by Walter Wager
It wouldn't be long.
The operation would begin very soon, when the charges knocked down the towers.
That would be in thirty-six minutes.
7
LIGHTNING flashed on the horizon.
The boom of thunder reached the large L-1011 airliner five seconds later. Then more jagged bolts ripped the night sky and another cannonade sounded swiftly.
The senior pilot on TWA Flight 22 wasn't the least bit troubled. Captain Lawrence Pace had more than thirteen thousand hours of multiengine jet experience, a thorough knowledge of this well-built plane and solid confidence in the competent people and impressive electronic gear of the sophisticated U.S. airways guidance and control system.
"What have we got up ahead, Tom?" he asked calmly.
The navigator rechecked the weather radar screen.
"I think we've outrun it, Captain," he reported. "Some turbulence a few miles down the road . . . heavy rain all the way in . . . nothing to sweat about. New York Center should pick us up in about nineteen minutes."
Pace nodded comfortably. The Federal Aviation Administration staffed its New York Center with some of its best air traffic controllers. These able veterans would bring TWA 22 into JFK with no trouble at all.
At that moment, Pace smelled the Ferré perfume and smiled. Samantha Wong, the sleek and wordly Chinese-American flight attendant who intrigued so many pilots and even more passengers, had arrived with his caffeine-free herb tea. Ferré was her trademark.
"Thanks, Sam. How're we doing back there?" he questioned.
"We are working our tails off. It's wall-to-wall people," she replied as he took the cup.
"Full house?"
"Not an empty seat; two hundred and sixty-five thirsty people and a box."
"What's in the box?" he asked between sips.
"A kidney, Captain. It's flying First Class—with a courier—for a transplant operation."
Pace shook his head.
"Don't think I ever hauled a kidney before," he said.
"Got to be a first time for everything."
"Is that a proposition, Sam?"
"Don't hold your breath, Captain," she advised and left the cockpit. When she entered the First-Class section, she heard the entertainment business shop talk that was so familiar to her after 174 flights between Los Angeles and New York.
"Four million two in the first week . . . It's definitely going platinum . . . Very high concept . . . Perfect for Eastwood . . . Those network bastards . . . Great foreign sales ... So we're getting three new writers . . . The kids will love it!"
Making her way past the development deals, miniseries, tax shelters and dirty jokes, she saw the white box. At first glance it looked like a picnic cooler. It was about fourteen inches long, twelve high and six wide. Made of Styrofoam, it was bound with metal strips and had a pair of sturdy handles double-riveted for extra safety. It was hard to believe that there was a living kidney inside.
The bearded man in the seat beside it appeared to be in his late twenties. Wearing a plain sport shirt, corduroy trousers and low work boots, he was busy reading a thick paperback book. As she came nearer, she could see the title— Chemical Warfare Today. Suddenly he looked up and their eyes met.
"Excuse me. I didn't mean to stare," she apologized.
"Lots of people do. I suppose you want to know how we keep it alive."
She hesitated and nodded.
"It's in a chilled slush," he said curtly and returned to reading.
"I didn't intend to disturb you, Doctor. Can I get you anything?"
"No," he answered without looking up.
Embarrassed and annoyed, she remembered the flight attendants' maxim as she walked away: There was always one nasty son of a bitch on every flight. No reason it couldn't be a rude young physician. It wasn't that rare for doctors to be abrupt and patronizing—especially with women.
There were plenty of pleasant passengers aboard, too, she reminded herself as she entered the Economy-Class section. The middle-aged black man in the uniform of an air force major—the one talking to the pretty little girl—had impressed her with his amiable courtesy from the moment he boarded the plane. He was the absolute opposite of the gruff kidney courier.
"Is there time for another cup of coffee, Miss?" he asked with an appealing smile.
"No problem. We won't land for half an hour. Would the young lady like a soft drink?"
"Orange juice, please" the tanned eight-year-old replied. Somebody was raising this long-haired girl with manners, Samantha Wong thought as she turned and headed for the galley.
The steady rain continued. It kept beating at the windows in heavy sheets. Looking out at the downpour, the girl frowned in concern.
"There's nothing to worry about," the uniformed man beside her said. "We've got a fine crew and an excellent aircraft. Rain's no problem for this machine."
"I've never flown before," the child confessed.
"Well, I have," he answered and pointed to the shoulder patch on his jacket.
"Stra . . . Strategic Air Command," she read aloud. "I guess you know about airplanes."
"A fair amount."
"I'm not afraid," she announced, "but it's good to hear an expert say everything's all right."
"Everything's fine."
Now he noticed her studying the silver metal oak leaves on his shoulders.
"Those mean I'm an officer," he said in answer to her unspoken question. "I'm a major."
"My daddy's an officer, too. He's a captain."
"Which branch of the service?"
"The New York City Police Department. He's going to meet me."
In the nearby galley, Samantha Wong poured coffee as she told another flight attendant about the rude man with the Styrofoam box.
"He's got the manners of a thug."
"Maybe he is one, Sam," the heavy-hipped redhead said.
"Don't be silly, Irene. He's just another arrogant young doctor."
"Have you seen his license? He could be a dope courier. That box wasn't opened by airport security. Who knows what's in it?"
Then the senior pilot's voice sounded from the loudspeakers. Captain Pace asked everyone to fasten their seat belts. There was turbulence ahead.
8
KENNEDY AIRPORT— ¼ MILE
Malone merely blinked as he saw the sign on the right side of the Van Wyck Expressway. The bulk of his attention was divided between driving carefully through the storm and listening to the flow of coded messages on the police radio. Though his car was equipped to pick up a wide range of commercial AM and FM stations, he always listened to the police frequency.
It was more than a job or a custom.
It was his natural habitat.
He'd been born into this world. He was a third-generation New York cop. In 1914, a thirteen-year-old boy named Patrick Joseph Malone had migrated to New York with his family from a small town fifty miles south of Dublin. Pat Malone became a U.S. citizen and a policeman—happy to be both. The firstborn of his eight children, Michael Peter Malone, was even more delighted to join the force in 1945—a month after he left the Marine Corps with three Purple Hearts for wounds received in the Pacific.
Tough and enthusiastic, Mike Malone proved to be a first-class cop. He really was one of "New York's finest." It seemed as if he had both a gift and a passion for this work. Nothing bothered him. Nothing frightened him. Other cops talked with affectionate admiration about Big Mike Malone ... his shrewd knowledge of street crime ... his awesome appetite and matching thirst for beer ... his directness . . . and his courage.
It wasn't only his boldness and swift skill with a pistol that made holdup men, burglars and other thugs shun his beat. Quick-witted and intuitive, he had the instincts of a hunter and used them well in the urban jungle. It was almost as if he could "smell" where the criminals were.
Having survived the bloody fighting on Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, he confronted armed hoodlums without hesitation. Mike Malone made far more
arrests than the ordinary foot patrolman. His extraordinary list of "collars" was noticed, so nobody in the NYPD was surprised when he was eventually promoted to detective and assigned to the Safe and Loft Squad.
Nobody was that surprised by the way he died either. He didn't change that much when he became a plainclothes detective. He was still a hard-driving street cop and ex-marine at heart. One winter night at a stakeout behind a fur warehouse, he went charging up an alley after a fleeing burglar. Big Mike Malone died with two bullets in his heart. Despite a determined and extended investigation, his killer was never caught.
Frank Malone had been a skinny twelve-year-old when his father was shot down. Now, twenty-three years later, he still remembered the terrible night clearly. That was why he hated snow. It had been in a storm like this that his father was murdered. It was the snow that had blurred his father's view of the alley. It was the snow that helped the faceless, nameless hoodlum kill him.
Frank Malone would never forget how small his six-foot-one, 195-pound father had looked in the casket. New York had given Detective Michael P. Malone another citation for valor and an inspector's funeral. Hundreds of cops from six states had been there. Both the police commissioner and the mayor had come to express their condolences to the widow, her five children and the seven television news cameras.
Then the municipal "death benefit" checks began and the media attention ended. Another cop was killed, then two more . . . three firemen perished a few months later. Before anyone knew it, the late Detective Michael P. Malone became last year's hero. Within eighteen months, only the family, a few neighbors and friends and twenty thousand policemen and women remembered. They didn't forget their dead. It was a tribal thing.
Shortly after Frank Malone's seventeenth birthday, his pious mother received a startling letter. Her thousands of sincere Hail Marys and Our Fathers had reached the Lord, who sent help through an organization she'd never heard of. The Jerome Mintzer Foundation had been created by some Jewish millionaire, a merchant prince whose generous gift threw off enough income to fund complete college educations for five or six children of police killed in the line of duty. One of those grants was now available.
Frank Malone, Latin scholar and one of the top quarterbacks in the high schools of the Brooklyn diocese, had been hoping for a football scholarship somewhere. Now he startled his mother by applying to Harvard. There he excelled both academically and athletically, and he learned about a much larger and more diverse world than he'd known.
Good-looking, amiable but disciplined and highly intelligent without a trace of arrogance, Frank Malone was popular with faculty and students of both sexes. It didn't hurt that he threw a football as accurately as his father had wielded a pistol, playing a key role in two winning seasons. His instincts were nearly as good as his father's, and his thinking was better. It was both fascinating and thrilling to watch him coolly pick apart the other teams' defense.
"This policeman's brilliant son has the mind of a safe cracker and the agility of a cat burglar," one sportswriter reported. "He should do well as a tax lawyer."
But Frank Malone didn't go to law school or any other graduate studies that could have kept him out of the armed forces. He went to Vietnam, won a Silver Star for gallantry and turned down a "regular" commission and career. When he got home a month after the city once known as Saigon fell, he declined job offers from the Central Intelligence Agency and a conglomerate headed by his Harvard roommate's uncle.
He had other plans. They startled everyone. He applied to be trained as a New York City policeman. With the help of his father's friends, he was accepted quickly and graduated from the academy at the head of his class. During all the months there he never spoke about his father, college, his experiences in Nam or why a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa would want to be a cop. His mother had thought he did it out of family pride, but she wasn't entirely sure.
JFK INTERNATIONAL
He saw the sign and turned off onto the curved multilane road that led to the huge airport's various terminals.
He'd been happy as a rookie, enjoying the camaraderie and the work. He moved up the ladder steadily. On the way up, he disarmed pipe-wielding maniacs, talked down would-be jumpers, caught vicious rapists, broke up arson rings, arrested muggers and burglars and drunken drivers, busted two of the city's senior dope dealers and earned a reputation as an excellent homicide detective.
He'd been shot by fleeing bank robbers. In three violent confrontations, his .38 Special had dropped criminals trying to kill him. Those men had all survived.
The word spread through the department.
Frank Malone didn't shoot to kill.
Some said that he was such a good marksman that he didn't have to.
Others had different opinions.
Everyone respected him as a cop's cop who didn't lie, grandstand or play departmental politics. Now he was commander of the New York Police Department's elite antiterrorist unit, an unusual assignment for one of the youngest captains on the force. One reason he'd been given the complex and highly sensitive job was his record of solid achievements. Another was the sophisticated style that let him get along so gracefully with foreign diplomats, self-important public officials and legislators and even the sometimes difficult FBI people. Only last week, the commissioner had complimented his "human relations."
Sheila Malone didn't rate them that highly, he reflected as he peered through the snow for the turnoff to the International Arrivals Building. He'd met her the week she'd come east to study at The Actors Studio. After nine years of wedlock she had realized that her husband really meant to stay a cop despite the danger and mediocre salary. She had returned to her parents' luxurious home in the fashionable California community that Frank Malone called The Amaretto Ghetto—Malibu by the Sea.
That had been eleven months ago. She had taken their daughter with her to provide "a more stable childhood" than the girl could expect in the home of a man "foolish enough to risk his life every day." Kate Malone hadn't seen her father since early July, and he was on his way to meet her at Kennedy when she got off TWA Flight 22.
He was worried.
Not about his wife's recent application for an annulment to end the marriage. He couldn't think of anything to do about that. He had tried to hold things together, but they'd been growing apart for several years. What troubled him was the separation from his only child. It hurt him deeply, and she must be suffering, too. Though he told himself that it wasn't his fault, he was wracked with all the anxieties and ghostly guilts of every caring nonresident father.
She was coming in for Christmas—seven days together. Was this what it was going to be like? A week together now and then? Would she blame him for the separation? Would she blame herself as children often did? Would pain and helpless anger . . . time and distance . . . drive them apart forever? Would she someday call another man father?
It had happened to two of Frank Malone's friends. He'd seen it tear them to pieces, he recalled grimly as he swung the green sedan into the parking lot. Looking at his watch, he saw that he was ten minutes late for his appointment in the control tower. That wasn't too bad for this weather, and he could still get over to TWA's terminal in time.
When he parked the car and stepped out into the falling snow, his stomach tightened involuntarily. He was known for his cool logic and self-control, but he couldn't help his body's reaction. It remembered the night that Detective Michael Malone had been shot down in that alley. Maybe it always would.
Captain Frank Malone shrugged and walked through the slow stream of cars to the entrance of the International Arrivals Building. As he reached the safety of the sidewalk, he noticed the small white panel truck directly in front of the main entrance. That was a No Parking area, so the truck had to be something special. Now he saw the name MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL lettered on one side of the vehicle, and nodded.
It must be here on some medical mission.
It was perfectly all right to park a hospital vehicle here f
or a while.
There couldn't be any crime in that.
9
MALONE didn't notice them when he entered the terminal.
He wasn't expecting danger here.
The first thing that seized his attention was the colorful array of many nations' flags on the glass-walled balcony atop the escalator. The second was the bustling crowd and its noise.
Scores of people waiting for relatives and friends to come through Customs filled the large high-ceilinged chamber. The sibilant French of tall, elegant black women from Haiti, the staccato dialogue of two knots of earnest Koreans, the laughter of a cheery Colombian family and the hard-edged syllables of a cluster of young Swedes collided with the rhythms of Russia and the loud nasal tones of New York.
The Dixie drawl of four well-fed executives in boots and wide-brimmed cowboy hats and the pulsing Yiddish of a dozen Hassidic Jewish men in traditional black fedoras added to the cosmopolitan wall of sound. Only a handful of bored-looking limousine service drivers, each clutching a small sign bearing the name of those they'd come to meet, stood silent in the milling throng.
A few moments after Malone walked into the building, he paused beside the information booth on his left to take a cigar from his jacket. Standing beneath a big, multicolored, Calder mobile hanging from the roof, he lit the dark corona and puffed on it.
He still didn't see them.
Then his restless policeman's eyes swept the crowd again.
There they were.
Two of them were chatting only a few yards from him. Wearing what looked like a Sony Walkman headset, another loitered in front of the ground transportation counter. A fourth, near the escalator, was attired in the visored cap and dark suit of a chauffeur.
Four?
There had to be more than that.
They took no chances. There must be others whom he didn't know lurking nearby, all armed and ready to strike. There could be shooting here very soon. Glad that his daughter would arrive at another terminal, Malone zigzagged his way to the escalator. According to the instructions he'd received, these moving metal steps were the most direct way to his rendezvous in the control tower.