by Diane Capri
As he was debating whether it was worth making another attempt to raise the subject with Nick, he heard the click of the main TRACON door opening behind him. Larry was a little surprised that Nick would enter from the door at the other end of the ops room rather than the side door he had used when he left, but maybe he had gone to his cubicle in the ready room to grab a book to read while he sat at the scope doing nothing. At least he was finally back, and Larry could get started on his own break.
He sat resting his chin on his hand with his elbow propped on the console in front of the scope, watching the lone target representing ChekPro Flight 112 move steadily toward Logan Airport. In the old days, airplanes running checks were a staple of overnight traffic at facilities all over the country, but with the advent of electronic banking, the check runners were becoming a dying breed. Larry figured within a few years they would be gone entirely. He wondered what the pilot of ChekPro 112 would do then.
Larry felt rather than heard the presence of a person standing behind him. Without turning around, he started a position relief briefing. “Okay, here’s what’s going on—” He stopped in midsentence as he felt the cold, insistent pressure of a gun barrel being jammed into his neck.
“No, here is what is going on,” came a deep, unfamiliar voice. Whoever was holding the gun pushed harder until it was all Larry could feel. The barrel was right beneath his ear. It defined his existence. “You will be quiet. You will do exactly as you’re told. If you cooperate, you will live. If you do not, you will die an extremely unpleasant and painfully messy death. Do we understand each other?”
Larry swallowed heavily and gave an almost imperceptible nod, afraid that if he moved, the gun would go off and blow his head all over the front of the radar scope.
“Good,” came the voice, cold and hard. “Now, where is the other controller?”
Lifting his hand slowly, still staring straight ahead, Larry pointed behind him to the Manchester area, where their midnight controller was sitting.
“I’m not talking about him. He is already being taken care of. See for yourself.”
Larry swiveled his head, still moving slowly, aware of the constant pressure of the gun barrel on his neck. He looked across the big, dark room to the Manchester area and saw a man dressed all in black, with black greasepaint covering his face, duct taping Ron Johnson to his chair. Ron’s mouth was invisible under a slash of silver tape, and he looked petrified, his wide, panicked eyes staring back at Larry. He wondered if he looked as frightened as Ron and figured he probably did.
“Now, back to my original question, and please bear in mind I am a man blessed with many good qualities, but patience is not one of them. Where is the other controller? I know the Boston area employs two controllers on the midnight shift. Where is your partner?”
These guys hadn’t seen Nick yet. Larry hesitated, uncertain how to answer the question, knowing his life was probably hanging in the balance. The intruders were aware that the Boston area used two controllers to cover the mid shift, so they were obviously pretty knowledgeable about the operation, but if Nick hadn’t been captured, there was always the possibility he could somehow escape and bring help.
“Answer the question!”
Larry closed his eyes and said a silent prayer before answering. “There is no other controller in my area tonight. He called in sick before the shift started, and the government refuses to pay overtime for a controller just to sit around on the midnight shift, so tonight I’m here alone.” He licked his lips nervously and winced, half expecting to see a split second of bright light and hear the beginning of the gunshot roar that would end his life.
Nothing happened.
One second went by and then two. Larry assumed the guy was digesting the information and trying to decide whether to believe him.
“So it is just you and this other man tonight?” The man gestured with the gun barrel at Ron, who was now completely immobilized in his chair across the room, before returning it to its original spot just under Larry’s ear.
“That’s right,” he answered. It seemed like the man was going to believe him, but who the hell knew what these guys were thinking? Why were they here? What did they want? And where was Nick?
A terrifying thought occurred to Larry. If Nick were to walk through the door, the men dressed in black would know he had been lying, and all three of them—Nick, Ron, and Larry—would probably be dead within a matter of seconds. He realized he was holding his breath and tried to force some air out of his lungs. It came out reluctantly and shakier than he would have expected.
Oh, well. There was nothing he could do about it now. He had chosen what seemed like the only viable path with his answer and would now just have to hope that Nick had seen the men and was calling for help from his cell phone or perhaps had escaped and was on his way to alert the police.
Larry took another breath, this one marginally less panicked than the last. “Why are you here? What do you guys want?”
“Shut up. You’ll find out when I’m ready to tell you.”
“What is Ron going to do if an airplane calls on his frequency while he’s got tape over his mouth and he’s tied to his chair?”
“I don’t care about that sector. If a pilot calls over there and doesn’t get an answer, eventually he will call you. When that happens, you will say that the Manchester controller is sick and you will control the plane yourself.”
“So you’re not going to cover my mouth with duct tape, too?”
“I will if you don’t shut your mouth right now.”
Larry decided he had asked enough questions for a while. He stopped talking and waited to see what would happen next.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Nick had never felt so exposed. He rushed down the empty span of hallway from the break room to the ready room. He stuck close to the concrete wall on the right side of the corridor as he walked, which, when he thought about it, made no sense whatsoever. If the terrorists or whoever they were came around the corner from either direction, they would see him just as easily as if he were marching down the middle of the hallway waving his arms and whistling a happy tune. But somehow it made him feel a little more secure to be close to the wall, so he did it anyway.
In a matter of seconds he arrived at the double doors of the TRACON ready room, which for some unknown reason were always kept propped open. The men had not reappeared yet.
So far, so good.
He paused just outside the doorway, wondering what he would find in the room when he turned the corner. Perhaps the terrorists had left a sentry there. Perhaps the room was filled with men dressed in black fatigues carrying rifles over their shoulders. Perhaps there was a bomb. This whole thing was crazy, and he figured almost anything was possible.
Nick rounded the corner and stepped into the ready room, convinced he would be shot at any moment, but when he got inside, it was empty and quiet. If Nick had not happened to see the men marching down the hallway with his own eyes just minutes ago, he would never have suspected anything was out of the ordinary. He crossed the room in four hurried strides, reaching into his cubicle to grab his cell phone, and pulled out…nothing. The phone was gone.
Shit.
Nick was certain he had left his cell phone in his mailbox; it was what he always did with the stupid thing when he got to work. He was a creature of habit, as were most air traffic controllers. You learned early in your career in ATC that the more things you could do instinctively, the more time you had to plan for the weird stuff that inevitably came up when things started to go sideways on a busy sector. So while he did not specifically remember tossing the phone into his mailbox when he arrived at the facility to start the mid shift, he knew without a doubt he had done exactly that.
The fact that the cell was now gone could mean only one thing: the men had confiscated it. He moved quickly to Fitz’s mailbox. If the men had found Nick’s phone, they would undoubtedly have searched every mailbox and taken Larry’s, too. Still, he d
idn’t know what else to do, so he had to try.
Fitz’s mailbox was a mess, even more so than Nick’s. Paperwork was crammed haphazardly into it, spilling out of the box at odd angles. There were a couple of books, a pair of winter gloves (in May?), some pens, and a fiftieth anniversary commemorative pin that the FAA had handed out to everyone. Most controllers had immediately thrown them into the trash. Nick hadn’t even taken his out of its clear plastic wrapper before shit-canning it.
He was utterly unsurprised to find no cell phone. Either Fitz had not brought a phone to work with him or the terrorists had confiscated his, too.
Nick felt the seconds ticking away and knew the armed men could return at any moment. What should he do now? It seemed that the only option left was to try to slip out of the facility and go for help. He didn’t want to leave Fitz and Ron at the mercy of the men, but there was nothing he could do to help them in any meaningful way by staying here. For all he knew, they were already dead.
Nick moved to the door of the ready room and cautiously eased his head out, looking both ways, expecting to be greeted with a gun barrel shoved in his face or perhaps a bullet to the head. Instead, he saw nothing. Making a quick decision, Nick backtracked down the hallway toward the break room.
When he came to the corner where he could either angle right to reenter the break room or turn left and continue down the hallway, Nick made the left turn after first flattening himself against the wall and peeking around the corner to see if anyone was approaching. The ops room was to his left on the other side of the wall, and Nick was beginning to think that was where the men must have gone.
At the end of the corridor was a thick metal door that opened outward, revealing a large, dusty stairwell. A set of wide metal steps wound their way down to the first floor. Nick descended the stairs, wondering whether he would meet a terrorist with an automatic weapon coming the other way. If he did, he would be trapped; there was no escape route out of the stairwell until he reached the bottom.
Halfway between the first and second floor was a small landing where the stairs reversed direction. Nick turned the corner, treading as softly as he could. He still saw no sign of the men.
When he reached the first floor, he paused, trying to recall exactly what was on the other side of the door immediately in front of him. He had worked at the BCT since its opening, but he didn’t normally visit the technicians’ side of the building, so he was a little hazy about the layout over here. He thought hard, knowing that an accurate recollection of the interior building design might mean the difference between living and dying.
After a moment, Nick shook his head in frustration and mumbled, “Shit” under his breath. He had a foggy notion that the door led into the large room where the techs stored their equipment and worked on radios, radar scopes, etc.
Finally he did what he had known all along he would have to do. He opened the door and stepped through it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The little run-in with the guys in the Jeep had put Joe-Bob and Dimitrios slightly behind schedule, but Joe-Bob wasn’t worried. There was still plenty of time to get set up for the president’s arrival and prepare his very special welcoming gift. The Jeep was too far away for Joe-Bob to see whether the guys trapped in it were still struggling with their bindings, although he imagined they were. Well, except for the one he had gutted like a deer. Joe-Bob was pretty sure that one was done struggling.
For good.
He kind of regretted having to kill the kid, especially since the poor guy had just had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that was the way of the world, wasn’t it? Kill or be killed. Do unto others before they do unto you—that was Joe-Bob’s motto, and he knew it was probably a pretty satisfactory expression of the worldview of the rest of their little group of misfits too, though they might not readily admit it. If nothing else, Joe-Bob was a realist.
Introspection was not Joe-Bob’s strong suit, but every so often he wondered how in the hell he had gotten involved with a homegrown terrorist organization that was preparing to assassinate the president of the United States, not to mention everyone else aboard Air Force One. It wasn’t like Joe-Bob had anything in particular against the country in which he had been born and raised; he was just a guy who wanted to raise hell and destroy things.
Joe-Bob had no concrete idea what group he was working for and didn’t much care. He knew, as did the rest of the team Tony had recruited, that it was some anonymous Middle Eastern terrorist organization. Not Al Qaeda but something similar. Just the fact that they had been flown to a training camp in the remote mountains of Afghanistan to learn guerrilla tactics proved the group meant business and possessed plenty of resources.
And he also knew that the Tony Andretti alias was so phony it was laughable. Whatever the real name of their mysterious and dangerous leader was, it most definitely was not Tony Andretti. He was obviously a born-and-raised raghead, the exact kind of virulent anti-American radical that the United States government had spent nearly ten years, billions of dollars, and thousands of American lives trying to thwart.
Joe-Bob knew all of that, or at least he knew most of it and suspected the rest. He just didn’t care. He was a young, disaffected American male who was being used in the most despicable way by the cunning, calculating elements of a faraway radical organization, perhaps even one that was state sponsored. He knew that and didn’t care about it, either.
Joe-Bob and the rest of the group were well aware that they didn’t fit anywhere in American society, but they weren’t deluded enough to think that they belonged in the Muslim world, either. To a man, they knew they were destined to die early, probably violently, so their attitude was that they might as well make a big splash before departing this life for whatever awaited them on the other side, if anything. It was no simpler or more complicated than that.
In the back of the Dodge Dakota, the group had fabricated a support harness out of steel tubing and nylon netting. The homemade harness would supply the shooter, in this case Joe-Bob, with as much support as possible in order to achieve maximum accuracy with the single Stinger missile he would soon fire at Air Force One.
The Stinger, a third-generation shoulder-fired weapon developed more than thirty years ago and popularized by the Soviets during their war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, was utilized for the first time by the U.S. in combat during the short conflict in the Falkland Islands. It combined line-of-sight targeting with a heat-seeking component, and the modern version came equipped with software designed to offer enviable accuracy considering it was a portable, handheld weapon. The Stinger was relatively light at around thirty-five pounds and was quick and easy to assemble and operate once all its components had been procured.
Joe-Bob sat in the cargo bed of the truck, leaning against the cab and assembling the Stinger. He was struggling. He had practiced exhaustively back in the garage in suburban D.C., but the unrelenting inky blackness of the marsh was causing problems. It didn’t provide for more than the vaguest visual acquisition of the components.
#
Dimitrios was struggling as well trying to set up the support harness the group had constructed. It probably would have been fine to drive around with the support in place in the back of the truck, but Tony had insisted that they leave it in pieces, covered by a tarp, until they arrived at the marsh and then put it together and bolt it into place. He was taking no chances that some curious policeman would see the contraption and wonder what the hell it was doing in the cargo bed of a rattletrap truck.
#
Joe-Bob slapped his hand in frustration on the steel bed of the truck. It sounded like a gunshot echoing across the heavy air of the marsh. “Fuck it. I know we’re supposed to do this in the dark, but I can’t see a goddamned thing.”
He snapped on a flashlight and smiled. This would make his life a lot easier, and there was almost no chance that anyone would see it from the road. Hell, Ocean Drive was far across the marsh, and,
in any event, there was almost no traffic driving by anyway. Even though it was a Saturday night, by now all but the most dedicated of partiers had stumbled home and gone to bed.
#
Dimitrios glanced at Joe-Bob and decided that if his partner was going to reap the benefits of a working flashlight, he might as well do the same, so he snapped his on, too. The men labored without speaking, each concentrating on the task at hand.
#
Forty yards away, the Jeep sat unmoving, a dark vague lump silhouetted against the slightly lighter road far in the distance. Inside it, two terrified young men were immobilized, each wondering if he would survive the night, while a third had already discovered that he would not.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Larry took a deep, shuddering breath, feeling the business end of the pistol sink slightly deeper into his neck as he did so. The heat from his body had warmed the gun barrel, so that now instead of feeling cold and frightening against his skin, the gun was warm and in some bizarre way almost soothing. Larry decided he might just be losing his mind.
He was still seated in front of his radar scope, staring blankly at the display showing no traffic inside his airspace. Neither he nor the man keeping the gun pressed to the base of his skull had spoken a word in the last several minutes.
Finally Larry decided to take a chance. What did he have to lose? Very softly, as if by keeping his voice low he could avoid startling the man who controlled his immediate future, he asked, “What are you doing here? Or, I guess to get more to the point, what do you want from me? What do I have to do to survive this night? Or is my fate already determined?”
