Air Marshals

by Wynne, Marcus

  "These guys look like ten miles of muddy road," Rhino McGee said, watching Donald Gene and his crew file through the terminal and into a waiting van in Athens.

  "Flying wears my ass out anyway," Spider said. He started the rented Fiat and followed the van out of the airport.

  In Istanbul, Charley and his people were followed through the terminal by Mad Max Onofrey and his partner Warren. "These guys are losing their edge," Max said. "They're not making us sometimes, and they know we're here."

  Before the first week was over, the phone calls began again to stations in the end cities as well as in Frankfurt.

  "When does Mr. Nelson's flight arrive? What gate will Mr. Dey deplane at it? What time does Ms. Bagley's flight depart Istanbul?"

  Each report set a jar through the marshal teams. It was unnerving, knowing that someone was watching them, and knew when they were traveling.

  "Why don't they change their flight schedules?" Mad Max asked John Bolen.

  "The airlines fly on a schedule. They're out there to protect passengers. What are they supposed to do, hide when they know there's shooters out there?" John had respect for the marshals. He'd seen how they kept going on doggedly, even though the break neck pace and the lack of rest and relaxation was wearing on them. It wasn't like the fear of detection that wears on a covert operative in enemy territory; it was worse than that. The enemy knew they were there, and knew where they were going to be each step of the way, and was toying with them. The constant tension of maintaining alertness on and off the plane, in the hotel, and the enforced isolation was taxing to the marshals.

  Ahmad Ajai's shooters maintained a similar isolation in the terrorist safe house. They were used to the enforced isolation; their training experiences in the camps had inured them to it. These were luxurious accommodations compared to their Spartan existences in the training cadres. They had some privacy in various rooms, television, books, prayer five times a day, communal meals, rotating watches on guard or in the electronics room monitoring the phones and the faxes and CNN. In the office Ahmad Ajai would sit, sometimes for hours, quietly spinning the permutations of his action plan. Often he would get up and walk among his shooters, quizzing them on their roles to play in the coming drama; once they had demonstrated their mastery of their individual tasks, he began to quiz them on the tasks of their team mates. The terrorists enjoyed the challenge; it kept their minds busy. Twice a week Ahmad Ajai would call for an exfiltration exercise, and over the period of 24 hours, the team would empty out of the building, going with the pedestrian flow in the morning or evening, enjoy some time in the sunshine and out of doors, and then practice running routes back in, undetected, into the safe house. Ahmad Ajai was confident of his people's ability to avoid detection. With the exception of himself and Ayoush, these others were not known to Western intelligence. Ahmad Ajai had used that as a criteria in his selection and it had proven to be of great benefit to him. Since his people were not known, and they were entirely cut out from the support infrastructure in Germany, there was no way for the various Western intelligence organizations to identify them yet. There was no need for direct communication from any of the logistics cells or any of the far flung, deeply compartmented cells doing tasks that they did not understand, and did not need to understand. The cell in Istanbul, for instance, did not know why they were supposed to mug the two American servicemen, only that they were to do it. The cell in Rome, the same. The cell in Athens had a clearer picture, but that cell was comprised of specialists who did not have any of the particulars. They were professional enough to understand why.

  The cell that made phone calls had an inkling, but no specific details. It wasn't until their most recent tasking that they got specifics about flights.

  There were other cells that specialized in other things.

  ***

  DELTA AIRLINES FLIGHT #103, ATHENS TO FRANKFURT:

  Don was proud of his people; they were all feeling the pressure, but they were sucking it up and driving on. Young Joan was turning out to be a champ. She kept smiling and cheering Jon and Butch up, and that drove those two harder than Don would have driven them. She was great. She was up in the aisle, leaning against the First Class bulkhead as though she were just stretching her legs. Don nodded to her. First Class was full of Greek shoppers on a run to Frankfurt, and his normal kibitzing was put aside in the interest of cover. Don returned to his magazine until he saw the captain come out of the cockpit. The captain came to Don's seat and said, "I need to speak to you for a moment. Up here," gesturing towards the first class galley.

  Don set the magazine aside and followed the captain into the galley.

  "We have a positive target identification bomb threat," the captain said without preamble. He was, like many of the DELTA pilots, a former Pan Am captain with a military background. "I just got off the radio with air traffic. The threat was phoned in to the Athens station right after we took off. They positively identified the flight number, the tail number of the aircraft, and they used your name."

  "My name?" Don said.

  "The caller said that you were a passenger on board."

  Don racked his brains for anything out of the ordinary that morning. The plane had been secured when they had arrived in Athens and he had personally inspected the seals when they came back on board this morning. It was the captain's call, ultimately, on how to handle this, but Don thought over the procedures anyway.

  "How do you want to handle this?" Don asked.

  "I'm treating it as real. I'm taking the plane down to 10,000 and we're going to divert to Vienna. I'm not going to announce anything specific, only that I want them to take their carry on bags down and hold them in their laps. I want to do a search. Can you have your people assist?"

  "Of course, Captain. You're in charge."

  "Outstanding. I'm going to do that right now." The captain returned to the cockpit. His voice came over the loudspeaker. "Ladies and gentlemen, please return to your seats. In order to assist the flight attendants, I would ask that each of you return to your seats, and then take your carry-on bags and hold them on your laps. Please return to your seats, take your carry-on bags and hold them on your laps."

  Don felt the plane begin its descent. The captain was taking his time, doing it smoothly. The passengers looked puzzled, but obeyed. The few of them that were up returned to their seats, and everyone began to pull their carry ons down. Don tapped Joan on the shoulder, and she stood up. He briefly filled her in, and they fell in with the flight attendants, checking the empty overhead compartments, and looking into people's carry-ons.

  "Is this your bag?" the flight attendants asked as they worked their way up and down the aisle. Halfway down the coach cabin, one of the flight attendants noticed a heavy manila envelope in the overhead compartment.

  "Is this yours, sir?" she asked the man seated below. "This envelope?"

  "No," the passenger said.

  "Does this envelope belong to anyone?" the flight attendant called to the passengers seated nearby. No one claimed it. The flight attendant looked at Don.

  "Keep going through the cabin," Don said easily. "let me have a look. You just keep going."

  "What's going on? What are you doing?" the man seated below said.

  "Never mind, sir. Just stay in your seat. We're off duty crew, just helping out," Joan said.

  Don examined the package without touching it. It was face down in the corner of the overhead compartment, near one of the internal braces that were hidden behind the plastic bulkheads. It was a bulky 9x12 envelope, heavily wrapped in plastic package tape. There was writing visible on the front of the package. Don pulled a plastic lexan knife, a "CIA letter opener", out of his shirt pocket and took a plastic emergency directions card from the seat back below. He slid the card slowly under the package, feeling for tripwires or pressure release switches on the bottom of the package. He tried the sides with the same negative result. Given the handling a package might reasonably get on board an airplane, Don d
oubted that there were mercury or tilt switches installed, but there was no way for him to be sure. He looked for the flight attendants, who had cleared the rest of the aircraft.

  "Tell the captain I have a suspicious package here. I'm going to move it to the LRBL. Tell him that exactly, okay, honey?" Don said to the lead flight attendant, who hurried away.

  LRBL stood for Least Risk Bomb Location, that spot on the aircraft where a team of engineers and explosives experts had determined was the safest place (if there was such a thing) for an explosive device to go off while the aircraft was in flight. On this particular 727 aircraft, that LRBL was in front of the rear stairwell door.

  Don said to Joan, "Get me the blankets, pillows and other stuff we need to make a bunker. We're going to build a LRBL."

  The fear was apparent on Joan's face. The other passengers were looking at each other nervously.

  Butch came forward and said to Don, "What have you got?"

  Don inclined his head at the package and said, "It's a PTI threat, Butch. And we've got this. We're going to LRBL it."

  "I'll cover the front," Butch said. With two marshals working on the LRBL, that left only two to cover the whole plane.

  "Take Jon forward with you," Don ordered.

  "Roger that."

  In the meantime, Joan was heaping blankets, pillows, and the carry-on bags of the flight attendants near the stairwell door. She signaled to Don that she was ready. Don reached into the compartment and picked up the package. It was heavy, but it didn't feel like explosives. He held it in the same position it had been in, and walked to the rear of the aircraft. The package felt like it might contain a thick sheaf of paper or large, heavy index cards. It might be sheet explosive, but there wasn't any sign of oil seepage on the enclosing paper. Don felt the package carefully as he knelt before the back door. "Hey, Joanie," he said conversationally. "Move away from me. Get on the other side of the bulkhead."

  Joan moved back, torn between watching Don and watching the rest of the passengers, most of whom had turned around in their seats to watch Don made a little berm of the carry-on bags. He heaped blankets and pillows on the berm till it was waist high. The package was on the other side. Don took his plastic knife and made a small incision along the seam of the envelope. He widened the hole carefully and looked into the package. It looked like a stack of thick sheets of heavy paper. More confidently, he widened the hole and carefully separated several of the sheets with the tip of his knife. It was paper, and more paper. Don tore open the package and found a sheaf of menu cards for a restaurant in Athens, and nothing else. The writing on the front of the package said, "Vassili," and nothing else.

  "Tell the captain it's a false alarm," Don said.

  Marco Vasilli Stephanopoulous, a student at the University of Athens and active member of the November 17th terrorist group, stared at the back of Donald's head. Marco had slid the envelope into the overhead compartment during the crowded boarding, and then taken his seat near the back of the plane near the two air marshals. He'd paid them no overt attention during the flight, but during the ruckus caused by the threat, had occasion to notice their positioning during the threat. He had seen the two who had been seated near him get up and move to the front, near the cockpit, and the young woman and this older one who seemed to be charge come back to deal with the suspected device. Marco didn't know why this information was important, he only knew that he had been tasked to do it, and he got a free trip to Frankfurt and back out of it. It seemed an easy enough way to get a free vacation, and he was proud to be a part, albeit a small part, of whatever operation was running against these arrogant Americans.

  ***

  FRANKFURT, GERMANY:

  George Baumgarner and Jed Loveless sped down the autobahn in Ed's Mercedes.

  "They're getting PTI bomb threats now," George said.

  "We got that. We're covering the air traffic transmissions on each flight. They're getting them on the ground at the hotels, too, you know."

  "I hadn't heard that."

  "Yeah. Somebody threatened to car bomb the Presidential in Istanbul," Jed said.

  "Great." George lit up a cigarette. "Want one?" he said, offering the pack to Jed.

  "Yeah." Jed leaned towards George's extended lighter and pulled greedily on the smoke.

  George settled back into his seat and watched the cars whip by. "What's your read, Jed?"

  Jed's brow furrowed as he pulled to the left to pass a Porsche Targa. "How do you see the increase in calls and threats in Asia?" he said. "Doesn't it feel like a feint to you?"

  George nodded. "We're starting to think this is just a massive disinformation campaign, terrorism by terroristic threat, with just enough of the real thing to keep everybody off balance, spending lots of money and committing assets, raising hell with the air carriers and scaring the shit out of the traveling public."

  "They're spending enough money on it, don't you think?"

  "What does it cost them? A couple of marks for a phone call? We've got all the lines to the US air carriers covered, but these guys are smart -- they're hitting pay phones at random and only staying on long enough to set the message and they're gone. We haven't even come close to snagging one. Even with the BND we can't watch every pay phone in Frankfurt and its suburbs." George blew smoke at his reflection in the window. "We've got some fresh teams shaping up in the states. We're going to pull these guys out pretty soon. This is wearing their asses out."

  "What are you guys doing for domestic coverage?" Jed asked.

  "What domestic coverage? We barely have enough assets to cover our foreign taskings. We only fly specific threat flights in the US."

  "Think this might be a cover for an op in the US?"

  "There's been some speculation along those lines. No hard evidence. Wouldn't be hard to do in the US...but no indicators yet. We own that playing field. No, if it goes down, it goes down over here."

  "That might just be what they are counting on us to believe."

  "Hey Jed, I hear you, okay? But we can't cover everything, nobody can. And so far it seems like we're doing just what they want us to do: run our asses ragged responding to false alarm after false alarm. They're just looking to see how we do things. We're too hard a target, we got too many eyes on them and too many guns behind those eyes."

  Jed shrugged. It was getting harder and harder for him to believe that any organization would mount an operation in the face of the security they had thrown up and around US airline operations. They might get some unarmed people on board, but what use was that? And the bomb threat turned out to be a sheaf of restaurant menus some cleaner must have overlooked. That wasn't a good sign, but making sure the security measures were met wasn't his job, it was George's, and he'd already reamed some ass over that. He had to worry about his own shooters, John Bolen and the boys of DOMINANCE RAIN. They were wearing out and there were leads in Beirut that needed to be tended to. The prospect of hands on time with some HizbAllah bad boys kept them motivated, though; they kept rising to the challenge like the pros they were. But that small, thin voice still rose up in him at peculiar times: something is going to happen, something is going to happen. He wasn't going to ignore that voice. It was just a matter of time before something gave, the terrorists slipped up in some way, left a fingerprint on a phone, used a name they had in the database, fucked up and got arrested for a parking ticket or something equally mundane. Like police work, in intelligence and special ops there is extraordinary planning, hard, dogged, and boring work punctuated by strokes of sheer good luck. There had been no shortage of planning and hard work. All they needed now was some good luck. All they needed was one little chink in the armor so they could pry in, and he could let slip the shooters of DOMINANCE RAIN.

  "When is Don's flight getting back from Vienna?" Jed asked.

  George looked at his watch. "In about two hours. They were getting ready to push back when you picked me up."

  "Where's Charley and limp dick HD?"

  "HD at
the hotel, Charley is at the airport with Bolen. He's carrying one of my spare beepers if we need to get hold of him."

  "No need. I'll talk to him later."

  ***

  "Donald Gene wants to have babies," Donald Gene said. "Donald Gene wants to grow old hugging and kissing on mama. He wants lil SEAL pups crawling around in the backyard pool while Daddy Don whips up raw meat, barely seared to body temperature on the Weber Grill. Daddy Don wants to get a driver's license for his ride-on lawnmower. Daddy Don wants a lawn."

  "Daddy Don has thrown a wheel." Charley laughed. "Uncle Charley has seen this before. Young Donald is in love with someone he hasn't slept with yet. After young Donald has slept with the Beauty In Question, young Donald will come crying to his Uncle to save his poor worthless ass, and Uncle Charley will remind young Donald about everything he has said."

  Joan was near hysterical with laughter. Jon and Butch were shaking their heads sorrowfully in the back seat of the crew bus.

  "What the fuck are you guys laughing about?" Donald Gene roared. "Do you know what love is?"

  "I've never seen a man so blind with lust," Joan sputtered.

  "Hang out a little longer," Butch said. "You'll meet a lot of us."

  "Oh Butch," Joan said. "Don't feel bad. If you're a good boy I might give you a little peek."

  "Don't tease an old man," Butch said.

  Even Jon had to laugh at that. The laughter eased the tight wound tension among Don's crew. The trip to Vienna, and the subsequent search had been harrowing. A bomb on board was everybody's nightmare. A bomb wasn't something you could shoot, something you could count on stopping; even Don, with his extensive background in explosives, couldn't count on being able to defuse a device while in flight.

  Charley turned to look at his marshals. He was concerned about what he saw. Under their laughter, this bunch was wound tight and would need time to decompress, time they didn't have. They would have to get up and do it again in the morning, this time to Rome, overnight, and then return to Frankfurt. Fortunately, they all had only one more mission leg to fly. Then it would be back to DC, debriefings, and then home to sleep and decompress and take care of homely business: paying bills, playing with the kids, sleeping with their wives, mowing the lawns, all the little things that needed tending between their missions. That was one of the hardest things about this job, the strict compartmentation between the missions and their homelives. Unlike regular police, who worked in an office and in a particular city, or a military unit that lived and breathed together when they were deployed, marshals were spread out all over and came together only for a mission or training. There was something other-worldly about it: putting on the mindset, getting the skills tuned up, and then disappearing from the regular world of home and routine and mail and telephone calls for three to four weeks, to enter a world of hotels and airport and four to six different foreign countries. It took its toll in marriages and divorces and affairs, in problems with the kids, in credit ratings suffering from bills not being paid. It was hard to talk with other people about the issues you dealt with and the things you saw. How can you explain to your loved one, who is at home worrying about whether the lawn is coming in right or whether the kids need braces, about what it is like to see something you believe to be a bomb in the plane you're in at 30,000 feet? How do you describe what it feels like when you have one hundred people looking at you and expecting you to do something magical, something out of the movies, to miraculously transport them from this frightening reality they have found themselves in? Don was hardened from twenty years of that and his five years with the marshals; Butch had done his time with the Massachusetts State Patrol, but Jon and Joan didn't have the life experience or the support structure yet, to find a way to get that stuff off their chests.