by Tom Clancy
“Tell them to hold back!” hollered Towers. “We don’t want them running. Keep them back!”
Moore had the airport programmed into the windshield-mounted GPS, so the unit began showing and calling out the turns: west on Viewridge toward Balboa, hang a left, get on to I-15, then merge later on with I-8. Freeway driving during rush hour left him white-knuckling his way around slower-moving vehicles. The airport was about fourteen miles away, a twenty-minute drive without traffic, but once they got onto the San Diego Freeway to head south, the ribbons of brake lights and hoods gleaming in the sun stretched to the horizon.
And that’s when Moore took to the shoulder and hauled ass, leaving a cloud of debris in their wake. They rumbled as long as they could over fast-food garbage and pieces of tractor-trailer tires until they were forced to weave back into traffic to make their next exit.
Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)
Cell-Phone Waiting Lot
9011 Airport Boulevard
Samad’s mouth had gone dry as they pulled into the lot. He checked his watch: 5:29 p.m. local time. He glanced over to Niazi, seated in the van’s passenger seat. The young man’s eyes grew wider, and he licked his lips like a snow leopard before the kill. Samad craned his head back to Talwar, who had the Anza propped on his shoulder and was praying quietly. The van’s engine thrummed, and Samad tapped a button, lowering his window to breathe in the cooler evening air.
He reached into his pocket and unwrapped a piece of chocolate. He examined it as though it were a precious gem before popping it into his mouth.
The piece of paper lying across his lap, the one Rahmani referred to as the target report, had cell-phone numbers handwritten beside each of the cities:
Los Angeles (LAX)
Flt#: US Airways 2965
Dest: New York, NY (JFK)
Departure: June 6, 5:40 p.m. Pacific Time
Boeing 757, twin-engine jet
202 passengers, 8 crew
San Diego (SAN)
Flt#: Southwest Airlines SWA1378
Dest: Houston, TX (HOU)
Departure: June 6, 5:41 p.m. Pacific Time
Boeing 737–700, twin-engine jet
149 passengers, 6 crew
Phoenix (PHX)
Flt#: US Airways 155
Dest: Minneapolis, MN (MSP)
Departure: June 6, 6:44 p.m. Mountain Time
Boeing 767-400ER
304 passengers, 10 crew
Tucson (TUS)
Flt#: Southwest Airlines SWA694
Dest: Chicago, IL (MDW)
Departure: June 6, 6:45 p.m. Mountain Time
Boeing 737–300, twin-engine jet
150 passengers, 8 crew
El Paso (ELP)
Flt#: Continental 545
Dest: Boston, MA (BOS)
Departure: June 6, 7:41 p.m. Central Time
Boeing 737-300
150 passengers, 8 crew
San Antonio (SAT)
Flt#: SkyWest Airlines OO5429
Dest: Los Angeles, CA (LAX)
Departure: June 6, 7:40 p.m. Central Time
Canadian CRJ900LR, twin-jet (tail)
76 passengers, 4 crew
The planes would be lifting off within minutes of one another, and all of Samad’s crews had finished checking in to say that their equipment was ready and that all of their flights were running on time, despite some earlier concerns about summer storms. Samad no longer had any uncertainties. He’d realized that even if he gave up, walked away, guided by the guilt imposed upon him by the memory of his dead father, that Talwar and Niazi would go on without him, that the others would go on without him. There was no stopping the jihad. He would die a fool and a coward. Thus before leaving for the mission, he had lit a match and had burned the photograph of his father, had left the ashes in the bathroom sink. They said their afternoon prayer, and then Samad had driven away from the apartment with narrow eyes and a clenched fist.
An airport police car cruised through the lot, the officers searching for unattended vehicles. Samad lifted his cell phone and pretended to speak. As he’d seen before, the other drivers were entirely consumed by their electronic devices, and there was an eerie calm that settled over the lot, broken momentarily by the next flight thundering on by.
5:36 p.m.
Samad brought up the iPhone app as their secondary source of identifying their target plane. He’d come to discover there was a thirty-second delay in the information the app gave him, but that didn’t matter. All Talwar needed to do was sight the target, and the missile would do the rest.
5:37 p.m.
The seconds were minutes, the minutes hours, as his pulse began to race. The sky had turned a bluish yellow, streaked by beams of the setting sun, with only a few finger clouds to the east. They would have a spectacular and unobstructed view of the launch.
His phone vibrated. And there they were: the text-message reports from their team inside the airport.
US Airways Flight 155
Phoenix to Minneapolis
6:42 p.m. Mountain Time
At the age of sixteen, Dan Burleson had soloed in a Cessna 150 over Modesto, California. He was flying planes before he had a driver’s license. He’d saved all of his lawn-cutting money for two years to take flying lessons. He’d grown up in the Salinas Valley and had been mesmerized by the crop-duster pilots swooping down to deliver their cargo. He knew that’s what he wanted to do. For the next three decades he pursued his passion for flying, spraying cotton fields in Georgia, serving as an airborne traffic reporter in Florida, and flying banking cargo and medical specimens out of the Southeast. He piloted single-engine planes, Cessna 21 °Centurions, and twin-engine cargo planes, Beechcraft Baron 58s. He’d experienced every conceivable equipment failure imaginable, flying on one engine and nearly crashing when his plane was flipped over during a storm. He could hear the rivets popping and felt certain he was going to die.
All of which was to say that Mr. Dan Burleson was not your average commercial airline passenger. He had a keen interest in what was happening in the cockpit and could tell you when the pilots were switching command to the flight computer to literally take over the plane during the climb out to altitude. The pilot would input turns and altitude directions via keyboard tabulation or by rotating a dial to the direction desired. For example, Airport Traffic Control might call with “Delta 1234, turn right to 180 degrees.” The pilot would rotate a dial on the FMS (Flight Management System) to 180, and the plane would start turning in that direction to meet that instruction received from ATC while the plane was being controlled by the FMS computer. Every time he flew, Dan would sit there imagining what was happening in the cockpit. Call it force of habit.
On this particular evening, he was seated in 21J, the exit row, with the window at his right shoulder. At over six-feet-five and three hundred pounds, he never had much choice in seat selection. Exit row was the name of the game. He was on his way to Minneapolis for a weeklong fishing trip with two high school buddies who promised him trophy-sized smallmouth bass. The wife had given Dan the okay, and his grown son, who’d been invited, had been forced to work instead.
They were taxiing along toward the runway, and Dan leaned back and glanced across the aisle: a college-aged girl was reading a textbook with the word Aesthetics in the title, and beside her, a dark-skinned young man, perhaps Indian or Middle Eastern, sat quietly, his head lowered, his eyes closed. He looked scared. Pussy.
“Please slide your tray tables to their upright position …”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dan said with a groan.
San Diego International Airport (SAN)
Cell-Phone Waiting Lot
North Harbor Drive
The fifty-space San Park cell-phone lot was located across a tree-lined drive from the Coast Guard Station’s main gate and its rows of tiled-roof buildings. The lot was a rectangular strip of pavement with a single row of angled parking spaces set along tall rows of shrubs and a chain-link fence, beyond whi
ch stood hangars and other airport service facilities.
“Meyers split up his people. He’s got six across the street at the Coast Guard Station, and he’s got another four getting up on the roofs of the hangars to the north,” said Towers. “The red Nissan is parked at the far end, south side. We’re the team moving in.”
“Not you, just me,” said Moore, pulling into the lot and taking the nearest spot to their right beside a yellow Park-n-Ride van with dark tinted windows.
“I’m good,” argued Towers. “I’m coming.”
Moore winced. “You’re the boss, boss.” He unzipped his jacket so he’d have quick access to his shoulder holster, then hustled out of the SUV, keeping close to the shrubs, Towers tight to his shadow. A few SWAT team operators crawled catlike up the backside of the Coast Guard Station’s roof. Moore caught movement up on the roofs of the hangars to their right, and for just a second he saw a head pop up, then vanish. These SWAT unit guys were hard-core assaulters, breachers, and sniper/observers, outfitted for war with Kevlar helmets, goggles, bulletproof vests, MOLLE (Modular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment) gear buckling with attached equipment pouches, and H&K MP5 submachine guns — the standard-issue rifles for everyone but the snipers, who fielded the Precision Arms.308-caliber sniper rifle. One of Moore’s buddies from SEAL Team 8 had left the Navy to become an FBI SWAT team member, and he’d schooled Moore in their weapons, tactics, techniques, and procedures. He’d even tried to recruit Moore, who at the time was being heavily courted by the CIA. The point was, Moore felt comfortable supported by these determined and highly trained operators.
The sign posted at the lot’s entrance warned of a one-hour time limit and that vehicles must remain running — this to discourage long-term parking and loitering, and to create a sense of urgency in drivers all paying exorbitant fuel prices.
Consequently, as Moore and Towers approached the brick-red Nissan Versa, he saw immediately that the car was empty, its engine off. His shoulders shrank. The men hurried forward, and in frustration Moore rapped a fist on the driver’s-side window.
Two SWAT team operators, along with a third man, middle-aged, gray sideburns, came around the corner and jogged toward them. The only tactical gear this older man wore was a vest and a helmet.
“Towers? Moore?” he called. “I’m Meyers. We empty here or what?”
Moore whirled around, studying the lot, his gaze panning the long row of cars and empty spaces, like ones and zeros, bits and bytes. Why would these guys leave a car in the cell-phone lot? Were they coming back for it within the hour? Were they concerned that they’d get towed? Where were they now?
He was just checking his watch, 5:42 p.m., when the back door of the yellow Park-n-Ride van beside their SUV slammed open, and out stepped a man wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, and a black balaclava concealing his face. He was shouldering a missile launcher.
Two more similarly dressed men burst out behind him, carrying machine guns.
The launcher guy rushed back toward Harbor Drive, positioning himself between the street and a tree to his left. He lifted his weapon into the air—
And there it was, his target, a Southwest twin-engine jet roaring into the sky, its blue-and-red fuselage glinting as the landing gear began folding away.
Moore observed this in the span of two breaths before he screamed, “The van!”
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!
42 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.