by Diane Capri
The watch supervisor, Dean Winters, leaned his head around the opening to the inner ring and said, “Okay, everybody, the comedy act’s over; let’s keep it down, shall we?”
As the controllers working the operational positions once again began transmitting to the airplanes inside their sectors, Dean beckoned Nick into the inner ring and to his desk. When he had moved inside, Dean told him, “Take a seat. We need to talk.”
Nick rolled a chair over to the supe’s desk and sat down. He had expected to be grilled by someone in management upon his return and had figured it wouldn’t take long. He didn’t blame them—his wife had just died, and the FAA would want to make absolutely certain he was in the proper frame of mind before assigning him to work a sector where one wrong move could spell disaster. Generally speaking, CYA was the rule of the day in FAA management, and no one would want to be known as the guy who sent the controller with the dead wife back to working airplanes if he then fucked up and ran two of those planes together. It would be a real career ender for the supervisor who made that decision.
“Nick, I’m really sorry about Lisa. How are you holding up?”
“Thanks. I’m okay, I guess. I’ve never had a wife up and die on me before, so I don’t really know how I’m supposed to react. I don’t know whether I’m behaving typically or not. I’ll tell you this, though: as much as I appreciate the well-intentioned gestures of support from everyone, I really need to get back to some semblance of normalcy; you know what I’m saying?”
“I can understand that,” Dean replied, nodding, “but are you sure you’re ready to come back to all this? After all, you took only a week off; that’s not very much time to grieve.”
“Oh, I’m sure. I need this. I need to start working airplanes again, if for no other reason than it will help take my mind off what happened. If I were to wait until I was done grieving, you’d probably never see me again, because I don’t think I’ll ever be done.”
“I don’t know …”
“Listen, sitting around my empty house with the ghost of my wife, waiting for her to come walking through the front door when it’s never going to happen, is not doing me any good. Accomplishing something positive and contributing even a little bit to the operation of this facility will go a long way toward helping me get back on my feet, believe me.”
Dean searched his eyes for a moment and then sighed. “I understand. If you want to ease back into it and work a slow position every now and then, just let me know. But I think I would look at things just the way you do if anything were to happen to Cheryl. Anyway, welcome back.”
“Thanks a lot. I appreciate it, probably more than you know. Is there anything else, or can I get to work?”
“Actually,” Dean said, “there is one more thing. You’re scheduled to work the midnight shift this Saturday night with Fitzgerald. I need to go over a couple of things with you before then.”
“What things?”
“President Cartwright is flying into Logan early Sunday morning.”
“Okay, well, you said I have the mid shift on Saturday night. Shouldn’t you be having this conversation with the Sunday day shift guys?”
“No, by early Sunday morning, I mean like 5:00 a.m. when you and Larry are still going to be the only Boston controllers here.”
Nick shrugged. “That’s fine; I’ve worked Air Force One before plenty of times. So has Larry. It won’t be a problem.”
“I know that. But someone in charge has to plug in and monitor the controller whenever he’s working the president’s plane.”
“That’s not a problem, either. Who’s been designated as CIC on that shift?” Controller in Charge was the designation given to the air traffic controller assigned the responsibility of running the watch when a supervisor wasn’t available, and supervisors were never assigned midnight shifts at the BCT.
“You’re CIC Saturday night on the mid.”
“Well, then, I’ll plug in behind Larry when he’s working the president’s plane. End of problem.”
“I know you could do it, but Don Trent wants to be here just in case. He wants me here, too.”
“Just in case? Just in case what?”
Dean sighed again. “I don’t know. But Don is the operations manager, and if he says we need to be here, then we need to be here.”
“So let me get this straight. Larry and I are good enough to handle the airplanes that don’t matter—you know, the ones with several hundred regular people on board—but when it comes to the president of the United States, we need the assistance of two guys who haven’t done the job in twenty years?”
Dean’s face tightened in annoyance. “It’s not like that. I know you and Larry would be fine here by yourselves and so does Don. But he wants us to be here, so we’re going to be here, whether you like it or not. Work your midnight shift as normal, but be ready for Don and me to walk in a little before five.”
“Fine. Whatever. That it?”
“That’s it.”
“Then what do you want me to do now?”
“Go get Fitz out of Final Vector. He’s backing up the whole East Coast.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The garage was cool and quiet in the middle of the night, which was exactly the way Tony liked it. He had been out of the Middle East so long now that he wasn’t sure whether he would be able to withstand the relentless baking heat when he was finally able to return. He was anxious to find out, though, and thrilled to know that day was rapidly approaching, after many long years of waiting and doubting he would ever go home again.
Tony had been living legally in the United States for nearly a full decade. In the beginning it had been difficult. At times during the first long, lonely years, he questioned the judgment of those who had given him this assignment, even though he had been well trained and thoroughly prepared for his insertion into the U.S. as the leader of a Jihadist sleeper cell.
For that initial period, Tony did nothing but live quietly in the community, scrupulously learning the customs, working hard to obey all the laws of his adopted country, and avoiding any activity that might suggest he was anything other than a hardworking immigrant, anxious to make a new life for himself in this alleged land of opportunity. He reported to his superiors via secure satellite phone once a month, but otherwise, to anyone paying attention, Tony Andretti could have been the poster boy for the American dream, post-9/11 melting pot edition.
He worked long hours at his job, provided by an anonymous patron sympathetic to his organization overseas and its revolutionary cause. Driving a delivery truck for a uniform services company gave Tony ample opportunity to insinuate himself into multiple different law enforcement and military agencies. After years of seeing the same quiet, respectful man come and go, serving them with all their uniform needs, many within these organizations came to view Tony as one of their own.
When Tony had established a standing in the community, he expanded his activities, using the Internet and the connections he had painstakingly developed in his job to identify and begin recruiting potential additions to his team. He also began stockpiling the impressive array of weapons and gear that was now practically overflowing the garage in which he now sat. He accomplished all this while never knowing precisely what his assignment would be or even when it would come.
Before Tony had arrived in America, he wondered whether his hatred for all things Western would begin to diminish as he fell into a routine and made a life for himself. After all, he would be forced to do the acting job of a lifetime: to convince everyone around him that he was not disgusted by the very sight of them. Perhaps at some point he would lose his edge and feel some empathy for these people and their twisted and heretical culture.
It never happened. In fact, the opposite was true. The longer Tony lived away from his true home, the more he missed it and the more he despised these strange people for their silly religions and their materialistic lifestyles and especially for the sexually suggestive way they permitted t
heir whorish women to dress while advancing the ridiculous notion that women were the equals of men.
Several years into his mission, Tony received more specific direction regarding his eventual assignment, and he was able to finalize the recruitment of the men who now made up his team. He enticed them with promises of wealth and power in another country upon completion of one simple task.
Now, sitting alone in the cool semidarkness of his D.C. base of operations, hours after he had sent his men home, Tony waited patiently for the sat phone to make the connection. When it had been established and his contact had been called to the phone, Tony wasted no time on small talk or pleasantries. Those things were pointless. “We’re ready,” he announced amiably into the handset.
“You have succeeded in acquiring everything you will need?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You already know the president’s itinerary. All that remains is for us to discuss your team’s extraction once the mission is complete. There is an abandoned grass landing strip in northern Massachusetts roughly halfway between the two locations where you and your men will be operating. I sent you the GPS coordinates of this airfield last week. I assume you have familiarized yourself with it?”
“Of course.”
“Good. That is where we will have a small aircraft waiting to transport you and your team to a freighter, which will depart out of Newport News, Virginia, immediately upon completion of your assignment to bring you home at last. Assuming you suffer no casualties, you will need a plane big enough for the pilot plus a five-man team; is that correct?”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“No, that is not correct.”
“You mean to tell me I have been misinformed as to the size of your team?”
Tony chuckled. “No, I mean to tell you that you have been misinformed as to the likelihood of the potential casualties that will be sustained by my team.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning there will be some. Four, to be precise.”
There was a pause. Then the man thousands of miles away on the other end of the satellite connection chuckled, too. His voice took on a hard edge. “Am I correct in assuming you will not be one of them?”
“I certainly hope so.”
“So, you …”
“That’s right. If all my men survive this mission, I will ensure none of them survive this mission.”
Tony’s contact paused again. The seconds ticked away in silence. Finally he asked the question Tony had been expecting. “Why? These men are going to help us achieve our greatest triumph, greater even than the success of September 11, 2001.”
“True,” Tony conceded. “But the answer is quite simple. For all their technical proficiency, these men are still nothing more than filthy infidels. They know nothing of our culture and religion; care nothing of them, either. They are greedy, unclean pigs, and I will not be responsible for infecting the sacred land of my country with the likes of them. They will help us accomplish our goal, and then they will be executed. A two-seater plane will be sufficient for the flight to Virginia.”
Tony broke the connection and placed the bulky satellite phone inside the bottom drawer of his desk, locking it securely. He lit a cigarette and took a long drag, exhaling slowly, watching as the smoke drifted away on the invisible currents of air circulating through the drafty garage.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Special Agent Kristin Cunningham reviewed all the material the FBI had removed from Nick Jensen’s home for about the thousandth time in the last several days. To Kristin and Frank, it had been instantly clear that the information could mean only one thing: some nameless and faceless group had planned to hijack Raytheon-made Stinger shoulder-fired missiles somewhere between the company’s home base in Tucson and the ultimate destination of the weapons, in this case Fort Bliss.
Their assumption had been right on target, too, although Kristin felt no satisfaction being right. Last week, on the very same evening that Kristin and Frank sat in Nick Jensen’s living room discussing the strange collection of information his dead wife had hidden inside their closet, that nameless and faceless terrorist group had indeed hijacked an Army transport truck, murdering the two soldiers assigned to the delivery and dumping their bodies by the side of the road in the desert.
The killers had then driven twenty miles to an RV sales center on the outskirts of Tucson, where they exchanged vehicles, abandoned the Army truck, and disappeared into the night, but not before killing one more person, a Tucson police officer who stumbled onto the exchange during a routine patrol.
There were no witnesses, at least none who had survived, and by now the missiles could be anywhere in the country—or possibly even overseas—under the control of a terrorist organization that had already murdered four people, if you included Nelson W. Michaels, the midlevel Pentagon staffer who sold the information to the group. Michaels had originally been presumed killed in an auto accident while driving home from work on the same day he had made the trade, but it was later determined that he had been murdered in his car following the wreck. It was the second time someone connected to the case had been killed in this manner.
Over the last several days, Kristin had been in almost constant contact with officials from the Department of Homeland Security. Their working theory was that the stolen Stinger missiles were hidden somewhere inside the United States and had been hijacked with a specific domestic target in mind. The murder of Michaels was executed cleanly and professionally, but no serious effort had been made to mask the killing. To Homeland Security, this indicated the group in possession of the Stingers was planning on using them soon.
The theft had triggered red flags throughout both the law enforcement and intelligence communities, because the stolen missiles were almost completely intact. In most cases, Stingers were delivered in several separate pieces to guard against an occurrence like the one that had just taken place. In this case, however, time-sensitive critical software modifications had been made, necessitating the shipment of missiles that were virtually complete. The only thing missing was the guidance system, which, if added, would give whoever possessed the shoulder-fired Stingers the ability to wreak untold havoc and kill potentially many thousands of people in a disaster that could rival the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The likelihood that the group which had stolen the weapons was actually in possession of the software needed to accurately control them was slim, but still, law enforcement agencies at all levels around the country had been put on the highest alert status. This would remain the case until the missiles had been safely recovered.
Kristin stifled a surge of annoyance that Nick Jensen had waited a couple of days after discovering the notes and other materials before alerting the authorities. Had he done so even one day sooner, DHS and the FBI could have set up a sting operation, driving a decoy truck along the mapped-out route that night with nothing inside it but a few empty crates. They could have taken down the terrorist organization that had purchased the information, and today there would be one less group of murderous fanatics out there bent on the destruction of the United States or some other Western country.
Of course, Kristin couldn’t really blame Nick. The poor guy had just lost his wife in a terrible accident and didn’t have any idea what he had stumbled upon when he found it hidden in the back of a closet. Plenty of people would never even have bothered to contact anyone. They would have tossed the binder in the trash and gone on with their lives, never giving it a second thought.
It was hard to blame Nick’s wife, either. Lisa was employed as an auditor at the Pentagon, and her work had been mostly limited to staffers stealing pens and surfing inappropriate websites. She had clearly known she was dealing with something big, but had been too hesitant in informing her superiors. Hell, maybe she had been concerned that a supervisor was involved and hadn’t known who she could trust with the discovery. Ultimately, Lisa Jensen had been involved in something much bigger tha
n she was prepared to handle, and it had cost her her life.
Kristin found her mind wandering back to her meeting a few nights ago with Nick, and she was embarrassed to admit that she felt a tug of attraction. The man had just lost his wife, for God’s sake. Still, she couldn’t help how she felt, and even though his face had been pale and drawn from sorrow and lack of sleep, there was something about him that she found alluring. He wasn’t football-star handsome, had probably never dated the prom queen in high school, but still, he seemed honest, with an easy smile and natural charm…
Jesus, she thought, what’s wrong with me? There’s a group of homicidal maniacs running around with a stolen truckload of lethal weapons, and I’m daydreaming like some love-struck junior high girl about a guy whose wife is barely in the ground.
She shook her head, disgusted with herself, and got back to work.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
An eight-foot-high chain-link fence encircled the outer perimeter of the large plot of land housing the Boston Consolidated TRACON. The upper eighteen inches of fencing consisted of four strands of tightly wound barbed wire angled outward forty-five-degrees. The fence was set back from the ugly mustard-colored brick building a minimum of fifty feet in all directions.
Ornamental trees, small and insignificant looking against the backdrop of the big building, dotted the landscaped property, but most of the area had been left open, presumably for security purposes. Anyone somehow managing to scale the fence without being incapacitated by the barbed wire strands—in addition to leaking copious amounts of blood—would be forced to cross a wide expanse of well-lit open ground before getting anywhere near the BCT building itself.
Closed-circuit cameras were mounted on all exterior corners of the building, providing three hundred sixty degrees of CCTV surveillance around the BCT, as well as in dozens of locations throughout the interior. The cameras were monitored twenty-four hours a day by armed security personnel quartered inside a brick guard shack, complete with bulletproof glass, located at the only entrance to the facility. A reinforced steel gate could be trundled across the entryway at the touch of a button, repelling access by any vehicle smaller than a tank.