On the left side of the hallway were a series of administrative offices: first came the secretary’s, occupied during weekday business hours by a sweet, white-haired lady named Mrs. Sanderson, who was maybe sixty years old and had worked at the facility as long as anyone could remember. This being a Sunday morning, her office was empty.
Beyond Mrs. Sanderson’s office were aligned the rest of the staff offices, beginning with that of the air traffic manager, Marty Hall. Hall’s name was just similar enough to the host of the popular game show Let’s Make a Deal, Monty Hall, that it was his fate to be forever known as Monty—at least when he wasn’t around.
Shane lifted the carafe off the Mr. Coffee machine and sniffed warily. He could really use another cup of coffee, but the stuff inside the facility’s pot was usually so old it had the consistency and taste of used motor oil. Today was no exception, and Shane grimaced and returned the carafe to the hot plate. He decided he wasn’t that desperate for caffeine.
He left the kitchen and wandered down the hallway, moving toward the sound of voices coming from Marty Hall’s office. He stopped at the open doorway and glanced inside. The facility manager was sitting behind his desk, and a half-dozen people Shane did not recognize were seated in folding metal chairs arranged in a semicircle around Hall’s desk. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, and for a moment no one noticed Shane.
When it seemed like this stalemate might go on forever, and mindful that this was his day off, Shane cleared his throat. Finally Marty Hall noticed him and waved him in. Everyone stopped talking and turned to stare at the new arrival. Hall said, “Gentlemen, this is my controller, Shane Rowley, the man who witnessed the crash while on his way to work last night.”
Shane nodded at the group while Hall continued. “Shane, this is the NTSB Accident Investigation team. They only just arrived about fifteen minutes ago. I’ll let each member of the team introduce himself.”
They all did, Shane shaking hands with each in turn, and then the lead investigator pointed to an empty chair and said, “We’re still awaiting the arrival of the Air Force representatives. Obviously, they wouldn’t be part of the investigation if a military aircraft hadn’t been involved, but it’s their airplane and they will take part as well. It will undoubtedly complicate matters, but we welcome their involvement.”
Shane sat, amused. It was plain by the tone of the investigator’s voice that he was anything but welcoming of more investigators, but that he knew full well there was nothing he could do about it. “How long before you expect the Air Force guys to show up?” Shane asked, picturing Tracie Tanner fast asleep in his bed back home. He felt a strong attraction to the beautiful—if enigmatic—young woman, not that he expected anything to come of it. She had made abundantly clear her desire to leave Bangor in her rearview mirror, and as soon as possible. But if nothing else, he wanted to see her one more time to say goodbye in person, and the longer this interview took, the less likely that was to happen.
“They’ll be here soon,” the lead investigator said, glancing at his watch. Shane noticed for the first time that each of the men surrounding Hall’s desk had a plastic nameplate pinned to the lapel of his suit, like children on the first day of school, and the man addressing him was named Paul Fiore. “The Air Force investigators are flying here from Andrews Air Force Base and are in the air as we speak. But I’d like to start now and then catch the other folks up when they arrive. You’ll probably have to go over your statement more than once, but my guess is you’re going to be telling the story a few times, anyway.”
“That’s fine,” Shane said, although it really wasn’t. There was no way he was going to get out of here any time soon.
“So,” Fiore said, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head. “Take it from the top. You were driving to work last night and the damned B-52 fell out of the sky next to you?”
“Not exactly,” Shane said. “This part of Maine is so heavily wooded I didn’t actually see the airplane crash. I caught a flash of it almost directly overhead, much too low to be on a normal approach to Bangor, and then it was gone. A second or two later—barely enough time to register what I had seen—I heard and felt the impact and knew immediately what had happened. That was when I pulled my car to the side of the road and went into the woods to see if I could find the accident site.”
The questioning continued, each investigator asking for clarification of various points at various times. After maybe twenty minutes, Fiore got around to the subject Shane had expected him to address right off the bat: “I understand you pulled a survivor out of the wreckage. I admire your bravery, Mr. Rowley. It is imperative we speak to this young woman also, and as soon as possible. We’ve checked all of the hospitals within a fifty-mile radius of Bangor and no one has any record of her. Where is she now?”
This was the question Shane had been dreading. He understood the need of the investigators to question her. After all, who better to describe the circumstances of an airplane crash than someone who had been aboard the plane? But by the same token, the girl had made it quite clear she was in serious trouble and did not want to be found.
Shane didn’t believe for a second Tracie Tanner had done anything to contribute to that B-52 going down, but he also wasn’t about to admit the subject of their search was even now sleeping, injured, in his bed. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth to speak, still with no idea what he would say, when a loud Crash! out in the hallway diverted everyone’s attention.
And all hell broke loose.
Shane craned his head toward the door, as did everyone in the room, just in time to see fellow controller Jimmy Roberts, on duty in the radar room this morning, stomp angrily past the office door in the direction of the facility entrance. “Who the hell do you think you are? And what the hell is up with all the noise?” he asked, continuing down the hallway and disappearing from view.
Shane heard a phht sound, followed in rapid succession by another, and Jimmy Roberts stumbled backward into view. He wavered unsteadily in the hallway before crumpling in a heap outside the office door. A spreading ring of crimson stained the front of Jimmy’s shirt, and he lay on the floor gasping for breath.
Chaos erupted in the office. Chairs toppled over as everyone stood, jostling and banging into each other, some moving to help the injured man, others backing away from the door.
A half-second later, a pair of large men filled the doorway, standing over the fallen Jimmy Roberts. They were dressed in suits remarkably similar to the ones worn by everyone in Hall’s office except Shane, and he had the absurd thought that maybe more investigators had arrived.
Then he saw their handguns.
The two investigators closest to the door saw the guns as well and they shoved backward, hard, plowing into Marty Hall, who had gotten up and rounded his desk at the sight of the injured Jimmy Roberts. He toppled directly into Shane, knocking him to the floor. Shane pushed immediately to his feet, still stunned by the suddenness of the onslaught. The men in the room were cursing and shouting.
Shane looked toward the doorway and saw the intruder to the right scan the room. The man wore thick glasses and his eyes widened when he looked at Shane. He nudged his friend, gesturing in Shane’s direction with his gun, which was big and black and fitted with a sound suppressor on the business end.
“Everybody sit down,” the man on the left said with an Eastern European accent. He was muscular, with a blocky head that seemed to melt directly into his shoulders. “No one needs to get hurt.”
And Shane exploded. He knew he should do as he was told, slow things down, try to figure a way out of this, but Jimmy Roberts was his friend, they had started out as air traffic control trainees at Bangor on the very same day six years ago, had worked traffic together, gone drinking and fishing together, and double-dated with their wives, back before each man’s marriage had crumbled. Jimmy Roberts was his friend, and Jimmy Roberts was lying on the floor at the feet of these men, dying or already dead.
“No one needs to get hurt?” he spat angrily. “It’s too late for that, wouldn’t you say? Or do you get a mulligan on your first victim? Do you only start counting after number one?”
“Easy, Shane,” Marty Hall said softly.
The man with the glasses snarled, “Shut up.”
Shane realized he had taken two steps forward without thinking. He was lost in his rage and his grief and wanted nothing more than to get his hands on the man who had taken Jimmy down. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he was making a mistake, but at this exact moment, he just didn’t care.
And in that instant, things went from bad to worse.
The guy with the glasses was saying something about everyone calming down and shutting the fuck up, that they only wanted to talk to Shane Rowley—Shane thought, how the hell do they know my name?—and then they would go away and leave everyone alone, and that was when Paul Fiore, the lead NTSB investigator, leapt forward and let loose a roundhouse right, catching the guy doing the talking in the side of the head. The man went down like a sack of Aroostook County potatoes, and the room, which had gone silent, erupted in chaos again.
The no-neck guy pivoted and fired. The slug caught Fiore in the face and his head exploded in a spray of blood, and everyone was screaming and scrambling for cover, trying to escape the hail of bullets as the guy continued shooting. The man Fiore had punched pushed himself up off the floor, shaking his head, as the square-headed guy began picking off investigators one by one, like shooting fish in a barrel, Shane thought. He dived behind Hall’s desk, banging heads with the facility manager.
Hall was panting like he had just run the Boston Marathon. “What do we do now?” he wheezed.
“Good question,” Shane said, trying desperately to think. He knew they had just seconds left before everyone in front of the desk would be dead and the men with the guns came for them.
He looked around for something they could use as a weapon. The metal chairs were scattered around on the floor and Shane wondered how long he might survive if he charged the men using a chair as a makeshift shield. Not long, he thought. He squinted against the sunlight streaming in through the window behind Hall’s desk, making it almost impossible to see.
The sun.
Coming through the window.
And Shane knew what to do.
He told Hall, “I’ll go first, just in case there are still shards of glass sticking out of the window frame. My body should pull most of them out as I go through, but we’ll only have a second or two before the guys with the guns react. You gotta follow right behind me.”
Hall said, “What are you talking about?” but there wasn’t time to explain. The gunshots were dying out and the screams were dying out, which meant the investigators were dying out. They were out of time. Shane lifted one of the metal chairs right beside the desk and took a deep breath, then stood quickly and heaved it through the picture window, then dived out the jagged opening right behind it, praying Hall had understood.
He landed on the chair and felt a slash of pain as his elbow struck the metal seat. He rolled onto his back and looked expectantly up at the window, waiting for Marty Hall. The air traffic manager appeared at the window and grabbed hold of the frame, but he was moving much too slowly. He wasn’t going to make it.
Shane screamed “Never mind climbing, just dive out! Dive, get out now!” He watched in horror as Hall began stuttering like a marionette, bullets peppering his body, slamming it down onto the window frame.
“Goddammit!” Shane screamed in fear and frustration, watching as his boss slumped half-in and half-out of the window, bloody and unmoving.
There was nothing he could do for Marty Hall, or for anyone inside the building. The slaughter had taken no more than a minute, although it had seemed much longer, and Shane knew he had just seconds left before the men with the guns appeared at the window and took him out, too.
He rolled to his feet and started racing toward the parking lot. He would use the cars for cover and try to make his way to his Beetle. Maybe he could start it up and get down to the cop who had set up the roadblock at the access road. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was a hell of a lot better than waiting around to die.
Shane sprinted into the lot, half expecting to be shot in the back, and ran straight into a third man in a suit. The man was holding a gun fitted with a sound suppressor that looked identical to the ones carried by the two men inside the facility, and he placed it squarely against Shane’s forehead as he skidded to a stop.
The man eyed him coldly and Shane knew he was going to die.
25
May 31, 1987
9:10 a.m.
Tracie jammed the accelerator to the floor and turned the stolen Datsun toward Bangor International Airport. The little car was built for fuel economy, not speed, and it reacted sluggishly.
Tracie pounded the steering wheel in frustration, wishing she had commandeered a livelier car, but she hadn’t wanted to risk hot-wiring a vehicle equipped with an alarm system, and the ancient cream-colored Datsun, pocked with rust spots and plastered with bumper stickers, had seemed the safest choice.
She had glanced around the apartment parking lot, trying not to be too obvious, and when she hadn’t been able to spot any observers, picked up a brick-sized rock and tossed it through the driver’s side window. Then she flipped the door lock, opened the door, and threw a blanket she had taken out of Shane’s apartment across the seat.
From there it had taken less than thirty seconds to hot-wire the car—chalk up one for CIA training—and chug out of the parking lot. She guessed Bangor International was roughly a ten-minute ride from Shane’s apartment, and the woman broadcasting the live news report had said Shane was scheduled to be interviewed by the NTSB investigators at the ATC facility at nine. It was now shortly after nine. She hoped she wasn’t already too late.
Tracie knew the KGB had operatives working in many major U.S. cities. Assuming Boston was one of those cities, or even New York, the KGB’s agents could have driven up Interstate 95 overnight. They could be here right now. They could have seen, or learned about, the news report detailing Shane’s actions last night, as well as the NTSB’s intention to interview him today. They likely would even have learned where and when the interview was to take place. He would be a sitting duck.
The entrance to Bangor International Airport loomed ahead on the left. Tracie wheeled the Datsun onto the access road, cutting across two lanes of oncoming traffic, serenaded by squealing brakes and honking horns. She ignored them and accelerated toward the control tower.
Two-thirds of the way along the access road she could see a police cruiser slewed across the road, hazard lights flashing, no doubt to prevent the media and curious onlookers from gaining access to the control tower complex. Tracie suddenly realized she had no idea what she was going to say to the cop to avoid being turned away. She toyed with the idea of simply blowing past the cruiser, but the Datsun was so underpowered the idea was laughable. She would be overtaken by the powerful police vehicle before she ever got close to the facility.
She would have to think of something. If worse came to worst she would pull her weapon on the officer and force her way in, and worry about the repercussions later. She slowed to a stop next to the cruiser. The cop was nowhere in sight. She suddenly got a very bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.
She lifted herself up as high as she could in the driver’s seat and craned her neck, looking out the passenger side window into the cruiser. That was when she saw the officer. He was sprawled across the front seat, unmoving, blood staining his uniform shirt.
Shit. Tracie put the gearshift into neutral and yanked on the emergency brake, then leapt out of the car and hurried to the cruiser. She pulled open the door and knelt, placed two fingers gently on the side of the cop’s neck. Felt for a pulse. Found none.
He was dead. Shot multiple times at close range.
The KGB was already here.
Dammit
.
The cop’s body was still warm, so they hadn’t been here long. Tracie considered calling an ambulance and rejected the idea. The officer was dead and the wasted time might cost more lives.
She cursed again and sprinted back to the Datsun. She slammed the door and gunned the car toward the control tower, racing along the decrepit access road, driving much too fast. The car bounced and jolted, slamming down into potholes so deep she was half afraid an axle might snap. She kept going.
The car sped around a corner, and a couple of hundred yards away Tracie could see the control tower and FAA base building. She slowed slightly, trying to come up with some kind of action plan, when a side window in the base building shattered. The glass exploded outward as a metal folding chair flew through the window, followed a heartbeat later by a tumbling body. It looked like Shane Rowley.
He dived through the window and landed on top of the chair, then rolled onto his back and looked up at the window. A second man appeared. The man was older, and as he tried to climb out, his body began to stutter as bullets ripped into him from behind, and then he slumped across the frame.
Shane scrambled to his feet and ran along the narrow alleyway between the base building and the control tower. He burst into the parking lot and ran straight into a man holding a silenced handgun. The man was facing away from Tracie, but she could see him raise the gun and shove the barrel into Shane’s forehead.
And she didn’t hesitate.
She drove her foot to the floor and aimed the Datsun straight at the pair. The gunman didn’t seem to have heard the sound of the little car’s engine, or perhaps didn’t comprehend the significance. Shane was facing the vehicle and Tracie hoped he would understand her intent.
The car leapt forward and the two men grew steadily larger in the windshield. The gunman seemed to be talking, asking Shane a question or maybe threatening him. Nothing in Shane’s demeanor gave away the fact that a speeding car was hurtling toward them. At the last moment Shane dived to the side, just as it seemed to occur to the man in the suit that something was wrong.
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