by Larry Bond
Northwest Flight 352
WHAMM.
Captain Jim Freeman’s first sign of trouble was a loud bang from the left and behind. The 757 shuddered abruptly, bouncing around in the air as though its port wing had slammed into something. Startled, he checked the altimeter. That was impossible. They were over the river and still at a thousand feet.
The pilot’s eyes raced over the array of gauges and dials, looking for the problem. Lord. There it was. The rpm gauge on the port engine was dropping fast. The 757 dipped left, and its airspeed began falling.
Freeman instinctively pushed his throttles forward, increasing power to both engines. He snapped out a quick, “Power loss on the port engine, Sue!”
“Understood.” Susan, his copilot, stopped monitoring the plane’s altitude and distance from the runway and started a frantic check of her instruments. That bang suggested an explosion of some sort, but it was better to go by the numbers. Her eyes flicked first to the fuel flow gauge. No problem there …
The 757’s port wing was still dropping.
Freeman clicked his radio mike. “National, this is Three-Five-Two. Declaring emergency. Repeat, declaring …”
WHAMM.
Another explosion rattled the plane, but this time the resulting shudder went on and on, growing rapidly worse. Both Freeman and Lewis heard a wrenching, tearing screech from the wing.
Halovic’s SAM had functioned perfectly, literally flying up the tailpipe of the airliner’s port engine before exploding. Fragments from the blast damaged the afterstages of the compressor fan, resulting in a rapid power loss. But jet engines are relatively tough, and the plane could still have landed safely.
Nizrahim’s missile finished the job.
The Igla-1 blew up only a few feet from the port engine pod. Pieces of shrapnel peppered the pod’s metal skin and sliced into the engine inside. They cut the fuel line and wrecked the digital controls, but most important, they weakened the afterstage of the compressor fan again. Spinning at more than ten thousand revolutions per minute, the fan tore itself and the rest of the engine apart.
Freeman saw the port engine gauges run wild and then go dead. Still fighting the wing as it dropped, he looked aft and saw the ruin of the port engine, now little more than a pylon with sharp-edged scraps of metal attached. Damn it.
“Give me full power on the right!” Freeman screamed. He strained on the control yoke, trying to get the port wing up. They were sliding off to the left, veering off course toward downtown Washington. He could see the gleaming white roof of the Lincoln Memorial ahead. Oh, Christ.
He silently cursed their slow speed. They were too close to the ragged edge of the 757’s envelope. The shattered engine pylon was now a liability instead of an asset, creating drag instead of power.
“Gear up!” he shouted.
“It’s already up,” Lewis replied desperately. She’d raised the wheels in an effort to reduce the drag.
Behind them, they could hear shouts and screaming through the bulkhead. “Pass the word back to brace for impact.”
Freeman had reached the end of a distressingly short list of things to try. He looked at their airspeed. Still falling. They weren’t going to make the runway.
Along the Potomac
Halovic followed the dying 757 with satisfaction. The airliner was lower now, and canted to the left. Black smoke trailed from its damaged wing, and even at this distance he could see the shattered left engine.
“Oh, my God!”
The horrified shout from behind them brought the Bosnian out of his trance. He whirled around and saw a tall, stout, middle-aged man in a tan topcoat staring upward at the stricken plane. A small dog, a tiny white poodle, tugged unnoticed at the leash in the American’s hand.
The man’s eyes flashed from the falling aircraft to the SAM launchers still on their shoulders. Horror turned to sudden, appalled knowledge and then to terror. He dropped the leash and turned to flee.
Alexander Phipps had not run anywhere in his life for years. The wealth accumulated over a lifetime of shrewd business dealing had ensured that other people did the running—not him. Now all that money meant nothing.
Gasping in panic, he dodged off the canal park path and crashed into the trees. He heard shots behind him and felt a slug rip past his ear. It seemed to pull him along and he ran faster. Another bullet gouged splinters off a tree in front of him.
Phipps skidded on the wet grass and fell forward onto his hands and knees. An impact from behind threw him facedown in a flood of searing, white-hot pain. The world around him darkened and vanished.
Halovic watched the American shudder and lie still. It had been Nizrahim’s shot that felled him.
The Iranian trotted over to the slumped figure and fired once more—this time into the man’s head. Then he calmly holstered his weapon and walked back toward Halovic. He stopped a few feet away and asked flatly, “What about the dog?”
The little white poodle had emerged from its hiding place and now stood nuzzling its fallen master, whimpering softly. The Bosnian shrugged. “Leave it.”
He turned away, striding toward the missile launchers they’d thrown aside to hunt down the dead man. It was time they were on their way.
Northwest Flight 352
The crippled airliner was down to three hundred feet above the Potomac.
Freeman yanked desperately on his controls and felt the 757 roll right a hair—not much, not more than a couple of degrees. It was just barely enough.
The white bulk of the Lincoln Memorial flashed past the cockpit’s portside window and vanished astern. They were heading back for the center of the river. Then he felt the controls go mushy under his hands and grimaced. He was out of airspeed and out of options.
The jetliner dipped again, sagging toward the water.
Susan Lewis screamed suddenly, staring straight ahead.
Freeman looked up and saw the long, gray, car-choked span of the Fourteenth Street Bridge filling the entire width of the cockpit windscreen. He sighed softly. “Oh, shit.”
Northwest Flight 352 slammed nose-first into the bridge at more than one hundred knots and exploded.
The Pentagon
The thundering, prolonged sound of the titanic blast barely half a mile away penetrated even the thick concrete walls of the Pentagon’s outer ring.
On his way back down to the ILU’s Dungeon after another unsuccessful sparring match with his counterparts in other DOD intelligence outfits, Colonel Peter Thorn paused with his hand on the staircase and stood listening. What the devil was that?
A young naval rating thundering down the stairs behind him supplied the answer. “A passenger jet just hit the Fourteenth Street Bridge, sir! Saw it out my window!”
The young man kept going.
Jesus. Thorn stood stunned for a split second and then took off after the sailor, taking the stairs down two at a time. He didn’t stop to think about it. If anybody on either the plane or the bridge had survived the impact, they were going to need help, and soon.
By the time he reached the ground floor, the hallway was filling up with dozens of men and women, most in uniform, some in civilian clothes. All were racing toward the Pentagon’s northeastern exit, the one closest to the crash site. He joined them.
A blinding cloud of thick black smoke hid most of the Fourteenth Street Bridge from view until Thorn crested the highway embankment and gained a clear line of sight. What he saw was worse than anything he had imagined.
Orange and red flames danced across the entire length and width of the span, fed by thousands of gallons of spilled aviation fuel and gasoline. The cars and trucks that had once crowded the bridge were unrecognizable—mere heaps and lumps of blackened, torn, and twisted metal. The impact itself had gouged an enormous crater out of the roadway at the midpoint across the Potomac. Only one scorched wing of the passenger jet remained visible—obscenely protruding above the water near a buckled bridge support like a giant shark’s fin.
A sm
all cadre of Pentagon security officers, Virginia state troopers, and U.S. park policemen were already on the scene, frantically and futilely trying to fight the nearest fires with handheld extinguishers. More and more civilians from the vehicles bottlenecked on the jammed highway were rushing forward to lend a helping hand.
Against all Thorn’s expectations, there were survivors emerging from the tangled chaos on the bridge. He could see them stumbling and staggering toward safety. Most were bleeding, their clothing in tatters. A few were on fire—human torches running madly in agonized circles amid terrifying shrieks and screams. People dashed toward them carrying coats and blankets to douse the flames.
Beneath the smoke pall, the kerosene-stained waters of the Potomac bubbled as debris from the sunken fragments of the airliner’s fuselage broke free and popped to the surface. Bright orange flotation seat cushions, jagged pieces of cabin ceiling insulation, and other unidentifiable odds and ends bobbed in the river.
Thorn came to the western end of the mangled bridge and stopped, staring downward into the black fog, straining to see clearly. Was that someone out in the water, drifting facedown in the midst of all the other debris? He caught a flash of long golden hair and made his decision without conscious thought. Nobody else was in a position to see what he saw or to act in time.
He stripped off his uniform jacket, kicked off his shoes, and dove straight into the Potomac—straight down into the black, icy waters.
For a terrible instant, Thorn feared the frigid cold had paralyzed him—that he would never taste the air again. But a single frantic kick brought him to the surface. He sucked in a welcome lungful of oxygen and spat out the sickeningly sweet taste of the jet fuel clogging his mouth and nostrils. Then he started swimming, covering the distance toward the bobbing head he’d glimpsed so faintly with a powerful crawl stroke. As he swam, he tried to keep his bearings with quick glances toward the shattered bridge.
Twenty yards. Forty. He was starting to tire now, weighed down by the cold, the water saturating his shirt and trousers, and the kerosene burning its way down into his lungs. Where was she? Had she already been dragged under?
Thorn pushed a charred seat cushion out of his path and began treading water, pushing himself above the surface as he spun slowly, peering in all directions. There! He spotted the tangle of golden hair drifting just a few yards away.
He lunged out and grabbed the floating woman from behind. With his right arm locked around her chest to pull her face out of the water, he used his left to turn around and kicked out for shore, sculling vigorously against the slow current pushing him down toward the burning Fourteenth Street Bridge. The distance, the icy cold, and the weight dragging at his hip all fused in one long, nightmarish journey without a clear beginning and without a visible end.
Thorn could barely move by the time he reached the shallows. He was only dimly aware of the sudden rush of volunteers who came thrashing into the Potomac to help him out onto the long grass at the water’s edge. He lay shuddering for long moments, gasping for air. When an Air Force sergeant knelt down to drape a spare jacket over his shoulders, he recovered enough to lever himself to his knees.
“What about the woman? Is someone helping her?” he heard himself ask hoarsely.
The sergeant’s face fell and he looked away. “I’m sorry, Colonel,” he said softly. “It was no good, sir. You couldn’t have done anything for her. No one could have.”
Thorn stared past the noncom to where the blond-haired passenger lay faceup, staring blindly at the sky. She was quite young, he realized. And quite pretty. But there was nothing left below her thighs but a few dangling scraps of bloodless flesh.
On the Virginia shore, near the Fourteenth Street Bridge
The rescue crews were still hard at it well into the night, working under hastily rigged floodlights to gather corpses and personal effects. Park Police and Coast Guard patrol boats motored back and forth across the searchlight-lit Potomac as they fished more bodies and more debris out of the river. Teams of divers in heavy wet suits were already conducting a coordinated search for the aircraft’s black boxes—the 757’s flight data and voice recorders.
Helen Gray climbed wearily out of the official car she’d borrowed and made her way slowly down the steep embankment. The smell of burned metal and flesh hung everywhere—in the air, on the roadway, on the grass, and in her clothes and hair. Earlier during that long, terrible day, she’d led a cadre of FBI volunteers in desperate rescue efforts on the D.C. side of the river. Now she’d taken the longer way around via the still-intact Memorial Bridge to find the man she loved.
Exhausted soldiers still plainly shaken by what they had witnessed directed her toward a small clump of senior officers gathered near the water’s edge.
One, a gray-haired Navy captain, nodded when she asked after Peter. “Colonel Thorn? Yeah. He’s around here somewhere, ma’am.” He looked up, squinting further down the riverbank against the floodlights. Then he pointed toward a lone figure staring out across the water. “That’s him.”
Helen nodded her thanks and moved on.
Peter Thorn looked up at her approach. His drawn face held a look of anger and sorrow stronger than any she had ever seen before. “This was deliberate?” he asked grimly.
She nodded. “Several hundred eyewitnesses have reported seeing two or three distinct missile trails merging with the plane. And we know where the terrorists fired from. The canal park. They killed an innocent bystander there. We found the body this afternoon.”
His jaw tightened.
“I’m afraid it gets worse, Peter,” she said gently. “Somebody blew up the main fuel storage tanks at Dallas/Fort Worth International two hours ago. Several hundred thousand gallons of jet fuel went up in seconds. They’re still trying to fight the fires and make some estimate of the damage and casualties, but it’s pretty bad.”
She paused briefly before delivering the rest of her news. “The local papers here and in Dallas have already had phone calls claiming responsibility for both attacks. They seem genuine.”
“From the goddamned New Aryan Order?”
Helen shook her head. “No. These came from a group called the African Liberation Front. They claimed they were retaliating against the ‘Nazi white establishment.’”
“Christ. That’s all we need.” Peter looked away again, out toward the floodlit river. His eyes were full of pain. “I became a soldier to fight the kind of bastards who would do something like this. The kind who shoot down airliners full of women and kids just to make some lousy political point. But now it’s happening right here at home, and I can’t do a single thing to stop it.”
She moved closer, into the circle of his arms. “I know,” she said softly.
He held her tighter, softly stroking her hair—taking what comfort he could from her presence and her warmth.
CHAPTER 15
REACTION TIME
NOVEMBER 15
JSOC headquarters, North Carolina
Officers from three separate services and several different units filled the JSOC’s main conference room. Delta Force officers mingled with their counterparts from the Navy’s SEAL Team Six, the Air Force’s air commando units, the Army’s Ranger forces, and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Night Stalkers. While they waited for Major General Sam Farrell to appear, they chatted quietly among themselves, exchanging theories about why they had been summoned on such short notice.
Colonel Peter Thorn finished talking to Bill Henderson, his successor at Delta’s A Squadron, and moved off toward the water cooler. His throat still hurt from the kerosene he’d swallowed in the Potomac, but the Pentagon doctors had cleared him for continued duty, with the sternly worded proviso that he significantly increase his fluid intake for the next seventy-two hours.
“Attention.”
The single, crisp order cut off every conversation in mid-sentence. Every man turned toward the entrance to the conference room and came to attention.
&nb
sp; The commander of the JSOC appeared there suddenly, flanked by his top operations officer, Colonel Raymond Ziegler. The general had a grim, set expression on his face. Ziegler’s face was studiously blank.
Farrell waved them into the chairs surrounding a long, rectangular conference table. “Please take your seats, gentlemen. We have a lot of ground to cover this afternoon.”
The general strode to the head of the table while Thorn and the other officers found their assigned places. He didn’t waste any time on the regular briefing platitudes. “I just got off the phone with the Joint Chiefs. As of 1500 hours today, all elements of this command are on full alert. All leaves have been canceled, and my staff is already issuing an immediate recall order to all affected personnel.”
Despite the earlier speculation, Thorn was surprised. Before he’d flown down to Pope Air Force Base earlier that morning he’d seen no signs of unusual activity at the Pentagon that might explain this sudden order. Washington’s policy makers, the FBI, and the American people were still in a state of shock over the twin disasters at Dallas/Fort Worth and National Airport. Had someone stumbled across the headquarters of a terrorist cell big enough to warrant all this military attention?
Farrell’s next words dashed that faint hope. “Gentlemen, the President has authorized a number of emergency measures in a coordinated effort to safeguard air travel over the capital and this country’s other major cities. This operation has been designated SAFE SKIES.”
The general was careful to keep his tone neutral, but Thorn could sense that he disagreed with aspects of the plan he was busy laying before them. He’d known Sam Farrell for too long to be taken in by his poker face. “As approved by the White House this morning, Operation SAFE SKIES has several key provisions.