Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (285 page)

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?”

“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-pitched 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.