Ghost

by Fred Burton

  Fred shakes his head sadly. “I don’t understand it. Every time you and I drop a line in the Potomac, there isn’t a fish for miles. Whenever I go out by myself, I catch the limit. You must scare the fish away.”

  “You know, it’s been a long time since we’ve gone fishing together.”

  “That is true. We need to do something about that.”

  I detect a tone of regret in his voice. He’s probably struggling with the same things I am right now. Neither of us is big on sharing a whole lot of emotion. In the past, we’ve just jawed about work, our cases, and the rescue squad. We don’t do heavy. We don’t do philosophical.

  Back when I was a cop, I used to swing by Brandt Place after my night shifts. Fred was working nights, too, and we’d take off together and go play golf at six in the morning. The local courses would let us in free, sort of a thank-you perk to us for being in law enforcement.

  We haven’t golfed together in over a year.

  I can’t really talk about all the things going on in the office. Most of it is classified secret or above, and with the Park Police, Fred’s cleared up to top secret. So even though I could discuss all this stuff going down in the world, the thought of rehashing it churns my stomach. I’m here to get away, not indulge.

  We limp on with the small talk, each of us searching for a way to reconnect. Then Fred’s roommate, a lawyer, steps onto the porch. He sits down and joins in the conversation. The limping devolves into a crawl. Lawyers and cops aren’t usually a good mix, and I’ve never really understood why Fred lives with this guy.

  At one point, the lawyer asks how we know each other. Out come the old rescue squad stories. Suddenly, the ice breaks. We enthrall our third wheel with tales from the firehouse. We responded to all sorts of incidents back in the early eighties before we’d even grown into men.

  In ’82, a man drove his car through the front of the local IBM plant, then opened fire and killed two people and wounded several more during a seven-hour standoff. We responded to that and carried away some of the injured in our rigs.

  In January 1982, an Air Florida jetliner crashed into the Potomac after skipping off the 14th Street Bridge. Scores of people were in the water, and rescue crews were hampered by a sudden blizzard that swept the area. My crew was staged nearby, and we carried some of the survivors to the local trauma center.

  We had two political assassinations in our neighborhood as well. One was an Iranian, the other an Israeli fighter pilot who worked at Israel’s embassy in D.C. In fact, I’ve been thinking that someday, now that I’m with the DSS, I’d like to reopen both cases. Our outfit responded to both incidents, though the hit on the Israeli took place in ’73, two years before I joined the squad. I was at the station when the Iranian was killed.

  As I hear these old war stories again, they sound just like the chaos I’m dealing with at work right now, only on a micro level. The litany of accidents, violence, and mayhem—it didn’t seem so overwhelming at the time. We rolled out of the station and never knew what to expect, but we were always in the moment. I guess it is all a matter of perspective. Maybe that’s what I need right now, just a little perspective.

  We’ve warmed up to the subject, the initial awkwardness of our conversation long left in the dust. Fred’s chatting now with his usual animation. Quick swipes of his hand emphasize the points he makes. He likes to talk with his hands. It makes watching him very entertaining. He’s a terrific raconteur.

  And then we come to the big one, the story we love to tell outsiders most of all. Fred looks at me and winks, and says, “Twilight Zone.”

  “Twilight Zone,” I echo back. We’ve told this one so many times we’re starting to sound like an old married couple.

  “Yeah. That was unbelievable.”

  “What happened?” the lawyer-roommate asks. He needn’t have bothered. Once we get rolling on this road, the whole thing comes out in all its spooky splendor.

  “Never seen anything like it. Never hope to again,” I add.

  “We were out in Rescue 18, the old GMC squad truck. I was driving,” Fred begins.

  I cut in, “Fred needed the hours behind the wheel. I was the truck trainer. We were just driving around late one Friday night.”

  “Funny how that worked out, isn’t it?” Fred asks.

  “Makes me want to believe in fate.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  “So we’re up on Wilson Lane, just driving and shooting the bull,” Fred continues, “when we get the call.”

  “The call?”

  I chime in, “Dispatch tells us there’s been an accident with one pinned near River Road and Wilson Lane.”

  “We were only a few blocks away,” Fred says.

  The lawyer looks puzzled. “What’s ‘one pinned’ mean?”

  “Somebody’s stuck in the car.”

  “Anyway”—I’m talking now—“I radio in and say, ‘Rescue 18 copy and en route.’ Flip on the sirens and we start using the air horn to clear cars out of our way.”

  “God, I’d forgotten that thing,” Fred interjects as he polishes off the last drops in his longneck. “Pull a cable and it rocked your world. That air horn was something else.”

  I cut in. “We get to the scene in minutes. Both of us jump out of the truck….”

  “Creepy vibe.” Fred’s now really animated. One hand sweeps across his chest as he says, “Fog hugging the ground. Dark. Looked like a Twilight Zone episode.”

  “Yeah, and dead quiet, too.”

  “One minute, we’re blazing away with lights, sirens, and the air horn. The next minute—nothing. Total silence.”

  “Creepy, all right.”

  The lawyer is rigid. We have him hooked.

  Fred plays to our one-man audience, building the drama. “We look around and find this little Honda sedan upside down in a gully off the right side of the road.”

  I explain. “The driver had hit a pole and slid off the embankment. Flipped over. Landed at the bottom of the gully on its back. Wheels still turning, broken glass everywhere.”

  “Antifreeze was pouring out of the radiator. And we saw smoke.”

  “I ran back to the truck and called HQ, ‘Rescue 18 on the scene with a rollover.’”

  “I followed Fred back to the truck. Suddenly, we hear something that breaks the silence.”

  Fred pauses for effect. The lawyer comes out of his seat. “What? What?”

  We both smile and simultaneously say, “‘Stairway to Heaven.’”

  “What?”

  “‘Stairway to Heaven.’ You know,” Fred says, “that old Zeppelin song.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No,” I say, “it was coming from the car’s radio. Only sound we could hear. Fred and I just stared at each other, chills running up and down our spines.”

  “You got that right, brother.”

  “We couldn’t even move for a second or two, the music was so surreal. Then, in the distance, we heard more sirens coming to us.”

  “We both climb down into the gully to see what we can do. Car’s beat to hell. Smashed—totaled. Inside, there’s the driver. He’s totaled, too. He was just a kid—our age at the time.”

  “About nineteen,” I interject.

  “Yeah, nineteen. Drunk driver. Threw his life away,” Fred says with a bitter smile. “Dead on the scene. Nothing we could do for him. Blood everywhere inside the car. Even on the radio, but it still worked.”

  “It sure did.”

  “And there we stood at the bottom of this gully, dead kid, smell of booze and blood in the air, listening to ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”

  “Totally surreal,” I manage. Hearing Fred tell the story again brings me right back there to the fog. That was a horrible scene. In our old life with the rescue squad, we saw a lot of ugly things. I didn’t used to think it got to me, but now I think maybe it affected me a lot deep down. I never got jaded enough to get used to such sights. Perhaps this is why I am so moved by the files in the dead bodies
cabinets. I can relate, and I don’t need a vivid imagination to envision the horrors that befell those innocent victims in Beirut.

  The evening rolls on unfettered by stilted small talk. The gates are open, and the stories pour out. The Twilight Zone night was the foundation for our relationship at a time when we were brothers coming of age together in this unique and terrifying world.

  I relax for the first time in months. I slump deep into my chair, put my feet up, and try to soak up every bit of this moment. It seems like old times as Fred and I regale each other with tales of the macabre. Cop stories. Rescue stories. They spill out one after another, but we never discuss the DSS. That’s off-limits. Before I know it, three hours have gone by and I’ve got to get home.

  With Mullen and Gleason, life is all business. Here, on this porch with Fred, it is all about old friends. Though we never even mentioned Libya or Qaddafi or terror attacks, I feel refreshed. Gleason was right: Sometimes you just have to get away, lest the Dark World eat your soul.

  Brandt Place is my defense against that.

  “Hey, Burton,” Fred calls as I walk through his yard toward the street. I stop and turn.

  “Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  Later that night, the phone rings me out of the first sound sleep I’ve had in weeks.

  six

  NO SPACE BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE

  April 4, 1986

  The bodies fell out of the sky and plummeted into a shepherd’s field. A Greek peasant, minding his flock of sheep, discovered them battered and smashed almost beyond recognition. Before this horrible day, the trio had been a family: one grandmother, one daughter, one infant granddaughter. These were terror’s latest targets.

  A fourth body was later found in some bushes, still strapped into seat 10F of TWA Flight 840.

  I sit at my desk behind the big blue door and stare at the photos. They fell from eleven thousand feet. How long did it take? Probably long enough to know the awful fate that had consumed their lives. Did they have time to make their peace with God? Did they shriek and cry until the impact came? My imagination roams. I know that I won’t be able to sleep tonight. The images play in my mind like I was there. The infant is the worst. Nine months old. She died in her mother’s arms. I want to cry.

  I turn next to a small folder of photos that have just come into the office. They show the damage to Flight 840, which was a Boeing 727. A ragged hole, roughly the size of a wheelbarrow, scars the starboard side of the fuselage just forward of the wing. Tattered aluminum strips flower out from the hole, making it clear that the explosion that befell this jetliner came from inside the cabin.

  Flight 840 was en route to Athens from Rome when the bomb went off. The pilot had already started the descent for Athens and was counting on about fifteen more minutes before touching down. A blast, then chaos. People watched as their fellow passengers got sucked out of the cabin by explosive decompression. According to the press accounts of the attack, the cabin filled with smoke and swirling debris, which the slipstream whipped around the surviving passengers with such force that several received gashes and cuts. A stewardess handed out linen napkins to the wounded, who used them to stanch the bleeding while the captain told everyone to remain calm. He promised to have the plane down in ten minutes. It took thirteen, and he executed a perfect emergency landing.

  Who pulled this off? The truth is we don’t know, and that’s a real issue right now. The administration wants a smoking gun that points to Libya. If this is retaliation for the Gulf of Sidra, Reagan will strike back hard. But the evidence needs to be overwhelming. So far, we have a few clues, but nothing that implicates the Libyans. In fact, Qaddafi denounced the attack, calling it “an act of terrorism against a civilian target, and I’m totally against it.”

  It was hard not to laugh when we heard that one.

  On the day of the attack, the press in Beirut reported they’d been given a handwritten statement from a group called the Ezzedine Kassam Unit of the Arab Revolutionary Cells. Kassam was a Palestinian cleric who led a revolt against the British in 1935 and subsequently died in the fighting.

  The Arab Revolutionary Cells is a front name used by Abu Nidal’s organization. A few days before this attack, it took credit for kidnapping two academics in West Beirut. Leigh Douglas, a British professor of political science, and Philip Padfield, the director of the language center at American University of Beirut.

  The communiqué, if we could get the original, might reveal some further details. The handwriting and verbiage can be analyzed, and we might be able to connect Flight 840 more directly to Abu Nidal. In this case, however, trying to pry loose the original from the media outlet in Beirut may just prove impossible. The press is not fond of us over there.

  We are forced to rely on the Greeks, who do not have a very robust intelligence service. Nor do they have a first-rate counterterror group that can investigate Flight 840 as well as we can. We offered to assist. They froze us out. The Greeks don’t like us much, and they’ve stonewalled our efforts to assist in the investigation. It is terribly frustrating, but the root of this ill will goes back eleven years to the 1975 assassination of the CIA’s Athens station chief, Richard Welch. A radical Greek group called 17 November executed the hit, and the subsequent investigation led to very bad blood between the U.S. and Greek authorities. A Colt .45 pistol was used in that assassination, and in the years to come, the same weapon was used in numerous assassinations and assaults.

  Earlier today, the Greeks did provide us with some details of what they’ve found in the Flight 840 investigation, but there’s little more there than what’s already been reported in the news. Seat 10F had been occupied earlier by a woman named May Mansur, sometimes known as Elias May Mansur. She’s a Lebanese radical with ties to various terror groups. She’s been associated with Abu Nidal in the past, as well as the Palestinian terror group 15 May. She boarded the plane on the morning of April 2 in Cairo. The 727 flew on to Athens, where Mansur exited the plane. According to the Greeks, she waited in the international lounge for seven hours before taking a flight to Beirut. Meanwhile, the 727 flew to Rome, where it became Flight 840, then headed back for Athens. It was supposed to terminate in Cairo, but of course it never made it back there.

  Our own intelligence sources show that Mansur flew from Beirut to Cairo a few days before the attack. She arrived late at the airport and the Egyptians actually drove her out to the plane in a car so she wouldn’t miss the flight. The Egyptians are adamant that she went through a thorough screening. Somehow, I doubt it was thorough enough.

  Her own movements that day are circumstantial evidence to her involvement. Yet, according to the media, she has denied all responsibility for the attack.

  I wish we could get a team in there to dissect what happened. What kind of bomb was it? How did it get past security? What security changes can we implement to ensure this never happens again?

  We don’t know any of this. The truth is, we’re lucky to even have these photographs spread out on my desk. The one sop the Greeks threw to us was to ask for the Federal Aviation Administration’s assistance. The FAA sent one of their best investigators to Athens, and he snapped these images of the 727.

  Gleason asked me to open a CT file on the attack. It is a woefully thin folder right now. I pick up the regional security officer’s report from Athens. It contains the names of the victims. Alberto Ospino, age thirty-nine, had taken 10F, a window seat, in Rome. How did fate pick this average Colombian-American for this cruel end? Given the FAA’s photographs, the bomb must have exploded directly beneath him, probably at his feet. As the blast tore the fuselage open, the sudden decompression sucked him out of the cabin along with Demetra Stylianopoulu, age fifty-eight. She was the grandmother. As she spun out into the void beneath the starboard wing, her daughter Maria Klug, clutching her infant, Demetra, followed her. Falling. Falling.

  I’ve come full circle and cannot escape the image of how t
hese innocents met death. The guilty must pay for this crime. Justice must be served. But if history is any judge, the forces of terror will likely escape their punishment. It is remarkably difficult to catch any of these killers. They have too many safe havens—too many places to hide and too many countries that protect them.

  In the meantime, a few miles up the road in Annapolis, Warren Klug, a grieving husband, father, and son-in-law, awaits the return of his shattered family.

  I cannot bring back the dead. I cannot balm the grief of those who survive such attacks. But here at Foggy Bottom, I swear that I will do everything in my power to see that these killers pay. Vengeance and justice are one and the same in this case. With terrorism, there is never any gray. The visions I have of the Klug family’s fate will always remind me of that.

  Falling. Falling. Falling. There will be no sleep tonight.

  seven

  THE MAD DOG OF THE MIDDLE EAST

  April 5, 1986

  The Libyans are running us ragged, and thanks to their plots every nerve in the intel world is lighting up with warnings. They’re coming in from every conceivable corner of the globe, from informants in dozens of countries. Police agencies, foreign intel services—they’re all adding to the chatter. It’s like being in a crowded dance hall with everyone talking at once, and our job is to find the one person we need to listen to. We don’t know who that is, so we’ve got to listen to everything. The trouble is, we’re being buried by all the incoming information.

  Historically, this happens all the time. After an event like Pearl Harbor, Beirut I, or the marine barracks bombing, it is easy to sift through all the traffic and find the smoking gun that warned us of the impending disaster. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, and knowing what to look for separates the chaff right away. In real time, though, we don’t have that luxury, we don’t have that vision. All we see are mountains of cables and thousands of clues, all of which must be checked out lest the one valid warning go unheeded.

  On top of all this, word has spread throughout the DSS network that a true CT office is now up and running. Agents have been sending us all sorts of stuff beyond the usual intel. Shell casings, bomb fragments, plastic explosives, timing devices, and photographs have been piling up, sent from embassies all over the world. The office behind the big blue door is starting to look like an evidence locker. We shuttle this stuff over to the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) labs for analysis, and riding herd on it all is taking more and more of our day.