and moved on.
Peter Thorn looked up at her approach. His drawn face held a look of anger and sorrow stronger than any she had ever seen before. “This was deliberate?” he asked grimly.
She nodded. “Several hundred eyewitnesses have reported seeing two or three distinct missile trails merging with the plane. And we know where the terrorists fired from. The canal park. They killed an innocent bystander there. We found the body this afternoon.”
His jaw tightened.
“I’m afraid it gets worse, Peter,” she said gently. “Somebody blew up the main fuel storage tanks at Dallas/Fort Worth International two hours ago. Several hundred thousand gallons of jet fuel went up in seconds. They’re still trying to fight the fires and make some estimate of the damage and casualties, but it’s pretty bad.”
She paused briefly before delivering the rest of her news. “The local papers here and in Dallas have already had phone calls claiming responsibility for both attacks. They seem genuine.”
“From the god damned New Aryan Order?”
Helen shook her head. “No. These came from a group called the African Liberation Front. They claimed they were retaliating against the ‘Nazi white establishment.’ ”
“Christ. That’s all we need.” Peter looked away again, out toward the floodlit river. His eyes were full of pain. “I became a soldier to fight the kind of bastards who would do something like this. The kind who shoot down airliners full of women and kids just to make some lousy political point. But now it’s happening right here at home, and I can’t do a single thing to stop it.”
She moved closer, into the circle of his arms. “I know,” she said softly.
He held her tighter, softly stroking her hair taking what comfort he could from her presence and her warmth.
