by Diane Capri
“To survive,” the man mused, “you need to understand a few things.”
Larry blinked in surprise when the man answered. It seemed as though he had been waiting for that very question.
“You should be aware that although I am no aviation expert, I am a fairly intelligent person. Do you believe me when I tell you this?”
Larry nodded slowly, still trying to keep his body as motionless as possible.
“Good. So, as a fairly intelligent person who is not an aviation expert, I have studied the subject of air traffic control exhaustively over the last several months in preparation for this mission. I have listened to hundreds of hours of routine communications between pilots and air traffic controllers. The Internet, which your former vice president Al Gore was so generous to invent, is a wonderful supplier of almost any kind of information anyone could desire, including radio communications on air traffic control frequencies. Are you following me so far?”
Larry choked off the reply he wanted to make, “Of course I’m following you; I’m not an idiot.” Instead, he simply said, “Yes.” His throat felt dry and scratchy. He wished he had some water.
“In my study of those hundreds of hours of radio communications, along with familiarizing myself with much of the equipment you use in this very impressive control room, I feel confident making the statement that I will know immediately if you attempt to alert anyone to our presence or if you say anything even slightly outside the boundaries of what would be considered normal air traffic control phraseology. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because I’m sure you are aware that it would be very unhealthy for you to ignore what I have told you. On the other hand, if you approach this situation with the seriousness it deserves and you do exactly as you are instructed, you will not be harmed in any way. You have my word on that.”
It took all of Larry’s self-control not to laugh at the last statement. The word of a man with a gun pressed scant millimeters away from his brain, with the expressed intention of blasting a bullet into it if his instructions were not followed explicitly, didn’t seem to mean much, at least not the way Larry read the situation.
He suspected there was virtually no chance that he would ever leave the BCT alive unless one of two things happened. Either Nick was still alive and had managed to get word out that they needed help, or Larry could find a way to get the drop on this well-spoken but extremely scary and possibly psychopathic dude.
Larry was an outstanding air traffic controller, one of the best in the BCT, but he was no kind of an expert at anything else, especially self-defense or counterterrorism tactics, so he seriously doubted the second option was going to happen. That left him fervently hoping that his buddy Nick was already outside the facility, well on his way to alerting the police, the FBI, the Secret Service, Homeland Security, and any other law enforcement agencies he could think of to the potentially deadly situation developing inside this building.
The president’s plane was due to fly into Logan in less than ninety minutes, and Larry didn’t have a clue what the intentions of these terrorists were at the BCT, but he knew the two scenarios had to be related in some way, so it was obvious that time was running out. And he had no idea what to do.
He stared straight ahead at his radar scope, which was cluttered with sector maps and final approach courses but lacking in airplanes. One thing he did believe was that this lunatic was telling the truth about understanding the basics of aviation communications. Most of the language was not that difficult to understand; a lot of it was pretty intuitive. If the man had really listened to hundreds of hours of controllers and pilots yakking at each other, he would undoubtedly know if Larry tried to use code words to notify a pilot or anyone else to what was going on here.
The funny thing was Larry had no freaking idea what sort of code he might be able to use even if he thought he could get away with it. He had never received any kind of training for dealing with this situation. As far as he was aware, there was no protocol developed for it, at least not in the Air Traffic Division of the FAA.
He was completely on his own. It was not a comforting thought.
CHAPTER FORTY
Nick eased the door open a few inches, looking first to the right, where the sidewall of the building loomed only a few feet away. A plastic tarp hung from the ceiling, blocking access to approximately the northernmost six feet of the room, which seemed to be in the middle of a construction project. Nick could see through the opaque plastic that no one was in there. It appeared as though work had been halted for the weekend and the area had been sealed up tightly.
As Nick peered cautiously around the heavy door, he could see that he had been right about this being the technicians’ equipment room. Half a dozen replacement radar scopes were lined up on the far wall like soldiers ready to be sent into battle. Stacked high on a wire rack running the length of the wall immediately to Nick’s left were various electronic components. They were clearly the innards of equipment the technicians worked with all the time—why else would they be here?—but what functions any of them might perform he had no idea.
All these things registered dimly in Nick’s consciousness as he scanned the room, looking for anyone or anything that might pose a threat. He saw nothing. Nick was becoming more and more convinced that the three men he had seen must be inside the ops room, since there had been no other sign of them.
In one sense that was good. Nick felt he was in little immediate personal danger, at least for now. That meant that the opposite, however, was true for fellow controllers Larry and Ron. If the men with the rifles and handguns had entered the ops room, then his two coworkers were in big trouble and may already be dead.
With this grim possibility weighing on his mind, Nick pushed the door open wider and stepped through it into the equipment room. As he did so, he tripped over something pliable lying in front of the door. Nick sprawled face-first onto the cool tile floor, trying his best to make as little noise as possible as he fell.
He absorbed most of the fall on his elbows, landing on them hard and bruising both of them, but thankfully he managed to avoid splitting his skull open on the unyielding floor. When he forced himself to his knees and looked back toward the door, he gasped involuntarily, clamping down his jaw firmly to avoid being sick.
Facedown on the ceramic tile floor was electronics technician Harry Tanner. Instantly the pain in Nick’s elbows was forgotten. He scrambled on his hands and knees to Harry’s side and placed two fingers lightly on the man’s neck behind his earlobe, searching desperately for a pulse and finding none. He stared at the puddle of blood that had soaked through Harry’s plaid work shirt and pooled on the floor beneath his body. There was a lot. He was amazed he hadn’t stepped in it.
He turned Harry over onto his back and gagged again, watching in horror as the blood of the man who had worked for the FAA even longer than he had—Harry was well past minimum retirement age and had planned on leaving next spring—began spreading sluggishly across the floor, no longer trapped under his clothing. It was just beginning to congeal in spots.
Nick slapped Harry’s face as if to wake him from a trance and realized the futility of his actions. Harry was dead. Either he had been working in this room when the fuckers with the guns had come in and surprised him, or else he had seen them and made a desperate attempt to outrun them.
Judging by the shocking amount of blood on the floor, it looked as though Harry may have been stabbed to death rather than shot, although Nick was by no means an expert on the subject. Maybe gunshot wounds could cause all that blood, too. But the thought that the men might have come at old Harry with knives rather than the guns they were carrying seemed somehow more horrifying to Nick than if he had been shot. The intimacy of the violence implied a level of bloodthirstiness that went beyond just killing the man to further their goals. It almost looked as though the killers had viewed it as sport.
A desperate, high-pitche
d keening noise filled the room, and Nick realized it was coming from him. He was breathing heavily, almost panting, dangerously close to hyperventilating. His hands were shaking as he knelt over the lifeless body of Harry Tanner. Controllers and technicians didn’t normally hang out together at work, but Harry and Nick had had numerous long conversations over the years, and Nick had come to know the man as a gentle soul who loved his wife, his kids and grandkids, and hunting and fishing, in that order.
The initial burst of shock and terror Nick had felt at seeing the armed intruders strolling down the hallway of the BCT as if they owned the joint began morphing into something else. He felt a powerful surge of rage and bitterness and the intense desire to avenge Harry’s death, although he had no earthly idea how he might manage to do so.
Nick knew he was reacting not just to the current bewildering and terrifying situation but to the murder of Lisa as well—to the immense jagged hole that had been torn open in his heart with the loss of his wife, a hole he knew he would never be able to close completely. She had been murdered simply because she had stumbled onto something far bigger than she had been prepared to deal with. It was a lot like the situation Nick found himself confronted with now.
He gently eased Harry’s eyes closed. Time was of the essence, of course, but if the killers had not found him yet, their main area of concern was obviously not this section of the building, and he was probably relatively safe.
For now.
Nick swore softly that he would not allow these killers to escape; one way or another he would provide some semblance of justice.
He was surprised to discover he was crying softly. Tears dripped down his nose and fell onto Harry’s shirt, mixing with all the awful blood that was beginning to darken and thicken into a sludge-like goo. He whispered, “I’m sorry, Harry.”
Even in his state of confusion and anger and fear, he knew he was really talking to Lisa, expressing to his dead wife the overwhelming pain and regret he felt, the baseless guilt that ate at him every day, saying it should have been him and not her lying in the ground.
He wasn’t sure how long he stayed in that kneeling position, sobbing next to Harry’s body. Eventually the tears dried, and Nick knew he was leaving himself horribly exposed, sitting out in the open on the bloody floor of the equipment room. If the men who had butchered Harry returned, he would be a sitting duck, and although by now he didn’t particularly care whether he lived or died, he found himself burning with the desire to make a statement to these people to whom human life clearly meant nothing.
Nick concluded that the best statement he could make would be to summon help and stop the murderous fanatics from completing whatever awful task they had broken into the facility to accomplish. He rose silently and padded across the room toward the door. It was time to get help.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“Connors 712, cleared visual approach Runway 4 Right, contact Boston Tower 123.7.” Larry was sitting ramrod straight at the scope. He had just worked a single arrival into Logan, glad for the momentary distraction from the tangible layer of tension building inside the ops room.
He thought about it and almost chuckled, a surprising and unlikely achievement considering the fact that his nerves were strung tight and he felt like he might puke at any moment. “Tangible layer of tension” was the understatement of the decade, and the clock was ticking. Hopefully Nick had been able to escape the facility and go for help, because the president’s plane would be leaving Andrews Air Force Base in less than an hour, and from there it was a short hop to Logan and directly into whatever shit sandwich these lunatics were planning on serving.
The man pointing the gun at him had not said in so many words that Air Force One would be targeted, but what the hell else could it possibly be? And with nothing much else to do except sit and think, Larry suddenly began to feel woozy and ill when he realized what the terrorists’ plan might be. Who was to say they didn’t have a group of conspirators in or around Logan? It would be simple and perfect.
The gunman lounged next to him in one of the controller chairs, feet propped up on the radar console to Larry’s right. The gun was still pointed steadily in his direction, but at least the barrel was no longer stuck into his neck. He would still be just as dead if the guy pulled the trigger, but somehow it didn’t feel quite as terrifying this way.
The man sitting next to Larry was apparently in charge, and earlier he’d had a short, intense conversation with the second terrorist. Larry had been unable to decipher anything that was said, even though they had been standing less than two feet behind him. After the brief conversation, the second terrorist had left the ops room.
Where that man had gone and what he was doing now, Larry couldn’t guess. Searching for Nick, maybe? He supposed it all depended upon whether they believed his lie about Nick calling in sick and the FAA not wanting to pay a controller overtime to cover the midnight shift.
That part was mostly true; they wouldn’t have wanted to spend the money. But in the current incarnation of the FAA, where the animosity between management and the controller workforce was all-encompassing, they likely would have forced one of the controllers scheduled to work tomorrow’s day shift to come in and work the mid instead, then worked one controller short on the day shift.
Allowing the Boston area to be staffed with less than two controllers on a midnight shift was considered a big no-no, although the Manchester area—which did the same job in the same room as Boston, albeit with less traffic—worked every single overnight with just one. Larry had no idea why that was, but it had always been that way. He hoped that this thug so casually waving a gun in his face wasn’t aware of that fact, although he certainly seemed to have a thorough knowledge about ATC in general and the Boston Consolidated TRACON specifically.
Suddenly a sickening thought occurred to Larry that was so obvious he wondered why he hadn’t had it sooner. He was assuming Nick had seen the terrorists when they entered the building and had been able to avoid them somehow, that even now he had escaped the building and was well on his way to alerting the authorities.
But how likely was that, really? Wouldn’t a much more credible scenario be that Nick had been wandering down the hallway on his way back to the TRACON from the break room, bag of corn chips in one hand and coffee or soda in the other, when these Rambo-looking dudes had come around a corner with their fatigues and their black greasepaint and their guns and put a bullet in his brain? The odds that Nick had seen them coming and had been able to avoid being captured or killed were pretty frigging slim.
Larry could almost hear the inexorable tick-tick-ticking of the invisible clock in his head. He wasn’t sure precisely what these people were planning, but they had gone to a whole lot of trouble and had risked their lives to storm a secure federal government facility protected 24/7 by armed guards, so it was obviously something major. He wondered whether he would still be alive when the sun rose. He felt queasy and washed-out.
The invisible clock in his head continued to tick.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Brian paced back and forth inside the large conference room adjacent to the foyer, located just inside the BCT’s main entrance. The side of the room fronting the foyer was constructed of six glass panels, each three feet wide and six feet high, making it the perfect location from which to maintain surveillance on the main entrance, now the only way into or out of the facility.
Brian wasn’t clear on exactly why the entrance needed to be watched. The security guards were both dead, and Jackie was sitting in the guard shack at the front gate looking ridiculous in the uniform he had taken off one of the dead guards. Jackie’s job was to ambush the FBI agent who would arrive soon to monitor the BCT. The only people inside the building were either being held in the operations room at gunpoint or were already dead.
So the idea of cooling his heels in this glass-walled conference room, guarding the entrance to the facility and waiting for—what, exactly?—seemed more than a little unn
ecessary to Brian. But this was his assignment from Tony, and one thing Brian had learned early in this little adventure was that you did not deviate from the plan if the plan had been developed by Tony. Their leader seemed perfectly calm and rational, if a little intense for Brian’s taste, but behind that calm rationality was a calculating coldness that did not suffer disloyalty.
Ever.
Brian thought about how Tony had dealt with the gang bangers that had tried to disrupt their operation when they had been getting set up in D.C. and shuddered. Tony had matter-of-factly gutted several dangerous men, leaving them for dead, just to send a message. That message had been received loud and clear, and the remaining gang members had steered clear of Tony and his men ever since. Brian had decided right then and there that he would not allow himself to become Tony’s message to anyone else if he could help it.
Besides, there were worse things he could be doing than hanging out in this cozy little conference room. A long, highly-polished table ran virtually the entire length of the room, with comfortable leather business chairs orbiting it like satellites. A retractable white screen hanging from the ceiling filled one of the smaller walls of the rectangular office.
If the room had only contained a television, Brian would have been perfectly satisfied to stay here the rest of the night, but unfortunately for him, that particular amenity had not been supplied. He sighed deeply. Nobody said this job would be easy.
In a little while, Jackie would come trudging through the front door, holding at gunpoint whatever unfortunate representative the FBI had sent over to spend the day monitoring the activities of the air traffic controllers who would be working Air Force One into and out of Logan Airport.
Brian had no doubt that Jackie would get the jump on the FBI guy. Jackie was pretty good with weapons, and Brian figured the agent would probably be a low-seniority rookie. The FBI wouldn’t bother wasting an experienced field agent on a secure federal facility located nearly forty miles from Boston, where Air Force One was going to be landing and where President Cartwright would be spending the day.
