by Diane Capri
Tony immediately faced left. Jackie walked in and faced right, ready to eliminate any threat from that direction should there happen to be one.
There wasn’t.
A second later Brian entered, too, and the team split up as the doors closed smoothly behind them, Tony moving left along the hallway in front of the equipment room and Jackie and Brian turning right, flanking the room on the other side.
The terrorists were totally at ease inside the BCT building. They were familiar with its layout, having studied blueprints until each man was confident he could navigate the facility with his eyes closed. Getting access to the construction plans and blueprints had been simple—they had been included in the packet of information purchased from Nelson Michaels.
Thanks to Michaels, the terrorist team knew that there were two exterior doors on this side of the building. The hallway they were standing in surrounded the enormous workspace where the technicians stored radar scopes and all the tools necessary to maintain the equipment inside the BCT. After winding around this workspace, the corridors terminated at the north wall, where each one ended at a heavy steel door leading to the outside.
The doors were locked and accessible from the outside only with an ID card like the one Tony had hanging around his neck. From the inside, however, the doors operated as normal. They were fitted with a steel bar stretching across their width at roughly waist height. Use of the key card was not necessary to exit the building.
When Tony reached the terminus of the hallway on his end, he pulled his Glock 9mm, fitted with sound suppressor, from his belt and fired one slug into the handle’s mechanism. The only sound was a soft phht when the weapon discharged followed a split second later by the sound of grating and smashing metal, but he carefully scanned the hallway behind him for thirty seconds afterward to be sure the electronics technician had not been alerted to his presence.
The hallway stayed quiet, and Andretti decided the technician had not heard the noise. He turned back to the door and tried the handle, shoving hard against it. The door was jammed. Perfect.
Tony retreated back up the hallway and around the corner, stopping in front of the wooden double doors. Within seconds he was joined by the other two terrorists, who nodded simultaneously. They had successfully disabled their door, too.
Only one access point remained besides the front entrance to the BCT. There was a door at the rear of the first-floor foyer on one side of a two-story glass wall. Brian moved back into the foyer to disable the door, while Tony and Jackie began their search for the electronics technician. It was time to disable him as well.
The two men split up when they reached the technicians’ cubicles. Undoubtedly the lone tech on duty was sleeping with his head down on his workspace, oblivious to his pending fate. Unless there was an equipment problem during the overnight shift, there would be nothing for the man to do, so why would he bother staying awake?
Tony stepped behind the first row of three cubicles, scanning for a sleeping body. It was empty. Jackie moved to the second row. Also empty.
They were taking their time, moving quietly, but they must have made some small amount of noise because as they walked along the far side of the partitions to check the final row of cubicles, a flash of motion at the far end of the room caught Tony’s eye. Above the six-foot-high cubicle walls, Tony glimpsed the top of a man’s head moving quickly toward the hallway door.
Tony wasn’t worried that they had spooked the tech. The man had nowhere to go, as long as he didn’t head for the front entrance, which Tony knew he would not do. That door was the farthest exit away, thus the least likely one he would try to use to escape the threat. When the man entered the hallway, he would sprint straight toward the door just a few tantalizing feet away, which, of course, would not open.
The technician was trapped like a rat in a cage, and the end of his life was rapidly approaching. He just didn’t know it yet. Tony looked forward to introducing the concept to him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Nick had always thought there was something a little eerie about the Boston Consolidated TRACON during the midnight shift. The building was huge, so even during the day—with a full complement of staff and administrative personnel and both the Manchester and Boston areas filled with a complete roster of controllers—it was not unusual to walk down one of the many mazelike corridors and not encounter a single soul.
Originally intended to house four or even five New England approach control facilities, only Boston and Manchester had ended up moving into the building. All the other candidates had enlisted the assistance of local senators, representatives, and other political heavyweights to successfully block any proposed move. The powers that be in each of the affected states were none too excited to see dozens of high-paying jobs, not to mention the associated tax receipts from those jobs, leave their states and move to New Hampshire.
The result of all this political maneuvering was a building two or three times bigger than it needed to be for the number of employees who worked in it. It was like Grandma rattling around in her massive old house after everyone else in the family had grown up, moved away, or died off. It struck Nick as a colossal waste of taxpayer money.
Nick strolled into the break room, not bothering to flip on the overhead lights. The glow from the television in one corner playing to an audience of zero provided more than enough illumination for someone who had been working at the BCT as long as Nick. He paused at one of the vending machines lined up along the north wall like soldiers standing at attention and dropped quarters into it.
He grabbed a soft drink and a package of chips—if Lisa was alive, she would have had a fit to see how he was eating—and opened the break room door to take his food back into the TRACON. It was time to give Fitz a break. Stepping through the door, Nick glimpsed what looked like shadows flitting down the long hallway encircling the operations room.
He started in surprise. It was beyond unusual to see anyone outside the ops room at this late hour, and as he focused on the far end of the corridor, he realized with shock that what he was seeing were not some amorphous shadows at all. And it was no one who belonged here, either. Three men dressed head to toe in black combat fatigues were walking in the opposite direction with rifles slung over their shoulders, holding handguns at their sides.
Somehow Nick managed not to cry out; he had no idea how he pulled that one off. He slid sideways, instinctively taking cover in the corner of the hallway across from the break room. In a stroke of luck that had probably saved his life, the three men were facing the other direction when he opened the door and thus remained unaware of his presence.
Had he flipped the lights on when he entered the break room, Nick knew he would likely be dead right now. The intruders must have walked right past the break room seconds ago while he was inside. Why they had not entered the room to investigate it Nick had no idea, but he concluded that since it appeared dark inside, the men had decided not to waste their time.
A surge of adrenaline coursed through Nick’s body, instantly bringing him fully awake. It was stronger than any buzz he could have gotten from his soda. He slipped silently back into the darkened break room as the men in combat fatigues disappeared around the corner at the far end of the hallway.
Who the hell were those guys? Something was obviously very wrong, and Nick knew he had to get help.
Crossing the room in five hurried steps, Nick picked up a telephone extension sitting on a table next to one of the plush easy chairs. He lifted it to his ear and was unsurprised to discover that it was dead.
His cell phone was the obvious next choice, but there was only one problem with that option: the FAA did not permit cell phones in the operating quarters. Nick’s phone, instead of hanging on his belt at his waist, was lying in his mailbox in the ready room down the hall. It was charged and operational and at the moment totally useless.
He replaced the telephone handset gently on its cradle, almost as if there was a chance one of t
he unknown intruders might hear the noise and return to investigate. He stood frozen in place, tapping the telephone’s hard plastic casing absently with his fingers, lost in thought. What to do? He couldn’t stay here forever, cowering in fear in the break room from the guys with the guns. Sooner or later he would be discovered.
Plus, it seemed like a coincidence of the most improbable magnitude that the BCT would be breached by men with automatic weapons on the very same morning that the president of the United States was flying into Boston’s airspace.
Nick had no idea what it meant that the guys with guns were here in Merrimack when the leader of the free world would soon be landing nearly forty miles away in Boston, but he was dead certain that it meant something significant.
He had to notify the authorities. Escaping the TRACON and going for help didn’t strike Nick as a reasonable plan, since it seemed unlikely in the extreme that the guys with guns (terrorists?) would have stormed the BCT and then left the exits uncovered. Even if he were able to escape the building undetected, and Nick knew he would have to hike for miles just to get anywhere he could tell someone about the situation, and by that time, it would probably be too late.
All of this went through Nick’s racing mind in a matter of seconds as he stood next to the useless telephone, feeling helpless and exposed in the shadowy break room. There really was no choice. He had to get to his cell phone in the ready room and use it to call 911, but to do so meant walking fifty feet down the well-lit hallway running adjacent to the operations room. He would be completely exposed the entire time. If anyone should round the corner from either direction while he made the journey he would be toast. And then, assuming he made it all the way to the ready room alive and unharmed, what would he find when he entered it?
Would another terrorist with an automatic weapon be standing sentry, ready to cut him down in a hail of bullets? Nick had no idea how many men with guns had actually entered the TRACON. Maybe the three he glimpsed were just one group of many; there was simply no way of knowing.
One thing he did know, however, was that standing here in the dark was accomplishing nothing, other than to make him more afraid and less sure of his ability to survive the next few minutes. Already a strong sense of impending doom threatened to reduce him to mindless panic. It was an almost physical presence. It was big. And it was growing.
Nick took a deep breath, surprised by how loud the roaring in his ears sounded, and opened the break room door a crack. He leaned forward and peeked through the tiny opening.
No one was there.
He breathed a short prayer to whoever might be listening, then stepped through the doorway and started down the corridor.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Dimitrios and Joe-Bob stood in the marshy wetlands of the Hull Peninsula, frozen in the glare of the Jeep’s headlights. Their shadows stretched in the opposite direction, fuzzy and indistinct on the muddy ground. They waited calmly to see what would happen next. The situation felt oddly similar to the one last week when the Tucson cop had stumbled onto them as they loaded the Stingers from the Army transport vehicle into their unmarked panel truck.
This time, Tony was not stationed somewhere in the darkness with an automatic weapon, ready to cut these people in half. But on the bright side, the Jeep clearly contained nothing more dangerous than a group of stupid kids looking for a little privacy so they could finish getting drunk and stoned. The chances that they were armed were slim, and even if they were, it seemed highly unlikely they were sober enough to hit anything they were aiming at, anyway.
Dimitrios and Joe-Bob could hear excited babbling coming from the Jeep. It was one of the old CJ models, with the removable canvas top, so the interior was open to the elements. Staring straight into the headlights, the two terrorists were effectively blinded and thus could not tell how many people the vehicle held. It sounded like there might be three separate voices.
It became clear that the kids sitting inside the Jeep had no idea what to do. They had Dimitrios and Joe-Bob pinned in the glare of their headlights, but they had not spoken a word to them or shut the lights off or done anything at all for close to two minutes.
Fuck it, thought Joe-Bob. We don’t have time for this. He arranged his face into what he hoped was his most disarming smile and affected his strongest Forrest Gump good ol’ boy Southern drawl. “Hey there, fellas, y’all mind turning down them headlights? All that brightness is givin’ me a headache, ya know?”
“What the hell are you doing out here?” came the shouted reply from the Jeep. It sounded aggressive and much too loud.
“Same as you, I would imagine. Relaxin’.” Joe-Bob kept his voice nice and soft, placating and non-confrontational.
After a moment the Jeep’s headlights were extinguished. All Joe-Bob could see now was a slowly fading blue image burned onto his retinas. Not good, but certainly better than before.
“You’re in our spot.” The tension seemed to have drained from the kid’s voice, and the statement was spoken softly rather than shouted. The kids inside the Jeep seemed to have decided that they had the situation well in hand, which was just the way Joe-Bob wanted it.
“Well, I’m sorry about that, boys,” Joe-Bob replied. “We’ll just be on our way, then. Find us another spot. We didn’t mean to step on any toes or nuthin’.” He exaggerated his drawl.
There was no reply from the Jeep, so Joe-Bob continued. “As a peace offerin’, how ’bout we leave a couple beers with you fellas? No harm, no foul, right?”
“Works for us.”
Joe-Bob sloshed over to the cab of their Dakota, reaching in through the door and grabbing two water bottles. He held them against his chest, using one big arm to shield them from view, so that the occupants of the Jeep would not be able to see that they weren’t actually beer bottles until it was too late. As he splashed past on his way to the Jeep, Joe-Bob growled softly to Dimitrios, “Grab the duct tape.”
By the time he reached the Jeep, Joe-Bob’s vision had returned more or less to normal. He could see now that the vehicle held three young men in their late teens, two in front and one in back.
He reached over the Jeep’s passenger side door, and as he did, he flung the two half-full water bottles hard into the face of the kid unfortunate enough to be sitting there. He pulled a thirteen-inch tactical combat knife out of its nylon sheath at his waist and in one smooth motion gutted the kid, plunging the razor-sharp CTV2 stainless blade into his belly and pulling up, using its serrated upper edge to slice him jaggedly open between his ribs.
Joe-Bob heard a sharp, surprised intake of breath followed immediately by a weak, watery “Ahhhhhh.” The kid’s voice sounded bubbly and far away, and he was dying with shocking suddenness.
Blood dripped from the black titanium carbonitride blade, looking almost as inky as the blade itself in the near-total darkness. Joe-Bob lifted his hand to shoulder height, using his massive bulk and the unexpectedly terrifying sight of the knife to intimidate the vehicle’s other two stunned occupants. The attack had occurred with such savage swiftness that it seemed neither kid had a chance to grasp what had just happened to their friend. Their reflexes dulled by alcohol and drugs, both young men stared stupidly at Joe-Bob, mouths hanging open in identical displays of shock.
“So, who wants to be next?” Joe-Bob asked quietly with a half grin.
No one answered, so he motioned Dimitrios forward with the knife.
By now the critically injured young man was panting as if he had just sprinted a great distance, his breathing rapid and shallow. Each outward expulsion of breath sounded bubbly and wet, and was accompanied by a low moan, and he had his arms wrapped tightly around the front of his body in an effort to keep his entrails from spilling out of the gaping wound in his belly and chest.
He was mostly failing in that regard. He was also fading fast and would be dead within minutes.
Dimitrios wrapped the duct tape around the driver’s head twice before slapping it on the seam. He taped th
e man’s hands to the steering wheel, then shut off the Jeep’s engine and pocketed the key. He repeated the procedure with the backseat occupant, taping that man’s hands to the driver’s side headrest since there was no steering wheel back there.
The wounded man in the front passenger seat slumped sideways against the door, his head lolling out the open window. He was still breathing shallowly but had slipped into unconsciousness.
Joe-Bob used the kid’s denim jacket to wipe some of the blood and gore off his knife, which he then slid back into his scabbard. He told Dimitrios matter-of-factly, “Luckily this little misadventure didn’t cost us too much time, but we really need to start getting set up. Let’s move our asses.”
Without looking back, he trudged back to the Dakota. The Forrest Gump good ol’ boy accent was almost completely gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Larry looked at his watch again and sighed. Where the hell was Futz, and what was taking him so long to get his goddamned snack? He should have been back ten minutes ago. It wasn’t like Larry minded sitting and staring at a mostly empty radar scope, especially since the federal government was paying him a 10 percent premium on top of an already handsome salary for working in the middle of the night, but he could feel his reflexes slowing and his eyes beginning to droop. He knew he needed a break; even just a few minutes to take a walk and stretch his legs would be enough.
He thought about what had happened to Lisa and wondered how he would react if he had been in Nick’s position. Wife brutally murdered and now buried in the ground, without the opportunity to even say good-bye. Life sucks; then you die.
Larry had married Sharon a few years before Nick and Lisa tied the knot, and although he and Sharon certainly didn’t have the perfect marriage—at least not when you compared it to Nick and Lisa’s—Larry knew he would be lost without his wife. He couldn’t imagine how Nick was going to cope. He had tried talking to his friend about it once or twice, and Nick had politely but firmly rebuffed him each time. He said he wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. Larry supposed he could understand that.
