Air Marshals

by Wynne, Marcus

  Dinkey answered carefully. "It's not a feud, sir...it's a personality conflict. I'm aware of Dey's interests and contacts within the community and I recognize his ability. I just don't agree with his approach, his way of just going ahead without checking in with anybody and taking independent action on his own."

  "That same criticism could be levied on you, Simon. The action you took with the Inspector General's Office, for instance."

  Dinkey was chagrined; he had thought that he had buried that incident in the Internal Investigations Unit. "It seemed right at the time, sir."

  "It wasn't. I need your attention focused on the overall mission right now, and not in scoring points off of Charley Dey. Understood?"

  "Clearly, sir. Absolutely." Dinkey turned and stared out at the big aircraft taxing down the runway. "Perfectly."

  ***

  Charley Dey slouched down in his Business Class seat and stretched as the L-1011 lifted away from Dulles and banked east for Frankfurt. The lead flight attendant, an attractive brunette in her forties named Luann, looked quizzically at him.

  "Why you sitting back here, Charley?" she asked.

  Charley smiled at her. He had known her for years. "I'm training my replacement, Luann. I'm getting ready to buy me a house, get me a wife, raise some lil childrens. You look like a good breeder, how bout it?"

  She punched him on the arm. "My lil children days are behind me, big boy." She looked around at her crew of young flight attendants. "I'm doing some training myself. But anytime you want to get bred, you just call, okay?"

  "Don't let your mouth write no checks your body can't cover, Luann."

  "You do talk trash, Charley. Where's your evil twin Donald?"

  "Back of the bus, smoking one of his evil cigars."

  "I'm gonna go back and say hello."

  "Be careful around him. I get jealous, you know."

  "Of who? Me or him?" Luann walked off, laughing.

  Butch looked over and waggled his eyebrows. Charley leaned back and opened his book.

  ***

  Charley patrolled his assigned sector of seats, then lingered by the bulkhead and looked back over the coach section. He reminded himself that he wasn't the team leader now, and he couldn't exercise the leader's prerogative to roam the aircraft at will. He heard Don's laughter coming from the smoking section at the very rear of coach. Charley smiled and turned his attention back to his section. Butch had his earphones tucked in, watching the movie. Young Jon was relaxed in his seat, occasionally looking up from his book to scan his assigned sector. He nodded at Charley.

  Charley liked Jon's enthusiasm and his focus. He was sharp, but then all these new kids were sharp. He looked forward to First Class, at the back of Harold's head, and Karen across the aisle from him. Something about her bothered him; maybe it was how she quickly catered to Harold. She seemed to take note of everything, ordinary or not. Of course, she hadn't had any experience on bread and butter runs. All she had so far was the one mission with Charley and this one. All these new kids. They were smart, college educated all of them, in great shape, but there was something missing from them. The first air marshal class had been a cobbled together pigfuck dignified by the label of a training program. In the scramble to meet the Presidential directive get marshals in the air after a particularly brutal hijacking in which an American serviceman had been beaten to death, there had been little attention paid on how to train properly. But Colleen Nicolovich, the tough broad put in charge of the program, had picked the right people.

  Almost everyone in that class had been shot at and had shot; there was a lot of gray hair -- most of them were in their late thirties to early forties, with an average 10-20 years of experience in law enforcement or the military. While their age showed in the physical fitness scores (even though the fitness tests were age compensated) the experience showed on the range and in the scenario problems. The young bloods who made up 25% of his team (not his team, he had to remind himself) were different. They were fitter, smarter, they trained well -- but their lack of maturity and experience showed when they went into the scenarios. Many of them choked the first couple of times they tried to deal with the violently realistic scenarios. The role players, screened and selected military and law enforcement personnel with a smattering of stunt people and professional actors, were trained and rehearsed on carefully scripted scenarios that simulated actual hijackings. They got into their roles and delivered a level of verbal and emotional violence many of these youngster had never experienced. Which is not to say that they couldn't do the job if properly trained. That had been his task, to break the old time instructors away from the idea that you couldn't train in experience. Everybody started someplace, and he had been young and immature and inexperienced once, too. These kids had the best that he'd been able to do. The rest was up to their leadership and God.

  Charley returned to his seat and picked up the book Maria had left in his apartment. It was a collection of essays by a Christian psychiatrist. It was strange to be reading. It had been a long time since he'd had the leisure to do so on a mission. It was nice to be taking it easy.

  ***

  "We're going to have to talk to Charley about this," Stacy said.

  Steve leaned against the counter in the empty galley and sipped another of his endless cups of coffee. He hated being the bearer of bad news, but Stacy was right. The little they'd heard of Dinkey's conversation with Karen confirmed the gut response the two old-timers had about Karen; she was up to no good.

  "You're right," he said reluctantly. "We'll get him off to the side when we get to Frankfurt." He paused. "I wonder if Harold is in on it?"

  "I don't know. I can't stand that fool as it is." Stacy shook her head in disgust. "This isn't a good start. I hate this."

  Steve reached out and squeezed her shoulder. "We all do."

  Stacy looked up at the big man with surprise at his rare gesture of concern. "Stevey, you really are a sweet man. I might just fuck you after all."

  ***

  FRANKFURT, GERMANY:

  "IRIS FURY?" John Bolen said. He was slouched in the passenger seat of Jed's Mercedes as Jed wove the car in and out of the heavy autobahn traffic. "That be it," Jed Loveless replied.

  "I've got to meet this guy sometime."

  "You probably will," Jed said.

  "It's a small world. So what have you got in mind for my boys?"

  "The same thing, but with a little twist: I want some shooters standing by in case somebody gets close to one of the marshal teams."

  John straightened and looked at Jed. "We're not going to dangle an air marshal team, Jed."

  "I'm not talking about a dangle. I'm talking about watching them a little more closely."

  "I don't have a lot left, Jed. We still have the primary tasking in Beirut. Even with the SAS helping us down there, we're spread too thin."

  The behind the scenes negotiations for the return of Bucknell Leigh continued in Beirut. American proxies sought an agreement with the shadowy representatives of HizbAllah; John's people worked concurrently, using surveillance, money, blackmail and any other tool at their disposal to find the missing station chief. Like most of the operatives working the case, John was convinced that Leigh was dead. The results of his interrogation had already been seen: the sophisticated Kuwaiti hijacking, the knowledge of protection procedures displayed in recent political assassinations, most notably in Egypt; the roll-up of the few sources they had cultivated in Beirut. But even though they didn't want to give up hope, Jed and John were realists. Their close encounters with the violent side of the business guaranteed daily reality checks. They'd learned to temper their all too human desire for false hope.

  "I won't divert any assets from Beirut, Jed. But I'll put the best people I've got available on it. Maybe we'll get lucky, and the marshals will kick up Neberi's people again. We haven't had a sniff of them since Athens and Istanbul. Nothing in Frankfurt, nothing in Paris. I'm beginning to believe they were just gathering data for a m
ission profile to be updated later -- maybe years from now, I don't know." John pulled a pack of Camels out and lit one up.

  "Open the window," Jed said. His wife wouldn't let him smoke in their car.

  John rolled down the window, cupping his smoke in his hand. "I'll do what I can, Uncle Jed."

  "I appreciate it, John. I just got a feeling about this. I got a feeling that something is coming and it's going to be bloody."

  "As long as it's them and not us bleeding."

  "No guarantee of that."

  "Amen, brother."

  ***

  The Frankfurt airport, the largest in Europe, saw hundreds of departures every day. Each of those planes had to be turned around efficiently: refueled, meals restocked, cabins set up and cleaned. The aircraft cleaning concession suffered from constant employee turnover. The cleaner's pay was good as such jobs went, especially to the immigrants from Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and other parts of the Middle East who made up the cleaning crews. The problem was with the mandated security requirements the US air carriers called for: background checks on each employee, training to ensure familiarity with the security procedures, all of the checks and balances the US Federal Aviation Administration required of their carriers on foreign soil. The local operators of the cleaning concession, working on contract for the US carriers, were fully aware of the contract requirements regarding security. The full time ground security coordinators hired by the airlines could not check each and every airplane cleaned, so often the security compliance checks were left to the contractor supervisors, who had so many planes to clean, and so little time. The cleaning concession supervisor was irritated when the new woman (Lebanese or Turkish, who knew and who cared?) came to him and told him she had to return to her country. But he cheered up when she told him her cousin had working papers and, best of all, spoke some English.

  The new man was very hard working. He kept to himself at first, but that was common among immigrants when they first came to work at the airport. Frankfurt's modern and sprawling airport could be intimidating to people used to air travel, let alone the poor who might never have been on an airplane before. He was very diligent, searching carefully under each of the seats in his assigned sector, checking the back of the seat trays and in the magazine pouches, making sure the life jackets were in place beneath the seats, polishing the overhead compartments with a rag and spray. Once he received his security training he was diligent there as well. He checked the lavatory compartments, pulled out the bins, looked beneath and between the cushions of the seats. In the random tests conducted by the contractor, he found, the first time out, the concealed mock bomb under the seat cushion, a copy of one that had blown the legs off of a young man on a flight out of Tokyo two years before. He seemed grateful for the bonus of $50 US dollars. His performance impressed the station manager, who told the contract supervisor to put that man on full-time on the US carriers. The young man (Lebanese, Turkish, who cared as long as he was a good worker?) accepted this news and the additional pay humbly. All in all the supervisor thought he got a good deal with this one.

  ***

  In a warehouse in a grimy industrial park on the outskirts of Frankfurt, Ahmad Ajai and his team of hijackers sat on the chilly concrete floor and watched a small, intense Filipino man demonstrate killing techniques with a knife. They were sweaty from the lengthy warm up led by the man, who was an instructor in the Filipino fighting art of kali and an active trainer in the communist insurgent militia in the Philippines. He had come over on a training exchange with HizbAllah, who had in turn sent bombing specialists to Manila to assist the insurgents.

  The instructor held up his blade. It was manufactured by Cold Steel, a company in the United States that designed some of the best fighting knives in the world. The knife was a special version of the Tanto model: a six inch razor sharp chisel modeled on the ancient samurai blades. What was unique about this particular knife was that it was manufactured out of a special super hard plastic. It could be sharpened to the same razor's edge as a blade of steel. It was lighter and, importantly, would not set off a metal detector . If carefully concealed, taped in the hollow of the spine or in the crotch, or hung on a string around the neck, it would probably get through a cursory body frisk.

  "There are several places on the body where you can achieve instant kills with the knife," the instructor said in his careful Catholic school English. "The first is at the base of the skull, angling upwards through the medulla oblongata. This is a difficult shot. You may break the blade if you get the angle wrong. Another is in front behind the collar bones. If you penetrate deeply there you can sever the subclavian artery and reduce the blood pressure immediately, which causes collapse. Penetrating the kidneys will do the same. Another area is the perineum, between the genitals and the anus."

  The students collectively shifted on the cold cement.

  "Please stand. We will go through a series of movements to demonstrate the angles for attack."

  The students obediently stood and took their knives in hand, following exactly the slow movements of the instructor, who demonstrated a series of cuts, jabs, and rips designed to instantly incapacitate an armed opponent. The power techniques with the knife were designed to, if necessary, penetrate the kevlar vests worn by air marshals.

  Ahmad Ajai followed the movements with total focus. He brought his emotional intensity up to peak with each movement, as though he were actually striking his opponent, ripping their flesh with his blade. His team watched his narrowed, gleaming eyes, the sweat dripping from his brow, and fell into rapport, moving as one, striking with controlled fury.

  ***

  John Bolen was on the shooting range hidden in the basement of an unmarked building on the Rhein Main US Air Force base. He and three of his men were standing in the range lanes working on basic drills. John had an electronic timer hung on his belt. Each time he pressed the START panel, he had between one to five seconds before a buzzer would sound. One and a half seconds later, a stop buzzer would sound. In that time he had to brush back his leather jacket, draw his pistol, acquire the target and fire. He was doing it dry, without bullets, working on his sight picture. He was making it within 1.5 seconds about eight times out of ten, which was slow for him.

  After a few dry runs, he inserted a magazine full of gleaming 9mm hollow points. It was no ordinary pistol he was working with. The Agency issued the Browning High-Power semi-automatic pistol or the Smith and Wesson Model 60 lightweight revolver. John had one of each. He thought the two complemented each other well: the High-Power as a main gun, the diminutive Smith as a back-up. Both guns showed signs of extensive customization. The High-Power had been worked over by Karl Sokol, a Browning specialist who worked for a very small and select clientele. Sokol had throated and ramped the barrel and ramp to the point where the pistol would feed empty cases. He had mounted low profile combat sights with Trijicon luminous inserts, an ambidextrous safety, and removed the troublesome magazine safety. The trigger was tuned to break at exactly four pounds. The sharp edges of the weapon were broken, polished, and refinished so that the pistol felt like a well used bar of soap. A dull matte black with Spegel Slim-Line grips of Brazilian cocobolo, the High-Power was a discreet example of the professional's pistol. Sokol had worked over the Smith in a similarly meticulous fashion, chamfering the chambers, smoothing the trigger, replacing the wooden grips with minuscule plastic ones that lowered its already low profile. While John was particular about his own personal weapons, he wasn't a stickler about what his guys carried. Some carried the Browning, others carried the Colt .45 auto they had toted in DELTA, one even carried a stainless .41 magnum revolver. As long as they could shoot to his demanding standards, he didn't care what they shot terrorists with.

  He seated the magazine, engaged the safety and sheathed the pistol in the close fitting horsehide scabbard. At the beep, he drew the weapon and put a 115 grain hollow point in the left eye of the silhouette target in 1.2 seconds. Still slow.

  **
*

  It was the middle of the night in Frankfurt. Ahmad Ajai and his hijackers were sleeping. Above the main floor of the warehouse, where the sleeping men and women curled in their folding cots, one man sat awake in an office and watched over them while they slept. He kept company with a television, the sound turned down, several telephones and a fax machine. In one corner was a locker filled with loaded weapons: shotguns, several submachine guns, and handguns for everyone. The isolated warehouse was not likely to be discovered or raided, so thoroughly cut-out was this portion of the operation, but if they were discovered they were prepared to fight to win. In front of the large sliding dock door were several vans kept gassed up and ready to go; at a moment's notice they could evacuate the building and leave nothing but some bunks and mattresses among the crates that were spread out across the floor.

  The terrorist leadership had learned their lessons from previous missions. Often the shooters actually tasked to conduct a hijacking were young, tough and idealistic: "trigger pullers." The problem was that in the critical pre-mission phase, they tended to party hard to make up for all they were denied in the training camps and their hard lives. In the aftermath of a hijacking, investigators found that many people remembered the hijackers by their antics before the operation. In light of this, Ahmad Ajai followed a military principle and isolated his entire team. Carefully, a few each day, he smuggled them into the warehouse, the surrounding streets and buildings carefully watched by his own people. Each day the perimeter shrunk until they were all inside, with the few remaining surveillance operatives who lived in the area providing basic security. No one other than his crew and his hand picked support people knew where they were. Only one other person had the telephone numbers for the phones and fax..

  He ran the risk of overtraining and dulling his people's edge with too much isolation, but he felt the time would be short. The American's unexpected aggressiveness in response to his surveillance was reaping unexpected benefits for him; he expected them to increase their tempo soon. He felt them coming, even in his dreams.