Authors: Allan Leverone
They all did,
Shane shaking hands with each in turn, and then the lead investigator pointed
to an empty chair and said, “We’re still awaiting the arrival of the Air Force
representatives. Obviously, they wouldn’t be part of the investigation if a
military aircraft hadn’t been involved, but it’s their airplane and they will
take part as well. It will undoubtedly complicate matters, but we welcome their
involvement.”
Shane sat, amused.
It was plain by the tone of the investigator’s voice that he was anything but
welcoming of more investigators, but that he knew full well there was nothing
he could do about it. “How long before you expect the Air Force guys to show
up?” Shane asked, picturing Tracie Tanner fast asleep in his bed back home. He
felt a strong attraction to the beautiful—if enigmatic—young woman, not that he
expected anything to come of it. She had made abundantly clear her desire to
leave Bangor in her rearview mirror, and as soon as possible. But if nothing
else, he wanted to see her one more time to say goodbye in person, and the
longer this interview took, the less likely that was to happen.
“They’ll be here
soon,” the lead investigator said, glancing at his watch. Shane noticed for the
first time that each of the men surrounding Hall’s desk had a plastic nameplate
pinned to the lapel of his suit, like children on the first day of school, and
the man addressing him was named Paul Fiore. “The Air Force investigators are
flying here from Andrews Air Force Base and are in the air as we speak. But I’d
like to start now and then catch the other folks up when they arrive. You’ll
probably have to go over your statement more than once, but my guess is you’re
going to be telling the story a few times, anyway.”
“That’s fine,”
Shane said, although it really wasn’t. There was no way he was going to get out
of here any time soon.
“So,” Fiore said,
leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head. “Take it from
the top. You were driving to work last night and the damned B-52 fell out of
the sky next to you?”
“Not exactly,”
Shane said. “This part of Maine is so heavily wooded I didn’t actually
see
the airplane crash. I caught a flash of it almost directly overhead, much too
low to be on a normal approach to Bangor, and then it was gone. A second or two
later—barely enough time to register what I had seen—I heard and felt the
impact and knew immediately what had happened. That was when I pulled my car to
the side of the road and went into the woods to see if I could find the
accident site.”
The questioning
continued, each investigator asking for clarification of various points at
various times. After maybe twenty minutes, Fiore got around to the subject
Shane had expected him to address right off the bat: “I understand you pulled a
survivor out of the wreckage. I admire your bravery, Mr. Rowley. It is imperative
we speak to this young woman also, and as soon as possible. We’ve checked all
of the hospitals within a fifty-mile radius of Bangor and no one has any record
of her. Where is she now?”
This was the
question Shane had been dreading. He understood the need of the investigators
to question her. After all, who better to describe the circumstances of an
airplane crash than someone who had been aboard the plane? But by the same
token, the girl had made it quite clear she was in serious trouble and did not want
to be found.
Shane didn’t
believe for a second Tracie Tanner had done anything to contribute to that B-52
going down, but he also wasn’t about to admit the subject of their search was
even now sleeping, injured, in his bed. He took a deep breath and opened his
mouth to speak, still with no idea what he would say, when a loud
Crash!
out
in the hallway diverted everyone’s attention.
And all hell broke
loose.
Shane craned his
head toward the door, as did everyone in the room, just in time to see fellow
controller Jimmy Roberts, on duty in the radar room this morning, stomp angrily
past the office door in the direction of the facility entrance. “Who the hell
do you think you are? And what the hell is up with all the noise?” he asked,
continuing down the hallway and disappearing from view.
Shane heard a
phht
sound, followed in rapid succession by another, and Jimmy Roberts stumbled
backward into view. He wavered unsteadily in the hallway before crumpling in a
heap outside the office door. A spreading ring of crimson stained the front of
Jimmy’s shirt, and he lay on the floor gasping for breath.
Chaos erupted in
the office. Chairs toppled over as everyone stood, jostling and banging into
each other, some moving to help the injured man, others backing away from the
door.
A half-second
later, a pair of large men filled the doorway, standing over the fallen Jimmy
Roberts. They were dressed in suits remarkably similar to the ones worn by
everyone in Hall’s office except Shane, and he had the absurd thought that
maybe more investigators had arrived.
Then he saw their
handguns.
The two
investigators closest to the door saw the guns as well and they shoved
backward, hard, plowing into Marty Hall, who had gotten up and rounded his desk
at the sight of the injured Jimmy Roberts. He toppled directly into Shane,
knocking him to the floor. Shane pushed immediately to his feet, still stunned
by the suddenness of the onslaught. The men in the room were cursing and
shouting.
Shane looked
toward the doorway and saw the intruder to the right scan the room. The man
wore thick glasses and his eyes widened when he looked at Shane. He nudged his
friend, gesturing in Shane’s direction with his gun, which was big and black
and fitted with a sound suppressor on the business end.
“Everybody sit
down,” the man on the left said with an Eastern European accent. He was
muscular, with a blocky head that seemed to melt directly into his shoulders.
“No one needs to get hurt.”
And Shane
exploded. He knew he should do as he was told, slow things down, try to figure
a way out of this, but Jimmy Roberts was his friend, they had started out as
air traffic control trainees at Bangor on the very same day six years ago, had
worked traffic together, gone drinking and fishing together, and double-dated
with their wives, back before each man’s marriage had crumbled. Jimmy Roberts
was his friend, and Jimmy Roberts was lying on the floor at the feet of these
men, dying or already dead.
“No one needs to
get hurt?” he spat angrily. “It’s too late for that, wouldn’t you say? Or do
you get a mulligan on your first victim? Do you only start counting after
number one?”
“Easy, Shane,”
Marty Hall said softly.
The man with the
glasses snarled, “Shut up.”
Shane realized he
had taken two steps forward without thinking. He was lost in his rage and his
grief and wanted nothing more than to get his hands on the man who had taken
Jimmy down. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he was making a mistake,
but at this exact moment, he just didn’t care.
And in that
instant, things went from bad to worse.
The guy with the
glasses was saying something about everyone calming down and shutting the fuck
up, that they only wanted to talk to Shane Rowley—Shane thought,
how the
hell do they know my name?
—and then they would go away and leave everyone
alone, and that was when Paul Fiore, the lead NTSB investigator, leapt forward
and let loose a roundhouse right, catching the guy doing the talking in the
side of the head. The man went down like a sack of Aroostook County potatoes,
and the room, which had gone silent, erupted in chaos again.
The no-neck guy
pivoted and fired. The slug caught Fiore in the face and his head exploded in a
spray of blood, and everyone was screaming and scrambling for cover, trying to
escape the hail of bullets as the guy continued shooting. The man Fiore had
punched pushed himself up off the floor, shaking his head, as the square-headed
guy began picking off investigators one by one,
like shooting fish in a
barrel,
Shane thought. He dived behind Hall’s desk, banging heads with the
facility manager.
Hall was panting
like he had just run the Boston Marathon. “What do we do now?” he wheezed.
“Good question,”
Shane said, trying desperately to think. He knew they had just seconds left
before everyone in front of the desk would be dead and the men with the guns
came for them.
He looked around
for something they could use as a weapon. The metal chairs were scattered
around on the floor and Shane wondered how long he might survive if he charged
the men using a chair as a makeshift shield. Not long, he thought. He squinted
against the sunlight streaming in through the window behind Hall’s desk, making
it almost impossible to see.
The sun.
Coming through the
window.
And Shane knew
what to do.
He told Hall,
“I’ll go first, just in case there are still shards of glass sticking out of
the window frame. My body should pull most of them out as I go through, but
we’ll only have a second or two before the guys with the guns react. You gotta
follow right behind me.”
Hall said, “What
are you talking about?” but there wasn’t time to explain. The gunshots were
dying out and the screams were dying out, which meant the investigators were
dying out. They were out of time. Shane lifted one of the metal chairs right
beside the desk and took a deep breath, then stood quickly and heaved it
through the picture window, then dived out the jagged opening right behind it,
praying Hall had understood.
He landed on the
chair and felt a slash of pain as his elbow struck the metal seat. He rolled
onto his back and looked expectantly up at the window, waiting for Marty Hall.
The air traffic manager appeared at the window and grabbed hold of the frame,
but he was moving much too slowly. He wasn’t going to make it.
Shane screamed
“Never mind climbing, just dive out! Dive, get out now!” He watched in horror
as Hall began stuttering like a marionette, bullets peppering his body,
slamming it down onto the window frame.
“Goddammit!” Shane
screamed in fear and frustration, watching as his boss slumped half-in and half-out
of the window, bloody and unmoving.
There was nothing
he could do for Marty Hall, or for anyone inside the building. The slaughter
had taken no more than a minute, although it had seemed much longer, and Shane
knew he had just seconds left before the men with the guns appeared at the
window and took him out, too.
He rolled to his
feet and started racing toward the parking lot. He would use the cars for cover
and try to make his way to his Beetle. Maybe he could start it up and get down
to the cop who had set up the roadblock at the access road. It wasn’t much of a
plan, but it was a hell of a lot better than waiting around to die.
Shane sprinted
into the lot, half expecting to be shot in the back, and ran straight into a
third man in a suit. The man was holding a gun fitted with a sound suppressor
that looked identical to the ones carried by the two men inside the facility,
and he placed it squarely against Shane’s forehead as he skidded to a stop.
The man eyed him
coldly and Shane knew he was going to die.
25
May 31, 1987
9:10 a.m.
Tracie jammed the accelerator to
the floor and turned the stolen Datsun toward Bangor International Airport. The
little car was built for fuel economy, not speed, and it reacted sluggishly.
Tracie pounded the
steering wheel in frustration, wishing she had commandeered a livelier car, but
she hadn’t wanted to risk hot-wiring a vehicle equipped with an alarm system,
and the ancient cream-colored Datsun, pocked with rust spots and plastered with
bumper stickers, had seemed the safest choice.
She had glanced
around the apartment parking lot, trying not to be too obvious, and when she
hadn’t been able to spot any observers, picked up a brick-sized rock and tossed
it through the driver’s side window. Then she flipped the door lock, opened the
door, and threw a blanket she had taken out of Shane’s apartment across the
seat.
From there it had
taken less than thirty seconds to hot-wire the car—
chalk up one for CIA
training
—and chug out of the parking lot. She guessed Bangor International
was roughly a ten-minute ride from Shane’s apartment, and the woman
broadcasting the live news report had said Shane was scheduled to be
interviewed by the NTSB investigators at the ATC facility at nine. It was now
shortly after nine. She hoped she wasn’t already too late.
Tracie knew the
KGB had operatives working in many major U.S. cities. Assuming Boston was one
of those cities, or even New York, the KGB’s agents could have driven up
Interstate 95 overnight. They could be here right now. They could have seen, or
learned about, the news report detailing Shane’s actions last night, as well as
the NTSB’s intention to interview him today. They likely would even have
learned where and when the interview was to take place. He would be a sitting
duck.
The entrance to
Bangor International Airport loomed ahead on the left. Tracie wheeled the
Datsun onto the access road, cutting across two lanes of oncoming traffic,
serenaded by squealing brakes and honking horns. She ignored them and
accelerated toward the control tower.
Two-thirds of the
way along the access road she could see a police cruiser slewed across the
road, hazard lights flashing, no doubt to prevent the media and curious
onlookers from gaining access to the control tower complex. Tracie suddenly
realized she had no idea what she was going to say to the cop to avoid being
turned away. She toyed with the idea of simply blowing past the cruiser, but
the Datsun was so underpowered the idea was laughable. She would be overtaken
by the powerful police vehicle before she ever got close to the facility.