9:03 A.M.
UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT BUILDING
FIRST AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Mansour clutched the door of the van, Ali, the steering wheel, each holding tight. Just as someone behind them honked, the ground seemed to shake, and then glass shattered—it was the bus, to the right. The minivan bounced as if made of rubber. Then came the sound of an explosion. To the left, above the East River, a cloud of black-and-gray smoke erupted into the sky, then there were flames. The flames tunneled up within the smoke as the heat soared into the sky.
Another rumble, from a different direction, to the right, more diffuse, nevertheless made the ground shake for a second time.
Mansour registered two yellow buses then heard automatic gunfire coming in a cloud of noise from in and around the buses.
A white van was just a few cars away from the line of policemen, trapped in a bumper-to-bumper turn, where traffic was being diverted, when suddenly the van’s back doors opened. Two men clutching AR-15s, clad in street clothes, leapt out, flanked the van, and looked to the line of officers, then trained their weapons and started firing at them, trying to hold the perimeter of the UN. The raw staccato of the AR-15s arose above the noise. Screams were next, as SWAT and police tried to lurch out of the way of incoming firepower.…
The scene erupted in chaos.…
Mansour and Ali opened the doors of the van in unison, stepping out onto the street.
In the distance, in front of them, Mansour assayed the scene. He registered pedestrians—on the ground—blown by the explosion. Some of them were injured. Second Avenue was clogged with cars and buses, all of the occupants no doubt in a state of shock.
Then Mansour registered the layer: soldiers. Dozens of men, climbing from cars, clutching firearms.
Just as he and Ali stepped out of the sedan clutching weapons, so too did a small army of others. Mansour could see many. Stepping out of various vehicles: cab, Uber, and Lyft drivers; delivery people. But those were aliases. All were QUDS. Mansour checked behind him, too, and saw yet more men.
Twenty men in all; they’d been handpicked by Mansour. They were sent to the United States, many through Canada, a few under manufactured identities, all of them immigrants, from various countries. But all of them were Iranian, and all were QUDS. The top tier: Hezbollah.
The UN was on the banks of the East River. The apron ran from the side of the river a block north from the UN in an arc that spread in a half-moon to Second Avenue, then curved back into the East River below the UN. A cordon.
The area inside the arc was the UN, and the objective was straightforward: kill every person inside the arc, particularly the president of the United States.
The security would be vulnerable. Despite the fact that it was the president, the inner tiers of last-line security were rusty, even atrophied. It didn’t matter if they were Secret Service, FBI, or NYPD—they weren’t Delta or SEALs. The ones assigned here today were there as a gift to them, a prestigious and exciting opportunity to see the president. The protective unit, the envelope, was a chink in the armor.
Mansour kicked the door shut just as, a few cars away, a bearded Italian man in a black Suburban opened the door. He was dressed in a sweatshirt. He held a pistol. It was just a citizen. He was not one of them. He looked around, then saw Mansour. Mansour trained the AR-15 on the man and pulled back on the trigger. A spray of bullets pounded the Italian in the chest, throwing him back against the Suburban, splattering blood across the vehicle.
Suddenly, the sound of automatic gunfire erupted as Mansour started firing at other vehicles, and then the sound was amplified as every Hezbollah gunman also started firing. They shot pedestrians prone on the sidewalks, killing them like they were whacking weeds, then moved into the vehicles. They sprayed bullets into every vehicle in the vicinity of where they were, in the semicircle around the UN—and then, led by Mansour, they all turned and moved in toward the UN complex.
The gunmen shredded the line, firing indiscriminately both behind the line of gunmen and forward, at the UN, beginning the process of clawing their way in.
A few officers in the immediate area—not caught in the initial killing arc of Iranian bullets—returned fire and soon it was an all-out firefight, even as screams and smoke and ash from the explosion at the tunnel started to choke the air.
Mansour climbed into the back of the van. He grabbed a shoulder-fired missile launcher; a Russian-made 9K32 Strela-2. He strapped it over his shoulder, sights extended, launch tube balanced perfectly, gripstock in his hand—and a long, thin missile already loaded and ready to fly. The missile itself was a “directed-energy” blast fragmentation warhead, with detonation immediate and grazing fuses that had a fifteen-second built-in delay before automatic self-destruction, once fired.
One of the men in back opened the rear door. Two gunmen leapt out. Men and women in surrounding vehicles screamed, ducking or leaping from cars, trying to get away. But the gunmen positioned without firing, taking up position at each corner of the back of the van, covering the area. Mansour climbed out of the back, moved around the corner of the van, and knelt behind a gunman on the driver’s side, then locked in the optic. He trained the MANPAD on the UN, counting out floors until he came to eighteen.
He waited, even as bullets ricocheted and clanked against the van.
There were more screams, then sirens.
Mansour looked at his watch, then put his eye to the optic. Then he fired the MANPAD.
The Strela made a loud boom and then it hissed and screeched as it soared toward the UN, trailing smoke, drowning out all other noise.
The missile screeched above the live weapon fire around the UN, tearing up at the tower as people screamed. The missile punctured the building approximately halfway up, shattering a large hole in the glass. A half second later, the explosion blew out a large wall of the windows on that floor, as well as the floors above and below. A cascade of glass dropped through the sky in front of the building, shattering in sheets and shards on the plaza directly beneath.