Tidal Rip

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.

“Make a stand right here!” Jeffrey’s bodyguard said. He reloaded his Uzi with a long and heavy ammo clip. The driver pulled another Uzi from its mount under the dash.

Both men pulled out pistols. The driver turned to Jeffrey and his father. “You know how to use these?”

“I think so,” Michael Fuller said. “Which thing is the safety?”

Great, Jeffrey told himself. My dad’s a bunch of help.

Jeffrey took one of the weapons. He recognized a nine-millimeter Beretta, a standard military-issue weapon.

But the bad guys have assault rifles and rocket launchers.

“When I yell ‘Go,’” the bodyguard said, “everybody pop their doors and roll out and start shooting. Some of us might make it.”

Jeffrey knew it was useless, even before the new wave of attackers opened fire.

AK-47 bullets came at the town cars in short but terrifying bursts. These attackers were firing green tracer rounds so their victims could see the rounds in flight as they passed. They peppered the side doors of Jeffrey’s car. Four grown men were pinned in Jeffrey’s auto. The bodyguard’s plan to shoot their way out would be suicide.

Whoever they are, these attackers know exactly what they’re doing. They’re just too good.

Behind this deadly incoming suppressive fire, Jeffrey saw an attacker kneel and take aim with a rocket launcher. The man seemed to point it right at Jeffrey, right through the dirty, punched-up armored windshield of the car. The warhead’s antitank shaped charge would fill the car with a supersonic jet of white-hot gas and metal vapor, cooking everyone alive.

Somebody important really wants me dead.

Policemen on the parkway stopped their cars. They were trying to shoot at the attackers with whatever light weapons they had. Some of the attackers shifted their fire in that direction.

Jeffrey’s father made eye contact and took a deep breath, and let it out. “Whoever thought we’d buy it, both, like this?”

Jeffrey felt deeply violated, and angry. Not because he would die. He’d always known that someday — in combat or in old age — he would die. He felt enraged at this latest defamation of the nation’s capital, at the heartless sacrifice of civilians so a gang of paid assassins could get at him. Jeffrey also felt guilty. People are dying here because of me.

The attacker with the rocket launcher exploded. A solid wall of bright red tracers poured at him out of the sky. There were brilliant flashes from the automatic-cannon rounds. The rocket launcher’s warhead and propellant fuel burst in half-blinding secondary detonations.

Above the pounding of his heart and the roaring in his ears, Jeffrey heard the noise of powerful turbines and the steady beat of military-helicopter rotor blades. He looked up in time to see two army Apache Longbow gunships racing by. More bursts from their chin-mounted Gatling guns pulverized the attackers’ position, mutilating the barricade of fallen trees.

“That’s it,” the bodyguard said. “We got air support! Let’s move it! ”