Air Marshals

by Wynne, Marcus

  Consider also that the aircraft is moving at some 300+ miles an hour and that the pilot, if he knows there is shooting going on, is going to take his aircraft down low enough where he can equalize pressure with the outside in a hurry. Remember explosive decompression? That adds a completely unstable platform to all of the other factors.

  And of course, there is the need, if you're an air marshal and not a terrorist, to preserve lives and not kill any of the hundreds of innocents (over 400 on the larger 747s) whose lives are in your charge.

  All of these factors must be considered when you plan to protect an aircraft. Or to take one.

  Ahmad Ajai considered all of them except the last.

  He had the benefit of the detailed interrogation notes from Bucknell Leigh. More came from the pilots of Iran Air and walk-throughs of the 747s they flew; other information from the detailed evaluations and schematics of US aircraft available from the manufacturer's marketing department. The detailed seat schematics, essential to the planning, came from the subscription service that provided seating booklets to customers all over the world. He had all that information, easily available in the public sector, spread all over the tiny table in his room in the Hotel Monceau in Paris. His team was dispersed, waiting for his go-ahead to reassemble. It would be soon.

  He sketched in with colored pencil the probable seat locations for the air marshals and the best seats for his hijackers. He noted the positions of the lavatories, the galleys, the distance to the cockpit. The cockpit was key. Nothing else mattered as long as they gained control of the cockpit. He poured over the seat schematics and drew long lines from each seat converging on the cockpit door.

  ***

  "We'll be heading back tomorrow," Charley announced to the marshals seated around the table in the backroom of the Basler Eck.

  "What's up with that?" Stacy asked.

  "HQ wants us back...they're pulling all the teams in now to reevaluate the threat."

  "We're going back while they figure out the threat?" Butch said. "That makes a lot of sense."

  "Fucking desk marshals," Steve muttered.

  "I don't get it," Joan said. "Why would they pull us back in if there's still a threat? We've been seeing the surveillances, we've got work to do out here."

  "Ours not to reason why, ours is just to fly and die," Don said. "Butt Boy Dinkey says come home, all the little desk weenies say "yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full' and we come home like dutiful lil childrens."

  "So we have our orders, and we know what to do. Make sure you have your stuff together, and we'll meet at the airport rally point at 0830 tomorrow morning," Charley said. "Hey, Hans," he called to the restaurant owner. "Bring a round of beers, will you?" He grinned and said, "Well, let's drink, for tomorrow we must fly. These repositioning flights are cake."

  ***

  Charley's people worked the crowd around the ticket counters in the busy terminal. Karen was tagging closely with Stacy, while Steve floated off to one side, his eyes scanning high and low. Charley watched for faces watching his, like the carefully impassive face of the Iran Air station manager behind his counter. The senior operative for the Iranian intelligence service in Frankfurt, he knew who Charley was, and Charley knew he knew. It was amusing how two men whose fates might be tied up in each others would so studiously ignore each other. All of this pretending to know and not to know was tiresome. A long time ago it had been exciting and new. Then it became business, just another consideration of trade craft. Now it was just tiresome, a meaningless ritual in a dance that had lost its music a long time ago.

  Don was across the terminal, lounging in a chair in front of the Mercedes Benz display. The latest Mercedes coupe was parked behind pillared ropes, with an easel with the specifications in German beside it. Don seemed glad to be there.

  "Good morning, sweet cheeks," Don said. "It's nice to see that cute little 'I hate the morning' look on you"

  Charley laughed. "You're mighty chipper."

  "Thank you."

  "Where's your crew?"

  "Conducting detailed counter-surveillance, of the counters and also to counter any surveillance of the hostile sort."

  "You get laid or what?"

  "Gentlemen don't discuss such matters."

  "You must be sick."

  Joan appeared out of the crowd with a capped cup of coffee in her hand. "Good morning, Charley," she said. "Got you some coffee."

  "Thanks, Joan. That was thoughtful," Charley said, breathing in the fresh brew.

  "How come you didn't bring Daddy Don any coffee, Joan?" Don said.

  "I must be slipping," she said. She turned away to go to the coffee stand.

  "Wait, Joan! Don't go...stay! Just hold...on while I get you some money," Don said, grinning evilly.

  Joan blushed a brilliant red. "Fuck you, Don," she said, walking away.

  "Don't go, Joan! Stay!" Don called after her. She held up her middle finger and disappeared into the crowd.

  "What's that about?" Charley said.

  "You wouldn't believe it if I told you."

  "I'm going to have to send you to cultural sensitivity training, Don. Your behavior borders on sexual harassment," Charley said, grinning into his coffee.

  "Is that where we sit in a circle and apologize for being born with a penis? Where we have a support partner we can call day or night if it gets hard and we don't know what to do? Please send me, daddy, I need all the help I can gets."

  The two of them laughed and laughed.

  ***

  "Do we have enough information?" Ahmad Ajai asked.

  His selected hijacking team exchanged significant looks with each other. There were fifteen of them, the youngest nineteen years old, Ajai the oldest at thirty-eight.

  A short and heavily muscled woman raised her hand. "We have enough. We need only continue a light surveillance to watch for any significant changes. We can do this," she said.

  Ajai nodded, pleased. "Who else?"

  The others remained silent.

  "We have enough," Ajai said. "The surveillance team continues for us. We will move to our other location for detailed rehearsal till it is time to act. Go now."

  He watched his team file out the door. He smoothed out the rumpled bed, picked up the overflowing ashtrays and dumped them into the trash, opened the windows to let the smoke out. He stared out at the street, the trolley running down the middle of it, its bell clanging, the people hurrying on their lunch hour to catch a rich snack of sausages and fried potatoes or buy a magazine or meet a lover. All of them so unknowing of the things that took place around them. How many of them would soon watch on television the spectacle he would orchestrate? How many of them would ever guess that they had brushed by him on the street, sold him an orange, offered him a light for his endless cigarettes?

  He remembered a bomb he had placed in a trash can near a bus stop in Tel Aviv. He had spent days watching that trash can, charting the arrival and departure times of the buses that ran from the military base into the shopping district. The trash can had become the center of his world, almost, but not quite, to the exclusion of the people who came and went around it: the soldiers, of course the soldiers; the old men and women with their mottled skin and unsteady gait; the young lovers who met there during their lunch hour; the children who got off at the end of the school day. He watched them with a clinical detachment born from a cold place in him that blocked out the thoughts of his own wife and son. He thought instead of the anger and helplessness of his father, and the pitiful weakness of his mother, and how they might have been better off if they had never lived.

  He cleared out of his observation post the day before the operation. Planting the device was simple. He put it into a fast-food bag, dropped it in during the morning rush, took a slow and unhurried walk around the corner. He was two blocks away when he felt the compression of air on his skin, the sound of the blast and the shivering of window glass, the voices rising and falling, and the distant, impotent sound of sirens. He
got on a bus and rode back by the scene, and sat there in the stopped traffic till the bus was routed around. He and the rest of his fellow passengers took in the carnage: the twisted and blackened bus, the bodies and parts still clad in army khaki; the huddled lovers, their bodies misshapen with the steel ball bearings he had packed around the charge. It is war, said the voice from that cold place inside him, where the snake dwelt. He looked down at the people below him, all innocent, all not innocent, all of them targets. It is war, he thought.

  ***

  WASHINGTON, DC.:

  Simon Dinkey leaned back in his executive chair and studied the two men seated in his office.

  "I appreciate the attention the two of you have given us on this matter. You have shown a great deal of sensitivity to the delicate nature of this investigation."

  The larger of the two men, a burly, gray-haired man who looked exactly like the former big city homicide detective he was, said, "We've all had to clean up our own shit before." He was the Agent in Charge of the Department of Transportation Inspector General's Office, the office tasked with investigating internal criminal and other wrong-doing within the Department of Transportation. The other man, thinner and younger, worked for him as a supervisor in the Washington DC office. The younger man shifted in his seat, and spoke to Dinkey.

  "I don't understand why you haven't taken action before this, if you have all this information. It would seem to be a simple job action, if you have had all this evidence. Why bring it to us now?"

  Dinkey shifted in his chair, flipped his hair. "Dey is a popular figure within this organization. He has a lot of friends. We thought that it might be better if the investigation was handled by an outside agency, so that there wouldn't be claims of bias."

  "If the evidence is as clear cut as you have presented to us, then the question arises as to why you didn't do anything before hand. That makes me wonder about his supervision and who else had this information," the younger agent pressed, to his partner's discomfort.

  "This information is recently developed," Dinkey said hastily. "And I am looking for more corroboration from a confidential source very soon. It was my decision to bring you in as soon as I saw this information."

  "An anonymous tip on your phone and on the internal hot-line is hardly hard evidence. If he's as popular as you say, maybe there's some disgruntled individual trying to stick it to him. It's hard to believe that a guy with a record like his would be involved in something as petty as smuggling jewelry through customs."

  "As I said, we believe it is sufficient to warrant an outside investigation. Is there anything else you require, gentleman? I have a meeting with the Secretary soon." Dinkey looked pointedly at his watch.

  The two agents looked at each other and stood.

  "Thank you for your time, Mr. Dinkey," the Agent in Charge said. "We'll let you know how it goes out at the airport."

  "Thank you," Dinkey said.

  The two agents walked out past the receptionist, who watched them suspiciously. When they closed the cipher-locked office door behind them and walked into the hallway of the office building on the outskirts of Dulles, the older one said, "Fucking asshole."

  "Who, Frank? Me or that weenie back there?"

  "Both of you, asshole. 'What about a disgruntled individual...blah, blah, blah.' You trying to be funny?"

  "You know the guy's a backstabbing prick and the only reason we're even doing this shit is because he's sucking the Secretary's dick."

  "You a poet now, or what?"

  "Fuck you, Frank."

  ***

  The flight out of Frankfurt and back to Washington was so routine as to be boring, the way most of the repositioning flights were. The new marshals were catching on and relaxed more on the return trip. Despite having the mission cut short, they still felt the cumulative effects of jet-lag and sleep disruption. The marshals pressed into a corner of first class and waited for the last of the passengers to file into the crowded jetway. The flight attendants filled out the last of their paperwork and logbooks.

  "Well, it's Miller time," Don said.

  One of the younger flight attendants kept looking over at Don, trying to catch his eye. Don studiously ignored her.

  "Don?" she called.

  Don went over and she whispered something in his ear, then filed out behind the remaining passengers and the other flight attendants, pulling her little luggage cart behind her.

  "Poor little lamb, so forlorn..." Butch began.

  "Well, she might have been Fluffy when she met him, but I bet she's Matty when he's done," Stacy said.

  "That's gross," Joan said.

  "But true," Stacy countered.

  Don grinned, pleased with himself.

  "Let's go," Charley said. He led the way out the door and down the jetway, past the signs and roped pillars directing them to the baggage claim and Customs area. They came down the stairs in the back of the long, warehouse-like space, and went to the inspection counters. Charley pulled out his credentials and said to the female Customs inspector, "Hey, how you doing? I'm the team leader for this Federal Air Marshal Unit, and we'd like an expedited entry, please."

  The inspector looked at his credentials and said, "Hold on a minute, I have to talk to a supervisor." She picked up a phone, pushed a button, and then spoke into an intercom that echoed throughout the Customs processing area. "Code Purple at Station 11, Code Purple at Station 11."

  "Is that your color, Charley?" Donald Gene asked. Stacy and Butch looked at each other and shrugged.

  "Must be a new requirement," Stacy said.

  Several other inspectors showed up, a couple of armed Customs agents and three men in plain clothes came to the counter.

  "What's going on?" Charley said.

  A senior inspector, the rank of an officer at his collar, said, "Who are you?"

  Charley handed the senior inspector his ID. "I'm the team leader of this Air Marshal Unit. What's going on?"

  The inspector looked over Charley's ID. "Charles Dey. Yeah. I'll need you to step into the office with me, Mr. Dey."

  The other inspectors began directing the marshals towards two other stations, roped off from the rest.

  "We'll need your customs declaration forms and passports. Please set your baggage on the counter, and hand your weapon to the Customs Agent," one of the men in plain clothes said.

  "I don't give up my fucking weapon," Donald Gene said. "What's this about?"

  Steve moved up next to Don. "That's right," he said softly. "Federal Agents don't give up their weapons unless they're under arrest. Are you arresting us?"

  "If we have to, we will..." the plain clothes inspector began.

  "Hey!" The Customs officer with Charley shouted. "These are Federal Agents. They are not under arrest. They keep their weapons. You understand me!"

  The plain clothes inspector turned away. "My mistake," he said in a tone of voice that made it clear he didn't think he was the one mistaken. "Set your bags on the counter." He turned back to the officer. "How are we supposed to body search them with weapons on?"

  "Body search?" Stacy said. "What the fuck is this about?"

  "No body searches," said the Customs officer.

  "But we were told..."

  "I'm telling you different." The customs officer turned away and snapped at Charley. "In here, Mr. Dey."

  Charley followed the officer through a door next to two large mirrors. Inside, there was a small room. The two mirrors were in fact two-way glass; standing behind them watching the close searches of the marshals were two men in suits. The older of the two turned away and came up to Charley.

  "Mr. Dey," he said. "I'm Frank Barnes, with the Department of Transportation Inspector General's Office."

  The younger one just shook his head and continued to stare out the window. "Fucking asshole," he muttered under his breath.

  ***

  "Oh, somebody's gonna die," Donald Gene said genially. He pulled out a cigar and lit it up. "They didn't even find my Cuba
ns," he said.

  "They weren't trying very hard," Butch said.

  "Yeah, the one inspecting me apologized twice. Said she was only doing her job and she thought it was bullshit, but she had to do it," Stacy said.

  "What's this about?" Karen asked.

  "Well, friend-girl," Stacy said. "Somebody has told Customs something about us that Customs didn't like and didn't want to believe, but had to do something about."

  "Does this happen often?" Joan asked. Jon edged up next to her.

  "This has never happened," Steve snapped. His lips were thin and white with rage. "Never happened. We're Federal Agents, and they were treating us like criminals. Right in front of the passengers. Blew our cover. Made us look like assholes."

  "Calm down, Stevey," Donald said serenely, blowing a thick cloud of smoke straight up in the air. "Calm down, young Paulson. Somebody's gonna die, and if you calm down and take a deep breath, Daddy Don will let you kill the first one."

  "This isn't funny, Nelson!" Steve said.

  "Take it easy," Butch said. "Don't bust a seam. When Charley gets back, we'll know what this is all about."

  Karen stood off by herself. She was angry, too, but more frightened. Dinkey had said nothing to her about this sort of treatment. It didn't seem right.

  ***

  "It was an anonymous tip, Mr. Dey, and it's turned out to be unsubstantiated," Frank Barnes said. "I'm sorry, but we're just doing our job."