by Marcus Wynne
“Mommy? Pretzel, please?” her son Zachary said.
“Honey, we’re in a hurry…”
“I want one.”
“Honey, I…”
“I want one!”
It was one of those times in a parent’s life when it was just best to give in and drive on. Amy pulled a wad of bills out of her purse, a parting gift from her father right before they went through the screening checkpoint, and pointed out a pretzel in the display case to the young black girl behind the counter.
“Not that one,” Zachary said. “It looks yucky. I want that one.”
“Okay, then!” Amy said, smiling in acknowledgement of the counter girl’s sympathetic look. She took the pretzel and handed it to him. “There! Are you fine now?”
“Thank you, mommy,” Zach said. He took a bite, and rolled his eyes with the unabashed delight of a well-loved child. “Ummmm. Good.” He took another bite. “Do you think Grandpa will cry because we’re going away?”
Amy laughed. “No honey. Your Grandpa doesn’t cry. C’mon.”
She took him by the hand and hurried him along into the boarding area. She was relieved to see that their haste had paid off. Boarding hadn’t started yet. Amy pulled Zach along, steering her way through the crowd to see if she could find two seats together for them. She stumbled over some feet and stopped to apologize.
“I’m sorry!” Amy said.
The man she’d stumbled over smiled. It was a good smile, a real smile in a face that seemed as though smiles were infrequent occurrences. He was dark-skinned, maybe from the sun, but there was a hint of an exotic mix of blood in his features. Gray hair, short cropped and thin on the top, good shoulders and that swoop of torso to a lean waist that spoke of an athlete of some kind. His hand was tucked inside a big paperback book, one of those the same size as a hardback. It had Chinese characters on the cover and an English title Amy read upside down: Thirty Six Stratagems.
“Not a problem,” he said. “Crowded in here. You okay?”
Amy rolled her eyes in mock dismay. “Oh, yeah.”
He laughed, a good sound. Zach gave the man his bold innocent stare.
“Hi.” Zach said.
“Hi, yourself,” the man said. “How’s that pretzel?”
“My mommy got it for me.”
“What a nice mommy you have.” He smiled up at Amy as he said it.
“Want to see my Felix?” Zach said.
The man set his book aside and gave his full attention to Zach. That warmed Amy.
“Who’s Felix?” the man said.
“Felix the Cat,” Zach said. He handed his pretzel to Amy, and shrugged off his backpack and pulled out a small cloth doll of a black and white cat with a big grin. “Grandpa gave him to me.”
“Wow!” the man said. “I haven’t seen one of those before! That’s from a cartoon a long, long time ago.”
“Grandpa told me.”
“Zach, don’t bother the man,” Amy said. “I’m sorry, he just loves to talk.”
“That’s really cool, Zach,” the man said. “I don’t mind at all. I like kids.”
Amy looked at his left hand. No ring, but there was a faint dent and paler skin there. “Do you have any of your own?”
He pursed his lips, shook his head. “No.”
“You’re young,” she said. “You could still have them.”
He laughed. “Vacation in Seattle?”
“I have a girlfriend out on Vashon Island. Zach’s never been there. I thought it would be fun for him, ride the ferries, see the sights.”
“It’s a good city for kids.”
“And you?”
He shrugged. “Business.”
“What do you do?”
“Part sales. Aircraft parts.”
“Oh,” Amy said. “You didn’t sell any to this airline, did you?”
He laughed. “Not this week. I don’t think they need any. They’ve got a pretty good record.”
“I’m a nervous flyer.”
“I am, too.”
She laughed. “Well, there’s some seats over there. Nice talking to you. C’mon, Zach.”
“Bye,” Zach said.
“Bye, Zach,” the man said. He watched them go and wend their way through the packed boarding area, passing between two knots of Syrian musicians who didn’t give them a second glance. He spent a brief moment looking at the Syrian musicians, then slowly surveyed the boarding area while disguising his movement as a slow stretch. Then the man, whose name was Hunter James, reached into the breast pocket of his untucked heavy denim shirt and took out a small PDA, plucked out the stylus and tapped the screen for a few minutes. An intent look came and went across his face before he put away his PDA and adjusted his shirt, pulling it away from his body and the weapons concealed there.
2
On board the Boeing 757 that would carry American Trans Air Flight #923, three Federal Air Marshals stood in the front of the empty cabin and spoke with the pilot.
“Did you see them?” the pilot, a tough and stocky character who’d spent years as a bush pilot in Alaska before he worked his way up to jets. “It looks like an Al-Qaeda reunion out there!”
Sean Young, the senior Air Marshal, took a deep breath. He’d been a Navy SEAL for ten years, and let his enlistment lapse after 9/11 to become a Federal Air Marshal. He was the Assistant Team Leader.
“Nothing we can do, Captain,” Sean said. “They haven’t broken any laws by being Middle Eastern and flying in a group.”
“They didn’t break any laws before boarding on 9/11 either, were they?” the pilot said acerbically.
Agent Kristy Wang, a slightly built Chinese woman, another Air Marshal, shifted her weight from foot to foot. The pilot glanced at her and looked away, his opinion of her clear in that dismissal. Her partner, Agent Bill Dillon, a tall, lanky, weather beaten former Border Patrol supervisor, shook his head in silence.
“There’s nothing I can do except do my job, Captain,” Sean said. “It’s your call, you’re the Pilot in Command. You refuse to carry them, that’s on you and your airline. We’re not here to tell you to deny boarding to any passenger. That’s not in our charter unless they’ve been identified as a positive threat. These people have been through CAPPS, screened, and closely profiled. They were designated selectees and went through the whole nine yards. They’re clean. The only things they’ve got are carry-ons and musical instruments. And we’re here in case of any problems.”
It was clear from his face that the pilot didn’t relish telling his management that he wouldn’t carry seventeen paying passengers that had been through selectee screening. “So you’re saying there’s nothing you can do?”
“Not unless they start something. Then we’ll finish it,” Sean said.
“Seventeen against five?”
“They don’t have guns. And they don’t know we’re here.”
The pilot glared at them, went into the cockpit and threw himself into his seat. The co-pilot looked at him, then back out the door at the Air Marshals. Sean looked back and shrugged. The PDA in Sean’s blazer inside pocket began to vibrate with the silent alarm. He took it out and looked at the screen.
“Hunter’s not happy,” Sean said. “He doesn’t like the look of things out there.”
“Operations got the message, right?” Kristy said.
“Just as soon as we put it in,” Sean said. “Document all activity and forward as appropriate to Ops and Intel. That’s all they got to say. Nothing else to be done. Ours is not to question why, ours is just to fly and die.”
“Cut that shit,” Bill Dillon said harshly.
“Only the good die young, Bill,” Sean said. “You’ll live forever.”
3
Hunter James sat stock still in the crowded boarding area, seemingly engrossed in his book, while all around him people swirled like waves on a hidden rock. He exuded nothing but the ordinary; a friendly man fixed on his book, apparently unaware of the glances that came and then passed over
him, dismissing him.
Dismissing Hunter was something he liked people to do.
At least when he was tooled up to work.
Under his baggy denim shirt, worn shirt tails out to conceal his tools, he had a Sig-Sauer P-229 semiautomatic pistol, chambered in .357 Sig, tucked into a Milt Sparks Executive Companion inside the waist band holster, worn right where it felt good, behind his right hip. The maximum allowed spare magazines, two of thirteen rounds each, rested just front of his left hip in a speed carrier. In the right hand appendix position, tucked inside his waistband in a custom sheath built for him by Mike Sastre of River City Sheaths, was a custom made Kasper/Polkowski Companion, a wickedly sharp knife with a four inch blade, razor sharp along its standard edge and halfway back along the top edge. It was the same knife carried undercover by the elite Army commandos of the Combat Applications Group…sometimes known as Delta Force. In his left hand pocket, clipped on a pocket rip-cord he could get it out in a hurry, was a Mick Strider ground Hideaway Knife designed by the mysterious Ms. Frontsight of Artemis Knives.
Hunter was fond of knives.
He paused, his finger tucked inside his book, and rolled his neck as though to get the kinks out, and used the slow movement to disguise his thorough pan of the boarding area. More of the same. Hunter didn’t like the Syrians. Nothing to do with race, and not much to do with their country of origin, though Syria was a long time supporter of and haven for terrorist organizations to include Al-Qaeda. It was more specific than that. It was their physiology, their kinesics, their body language. Hunter had studied that arcane subject with the best academics, and then gone on to practice under the close tutelage of the best field practitioner he’d ever known, the Raven, and he’d learned that the body transmits a constant communication that never stops and can always be read by the skilled and trained. You can alter it a bit, disguise it, but except for a very few – and Hunter had known at least two of those – there was no hiding the message for long.
The Syrian’s message was violence.
Although they were supposedly traveling as a group, they had broken down into three distinct huddles. Like three teams. They were obviously nervous, perhaps because of the suspicious looks they were getting, maybe because of the intensive screening they’d gone through which included pat-downs, x-rays and searches of their carry-on bags and musical instruments, even their shoes.
They put his teeth on edge.
There was a sense of readiness, of willingness, and those were danger indicators in Hunter’s significant body of experience.
Willingness. Willing to do…what?
Violence.
Maybe the same kind of violence he was willing to do: skilled, extreme, lethal.
Hunter riffled the pages of his book at random, looked down to see where his fingers had stopped. Stratagem 15: Lure a tiger out of the mountain.
“Use unfavorable natural conditions to trap the enemy in an difficult position. Use deception to lure him out. In an offensive that involves great risk lure the enemy to come out against you.”
That seemed exactly appropriate to the situation facing Hunter’s Air Marshal Team. They were hamstrung by regulations and numbers, their real weapons deception and surprise. They would have to wait for the enemy to come out against them.
Paul Raven would have found it amusing. Hunter wondered, briefly, if his old friend and mentor was looking down from Heaven, watching him flip through the book Raven had given him as a gift so long ago. Or, more likely, looking up from Hell. The Thirty-Six Stratagems, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, and Yamamoto Tsuenori’s Hagakure, those were the holy texts of Raven’s religion: deception in warfare. What a great warrior – and deceiver – he had been.
And, for a while, a great friend.
An old, dead friend.
Hunter didn’t like to think of that. He had very few friends left. Friends that had died, marriages that fell apart, lives torn apart, and the plain walls of his small apartment in the Chicago suburbs – those were things he set aside with the iron discipline he’d cultivated. Keep your mind in the game, in the now, that was his credo while working.
On the opposite side of the boarding area, standing with his bag against the wall and ostensibly studying the USA Today he held in his hands, Hunter’s partner John Valentine, a quiet 27 year old who’d come into the Air Marshal Service right out of college after 9/11, visually worked the crowd. The kid needed to relax, Hunter thought, but even after five years on the job he was still excited about it and, if Hunter admitted it to himself, John was excited about working with Hunter. A lot of the new blood got that way. There weren’t many Marshals left from the pre 9/11 era, and Hunter was well known to most of the new agents from his instructor time at Artesia and Atlantic City. He taught Undercover Principles and Practice, Overseas Safety and Security, but what he was most remembered for was his instruction in empty hand to hand combatives, knife fighting and extreme close quarters shooting.
The new agents all remembered those blocks of instruction.
The headlines on the USA Today were visible even across the room: Director of Federal Air Marshal Service Resigns. The boss had stepped down after a rancorous meeting, and made his political suicide complete by holding a press conference afterwards denouncing the increasingly ludicrous demands put onto the Air Marshals by the management of the Department of Homeland Security. In the interest of “public perception” the Marshals were now required to travel in business suits or blazers; the relaxed grooming standards that had previously allowed the undercover Marshals to blend effortlessly into the thundering herd of passengers went away. They all looked like Mormon missionaries now, which might have been amusing except that now it took no effort whatsoever to identify the traveling Marshals, especially when seated in key positions. You don’t have to be a tactical genius to read the layout and configuration of an aircraft cabin and determine the best seats to prevent a hijacking.
The boss was gone, and Hunter was going to miss him. He’d been a good man, a street gunfighter come over from DEA, but his best efforts had been like pissing in the wind. Nothing good came from bucking career bureaucrats, especially the mafia of retired Secret Service agents who’d moved into the administrative levels of the Air Marshal Service. You just had to make do with what you were dealt.
It’s not what you’re dealt, it’s how you play it.
Hunter allowed himself a small grim smile at that favorite saying of Raven. He wondered what that old CIA legend would have said about the current play.
Up at the ticket counter, the tired looking ticket agent pulled away from a heated discussion going on with the local station manager and a well dressed Hispanic woman who was apparently giving him hell about something. The station manager would look over at Hunter from time to time, perhaps remembering him from a threat briefing.
The ticket agent took up the PA microphone and said, “We are happy to announce the on-time boarding of Flight 923 from Midway Chicago to Seattle Washington. Please have your ticket out and available for inspection. We want to offer pre-boarding at this time for our Gold Pass passengers, families traveling with small children, and any passengers needing assistance with boarding.”
Hunter watched the pre-boarding. There were a lot of children on this flight. A Syrian man and three others in his wake brushed by Hunter on their way to the front of the line. Hunter looked down, smiled, and thought about cutting their throats. After a moment to let the gap between them widen, Hunter followed them close to the boarding door.
There was a faint peal of children’s laughter through the door.
The ticket agent then opened for general boarding, and Hunter followed the first group of Syrians down the jet way. He ducked his head as he went through the forward passenger loading door. Sean Young was ducked back into the galley, watching the passengers board. Sean made brief eye contact with Hunter, twitched one eye in a wink meant to be reassuring. A Syrian in an off the rack business suit worn
over a polo shirt, lingered for a moment and looked intently at Sean. Then the Syrian exchanged glances with his two companions, and made their way to their seats.
The door shut. The passengers were seated. Sean slipped into his aisle seat right outside the cockpit door, across from the flight attendants. Across the aisle and one seat back, Hunter seemed engrossed in his book.
The pilot’s voice was strong and firm over the loudspeaker: “We are pleased to announce an on-time departure for Flight #923 to Seattle…”
4
Outside the security checkpoint, a fierce visaged, heavily made up woman who might pass for George Washington on the dollar bill, sighed deeply. A man close to her age, early sixties, trim and fit in casual clothes, said, “Are yours coming in or going?”
She smiled, and answered in a hoarse smoker’s voice. “Going. My daughter and my grandson. All I’ve got in the world.”
He nodded. “Me too. Exactly the same. Don’t know why I stick around, I just want to know they get off okay.”
“I hate to see them fly,” the woman said with vehemence. “I hate it. She just called me a few minutes ago, said she had a bad feeling. I wanted her to get off the plane, but she won’t. She’s stubborn, like her father. And me, too, I suppose. I guess you just have to trust the system, but after 9/11, I have no more trust in me.”
