Brown, Dale - Independent 04 (68 page)

 
          
The
terrorist sat up so as to present as large a target as possible, aimed his
Browning at the headlights, and fired. The security police returned fire with
an M-16 assault rifle.

 
          
He
was not disappointed.

 
          
Army
Colonel Wes Slotter, commander of 108th Air Defense Artillery Brigade,
Fort Polk
,
Louisiana
, was the overall commander of ground air defense forces for the
nation’s capital. From the
Patriot
Integrated
Command
Center
van at Andrews Air Force Base, he was in
constant contact with all of the Patriot, Hawk, Avenger, and Stinger units in
the
Washington
area, as well as the E-3C AW ACS radar
plane and the
National
Military
Command
Center
at the Pentagon, where the Joint Air
Defense Commander was headquartered. Although his headquarters was at Fort
Belvoir, Virginia, like his mentor, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, he hated
being stuck in his office with his units deployed in the field—even if “in the
field” only meant The Mall or a golf course on East Potomac Island Park—so he
was on his way to the integrated central command for all of the ground air
defense units when the air defense alert came down.

 
          
And
as he trotted over to the control van, he also had a perfect view of the crash
of the two F-16 fighter jets, less than a mile from where he was standing.

 
          
Slotter
ran back to the control center van, wedging his six-foot-two frame past the
maintenance technicians and over to the Patriot battalion commander, Lieutenant
Colonel Jim Buckwall, who was seated at the communications officer’s station
behind the battalion fire control officer and battalion radar technician.
“Jesus, we just had two fighters crash on the runway,” Slotter said. “What do
we got, Jim?”

 
          
“AWACS
radioed an air defense emergency about two minutes ago, sir,” Buckwall
reported. “We’re tracking a single heavy airliner inbound toward D.C. from the
north. Apparently it made its way from
New Hampshire
calling itself Executive-One-Foxtrot.”

 
          
“A
VIP flight? No shit,” Slotter exclaimed. How that bastard made it all the way
like that was almost unbelievable. “First that, then they crash a couple
F-16s—the Air Force is dicking up by the numbers.” He wasn’t one to dig on
another branch of the service, especially during an emergency when anything
could happen to anyone at any time, but the prima donnas in the Air Force
really deserved it sometimes. “Let’s try not to make any mistakes ourselves.
Everybody reporting in okay?”

           
“Yes, sir,” Buckwall said. “All
Avenger ground units deploying as per the ops order. This ICC is in contact
with all the Hawk batteries except for
Baltimore
, but the AW ACS had full connectivity with
them. We’re checking our comm relays to find out what the problem is.”

 
          
“That
AWACS has full control of all ground units, eh?” “Yes, sir,” Buckwall said. “We
launch our missiles, but Leather-90 tells us who and when and how we attack. If
we lose connectivity with them we have full authority to launch, but as long as
the hookup is solid, Leather-90 has the red button.” Slotter didn’t like that idea,
either. An Air Force guy with authority over a dozen Hawk missile batteries and
two dozen Avenger units, and with full launch control over the Patriots if they
were still on-line—well, the idea was unnatural.

 
          
Slotter
could tell that the maintenance techs wanted to get inside to start checking
over the systems to regain contact with the Hawk units at Baltimore-Washington
International. There was no room in the control van for an extra person,
especially a high-ranking extra person. “I’ll be en route to the NMCC at the
Pentagon, Colonel,” he said. “Notify me as soon as possible on the secure line
on the engagement status.”

 
          
“Yes,
sir,” Buckwall responded.

 
          
Slotter
squeezed past the maintenance techs and exited the hatch, nearly colliding with
a soldier coming up the steps toward the ICC. The soldier, wearing an
ALICE
harness and web belt, had his Kevlar helmet
strapped down tight and pulled over his eyes, so Slotter couldn’t recognize
him. It was unusual to see a soldier in full combat gear up in the ICC—the
security guys usually stayed on the perimeter. “Excuse me, sir,” the soldier
said. “I’ve got a message for the commander.”

 
          
“Battalion
CO’s tied up right now,” Slotter said. “I’m Colonel Slotter, the brigade CO.
Let’s have it.”

 
          
“Yes,
sir,” the soldier said. His right hand came up—but I there was no message, only
a small submachine gun with a long silencer on it. Before Slotter could cry out
a warning, he felt the sharp, sledgehammer-like blows on his chest, then
nothing.

 
          
Tomas
Ysidro shoved the body off the rear deck of the Patriot ICC, pushed open the
entry hatch, threw a tear gas grenade and two hand grenades into the ICC,
slammed the door tight, and jumped off the truck. Seconds later, the hatch
opened and the tear gas grenade sailed out, but it was too late. The other two
high-explosive grenades were never picked up, and the explosions inside the
steel box of the Patriot ICC destroyed everything inside instantly.

 
          
“Move it, move it!”
Ysidro shouted to
his partners. He should have set the explosives on the antenna array, but the
array was still deployed and the electrical power plant was still operational.
He unbuckled the last two grenades he carried, pulled the safety pins, and ran
toward the antenna array truck when he heard, “Halt! Drop your weapon!”
_u
Always playing cowboy,
Ysidro thought.
You're in combat, you
idiot Americans—why do you insist on trying to order the enemy to halt?
Ysidro threw the first grenade at the antenna array, then wheeled around and
rolled the second grenade under the electrical power plant truck—just as three
Army security guards opened fire, catching him in a murderous crossfire from
their M-16s. His shattered body hit the ground just a few feet from where his
partner lay, shot by another security guard as he tried to plant the
remote-detonated mines around the antenna array and electrical power plant.

 
          
But
the first grenade did the trick. Ysidro’s toss was perfect, bouncing off the
back of the “drive-in theater” array and landing right on the waveguide horn on
top of the unit. The explosion ripped the entire array and waveguide assembly
off the top of the van. The second grenade rolled all the way under the EPP,
but the force of the explosion toppled the vehicle on its left side, spilling
diesel fuel and starting a fire.

 
 
          
Along The Mall That Same Moment

           
When the alert went out from Major
Milford aboard the E- 3C AWACS radar plane that
Washington
was under attack, the air defense ground
units that had so very carefully been under wraps for the past several days
immediately deployed to their fire positions.

 
          
From
First Street, east of the Capitol, to the Lincoln Memorial, Avenger units
rolled out of their parking garages and took up positions on The Mall, with one
Avenger stationed every six thousand feet; at the same time, Avenger units
deployed to positions around the approach ends of main runways at Dulles,
National, Andrews, and Baltimore airports. Avenger was an HMMWV (High Mobility
Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, the Army’s new “Jeep”) truck with a rotating
turret installed on it that contained two four- round Stinger missile
launchers, a .50-caliber heavy machine gun, a laser rangefinder, and a
telescopic infrared sensor. The gunner sat in a cab between the two Stinger
launchers and electronically spotted and attacked airborne targets as far as
three miles away. A driver/loader and two security troops completed the Avenger
crew.

 
          
“All
Leather units, Bandit-1 bearing zero-one-eight degrees magnetic, range thirty
miles and closing. All units stand by for status poll.”

 
          
Sergeant
First Class Paul Lathrop pushed open the bulletproof Lexan canopy of his
Avenger FAAD (Forward Area Air Defense) unit to get a little fresh air into the
cockpit, and stretched to try to smooth out the kinks in his muscles. He was
the unit gunner, sitting in a tiny, narrow cockpit between two four-round
Stinger missile pods. The cab was not made for anyone over six feet tall, nor
anyone with any hint of fat—the turret steering column was right up against his
chest, and his knees were bent all the way up practically to the dashboard. But
even worse than sitting in the hot, confined cab was sitting in the cab when
the vehicle was moving. He was wearing no tanker’s pads to protect himself, so
every bone in his body ached from being thrown around in the bucking-bronco
HMMWV.

 
          
Lathrop’s
Avenger unit was stationed on the west side of the
Washington
Monument
, with an almost unobstructed view of the
sky in all directions—except, of course, for the sky blocked out by the
monument. He could clearly see the front of the White House, the Lincoln
Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, and of course the Capitol itself. There was
another Avenger unit east of the Washington Monument, near the Capitol, with a
clear shot of most of the sky that Lathrop couldn’t see to the east; there were
other units over at West Potomac Park guarding south D.C., Ft. McNair,
Arlington National Cemetery, and the Pentagon, and east of the Capitol as well.

 
          
You
don’t deploy units like Avenger in the middle of The Mall in
Washington
,
D.C.
, and expect not to get noticed, and almost as soon as they rolled out
of their hiding places near Union Station,
West
Potomac
Park
, the Navy Bureau of Medicine, and
George
Washington
University
, a crowd had gathered to watch. D.C. Police
and Army security troops were trying to close off The Mall and chase all the
bystanders away, but on a warm summer evening in D.C., with the lights of the
monuments on for the first time in days, there were a lot of folks out
wandering around. The lights had not yet been turned off, and Lathrop idly
wondered who would have the switch to the lights of
Washington
,
D.C.
Certainly not the President—or the Steel Magnolia.

 
          
It
was then he noticed that the poll of the air defense units had stopped. On
interphone, he said, “Mike, how do you hear?”

 
          
“Loud
and clear,” Specialist Mike Reston replied.

 
          
“What
happened to the poll?”

 
          
“Dunno,”
Reston
replied. Lathrop heard a squeal in the
radio as
Reston
deactivated the squelch control. “Radio
still works. Hang on.” On the radio, Lathrop heard, “Control, Leather-713,
radio check ... Control, -713, radio check.”

 
          
“-713,
this is Leather-601, stand by.” That was from the lieutenant in charge of the
four Hawk missile sites stationed around D.C., based out at
East
Potomac
Island
Park
, south of the Capitol, along the
Potomac
.

 
          
“Control
must’ve gone off the air,”
Reston
said.

 
          
That
got Lathrop worried. With a bandit only a few minutes away, he needed radio
contact with someone with a long-range radar to spot targets for him until the
bandit got close enough. The passive infrared sensor on the Avenger was good
out to a range of about five to eight miles, $o long-range spotting was
crucial. The Patriot ICC (
Integrated
Command
Center
) stationed out at Andrews provided radar
coverage for the Hawk and Avenger units —what a shitty time to have radio
problems.