“You two between the hangars!” the SP shouted on the car’s loudspeaker. “Security police! Kneel down with your hands on your head, now! ” The two men ran off, together at first and then in diverging directions.
As they bolted from their hiding spot, another security police cruiser passing by saw them running and heard the other officer’s alert on the radio, hit his brakes, and stepped out of the car. He shouted a perfunctory “Halt! Security police canine unit! Stop!” but he was already opening up the right rear passenger door of his cruiser. He shouted a few instructions to his German shepherd partner, pointing out one of the fleeing suspects until the dog barked that he had the suspect in sight, and then commanded the dog to pursue.
Spurred on by the wail of sirens all around him, the first terrorist ran north on Arnold Avenue as fast as he ever recalled running in his life. The fire trucks from the base fire station at Arnold Avenue and D Street were rolling, heading for the flight line, and for a moment the terrorist thought he could lose himself in the confusion of vehicles if he could just make it to D Street. Beyond the fire station was the base exchange, commissary, and theater, with plenty of places to hide, cars to steal, hostages to capture.
But the chase did not last long. Trained to be perfectly silent throughout the chase, the terrorist didn’t hear the animal, not even a growl, until he felt the dog’s teeth sink into his upper-left calf muscle. The terrorist screamed and went down, rolling across the ground with the dog’s incisors still buried in his leg. As he tried to rise, the dog released the man’s leg and went for the right wrist, the main appendage a K-9 patrol dog is trained to clamp down on, and began pulling in any direction possible, trying to keep the suspect off-balance until his human partner arrived. Teeth struck bone several times, and dog and man went down together. The dog was a dynamo, never staying still, but twisting in several directions, shaking his head as if trying to rip the- suspect’s arm free from his torso.
But the terrorist was left-handed. He drew a 9-millimeter Browning automatic, and, before the dog spotted the gun and went for the other wrist, put it up to the big furry body and pulled the trigger. The one-hundred-pound bundle of teeth and muscle blew apart in a cloud of blood and hair, still trying to keep hold of his suspect until life drained out of his body—even so, the terrorist had to use the muzzle of his Browning to pry the animal’s teeth out of his mangled right arm so he could ...
Headlights, squealing tires, a furious, high-pitched voice shouting, “Freeze! Don’t move or you’re dead!” It was too late. He was already dizzy from the exertion and the loss of blood—there was no resistance possible. Capture was not an option. If the cops didn’t kill him, Cazaux would. Failure was inexcusable; capture automatically meant betrayal, punishable by death. He would rather have the cops do it quick than watch Henri Cazaux rip his beating heart out from his chest.
The terrorist sat up so as to present as large a target as possible, aimed his Browning at the headlights, and fired. The security police returned fire with an M-16 assault rifle.
He was not disappointed.
Army Colonel Wes Slotter, commander of 108th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, Fort Polk, Louisiana, was the overall commander of ground air defense forces for the nation’s capital. From the Patriot Integrated Command Center van at Andrews Air Force Base, he was in constant contact with all of the Patriot, Hawk, Avenger, and Stinger units in the Washington area, as well as the E-3C AW ACS radar plane and the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, where the Joint Air Defense Commander was headquartered. Although his headquarters was at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, like his mentor, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, he hated being stuck in his office with his units deployed in the field—even if “in the field” only meant The Mall or a golf course on East Potomac Island Park—so he was on his way to the integrated central command for all of the ground air defense units when the air defense alert came down.
And as he trotted over to the control van, he also had a perfect view of the crash of the two F-16 fighter jets, less than a mile from where he was standing.
Slotter ran back to the control center van, wedging his six-foot-two frame past the maintenance technicians and over to the Patriot battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Buckwall, who was seated at the communications officer’s station behind the battalion fire control officer and battalion radar technician. “Jesus, we just had two fighters crash on the runway,” Slotter said. “What do we got, Jim?”
“AWACS radioed an air defense emergency about two minutes ago, sir,” Buckwall reported. “We’re tracking a single heavy airliner inbound toward D.C. from the north. Apparently it made its way from New Hampshire calling itself Executive-One-Foxtrot.”
“A VIP flight? No shit,” Slotter exclaimed. How that bastard made it all the way like that was almost unbelievable. “First that, then they crash a couple F-16s—the Air Force is dicking up by the numbers.” He wasn’t one to dig on another branch of the service, especially during an emergency when anything could happen to anyone at any time, but the prima donnas in the Air Force really deserved it sometimes. “Let’s try not to make any mistakes ourselves. Everybody reporting in okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Buckwall said. “All Avenger ground units deploying as per the ops order. This ICC is in contact with all the Hawk batteries except for Baltimore, but the AW ACS had full connectivity with them. We’re checking our comm relays to find out what the problem is.”
“That AWACS has full control of all ground units, eh?” “Yes, sir,” Buckwall said. “We launch our missiles, but Leather-90 tells us who and when and how we attack. If we lose connectivity with them we have full authority to launch, but as long as the hookup is solid, Leather-90 has the red button.” Slotter didn’t like that idea, either. An Air Force guy with authority over a dozen Hawk missile batteries and two dozen Avenger units, and with full launch control over the Patriots if they were still on-line—well, the idea was unnatural.
Slotter could tell that the maintenance techs wanted to get inside to start checking over the systems to regain contact with the Hawk units at Baltimore-Washington International. There was no room in the control van for an extra person, especially a high-ranking extra person. “I’ll be en route to the NMCC at the Pentagon, Colonel,” he said. “Notify me as soon as possible on the secure line on the engagement status.”
“Yes, sir,” Buckwall responded.
Slotter squeezed past the maintenance techs and exited the hatch, nearly colliding with a soldier coming up the steps toward the ICC. The soldier, wearing an ALICE harness and web belt, had his Kevlar helmet strapped down tight and pulled over his eyes, so Slotter couldn’t recognize him. It was unusual to see a soldier in full combat gear up in the ICC—the security guys usually stayed on the perimeter. “Excuse me, sir,” the soldier said. “I’ve got a message for the commander.”
“Battalion CO’s tied up right now,” Slotter said. “I’m Colonel Slotter, the brigade CO. Let’s have it.”
“Yes, sir,” the soldier said. His right hand came up—but I there was no message, only a small submachine gun with a long silencer on it. Before Slotter could cry out a warning, he felt the sharp, sledgehammer-like blows on his chest, then nothing.
Tomas Ysidro shoved the body off the rear deck of the Patriot ICC, pushed open the entry hatch, threw a tear gas grenade and two hand grenades into the ICC, slammed the door tight, and jumped off the truck. Seconds later, the hatch opened and the tear gas grenade sailed out, but it was too late. The other two high-explosive grenades were never picked up, and the explosions inside the steel box of the Patriot ICC destroyed everything inside instantly.
“Move it, move it!” Ysidro shouted to his partners. He should have set the explosives on the antenna array, but the array was still deployed and the electrical power plant was still operational. He unbuckled the last two grenades he carried, pulled the safety pins, and ran toward the antenna array truck when he heard, “Halt! Drop your weapon!” u Always playing cowboy, Ysidro
thought. You're in combat, you idiot Americans—why do you insist on trying to order the enemy to halt? Ysidro threw the first grenade at the antenna array, then wheeled around and rolled the second grenade under the electrical power plant truck—just as three Army security guards opened fire, catching him in a murderous crossfire from their M-16s. His shattered body hit the ground just a few feet from where his partner lay, shot by another security guard as he tried to plant the remote-detonated mines around the antenna array and electrical power plant.
But the first grenade did the trick. Ysidro’s toss was perfect, bouncing off the back of the “drive-in theater” array and landing right on the waveguide horn on top of the unit. The explosion ripped the entire array and waveguide assembly off the top of the van. The second grenade rolled all the way under the EPP, but the force of the explosion toppled the vehicle on its left side, spilling diesel fuel and starting a fire.
Along The Mall That Same Moment
When the alert went out from Major Milford aboard the E- 3C AWACS radar plane that Washington was under attack, the air defense ground units that had so very carefully been under wraps for the past several days immediately deployed to their fire positions.
From First Street, east of the Capitol, to the Lincoln Memorial, Avenger units rolled out of their parking garages and took up positions on The Mall, with one Avenger stationed every six thousand feet; at the same time, Avenger units deployed to positions around the approach ends of main runways at Dulles, National, Andrews, and Baltimore airports. Avenger was an HMMWV (High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, the Army’s new “Jeep”) truck with a rotating turret installed on it that contained two four- round Stinger missile launchers, a .50-caliber heavy machine gun, a laser rangefinder, and a telescopic infrared sensor. The gunner sat in a cab between the two Stinger launchers and electronically spotted and attacked airborne targets as far as three miles away. A driver/loader and two security troops completed the Avenger crew.
“All Leather units, Bandit-1 bearing zero-one-eight degrees magnetic, range thirty miles and closing. All units stand by for status poll.”
Sergeant First Class Paul Lathrop pushed open the bulletproof Lexan canopy of his Avenger FAAD (Forward Area Air Defense) unit to get a little fresh air into the cockpit, and stretched to try to smooth out the kinks in his muscles. He was the unit gunner, sitting in a tiny, narrow cockpit between two four-round Stinger missile pods. The cab was not made for anyone over six feet tall, nor anyone with any hint of fat—the turret steering column was right up against his chest, and his knees were bent all the way up practically to the dashboard. But even worse than sitting in the hot, confined cab was sitting in the cab when the vehicle was moving. He was wearing no tanker’s pads to protect himself, so every bone in his body ached from being thrown around in the bucking-bronco HMMWV.
Lathrop’s Avenger unit was stationed on the west side of the Washington Monument, with an almost unobstructed view of the sky in all directions—except, of course, for the sky blocked out by the monument. He could clearly see the front of the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, and of course the Capitol itself. There was another Avenger unit east of the Washington Monument, near the Capitol, with a clear shot of most of the sky that Lathrop couldn’t see to the east; there were other units over at West Potomac Park guarding south D.C., Ft. McNair, Arlington National Cemetery, and the Pentagon, and east of the Capitol as well.
You don’t deploy units like Avenger in the middle of The Mall in Washington, D.C., and expect not to get noticed, and almost as soon as they rolled out of their hiding places near Union Station, West Potomac Park, the Navy Bureau of Medicine, and George Washington University, a crowd had gathered to watch. D.C. Police and Army security troops were trying to close off The Mall and chase all the bystanders away, but on a warm summer evening in D.C., with the lights of the monuments on for the first time in days, there were a lot of folks out wandering around. The lights had not yet been turned off, and Lathrop idly wondered who would have the switch to the lights of Washington, D.C. Certainly not the President—or the Steel Magnolia.
It was then he noticed that the poll of the air defense units had stopped. On interphone, he said, “Mike, how do you hear?”
“Loud and clear,” Specialist Mike Reston replied.
“What happened to the poll?”
“Dunno,” Reston replied. Lathrop heard a squeal in the radio as Reston deactivated the squelch control. “Radio still works. Hang on.” On the radio, Lathrop heard, “Control, Leather-713, radio check ... Control, -713, radio check.”
“-713, this is Leather-601, stand by.” That was from the lieutenant in charge of the four Hawk missile sites stationed around D.C., based out at East Potomac Island Park, south of the Capitol, along the Potomac.
“Control must’ve gone off the air,” Reston said.
That got Lathrop worried. With a bandit only a few minutes away, he needed radio contact with someone with a long-range radar to spot targets for him until the bandit got close enough. The passive infrared sensor on the Avenger was good out to a range of about five to eight miles, $o long-range spotting was crucial. The Patriot ICC (Integrated Command Center) stationed out at Andrews provided radar coverage for the Hawk and Avenger units —what a shitty time to have radio problems.
“All Leather-600 and -700 units, this is Leather-601,” the commander of the Hawk battalion said on the command net. “ICC is down, repeat, ICC is down, -601 is taking operational control. Bandit-1 bearing zero-one-zero magnetic, twenty-eight miles, status is batteries released tight, repeat, status is batteries released tight, all units—”
And then that transmission stopped.
“What the fuck ... ?”
“Hey, guys ... er, Leather-700 units, this is -711,1 see a fire over on East Potomac Island Park,” one of the crew members on the Avenger at West Potomac Park radioed. “I see ... holy shit, man, I see big explosions south across the Inlet, over on East Potomac Island. I think the Hawk site just got wiped.”
“Say again, Winfield?” Lathrop radioed. “You say you saw explosions?”
When Lathrop released the mike button, the gunner on Leather-711 named Winfield was already reporting: “... and I see several guys headin’ this way ... shit, man, * shit, they’re firing at me, all units ... you motherfucker!”
“Win, what the hell’s going on?” But then Lathrop looked to his left and saw two men dressed in jogging shorts but carrying rather big knapsacks or duffel bags running down the long walkway to the west of the Washington Monument. He rose out of his seat and shouted to his security guard, “Hey, Kelly, watch those two guys to the west. Don’t let anyone near the unit! Some shit’s going down out there! We lost contact with Winfield in -711.”
The Army guard named Kelly moved over to the left rear comer of the Avenger unit and spotted the two guys trying to casually jog over toward them. Kelly shouted, “Hold it! Stop where you are!” The joggers didn’t stop. A D.C. Police cruiser on Seventeenth Street spotted the joggers and turned on its lights, trying to get them to stop. The first one hesitated, jogging in place a bit until the second guy caught up with him, then they continued. The Police cruiser jumped the curb and started down the walkway, issuing a warning to stop on their PA system. The joggers kept on coming. Kelly leveled his M-16 and shouted, “I said, halt! Last warning! Stop! ”
The joggers angled over away from the Washington Monument, about fifty yards or so away from the Avenger, near a small information kiosk.. . then suddenly stopped, both of them, and put their duffel bags down.
“What’s the problem, man?” one of the joggers shouted. “What’s going on?”
Kelly shouted, “Leave those bags on the ground and raise your—” But he was interrupted by a terrific explosion that rolled across The Mall. A bright yellow fire was burning, somewhere near the Capitol.
“-712, you read me?” Lathrop radioed. “Wood, man, answer up ... -712, you read me? What’s that fire ... ?” But Lath
rop knew what it was—it was the burning hulk of the Avenger stationed west of the Capitol. Someone was picking off all the air defense units around the Capital, one by one...
... and now they were attacking here. The two joggers had leaped behind the information kiosk, out of sight of the Avenger crew—and suddenly a burst of automatic gunfire erupted, sweeping across Lathrop’s Avenger. The D.C. Police car that was speeding toward them slammed on its brakes, and another burst of automatic gunfire sprayed it with bullets. Kelly ran behind the Avenger and returned fire with his M-16, chopping holes in the fiberglass kiosk. The D.C. Police cruiser was getting chopped up badly—they had some heavy firepower .. .
Lathrop closed his canopy and swung his turret westward toward the kiosk. Machine-gun fire peppered the polycarbonate canopy, and 9-millimeter bullet holes dented it, but thankfully did not penetrate. One of the joggers bolted toward the police cruiser, firing on the run. Lathrop tracked him with ease in his infrared scanner window, flicked his arm switch to guns, hit the enable button on the left turret control, and squeezed the trigger on the right turret grip. From only about two hundred feet away, the Avenger’s .50-caliber heavy machine gun—designed to blow fifty- thousand-pound aircraft out of the sky a mile away— chopped the first jogger up into several large chunks in less than a second. Lathrop immediately swung the turret back around and reacquired the kiosk, ready to blow the shit out of it as well...
... but the second jogger had pulled out a LAWS (Lightweight Antitank Weapon System) rocket from his duffel bag, aimed and fired, and from less than two hundred feet away he could not miss. It seemed as if the rocket was headed straight for the space between Lathrop’s eyes. He felt an incredible blast rock his eight-thousand-pound vehicle and saw a bright flash of light, and then he saw and felt nothing...
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