They scattered around the living room and sat, some in chairs, some on the hearth of the fireplace, some on the floor, and one by one they spoke. Each had a devastating story of loss. Each story was heartrending. Most, like him, had lost children, others siblings; some had lost arms and legs, but it was all a familiar theme; they had gotten in the way of a brute, a government that was flexing its muscle to show ownership of the world. About half way through, Jonathan heard a thump and turned to see Carly sitting on the stairway. He scurried up to get her, but she sat frozen, transfixed, hypnotized by what she had heard.
“Honey you shouldn’t be listening to this. Let’s find a good television show to watch.”
She nodded.
Jonathan scooped her up and carried her to the bedroom and tucked her into bed. “Did you hear much?” he asked trying to understand what might be going on in her head.
She nodded and then a tear came down her cheek.
“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.
“I’m just Carly,” she responded.
He tucked her in and gave her a kiss on the forehead and left the door opened a crack. He waited a minute and peeked back into the room to see her sitting up with her big blue eyes wide open staring at the wall.
“What is going on in my little angel’s head?” he thought as he tiptoed down the stairs and re-engaged with his new friends.
They talked until morning, Islee bringing pot after pot of coffee and tea. When they were through, Jonathan understood what was going on in Carly’s head as he stared blankly at the wall.
Chapter 27
It was 5 a.m. and Jonathan laid all of the items on the couch in preparation for what would be the most significant day in his life. There were the two handguns, a latex mask he had made from the corpse of Bob Runyan, Burton’s id badge, a forged id, a list of the pilots who would fly in today’s mission, the taser and a pile of documents and money.
Mary and Islee were still fast asleep. He felt the presence of someone behind him and turned to see Carly, hanging onto Bruiser’s only arm with her right hand and the Velveteen Rabbit book in her left.
“Come up here,” she said patting the bed.
She curled up on his lap, released the book and immediately stuck her thumb in her mouth.
“Daddy, can I tell you a story?”
“Sure sweetie.”
“Once upon a time there was this scruffy rabbit that looked a whole lot like Bruiser, except he was a rabbit and Bruiser is a bear.”
Jonathan knew the story well.
“And all this rabbit wanted was to be real, because he wanted the little boy to love him. He had this friend that was a skin horse and he somehow became real, so the rabbit wanted to know how he did it. You know how he did it?”
Jonathan asked, “How?”
“He was always there for the boy and he didn’t care what the boy did to him as long as the boy loved him. After a long, long time the love of the boy made the Skin Horse real. You know I’ve been thinking, it’s not only toys and animals that can become real.” Carly laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Jonathan asked.
“I have a Skin Horse,” answered Carly.
“I know you do,” said Jonathan reaching over and stroking Bruiser.
“No……..,” laughed Carly even louder. “That’s Bruiser….he’s not real yet, he’s still working on it.”
“Okay then, I’m stumped. Where’s your Skin Horse?”
Carly giggled and then pressed her index finger right into her daddy’s chest. “You are my Skin Horse, Daddy.”
The touch of her little finger felt like a sledge hammer and pushed him back against the couch. He didn’t know how to react and felt his eyes welling with tears.
“No one else?” he asked.
She shook her head no.
“What about mama?”
Carly shook her head no. “Mama’s not real, Daddy, she’ll never be real.”
“Sure she is, sweetie. Your Mama loves you very much.
Carly shrugged her shoulders. “She lies and she kills people. Bruiser says you can never be real if you lie and kill people.”
“How do you know she lies?”
“Bruiser told me that she never tells the truth.”
“Never?”
“Not since Matthew died. Bruiser is going to be real like you someday, Daddy.”
“But look at him, he only has one arm and a half a mouth and his ear is all burned. Certainly that has to make him real.”
“He’s on his way, he’s definitely on his way,” she answered. “It’s not that easy.”
“I guess it isn’t,” said Jonathan.
“Are you going to Washington today?”
“I think so, how did you know about that?”
“Bruiser told me.”
“That’s a pretty smart bear you have.”
“Are you going because of my dream?”
“I’m going for a lot of reasons.”
“Be careful Daddy.”
“I will sweetie.”
She reached her arms around him and squeezed as hard as she could and whispered, “Sometimes a person only gets one Skin Horse their whole lifetime and if they lose it they never get it back.”
Chapter 27
It was 6 a.m. Tuesday morning and Jonathan had one stop to make before driving to Andrews Air Force Base, a stop that he hadn’t discussed with Mary. He tapped lightly on Director William Reed’s door and the door slid open. The Director was regularly in his office at 5:30 a.m., planning his day and drinking his five cups of coffee before the regular crew arrived. He sat behind his desk, with a three inch pile of documents in front of him. Most of the reports were tucked within bright red folders, labeled “top secret.” His secretary, Janice would arrive promptly at 7 a.m.
The face of a perfectly disguised Alex Moore peeked into his office and stared directly at the Director who was on the cell phone talking with Harry Davidson.
Harry was confirming the finding of the missing Lear jet in the Green hangar in Greeneville, Tennessee. The Director froze when he saw Alex as if he was looking at a ghost. “I’ll call you right back,” he said to Davidson as he flipped the phone shut.
“Can I come in?” asked Jonathan.
The Director nodded and then responded, “What the hell are you doing here? He carefully slid open his top drawer revealing a 45 caliber hand gun.
“Sorry sir, but it’s important.”
The Director looked down at his gold Rolex, stalling for time as he tried to sense the seriousness of the situation and then collected himself. “Jesus Christ, Bob you shouldn’t be here and what the fuck are you doing out of cover!”
“I didn’t think it mattered anymore, the Andersons know I’m alive.”
“They found you?”
“Yes, sir they did.”
“And?”
“They know more than we think….Lexington, the President’s address tonight and they are going to try to intervene.”
“I don’t know how they can.”
“Good, then we can continue as planned.”
“Of course, we’re too fucking pregnant to back out now.”
“What time is the intercept?”
“Intercept?”
Jonathan was at a loss for words, “For the helicopter, sir?”
The Director put on a half smile, “The helicopter will impact at 8:23 p.m.”
“And Mary?”
“An accomplice….we’ll hang her for treason. Now get the fuck out of here and get back under cover before someone sees you.”
“PD get in here!” screamed the Director into the intercom. In a few seconds, PD was in the office. The Director was leaning back in his chair with his feet on his desk, a big grin on his face. “We got him.”
“Are you going to let me in on what’s making you so confident?”
“He was just here.”
“Who?”
“Anderson.”
“You’ve got to be fu
cking kidding me?”
“PD it couldn’t be more perfect, he’s fallen right into it. Not like we planned, but in the end who in the hell will care.”
“He’s going to fly the plane?”
“He’s on his way to the base as we speak.”
“What about Mary and the kid?”
“Harry will be back from Texas in an hour, and he’ll take care of them.”
“What if Anderson doesn’t do it?”
“Not a chance, he’ll do it. He’s bought the line about the President sponsoring terror, hook, line and sinker. He thinks that the administration is blowing up cities and buildings. He actually believes that he is doing the country a favor,” responded the Director.
“How do you know it was him?”
“Runyan is dead. Mary confirmed it yesterday. And it makes perfect sense for him to come. It was obvious that he was fishing, which let me feed him, just what he needed. I confirmed every one of his fears.”
PD smiled, “Then tomorrow will be a brand new day, we will have accomplished the largest coup in the history of mankind. And you have the military and NSA on your side?”
“The Hart-Langley Act requires all the leadership to be inside that building. I will be the highest ranking Presidential appointee still alive. We have our people on the inside of each critical agency. Everything has been taken care of.”
“So tomorrow you will be the next President of the United States.”
The Director chuckled, “Let’s not get hung up on titles.”
The Director’s intercom rang, and Janice came over the speaker. “Sir, the White House is on the line. They want to know why you won’t be attending the State of the Union Address tonight.”
“Thank you, Janice. I’ll pick up.”
Chapter 28
Jonathan left CIA headquarters and drove to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. He sent a letter from the Director Bill Reed with a forged authorization from the President of the United States to the leader of the F-18 squadron, requesting a pilot by the name of Todd Hamilton to be removed from the flight schedule and be replaced with another, Tony Dimarco. He included an attachment that contained all of Tony’s flight experience, which was actually Jonathan’s, and a picture of Alex Moore. Jonathan knew that substitutions were not unusual in special missions, because pilots were often targets of information, so few knew anything about their mission until the briefing a few hours before. Jonathan had forged all the identification that he needed to enter the facility.
Once inside Jonathan had no problem finding his way around. He had flown many missions from the Air Force Base and was familiar with the layout of the facility. He walked confidently carrying his pilot’s bag into the locker room, where 12 blue pilot jumpsuits were hanging next to empty lockers. He found the suit with Tony Dimarco’s name above the left pocket and put it on. Once in the briefing room, the other pilots introduced themselves, some knowing each other, most not, but used to this type of atmosphere and almost instantly creating a team. The briefing room was a huge interior room with no windows and four rows of contiguous tables all in a huge semi-circle. At the front of the room were three layers of white boards that could be manually moved up and down on rollers and a massive motorized white screen to capture the projections from the video and Microsoft projectors. The squadron leader, Charles Sowell, a small man about 5 feet 7 inches tall, gave the briefing. Also sitting in the front were the three other sub-squadron leaders, each in charge of groups of three airplanes.
The briefing was a typical special operations Navy briefing with all of the flying positions superimposed on a large sectional map, which moved based upon the projection of time. The specially equipped F-18 SP’s could protect the capital city from 100 miles in every direction. Commercial flights were suspended from Reagan-National and Dulles International for two hours before the State of the Union address and two hours after, and a temporary flight restriction (TFR) was in place for a 250 mile circle, so any private aircraft flying within Washington, DC, Northern Virginia, Southeast Pennsylvania and Maryland air space would be intercepted and escorted to a proper landing place or shot down. Jonathan’s aircraft was code named Oscar Papa 4 (OP4) and was one of a squadron of 12 identical aircraft. The planes were armed with 10 laser guided air to air missiles, one maverick and one tomahawk missile, and a 30 mm cannon. The smaller missiles and cannon gave him good air to air combat capability; the maverick missiles could destroy a city block, the tomahawk could sink a destroyer. It also had two auxiliary fuel tanks, one on each wing tip that gave him 4 1/2 hours of endurance, enough to stay airborne for the entire mission. He studied the flight manual of the F-18SP aircraft and familiarized himself with all the new avionics in the glass cockpit. The aircraft had become more sophisticated from an electronics point of view, but it was still the same old F-18 that he had been flying for the past 20 years.
It took the squadron only 12 minutes to fly from Patterson to their North, South, East and West positions on 25 mile circumference points from the Capitol Building. Radar from Reagan–National Airport, Dulles and the Pentagon would accompany their on-board Long Bow radar and Cineflex High Definition camera systems and alert them of any air traffic immediately providing a “laser lock” which could be handed off to any or all of the 12 targeting systems. A Hummingbird couldn’t get within 10 miles of the Capitol without being shot down.
The planes departed at 6:02 p.m., two hours and 13 minutes before the President and his staff entered the building. They circled their respective perimeters in squadrons of 4 aircraft. Jonathan’s plane was outboard left. The holding pattern was quite boring, so Jonathan entered the battlefield of his own mind, where there was no longer delineation between good and evil. His entire life, value system and ideals were now in shatters and every waking moment brought pain. He missed Matthew terribly, thought about him daily and now knew that he had given his life to a political system that had taken his life. Mary was right. The administration is the terrorist and the people he met with and cried with the night before are the victims. For every American who had died through real terror, at least a thousand innocent people were victimized for revenge. Now, innocent people were dying from artificial terror.
The Director had confirmed a mission in Lexington even though there was no mention of Lexington during the briefing, which meant that there was no plan for an intercept.
However, the Director said some very disturbing things that he didn’t have to. Why were they so concerned about Mary? How could she possibly be involved with anything? She’s hurting more than me! She lost her baby!
“We’ll see,” he thought.
He cued the Pentagon tower, “This is Oscar Papa 4; is there a TFR over the Lexington Liquified Natural Gas Plant?”
“This is Pentagon Tower; that’s an affirmative.”
“This is Oscar Papa 4; can you put out an alert, I have picked up radio communication on Unicom 122.8 that we may have some trespassers there today.”
“Roger, I’ll notify Lexington tower.”
Jonathan’s leader was named Jimmy Wilder. At 8:12 p.m. Jimmy announced “red alert status” because the President of the United States had entered the Capital building. Jonathan looked down at his arming mechanism, knowing that as soon as he armed his missiles the aircraft would send a signal back to the Pentagon. He would have to arm and then immediately fire, to avoid being intercepted. He hit the chronometer button on his Breitling watch, flipped up the red cover and put his right thumb on the switch. It would take only five seconds to arm, fire and end it all.
“Oscar 4 this is the Pentagon tower, Lexington has reported a VFR aircraft heading Northwest at an altitude of 1500 AGL, transponder off, probably a helicopter that will encroach on the TFR in 7 minutes.”
“Request permission to intercept,” said Jonathan.
“Permission granted.”
“Please give me an intercept course.”
Jonathan communicated to his squadron leader that he was departin
g and then hit his afterburners. He would be in Lexington airspace in 18 minutes.
“Lexington Tower, this is Military F-18 Oscar Papa 4, has the aircraft entered restricted airspace?”
“Oscar Papa 4, that is an affirmative.”
“What is its distance from the Liquified Gas Plant?”
“30 miles.”
“And its airspeed?”
“140 knots.”
Jonathan calculated that if it was in fact on a collision course with the gas facility, it would be there in less than 15 minutes. “Mary was right, they’re going to do this during the State of the Union Address. They’re going to kill thousands of innocent people to create the illusion of terror. And then the President will have his way with the nation, maybe even usher in Martial Law.”
“Oscar Papa 4, this is Lexington tower, aircraft is at 10 o’clock. Please report aircraft in sight.”
“Oscar Papa 4, that’s an affirmative. I have the aircraft in sight.”
Jonathan could see the high visibility blades making a perfect target. The helicopter was six minutes from the gas plant and was descending.
He radioed to the helicopter. “Unidentified Helicopter, I have your position over the liquefied natural gas plant in Lexington, Kentucky, this is a Military F-18, please increase your altitude from 500 AGL to 1000 AGL and adjust to a heading of 090. I will escort you to Lexington International Airport. Please heed or you will be shot down. Repeat, you will be shot down.”
The Helicopter began to dive.
“Pentagon Tower, Helicopter is not responding and is diving toward the gas plant; request permission to take out target.”
“Oscar Papa 4 permission granted.”
Jonathan armed a laser guided air to air missile, locked on the helicopter and in a matter of seconds watched an explosion like he had never seen before. The helicopter burst into a thousand balls of fire that fell harmlessly to earth, extinguishing themselves before they hit the ground.
Perspectives, An Intriguing Tale of an American Born Terrorist Page 32
