Free The Last Jihad by Joel C Rosenberg

created a high-tech financial war room, wired up with the world’s state-of-the-art communications equipment—from shortwave radios and satellite dishes to high-speed Internet access and fiber optic cables capable of transmitting thirty million phone calls across the Atlantic in a single second.
    All of it allowed McCoy and her team to receive instantaneous reports from news services, financial markets, GSX staff, and other sources all over the planet. “Know well the condition of thy flocks,” read the tiny ceramic plaque beside her phones and computer and always-stocked jar of lollypops, all neatly arranged on her massive cherry desk, a desk once used by Churchill when he was a parliamentary backbencher and self-designated rabble-rouser.
    Bennett could picture McCoy and her staff, piled into her office in the wee hours of the British morning, simultaneously watching ten wall-mounted TV screens and working the phones.
    “Erin? What’ve you got?”
    “All right…hold on…uh…they’re zooming in…come on, guys, get it in focus…wait…oh…ohGod…ohGod…”
    “What? Erin, what is it?”
     
     
    Norris didn’t want the world to see anything, least of all these pictures.
    He guessed a Fox cameraman had somehow climbed atop his satellite truck, or somehow scrambled atop one of the press buses. Either way, using a high-powered zoom lens, the image he was capturing and beaming to the entire world was now zeroed in on the newly created hole in the side of Stagecoach.
    Secret Service agents could be seen beginning to carefully lift another lifeless body—strapped to a wooden stretcher—out of the car. Billowing smoke occasionally obscured the image. But no doubt, this was powerful television—and thus far, an exclusive.
    “Sanchez—stop everything—I repeat stop your evacuation IMMEDIATELY .”
    Norris was screaming into his phone. Stunned, everyone in the Secret Service op center stared at him in horror.
    “Nikon One, Nikon One, this is Home Plate—land in front of Stagecoach now. Get on the ground—now. Go, go, go—get on the ground, now.”
    Around the world, viewers suddenly found the gripping Fox and Sky News image completely obscured by a rapidly descending Denver police helicopter. The cameraman zoomed out, but to no avail. No camera, no reporter, no one could now see what was unfolding. No one except Bud Norris and his colleagues at the White House, Pentagon, FBI and CIA, that is. The secure images streaming in from the front-mounted video camera on the Apache helicopter still hovering above the scene once again provided them exclusive command of the situation.
    Norris finally gave the word and the extraction effort resumed, quickly but carefully. More agents with M-16s moved in to surround the rescue crew. Another ambulance now backed carefully into position, along with Dodgeball, flanked by plainclothes agents brandishing Uzis.
    “Sanchez, what’ve you got?”
    “Thomas and Stevens are bad,” she told him, referring to Gambit’s two “body men,” the two agents directly assigned to protecting the president’s life. “Both unconscious, massive internal bleeding. We’re about to medivac them out.”
    Norris’s stomach tightened.
    “Burdett and Rodriquez just came out. Burdett’s unconscious, but stable. Rodriguez is a mess sir, very bad,” Sanchez relayed, referring to Terry Burdett, the president’s personal assistant and Tommy Rodriguez, the limousine driver.
    Norris found himself getting angry. Yes, he cared about his own men. Yes, he cared about the president’s staff. But none were his prime concern right now.
    “Sanchez, what about Gambit?”
    “We’ll know in a moment, sir.”
     
     
    Marine Two dropped fast and hard onto the South Lawn of the White House.
    On the way down, the vice president—code-named Checkmate by his protective detail—could see batteries of surface-to-air missiles out of their casings and ready for action on the roof of the White House and the OEOB.