They were breathing heavily but moving rapidly, a light sheen of sweat coating each man's body in the cool desert air. Their breath crystallized and then disappeared as it rose slowly skyward.
Conversation was kept to a minimum, with each man concentrating on his own role in getting the heavy crates secured so the group could get on the road as soon as possible and disappear.
The reinforced wooden crates contained two Stingers apiece, each weighing about thirty-five pounds. With the palletlike boxes added into the equation, each one weighed in at close to eighty pounds. Tony knew even the heavily muscled young men were beginning to tire as the job approached completion.
Joe-Bob and Jackie were precisely halfway between vehicles, duck-stepping one of the heavy crates toward the back of the panel truck, when an impossibly bright spotlight blazed on, bleaching the scene in its glare.
From beyond the light source, a tense voice grated, "Tucson Police! You all stay right where you are, and keep your hands where I can see them!"
Chapter 22
The Tucson police officer crouched behind the open door of his vehicle, bracing his weapon in the crease where the door's hinges connected to the cruiser's body, keeping it trained on the men trapped in the intense brightness of the spotlight. Nothing at all happened for what seemed like minutes, although it was undoubtedly only a few seconds. Then the cop eased the door open fully and stepped slowly and cautiously around it, eyeing the surreal scene playing out in front of him. "Let's all just take it nice and easy, and nobody gets hurt, all right, boys?"
As he finished the upward inflection on the word boys and took one step away from the patrol car toward the men, a burst of automatic weapon fire erupted from behind him.
***
Tony's weapon roared, and bright orange fire flashed from the muzzle as he strafed the cruiser and swung his rifle slightly to the left, cutting down the officer before he could react.
The cop's body stuttered forward from the impact of the gunfire, twisting and writhing forward before falling to the ground.
His body thudded to the brittle pavement with the slightly hollow, moist squishing sound of a pumpkin being smashed in the street on Halloween night. He died without uttering a sound.
The sharp smell of cordite filled the air, the sudden quiet disorienting after the AK's throaty roar. Nobody moved.
Finally Tony spoke casually, almost lazily. "Well, what are you waiting for? Let's wrap this thing up and get the hell out of here.
Undoubtedly that cop radioed his location into his dispatchers and advised them he was checking out a possible breaking and entering. When he doesn't report back in within a few minutes, they will send another car out here to investigate. It would seem to be in our best interest to get as far away from this place as possible before that happens, so let's pick up the pace."
While the men hurriedly finished transferring the last few crates and lashing them securely into the cargo box of the panel truck, Tony bent down and put both hands under the armpits of the fallen officer. With a grunt, he muscled the man's bleeding body into the back of his own police cruiser. Blood immediately began pooling on the vinyl bench seat beneath the fresh corpse.
Tony then slipped behind the wheel and put the idling Crown Vic in gear, moving it the short distance from the scene of the massacre to the chain-link fence at the very back of the dealership. He nosed in behind the rusting hulk of a decades-old used Airstream trailer that the franchise owner had apparently given up on ever unloading, hoping the cruiser's semiconcealment behind the big rig might buy the team a few more minutes before the authorities became aware of the murder. It was their third in the last two hours, and Tony knew they were tempting fate as the bodies piled up.
He shut down the engine and jumped out of the patrol car. He thought for a moment about taking the dead cop's riot gun--after all, he reasoned, the cop certainly didn't need it anymore, and you could never have too many weapons, especially high-quality ones like the Remington 870--but ultimately decided that it might be detrimental to his freedom if he were to get pulled over with a murdered law enforcement officer's weapon lying next to him in the front seat of his vehicle.
Tony had no doubt he could shoot his way out of any confrontation if necessary, but it was important to keep his eyes on the big picture, on his sacred destiny as it were. Getting into a shoot-out with the police during the drive back to D.C. was a distraction he didn't need when he had been given the honor of ridding the world of the president of the United States, the oppressor of so many of his people in the Middle East, Robert Cartwright.
Tony slammed the door of the cruiser, closing the dead cop inside with a satisfying clunk, then jumped when Brian, standing right behind him, announced, "We're all done and ready to roll."
Tony decided he must be extremely tired. There was no way any of these American pseudoterrorists, despite graduating from the rigorous training program in the mountains of Afghanistan, should have been able to approach from behind without him being aware of it.
He closed his eyes and centered himself, focusing on the steps he needed to accomplish to achieve his goal. Right now that meant getting the Stinger missiles out of here and as far away from Tucson as possible before daybreak. Sleep would have to wait.
"Thank you," he told Brian, forcing himself to remain calm and doing his best to keep the annoyance out of his voice. He hated for these nonbelievers to see him at anything less than his best, although he doubted Brian or any of the others would even notice.
A quick inspection of the back of the panel truck convinced Tony that the missile crates were well secured with bungee cords and completely covered with wool blankets. Anyone looking into the back of the truck would see only piles of unidentifiable material. A closer examination would reveal the true nature of the truck's cargo, but Tony would ensure that no one made that closer examination. Anyone attempting to do so would suffer a fate identical to that of the cop lying dead in his own vehicle just a couple of dozen feet away.
The team climbed into the two cars that had been used to stage the accident on the highway less than two hours ago, while Tony slid behind the wheel of the panel truck. They left the military transport vehicle parked in the rear of the lot. There was no way to hide it effectively, and it would be discovered very soon in any event.
The three-vehicle caravan snaked its way back along the rutted tarmac to the front of the Cactus RV Center and pulled onto the road, moving west toward Interstate 10. The plan was to travel north, hoping to lose any initial pursuit in the urban sprawl of the Phoenix/Glendale/Scottsdale metropolitan complex, before continuing on to Flagstaff and then turning east on I-40 to begin the long drive to their home base in Washington, D.C.
A few cars populated the roads, perhaps heading home after a long night of drinking and partying. The team observed no law enforcement activity between the RV center and the highway. They hit the interstate and accelerated to an invisible sixty-five miles per hour and drove for ten hours straight, stopping only for food and fuel. Things were right on schedule.
Chapter 23
Nick had taken just a week off from work following Lisa's death, but as he walked through the double doors into the Boston Consolidated TRACON Operations Room to begin his workweek, he felt as though nothing and everything had changed. He flashed his key card at the scanner mounted outside the door and flinched like always as the annoying, high-pitched beep sounded, signifying the reader had recognized the chip embedded inside his ID card and he was permitted to enter. A tiny LED on the card reader changed color from red to green when the chip was recognized, and Nick had always thought that visual signal should be enough.
The door swung open noiselessly, and Nick stepped into the massive room. Built in 2004 to house four separate radar approach control facilities, the building was currently home to just two--
the controllers formerly quartered at Logan International Airport in Boston and those from Manchester-Boston Regional Airport in Manchester, New Hamps
hire. This meant that the majority of the radar scopes placed side by side around the outside of the room--
shaped more or less in a fair approximation of a giant Roller Derby rink--were unmanned, giving it the look of an air traffic control ghost town of sorts.
Glancing to the right as he entered, Nick saw the controllers in the Manchester Area, at the moment operating with three radar sectors plus a flight data position. Each controller sitting at a scope was responsible for his or her own sector within the Manchester airspace; that is, a slice of the airspace "pie" belonging to Manchester was delegated to each position.
The flight data controller answered landline calls, handled coordination for the radar sectors when they were too busy to do it themselves, and took care of paperwork. Controllers rotated among positions and most tried their best to avoid flight data, which was almost universally considered boring.
Nick walked toward his own area of specialization: the Boston Area, located in the rear of the Operations Room. At the moment it was running with five radar sectors plus one flight data position.
Within the giant oval of the Operations Room was what controllers referred to as the Inner Ring--a console built approximately ten feet inside the room, running in a complete circuit around the oval like the radar scopes but with five openings, each roughly four feet in width, allowing people access into and through the Inner Ring.
The Inner Ring was where management generally congre-gated. The workspace for each area's watch supervisor was inside the Inner Ring, and the traffic management coordinators--tasked with the responsibility of ensuring a smooth flow of traffic into and out of the facility's airspace--worked inside it as well.
As Nick walked toward the back of the Ops Room, skirting the Inner Ring, he glanced at the giant plasma screens placed high on the walls above the radar scopes circling the room. Displayed on one screen was a depiction of the equipment monitoring the status of all the approach aids serving both major airports in the airspace, Manchester and Boston. On another, a real-time display of all the traffic inbound to each airport from across the country and overseas, and still another screen showed the status board indicating which runway configurations were in use at each airport and what pertinent NOTAMs, if any, were affecting the daily operation.
NOTAMs, or Notices to Airmen, were constantly updated bulletins intended to keep pilots and controllers abreast of the latest information affecting aviation--from equipment outages to weather alerts regarding pending thunderstorms or turbulence or airborne icing--applying to specific areas of the country.
To the uninitiated, the darkened Ops Room looked impressive and intimidating, with its electronic equipment and flashing lights and buzzers and alarms. Even to people who moved thousands of airplanes through a congested chunk of airspace every day, it was pretty impressive when you actually stopped and thought about it, which controllers rarely had the time or the inclination to do. The Ops Room was just where they went to work and did their thing.
Another day at the office, so to speak.
Nick trudged through the dimly lit room, approaching the Boston Area slowly and with some trepidation. Air traffic controllers tended to be strong-willed, decisive people, with take-charge personalities and irreverent senses of humor, given to regarding virtually any situation as fodder for a joke. Nick supposed it was a natural coping mechanism in a job where you held more lives in your hands every single day than a brain surgeon did in his entire career.
Today, though, Nick wondered how he would be received.
Losing a spouse, especially at such a young age, was no joking matter, and he felt on edge, nervous, and reluctant to face his coworkers. It was almost as if he thought people would view him with suspicion, like he had done something wrong, which, of course, he hadn't. His wife had been killed, for crying out loud, murdered; it wasn't like he had something to be ashamed of.
He needn't have worried. No sooner did the controllers spot him in the gloom of the low TRACON lighting than a shout went up from John Donaldson working the Bedford Sector. "Futz, welcome back, my man. We've missed you! It's been boring as hell around here--there's nobody as much fun to heckle as you while they're running their airplanes together on Final Vector!"
Nick grinned in spite of himself. The nickname Futz had been bestowed on him by someone--he couldn't even remember who--
when he had first arrived at the facility as a wet-behind-the-ears trainee years ago. It was short for Fucking Nuts, which had been his style when working Final Vector. He would aim everybody at the same point in space, then at the last minute begin to sort them all out. As an operating technique, it was not the sort of thing you would ever train someone to do, but from his earliest days as a controller Nick had possessed an uncanny ability to visualize the sequence of arrivals developing well before anyone else could, so what appeared random and accidental to the uninitiated was in reality a well-choreographed aerial ballet.
"Hey, John, thanks a lot. I'd like to say it's good to see you too, but I still find your hideousness repulsive, even in the dark."
"Jeez, now you're starting to sound like my wife," Donaldson shot back. "Of course, she would say, ' especially in the dark,' if you get my meaning."
By now, everyone along the line of scopes had turned their attention away from their sectors long enough to add their own welcome back message to John's.
Even Larry Fitzgerald, working the intense Final Vector position, took a second to shout, "Hey, Futz, enough with the hearts and flowers. Make yourself useful for a change, and come gimme a break," before turning back to his scope and leaning so close to it his nose practically scraped the screen.
Final Vector was generally considered be the busiest and most pressure-filled position because the goal was to get the airplanes as close together as legally possible and keep them that way, all the way to touchdown on the landing runway. Often that meant taking a steady stream of arrivals from four or more different directions and running them almost directly at each other--a task requiring intense concentration and nerves of steel and one not to be undertaken by the faint of heart.
The supervisor, Dean Winters, leaned his head around the opening to the Inner Ring and said, "Okay, everybody, the comedy act's over; let's keep it down, shall we?"
As the controllers working operational positions once again began transmitting to the airplanes inside their sectors, Dean beckoned Nick into the Inner Ring and to his desk. When he had moved inside, Dean told him, "Take a seat. We need to talk."
Nick rolled a chair over to the supe's desk and sat down. He had expected to be grilled by someone in management upon his return and had figured it wouldn't take long. He didn't blame them--his wife had just died, and the FAA would want to make absolutely certain he was in the proper frame of mind before assigning him to work a sector where one wrong move could spell disaster. Generally speaking, CYA was the rule of the day in FAA management, and no one would want to be known as the guy who sent the controller with the dead wife back to working airplanes if he then fucked up and ran two of those planes together. It would be a real career ender for the supervisor who made that decision.
"Nick, I'm really sorry about Lisa. How are you holding up?"
"Thanks. I'm okay, I guess. I've never had a wife up and die on me before, so I don't really know how I'm supposed to react. I don't know whether I'm behaving typically or not. I'll tell you this, though: as much as I appreciate the well-intentioned gestures of support from everyone, I really need to get back to some semblance of normalcy; you know what I'm saying?"
"I can understand that," Dean replied, nodding, "but are you sure you're ready to come back to all this? After all, you took only a week off; that's not very much time to grieve."
"Oh, I'm sure. I need this. I need to start working airplanes again, if for no other reason than it will help take my mind off what happened. If I were to wait until I was done grieving, you'd probably never see me again, because I don't think I'll ever be done."
"I don'
t know . . ."
"Listen, sitting around my empty house with the ghost of my wife, waiting for her to come walking through the front door when it's never going to happen, is not doing me any good. Accomplishing something positive and contributing even a little bit to the operation of this facility will go a long way toward helping me get back on my feet, believe me."
Dean searched his eyes for a moment and then sighed. "I understand. If you want to ease back into it and work a slow position every now and then, just let me know. But I think I would look at things just the way you do if anything were to happen to Cheryl.
Anyway, welcome back."
"Thanks a lot. I appreciate it, probably more than you know. Is there anything else, or can I get to work?"
"Actually," Dean said, "there is one more thing. You're scheduled to work the midnight shift this Saturday night with Fitzgerald. I need to go over a couple of things with you before then."
"What things?"
"President Cartwright is flying into Logan early Sunday morning."
"Okay, well, you said I have the mid shift on Saturday night.
Shouldn't you be having this conversation with the Sunday day shift guys?"
"No, by early Sunday morning, I mean like 5:00 a.m. when you and Larry are still going to be the only Boston controllers here."
Nick shrugged. "That's fine; I've worked Air Force One before plenty of times. So has Larry. It won't be a problem."
"I know that. But someone in charge has to plug in and monitor the controller whenever he's working the president's plane."
"That's not a problem, either. Who's been designated as CIC
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