Ted said, "American Airlines Flight 43. Departed Boston at 8:10 AM. It hit the containment dome at Indian Point at 8:45. The approach angle was 45 degrees and the speed was 500 knots. About a minute later American Airlines Flight 1 1 hit Tower 1 of the World Trade Center at 490 knots. So, our mission is to stop American Airlines Flight 43."
Sally clicked on a slide and it appeared on the screen, "I've got the names of the people the investigators think hijacked that flight.This particular group hid their tracks pretty well.
As of this morning the FBI is telling the PENTTBOM group that they are sure of three hijackers on Flight 43 and suspect three others. I've backtracked the top three and I can tell you with a good degree of certainty what rooms they were in at the Day's Inn hotel in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston on the night of September 1 0th.'
"So, you're suggesting we drop a hot ball in them while they sleep?"Landry asked.
"Hey, I'm an engineer, not an assassin." Sally said. "I mean, I want to change things so this horror goes away, but I don't want to think about dropping one of those burning beads into somebody's chest."
Obviously, Sally had thought about exactly that and was disturbed about those thoughts. But, if her information on their locations was good enough, burning them in their beds before they ever got up on the morning of September 1 1th was clearly a possible course of action. The fused quartz beads the Project sent back in time melted at about three thousand six hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Having a three thousand degree chunk of rock appear in your chest would be very unpleasant for as long as you lasted. Sally had seen several of the hot glass beads pop into the air around her when they had worked at Sandia. Ted and Bill had used the appearance of a hot bead in thin air in a Ritz Carlton restaurant to entice her to come back to work with them after an emotional misunderstanding early in their relationship.
Landry rubbed his left shoulder. It was a habit from a decade old shoulder separation. The action was a natural
thing he did in meetings when he was worried, but he used it as a conscious misdirection when he played poker. "I like the direct approach, but it has problems. First, we don't know which one of these guys is this group's leader. If we don't get him, then he might carry on with whoever he has left and we're not positive of who all is on the team. Second, we don't know for certain if they even slept in their beds. They might have been up all night praying or playing poker or whatever. We might just set fire to their sheets."
"How about in the plane?" Ted asked. "We have seat numbers. But yeah, I see it. We have almost the same problem. We're not one hundred percent certain who to target."
"I had this discussion briefly with a senior officer in the Pentagon the other day." Landry said. "At that time the idea of taking out the aircraft's tires before it left the gate was the best thing I could think of. It's conservative and not bloody. Additionally, we might be able to leave some signs for ourselves that we did something."
"First, do no harm." Bill said. "Just like doctors. We have to step softly."
"The law of unintended consequences will always come back to surprise you." Sally observed.
"The bad guys on that flight will get away if we just disable the aircraft." Ted observed.
"Yeah," Bill agreed. "But stopping that plane from going into Indian Point is the first priority. Hopefully the bad guys will get rolled up as part of the larger investigation."
"Particularly," Sally said. "if we can leave ourselves some signs."
Landry said, "Let's plan for this. Today you get every detail you can about Flight 43. We need its exact location on the morning of 9/1 I as precisely as it is possible to define it. I'll tell the physics folks to get ready for repeated shots starting tomorrow morning."
"I'll call the Turkey Point power plant down the road."Bill said. "In fact, I'll drive over there. I don't know what their status is with the Indian Point reactors off line. Taking down the entire remaining East Coast power grid would not be a good idea."
Ted and Sally spent the day compiling everything they could about the location and condition of American Airlines Flight 43 at 8AM on 9/1 1. Ted suggested that he could get into an F-16, fly to Logan Airport in Boston, make exact measurements at the departure gate used by the flight, and be back by dinner time. Nobody thought that was a good idea and one glance from his wife convinced him not to press it. Instead, Ted turned to standard tools including an FAA taxi diagram of the airport. The fact that every gate followed a precise pattern of spacing and dimensions helped at lot. Sally continued to use the processing power and communications connections of the Project to gather information on every passenger on the flight.
At about two o'clock, Sally's internal pressure cooker had to let off some steam.
"It really bugs me that if we are successful we won't know we were successful because the need to do whatever we did will have gone away with all evidence that we did it." Sally said.
"It bugs a lot of people. Me too.â€Ted replied.
"But, I know that you and Bill sent two glass balls back in time when we were having lunch in Atlanta. I saw the two balls appear. Why didn't that event erase itself?"She asked.
"We've talked about this before.†Ted said.“The conditions were different. The shot into the past in Atlanta probably really didn't change anything. While I love you much and I'm happy that you joined the Project then, you probably would have joined anyway even if Bill and I hadn't used the Sandia facilities to send the marbles back almost six months later. That's what I think anyway. It's all like Alice in Wonderland."
Sally was listening to him, but only partially. She had heard the whole thing before, but she wanted to pull it out again in order to see how things could be even a little different. "So, what if we do something to the airplane that will get written up in such a way that we will see it and realize we did it."
"Arrrgh. It all makes my brain hurt." Ted replied. "If we are successful and stop the attack, then we don't have to stop the attack. So, we won't leave ourselves any clues. That's the way I understand it."
"Hmmm."Sally said. "It sounds like we don't need to stop the attack. Only to modify it, substantially modify it, in some way that we will recognize it as our work."
Ted's reply was to nod thoughtfully.
Ted only needed a few minutes to develop a plan to attack the commercial plane. The plane's tires were easy and vulnerable targets for the hot rocks. If glass spheres from the Project appeared in or on the tires, the tires would melt instantly. Low tire pressures would immediately ring alarms in the cockpit and multiple flat tires appearing a little after 8AM would result in grounding the aircraft for many hours.
They consulted with Bill, took the plan to Colonel Landry, and after doing his own double checks, Landry loaded the location and time data into a form in the physics application. The plan called for the placement oftwenty two blazing quartz balls into twelve targeted tires on the 767 jet. Because of the time needed to re-charge the capacitor bank between each laser shot, firing the entire spread would take over almost two days in real time. However, they would all be targeted to appear at the same time on the ramp at Logan Airport.
"Actually," Landry said. The plane might be grounded and history changed with the first shot. We might just as well plan for a thousand shots over two thousand days. When we have success, in that instant everything will shift and it will be like it never happened."
"Oh look," Sally said innocently, "A white rabbit with a watch and a waistcoat."
Colonel Landry smiled thinly. "I've lived with this conundrum every day for five years. I'm still not used to it"He turned away from his computer screen. "Okay, I've plugged everything into the physics software. It will have to chew through the four dimensional positioning and power formula for at least ten hours until we get the firing data. Some people on the physics side will be working all night to put together the beads and holders. I told the software to set the initial firing at 0730.1 don't want to wake up too many of our neighbors with the bang."
"Well," Ted said. "It will be a full day tomorrow. How about some dinner, Sal?"
THE DAY OF JIHAD
Tuesday, September 17, 2001
2130 Eastern
Sunrise Apartments, Homestead, FL
UNCLASSIFIED
"Hostility toward America is a religious duty, and we hope to be rewarded for it by God . . . . I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America." Osama bin Laden quoted in Time Magazine
Mohammad Rajesh Mishra watched his friend Abu bin Fahd pace the room. Fahd was agitated. He spoke in rapid Arabic with a Saudi accent. At times Rajesh, whose Arabic was learned Afghanistan and went rusty in Brooklyn, couldn't keep up.
"This is the greatest time in the history of the world for Pan-Islam." Abu bin Fahd said. "We must strike in this great time and we can not allow these worshipers of Satan's science to take away the sacrifices of our holy martyrs."
"That is why I came to you, my friend. But, what can we do?" Rajesh asked. Rajesh stood in the middle of his apartment's living room while Fahd paced around him. Suddenly, Fahd stopped, turned, and put his arms on Rajesh's
shoulders. Fahd literally whispered into his ear as if to hide from hidden microphones.
"When Mohammad Atta, praised be his name, was here in Florida, I met with him several times. He gave me an Internet address, a Website hosted in Germany, where I could leave information for the intelligence unit of Al-Qaeda. We must find out what these Americans know, what they plan, what they can do. Then, we must tell Al-Qaeda. We must give them this weapon so that, praises to Allah, our brave fighters can wipe these American infidels from our Earth."
Fahd looked Rajesh in the eyes. His breath was sour and he stunk of sweat. "Which of these Americans knows the most? Which is the most vulnerable?"
"The whore and her man." Rajesh answered. He struggled with the Arabic phrases. "The Colonel and Dr. Wirtz are not vulnerable. They would die before telling us anything of value. But, the whore's man would tell us everything when we start to put her in her place. They have a child. We could use the child's pain to make this colonel and his whore tell us all."
Mohammad Rajesh Mishra was the son of an Afghan Mujahideen or "Freedom Fighter" as the CIA-inspired American press called them. His father fought against the Russians. The CIA had trained his father to fire the American Stinger missiles that were so effective against Soviet Helicopters in Afghanistan.
His father lost his left foot to a Soviet land mine in 1980. Rajesh was only a boy of twelve, but he nursed and hid his father for months while the Soviets searched for him. The CIA agents sent his father and him to New York in 1981 in order to keep his father from becoming a propaganda tool for the Soviets. Five years later in Brooklyn, his father died, an angry and bitter taxicab driver.
Rajesh worked his way through the school system in New York and earned a two-year degree in computer database management. He had a CIA-created identity as a Pakistani, a CIA-issued Green Card, and he earned his US citizenship when he turned 18. He had a perfect school and work record so he was able to get a federal government job in New York. He felt that the American Government owed him a job because of what they had done to his father. On the strength of steady performance on that first job, and through the power of the Civil Service System, he got a job with a mid-level security clearance at this Homestead Project.
At first, he had no idea what the Project did. There were large parts of the building he could not enter and his computer access was limited to updating programs, doing maintenance, and writing special applications such as database searches. But eventually, tiny pieces of ideas filtered through. Once, in a database search, he came across an unclassified document that had been prepared for a briefing with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It described, in general terms, some of the potential uses of time displacement. That document opened his eyes to possibilities.
While he was a practicing Muslim, he never considered himself radical. But, during 2000 he knew that there were things going on in the small Muslim community in South Florida. At the Mosque, he met Abu bin Fahd.They were the same age and neither one had a real social life. They were both simultaneously shocked and drawn to the nightlife of Miami.They felt corrupted by the filthy women they saw, but they lusted to throw themselves into the dirt.
On the morning of 9/1 1, Rajesh has just arrived on the base to go to work when the security alert siren sounded. He left the base and went home to watch television. Fahd, who was a part time student at Florida International University with no real employment, joined him. Together they toasted to the wonderful success of the Islamic martyrs and felt ashamed that they had no real part in the action of the wonderful day.
On the Saturday after the glorious attack, the Colonel had called everyone in to work. Rajesh was pretending to work on a database update, but he was still too emotional to get anything done. When the woman, Sally Arthurs, come into the Project building, he saw her in the hallway. She seemed powerful and beautiful, but she had bare legs and bare shoulders. Her toe nails were painted and naked like a whore's. When he passed her in the hallway she smiled at him and met his eyes. He was immediately attracted to her, but then her husband gave him a hard look and he turned away.
That evening he had consulted with Abu bin Fahd. It was evident that the new Air Force officer was an expert who
would use the Homestead project to somehow stop the holy martyrs. Such a thing seemed impossible, but Rajesh convinced Fahd that these Americans and their time science were capable of anything.
The next day Rajesh followed the whore and her man and boy to their house next to the golf course. He had looked at houses like that when he first came to the town. They had large sliding glass doors in the back just like those on his apartment. Last month an apartment in his building had been robbed. The robbers had simply levered a sliding door out of its track and removed it to gain entry.