CHAPTER SIXTEEN

General Grant’s office

The Pentagon

Arlington, Virginia

General Frank Grant felt equally distracted after his telephone conversation with his niece. But he didn’t have time to ponder his thoughts. As soon as he’d put down his phone, his National Security Council liaison, Lieutenant Colonel Gabe DeMoss, entered his office.

“You asked to see me, sir,” DeMoss said.

“Is there anything new from the SAD team that was dispatched to Nairobi?”

“Nothing that I’ve been told,” DeMoss answered. “Sir, I noticed on your schedule this morning that you’re meeting Director Grainger. He would be the first to hear from the SAD team.” DeMoss glanced at his watch. “You need to be leaving now or you’ll be late.”

“I want you to accompany me to Langley,” Grant said.

“Sir, I have a meeting scheduled.”

“Cancel it,” Grant snapped. “I’ve learned a bit more about that burner phone used in the assassination attempt on the president and I want you there when I brief Grainger.”

Within minutes, the two men were traveling north on Highway 110, a two-and-a-half-mile freeway built in the early 1940s, in part to connect the Pentagon with the federal district. On some maps the road was identified as the Jefferson Davis Highway, but that name had fallen out of favor as part of a public campaign aimed at erasing everything from official landmarks that commemorated the Confederacy, especially the name of a secessionist president. The Potomac River was on their right and Arlington National Cemetery on their left.

About a quarter mile ahead of the general’s government-provided Cadillac, a Ford F-150 truck turned on the same highway. The truck had been rented from a local home improvement store and had been fitted with a flatbed that could be raised and lowered. Large trucks and tour buses were banned from using Highway 110 after the 9/11 attacks because of the highway’s proximity to the Pentagon, but pickup trucks like the F-150 were allowed. When it reached an interchange where Highways 110 and 50 connect with Interstate 66, the truck’s driver pulled a lever that raised the vehicle’s cargo bed. Cardboard boxes filled with thousands of roofing nails and stacks of two-by-four-inch pine boards slid onto the freeway. The two cars directly behind the truck slammed on their brakes, causing a chain reaction. Four cars rear-ended the vehicles in front of them.

“What’s going on?” DeMoss asked Bill Lepinski, the general’s driver, when their sedan came to a full stop.

“Looks like a major tie-up in both lanes,” Lepinski replied. Because they were a dozen cars back from the blockage, they couldn’t see the spilled debris. Lepinski opened the driver’s door. “I’ll go see what the holdup is.”

From the rooftop of a high-rise apartment building less than a half mile away, the assassin known as Akbar watched Lepinski step from the Cadillac and thread his way through the stalled vehicles.

Akbar had been waiting patiently for this moment since before first light. He had selected this shooting spot weeks earlier after studying Google satellite images and inspecting each site. He had selected this apartment building at the northwest corner of the highway interchange because it was tall enough for him to clearly observe a section of Highway 110 for more than a mile. Although he couldn’t know exactly where the general’s car would be forced to stop, he knew General Grant would be in a kill zone as long as the Cadillac was within a half mile of the highway interchange. His Dragunov sniper’s rifle, the most readily available to terrorists, was most effective at 875 yards.

Akbar was lying prone on the building’s white-painted roof wearing a snow-colored camouflage poncho to conceal him from any aircraft passing close to the building. Reagan National Airport was south of the Pentagon and pilots often followed a landing course that followed the Potomac River near where he was hiding.

Snipers always had to compensate for distance and wind, but Akbar also had needed to consider how his bullet would react when it hit the Cadillac’s glass. He’d scoured the Internet until he’d found the bidding criteria that the federal government had posted when it notified the public that it intended to buy dozens of lightly armored sedans for use by government officials. The specifications had called for an inch of bullet-resistant glass in all executive-level cars. That inch was not nearly as thick as the glass in the two presidential limousines—a reduction intended to help reduce the weight and costs of the cars. Akbar felt confident that the 168-gram, solid copper, 7.62x54 mm NATO round that he had chambered would punch through the window. But he wasn’t certain if the path of the slug would be altered by the glass, causing it to swerve and miss its target.

As he peered through the Dragunov’s scope, he watched Lepinski returning to the Cadillac, having learned the reason for the backup. As the driver neared the car, Gabe DeMoss stepped from the right side of the sedan. DeMoss momentarily glanced upward at the high-rise where Akbar was hiding while surveying the scene. He walked toward Lepinski, who gestured toward the cause of the roadblock. What happened next caused Akbar to begin praising Allah.

Having been briefed by Lepinski, DeMoss walked down the left side of the Cadillac and opened the rear passenger door behind its driver’s seat. He opened the door because the one-inch-thick bullet-resistant windows in the car doors could neither be raised nor lowered, and he wanted to tell General Grant about the cargo spill that was causing their delay.

In that moment, Akbar had a shot.

He aimed the round between the gap that had been created by DeMoss when he opened the rear passenger door. From his perch, Akbar could see a sliver of General Grant sitting in the backseat. The assassin no longer had to worry about his bullet being deflected when it struck the vehicle’s glass.

Marksmen often brag about head shots, but Akbar aimed at “center mass”—Grant’s uniformed chest with its brightly colored award ribbons. His crosshairs were centered on the general’s heart as he squeezed the Dragunov’s trigger.

Akbar had correctly calculated the wind and distance. But he’d misgauged the bullet’s spin, which influenced the round just enough for it to nick the edge of the Cadillac’s reinforced doorframe, slightly altering the shot’s trajectory. Rather than striking the general’s heart, it struck Grant on the left side of his face, shattering his jaw. His head recoiled from the impact before his body flew forward.

Lieutenant Colonel DeMoss dropped to the pavement the moment he realized a sniper was shooting at them. But Akbar was already running across the rooftop, shedding his white poncho as he dashed down the building’s stairway. His wife, Aludra, was waiting behind the wheel of a rental car at the building’s ground exit, with its engine running.

She exited from the parking lot onto Highway 50 and drove west. Akbar had a second shooting to execute.

A medevac helicopter airlifted General Grant across the Potomac River to the George Washington University Hospital trauma center. Lieutenant Colonel DeMoss flew with him. As soon as they landed, DeMoss reached for his phone to telephone Brooke Grant. When she didn’t answer her cell phone, he checked his watch and realized that she was still onboard a commercial jet flying to Minneapolis.