by Chris Ryan
A hundred metres away, a plane was turning onto the runway, and the Agusta was suddenly changing course.
Heading in his direction.
He pressed the beacon against the accelerator and released the break. The truck slid forward. With a sharp jab, he forced the opposite end of the beacon against the front of the driver’s seat and let go.
The truck continued to move.
Joe jumped out.
As he ran back to the sniper rifle, the air was filled with a riot of noise: the sirens were getting louder, the engines of the aircraft were rising in pitch as it prepared for take-off, the rush of the Agusta’s rotors was getting nearer. Joe flung himself on the ground, grabbed the rifle and took up the firing position.
The fuel truck was accelerating towards the plane that had stopped at the end of the runway in advance of take-off. It was twenty metres away – then thirty – heading at right angles towards the runway. Joe was right in the zone. There was no longer any panic or fear. Just a ruthless, clear-headed determination. He had to turn this truck into a moving fireball. It was his only chance of seeding panic in the international air-traffic control network. His only chance of keeping flights on the ground.
He fired a single shot into the truck’s massive fuel tank. He didn’t expect an explosion at first, even with this HEI round. Aviation fuel was not as flammable as regular petrol, and even that was difficult to explode without a bit of help. Unless he got oxygen into the tank, the plan was fucked.
The Agusta was directly over the moving truck. He heard a strident voice coming from a loudspeaker. ‘Stand away from your weapon! Stand away from your weapon!’
The truck had swerved. It was heading towards the aircraft standing at the end of the runway. Joe fired a second round. He saw it impacting, but there was no explosion.
The Agusta was touching down, just fifteen metres to his right. He had one more chance. One more shot.
He fired.
An immense explosion was followed by a massive fireball of orange flame and black smoke. The blast knocked the fuel truck onto its side and boomed out over all the other noises. The ground shook. The heat radiated towards Joe’s face – a harsh burning that he felt singe his hair and skin. Immediately he rolled away from the rifle, flinging his hands up to his head. The noise all around was deafening – from the Agusta’s rotors, the burning truck, the sirens on two airport security vehicles as they roared up and came to a halt just metres from where he was lying.
In seconds he was surrounded. Five flak-jacketed armed police with MP5s dug into their shoulders, the barrels pointing directly at Joe, each of them screaming instructions at him: ‘Don’t move! Keep your hands on your head!’ Two more officers arrived. They rolled Joe onto his belly and jerked his hands behind his back. He felt cold metal against his wrists as they cuffed him.
He started to shout. ‘Listen to me! You’ve got to listen to me! Ground all flights!’
But the only response was rough hands pulling him to his feet. ‘We know who you are! Get into the fucking chopper now . . .’
‘Listen to me! Listen!’
But nobody listened. They just shoved him, stumbling, through the downdraft of the helicopter and into its body. The MP5 barrels didn’t deviate. The shouting didn’t stop.
‘There’s going to be an attack! I know which planes! I know which fucking planes!’
‘Shut him up!’ roared a voice.
Joe felt a boot in his stomach knock the wind from his lungs. He tried to shout again, to tell them, but it was no good. Now he couldn’t even speak.
The chopper was already lifting off.
He’d failed.
It was five minutes to ten.
TWENTY-TWO
0455 hours EST.
At Tampa International there were no signs that any of the passengers for flight number AA346 knew there was anything wrong. They had filed from the gate and into the waiting buses without comment. If any of them thought it unusual that the airport had laid on three buses and that each person had a seat, rather than being packed into one vehicle as was the norm, they didn’t mention it. And since they were all looking out of the side windows at the lights twinkling in the early-morning darkness, they did not notice that the buses moved nose to tail, just a couple of metres apart.
The convoy trundled in a straight line north from the gate. Those passengers on the right-hand side of the buses saw, approximately thirty metres to their right, a vast aircraft hangar, 200 metres long, ninety wide, fifteen high. Its steel doors were closed and they remained so until, in perfect synchronization, all three buses turned ninety degrees clockwise.
They accelerated. The hangar doors slid open. Inside each bus, two men stood up. They all wore sports jackets which they unzipped to reveal blue flak jackets with ‘FBI’ emblazoned on the front. ‘Federal officers,’ they yelled. ‘Stay in your seats and put your hands on your heads. Stay in your seats and put your hands on your heads!’
Confusion. Anxious, alarmed faces. Sitting in the back row of the bus that had been at the head of the convoy and which was now on the left as they sped, three abreast, towards the hangar, a woman who looked Middle Eastern slowly put her hands on her head. Her bag was nestled firmly on her lap. Her eyes flickered down towards it, and then in the direction of an FBI officer who had drawn a Glock 22 and was still yelling.
They were inside the hangar within seconds, screeching to a halt approximately twenty metres from the entrance. The hangar was very brightly lit, thanks to a series of floodlights along both of the longer sides. And there were a lot of people: a sixteen-man FBI SWAT team, each packing an M4 with racks, torches and laser markers, as well as Glock 22s identical to those carried by their colleagues in the buses and loaded with hard-hitting, high-calibre .40 S&W rounds. There was a dog unit – eight German shepherds, harnessed and waiting calmly despite the sudden activity. The SWAT team immediately formed a circle round the parked buses. In a second layer beyond them, fifteen members of the Transportation Security Authority and ten members of Immigration Customs Enforcement – all of them armed, though their weapons were not on show. Between the fronts of the buses and the back wall of the hangar was an X-ray machine, manned by another four members of the TSA.
The doors of the buses hissed open; the on-board FBI sleepers started shouting at the passengers to file out. The passengers were throwing wild looks around, murmuring to their neighbours, but the FBI personnel did nothing to soothe their nerves. Two members of the SWAT team boarded each bus, screaming ferociously: ‘Keep your hands on your head! Leave your hand luggage on the seats . . .’
They passed through the buses, hauling passengers to their feet, many eyes widening as they saw the SWAT team’s personal weapons. The travellers were herded towards the central doors, and as they filed out, stumbling, into the hangar, they were met by the sight of more weapons, the sound of more barked instructions. The children – there were five in all – were crying; some of the adults looked like they wanted to. The Middle Eastern woman was expressionless. She glanced over at the man whose eyes she had met by the coffee shop – he had been on the second bus – and again he broke away from her gaze as they were rounded up with all the others and made to stand against the back wall with their hands still on their heads.
The buses were empty now, apart from passengers’ bags. Five TSA personnel boarded each one to start examining the hand luggage, carefully carrying each piece towards the X-ray machine. Along the back wall, a rotund, flabby-jawed man lowered his hands with a disgruntled: ‘What the hell’s going on anyway?’ Three SWAT team members stepped towards him, screaming at him to return his hands to his head while three red dots from their laser markers danced across his chest like fireflies. His ruddy skin turned pale; he raised his arms. And any murmuring from the other passengers instantly died away as the security personnel started passing their luggage through the X-ray machine.
A trickle of sweat dripped down the side of Mason Delaney’s face.
He
was sitting once more at the long, narrow table in the White House Situation Room. There were no photographers. The President was absent. There was just him, Scott Stroman, Herb Sagan and four of Sagan’s little people. General Sagan had two fingers to his ear and was listening to updates over a headset.
‘We have an all-clear from Tampa,’ he said. ‘All passengers isolated, no incidents.’
A thirty-second silence. Delaney wiped away the sweat with a silk handkerchief.
‘Boston, Orlando, Philly, all clear,’ Sagan stated.
‘Cincinnati?’ Delaney breathed.
The general held up one finger.
‘That’s an all-clear from Cincinnati,’ he stated, before removing the headset, leaning back in his chair and exhaling explosively. ‘Gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘That’s a wrap.’
Unnoticed by anyone else in the room, Delaney and Stroman exchanged a look. It would have meant nothing to anybody else, but the two CIA men knew it was not a wrap at all. The morning’s activity hadn’t ended.
It was only just beginning.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard flight BA729 from London to Dublin. We’ll be underway in a couple of minutes’ time, just as soon as we get the nod from air-traffic control. In the meantime, please make sure your luggage is safely stowed in the overhead lockers or beneath the seat in front of you. Our cabin crew will shortly be taking you through some of the safety features of this Boeing 737. Please do pay attention, as these may differ from other aircraft you’ve travelled on . . .’
Flight BA729 was full, but nobody seemed to paying any attention to the captain’s clipped tones. They were all too busy sending last-minute text messages, or trying to stuff their coats into the overhead compartments as the heavily made-up hostesses filed up and down the aisle, checking seatbelts and handing out colouring packs to the children on the flight. An air steward and a stewardess remained at the back in the service area, replenishing the drinks trolley that they would be pushing through the cabin just as soon as they were airborne. Then they would hand out the airline meals that had just been loaded onto the aircraft by a friendly young man with a wispy blond beard that failed to hide the pockmarks on his face.
The steward noticed that a Middle Eastern gentleman in an aisle seat in the back row looked unwell. Perspiration was dripping down his face, and he seemed to be muttering something to himself. The steward put a slightly overfamiliar hand on his shoulder and bent down over him.
‘Are you OK, sir?’
The man didn’t meet the steward’s eyes. He just nodded silently.
‘Nervous flyer?’
‘I’m fine,’ said the man. He looked at his watch. Two minutes to ten. He closed his eyes and continued his muttering.
Eva’s world was spinning. She didn’t know what time it was, nor how long she had been away from the house. All she knew was that the Range Rover was in reach, ten metres away, still parked opposite the church. But she was in such agony that it could have been ten miles.
She stumbled into the car park and fell against the vehicle, gasping for breath and retching. It took a full thirty seconds for her shaking hands to align the key with the lock. Scrambling inside, she turned on her mobile phone and put it on the dashboard.
No signal.
She started the engine. As she turned the steering wheel, she cried out, and she was sobbing as she pulled out into the road and started to drive eastwards, away from the coast. In her distress she veered to left and right.
She checked the phone again. Still no signal.
She drove a mile, her speed increasing. A mile and a half. A white Bedford van – the first vehicle she’d seen – sped past in the opposite direction, the aggressive sound of its horn fading into the distance behind her.
Suddenly she slammed her foot on the brake.
A single bar had appeared on the phone’s screen. Eva grabbed the phone with one trembling hand and scrolled through her address book. Names appeared in front of her and, with fear surging through her gut, she realized that she’d been so focused on getting to an area where she could get a signal that she hadn’t even thought about who she was going to call.
Three minutes to ten. Panicking, she scrolled through her contacts again.
‘Jacobson, John, DCI’, she read.
The image flashed into her head of Jacobson staring at her as she slipped into the lift having stolen the Barfield files back at the office. The last thing he’d be expecting was a call from her. Perhaps that was to her advantage. Perhaps he would take her seriously.
She called him. After four rings voicemail cut in, scratchy and crackly. The signal was terrible. ‘This is Jacobson, leave a—’
Eva hung up and called again. She could tell from the number of rings that Jacobson had manually declined the call. The third time she tried, however, he answered it. ‘Who’s calling?’ he demanded.
Eva’s voice didn’t sound like her. ‘It’s me . . .’ she rasped. ‘Eva . . .’
‘Hello? Can you hear me? Who’s this?’
‘Eva Buckley!’ she shouted as loud as she could. The line was still poor. ‘You have to listen to me! There’s going to be a terrorist attack . . . ten planes . . . five in the UK . . . five in the US . . . explosives in the food trays . . . they’ll be in the air any second now . . . you need to find Joe Mansfield . . . he has the flight numbers . . .’
Silence.
Eva looked at the mobile’s screen. It was blank. No battery.
‘No!’ she yelled, and in a fit of frustration she hurled the phone against the windscreen. It clattered down into the footwell, but Eva didn’t see it. She was looking at the clock. Ten precisely.
She was too late.
0500 EST.
The hangar at Tampa International was almost silent. The passengers were still held at gunpoint. Two of them had been removed from the others. They were a short, dumpy Middle Eastern woman and a taller man, also of Arabic extraction. Two members of the SWAT team had brought them over to the other side of the parked buses and forced them onto the ground with their hands on the backs of their heads. Their two items of hand luggage were next to each other on a trestle table, behind which a studious-looking young woman wearing a white coat and latex gloves was examining four identical bottles of shampoo.
She picked one of them up, opened it rather nervously, and squirted a small puddle onto a petri dish. It was green, thick and viscous. A look of suspicion crossed the woman’s face. She dabbed the substance with a strip of litmus paper, which she held up to the light. She sniffed the petri dish and then, working quickly, checked samples from the other three bottles. When she was done, she looked up at a waiting member of the TSA.
‘I’ll need to do more tests,’ she said, ‘but . . .’
She hesitated.
‘Binary explosives?’ the TSA man asked.
The young woman looked back at the petri dishes. ‘No. I think it’s . . .’
‘What?’
‘. . . just shampoo.’
Pressed to the floor of the Agusta, MP5s pointing at him and the vibrations of the aircraft juddering through him, Joe couldn’t tell in which direction they were travelling. A voice above him – one of the ARU – was barking into his headset: ‘Roger that, we have him apprehended . . . heavily armed, sir . . . firing on a moving fuel truck.’
‘You have to listen to me!’ Joe roared again, and was rewarded with a boot in the ribs. He barely felt it. All his attention was on the voice.
‘I don’t recommend uncuffing him, sir . . . the guy’s . . . a threat to the safety of the aircraft . . .’ And then, in shocked tones, as though someone had just torn a few strips off him: ‘Yes, sir . . .’
Joe was pulled to his knees, and he felt the cuffs being unlocked. A quick glance at the position of the sun told him they were heading north, but he had no more chance to get his bearings before one of the ARU thrust a headset at him. ‘Put it on – now!’
Joe did as he was told.
‘Who am I talki
ng to?’ he demanded.
‘This is GCHQ. Give me the flight numbers, now!’
There was no time to think about this sudden change of heart, or even how they knew he had the intelligence. Joe just ripped the handwritten A4 sheet from his pocket and started screaming the flight numbers down the line: ‘Bravo Alpha Seven Two Niner, Echo Zulu Three Eight Six, Lima Tango Two Two Three . . .’
Flight BA729 from Heathrow to Dublin was gaining speed down the runway. The cabin crew were strapped in, and all phones and electrical equipment had been switched off. The man in the back row continued to sweat and to mutter silently to himself as the G-force pressed him back into his seat. The aircraft shuddered; the engines screamed. Any second now they would be airborne.
But then the sound of the engines changed. There was a murmuring in the cabin. The plane was slowing down.
The man at the back had stopped muttering and was now looking sharply around. Just behind him, by the catering trolleys, the air steward who had checked he was OK was looking at one of his colleagues. This was clearly unexpected.
The conversation in the cabin was louder now, but the engines were quieter. Above both noises came the distant sound of sirens, growing nearer. The man in the back row looked left, across his two neighbours, and out of the window. He saw two police cars, an ambulance and an unmarked white van screaming across the airfield.
‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ The captain’s voice was not panicked, but he was clearly being very careful to sound calm. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, just a minor technical issue . . .’
But the passengers weren’t fooled. They too had seen the emergency vehicles. And as the aircraft ground to a complete halt, they saw the flak-jacketed, armed police burst out of the unmarked white van. Someone screamed. At least half the passengers ripped off their seatbelts and got to their feet.