Air Marshals

by Wynne, Marcus

  ***

  Charley's flight out of Istanbul was uneventful. He leaned back in his First Class seat and stretched. He looked out the window and watched eastern Europe stretch away beneath him. How many times had he been here, suspended over countries he'd only dreamed of as a kid? How many flights had he been on? Sometimes he experienced a strange fugue state, when he woke up in his hotel room and didn't know where he was, or on a flight when for a moment he couldn't remember where he had started from or where he was going. Donald had kidded him about it when he'd mentioned it to him:

  "Well, Charley, that's a sign of old age. Your brain cells are going from stopping too many blows to the head."

  Charley glanced over his shoulder at his crew, seated among the other passengers down the length of the 727. They were all young, or fairly so: Stacy was thirty-eight, Steve thirty-three, Karen only twenty-six. They had so much in front of them, especially Karen. None of them had been in the business before they became marshals. None of them had any previous time carrying a gun and a bad attitude hunting other men and women doing the same. Steve had a brief stint with State Department Security, but that hardly counted.

  Charley's whole life, since he'd left Minnesota, had been in the business. First the army and Viet Nam, and then to pass on the lessons he'd learned there as an instructor in the Special Forces Q-Course; then with the Agency on a regular paycheck, and then with the Marshals when they started up. He'd been married once. It hadn't lasted his first tour in Viet Nam. There had been a steady succession of women, and he'd enjoyed that, needed that softness for a long time when he was younger. That need fell away as he got older and developed a discipline in his personal life to mirror the discipline he'd always had in his professional life. While he still enjoyed women, he had been without a serious entanglement for a long time until he met Maria. She was a beautiful and serious Hispanic physical therapist he had dated in Tucson. She was quiet and loving and very clear about what she wanted and what she was willing to accept from him.

  "You're not ready to marry, Charley," she told him in her soft voice. "And I won't marry a man who is married to his job. I can love you, and I can hold you for awhile, but you'll go back to what you do, and I won't try to stop you. When you're ready to settle down, maybe I'll still be here. Maybe I won't. What I want right now is what I have with you. I'm happy enough with you in my bed sometimes. You're good to me, in your way, and that's good enough for me. For now," she added. "Maybe you'll change your mind someday."

  She had been prophetic. He had written her not long after he had moved to his apartment outside of Dulles. She wrote back:

  "Well, Charley, when I got your letter I hoped for a minute that you might be asking me to move to Washington with you. But that turned out not to be so. I hope you are well. I think of you often. I went to dinner at Vasquez's the other night, and Mrs. Ortiz asked about you. Write me when you like. Maria."

  The divorce rate among the marshals was as bad as, if not worse than, most military and law enforcement families. At least half of the marriages failed, and many others had the specter of infidelity hanging over them. The merry-go-round of relationships among the marshals could be amusing; Charley often remarked to Don that he needed a scorecard to keep track.

  But living his chosen life meant living alone and Charley realized, just now, at thirty thousand feet over the Adriatic Sea, that he was ready to not be alone. The thought surprised him. He often had surprising little insights midway through a flight when all the patrols had been made and his inner voice told him he could relax a little bit. He'd fall into the rhythm of the flight, and these stray thoughts would come to him. It went way back. He remembered how once, on a mission over the fence into Cambodia, he had settled into his patrol base for the day. In the stuporous heat, slumped over his CAR-16, he realized suddenly that his marriage was over, that he had changed, and there was no going back to what had been before. The letter she sent him was waiting when he got back to the fire base.

  He still got those insights, especially when flying, but now they were about training, or how to deal with team issues. Only occasionally did he have to deal with an insight into himself. But this was one of those times. When this mission was done, when the resolution, one way or the other, had come, Charley was going to stand down. It was time. He'd known too many friends who had hung on past their time, when they no longer had any juice, desire or passion to continue in the business. They only clung to it because over the years it had consumed them and become their only source of identity. Too many of them, after retiring, drifted into drinking, trouble, or an early grave. It was time. He still had a mission to run, problems to solve, a friend to avenge, if possible. But it was time.

  ***

  FRANKFURT, GERMANY:

  Ahmad Ajai sat at a desk in yet another small hotel in Frankfurt's Iranian district and made notes to himself on a legal pad. Reports were coming in from Athens and Istanbul, and there were decisions to be made. It was apparent that this air marshal team had spotted his surveillance in Frankfurt, and were probably responsible for the disappearance of Rashid. It was possible that they had also spotted his surveillances in Athens and Istanbul, which spoke to a high level of training and awareness on their part. He had reviewed the reports generated by other intelligence gathering cells on the marshal teams operating in Africa and Asia. This team seemed to be one of the most proficient, and without a doubt the best led.

  The hardest target.

  While he wished to make the most significant statement possible, Ajai had not lived to the age he was, with his long string of successes, without being pragmatic. There were softer targets. But this team was assigned the highest threat routes, had the two top trainers assigned as leaders, and was operating where he had the most logistical support. He had a feeling about this Charley Dey. They were of similar ages, the two of them; they had both served long and hard in the service of their countries. They were peers, worthy opponents. And the thought of a worthy opponent, the trainer for the marshals, with a tough and seasoned team...what a blow that would be to the morale of the Americans! What would they think when they saw their very best people paraded through the streets of Teheran, or the bodies photographed, surrounded by the triumphant fighters of HizbAllah?

  His wrist watch alarm buzzed. It was time for mid-day prayer. Ajai laid out his prayer rug, and knelt in surrender to Allah the merciful. In his surrender was this prayer: Send me the opportunity to take this man. Send me the opportunity to make the statement I will make with the blood of this man and his marshals.

  ***

  In Charley's room in the Frankfurt Marriott Hotel, Don and Charley sorted through a stack of notes and report forms from both split teams. The other six marshals sat on the floor, or in the two available chairs, and sipped Dortmunder Beer from the minibar.

  "It stinks of men in here," Stacy said. "Somebody open a window."

  "It's all that pent up man stuff, baby. Come by after the meeting and help me take care of that," Don said.

  "Fuck you, Nelson," Stacy said.

  "Let's get started," Charley said. "Anybody have anything to add to the team reports, any general observations?"

  "What is HQ saying about the increased surveillance?" Steve asked.

  "Not much," Charley said.

  Don looked down at the floor.

  "There's some sentiment that we might be over anxious, that we might be seeing things where there isn't anything," Charley said carefully.

  "What the fuck is that about!" Butch exploded. "Are they on dope, or what? What about at the Intercontinental, what about the goddamn people working us in every city we show up in?"

  "There's a rumor going around that we're being dangled, for the Agency and DOD to pick up on the guys who might be targeting us," Charley added.

  "Is that true?" Stacy asked.

  "I don't think so. It'd be one thing if it was just us, but putting civilian passengers at risk...no way would the oversight committees let that fly," Charley
said.

  "Who's saying we're over-reacting?" Joan asked.

  Don said, "A certain very light ex-colonel in Uncle Sam's Maniac Children, chief toady and training advisor, tactical wizard extraordinary named Buttfucked Dinkey."

  "I don't understand," Karen said. "Why would he downplay this? This is for real."

  "Politics," Charley said. "We'll take care of that when we get back in DC. We're going to take care of ourselves right now. Don and I are going to the consulate later to call in and see what is going on, talk to some of our friends there. We'll let you know what we find out. Anybody else have something to add?"

  The marshals looked around at each other.

  "Then we'll see you guys later. Anybody that wants to meet up for dinner can link up with us in the bar at six o'clock. See you later," Charley said again, as he busied himself with the paperwork spread out across his bed. Stacy and Butch lingered, but Don waved them out and shut the door.

  "When we going to meet up with Jedi?" Don asked.

  "He'll meet us down at the SCIF in the annex about eleven thirty."

  "I'm beginning to become highly pissed with this Dinkey disinformation campaign. We got enough shit going on that we don't have to deal with office politics, too," Don said.

  "We'll deal with that when we get back," Charley said. "We've got these kids to think of first."

  "Kids? Charley, you need to shift gears. We're not training, we're operating, we can't afford to think about them as kids or trainees...you got to get your own mind in the game, you've been off this whole trip. You listening to me?"

  Charley watched a river barge make its slow and ponderous way up the Main River. "I'm getting too old for this shit, Donny."

  "We're both too old for this shit, brother."

  ***

  The US Consulate Annex is a nondescript building near the old US Army Headquarters in Frankfurt. In the basement, behind the metal sheathed walls of a Secure Compartmented Information Facility, was "Jedi" Loveless's office. Don and Charley sat slouched in heavy leather chairs, sipping coffee from mugs emblazoned with the Special Operations Command crest.

  "I'm not supposed to be talking to you," Jed Loveless said.

  "Imagine that," Don said. "Got any sugar?"

  Jed gestured to a mug stuffed with sugar and sweetener packets. "Your boy Dinkey called a general who called a general who called the Director, who called me. You got a bug deep up his ass, Charley."

  "I'd like to have my foot up his ass," Charley said.

  "He'd love it...it'd fit right in with his description of you. 'Irresponsible, impulsive and uncontrollable, a cowboy endangering the operational security of the marshal mission.'" Jed recited, grinning. "He's particularly bent about what little he knows about you handing our little buddy over."

  "What does he know?" Charley said.

  "Nothing, really. He suspects that a couple of his more senior marshals might have had a hand in it, but he knows nothing." Jed paused. "That was pushing the envelope some, Charley."

  Don smirked as Charley set his cup down and leaned forward.

  "Since it's just us girls here, Jed," Charley said tersely. "Let's not fuck each other around. I know what it was about. Me and Don have been pushing the envelope for you since you got up and running. We could talk about pathfinder operations. Or cargo diversions. Or big bulky guys with long hair showing up with us to inspect aircraft from certain countries of interest, or the teams of 'air marshals' that show up where, damn, we don't recall sending any. We can talk about all that stuff being off the shelf, or we could talk about how black operations are run, the way the bureaucrats do. But let's not. Let's just say that shooters do what they have to do, and that they look out for each other. You'll just have to cover for me the same way I've covered for you. Let's keep it that way."

  Jed said, "I love it when you get mad, Chuckie. Makes my dick hard."

  The three of them burst out laughing.

  "Okay," Jed said. "Point taken. Let's get down to business." He opened a manila folder with a Top Secret codeword coversheet on it. "Your boy is a low-level operator with a specialty in logistics. Mostly courier stuff: running vehicles back and forth, renting apartments, ferrying money and papers. The Germans picked him up once at the airport, with a briefcase full of money and ten Kuwaiti passports with pictures of known terrorists on them. They let him go, and kept an eye on him. Under duress, the subject indicated he had been assigned to surveil airport security operations around American carriers. He claims, at this point, to have no particular and specific knowledge regarding the end use of the surveillance data...but he suspected an attack on US Air Marshals, possibly when they were on the ground in a host country that didn't allow them to carry their weapons."

  "Under duress? At this point?" Don said.

  "The interrogation was conducted by German intelligence. We were allowed to observe. Of course, it's not our place to comment on their interrogation techniques. They're not bound by the same restraints regarding the rights of prisoners that we are," Ed said, smiling slightly.

  "Tasty," Don said.

  "What else?" Charley said.

  "That's it. He's not doing well right now, so we're waiting for medical authorization to continue. What are your thoughts about a hit on the ground?"

  "Possible," Charley mused. "But how does killing off-duty air marshals justify the trouble of running the op? Why not take out an ambassador or somebody higher profile? What about introducing explosives onto the aircraft, or attacking a flight without coverage? What if they're trying to determine which flights are covered and which aren't, so they can mount a hijacking like the Kuwaiti one?"

  "They've got a lot of info...how much did Leigh know about your current doctrine?" Ed said. He watched Charley 's lips purse and his brow furrow, the narrowing of his eyes and the pupil dilation...the indicators his kinesic interview instructors had trained him to recognize as an internal state of controlled anger. It was the physiological response of a trained and seasoned killer in formulating a reply to something deeply disturbing.

  "We exchanged training ideas and tactical concepts, but hell, there's only so many ways you can defend an airplane," Charley said. "Tactical doctrine can be extrapolated if you have aircraft configuration and team size. There's only so much you can do with a given number of bodies." He paused. "He could have given them everything, really."

  "At least part of his interrogation focused on aircraft recovery on the ground," Ed said.

  "How do you know that?" Don said.

  "The after-action reports from the Kuwaiti hijacking indicated that the hijackers were focused on defending the aircraft from a ground assault...a DELTA or Team 6 option."

  "What about the Kuwaiti air marshals?" Don said.

  "Both were executed in their seats in the first three minutes of the take over," Ed said.

  "Isn't that surprising," Don said flatly.

  "They were more worried about a recovery effort on the ground than marshal coverage. That would make sense if they were targeting a plane we weren't on," Charley said.

  "It'd give us a major black eye to have a hijacking go off. We'd lose all our deterrent credibility," Don said. "They'd be proving the point that we can't be everywhere all the time. It'd be a great coup for them."

  "Not as great as if they took one we were on," Charley said.

  ***

  In the world of tacticians, an aircraft is called a "linear problem." That means the main action of taking the aircraft or recovering it takes place in the aisles, up the long axis of the aircraft. One variation involves multiple simultaneous entries to swarm the aircraft. Logistical difficulties like how to stage multiple entries onto an airplane when an unknown number of hijackers are maintaining 360 degree observation and denying you concealed avenues of approach tend to limit that option. In the real world the solution is elegant in its simplicity, bloody and violent in its execution: bust the plane open where you can, put flashbang grenades in the hole, follow them with shooters sprinti
ng down the aisle killing anything that poses a threat, with covering shooters upon on the seats inside or shooting through the windows from ladders outside. The team swarms the aircraft with maximum violence and speed and surprise. It can work great.

  On the ground.

  In the air it's a different ballgame. At 30,000 feet, you don't bust open the plane and fill it with all the best shooters in the world. So it's only the folks you bring to the dance. No back up. If you crack the plane, there's this thing called explosive decompression, where the pressurized cabin tries to empty itself instantly to equalize the pressure inside with the lack of pressure outside.

  If you're counting on pin-point precision shooting, remember that your people are operating under severe environmental duress. The stress of a real shooting incident causes you to lose your fine muscle control; you also experience auditory exclusion and tunnel vision. Even highly trained shooters often lose the ability to make precision shots with a handgun past seven yards when someone is shooting back. Airplane passengers are generally mildly to severely dehydrated (you lose 1 pint an hour in the super dry atmosphere), suffering from fatigue (the constant vibration and noise take a subtle but measurable toll on you, even if you sleep, which air marshals and hijackers do not) and stiff and slow from sitting in a cramped position. Even the best marksman in the world, and some of them are air marshals, lose their fine edge under those conditions. Not all bullets hit the target in a real gunfight. At the end of that long "linear problem" is a cockpit, where the pilots and flight crew keep the plane in the air. The thin plastic and fabric bulkhead that separates the cockpit from the rest of the aircraft has the bullet resistance of a very strong piece of cardboard; in other words, none at all. There are few places on a modern aircraft that have any bullet resistance. So there's no place to hide. That's the shooting part.

  Now consider hand grenades. They're a weapon of choice for hijackers because they are small, easily concealable, and devastating at short range, where all the fighting takes place in a plane. If a hand grenade with the pin pulled out falls to the floor, say because the hijacker brandishing it has stopped a 115 grain +P+ Winchester Silvertip in his brainpan, that grenade is going to go off in five seconds, give or take a second. If it detonates on the floor, besides killing people within a yard and severely injuring those out to about ten yards, it may also blow a hole in the floor. Remember explosive decompression? In civilian aircraft, many of the critical hydraulics and electrical components run in unshielded conduits under the floorboards. In military aircraft, there is built in redundancy; since military aircraft are built with the expectation that they may be shot or blown up, there are back up measures to ensure that the aircraft can survive. Civilian airliners don't have those expensive countermeasures built in. So there's that.