Tom Hickok quickly weighed the odds—clutching his
camera, he threw himself to the ground.
SANDY’S INSTRUMENTS WERE
AS DEAD
as her headphones, which only muffled the whine of the runaway
engine. The terrifying thought
over-speed
gripped her when a violent
explosion rocked the plane and a ball of flame shot forward out of the engine. What
followed came far too quickly for her brain to discern. Ninety milliseconds
after the compressor stall, each of the sixteen propeller blades exerted a
centrifugal force of some thirty
tons.
Along with fragments of the
rotors to which they attached, the propellers ripped free of the engine. Half
of these deadly projectiles slammed into the runway at the speed of sound. The
aircraft’s highly effective Kevlar armor had not been designed to absorb the
massive energy release of the rotors. One three-bladed sector of titanium spool
hardly slowed as it tore through the fuselage and nearly severed the aircraft
in two.
Sandy’s headphones were torn free. Her eardrums ruptured, she
forced her eyes open to witness the source of blistering heat. Violent shaking
caused by the mangled rotors made the act of focusing all but impossible. Shards
of metal and severed cables were whipping around an enormous tear through the
skin of the plane. Blazing debris streaked across the cabin inches behind her. If
I stay here, she realized, I’m going to die.
Sandy fought against panic as her fingers tore at the
buckles of her restraining straps. Mustering all of her strength she dove into
the aisle, rolled onto her side and stared, mesmerized by the destruction
behind her.
Oh God I have to get forward.
She struggled to her feet...
Like an animal dismembering itself from a trap, a final
shriek of tearing metal freed the engine from the plane. Bright blue air rushed
inside the plane to engulf her.
FROM THE FIRST SHUDDER
and
eruption of cockpit klaxons, to the red annunciator lights flashing warnings
across the instrument panel, Vic Reilly knew that his starboard engine had
failed. The loss of symmetrical thrust pulled the plane’s nose down and to the
right. In the blink of an eye Reilly had driven his left foot hard onto the
rudder pedal. He eased back on the yoke.
“Hold it—hold it—hold it—bring it up! Okay...
Jesus,
straighten it out!”
Harris shouted as if needing to get his point across. “Just
bring it up, bring IT UP!”
As true for any pilot, flying this close to the ground
under these conditions was Reilly’s worst nightmare. “Gear DOWN!” he shouted.
“Gear down!” Harris grabbed the landing gear handle and
shoved down hard, not realizing he’d bent it past the stop. Now both men fought
the controls.
The old DC-9 was not a ‘fly-by-wire’ aircraft, its cockpit
controls were instead directly connected to aerodynamic control surfaces
through a series of cables, linkages, and actuators. The vertical tail
rudder—over-stressed from the combination of massive engine vibration and
Reilly’s efforts to keep the plane flying straight—communicated its enormous
oscillation to the pedal under Reilly’s foot. He had never experienced the
sensation of standing on a raging beast, even on the simulator, as the
procession of failures presently unfolding had never been conceived. This
realization compounded the pilot’s sense of doom when a sharp jolt brought the
violent shuddering to a halt—and his rudder pedal slammed to the floor.
Harris snapped his head around. “Hydraulic pressure zero!”
The pilots looked at each other as the controls in their
hands went all the way slack. As the nose of the airplane pitched up, filling
the windscreen with blue, neither man was aware that the aircraft’s severed
tail and engines were already tumbling down the runway. In a burst of denial
Reilly grunted as he frantically worked the controls; the plane wandered with a
mind of its own. The nose yawed freely to the right and gyrated down.
Both men knew they would not pull up again. With the
asphalt runway looming ever closer, Reilly’s final regret was that he could do
nothing for the wild-eyed people frantically running away.
“We bought it!”
“Shit—”
4
The Next Day
Washington, D.C.
SAMUEL MCBURNEY
was
led through the pouring rain past several dozen Metro police cars, ambulances,
and government-issue sedans lining the curb in front of the Rivergate apartment
complex. McBurney knew few of the facts surrounding the double murder which had
occurred inside, even less of the unexpected discovery supposedly responsible
for his being summoned. The rear door of an idling car swung open, he climbed
inside, and was handed a towel.
McBurney mopped his face dry. He asked, “What is it the CIA
can do for you this morning, Mr...?”
The square-jawed man wearing wire rim glasses presented him
with a manila folder. “I’m Special Agent Peter Kosmalski, and I’m in charge
here. Can you identify this man?”
McBurney was aware of the gaze of both Kosmalski and the
agent behind the wheel as he hesitantly opened the folder of photographs. He
realized by the infamous date on each still image that they were probably taken
from a passing tourist’s camcorder; several such recordings had surfaced
following the recent terrorist attack on Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum.
McBurney considered himself good at remembering faces and he looked closely at
one profile of particular clarity. As he did, he felt a cold chill of unease. He
looked up. “This is bullshit—no way.”
“We lifted matching prints from inside the van,” Kosmalski
explained.
“Matching what?”
“They match the set you took in 1982.”
McBurney stared again at the photograph with diminishing
disbelief—at the line of the man’s jaw, the Roman nose, the heavy brow and
cheek bones. Beneath a dark wool cap were the graying sideburns consistent with
a man in his fifties, so the age was about right. The Aryan facial features had
weathered with time, but McBurney’s memory of that fateful November night in
1983 was sharp; he recalled the view through binoculars of city rooftops in Old
Achrafieh, Beirut, and the smell of the Mediterranean Sea. His clandestine
operation had begun, ironically, with his having been officially declared dead,
a young case officer among the 63 casualties of the brutal suicide attack on
the U.S. embassy in Lebanon. He had watched breathlessly as the man who had betrayed
his personal trust—Nijad Jabara, an Islamic Jihadist with American blood on his
hands—brought his Renault to a stop inside his gated residence, climbed from
the car and entered the modest stone house. McBurney himself had coordinated
the placement of the explosives inside. The muffled explosion shot fingers of
flame through every window and collapsed the roof in a cloud of debris.
“He can’t be who you believe him to be. We killed him over
thirty years ago.”
“And did you verify the remains?”
McBurney resumed sorting through the photographs and didn’t
respond.
Kosmalski said, “Mr. Jabara sure seemed like one angry
honcho before punching his own ticket. Maybe a man with a score to settle? Any
way, we know it’s him on the videotape.”
“How do you know for certain?”
“Well, the bastard took two good men along to meet his
seventy virgins, but he forgot to bring a few of his fingers, his head, and
other assorted DNA material.”
McBurney recalled the accounts of the final seconds of
assault on the Holocaust Memorial. Tossing out their spent RPG tubes, two
terrorists followed immediately by a third burst from the rear of their van on
motorcycles. The first, tandem pair escaped after taking off in the direction
of the Mall. The solo biker raced up the narrow lane between stalled traffic
toward the intersection of Jefferson and 14
th
—where a police officer
stood taking aim. The motorcyclist tried to stop, fell sideways, and bounced
between vehicles before sliding to a halt. A brief wrestling match involving
the officer, the terrorist, and an angry motorist ended abruptly when the
terrorist detonated his final avenue of escape. All three men vanished in a
violent burst of flying body parts.
McBurney referred Kosmalski to the curious presence of a
Caucasian male in one of the photographs. “This guy near the van seems a little
casual about things, doesn’t he?”
Kosmalski studied McBurney’s face for a moment. “The time
and sequence of the images are a little deceiving. But yeah, he’s probably not
just some pedestrian happening by.”
“Where’s the driver of the van?”
Kosmalski cleared his throat. “We’re using a variety of
methods in order to locate him as a witness.”
“Do these murders inside have something to do with the
Holocaust attack?”
“We believe they do.”
“And so, you hauled me in here—”
“To rub your nose in the FBI clean-up of your costly
operational failure? Not entirely.”
McBurney dropped the photos on the seat between him and Kosmalski.
“Then besides maybe a pound of flesh, just what is it you want from me? I’m the
chief of East Asia Division. The Middle East has not been my purview for quite
a few years.”
“Your Mr. Jabara had a friend named Mohammad Ahmadi.”
Staring outside through the reflection of his own scowl,
McBurney did not have to struggle over this name, either. Mohammad Reza Ahmadi
had been working for Iranian intelligence and was assigned to advise the
fledgling Lebanese resistance during the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon—a
man known to be skilled in the art of designing bloody attacks. He recalled his
last meeting with both Ahmadi and Jabara over lunch inside a Beirut café some
thirty years ago. “What little I remember isn’t going to help you track him
down.”
“No need. For the past two years he’s been working at the
Iranian consulate as deputy charge d’affaires, among other things, apparently. We’ve
actually been becoming well acquainted with Mr. Ahmadi.”
McBurney was aware of the scuttlebutt; word had it that FBI
counterintel had tapped into a terrorist source with the potential of becoming
another Penkovsky, or a Nosenko—there were few walking the corridors at Langley
who could personally recall such successes. But a thug like Mohammad Ahmadi, on
the loose in
Washington
?
McBurney suspected more bloodshed was about to be laid at
his feet. “It’s been a while. I don’t remember Ahmadi as being much of a
player.”
“We weren’t exactly running him. I think it was more the
other way around.”
McBurney was almost afraid to ask, “You suspect this man of
committing the murders?”
“This is his residence. He’s one of the victims.”
McBurney nodded slowly. “So he had been talking to you, and
somebody didn’t approve. Who’s the other victim?”
McBurney’s question prompted Kosmalski to exchange a look
with his partner. “Mr. McBurney, the Bureau requested your presence this
morning as a courtesy. And frankly, only because I was overruled.”
“I understood that you were referred to me regarding
something unexpected. Just what did you find?”
“I’m obligated to provide you the minimum background in
order that you understand the context of what it is we found. Beyond that, the
murders are not your business.”
“Understood. How soon do I get to leave?”
Kosmalski ignored the remark in order to answer his cell
phone. “Kosmalski here...uh-huh. Thanks.” He ended the call.
“Media on their way?” asked Kosmalski’s partner.
“Hell, it is five-forty in the morning. I’m surprised it
took this long.” Kosmalski heaved a sigh. He turned toward McBurney. “I guess
we’d better take this up inside.”
5
MCBURNEY WADED BEHIND
Special
Agent Kosmalski through a lobby brimming with FBI, police, and other officials
conducting interviews of the building’s tenants; several dozen more appeared to
be comparing notes or simply milling around sipping coffee. Outside the Iranian
diplomat’s seventh floor apartment, the designated crime scene coordinator
requested that he and Kosmalski don surgical gloves and stretch Rayon socks
over their shoes before entering. McBurney noted the absence of any apparent
damage to the door. Inside, the place had been thoroughly ransacked. Three
forensics investigators clad in green overalls and baseball caps were in the
process of cataloging objects, most of them scattered about the floor amid
pieces of furniture. The sofa had been over-turned, slashed, and eviscerated. Doors
of cabinets and drawers had all been flung open, their contents in broken
pieces throughout the living room. A woman wearing blue FBI overalls carefully
dusted a water glass on the floor for fingerprints.
McBurney was familiar enough with the exclusive Rivergate
address—the Iranian’s tastes had certainly evolved since his days blowing up
the neighborhoods of Beirut. Even so, an overturned wine rack and liquor
cabinet struck him as particularly out of character. He asked Kosmalski,
“Ahmadi lived here alone?”
“I guess his wife and kids are back in Tehran.”
“It might be insightful to verify if they’re even alive.”
“Noted. So the police responded to a 911 disturbance call
and the manager let them in. Upon identifying the female victim they gave the
Bureau a call. We in turn called the Secret Service.”
McBurney turned toward Kosmalski. “Secret Service?” The
strobe light of a photographer’s camera flashed from beyond the archway leading
out of the living room.
Kosmalski jutted his chin. “The dining room.”
McBurney realized upon rounding the archway that nothing Kosmalski
might have said could prepare him for the aftermath of a slaughter. Two FBI
crime scene investigators hovered over the victims, a man and a woman seated
back-to-back and slumped forward against what looked like lamp cord strung
tightly around their torsos. A starburst of blood and gore on the wall drew
McBurney’s eye to the bullet hole in each of their temples.