by Diane Capri
She shook her head and blinked to clear her fuzzy vision and tried to focus on what the man was saying, but it was so difficult. She couldn’t get past the unbelievable fiery agony burning through her leg.
Call.
He was saying something about a telephone call. He wanted her to make the call to her superiors.
The man fished her cell phone out of the holster on her hip and placed it on the floor in front of her. Behind it, in front of the absurdly large plate-glass windows of the conference room, a thin grey cord ran out the back of a telephone’s base like a rat’s tail and snaked its way along the floor, disappearing behind a table. From this angle, Kristin could see dust bunnies and a sprinkling of crumbs that had gathered on the carpet under the table; it was clear the janitorial service contracted to clean the BCT had not been doing a thorough job.
Kristin reached out to pick up her cell. It seemed as though her hand stretched out for ten or twelve feet before it reached the phone, like she was looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. She was surprised to see how much her hand was shaking. It occurred to her that she was going into shock, and she wondered in a detached way if she was dying.
The man told her again to dial her supervisor. It sounded like he was talking underwater.
The man kneeled down and placed his gun at her temple. He leaned close to her ear and whispered. “I’m going to scatter your few simple brains all over this beautiful conference room if you don’t make that fucking call right now.”
Kristin believed him. She punched the speed dial with her trembling hands.
On the first ring a voice said, “Watkins.”
“This is Cunningham,” she said in a voice that sounded like someone else’s. Someone she didn’t know. Someone who was dying.
“Hey, how’s life up in the wilds of New Hamster?”
“Great,” she said, concentrating on remaining conscious and keeping her voice steady. She felt increasingly woozy and thought she might throw up at any moment. The pain was immense.
“Are you okay?”
“Just … just not feeling very well,” she mumbled, feeling sick and scared and ashamed of herself. She knew she should be trying to pass a message to Lieutenant Watkins, but she could barely think at all.
“Everything’s all right up there?”
“Yeah, sure. Everything’s fine.”
“Okay, thanks for checking in. We’ll give you a call as soon as the president’s motorcade is moving into the city. Talk to you soon.”
“Yes, soon,” Kristin repeated hollowly, her leg feeling like it was being blasted by a blowtorch.
“Take care of yourself; you don’t sound too good,” Watkins told her.
For some reason she found that very funny. “I will,” she said with a high-pitched laugh that sounded just short of hysterical, even to her.
The connection broke, and the terrorist removed the gun from her head as he rose. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
The room was spinning now, twisting around and around like the antigravity wheel she used to love to ride every fall when the county fair passed through her tiny town. Kristin guessed she had spent easily a couple hundred dollars on that ride when she was a teenager. Who knew you could get the same effect without spending any money at all?
Of course, there was the small matter of being shot, of having a chunk of lead traveling at near supersonic speed blast your knee apart. But what the hell. There’s no such thing as a free ride in this world, as her old man liked to say.
She tried to focus on the man with the gun, but he was spinning just like the room, and now Kristin knew she was going to be sick. He was saying something else that she could not make out. He was so damned far away.
He must have gotten tired of trying to make her understand because he prodded her right leg with the toe of his combat boot.
Instantly the world exploded in an atomic blast of pain, and then everything went black.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Nick stood just inside the door on the west side of the TRACON ops room, holding his weapon in both hands and watching, sick with fear, as the terrorist held a pistol steadfastly against the side of Larry’s head.
It had been a stroke of good fortune—probably his first since this whole nightmare began unfolding—finding the fully charged, battery-operated nail gun lying in the first-floor construction site. The thing was filled with heavy-gauge nails, maybe tenpenny?
Nick had seen a video once of the injuries a roofer had suffered when he fell off a house and reflexively squeezed the trigger of his nail gun on the way down to the ground, firing three nails into his skull. The damage had been extensive, with X-rays depicting the spikes protruding well into the man’s brain after punching holes right through the thick protective plate of the skull. Nick was hopeful that if he could fire even one shot into the guy’s head, the man would be incapacitated and maybe even killed; he certainly would be unable to hold his gun on Fitz as he was crashing to the floor with a thick nail stabbing into his brain.
Larry was seated in his controller chair, facing his scope. The terrorist stood behind him, facing the scope as well. They had their backs turned toward Nick, and he could see the flashing data tag displayed on Larry’s scope that must surely represent Air Force One. Nick was too far away to read the information contained in the tag, but judging from the intensity with which the terrorist was watching the radar display, he knew there was no other possibility.
Far off on the other side of the big room, Ron sat duct taped to his chair. His eyes were closed, and Nick hoped he was simply dozing. There was no obvious sign of a gunshot wound or any other kind of wound for that matter, nothing resembling the damage that had been done to Harry, but Nick knew these men were cold-blooded fanatics and would not be above killing another defenseless man.
He noticed Larry struggling to accept the automated handoff on Air Force One. Larry’s hands were shaking so badly he could barely control the slewball. Nick felt sorry for him and for the fact that he had a loaded weapon aimed at him. Then he looked down at his own hands and realized they were shaking just as badly as Fitz’s, maybe worse.
He tried to calm himself. The next couple of minutes were critical, literally life-and-death. He would get one chance to take the terrorist by surprise, and he knew he had to make the most of it if he wanted to put the man down. Desperately he tried to control his fear and focus on the task in front of him. What would be the best approach to take—speed or stealth?
The edge of the console currently providing cover for Nick was only about fifteen feet from where the terrorist stood. He could step clear of the console in three long strides. The obvious problem, though, was that if he made even the slightest noise during that time—a scrape of his shoe on the carpet, a rustle of clothing, anything—there would be more than ample time for the man to fire his gun into Fitz’s head and blow his brains all over the TRACON.
On the other hand, if he moved slowly and deliberately, Nick was reasonably sure he could quiet his approach enough so that the man would not hear him coming until it was too late for him to react. But what if he was wrong? What if he couldn’t sneak up on the man? What if the terrorist saw a shadow or turned at the wrong time or just felt Nick’s presence? What then? This scenario would doubtless end the same way, with Fitz’s dying body slumping out of his chair onto the floor.
He thought about Lisa and wondered whether she had been aware of what was happening to her as she was being murdered. Did she have any idea why she had been targeted? Was she aware that the man who ended her life was taking it from her just because she had been unlucky enough to stumble across the wrong information in the course of trying to do her job?
Nick pictured his wife, with her warm brown eyes, her angelic smile, and her determination to always do the right thing, and he felt a surge of calm confidence. He could do this. With a little luck and a little determination of his own, this could all be over in just a few minutes.
C
HAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
“Boston Approach, Air Force One is with you, leveling at one-one thousand, with ATIS Information Charlie.”
Larry keyed up his mike, unsure how in the hell he was going to keep President Cartwright out of harm’s way and also continue breathing for more than the next couple of minutes. The barrel of the terrorist’s gun pressed relentlessly into his neck just below his ear. “Air Force One, this is Boston Approach. Fly heading zero-six-zero. That’s your vector for the ILS Runway 33 Left approach. Boston altimeter two-niner-niner-seven.”
There was a short delay while the flight crew forty-five miles south of Boston, flying over Providence, Rhode Island at eleven thousand feet, digested the information they had been given. Then the call came back. “Uh, Approach, on the ATIS broadcast the tower is advertising Runway 4 Right as the active. Did we miss something?”
Larry had known the pilot would question the assignment of a landing runway that was not being broadcast as the active runway on the ATIS. It was a basic tenet of aviation everywhere that airplanes perform their best when they are landing and departing on the runway that is most closely aligned with the wind direction, and on the latest weather sequence, it was showing out of the northeast, zero-three-zero at eight knots. The flight crew of Air Force One wanted and expected to land on Runway 4 Right.
The terrorist forced the gun up under Larry’s ear and said softly, “You will take that airplane to Runway 33 Left. Say whatever you must to convince him to accept it, but that is where that airplane is going to go.” Although spoken quietly, the words were filled with an implied menace that Larry did not miss. He supposed that was the point.
“Air Force One, sorry about that, but Runway 4 Right will be closing momentarily and will not be available for at least an hour. We had an aircraft incident, and there is debris on 4 Right that needs to be removed. The winds are light enough where the decision was made by the tower supervisor to go with Runway 33 Left. The ATIS will be updated shortly to reflect the change. Sorry to spring it on you like that, but we didn’t get any advance notice, either.”
Larry was taking a calculated risk. If the crew of Air Force One were to call down to Massport—the Massachusetts Port Authority, the state-run agency responsible for the operation of Logan Airport—they would discover in short order that there was no closure planned for Runway 4 Right and there had been no aircraft incident.
If that happened, Larry had no idea what he would do. He was banking on the fact that the winds were relatively light and that 33 Left was a longer runway than 4 Right anyway, so it wouldn’t be a big deal to them. He also hoped that since they were on a tight schedule, they wouldn’t want to waste time arguing about a landing runway when it didn’t really matter.
Seconds ticked by. The AF1 target moved closer to the middle of the scope, where the depiction of Logan Airport was scribed on the digital map. The terrorist and Larry waited in silence for the response.
“Okay, then, 33 Left will be fine. We’ll fly a zero-six-zero heading. Did you give us lower?”
“Not yet,” Larry replied, “but now you can descend and maintain three thousand.” He wondered if his shaking voice was as noticeable to the pilot as it was to him; he guessed not, since the man didn’t seem to recognize anything was wrong.
The Boeing 747 turning and starting its descent toward Boston was actually one of two identical customized airplanes traditionally considered by the public to be Air Force One, although in reality that designator was used to refer to any airplane occupied by the president of the United States if that plane was under the command of the U.S. Air Force. Normally that plane was one of the two customized Boeing 747s. Sometimes the president was ferried on a Marine helicopter if, for example, using an airplane would be inconvenient or unwieldy. In that case, the helicopter would be known as Marine One as long as the president was aboard.
The terrorist spoke softly, almost casually. “I thought I made myself clear when I told you that I wanted you to get the president’s plane as low as possible. I know you can do better than three thousand feet.”
Larry closed his eyes and nodded, hoping he wouldn’t accidentally jar the man’s finger on the trigger and blow his own head off. “I understand, but if I issue a descent clearance to an altitude of, say, fifteen hundred feet when they are still that far away from the airport, the crew will get suspicious. It’s not something they would be expecting to hear. I’m assuming you don’t want them to be suspicious, right?”
The answer seemed to satisfy the man, although Larry knew he could have issued the descent clearance. He just didn’t know where the terrorists were planning to strike, so his goal was to keep Air Force One at a reasonable altitude for as long as possible. He couldn’t imagine what difference it would make, but he needed to feel like he was doing something to try to delay the inevitable.
He wondered about Nick. Had he been captured or killed, or was there any chance at all that he had escaped and was even now on his way back to the BCT with help? Larry didn’t know how many terrorists were involved in this plot; he knew there were at least two, because he had seen them. Maybe there were many more. If that was the case, the odds of Nick even being alive, much less rushing back with the cavalry to save the day, were pretty much nonexistent.
If he had lived, though, and he was bringing help, he damned well better hurry up about it, because the clock was winding down.
Just cling to that hope, he told himself. Nick was bringing the state police, the Merrimack police, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the freaking CIA and the NSA. The U.S. Marines and a few Navy SEALs would be okay, too.
That thought gave him a moment’s hope, but then he refocused on the digitized target representing Air Force One, now less than twenty miles from the airport and approaching three thousand feet in altitude. Soon the pilot would expect a turn onto the final approach course, and the zealot standing right behind his chair holding a gun to his head would be expecting him to issue a further descent clearance to the airplane.
Jesus Christ, Nick, hurry up. Please.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Nick moved quickly to close the distance between himself and the man pressing the gun to Larry’s head. The terrorist appeared completely engrossed in what was happening on the radar scope.
Saying a silent, hurried prayer of thanks to the God he had always believed in but most recently had been castigating for taking his wife away from him, Nick was surprised to discover he made it nearly the entire fifteen feet without tripping over a chair or scuffing his feet on the floor or alerting the man to his impending attack. He was going to make it!
As he rushed forward, Nick saw Air Force One on the radar scope turning northwest, dangerously close to Logan. He feared he had cut it too close and that the worst-case scenario would be played out. He could see it all clearly in his head. He would disarm the terrorist, taking him down and thinking he had saved the day, and then the huge Boeing 747 jumbo jet would be blown out of the sky anyway. One moment the target would be there on the radar scope, and the next it would simply have disappeared.
Who knew where the coconspirators with the missiles were actually located? They had to be fairly close to the airport, but that was exactly the problem—Air Force One was even now fairly close to the airport.
Nick reached a point roughly three feet behind Fitz and the terrorist, the two of them clumped together watching the scope like it held the secret to life. Nick supposed that at the moment it did. He raised the heavy nail gun to his shoulder, holding it exactly like he had seen hundreds of movie and television heroes hold their guns: with both hands, aiming it under his right eye with his left eye squeezed shut.
Nick fired, but as he did, the terrorist dropped to the floor and rolled. Somehow the man sensed his presence and at the last second performed an evasive maneuver more rapidly than Nick would have ever dreamed possible. Maybe Nick made some almost imperceptible noise; maybe he caused some minute change in the air cu
rrents. Maybe it was nothing more than sheer dumb luck on the part of the terrorist. Whatever it was, the man had felt him coming and reacted like a gazelle.
Vaguely aware of a humph noise coming from the man as he hit the thinly carpeted floor and jarred the air out of his lungs, Nick heard the heavy nail strike the screen of the radar scope located to the right of Larry. He knew then he had missed the terrorist. The scope imploded with a loud pop, and instantly the acrid metallic smell of frying electronic circuitry filled the air.
Everything was going to shit, and even worse, it was happening way too fast. Desperately trying to readjust his aim and fire another nail at the terrorist, Nick could see plainly that he was going to be too late. He felt like he was trying to maneuver under water while the other man was moving with the grace and speed of an elite athlete. Before Nick could squeeze off another shot, the man rolled over, sprang up into a shooter’s crouch, and aimed his weapon at Nick. The gun was big and black and terrifying.
Nick heard a scream, and he realized it was coming from him. He barely registered Fitz diving out of the way, hitting the floor to his left, as he pulled the trigger on the nail gun before he could even take proper aim. He simply turned it in the general direction of the terrorist and squeezed, panic coursing through his body as he waited to die.
The terrorist’s bullet slammed into Nick’s shoulder and spun him to the floor, and as he fell, he heard another scream, a high-pitched one that he was almost certain was not coming from him. Was it Fitz? Had Fitz been hit, too? Was it possible that the terrorist had shot both of them with one bullet, or had Nick been so freaked out he had missed the sound of the man pulling the trigger on his weapon more than once?
Nick had failed. He waited for the end, for the man to put him away with a second bullet, this time between the eyes. One second passed. Another. Nothing happened. Nick realized he had squeezed his eyes tightly shut in anticipation of the kill shot that had never come.
