Air Marshals

by Wynne, Marcus

  In the third drawer up, the woman found a Second Chance Deep Cover vest and carrier under some shirts. "Level Two body armor," she said softly.

  Her partner nodded and continued through the portfolio. He found Karen's passports, both the brown official and the blue standard, and copied the stamps and front pages from both. After searching further, the two nodded at each other and left the room after making sure everything was the same as when they had entered.

  The room next door was Stacy's. Pressed in the jamb of the door, wedged at the bottom where they didn't notice it, was a small folded square of paper. Going through the room in the same fashion as the previous one, the two came up empty handed.

  "Nothing?" the man said.

  "Nothing. She must have put it all in the hotel safe."

  "Scheiss...we'll try the other rooms later."

  They paused at the door and looked round the room. The woman adjusted a book resting on the desk. Satisfied, she nodded to her partner and the two of them left the room. Neither one noticed the small scrap of paper resting on the carpet beside the door jamb.

  ***

  Stacy came out of the elevator on her floor, looked up and down the hallway, and went to her door. She slowed when she saw the tiny scrap of paper on the carpet, almost directly beneath the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the doorknob. She glanced around at the other room doors and up and down the hallway. Stooping quickly, she picked up the paper. Lightly traced in the middle crease with pencil was the character S. Her nostrils flared briefly. She tested the door and saw that it was locked. She took her cardkey and inserted it quickly into the electronic lock, then turned the handle to release the bolt, but held the door shut.

  Stacy pulled a Police Model Spyderco Clip-it knife from concealment in the waistband of her Levi's and thumbed the five-inch serrated blade open. She held it behind her leg and slipped through the door. She moved cautiously into the room, checking and clearing the bathroom, the closet, under the bed and behind the heavy, full-length curtains -- the only places large enough to hide a man.

  Kneeling on the floor beside her suitcase, she noticed the small scratches around the lock, fresh lines in the dull yellow brass. There was nothing missing from her suitcase. The tissue paper she had placed between the suitcase liner and the edge of the case had two lines in it, indicating it had been removed and replaced. In the bathroom, she took the shower curtain rod down. Rolled into a tight bundle and tucked into the hollow end of the rod was a wad of documentation papers. She riffled through the sheaf of papers to make sure they were all there and then went to the house phone beside her bed. She punched in a room number from memory.

  "Hello?" Charley Dey said.

  "Yo, Charley," she said.

  "Stacy."

  "Meet me down in the lobby for a drink, homeboy."

  "What's up?"

  "Just meet me, big boy. I got something to tell you."

  ***

  Charley Dey sat in the open cafe tucked into a corner of the huge lobby. From where he sat he could see the entire lobby, the front entrance of the hotel with its revolving door and the baggage door the porters utilized, as well as the full bank of elevators. He saw Stacy come out of the elevator, scan the lobby, then walk over to join him.

  "Orange juice," she called out to the waitress as she slid into the seat beside Charley.

  "What's up, Stacy?"

  "Somebody shook my room."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Door been opened, somebody with a key. You know the maids here never go in with a DO NOT DISTURB sign. Scratches on my suitcase lock. Somebody competent, knew what they were looking for."

  "What's missing?"

  "Nothing."

  That was a bad sign, Charley thought. "Where were your documents?"

  "Stashed, stashed good. They didn't find them."

  "All right," Charley said. "Start making the rounds. Take your team list and start on the A split, I'll start on the B split. Get everybody to check their gear and their documentation. I want to know if anybody is missing anything. Check out the new guys and see if anybody left their documentation in the room unsecured. I want to know who if that's so. Get everybody packed up and ready to move.

  You get your split and tell them verbally to move by cell to the Marriott over on Hamburger Allee. I'm going to move my split over to the Holiday Inn in Sachenhausen. Get with Donald Gene and tell him to meet me outside the Basler Eck in four hours. Everybody else on full counter-surveillance, Stacy...make sure they're checking out any unoccupied rooms, got that? Any sign of anybody displaying any interest, we sit back, sit back, understand? Donald Gene and I will touch base with you guys and we'll coordinate further then."

  Stacy grinned at Charley. "You know, old man, if I had a dick it'd be hard right now. It's nice to see you with your hunting license back."

  Charley had a far away, almost dreamy look that slowly turned cruel. "Yeah, friend girl. Get going."

  ***

  "This appears to be the flight schedule for this mission," the man who had been dressed as a hotel maintenance worker said. "Notice how they split up to cover the smaller aircraft."

  "This is good," Ajai said. "Very good. We'll see how they stand up under pressure."

  "Notice the seat assignments."

  "Yes. The same every time."

  The phone rang twice, then stopped. It rang twice again, fell silent, then began ringing steadily. Ahmad Ajai picked up the phone and said, "Yes?"

  He nodded, listening intently to the other person on the line.

  "Yes. Good. We'll have something for you shortly." He hung up the phone and spoke to the other man. "Some of the Americans are checking out of the hotel. Did anyone see you two coming out of the rooms? Did you leave anything disturbed?"

  "No."

  "I want some of the team on the marshals who are checking out...find out where they are moving to. I want Rashid down at the restaurant where they are supposed to meet the stewardesses tonight."

  The man nodded and looked at the picture he held in his hand. It was an enlargement of a photo taken at the airport of Charley Dey and Donald Gene Nelson.

  "Wherever they go, I want to know," his leader told him.

  "Of course," the man said. "Rashid will take care of it. I'll give him this picture."

  "Tell him to be careful. These two are the most dangerous of all."

  ***

  Despite their reputation for being rigid and authoritarian, the Germans have always had a liberal and gleefully lusty attitude towards sex and the sex industry. The cabaret, the dance halls and beer parlors and the attending prostitution have always been an integral part of German urban life. Frankfurt's reputation for the quality of its sex industry was surpassed only by Hamburg's. The Bahnhofsviertel district around the train station has always been the center for Frankfurt's red light district. The streets are lined with anonymous storefronts and doorways, brightly lit with garish neon signs displaying pictures of naked women. The various stores provide a variety of sexual toys and aids, pornographic books and magazines. The area is referred to as the "Sticky Steps" by foreign visitors, who make up a sizable percentage of its patrons. The name refers to the noisome condition of the darkened stairwells that line the many alleyways.

  Not far from the Sticky Steps, near the Friedensbrucke Bridge which spans the Main River, is a restaurant known around the world by flight crews. The Basler Eck has been an air line hangout for over twenty years, since the early stages of the Viet Nam war. It's walnut paneled walls are covered with decals from visiting air crews: patches and stick-ons from B-52 crews to TWA to Air Nepal are displayed on the chipped paneling. Over the years with the advent of hijacking, the Basler Eck began hosting a number of air marshal crews as well. Before their government confined them to the embassy during their layovers, the Israeli air marshals -- lean and sun-burned, if they weren't thick boned and muscled and sun-burned -- would sit in one corner and demolish huge German meals and huge quantities of beer. The va
rious middle-eastern crews -- Jordanian, Saudi Arabian, Iraqi -- would sit across the room and nod coldly when the Israelis would hold up their beer mugs in a mocking gesture of temporary neutrality. The South Korean marshals were notorious for silently chugging mug after mug of beer, their faces becoming beet red, until they broke out in the marching songs of the Korean Special Forces. After a fight in which they hospitalized two male flight attendants from Lufthansa whose overtures were misunderstood, they were banned in perpetuity by Hans, the world-weary owner and chief bartender.

  Despite Air Marshal HQ declaring the Basler off-limits for reasons of operational security, most of the marshal teams took at least one meal during their layovers with Hans. He had known many of them since the beginning of the program. While hostile surveillances had happened in and around the Basler, on any given night there would be plenty of armed foreign air marshals as well as German Polizei in plain clothes to deter any real trouble.

  At a table in the corner of the main dining room, where they had a fine view of both doors and their backs to a wall, Donald Gene and Charley were drinking good German pilsner from tall frosty mugs. Three empty pitchers and the remains of a massive meal sat on the table in front of them, where three of the flight attendants picked at the remains.

  "Where's the rest of your crew?" Robin asked.

  "Rank hath it's privileges," Donald Gene said, leering. "We put all them young ones to bed so's the chaperones get a chance to get out."

  The tall German lead flight attendant, Freida, snorted and sipped on her beer.

  Charley glanced at his Seiko and said, "Well, it's the witching hour, Donald Gene."

  "Daddy, say it ain't so!" Donald said.

  "Sorry, buddy."

  "What are you guys talking about?" Robin said.

  "We're on status twelve hours before our flight departure...so this is when we switch to cokes," Charley said.

  "That's stricter than our rules," Robin said. "We only have to go eight hours."

  "You don't carry guns, little squirrel," Donald Gene said.

  "Little squirrel?" Robin said.

  Freida cleared her throat. "So. You are not quite as you said, Mr. Donald Gene Nelson. Perhaps you should not drink so much."

  "Freida, baby, I'm more than what I said, I'm..."

  "Drunk, perhaps. Maybe just talk, perhaps."

  "Now, don't mistake an occasional wobble for a lack of bobble in my equipage, sweet thing. I are a SEAL and we are happiest when we are inhaling liquids and very wet." He grinned. "And hard."

  "You're not going to go, are you?" Robin said.

  "Sorry, baby," Donald said, looking over at Charley. "Ours not to reason why..."

  Charley nodded and looked around the crowded restaurant. Germans loved to smoke, and the room was thick with the smells of strong tobacco, roasted pig and the sharp bite of good strong beer. He loved Germany, always had. He nodded to a senior captain sitting with his crew at the next table. Northwest, he thought, on the Minneapolis-Seattle-Tokyo run. There were some other familiar faces in the crowd. The flight crews they flew with would see them sometimes, and foreign crews often took them for pilots or flight attendants. Sometimes those that recognized them as marshals were too intimidated to come up and speak to them, but others did and were welcomed by the fun-loving marshals.

  Charley didn't see who he was looking for. When he and Don had come in, a man had been sitting at the bar alone. A lone drinker on a Friday night in a German pub is not usual, especially one who nurses his beer for a half-hour at a time.

  "We've got to go," Charley said, standing. "Let's go, Donald Gene. We'll see you girls to a cab."

  They walked the women out to the cab stand and saw them off, Donald Gene reeling like the proverbial drunken sailor.

  "Whoa, buddy," Donald slurred. "Let's ride with the girls..."

  "We'll walk," Charley said to Freida. "We can use the air."

  "Someone certainly can," Freida said, slamming the cab door.

  "C'mon, sailor," Charley said. "Let's go."

  Donald waved at the flight attendants till the cab was out of sight. "Let's go, Charley. I gotta sleep."

  Don draped an arm over his partner's neck and leaned on him. The two of them made their way down the street, weaving and laughing. To the Palestinian man watching them from across the street at the trolley kiosk, they appeared to be quite drunk. The Palestinian stepped out into the street and began to follow them, keeping well back in the thin foot traffic. After several blocks and a few random turns, the two marshals stopped by the mouth of an alley.

  "I gotta piss," Donald Gene said loudly.

  "What you telling me for?"

  "Don't leave me, man."

  Donald staggered down the alley into the dark. Charley leaned against the brick wall and stared up at the building across from him. A hooker detached herself from the shadows across the street and made her way towards him.

  "Nein," Charley said, waving her off.

  The Palestinian man following them paused a few hundred feet behind Charley and looked into a closed shop window. He lit a cigarette and watched Charley with his peripheral vision. He drew on the cigarette hard.

  "Got a light?" Donald Gene Nelson asked him.

  The Palestinian looked up in surprise. Donald Gene grinned at him and struck the brachial nerve plexus in the terrorist's neck with his forearm. Don hooked the man's neck with his hand and slammed his elbow into the Palestinian's temple. The man dropped to his knees, stunned. Donald Gene twisted the man's neck into the crook of his arm and applied a carotid choke, pulling the man back into the alley beside them.

  Charley walked briskly towards the alley where Donald Gene and the man had disappeared. A few of the street people, who had seen the incident, backed off in a hurry when they saw how Charley's drunken weaving had suddenly become a quick, purposeful walk. Charley stopped at the mouth of the alley and looked to see if anything besides the man's still smoldering cigarette had been dropped in the struggle. He went down the alley where Donald Gene was going through the man's pockets.

  "The boy is clean," Donald said. "Just regular pocket litter: money, smokes, a trolley ticket."

  The man started to stir. Charley leaned over and put a short, hard punch into the man's solar plexus. "Hey," he said in English.

  "Why are you hitting me? Take the money," the man said in English.

  "You speak good English," Charley said. "Why are you following us?"

  "I wasn't..."

  Charley hit him again. Donald Gene tore open the packet of cigarettes. There was a piece of paper folded into the packet. It was a xeroxed photograph of Charley and Don at the airport.

  "Bad tradecraft, homeboy," Donald said. "Your ass is ours."

  The Palestinian began to struggle in earnest. Don put the sleeper hold back on him and let the man kick himself into unconsciousness. Charley helped Don pick the man up and looped one of his limp arms around his neck.

  "I think the Jedi will want to talk to this boy," Charley grunted, as they drug the man down the alley.

  ***

  Jedediah Isiah Loveless was asleep in bed with his wife when the phone rang. Chief of the Special Military Liaison Unit at the consulate, the organization chart had him reporting to the senior military attaches as a Department of Defense civilian. The truth was, most of the attaches gave "Jedi" Loveless a wide berth and muttered -- behind his back -- about him and his "crazies in the basement." Loveless's cover job was to coordinate the military activities of the various US special operations forces that maintained a presence in Germany. What he actually did was run a highly classified and compartmentalized unit that provided special security, specialized reconnaissance and direct action capabilities to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense's Special Operations Command. He was used to phone calls in the middle of the night, as was his wife, who barely stirred as he reached over her and picked up the phone.

  "...Loveless..." he murmured sleepily.

  "Aren't we
all, brother?" Donald Gene said.

  "Who is this?"

  "Your friendly neighborhood frogman, who bought you too many drinks at Country Sam's in the Seoul of the ROK."

  "What the fuck you calling me in the middle of the night for?"

  "Me and my homeboy have some precious cargo for you. Need you to send some of those big manly men you hang around with to pick it up."

  "What have you got?"

  "Well, he was working us...and we're working something related to that friend of yours that showed up missing."

  Jed sat up and turned on the light. His wife buried her head in the covers. "Where are you at?"

  "Remember where you took us to get a massage last fall?"

  Jed looked over at his wife. "You're in a fucking whorehouse?"

  "It's because we are loveless."

  ***

  On a quiet side street just off the Taunus Strasse is a non-descript building with a small walk-up to a solid and well-maintained door. The building is a discreet brothel of long-standing and excellent reputation, favored by wealthy Germans and foreigners for the beauty of the women and the discretion of the management. The handsome woman who ran the establishment had long-standing agreements with elements of German Intelligence, as well as the US special operations community, who utilized her establishment as a crash pad, safe house, or recreation facility. In the second room past the stairs on the third floor, Charley Dey let in four big, quiet men dressed in blue jeans, t-shirts and black leather jackets. Jed Loveless followed his men into the room.

  "Hello, Charley," Jed said, lighting a cigarette.

  "Jed."

  "Donald Gene, how are you?" Jed said to Don, who slouched in a corner armchair.

  "The good Mr. Loveless," Don said.

  The four men who came in with Loveless looked at the Palestinian man curled up unconscious in the middle of the queen sized bed. His hands and feet were tied. The four men moved with the efficiency born of long practice and experience. One slid the captive's pants down and deftly jabbed him with a hypodermic syringe in one hairy and muscular buttock. Two of the others cut the knotted pillowcases off the prisoner's hands and replaced them with plastic flexicuffs. The fourth man took a pillowcase and stuffed the cut pillowcases and the prisoner's wallet into it. One man went to the door and looked out, while two others gripped the prisoner's arms and hauled him like a bag of potatoes. The last one followed them, one hand holding the pillowcase, the other straying near the waistline of his leather jacket. He nodded at Jed as he left, ignoring Charley and Don. Jed watched them go, then turned back to the two marshals.