To the Death am-10

by Patrick Robinson

  A bus braked and was hit in the rear by a taxi. Two cops on duty heard Danny yell, “CLEAR THE PARKING LOT RIGHT NOW! I’M HOLDING A FUCKING BOMB!”

  The two cops saw him running for the center of the roadway and charged out into the traffic. A limo driver hit a truck. An SUV mounted the sidewalk. And Danny Kearns kept running, dodging, sidestepping, and now he was shouting, yelling over and over, “GET OUT OF THE PARKING GARAGE — VACATE THE AREA!”

  In front of him was the low concrete wall of the garage’s first floor, and Danny prepared for the greatest throw of his life. He could see that the area he wanted was empty, like a yawning end zone. In Danny’s mind, Tom Brady, the Patriots’ legendary quarterback who was still going strong at age thirty-five, was urging him on. The massed ranks of the Patriot fans were roaring him home.

  He adjusted his grip on the briefcase, fumbling for the handle. Then he straightened up, swiveled, spun around, and leaned back, a lot more like a javelin thrower than a quarterback. And then he let fly, hurling the briefcase into the garage, hurling it as near to the center as he could.

  He watched it fly, whipping over the roof of a Cadillac and then tumbling to the concrete floor. Danny, still shouting, still imploring everyone to get the hell out of the garage, hit the deck, right under the low wall that separated the garage from the roadway. He covered his head with his arms, suspecting correctly that if the terrorist had any clue what he was doing, the timing device would be overridden by any major impact on the briefcase.

  Thirty-two seconds later, the case detonated with a stupendous blast. It sent four cars into the air, blew twelve more sideways up to ten yards from their parking spaces, and knocked down four concrete- and steel-reinforced support pillars. The second floor of the parking garage collapsed onto the first. The third floor was punctured by a 25-foot-wide crater, and possibly forty cars were effectively totaled. However, only twelve people had been in the direct line of the blast and were quite badly injured by flying debris. No one was dead.

  The entire area was enveloped by smoke and flames from burning gasoline, and the unmistakable smell of cordite hung on the air. Logan International Airport had been transformed into a battle zone, and Officer Pete Mackay was right in the thick of it.

  While Danny Kearns had been removing the bomb, Pete Mackay had pounded through the terminal after the man in the tan-colored jacket. At the second emergency door, Pete had busted through to the sidewalk and kept running, praying that his quarry would make an exit at the next automatic door, and knowing that he, Pete, could run a hell of a lot faster outside than anyone could inside the packed terminal.

  He reached the doors before the blast. And as he did so, the man who had left his briefcase in the care of Elliott Gardner came running out. It was, perhaps, the moment for which Pete Mackay had waited all of his life. He slammed that terrorist with a block that would have made a grizzly bear gasp.

  The man cannoned back into the door and crashed to the ground. Pete Mackay had his hands around the man’s throat before he hit the ground, his head crashing into the sidewalk. But that was when the briefcase detonated, and as it did so a third man entered the fray, another Middle Eastern-looking character who burst out of a black limo on the sidewalk and delivered a vicious kick to Mackay’s ribs.

  Pete fell back, temporarily winded, grabbing for the man’s ankle. But by now the first terrorist was up and running, heading for the black car. Pete was still on the ground when the second man tore himself away and rushed for the driver’s-side door. He piled in, revved, and accelerated. The light tan jacket could be seen right beside him.

  Pete Mackay climbed to his feet, ran into the road, and leveled his machine gun. The car drove straight at him, but Pete held his ground, pumping bullets through the windshield until the last second, when he dived clear. The car veered out into the stalled traffic. The driver was dead, but he slumped forward and rammed down the accelerator. The vehicle lurched diagonally, hit the rear end of a Hertz bus, and flipped over, exploding in a fireball.

  Danny Kearns was now up and heading across the traffic to help his partner. But the left-hand side of the car was an inferno. Danny kicked out the passenger window, and together they hauled clear the terrorist in the partially burned tan-colored jacket and dragged him away.

  Within minutes, police cruisers from all over the city were headed out to Logan to assist with the total evacuation of the terminals. Incoming flights were diverted to Providence, Rhode Island, and only outgoing flights that had already left the gate were permitted to taxi out to the runway and take off.

  Officers Mackay and Kearns assumed a loose command in Terminal C, and in effect they just turned the long passport lines and security lines toward the main doors and told everyone to leave the airport with all speed. Plainly the police department had no idea whether this was another 9/11, and the airport blast might be the harbinger of a whole series of attacks. No one was taking any chances. Logan International was history as far as this day was concerned, and according to security forces there was no possibility of its opening again for at least forty-eight hours.

  The intense bush telegraph that hits local media newsrooms when something this big happens was instantly into gear, and by 8:45 A.M. the entire city knew there had been a big bang at the airport. Terrorist-related. Right now, the police were denying access to television crews, which traditionally managed to get in everyone’s way during emergency operations, as this now was.

  The media on these occasions are apt to assume an air of slightly irate self-importance on the basis that they are a great deal more significant than the firemen trying to extinguish the ferocious blaze in the parking garage and the army of cops trying to stop anyone else from getting blown up, or perhaps even killed.

  But how could this have been allowed to happen? How the hell could the security forces have been so incompetent? Do you expect heads to roll? The public has a right to know. what’s the status out here?

  At this moment, the police decided to dispense with all that and allowed no broadcasting crews into the airport. Nonetheless, news of the terrorist bomb at Logan International had hit the airwaves in every corner of the country — and, within a few minutes, every corner of the world, regardless of time zones.

  National security went to the highest level. The National Security Agency at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, was vibrating with communications, and at five minutes before 10 A.M. the president’s national security adviser was in the Oval Office to brief the boss on this latest outrage — an estimated thousand lives saved by the heroic actions of a couple of Boston cops.

  Al Qaeda, however, had unquestionably struck again, even if it had turned out to be in the parking garage. Every police officer in the entire country was on heightened bomb alert.

  Paul Bedford, the Democratic Party’s right-of-center president, was an ex-U.S. Navy lieutenant. As commander in chief of the United States armed forces, he still found it more comfortable to consult with the high-ranking generals and admirals of his younger days than he ever did with professional politicians.

  There was a myriad of reasons for this: possibly the unquestioning patriotism of the military, perhaps their impeccable good manners and respect for high office, or maybe their clarity of thought, the military’s instant grasp of what can be done, what could be done, and what must be done. Paul Bedford admired the way the admirals and generals did not confuse the three.

  Today he was due to have a private lunch in the White House with Admiral Arnold Morgan, the former head of the National Security Agency and former national security adviser to the president. Admiral Morgan had effectively put President Bedford into power a couple of years previously. And Bedford still, in unguarded moments, called the admiral “sir”—because, in the president’s mind, it was still young navigation officer to nuclear submarine commander. And it always would be. Yessir.

  Admiral Morgan would arrive at noon, which was not, by the way, to be confused with thirty seconds past the hour, nor indee
d with one minute before the hour. Noon was noon, goddammit. And Paul Bedford always looked forward to the moment his desktop digital clock snapped over to 1200 from 1159. The door would fly open as the admiral let himself in, unannounced, called the end of the forenoon watch, and snapped “Permission to come aboard, sir?”

  The president loved it. Because it not only brought back distant memories of nights spent at the helm of a U.S. Navy guided missile frigate, racing through the Atlantic dark, but it heralded the arrival of the man he trusted most in all the world.

  This morning, however, events were crowding in upon him. These half-crazed al Qaeda fanatics had apparently had a serious shot at blowing up one of the busiest airport terminals in the country, and according to the CIA this latest Islamic offensive might not be over yet.

  His new national security adviser was the dark, angular Professor Alan Brett, former lecturer at both Princeton and West Point, former colonel in the United States Army, and a firm believer that in the past thirty years only George W. Bush had had the slightest idea about showing the proper iron fist to Middle Eastern terrorists.

  Paul Bedford did not believe that Alan Brett considered him to be soft, but he always sensed that the former infantry colonel erred on the side of a hard, ruthless response to any actions taken against the United States. President Bedford had no problem with that. Besides, Alan Brett’s motives were unfailingly high.

  A half hour ago, the professor had briefed him fully on the explosion at Logan. He had also produced a preliminary CIA report, which recommended no one drop their guard, that al Qaeda might not be finished on this day.

  A nationwide security clampdown was in effect. All East Coast airports were either closed or closing, once the incoming passenger jets from the western side of the Atlantic had safely landed. Every aircraft coming from the eastern side of the ocean had been turned back to Europe. They had already shut down JFK in New York, Philadelphia, Washington Reagan and Dulles, Atlanta, Jacksonville, and Miami. Only the smaller airports were allowing transatlantic flights to land, mostly stranding thousands of passengers hundreds of miles from their destinations.

  If the al Qaeda operatives had been bent on causing death and chaos, they had achieved the latter in spades. Large-scale death had been averted thanks to the actions of Pete Mackay and Danny Kearns, whose photographs were currently in the hands of President Bedford.

  The president was anxious to speak to Admiral Morgan, but right now he could only listen to the incoming intelligence, and the news was not all bad. The passenger wearing the tan-colored jacket, dragged from the wreckage by Officer Kearns, had been shot in the upper arm and suffered burns on his left hand. He was alive and conscious under heavy guard in Mass General Hospital. According to the name on the Egyptian passport he was carrying, he was Reza Aghani. His cohort, the driver of the getaway vehicle, was dead.

  The CIA, however, was in permanent communication with the National Security Agency over at Fort Meade, and according to Professor Brett they had a lead — one that he believed made the plot more complicated and a lot more dangerous.

  0955 Friday 14 January 2012 National Security Agency Fort George G. Meade, Maryland

  Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Ramshawe, assistant to the director, was, by any standard, on the case. It was usually possible to ascertain his degree of interest in any given case, or surveillance report, by the general condition of his office. Traditionally it looked like a mildly dangerous minefield with small(ish) piles of documents placed strategically around the floor, the more pertinent ones in closer proximity to the desk. Today it looked like a medium-range guided missile had just come in.

  The Ramshawe floor contained more detail on the activities of al Qaeda terrorists than you’d find in the seething cauldrons of Islamic fervor in Baghdad. That pile of data was close to the desk. Real close. The lieutenant commander had been in the building since 0500, after a heightened alert had been issued on the strength of reports from the Surveillance Office phone-monitoring section.

  Ever since 9/11, the agency had insisted on strict intelligence phone observation on every single call made from any of the bin Laden family’s former residences in the city of Boston.

  This stringent policy was forged in private consultations with the former NSA director, the president’s closest confidant, Admiral Arnold Morgan, who wanted it enforced—regardless of who the hell now lived there, regardless of laws about rights of privacy, human rights, last rites, or any other goddamned rights, including the pursuit of happiness.

  There was one residence in particular, in the Back Bay area, that had constantly given cause for concern. The Surveillance Office had picked up so many cell phone calls that appeared to emanate from Baghdad, Tehran, or the Gaza Strip, they’d given up being startled. None of them made any sense, none of them had ever proved alarming, and none of them had ever amounted to a hill of beans.

  But today’s message, received on a cell in the very small hours of the morning, seemed more specific than anything recently transmitted. The recipient was unknown to the Boston Police Department, but he was of Middle Eastern appearance, a man called Ramon Salman, who had been photographed but never interviewed. And that cell phone call had been transmitted to Syria from a block of apartments on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue, from a suite of rooms formerly occupied by Osama bin Laden’s cousin.

  This small sequence of coincidences was inflamed by the wording of the one-way transmission. Mr. Salman was the only voice. There was no acknowledgment from the other end of the line. However, that was kids’ stuff for the National Surveillance Office, which had, at the turn of the century, routinely tapped into Osama’s phone calls from his cave in the Hindu Kush, direct to his mother in Saudi Arabia.

  They pinpointed this morning’s call to a position near the center of Damascus. The translation from Arabic to English read:

  “D-hour Charlie Hall 0800 (local). Reza in line — exit with Ari regroup HQ Houston. Flight 62 affirmative.”

  Lt. Commander Ramshawe had every code-breaking operator in the agency hitting the computer keys; fingers were flashing downward like shafts of light. The huge glassed bulletproof building quivered with activity. But, after eight hours, no one had cracked the clandestine communiqué directed, almost certainly, at one of the al Qaeda or Hamas strongholds in the Syrian capital.

  Worse yet, Ramon Salman had vanished. Really vanished, that is. When Boston police had smashed their way into his apartment at 7 A.M., they had been greeted by empty cupboards, a couple of bathrooms stripped even of toothpaste, and a kitchen bereft of any form of nourishment. The phone was cut off, the television cable input was dead, and even the answering machine was disconnected. Sayonara, Salman.

  As Lt. Commander Ramshawe put it on the phone to his boss at 7:30 A.M., “Beats the living shit out of me, Chief. But I don’t bloody like it. And who the hell’s Charlie Hall when he’s up and running?”

  At approximately 0809, Jimmy had a clearer idea of the significance of the message. Charlie Hall was plainly code for Terminal C at Logan, right? D-hour was 0800, and a couple of right fucking nutters had just tried to blow up the freakin’ airport. Holy shit!

  That apartment on Commonwealth Avenue plainly held the key to this latest terrorist assault on an American city. At least it used to. But despite the presence of a dozen forensic guys combing through the place for clues, it was now just another dead end. Ramon Salman had vanished and taken his secrets with him. Maybe the police would pick him up somewhere. Maybe not. America’s a very big place in which to get lost, and the Arab had probably taken off around 0300, six hours before the airport closures. J. Ramshawe knew the murderous little bastard could be anywhere.

  He also knew that even the massive resources of Crypto City, the insiders’ name for the National Security Agency, would not be effective against a foe who had disappeared off the charts. So far as Jimmy could tell, the only chance was to get after the wounded Reza Aghani and persuade him to talk.

  Meanwhile, so far a
s Jimmy was concerned, the rest of the message was nothing short of a bloody PITA—that’s Australian for pain-in-the-ass. And Jimmy, born in the USA of Aussie parents, retained at all times the rich Aussie accent and the quaint, colorful inflections of the outback west of Sydney, where his family traced their roots. His office was where Clancy of the Overflow met James Bond. G’day, Admiral — no worries.

  Meanwhile, the second part of the transmission to Syria was giving him a whole stack of worries. Reza was accounted for, and Ari was dead. But the “headquarters in Houston” was a complete blank, and that was where Reza was supposedly headed. The Texas police were concentrating a search for Ramon Salman in the Houston area, but there was no Flight 62 on any airline going anywhere near the southern Texas area.

  The number 62 of course could have meant anything, and the code-breakers in Crypto City had come up with over seven thousand computerized possibilities, which included just about every takeoff in North America that week, including the Space Shuttle.

  The wording did suggest that Flight 62 was the one the terrorists were supposed to be on, and that probably had meant their leaving the country ASAP. And yet, in Jimmy’s mind, he saw that last short sentence, Flight 62 affirmative, as something separate. Like a possible second hit.

  He had been ruminating for a half hour on this and had twice tried to speak to his mentor, the Big Man, Admiral Morgan himself. But Mrs. Morgan thought Arnold was in Norfolk with Jimmy’s boss, Admiral Morris, on board a carrier, but he would be at the White House later for lunch with the president if Jimmy’s business was vital.

  “Might not be vital now at 11:30,” he said as he put down the telephone. “But it sure as hell might be at lunchtime.”

  Meanwhile, back in the Oval Office, President Bedford had just been briefed that Reza Aghani was conscious, the bullet had been removed from his arm, and he was drinking tea, resolutely refusing to utter one word to any of the six police officers currently guarding his room both inside and out.