Final Vector (15 page)

They opened the doors of the pickup and plopped down onto the wet ground, instantly sinking six inches into the muck. It was no wonder this area had never been developed. Between the standing water of the marshland and the bustling activity of Logan Airport just a couple of miles away, no one in their right mind would want to live here, even though the view of the sea was breathtaking and oceanfront land was a prime commodity.

The two men splashed slowly toward the tailgate in their wa-terproof boots. Joe-Bob stopped and cocked his head.

"What is it?" Dimitrios asked.

"You hear that?"

Dimitrios shook his head, and as he did, he began to hear a low buzzing, almost like the sound a mosquito would make as it navigated its way to your head to begin munching. It wasn't a mosquito, though, and the two men stared at each other incredulously as it dawned on them both at the same time.

"Somebody's driving out here," Dimitrios said. He couldn't believe his ears. Who the hell would come all the way to the northern tip of the Hull Peninsula in this swampy mess at 3:30 in the morning? His first thought was the police, but that was impossible.

No one knew they were here; he was certain of that. If the authorities were aware of their presence, they would have been arrested and taken away hours ago when they first arrived.

The two men hurriedly retreated to the cab of the Dakota.

"Whoever is coming out here, we have to get rid of them,"

Dimitrios whispered fiercely, as if concerned that the occupants of the four-wheel drive making its way slowly toward them with its lights off might be able to hear him.

They stared at the advancing truck as it materialized out of the darkness. The thing was close enough now that they could see it was a Jeep, at least ten years old, and it was filled with young men drinking and partying.

It occurred to Dimitrios that the Jeep's occupants, who were clearly drunk and not paying much attention to their surroundings, might not even have noticed yet that they had company in the marsh. With a little luck, he and Joe-Bob could circle quietly behind them while they were busy carousing and eliminate them easily and quickly.

No sooner had that thought occurred to him than the Jeep slid to a stop in the mud and its headlights blazed on.

It was too late. They had been spotted.

Just after 3:30 a.m., Tony, Jackie, and Brian marched through the BCT's two sets of double doors and into the building openly and brazenly, without even a halfhearted attempt at stealth. There was no reason to be overly cautious now; they had eliminated the two men who could reasonably be considered a threat and weren't the least bit concerned about a couple of air traffic controllers and a federal government electronics technician.

The men, clad from head to toe in black fatigues and boots, with black camouflage greasepaint covering their faces, moved single file across the terrazzo floor. Their semiautomatic rifles were drawn and held in both hands across their chests.

For the moment the terrorists ignored the wide staircase on the left that led up to the second floor and the operational quarters.

Accessing the Operations Room would come later. First things first. Walking swiftly, the group passed the staircase and turned left. Tony lifted the stolen ID card and waved it in front of the card reader, unlocking the wooden double doors leading to the technicians' workspace.

The card reader issued a loud beep, and the locks disengaged.

Tony elbowed his way through the doors, holding his weapon in front of him at the ready. It was highly unlikely that the technician assigned the overnight shift was doing anything other than sleeping, but Tony wasn't taking the chance of running into the guy in the hallway and being caught unprepared.

Tony immediately faced left. Jackie walked in and faced right, ready to eliminate any threat from that direction should there happen to be one. There wasn't. A second later Brian entered, too, and the team split up as the doors closed smoothly behind them, Tony moving left along the hallway in front of the equipment room and Jackie and Brian turning right, flanking the room on the other side.

The terrorists were totally at ease inside the BCT building.

They were familiar with its layout, having studied blueprints until each man was confident he could navigate the facility with his eyes closed. Getting access to the construction plans and blueprints had been simple--they had been included in the packet of information purchased from Nelson Michaels.

Thanks to Michaels, the terrorist team knew that there were two exterior doors on this side of the building. The hallway they were standing in surrounded the enormous workspace where the technicians stored radar scopes and all the tools necessary to maintain the equipment in the BCT. After winding around this workspace, the corridors terminated at the north wall, where each one ended at a heavy steel door leading to the outside.

The doors were locked and accessible from the outside only with an ID card like the one Tony had hanging around his neck.

From the inside, however, the doors operated as normal. They were fitted with a steel bar stretching across their width at roughly waist height. The key card was not necessary.

When Tony reached the terminus of the hallway on his end, he pulled his Glock 9mm, fitted with sound suppressor, from his belt and fired one slug into the handle's mechanism. The only sound was a soft
phht
when the weapon discharged followed a split second later by the sound of grating and smashing metal, but he carefully scanned the hallway behind him for thirty seconds afterward to be sure the electronics technician had not been alerted to his presence.

The hallway stayed quiet, and Andretti decided the technician had not heard the noise. He turned back to the door and tried the handle, shoving hard against it. The door was jammed. Perfect.

Tony retreated back up the hallway and around the corner, stopping in front of the wooden double doors. Within seconds he was joined by the other two terrorists, who nodded simultaneously.

They had successfully disabled their door, too.

Only one access point remained besides the front entrance to the BCT. There was a door at the rear of the first-floor foyer on one side of a two-story glass wall. Brian moved back into the foyer to disable the door, while Tony and Jackie began their search for the electronics technician. It was time to disable him as well.

The two men split up when they reached the technicians' cubicles. Undoubtedly the lone tech on duty was sleeping with his head down on his workspace, oblivious to his pending fate. Unless there was an equipment problem during the overnight shift, there would be nothing for the man to do, so why would he bother staying awake?

Tony stepped behind the first row of three cubicles, scanning for a sleeping body. It was empty. Jackie moved to the second row.

Also empty.

They were taking their time, moving quietly, but they must have made some small amount of noise because as they walked along the far side of the partitions to check the final row of cubicles, a flash of motion at the far end of the room caught Tony's eye. Above the six-foot-high cubicle walls, Tony glimpsed a disem-bodied head moving quickly toward the hallway door.

Tony wasn't worried that they had spooked the tech. The man had nowhere to go, as long as he didn't head for the front entrance, which Tony knew he would not do. That door was the farthest exit away, thus the least likely one he would try to use to escape the pending threat. When the man entered the hallway, he would sprint straight toward the door just a few tantalizing feet away, which of course would not open.

The technician was trapped like a rat in a cage, and the end of his life was rapidly approaching. He just didn't know it yet. Tony looked forward to introducing the concept to him.

Nick had always thought there was something a little eerie about the Boston Consolidated TRACON during the midnight shift.

The building was huge, so even during the day--with a full complement of staff and administrative personnel and both the Manchester and Boston Areas filled with a complete roster of controllers--it was not unusual to walk down one of the many mazelike corridors and not encounter a single soul.

Originally intended to house four or even five New England approach control facilities (hence the
consolidated
portion of its name), only Boston and Manchester had ended up moving into the building. All the other candidates had enlisted the assistance of local senators, representatives, and other political heavyweights to successfully block any proposed move. The powers that be in each of the affected states were none too excited to see dozens of high-paying jobs, not to mention the associated income tax receipts from those jobs, move out of their states and take up residence in New Hampshire.

The result of all this political maneuvering was a building two or three times bigger than it needed to be for the number of employees who worked in it. It was like Grandma rattling around in her massive old house after everyone else in the family had grown up, moved away, or died off. It was a colossal waste of taxpayer money.

Nick strolled into the break room, not bothering to take the time to flip on the overhead lights. The glow from the television in one corner playing to an audience of zero provided more than enough illumination for someone who had been at the BCT as long as Nick. He paused at one of the vending machines lined up along the north wall like soldiers standing at attention and dropped three quarters into it.

He grabbed a soft drink and a package of chips--if Lisa were alive, she would have had a fit to see how he was eating--and opened the break room door to take his food back into the TRACON. It was time to give Fitz a break. Stepping through the door, Nick glimpsed what looked like shadows flitting down the long hallway that completely encircled the Operations Room on the second floor.

He started in surprise. It was beyond unusual to see anyone outside the Ops Room at this late hour, and as he focused on the far end of the corridor, he realized with shock that what he was seeing were not some amorphous shadows at all. Three men dressed head to toe in black combat fatigues walked in the opposite direction with what appeared to be rifles slung over their shoulders, holding handguns at their sides.

Somehow Nick managed not to cry out; he had no idea how he pulled that one off. He slid sideways, instinctively taking cover in the corner of the hallway across from the break room. In a stroke of luck that he immediately recognized had probably saved his life, the three men were facing the other direction when he opened the door and thus remained unaware of his presence.

Had he flipped the lights on when he entered the break room, Nick knew he would likely be dead right now. The three men must have walked right past the break room seconds ago while he was inside. Why they had not entered the room to investigate it Nick had no idea, but he concluded that since it appeared dark through the tiny window cut into the door, the men had decided not to waste their time.

A surge of adrenaline coursed through Nick's body, instantly bringing him fully awake. It was stronger than any buzz he could have gotten from his soda. He slipped silently back into the darkened break room as the men in combat fatigues disappeared around the corner at the far end of the hallway. Who the hell were those guys? Something was obviously very wrong, and Nick knew he had to get help.

Crossing the room in five hurried steps, Nick picked up a telephone extension sitting on a table next to one of the plush easy chairs. He lifted it to his ear and was unsurprised to discover that it was completely dead.

His cell phone was the obvious next choice, but there was only one problem with that option--the FAA did not permit cell phones in the operating quarters

Nick's phone, instead of hanging on his belt at his waist, was lying in his mailbox in the ready room down the hall. It was completely charged and completely operational and at the moment completely useless.

He replaced the handset of the telephone gently on its cra-dle, almost as if there was a chance one of the unknown intruders might hear the noise and return to investigate. He stood frozen in place next to the phone, tapping its hard plastic casing absently with his fingers, lost in thought. What to do? He couldn't stay here forever, cowering in fear in the break room from the guys with the guns. Sooner or later he would be discovered.

Plus, it seemed like a coincidence of the most unlikely and improbable magnitude that the BCT would be breached by guys with what appeared to be automatic weapons on the very same morning that the president of the United States was flying into Boston's airspace.

Nick had no idea what it meant that the guys with guns were here in Merrimack when the leader of the free world would soon be landing nearly forty miles away in Boston, but he was dead certain that it meant something significant.

Nick knew he had to notify the authorities. Escaping the TRACON and going for help didn't strike Nick as a reasonable plan, since it seemed unlikely in the extreme that the guys with guns (terrorists?) would have stormed the BCT and then left the exits wide open and uncovered. Even if he were able to escape the building undetected, Nick knew he would have to hike for miles just to get anywhere he could even hope to tell someone about the situation, and by that time, it would probably be too late.

All of this went through Nick's racing mind in a matter of seconds as he stood next to the useless telephone, feeling helpless and exposed in the shadowy break room. There really was no choice.

He had to get to his cell phone in the ready room and use it to call 911, but to do so meant walking fifty feet down the well-lit hallway running adjacent to the Operations Room. He would be completely exposed the entire time. If anyone should round the corner from either direction while he made the journey he would be toast. And then, assuming he made it all the way to the ready room alive and unharmed, what would he find when he entered it?