Happy Birthday: A Novel

A lone sniper had come down another stairway when he found the women missing and opened fire on them. Two women dropped to the floor, and a commando was shot in the arm before anyone could react, and by then the sniper was darting through the crowd with a mask on his face. The commandos didn’t dare shoot at him, for fear of killing any of the women, who were screaming and running toward the doors.

Jack had reached Valerie by then, who was kneeling next to a woman who had been shot in the head. And without thinking, Jack grabbed Valerie, pulled her to her feet, shielded her with his body, and led her to the doors, where a policeman pulled her out. Just as he did, four of the commandos took careful aim at the sniper and killed him on the spot. He lay in a pool of blood facedown on the marble floor near the two women he had killed.

Jack was staring at the scene in disbelief as the faces of the women swirled around him, and he heard a man’s voice say something to him. The words he heard were a blur, as Jack saw legs around him and wondered what had happened, and as he did, everything went black. He passed out without a sound.

The women were out of the building as the remaining commandos knelt over Jack. The sniper had shot him in the leg and hit an artery before the SWAT team took the sniper out. They had Jack on a gurney and rushed him to an ambulance, as Valerie and the other women were being tended to, covered with blankets, and shepherded into the hands of medical units that had been waiting for them for hours. Valerie saw the ambulance leave but didn’t register who was in it. She hadn’t seen Jack fall.

In the lobby, firemen and police were covering the three bodies with tarps. It was a grisly scene, and the white marble floor was covered with blood.

There was no further news from upstairs yet, but within seconds their radios came to life. The male hostages were safe. Three were killed during the operation to free them, and four had been shot before their rescuers arrived. In total, eleven people had died in the attack. It was more than anyone wanted, but better than they had feared. The remaining terrorists had tried to detonate a bomb, which the SWAT team had been able to deactivate immediately. It was a small, amateurish bomb, and all of the hostage-takers had been killed by the commandos. Their weapons had been rough and their plan crude but astonishingly effective.

The men who had been taken hostage were brought downstairs, taken past the grisly scene in the lobby, and turned over to medical units, just as the women had been. Several units of the SWAT team were still upstairs checking for bombs.

Valerie left the scene in a police car, with siren screaming, as many of the vehicles in the area began to back up and leave. More police units were brought in for the clean-up, as Valerie borrowed a cell phone from one of the policemen to call April at the restaurant.

April burst into tears the minute she heard her mother’s voice. She was sobbing incoherently in relief. Valerie said they had to be debriefed and examined at the hospital, and she would call her as soon as she got home. She didn’t think it would be for several hours. As she hung up, April melted into Mike’s arms.

“She’s okay,” she said to him, blowing her nose in a tissue someone handed her. “She didn’t have time to tell me much else. She’ll call me later. I’m okay, if you want to go.” She looked at him apologetically, and he shook his head. He was staying till the bitter end. She called her father then to tell him that Valerie was okay, and he burst into tears too. The day had been agonizing beyond belief for them all. The tension had gone on for nearly twelve hours. It was hard to believe that six gunmen had taken over the network building, and that they had gotten in, while the whole free world watched what they were doing on broadcasts in every country.

By eleven o’clock, it was confirmed that in total eleven people had been killed, all network employees, although their names hadn’t been released, until their families could be notified. The only one Valerie knew about for sure was her assistant Marilyn, who had been one of the two women the sniper shot in the lobby. Valerie had seen it happen. When April was talking to her father, Valerie was at Bellevue being examined, and Jack Adams was at New York–Presbyterian Hospital, in the trauma unit, critically injured.

There was a rapid mention of it on the news, which April saw at the restaurant. The report said that Jack Adams had been shot at the end of the hostage situation, while helping the freed women from the building. A sniper had shot him and hit an artery in his leg. They identified him as the former NFL quarterback turned sportscaster and said he had been at the site all day, talking to the SWAT teams and other crisis units at the scene, and offering any assistance he could.