Payback wi-10, page 6
part #10 of WW III Series
“Yes,” she told Freeman, “apparently they were.”
“Shooters might have been in U.S. Army uniforms,” added Freeman.
“So zero chance of finding the shooters or the launchers?” said Eleanor.
“Not necessarily.” The general was ransacking his memory for MANPAD hits. In Afghanistan against the Soviet, the U.S.-Stinger-supplied mujahideen had brought down 270 aircraft, and they weren’t big 7E7s or jumbos but agile close-air support attack helos, including the highly maneuverable Soviet Hind gunships and fighter aircraft. For the mujahideen there had been no need to jettison the reusable launchers, but for terrorists audaciously attacking American civilians in three of the nation’s biggest and most heavily populated airports, ditching the launchers of course made more sense.
Then he recalled an attack by Chechen rebels on the sleek, updated international terminal at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. He clicked the mouse to bring up the file on his laptop but remembered the details of the attack before the computer had it on-screen. The crucial point had been that though the Chechen terrorists had fired MANPADs, they’d ditched the launchers and vanished. How? Freeman went to the NYPD’s overhead traffic cam on the expressway and saw the gridlock of traffic — none of it moving except for police and security vehicles — their reds, whites, and blues flashing frenetically all around JFK’s perimeter.
“I’ve got it,” he told Eleanor, recalling the details of the Chechen attack. “They’re hiding out in a safe house close to the airport — waiting until the hullabaloo dies down and…” Switching the computer screen back and forth between the NYPD cam window and the Chechen file, he suddenly announced to Eleanor, “Chechen terrorists were belted,” by which he meant they had had dynamite belts beneath their battle tunics, as Iraqi Shiite “martyrs” had later armed themselves against the Americans in ’03 and ’04. “And they could be in NYPD uniforms.”
“Shit!”
“I don’t want to depress you further, but from the firing point position I saw on the video—”
“Which one?”
“The one with the eyewitness — guy who thought it was fired from a pickup. The point of firing looks close enough to the airport that they could be changing clothing in the airport.”
“My God!” said Eleanor. “It’s a zoo out at JFK.”
“Not to mention LAX and Dallas/Fort Worth,” said Freeman.
Eleanor Prenty knew from her experience of crises involving airport delays that passengers would put up with it overnight, but then would start demanding that they be put up in hotels, be transported back to the city. And there’d be added pressure from delivery trucks and taxis, and toilet facilities would be overloaded. “By the time there are enough cops to cope,” she told Freeman, “it’ll be like a sieve of escape hatches out there.”
“Those two discarded launchers,” Freeman said. “Have we got their MIDs?” It was obvious she didn’t know what he meant, and so he added, “Manufacturer’s identification numbers. Without them you can’t keep track of inventory in a factory. Do we have them from the launchers?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll find out.”
In fact, the FBI field forensic lab was already examining the launchers for MID numbers. It had proved helpful in the past — the same launcher used in the near-miss against the Arika Airlines’ Boeing 757–300 of November ’02 had been used in other attacks.
“If we can find out where the launchers came from,” said Freeman, “we could pay it a visit.”
“The President’s already determined to do that, but we’ve had so much stuff coming in, I don’t know whether anyone’s determined the actual source, even if they’ve got those MID serial numbers. My God, Douglas, how are they getting them into this country?” Eleanor asked exasperatedly.
“Through slimeballs like unlicensed arms dealers.”
“I’ll press the agencies for the serial numbers.”
“If I can be of further help…”
“Don’t worry, Douglas. The Pentagon might have exiled you; I haven’t.”
He was at once gratified and humiliated that his only conduit as a “retiree” to the halls of power was not via his reputation, his past reputation, as a gung-ho leader of Special Forces in America’s defense, but only through the goodwill of Eleanor Prenty. A civilian.
“I appreciate what you said,” responded Freeman, then said good-bye, his tone, one of a forgotten champion, noticed by Margaret — who, getting ready for bed, passed by in her robe, beneath which she was wearing a brand-new translucent pink nightgown, of a kind that her mother would have condemned as “blatant.” And Margaret would have agreed, but the awful carnage of today, the sight of the black, smoldering heaps that only seconds before had been hundreds of human beings pulsating with life and hope, had been an epiphany in Margaret’s life, provoking a determination to no longer simply exist, to vegetate in a lonely world of restrained, reined-in spinsterdom, but to cast off her uptight, buttoned-down feelings of guilt about the love she’d felt for her sister’s husband all these years. Catherine was long deceased. Anyway, wouldn’t she have wanted Douglas to be, well, comforted? Margaret felt it was time for her need to be comforted. And today they had broken the ice, through the deep freeze she had built up between them, but she was afraid that now that the ice of her guilt had cracked, she would be — well, she would be humiliated.
She said good night. He was still working at his laptop but gave her a smile. “Good night, Margaret. You’ve been a great help.” After all this time, it was as if he’d kissed her.
“Don’t—,” she began, quickly aborting the phrase “stay up too late” and instead encouraged him. “Don’t forget there’s lots of food — in the icebox.”
He laughed. She smiled, but was nonplused. “What’s so funny?”
“ ‘Icebox.’ It’s — such an old-fashioned term. I like it.”
“You do?”
“I do.”
“God bless,” she said, and went to her bedroom. “Icebox,” she said softly. Well, she wasn’t going to be an icebox. She searched in her dresser drawer for a small six-by-one-and-a-half-inch square white box purchased in a moment of fantasy years ago in an out-of-town drugstore. She took the tube of viscous liquid from the box and, removing her robe, admired her figure in the mirror — full breasts, firm tummy and bottom, front and side-on beneath the slinky film of pink silk. “Not bad,” she dared whisper, “for an old-young girl of fifty-five.”
Beneath the covers she squeezed a bead-sized drop of the K-Y lubricant on her right index finger and, careful to replace the tube’s screw-on top so as not to get any on the sheet, she slowly applied it, working it in gently. She couldn’t fit a minnow in there. One of those dreadfully sex-obsessed women’s magazines—Cosmopolitan, if she remembered correctly — at the hairdresser’s had had an article in it about how virgins needed to use one of those “things” to widen the entrance.
It seemed such a lot of bother, but then sometimes alone in bed, or working alone in the garden, alone on her daily walk, she just ached — there was no other word for it — she ached to have a man inside her, hard and gentle and forceful until…until what she’d never known from a man would happen. How so-called modern women would laugh at her, she thought, a woman so traumatized by a fundamentalist upbringing that even satisfying yourself was such a mortal sin that she had always felt guilty — you had to save yourself, wait for marriage. She had waited — fifty-five long, aching years. Dear Lord, wasn’t it time? The awful vision of the dead from the plane crashes was before her, their lives ended, snuffed out like candles. Life itself was so tenuous — you never knew. If Douglas walked through her bedroom door, she’d cast her bedcovers aside and be blatant for once in her life. He could do what he wanted with her. He would be her lover. Her first.
The very thought of the word “lover” made her catch her breath, her eyes closing, then wide-awake in fright. The article in Cosmopolitan said you would need to insert one of those wax things daily for a week or two, or use your fingers with some lubricant, to ensure you were wide enough, because if the skin tore, it would hurt like the devil, as too many honeymoon-nighters had apparently discovered, a terrible way to start a relationship — and worse, put the man right off. Surely her lubricated fingers would serve to—
She tried to relax. Of course he wouldn’t approach her tonight. What was she thinking? They’d just broken the ice. Besides, he’d be too busy trying to help track down the unspeakable creatures who had murdered all those children and other passengers at JFK, at Los Angeles, and down in Dallas/Fort Worth, hundreds of people who’d been alive only hours before. Tomorrow she would go see a doctor — no, not her usual MD, but someone, a young woman doctor perhaps? No, a married middle-aged doctor, who could advise her. Surely there must be a quicker, more modern way to widen herself than one of those things Cosmopolitan talked about. Ugh.
The phone rang and she glanced at the clock on her bedside table. It was just after midnight as she picked it up. She heard a man’s voice — an Australian accent. “The products’ MID numbers—” Margaret replaced the phone.
In the living room, the kitchen’s cordless phone beside him by the laptop, Freeman was pressing Aussie Lewis for details. “What’s the problem?”
“Scuttlebutt from my buddies at the Pentagon is that there’s a jurisdictional scrap going on between National Transportation Safety Board investigators and the FBI over who has primary responsibility for detecting serial numbers.”
“For God’s sake!” thundered Freeman. “What are those suits doing? The President’s spent millions with Homeland Security, trying to get those wankers to stop competing against each other and start cooperating. Pride, Aussie, pride cometh before a fall.”
“You got it,” agreed Aussie, thinking of another adage, something about the pot calling the kettle black. Freeman’s legend, like Patton’s, was based on solid and, at times, brilliantly unorthodox tactics, such as the famous Russian tank-oil maneuver in the U.S.-led NATO mission in Siberia. But the legend was also built on an ego and a pride that, like Patton’s, thrived on media-fed public acclaim. What was it General Omar Bradley, Patton’s onetime subordinate, then his superior, had once said about the legendary Patton when his Third Army had broken out of the heavily fortified bocage, the hedgerow country in Normandy, slashing through the Nazi defenses? “Give George a headline and he’s good for another hundred miles.”
“Where do you think the product is coming from, General?”
“Don’t know. If we catch any of those bastards maybe we can have a little talk with them.”
“Roger that,” said Aussie with feeling. “I’d like to have five minutes with one of the bastards. I’ll keep in touch. By the way, General, no need to be hesitant about what we’re saying on the blower anymore. The networks are all yakking about MANPADs.”
Freeman had no sooner put the phone, or “blower,” as Aussie called it, down than he was thinking again about the MANPADs’ backblast. He immediately called Eleanor Prenty, explaining to the National Security Advisor something that the mujahideen and later the anti-U.S. Taliban had never had to do in Afghanistan: change clothes after firing their MANPADs. The terrorists’ drill, having fired their weapons in such a high-density area, would be first to dump their launchers and disappear into the airport crowds, as he’d already told her; then they’d probably try to shower down before they donned their replacement clothing, in order to get rid of any scent of cordite, sulfur, et cetera, lest a K-9 dog squad sniff them out at the airport.
The general advised her to order NYPD and their counterparts in LAX and Dallas/Fort Worth to immediately shut off all water flow to airport shower stalls, detain anyone who was found using one, and go over them and the washbasins with the police’s handheld NBC sensor. Even if the terrorists had dumped the clothes they’d used while firing the MANPADs, the backblast was so pervasive it was like passing another vehicle on a dusty road with your windows open; particles wedged themselves into ears, nostrils, and especially in your hair. Even if their hair was shampooed, the particles could still be detected in trace amounts by the handheld sensors and, if necessary, analyzed by spectrometers either in the FBI’s portable field labs or in Homeland Security’s downtown forensic labs.
The order from Eleanor Prenty was out to all three airports within two minutes, and within another seven to ten minutes — it taking longer because of the endless corridors at Dallas/Fort Worth and an argument over who had first call on the electric carts, federal or local police — dozens of astonished, irritated, and some downright outraged citizens, most already fatigued by long flights from Alaska and South America, found themselves being ordered out of executive club and public coin-operated shower stalls into Immigration holding rooms, where they were being “swept” by NBC sensors and searched — some would complain violated — by no-nonsense AO, all-orifice, examinations.
Meanwhile, all waiting passengers, air crew, and airport staff were being sniffed by K-9 squads. At Dallas/Fort Worth, two Guatemalans, seeing the dogs approaching, made a dash through a packed waiting lounge for the nearest exit, police running after them, converging on them. One of the pair, a dark, mustachioed man in his early twenties, stopped and threw up his hands. The other, an older man, held a tubular map case close to his body with his left hand, one end on the floor, his right hand grasping the tube’s other end, which seemed to be either a screw- or pull-up top. “I have bomb! Nobody move!”
Nobody did, except for a terrified elderly woman who made to get up from her waiting-lounge seat but couldn’t unaided. A cop eased her back into the seat. “Don’t worry, ma’am. Just stay still. It’ll be fine. Just stay still.”
“It’s a bluff!” an FBI agent on the periphery of the overcrowded waiting lounge whispered into his voice-activated shirt-button mike to the just-arrived SWAT team, which had been swiftly summoned from patrolling the airport perimeter. “Ten to one he’s carrying dope.”
“You certain?” came the SWAT team’s CO’s response.
“Not a hundred percent.”
“Then we do it by the book. Bomb squad and negotiator are en route. Tell this guy someone’s coming — we’ll work it out. How’s he look?”
“Like they all do, sweating like a pig.” The agent held up his hands and called out to the Guatemalan, “Just relax! We’re gonna work this out, okay? You understand? We’ll work it out.”
“Nobody moves,” shouted the Guatemalan.
“Nobody moves,” the agent assured him. “Absolutely.”
The other Guatemalan with his hands up wasn’t moving, but he was talking rapidly to his partner in Spanish. But one of the words he used was “SWAT,” so then the one with the map case told a half-dozen passengers to “come here.” Most of them were taller than he. He told them to stand face-out in a circle about him, and told his ring of hostages, “Anyone turns around, anyone touches me, the bomb goes. You understand?”
Everyone understood, and it meant that for the SWAT team moving quickly, quietly into the airport, it was going to be virtually impossible to get a head shot — or any other shot, for that matter. Now the other Guatemalan, seeing how his buddy had brought temporary immunity with the threat of a bomb, got cocky, put his hands down, and moved over to his map-case friend.
“Shit!” said the FBI agent into his wrist mike, a profanity that would never have been condoned in Hoover’s day. “His accomplice is getting a ring of more people around them. Now we’ve got double trouble. Who’s our negotiator?”
“Ralph Fiennes,” cut in the SWAT commander. His real name was Ralph Fine but they called him “Fiennes” because he had the same lean build and intense eyes as the movie actor.
“We don’t want him,” snapped the FBI agent. “We need casual cool with these two, not Sigmund Freud.”
“Here he is,” cut in the SWAT commander from behind a ticket counter. “He’s riding a cart. No necktie — looks like he’s gonna do his casual serious bit.”
Fine was undoing the top button of his shirt. “This place stinks like a locker room. Everybody’s sweating. Where’s the bomb squad?”
“En route,” the SWAT commander told him. “What’s the matter? You sweating, Mr. Fine?”
“Just a little,” Fine said. “It’s hot. You think you might get a shot at him?”
“Dunno, there’s a lot of people around him.”
“Around them,” cut in the FBI agent. “Don’t forget the second guy.”
“I won’t,” said Fine. “We’ll know more when—”
“Hey!” shouted the second Guatemalan. “Those cameras. Turn those stinking cameras off.”
“They are off,” said the FBI agent.
“No, they’re not,” said Fine, alighting the cart about thirty feet from the ring of terrified hostages, his body language that of a golfer approaching the nineteenth hole, his eyes, however, never moving from the Guatemalan with the map case. “We’ll duct-tape ’em — the cameras. How’s that?”
“Yeah,” said the one with the map case. “You do that. Duct-tape ’em right now.”
“That wasn’t any help,” said Fine, talking to the FBI agent who was standing off to his right. “You lying about the cameras. Makes them nervous. Let me handle this. You go over to that newsstand and get some tape, plastic carrying bags, anything, to stick over those security cameras. Stand on someone’s shoulders if you have to!”
“It isn’t a bomb,” said the FBI agent. “He’s a druggie. Saw the sniffer dogs and panicked. Nowhere to run.”
“You might be right,” said Fine. He looked over at the one holding the map case. “I’m Agent Fine. Mr. — ?”
The Guatemalan hesitated. “Gonzales.”
“What do you want, Mr. Gonzales?”
“I want you should get a plane for me an’ my frien’. Right now. These people come with me — us — to Cuba.”
Ralph Fine scratched his head. “That’s going to take a little while to organize, Mr.—”
“Bullshit! I wan’ that plane. Honda jet, eh?” The Honda Executive jets had displaced the Lear as a status symbol. “Half an hour,” he added. “Half an hour.” His friend whispered to him. “Yeah, an’ two million dollars!” The friend whispered to Gonzales again, who nodded eagerly, his voice infused with bravado. “Yeah, an’ no dye, no sequential noombers. You understan’?”
