“Yes, Sir. If we ever find out, I’m afraid those tapes will show maybe one person got a gun through, while the others—this has to be a multi-person mission—have knives or…. What do they call those things with razor blades with a handle?”
“X-acto knives? Linoleum knives? Utility knives? Box cutters?”
“Oh, God. That’s it. Box cutters, the perfect terrorist tool you can hide. If one were stopped by accident…anyway, they can be smuggled into a carry-on so easily.”
“OK, OK, OK! Let me make some calls. I want to talk to you later on how you know all this.”
“Thanks, Greg.”
*
Later that evening, after four aircraft crashed, Lynche called Hunter and told him he relayed his message to a senior FBI agent and his old boss at the CIA. They thought he was nuts, but, when a retired member of the Senior Intelligence Service begins to relay intelligence, woe be anyone who doesn’t act on it.
Immediately after Hunter was off the call, Lynche called someone he was close to who was still on active duty at CIA.
Six hours later, the Deputy Operations Officer quietly told him that over fifty people were being sought in conjunction with activities at the airports in Dallas, Denver, Chicago, Miami, Memphis, and LA. It took FBI field agents several hours to get into the major airports and confiscate the concourse security tapes. Reports soon came into FBI Headquarters that from across the country the concourse security tapes clearly showed several flat box cutters in the luggage of Eastern-looking men going through the magnetometers.
FBI agents at a few airports sat in stony silence, as they picked out the teams of five men with the signature flat metal box cutters going through the X-ray machines. Not once had the operator stopped to check the bag or alert his supervisor of a possible weapon. All four channel surveillance tapes at the other airports showed the same thing.
Camera one showed what was being X-rayed. Camera two showed the passenger setting his baggage on the X-ray machine. Camera Three gave a frontal view of the passenger passing through the magnetometer to see if he carried metal on his body. Camera four showed the X-ray operator at work with the machine.
At eight airports, the four-channel surveillance tapes clearly showed a Muslim man or woman, some women wearing hijabs, operating the X-ray machines. Eight tapes showed the X-ray machine operators all checking their watches repeatedly starting at 0800 local time. They were obviously looking for a face in the magnetometer line. Once the operator identified his marks in the line, he or she focused intently on the X-ray machines. None of them looked up until long after the Eastern-looking men passed through and retrieved their bags from the X-ray machine.
The FBI agents were aghast to learn that within fifteen minutes after the men passed through the magnetometer, every X-ray machine operator asked to be relieved from his or her post and never returned.
Once the FAA ordered all aircraft grounded, another theme was replicated across the eight US airports. Some managers of the contracted airport security firms complained several employees quit, or the employees walked off the job. Some airport security uniforms were found in trashcans in airport restrooms.
When the FBI descended on the airports and demanded employee records, over fifty employees across the country were reported missing. The airport security managers confirmed the missing employees were Muslims, good workers who never gave any trouble. The managers had to make accommodations for them, even helping find a room at the airport, so they could go to prayer.
One manager commented, “They never complained about making a minimum wage plus a nickel. By the way, do you think it’s coincidental that over a year ago, I didn’t have a single Muslim employee, then, within a month, I had a couple dozen?”
Employee records were taken to FBI offices, and fingerprint cards were processed. Each of the former airport security employees became a person of interest. Police and FBI descended on the employees’ home addresses, but the apartments were all vacant. None of the neighbors reported seeing anything unusual. All-points bulletins were issued, but not one of the former X-ray machine operators was found or detained.
When the FAA grounded all aircraft, many passengers on the airplanes left the airport to find ground transportation. At least twenty-four men of Eastern descent were revealed in the surveillance tapes quickly exiting the airport in advance of the X-ray machine operators leaving. FBI agents were able to piece together several plausible situations where five-man teams were to be passengers on six other aircraft flights of Boeing 757s or 737s. Had not the FAA grounded all planes, those aircraft would probably have been hijacked to attack nuclear power-generating stations near major metropolitan areas.
*
During the 9/11 Commission hearings, there was no mention of the fifty missing Muslin X-ray machine operators, the six airport concourse surveillance tapes, or the thirty men of apparent Eastern descent who quickly left the six Midwest and Western airports after their flights were grounded.
*
FBI agents interviewed Hunter several times concerning his insights into airport operations and how to breech airport security for those of Muslim faith. The FBI report resembled that of the Oklahoma City bombing. Muslins were involved to a greater extent than anyone believed. The US government, specifically the FBI, refused to pursue the case.
Only two FBI agents in Boston were assigned to investigate the hijackers’ comings and goings while in Boston. It wasn’t until years later, when an al-Qaeda lieutenant being interrogated in Jordan named the imam and mosque from which eight of the ten men who flew the two aircraft into the Twin Towers passed through at one time or another.
Imam Abrahim was instrumental in helping members of his flock secure employment at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Two dozen Muslims, who worshipped at the Al-Azzam Islamic Center, worked at the fast-food restaurants or gift shops at the airport for almost two years before moving and attaining pre-board screening positions with the local security contractor, International Screening Services, several months before Osama bin Laden released the cowards from hell and started a war between al-Qaeda and the United States.
CHAPTER TEN
0600 September 12, 2001
Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training Area Naval Special Warfare Command, Coronado, CA
On the brink of passing out, he emerged from the surf shivering uncontrollably, trying hard to control his breathing and not hyperventilate. After almost five days of exercise, continuous drenching in the super-chilled California surf, with little sleep or food, all twenty candidates struggled in the mild riptide to return to the beach after their rafts capsized and blew away in the wind.
So that’s what it’s like to see stars, he thought in a flash of coherence before falling face-first into the water.
Eight inches of seawater provided enough cushion to prevent him from breaking his nose, jaw, and neck. He was completely exhausted, with his nose embedded in the sand. Fear of drowning gave him a jolt of adrenalin to his trembling arms as he struggled to push himself up and get his face out of the water. Sandy seawater drained from his mouth and sinuses, choking him.
It wasn’t worth it. They would let him die. As the surf withdrew, gently tugging him back into the bay, he momentarily lost consciousness. His quaking arms buckled, and his chest and head fell back to the beach. With the next wave, the cold Pacific shocked him awake again.
Eyes blinking wildly to clear themselves of salt and sand, he exhaled rushes of spit and salty water. He was going to die on that stinking beach. With a loud exhalation, he fell over and stopped moving Two instructors leaped into the water and screamed at him to get up. Another yelled, “You can make it all go away!”
“You don’t want to do this anymore, do you?”
His shivering returned so hard he could barely speak. Finally, his head bobbed up and down.
“He’s done. Corpsman, here’s another one.”
That was the last thing he heard before Petty Officer Sam Miller’s eyes
rolled up, and his heart stopped.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
0145 June 30, 2002
Hunter Ranch, Del Rio, Texas
After three hours on the road, Duncan Hunter tried to exhale deeply but was overcome by a lengthy yawn that squeezed tears into the corners of his eyes. Physically spent, he couldn’t squelch another yawn even if he tried. With the ranch house ahead, he deftly coordinated another yawn with a left-handed press of the garage remote clipped to his sun visor and a right-handed turn of the steering wheel into the driveway.
As the garage door slowly crept up, the truck’s headlights progressively illuminated the black-and-white checkerboard floor, blood-red toolboxes, and gray car cover hiding an old, yellow Corvette racecar.
He sighed audibly, waiting for the garage door motor, spawning another yawn and forcing him to stop the truck. He leaked more tears as he stretched his jaw and facial muscles. He guided the Silverado inside, turned off the engine, and closed the garage door.
Hunter, glad to be home, sat in the seat, hands gripping the wheel. He was exhausted from ten days in the oxygen-deprived high altitude of Bogota and by night flying at low altitudes under night-vision goggles. The work, extremely stressful, demanded his utmost attention, many times more than during big deck carrier operations from his fighter-pilot days. Nighttime missions were downright scary and very dangerous. The intense, continuous stress of low-level night flying on the ragged edge of life and death over treetops to spot drug labs or through canyons to find terrorist encampments took its toll in fatigue—not during the flight but afterwards.
A mission was followed by fitful sleep during daylight hours, which always messed up his hypothalamus and biorhythms. He didn’t know how Lynche did it at his age.
When he asked, Greg replied, “I never even think about it. You’re the pilot. I’m in back playing with the sensors.”
Decompression and rest wouldn’t occur until Hunter returned home to his bed in Texas. Getting there required a two-stop commercial flight from Miami. He raced the 150-mile gauntlet of Highway 90, where kamikaze whitetail deer stepped into his headlights at inopportune moments, sporadically flooding adrenalin into his system as he swerved to avoid collisions.
Some evenings, the deer stayed on the side of the road, but not that night. After every close encounter, Hunter’s skin tingled from the hormonal spike. His body’s natural tendency was to compensate with rest.
After completing the exciting midnight run from San Antonio to Del Rio, Hunter’s natural inclination was to let his guard down when entering the city limits, because he was tired and knew sleep would come quickly. After five years of flying with Lynche for Art Yoder and “Lynche's old place,” Hunter couldn’t afford to let his guard down at any point in the kill chain.
Hunter, Lynche, Yoder, and the Director of Central Intelligence were continuously reminded that Hunter was targeted for assassination. Only his wits and situational awareness kept him alive. If it wasn’t highway deer trying to take him out, it was other road hazards.
The first unbelievable and bizarre attempt on his life occurred shortly after Lynche and Yoder brought the Schweizer to the Border Patrol in 1996. Two punks in an old truck in broad daylight tried to crowd Hunter off the road toward a deep ditch along a long, clear stretch of Highway 90 between Del Rio and Brackettville.
They’d obviously been waiting for him, as his black Silverado passed through the former home of Buffalo soldiers, John Wayne’s Alamo, a German prisoner-of-war camp, and a small Border Patrol Station. Hunter immediately felt the act was intended to be more lethal than lazy or poor driving technique, and he countered the aggressive move with skills learning from a survival-and-defensive driving course.
Braking hard, he modulated the pressure on the pedal while steering into the truck’s rear bumper at the right moment and angle. His heavy brush guard’s firm bump against the other truck’s rear quarter panel unweighted the Ford’s truck bed enough to give it a sideways skid. At seventy mph and suddenly going sideways, the driver tried to compensate with a hapless maneuver just when his tires struck an expansion joint in the road bed and stopped.
The truck flipped over and rolled down the center of the highway. Hunter slammed on the brakes and watched the vehicle shed parts and people with each revolution. He sat in his lane, engine idling, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and wondering, What was that all about?
Reversing direction, he returned to the Border Patrol Station in Brackettville to report the incident to the Chief Patrol Agent and Greg Lynche.
“If I didn’t know better,” Hunter said, “I’d swear they were trying to kill me.”
With the sudden retirement of the unit’s chief pilot, three increasingly aggressive attempts on Hunter’s life were enough for Yoder and Lynche to encourage the Director of Central Intelligence to intervene. An FBI counterintelligence team was dispatched to the border town and quickly determined that the former chief pilot had ties to a Colombian drug cartel and possibly a militant Islamic group. They even uncovered a potential link to an unsolved homicide.
The FBI and the Border Patrol Chief Agent recommended Hunter be administratively transferred to another duty station or federal agency for better protection.
While some at Border Patrol Air Operations cheered the announcement, the Chief Patrol Agent lamented he didn’t want to lose Hunter, because he was the most-dynamic employee he ever had. By the end of the week, the former Marine Corps pilot, who was already teaching graduate school classes for the instructor pilot cadre at the nearby US Air Force base, was transferred to the Air Force under a by-name assignment and became their deputy director of aircraft maintenance.
As Wraith missions continued every other month, Hunter managed the stressors of flying the low-level nighttime ghost over hostile territory. He achieved decompression by returning home to work at his real job, teach courses at night, and play racquetball and relax in his hot tub. With the move from the airport to the air base, Hunter bought a new house closer to the Laughlin Air Force Base complex, although its location was somewhat remote.
The ranch-style home, built by a local orthopedic surgeon, featured a diving pool and in-ground hot tub with a seven-foot satellite dish wedged into a corner. As illegal aliens became more of a problem, trespassing the ranch and even breaking into the house, the surgeon erected a twelve-foot brick wall around the basic living area to encompass the patios, pools, and plants to make it difficult for the average illegal alien to get into the house.
After Hunter moved in, the Border Patrol installed seismic sensors around the property and placed the ranch on their patrol schedule. Intrusion detectors and motion-activated floodlights reminiscent of a warlord’s compound found in any third-world country provided a level of security and safety that was acceptable to Yoder, Lynche, and the DCI.
Hunter loved the security, privacy, and lush tropical garden in the backyard. Bougainvillea, Mexican fire bushes, and many different species of palms required a gardener’s services to maintain. During summer months, when the sun heated the pool to the high nineties, Duncan stumbled out of his bedroom and wobbled outside to fall into the pool to wake up. At night, after a late evening of work, school, or racquetball, he fired up the Jacuzzi’s jets and relaxed in the pulsing, hot, eucalyptus-scented water.
That night, all he wanted was to drag himself into bed with the ceiling fan on high and sleep. He’d brush his teeth in the morning.
He unfolded himself from the truck, extracted his roller board from the truck bed, punched numbers on the keypad near the door to disable the alarm, and entered the kitchen. He glanced at the pile of mail and number of missed calls on his answering machine. They could wait. It was late.
He yawned and started dragging his flight bag to the bedroom when red lights erupted on the security panel. After a double-take, he realized the seismic sensors were showing movement outside the compound walls. Hunter tried to make sense of the flashing lights. He blinked several times, then rubbed his eyes.<
br />
Did I miss that? he wondered.
An alarm bell rang in his mind, as he quickly looked through the kitchen and sunroom to see if the motion-activated floodlights were on. After two seconds of scanning the outer wall for signs that the floodlights would illuminate, he jumped when the security system beeped, signaling an intrusion into the compound.
Hunter kicked his bag aside, mashed the Help button on the security panel, and bolted for his bedroom, racing from the kitchen, across the dining room, and down the hall.
As he turned left into the bedroom and directly into his walk-in closet, the first rounds of an AK-47 assault rifle shattered the glass panels in the sunroom. Hunched over in the closet, he pulled up on a folded T handle and lifted a door leading to the storm safe room, taking the stairs two at a time before stopping.
A second burst from an AK-47 sent 7.62 mm bullets raking the house, as he closed the overhead door of the safe room. In the dark, he felt for and located the dead bolts and rammed them home, left and right.
The safe-room door, reinforced with sheets of steel, Kevlar, and bullet-resistant Fiberglas, shut off all light from the bedroom. His skin tingled from adrenalin. In total darkness, his senses became hyperactive. He was breathing so hard, he almost hyperventilated.
Hunter thought a third Kalashnikov joined in ripping apart the house. He reached for the flashlight he always left on the third step and touched the cold metal silently. His heart pounded. In the total darkness, he saw phosphenes with each heartbeat. He almost celebrated his escape, then he realized the basement wasn’t designed to repel Kalashnikovs. He might be trapped, but he had to decide whether to stay and fight or go.
When the previous owner decided to install an in-ground pool he was surprised to find the ground was solid rock under six inches of caliche, requiring drills, dynamite, and jackhammers to blast out material for the pool and hot tub. While all the heavy equipment was on site, the surgeon had his architect design a safe room for the occasional tornado that swept across southwest Texas when least expected.
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