Final Vector

by Allan Leverone

  Dimitrios and Joe-Bob had encountered no difficulties, so they were now hunkered down in position a couple of hours early and could relax for a while. They would begin setting up the equipment in the bed of the retrofitted truck in half an hour. That would give them roughly ninety minutes to prepare before Air Force One came floating out of the sky with its big fat belly hanging in the air above them, exposed and vulnerable and waiting to be blown to a million scorched pieces along with everyone inside.

  Across the water, the bees continued to swarm, one long line of airplanes arriving, their yellow landing lights seemingly suspended in the air in complete defiance of the laws of gravity, and another line departing. The throaty roar of the departing engines floated across the water, shattering the stillness every couple of minutes like clockwork. Dimitrios and Joe-Bob smoked cigarettes and watched the aerial ballet in silence.

  Chapter 29

  Nick glanced at the big clock hanging on the wall over one of the two small entryway doors flanking the east end of the TRACON

  Operations Room. Hanging amidst all the high-tech electronic gadgetry stuffed inside this room, the clock seemed almost anach-ronistic--a Flintstones clock in a Star Wars world. It was big and round, with clunky black hands fitted over an off white face, an exact match to the clocks that used to hang in the classrooms of the Sydney Street Elementary School Nick had attended. He had always thought that a fancy digital display would have been much more appropriate to the setting.

  It was 3:15 a.m. Airborne traffic in and out of Logan had slowed to a trickle, and that would remain the case until flights began gearing up for the new day, normally around 5:15 to 5:30.

  Today would not be a normal day, of course, with the anticipated arrival of President Cartwright at about 5:00. The ops manager and the day shift supervisor would be stumbling in all bleary-eyed before then to stand around and look important, and the Secret Service or FBI would also be represented.

  Sitting alone at the Initial Departure scope, where the Boston Area's sectors were typically combined for the midnight shift, was Larry Fitzgerald. He looked like a lost little kid, manning one scope while surrounded by all the others dutifully displaying their boundary maps and traffic, but with no controller sitting in front of any of them. There was no need for more than one sector to be open in either the Boston or the Manchester Area on the overnight shift, considering the lack of traffic.

  Nick stood up from the supervisor's console, where he had been reading a book and trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to stay awake. He strolled over to Fitz's scope and saw one arrival in the entire Boston Area airspace, a Global Airlines flight that had been delayed departing Tampa, thanks to a series of thunderstorms pummeling the west coast of Florida.

  "Fitzy, I'm going to grab a bite to eat; then I'll give you a break.

  Does that work for you?"

  "That works for me, boss. I'm pretty sure I can handle this solitary airplane all by myself."

  Nick laughed. "Don't kid yourself. You could have twenty airplanes, and I'd still be taking a break, pal."

  "Hah! Who needs you, anyway? Go ahead and take your break. I'll face the onslaught alone."

  "I'll be back in like twenty minutes. Do me a favor and try not to kill anybody in the meantime."

  This was how it went between Fitz and Futz, two veteran controllers who had been hooking airplanes in the Boston Area for years.

  They were forever denigrating each other's abilities, but both men knew that when push came to shove and the traffic was heavy and things were going to hell in the TRACON, they could trust each other implicitly. The bonds of shared experience were strong among air traffic controllers, and until you proved yourself time and time again under the intense pressure of busy traffic and poor weather conditions, you could look cool and sound sharp on the frequency and you would still garner little or no respect from your peers.

  Nick and Larry had been there. Each man knew he could count on the other when it mattered.

  Chapter 30

  The bodies of the two dead security guards lay side by side on the cold ground, tossed next to each other like trash piled on a curb awaiting collection.

  Jackie had thrown the second guard's bleeding body over his shoulder and carried him to the security fence the team had been breached just a few minutes before, where the rest of the small team huddled, waiting impatiently.

  "Took ya long enough," Brian groused, stamping his feet to keep warm and lighting a cigarette. Tony had expressly forbidden smoking while both guards remained in play. Now, however, with the small security force eliminated, there was no reason not to light up. No residences or businesses populated the area immediately surrounding the BCT, meaning there would be no one to see the flare of a lighter or match. Even if a patrolling Merrimack town cop should happen to cruise past the property on the access road, he would see nothing, as the team had retreated into the relative safety of the thick stand of trees on the east side of the property.

  Jackie glared at Brian, a look of scorn plainly evident on his face, even half-hidden in the shadows as it was. "Oh, really? I didn't ice this guy fast enough for you? Well, maybe next time you can do all the heavy lifting, and I'll hide back here in the friggin' forest and sit around complaining. How's that sound to you, pretty boy?"

  "Shut your mouths and focus, both of you," Tony cut in.

  "We've got work to do, remember? Or would you rather just stand around arguing like spoiled children the rest of the night?"

  The two men stared at each other for a moment. Finally they knelt next to Tony, who was busy rifling through the pockets of the guards. The most valuable item in each guard's possession was not his weapon or his radio or his money or any of his personal effects; it was the picture ID hanging on a lanyard around his neck.

  Every BCT employee possessed a similar identification card, and embedded in each was a chip limiting BCT access to those portions of the property the employee had reason to use based on his or her job description. Electronic locks adorned the entrance to every sensitive area, but not every ID would provide access to every area of the building.

  As security personnel charged with protecting both the interior and the exterior of the property, however, the chips embedded inside the guards' identification cards opened all locks and permitted access to every area within the BCT, and thus were keenly valuable to the terrorists.

  Tony lifted an ID from around the neck of one of the dead guards and examined it. "Morris Stapleton," he muttered, reading the identifying information. He smiled and hung it around his neck like an Olympic athlete displaying his gold medal. He then removed Jim Shay's, lifting the dead man's upper body off the ground to slide it off before dropping his head with a muffled thud.

  He handed the ID to Jackie, who placed it around his neck.

  They performed the same ritual with both men's two-way radios; Tony kept one and handed the other to Corrigan. The guards'

  weapons they ignored. The men were already heavily armed and had no use for more firepower. What they had brought with them would be more than enough to force compliance from the overnight skeleton crew of three air traffic controllers and one electronics technician, now unprotected and alone in the building until later this morning.

  Brian smoked his cigarette as he watched the two men. The air was heavy and damp, thick with the promise of approaching rain, which had thus far held off exactly as the weather forecasters had predicted. He burned it all the way down to the end, flicking the butt into the trees and holding his breath to keep in that last puff as long as possible.

  "All right, let's go," Tony ordered.

  Brian reluctantly blew out the smoke in a slow, steady breath.

  The three men lined up and slid through the opening Brian had cut in the security fence. They made no particular effort to hide either the dead bodies lying on the ground or the damage that had been done to the chain-link fence. No one would make the gruesome discovery until a full complement of guards, controllers, and techni
cians began arriving for the day shift a couple of hours from now. By then it wouldn't matter.

  Chapter 31

  Dimitrios awoke with a start, confused. It took him a moment to get his bearings--he was slouched in the front seat of the Dodge Dakota parked in a marsh, a couple of miles across the water from the approach end of Runway 33 Left at Logan Airport. Dimitrios squinted at his watch. It was 3:30 a.m. He realized he had been dozing, snoring lightly, and he turned angrily to Joe-Bob. "Jesus, why didn't you wake me up when I fell asleep?"

  Joe-Bob shrugged. "Why should I? There was nothing to do for a while, anyway. It doesn't really require two of us to watch the airplanes come and go." He nodded toward the windshield, grimy with dried mud that had been kicked up when they drove through the marsh.

  Dimitrios followed Joe-Bob's gaze and saw that what had been a steady stream of arriving and departing airplanes was now pretty much petered out to nothing. The line of bees flying into and out of the hive had turned into an occasional lonely airplane descending the glide path to the airport or taking off and turning, climbing away toward some unknown destination.

  "I suppose we should get to work," Joe-Bob said languidly. It was clear he was tired and wished for nothing more than to sleep for a while, as Dimitrios had done.

  Now, however, there was no time left for a nap. They needed to begin preparing for the critical task they would complete as the sky was brightening over the Atlantic. In roughly ninety short minutes, Dimitrios and Joe-Bob, along with the other three members of their little team thirty-five miles away in Merrimack, would change the course of history forever.

  They opened the doors of the pickup and plopped down onto the wet ground, instantly sinking six inches into the muck. It was no wonder this area had never been developed. Between the standing water of the marshland and the bustling activity of Logan Airport just a couple of miles away, no one in their right mind would want to live here, even though the view of the sea was breathtaking and oceanfront land was a prime commodity.

  The two men splashed slowly toward the tailgate in their wa-terproof boots. Joe-Bob stopped and cocked his head.

  "What is it?" Dimitrios asked.

  "You hear that?"

  Dimitrios shook his head, and as he did, he began to hear a low buzzing, almost like the sound a mosquito would make as it navigated its way to your head to begin munching. It wasn't a mosquito, though, and the two men stared at each other incredulously as it dawned on them both at the same time.

  "Somebody's driving out here," Dimitrios said. He couldn't believe his ears. Who the hell would come all the way to the northern tip of the Hull Peninsula in this swampy mess at 3:30 in the morning? His first thought was the police, but that was impossible.

  No one knew they were here; he was certain of that. If the authorities were aware of their presence, they would have been arrested and taken away hours ago when they first arrived.

  The two men hurriedly retreated to the cab of the Dakota.

  "Whoever is coming out here, we have to get rid of them,"

  Dimitrios whispered fiercely, as if concerned that the occupants of the four-wheel drive making its way slowly toward them with its lights off might be able to hear him.

  They stared at the advancing truck as it materialized out of the darkness. The thing was close enough now that they could see it was a Jeep, at least ten years old, and it was filled with young men drinking and partying.

  It occurred to Dimitrios that the Jeep's occupants, who were clearly drunk and not paying much attention to their surroundings, might not even have noticed yet that they had company in the marsh. With a little luck, he and Joe-Bob could circle quietly behind them while they were busy carousing and eliminate them easily and quickly.

  No sooner had that thought occurred to him than the Jeep slid to a stop in the mud and its headlights blazed on.

  It was too late. They had been spotted.

  Chapter 32

  Just after 3:30 a.m., Tony, Jackie, and Brian marched through the BCT's two sets of double doors and into the building openly and brazenly, without even a halfhearted attempt at stealth. There was no reason to be overly cautious now; they had eliminated the two men who could reasonably be considered a threat and weren't the least bit concerned about a couple of air traffic controllers and a federal government electronics technician.

  The men, clad from head to toe in black fatigues and boots, with black camouflage greasepaint covering their faces, moved single file across the terrazzo floor. Their semiautomatic rifles were drawn and held in both hands across their chests.

  For the moment the terrorists ignored the wide staircase on the left that led up to the second floor and the operational quarters.

  Accessing the Operations Room would come later. First things first. Walking swiftly, the group passed the staircase and turned left. Tony lifted the stolen ID card and waved it in front of the card reader, unlocking the wooden double doors leading to the technicians' workspace.

  The card reader issued a loud beep, and the locks disengaged.

  Tony elbowed his way through the doors, holding his weapon in front of him at the ready. It was highly unlikely that the technician assigned the overnight shift was doing anything other than sleeping, but Tony wasn't taking the chance of running into the guy in the hallway and being caught unprepared.

  Tony immediately faced left. Jackie walked in and faced right, ready to eliminate any threat from that direction should there happen to be one. There wasn't. A second later Brian entered, too, and the team split up as the doors closed smoothly behind them, Tony moving left along the hallway in front of the equipment room and Jackie and Brian turning right, flanking the room on the other side.

  The terrorists were totally at ease inside the BCT building.

  They were familiar with its layout, having studied blueprints until each man was confident he could navigate the facility with his eyes closed. Getting access to the construction plans and blueprints had been simple--they had been included in the packet of information purchased from Nelson Michaels.

  Thanks to Michaels, the terrorist team knew that there were two exterior doors on this side of the building. The hallway they were standing in surrounded the enormous workspace where the technicians stored radar scopes and all the tools necessary to maintain the equipment in the BCT. After winding around this workspace, the corridors terminated at the north wall, where each one ended at a heavy steel door leading to the outside.

  The doors were locked and accessible from the outside only with an ID card like the one Tony had hanging around his neck.

  From the inside, however, the doors operated as normal. They were fitted with a steel bar stretching across their width at roughly waist height. The key card was not necessary.

  When Tony reached the terminus of the hallway on his end, he pulled his Glock 9mm, fitted with sound suppressor, from his belt and fired one slug into the handle's mechanism. The only sound was a soft phht when the weapon discharged followed a split second later by the sound of grating and smashing metal, but he carefully scanned the hallway behind him for thirty seconds afterward to be sure the electronics technician had not been alerted to his presence.

  The hallway stayed quiet, and Andretti decided the technician had not heard the noise. He turned back to the door and tried the handle, shoving hard against it. The door was jammed. Perfect.

  Tony retreated back up the hallway and around the corner, stopping in front of the wooden double doors. Within seconds he was joined by the other two terrorists, who nodded simultaneously.

  They had successfully disabled their door, too.

  Only one access point remained besides the front entrance to the BCT. There was a door at the rear of the first-floor foyer on one side of a two-story glass wall. Brian moved back into the foyer to disable the door, while Tony and Jackie began their search for the electronics technician. It was time to disable him as well.

  The two men split up when they reached the technicians' cubicles. Undou
btedly the lone tech on duty was sleeping with his head down on his workspace, oblivious to his pending fate. Unless there was an equipment problem during the overnight shift, there would be nothing for the man to do, so why would he bother staying awake?

  Tony stepped behind the first row of three cubicles, scanning for a sleeping body. It was empty. Jackie moved to the second row.

  Also empty.

  They were taking their time, moving quietly, but they must have made some small amount of noise because as they walked along the far side of the partitions to check the final row of cubicles, a flash of motion at the far end of the room caught Tony's eye. Above the six-foot-high cubicle walls, Tony glimpsed a disem-bodied head moving quickly toward the hallway door.

  Tony wasn't worried that they had spooked the tech. The man had nowhere to go, as long as he didn't head for the front entrance, which Tony knew he would not do. That door was the farthest exit away, thus the least likely one he would try to use to escape the pending threat. When the man entered the hallway, he would sprint straight toward the door just a few tantalizing feet away, which of course would not open.

  The technician was trapped like a rat in a cage, and the end of his life was rapidly approaching. He just didn't know it yet. Tony looked forward to introducing the concept to him.

  Chapter 33

  Nick had always thought there was something a little eerie about the Boston Consolidated TRACON during the midnight shift.

  The building was huge, so even during the day--with a full complement of staff and administrative personnel and both the Manchester and Boston Areas filled with a complete roster of controllers--it was not unusual to walk down one of the many mazelike corridors and not encounter a single soul.

  Originally intended to house four or even five New England approach control facilities (hence the consolidated portion of its name), only Boston and Manchester had ended up moving into the building. All the other candidates had enlisted the assistance of local senators, representatives, and other political heavyweights to successfully block any proposed move. The powers that be in each of the affected states were none too excited to see dozens of high-paying jobs, not to mention the associated income tax receipts from those jobs, move out of their states and take up residence in New Hampshire.