by Tom Clancy
As he charged toward the group, the snipers across the street at the Coast Guard Station opened fire, hitting one of the terrorists brandishing a machine gun while his partner whirled and directed fire toward the rooftops across the street. The first guy’s head jerked to the right, and a fountain of blood, flesh, and pieces of skull arced in the air.
Moore focused on the launcher guy, running and firing, striking the guy in the arm, the chest, the leg, as the terrorist lost his balance, turned—and a white-hot flash swelled from the launcher’s barrel, which had drifted down toward the rows of parked cars.
With a gasp, Moore threw himself onto the grass median to his right as the missile raced across the lot and banked hard, finding the nearest heat source: the idling engine of the terrorists’ own yellow van. The missile’s warhead contained HE-fragmentation, the high explosive detonating on impact with the van’s hood despite the minimum-distance arming sequence. Jagged pieces of steel, plastic, and glass flew in all directions as the van lifted six feet off the ground, the blast wave knocking Moore’s SUV onto its side and doing likewise to the car on the other side of the van. At the same time, the van’s gas tank ruptured, sending a pool of burning fuel spreading outward as the vehicle crashed back onto the ground with an echoing thud and a clatter of more glass. The stench of that burning fuel and the black smoke rising in thick clouds caught the attention of drivers out on the highway, and as Moore clambered to his feet, a taxi plowed into the back of a limousine, bumpers crunching. With ringing ears, and squinting against the smoke burning his eyes, Moore rushed to the launcher guy, who now lay on the ground, clutching his wounds, the green Anza launcher still hot and smoking, abandoned near his leg.
Moore dropped to his knees beside the man. He grabbed the guy by the shirt collar, ripped off his balaclava, and spoke through his teeth in Urdu: “Where’s Samad?”
The guy just looked at him, his eyes full of red veins, his breathing more labored.
“WHERE IS HE?” Moore screamed.
Shouting erupted around him—the SWAT unit converging and trying to rescue someone from the car that had been blown over.
Towers hustled over to the other two terrorists, one lying supine on the pavement, the other on his side.
The launcher guy’s eyes went vague; then his head fell limp. Moore cursed and shoved him back to the ground. He groaned his way up to his feet. “This was just one team!” he shouted to Towers. “Just one! There could be more!”
Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)
Cell-Phone Waiting Lot
9011 Airport Boulevard
Samad smiled tightly.
Every airport in the entire world was about to be shut down, nearly fifty thousand of them.
Every pilot in the sky, every last one of them, was about to receive orders to land immediately—
Even the fateful six, who would, of course, be unable to comply with those instructions.
Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, and San Antonio …all major American cities whose first responders would confront sheer horrors unlike any they’d experienced before, airports whose TSA employees were about to realize that their “layers of security” policies had been ineffectual, that Rahmani’s teams knew exactly how to act so as not to alert the behavior-detection officers. With flawless documents and nothing suspicious in their luggage, they’d been allowed onboard. Airport security teams, police, and local law enforcement authorities would be reminded that they could not secure the ground beneath so many flight paths.
Most of all, the American public—the infidels who polluted the holy lands, who endorsed leaders of injustice and oppression, and who rejected the truth—would turn their heads skyward and bear witness to Allah’s power and might, fully alive before their eyes.
Samad opened his door and got out. He held the iPhone up to the airliner in the distance, which was cutting through the sky with a deep and breath-robbing rumble. Confirmation.
He returned to the van, pulled on his balaclava, received the AK-47 handed to him by Niazi, then cried, “Yalla!” and swung around and wrenched open the van’s back door.
Talwar climbed out with the Anza on his shoulder while Niazi came around, holding the second missile.
The woman in the Nissan Pathfinder with the flag of Puerto Rico hanging from her rearview mirror glanced up from her cell phone as Samad raised his rifle at her and Talwar turned to sight the airliner.
They were seconds away from launch, and while others in the lot began to look up from their phones, not a one of them made a move to get out of his or her car. They sat there, sheep, while Talwar counted aloud, “Thalatha! Ithnain! Wahid!”
The MK III tore away from the launcher, leaving a dense exhaust cloud in its wake. Before Samad could take another breath, Talwar and Niazi had counted down again, and Niazi was helping his comrade reload the weapon.
Torn between watching the missile’s glowing trajectory and covering his men, Samad shifted around the van once more, swinging the weapon wildly on the cars in a show of force. The sheep began to react: mouths falling open, utter shock reaching their eyes.
Samad glanced back at the plane, at the ribbon of exhaust sewn across the sky, at the missile’s white-hot engine a second before—
Impact!
DEVASTATION
Tucson International Airport (TUS)
Cell-Phone Waiting Lot
East Airport Drive
6:46 p.m. Mountain Time
JOE DOMINGUEZ was at the airport to pick up his cousin Ricky, who was flying in from Orlando to spend a week’s vacation. Dominguez was twenty-four, an admittedly scrawny kid who made up for it with a keen wit and argumentative nature. He was the only son of Mexican immigrants who’d come legally into the United States back in the late 1970s. Both parents had eventually become citizens. Joe’s father was a framer and drywall installer with a crew of ten who worked for a half-dozen commercial homebuilders in the Tucson metropolitan area. His mother had started her own maid service when he was a boy, and she now managed more than forty employees who cleaned both commercial and residential properties; they even had their own fleet of cars. Meanwhile, Joe had finished high school with little desire to attend “regular” college and had instead moved temporarily to Southern California, where he’d enrolled in Ford Motor Company’s ASSET (Automotive Student Service Educational Training) program to get his AA degree and become a certified Ford Automotive Technician. After two long years of taking courses in engine control systems, brakes, steering/suspensions, transmissions, and fuel and emission control systems, he’d graduated with a 3.3 GPA. He returned home to Tucson, where he’d been hired by Holmes Tuttle Ford Lincoln Mercury. He loved being a grease monkey and had eventually saved up enough money to buy his dream ride: a black Ford F-250 FX4 pickup truck with six-inch lift kit and BFGoodrich Mud-Terrain T/A KM2 tires. His friends referred to the truck as the “black beast,” and those brave enough to come along for a ride found they needed either a ladder or good flexibility to climb into the cab. Sure, the truck intimidated the girls he dated, but he wasn’t looking for timid women, anyway. He wanted an adventurous girl. He was still looking.
As he sat there, the diesel engine thrumming, the radio set low so he could hear Ricky’s call, he did a double take at the three men getting out of their Hampton Inn shuttle van parked across the lot in the next row of angled spaces. They were dressed like Mexicans but were taller, and all three wore black ski masks. While two guys argued with each other, a third went around the back to open the rear doors.
The two arguing broke off, and one pointed to the sky, where a Southwest jet was just lifting off.
Then the other guy reached past the van’s open side door and handed his partner a rifle with a curved magazine, an AK-47.
Joe Dominguez blinked. Hard.
Now both guys had rifles and joined the third guy, who lifted to his shoulder a green missile launcher like the kind Dominguez had seen in Schwarzenegger movies. The launcher man swung
his weapon toward the climbing airliner while the two riflemen swept their barrels across the rows of cars, covering him.
The cell-phone lot was packed, and a quick glance to his left revealed that the woman waiting in her small sedan was pointing at the men and yelling something at the teenage girl seated beside her.
This, Dominguez needed to remind himself, was not a daydream. These motherfuckers—because that’s what they were—planned to shoot down that plane!
His heart raced as instincts took over. He threw the truck in gear, jammed his snakeskin boot down on the accelerator pedal, and took the black beast forward with a great roar and cloud of diesel exhaust. He steered directly for the guy with the launcher, covering the distance between them in three seconds.
The other two bastards reacted immediately with gunfire. Dominguez ducked behind the wheel as rounds punched through his windshield. First came a thump, then a much louder crash as he plowed into the back of the shuttle van. He stole a look up—
The other two, who’d gotten out of the way, fired once more into his truck, bullets pinging off the doors. He ducked again and let out a scream.
Then …more gunfire from outside. Different guns. He chanced a look through his side window, saw two men with pistols, one wearing a black cowboy hat, running straight at the terrorists and emptying their magazines. Dominguez, a registered gun owner himself, finally remembered that fact and reached into the center console of his truck. He dug out his Beretta, worked the safety, chambered a round, then jumped out of his truck.
He crouched down near the front wheel, and there beneath his engine lay the missile-launcher guy. He’d cracked his head open on the pavement but was still alive, groaning softly.
Gunfire continued popping, and in the fray, Dominguez watched as the terrorist glanced up at him, then reached toward his waist.
Dominguez cursed and fired a single round into his head.
“We’re clear, we’re clear!” someone shouted behind him. “They’re all down!”
He craned his neck, and the man wearing the cowboy hat was hovering over him. His gray beard was closely cropped, and the diamond earring in his left ear seemed to match the twinkle in his eye. His collar was bound by a bolo tie featuring a long-horn steer head with turquoise eyes. “I saw what you did,” he said. “That got my attention. I just can’t believe it.”
The cowboy proffered his hand, and Dominguez took it. He stepped away from the truck, then glanced back at his pride and joy.
Holy shit. The black beast was riddled with bullet holes. He gasped and began to feel a pinching sensation in his left arm. He pushed up his sleeve and noticed a cut across his biceps and a piece of skin flapping.
“Damn, son, you got grazed! I’ve never seen one that close!”
Dominguez didn’t know what was happening, but as he touched the wound he began to feel nauseated, and then it hit. He’d almost died. He leaned over and threw up …
“Aw, that’s all right, boy, you let it all out.”
Sirens lifted in the distance.
And from inside the truck, his cell phone rang. Ricky …
US Airways Flight 155
Phoenix to Minneapolis
Mr. Dan Burleson had settled in to enjoy the terrific roar and awe-inspiring vibration of the Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines when three events occurred in succession.
First, they left the runway without incident and the fasten-seat-belt sign remained lit.
Second, the scared-looking guy beside the college girl suddenly threw off his seat belt and literally climbed over the girl, stomping on her lap, to get into the aisle.
Third—as Dan thought, What the fuck?—the guy began screaming for people to turn their electronic devices back on and video-record him. He raised his voice even more as some shocked passengers lifted their cell-phone cameras. A fiery light came into his eyes, and he spoke in a strange lilt, the words heavily accented but clear enough:
“People of America, this message is for you. The jihad has returned to your soil because we are free men who do not sleep under oppression. We are here by the grace of Allah to fight you infidels, to purge you from our Holy Lands, and to remind you that the false prophets in your White House who wage war against us to keep their corporations busy are responsible for your deaths. This is the recompense for unbelievers who attack Allah. This is the truth. Allahu Akbar!”
As one of the flight attendants who’d been buckled in at the front of the aircraft came rushing down the aisle, the crazy guy whirled, reached into his pocket, and produced his cell phone, which he held tightly in one hand, allowing it to jut out from the bottom of his fist like some pathetic knife. He reared back and ran toward the approaching attendant, a lithe blonde no more than five feet tall who couldn’t have weighed more than 110 pounds.
Well, fuck this shit, Dan thought. He threw off his seat belt and bolted up into the aisle, charging after the guy, as two more flight attendants appeared behind the first.
And that’s when the plane shook violently, as though it’d passed into a powerful downburst. A flash of light came through the windows near Dan’s seat, and he flicked a quick glance back. Smoke and flames were whipping from beneath the wing, and worse: Most of the engine was now gone.
Meanwhile, the punk terrorist in the aisle was only a few seconds away from attacking the flight attendant.
Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)
Cell-Phone Waiting Lot
9011 Airport Boulevard
A few of the cars farther away from the van began to turn around and try to exit the lot, tires squealing a moment before two of them crashed into each other, blocking one exit.
Samad fired a warning salvo into the air as a fat Hispanic guy with a beard that seemed to have been drawn in marker on his face shouted at him.
Behind Samad, Niazi was helping Talwar load the second missile, and without delay—their count going exactly as planned—Talwar fired again.
The airliner had already taken the first hit. Its engine had exploded and was issuing a long trail of smoke as the plane rolled toward the damaged side.
Three, two, one, and praise Allah, the second missile, which Samad thought might take out the other engine, homed in on the hottest heat source, the first engine still on fire.
It was simply unbelievable to watch the MK III cut a secondary path through the first missile’s smoke trail, a tiny spot of light growing fainter for a second until a magnificent flash, like the first impact.
Because the plane had rolled, this second strike tore up through the flaming engine, blasting apart the wing. Part of it hung on for a second, then ripped off and boomeranged away beneath fountains of flaming and sparking debris.
Samad was enthralled by the image, unable to move, until the man who’d been yelling at him regained his attention. The guy had gotten out of his car and drawn a handgun. At that, Samad gasped and opened fire, full automatic, hammering the guy back into his low-rider car, blood spraying across the roof and windows.
And then, as quickly as it all happened, it was over. Samad leapt into the back of the van, where Talwar closed the door after him. Niazi was at the wheel now, and they sped away, riding up across the grass along the lot’s perimeter, then bounding over the sidewalk and bouncing onto the street. They raced up to the first corner and turned sharply. Once there, they slowed with the traffic so as not to distinguish their vehicle from any others. They headed toward the parking garage five minutes away, where the second car and driver were waiting.
If only they had time to watch the airliner crash, but he’d assured his men that they’d be able to watch it over and over on TV, and that in the years to come, cable channels would create documentaries detailing the genius and audacity of their attack.
“Praise God, can you believe that?” cried Talwar, glancing up through the windshield, trying to watch the airliner’s trajectory as it now began to dive inverted toward the ground at about a forty-five-degree angle.
“Today is a great da
y,” cried Niazi.
Samad agreed, but he couldn’t help wishing that he hadn’t burned that photograph of his father.
110 Harbor Freeway Southbound
Los Angeles, California
Abe Fernandez cursed as the guy in front of him jammed on his brakes. It was too late. Fernandez plowed into the back of the guy, who was driving a piece-of-shit old Camry. But then some asshole smashed into the rear bumper of Fernandez’s small pickup, and they were all piling up, one after another. He screamed, turned down the radio, and pulled his car over to the shoulder, his front bumper still attached to the other guy’s car.
Growing up in downtown Los Angeles had allowed Fernandez to see a lot in his short life of nineteen years: car accidents, shootings, drug deals, high-speed chases …
But he had never witnessed anything like this.
He realized why everyone was stopping, why everyone was crashing, because in the sky to the west came a surreal sight.
He blinked hard. Not a dream. Or a nightmare.
A giant commercial airplane, US Airways, with its blue tailfin and pristine white fuselage, was missing a large portion of one wing, rolling out of control, and streaking directly toward them. What sounded like metal actually screaming and the plane’s remaining engine joining in made Fernandez’s jaw drop. In his next breath he smelled the jet fuel.
Reflexively, he threw open his door and started running back along the freeway, along with dozens and dozens of other drivers, the panic reaching their mouths, the cries of hysteria sending chills down Fernandez’s spine as he felt the heat of the aircraft’s approach.
He charged past a kid wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt who was videoing the airliner with his iPhone, as though it were all happening on YouTube and he weren’t about to be killed. The kid didn’t move as Fernandez screamed at him, nearly knocked him over, and when he looked back, the airliner—upside down, dark liquids streaming from its torn wing, its single engine now coughing, struck the freeway at about a thirty-degree angle.