Enemy In the Room (54 page)

Then she leveled out, descended, and hugged
the deck, flying right up the line where the sand met the water,
and where there were no poles and no wires to get in the way.

The Stinger never had a chance to acquire or
lock on to the airliner. It flew out over the ocean, and after a
pre-programmed time, it self-destructed.

Steve Toller had hit the beach early that
morning, hoping to get a good spot before the crowds arrived. He
was sitting in his beach chair, facing slightly north so that the
sunlight would illuminate the book he was reading, his feet
touching the water. Earphones provided soft background music when
he felt, more than heard, what seemed like a fast-moving diesel
locomotive coming up behind him. He turned his head in time to see
the Rolls Royce logo on the starboard engine of a huge jet
airliner, just before the noise and the blast hit him full tilt. It
was a long minute of cursing before he could hear well enough again
to call the police and complain.

Yusef threw the launcher down in disgust and
walked around the van, determined to make the infidels pay a high
price for this treachery.

“Los Angeles Tower, where do you want us?”
Captain Morgan asked. “I imagine we’ve got some messed up and maybe
banged up folks in the back.”

“Great flying, mam. We’re closed. Suggest
John Wayne Airport at Orange County. Fly heading one-five-zero and
climb to five thousand.”

“Seems an appropriate spot, but we prefer to
stay low,” Morgan answered. And she finally smiled. Then she turned
on the intercom to the passenger cabin. “Ladies and gentlemen, I
think we’re OK now. Let me tell you what just happened, and why, as
we take a short bird’s eye flight to the south.”

Perviz was waiting next to his own van at
the housing site in the Inwood area, across a small bay from the
end of runway 13 Right at JFK. Unfortunately for him, when the
order came across the Tower frequency to cease operations, no
airliner was rolling. He knew that there would be no more
take-offs. Frustrated, he looked northwest, to the other end of the
runway, and noticed a large airliner descending rapidly on final
approach. He immediately turned the launcher in that direction,
realizing that the distance was at the far end of the acquisition
parameters.

He tracked the plane and thought he heard
the lock-on tone. Instantly he fired the missile.

Brannon Ward was standing by the grill in
his backyard in Inwood, preparing hamburgers and hot dogs for three
families who had joined them to celebrate the Fourth. Like Brannon
and his wife, the other couples had young children. All of the men
worked with Brannon in the local police department, and so the talk
was mostly about bad guys of all types. Without even thinking about
it, each one of them wore a pistol on his belt.

“Wow!” Brannon’s six year old son exclaimed,
when the Stinger went off about two blocks to the west.
“Fireworks!”

Before joining the police, Brannon had been
a Marine in Afghanistan, and he knew exactly what a Stinger missile
sounded like. And, living near JFK, he knew what it could mean.

Handing the spatula to his wife, he motioned
to his buddies, whose conversations had also stopped, “Come on.”
They ran toward their cars at the front of the house.

The Stinger did its best to follow the line
of site to the heat from the descending target. But because of the
angle, the plane’s course took it behind a hangar, just as it was
touching down. The Stinger lost the target for a crucial two
seconds, and was unable to recover. It hit the edge of the hangar,
doing considerable damage, but it did not explode.

Perviz dropped the launch tube and waited by
his van in the middle of the field, expecting sirens to start any
second, and the police to arrive a few minutes later. Instead, four
men in shorts and casual shirts materialized from cars on the
street. They fanned out as they yelled, each one pointing a gun at
him.

Remember that I tried
, he prayed. He
held the cell phone open in his right hand, and slowly raised both
hands in surrender.

“What the hell are you doing?” Brannon
yelled, as he and the other men surrounded him. “Get down on the
ground.” Sirens could be heard approaching,

Perviz smiled. “Killing you.” Then he
pressed the Send button on his phone. A huge fireball erupted from
the van, laced with nails and metal shards. All five men were
instantly torn to shreds.

At Vnukovo Airport, David had been escorted
at gun point to a nearby hangar, where he sat by himself in an
office, again handcuffed to a chair. Mustafin had started to come
around as the police arrived, and now he was in the adjoining
office. David could hear him screaming in Russian at the guards
outside. He had tried in his best English to explain to the
Russians that they could not let Mustafin go. David had asked to
use his phone again, but they would not let him.

Yusef had no idea who would come for him in
the middle of the parking lot. LAPD? Airport security? FBI? But he
knew, especially after missing the aircraft, that he had to kill as
many as he could with the bomb in the van. That was why he was
dressed so minimally. He wanted no one to have the idea that he was
wearing a suicide vest. They should feel safe in approaching him.
He stood outside the front door of the van, the empty rocket
launcher ten feet away on the asphalt.

His location was, of course, obvious to
those in the control tower and around the airport, because of the
white contrail left by the missile. The launch had also been seen
by Officer Clark Perry, a young African-American who had only been
on the force for a year. On this holiday morning he had drawn the
“short straw” to patrol both his own area and an adjoining one.
Which was why he was driving through the neighborhood north of LAX
when the missile went off and, a few seconds later, his police
radio erupted.

Perry radioed that he was responding and
turned his patrol car in the direction of the contrail’s origin,
only a few blocks away. Even without his siren, he turned into the
high school parking lot in less than a minute.

There he saw the van, a single man standing
next to the open driver’s door, and what could well be the launch
tube near his feet.

Perry stopped just inside the entrance gate,
a hundred yards from the van. He was new to the force, but he had
seen similar scenes like this before. Six years earlier, before
attending college, Perry had been in the Army, stationed in Iraq,
training the local police. And he had seen first hand what a single
man and a van full of explosives could do to his best friends.

He immediately radioed his position and
asked for back-up, including the SWAT and Ordnance Teams.

From the other side of the parking lot two
young boys, apparently playing in the area, were attracted by the
noise of the rocket and had just seen the police car. They came
running across the lot toward the van.

Perry opened his door and pulled out his
loudhailer. He yelled to the boys to get back and go home, but they
either did not hear him or decided to investigate anyway. They
walked up to inspect the launch tube and then went over to the
vehicle.

The man next to the van leveled a gun at the
pair. A discussion ensued. The smaller of the two boys got in and
moved over to the passenger side. Once he was inside, the man shot
the other boy in the head at point blank range, his body collapsing
on the pavement.

As the killer got in the van and closed the
door, Perry heard the smaller boy’s scream, along with the wail of
multiple sirens rapidly approaching from several directions.

David was not sure of the time. He was still
alone, and once Mustafin had stopped yelling, he had decided to
pray, particularly for the people on two airliners.

Suddenly there was a commotion outside and a
lot of voices. He instantly recognized Tanya Prescott’s
commands.

The door to the office flew open and a tall
Russian in a suit entered, all the time berating the police officer
who had taken David prisoner. Tanya was right behind them, smiling
broadly. “Where have you been all day?” she asked.

David stood as the officer unlocked his
cuffs. Then he hugged her. “I’m so glad to see you. Don’t let them
give the man next door any leeway. They should watch him every
minute. He knows everything about all that has happened, and he
might try to kill himself. What about the planes in the
States?”

“Two missiles fired, just as you said, but
two misses.”

“Thank God.”

“There were casualties in New York, though,
and they’ve got the guy in LA surrounded. Thank you. Here’s all
your stuff, by the way.” She handed him a bag that she had
retrieved from the officer. “My Russian counterpart is telling the
other police how you saved the Presidents and the Kremlin, and that
the guy next door planned it all.”

A moment later, all the Russian police in
the building came to shake David’s hand.

When the first responding cars arrived,
Perry directed them to take up positions around the perimeter, to
keep other curious residents from entering the lot. Ten minutes
later Captain Eric Dean of the SWAT team arrived. He interviewed
Perry, agreed that he had done the right thing not to approach the
van, and asked him to stay close. Dean then took command of the
scene, as the first SWAT vehicles arrived.

Word was just arriving about a similar
incident at JFK Airport only thirty minutes earlier, including the
explosion of the van.

Dean, standing behind the SWAT truck just
inside the hedges, radioed downtown. “See if they have anybody that
I can talk to who saw what happened with that van.”

Compounding his problems, the Chief called
to tell Dean that Homeland Security and the FBI wanted him to try
to capture the perpetrator alive, if at all possible, so that they
could interrogate him. “Yes sir, we’ll try. He’s got a hostage in
the van.” he replied.

Yusef could not believe how gracious Allah
had been in providing the two young boys. Even if the one in the
passenger seat would not stop whimpering.

“Shut up!” he yelled, raising the gun to the
boy’s head.

The boy swallowed and tried to be quiet.

“They should be coming to us,” he said out
loud. “To rescue you. But if they don’t come soon, we’ll drive over
to them.” He smiled.

Another twenty minutes passed. The perimeter
was now heavily defended. Two snipers with Barrett M-107 Caliber
.50 rifles were positioned at the ends of the parking lot. Dean’s
phone rang. It was a senior officer with the New York team that was
investigating the missile and van explosion at JFK. She was
standing near the site and had a witness to the explosion with
her.

“Put her on,” Dean said.

The nearly hysterical woman described how
she had been walking her dog, had seen the smoke and heard the
noise, and so she walked one block further west than her usual
route. She had seen the two cars pull up to the vacant lot, and the
four men get out with guns. She then described what happened, and
noted that a piece of the shrapnel had hit her arm.

“So the man was standing outside the van
when the men approached him?”

“Yes. He was outside. He had his hands
raised, as if he were surrendering. Then, my God…”

“OK. Thank you, mam. You’ve been a big help.
Please put the officer back on the line.” Dean then said to her,
being sure that his lieutenants and Officer Perry heard. “Probably
a cell phone or garage door opener trigger. Let us know if you find
any evidence either way. My bet is a cell phone, which an
accomplice could also use from a distance in case the perp got cold
feet.”

Just then the engine of the van cranked up,
and it started heading toward the command area by the gate.

Dean spoke into the microphone on his
headset. “Sniper One, take out the engine. We want them alive.”

Immediately a single loud shot rang out and
a .50 caliber round went through the engine block, ending its
operation. . The van stopped twenty yards from where it had been
parked.

“Perry, who are the cell phone providers in
this area?”

“Tri-County, Prime, and USNet.”

Yusef cursed as the van stopped and would
move no further. Wild-eyed, he looked over at the boy.

Lon Gibson was heading up the morning shift
at USNet’s LA operations center, ensuring that the voice and data
networks functioned properly for their customers. From the center
console in a dimly lit command center, he and four other
technicians monitored every aspect of their circuits.

Gibson’s phone rang. He answered, listened,
and frowned. “I can’t shut down the entire USNet system in L.A. To
do that I’d need approval from our Central Security.”

“Where is it?” Officer Perry asked.

“I’m not sure. I just have a phone
number.”

Perry’s voice rose. “Did I give you the
proper authentication code for today?”

“Yes.”

“Are you in charge?”

“I’m really just an assistant manager, on
duty for the holiday. But, uh, yes, I guess so.”

“We have an emergency, Mr. Gibson. A police
car is on the way there now with the written form, but we don’t
have time to wait.”

“I’m not sure.”

Yusef motioned to the boy. “Start
screaming.”

Everyone around the perimeter of the lot
could hear the screams. Then there was a gunshot, and the screams
grew even louder.

“What the hell?” Captain Dean asked out
loud, trying to see with binoculars into the van through the glare
on the windshield. Then he yelled, “Perry, what about those
phones?”