The Rule of Nine (30 page)

T
wo hours after the fiery wreckage splashed into the Atlantic, and eleven hundred miles to the northwest, the phantom FedEx 727 passed over the outer continental shelf just a few miles north of Cape Hatteras.

Ten minutes later Ahmed and Masud saw the coastline as it passed beneath them somewhere near Virginia Beach. They could see the mouth of the Chesapeake yawning directly in front of them.

Suddenly the onboard VHF radio came to life. “Squawk 1423, this is Potomac air traffic control. Please identify yourself.”

“Take over.” Ahmed turned over the flight controls to Masud, reached over, and flipped the switch on the radio. “Potomac, this is FedEx flight 9303, on route from Rafael Hernández Airport in Puerto Rico bound for Newark Liberty Airport. We're showing a serious hydraulic problem, requesting permission to land at Reagan National.”

“Flight 9303, this is Potomac air control, say again? Are you reporting an in-flight emergency?”

“Affirmative,” said Ahmed. “We have shut down starboard engine overheating and show loss of hydraulic controls. Requesting permission to land at Reagan National.”

Ahmed looked at Masud, who glanced over at him.

“Flight 9303, this is Potomac. Descend to eighteen thousand feet and await further instructions.”

Ahmed reached over and pushed the throttle controls all the way forward. He goosed their speed to just over six hundred miles an hour and told Masud to maintain their present heading and altitude. They were on a beeline flying directly toward downtown Washington, D.C.

Ahmed knew that air traffic control would never clear them to land at Reagan National Airport. The tactic now was to stall for time. The plane was nothing more than an aerial platform for the fuel-air thermobaric bomb tucked away in the ramp of the airstairs in the rear. In order to deliver it to the target, speed and elevation were everything.

Ahmed did some quick calculations in his head. They were roughly a hundred and twenty miles out; at six hundred miles an hour, ten miles a minute, they only had to stall for twelve minutes to reach the target, and not even that if they could maintain altitude. At their current altitude with its front-end canard controls and big rear fins, the bomb had a glide range of almost thirteen miles.

“Potomac air control to flight 9303, you are instructed to descend to eighteen thousand feet, do you read?”

“Potomac, this is flight 9303. We are having problems with flight surfaces due to hydraulic failure. Trying to descend at this time,” said Ahmed.

“This is Potomac air control. How serious is the emergency?”

Ahmed looked at Masud, shrugged his shoulders, and smiled.

“Potomac, we're not sure at this time. We are having some difficulty with flight controls.”

He muted the radio for a second. “Descend. We'll give them two thousand feet and then report more problems,” he told Masud.

It was as if the bottom fell out of the plane. They dropped quickly down to twenty-three thousand feet.

“This is Potomac air control. One moment.”

The air defensive zone around Washington had been beefed up and expanded following the attacks on 9/11. The no-fly zone had been extended out to a radius of between fifteen to seventeen statute miles from the Capitol and the White House. But politicians had already compromised the system, and the military had tipped their hand concerning their willingness to use dire tactics in the event of aircraft violating the zone.

At one point the governor of Kentucky had accidentally wandered into the defensive zone in a private plane, which had caused the entire Capitol to be evacuated.

It was the problem with Washington. Wherever there were people of wealth and power, you could expect that rules would be broken. It was one thing to shoot down a commercial jetliner with a few hundred tax-paying drones on board, all strapped into their seats so they couldn't even pee for the last hour of the flight. It was another to fire on a jet-powered ego container taking members of Congress to some lobbyist-paid junket. And around Washington, odds were that if you shot down a plane, there was more than a fair chance it might have somebody important on board.

Ahmed was banking on all of this, vacillations, indecision, and delay just to get the nose of the 727 under the tent. All he needed was just a few miles inside the no-fly zone, and at ten miles a minute that wouldn't take long.

“Flight 9303, this is Potomac control. You're being diverted to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Dover tower has been advised of the emergency. They have facilities and a long enough runway to allow a landing if your brakes fail.”

Masud gave Ahmed a worried look.

“Potomac control, this is flight 9303. We may not be able to make Dover. We're having problems with the rudder controls, a lot of vibration.”

“This is Potomac control, are you sure your starboard engine is
shut down? Radar control shows your current speed at approximately 520 knots.”

Ahmed reached over and switched off the radio. “Take it back up to twenty-five thousand feet.” He pushed the throttles all the way forward. The plane screamed toward Washington.

 

After more than an hour of desperate work, transit authorities managed to pull the cement truck back from the brink and away from the open hole over the Fulton Street station.

They emptied out the subway down below and one of ATF's bomb-disposal units was gingerly moving in on the vehicle. ATF had already been briefed by the military on the fuel-air device that authorities believed was on board. If Thorpe was right, it was the big one from North Korea, the one that Soyev called Fat Man.

The mixing barrel on the truck was about the right size. Thorpe wanted to know if the cement truck could be safely moved from its present location to somewhere outside the city where the bomb could be safely defused. But the bomb squad said no.

While the manual triggering device in the cab could be controlled, and the trembler switch, if there was one, wouldn't present any particular difficulties since the truck had already been driven to the site, they couldn't be sure until they looked whether there was a timing device.

Given the size and potential destructive power of the fuel-air device, the bomb squad couldn't guarantee that if they moved the truck through the streets of New York it wouldn't go off.

They could try to move it onto a barge and haul it out into the Hudson. But it would take time to get all of the necessary equipment together. And time was the one thing they didn't have if the bomb had a clock on it.

They were probably lucky in one respect. If whoever put the device together had mounted a pressure switch under the driver's
seat, the bomb would have gone off when the transit cop pulled the dead driver out from behind the wheel. They were guessing that the bomb maker probably didn't want the device to go off until it was down in the hole, where it would do the most damage.

The short answer to their dilemma was that they couldn't move the truck. Instead they would have to move all of the news helicopters and anybody with a television feed away from the scene so that viewers wouldn't be able to see what was happening when one of the members of the bomb squad crawled inside the tumbler of the cement truck and tried to defuse the detonator.

The fear was that the detonator could also be remotely controlled by someone close enough who, if he saw what was happening, might set it off.

They assumed, given the nature of the device, that the detonator was probably electronic. If they could safely clip its power source, they could then cut the wires to the manual trigger, make sure there was no secondary detonator, and then haul the truck away to dispose of the massive bomb somewhere safe.

 

I'm standing near the exit to the garage still trying to reach Joselyn on the phone as they roll Herman into the back of an ambulance. Half of the blood from his body is now on the concrete floor near where he lay. But sadly, I don't have time to think about it.

On the third ring she finally picks up.

“Hello, Paul, where are you? I thought you were coming right back.”

“Never mind,” I tell her. “Are you still in the room?”

“Yes.”

“Stay there, and don't open the door unless you hear my voice. Do you understand?”

“What's wrong? What's happened?”

“I'll be there in a minute. Just wait for me.” I hang up and look
over my shoulder. The cop who was taking my statement is busy talking to somebody else.

I step out into the sunlight, take off the yellow jacket, and hand it to one of the firemen. “Thanks.” And before he can say anything, I skip across the street and scurry down the sidewalk on the other side under the chrome marquee and through the front door of the Hotel George.

Shirtless and speckled with Herman's blood, I draw stares from curious onlookers as I make my way through the lobby to the elevator. One older woman is standing there waiting for a car to arrive. She looks at me wide eyed.

“An accident,” I tell her.

“I take it someone was hurt?”

“Yes. He's on his way to the hospital.”

“What a shame,” she says.

“Yeah, it is.” We walk into the elevator together and I lose her on the third floor as I get off and head for my room. I knock on the door. “It's me.” Then I use my key to get in, but the door is locked with the safety bar.

“Just a minute,” she says. Joselyn comes over, closes the door all the way, then opens it again. “What happened to you? Where's your shirt? Are you cut?”

“No. But Herman's been stabbed. It's bad,” I tell her. “He's on the way to the hospital.”

“What do you mean, it's bad?” she says.

I head for the bathroom to wash my hands. “I don't know if he's going to make it. It was Liquida. Herman was able to tell me before he passed out. And Thorn got away. Slipped out of the garage somehow.” I grab a facecloth, wet it down, and start to mop the blood off my body, then notice that the knee of my pants where I pressed it into Herman's back is stained a dry brown. I strip my pants off.

“Let me get you some clothes,” she says. A few seconds later
Joselyn is back at the bathroom door with a clean shirt and a pair of pants. “Here.”

“What I need to know from you is who you called,” I tell her.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean your source who gave you all the assurances that the FBI and the police had Thorn under glass. Because there was nobody there. Thorn led Herman into a trap in the garage. And the only way he could have done that was if someone tipped him off and he knew that we were following him.”

“What are you talking about?” she says.

“It's possible Thorn might have seen Herman following him,” I tell her, “but I doubt it. Herman was too good to let that happen. But even if he did, that doesn't explain Liquida. Herman didn't say anything on the phone this morning when he called about anyone else tagging along with Thorn. According to Herman, when Thorn came out of the elevator in his hotel this morning, he was alone. If anybody had been with him, Herman would have mentioned it, especially if it looked like it might be Liquida. But he didn't. That means Liquida was already waiting for Herman over in the garage. And the only way that could have happened is if someone tipped Thorn off that we were here. And the only person we've talked to besides Thorpe, and he didn't know where we were staying, was your contact.”

I look at her as all the computations are being made in that sharp little brain behind her eyes. “I…I find that hard to believe,” she says.

“Hard to believe or not, it's a fact. Who else knew we were here?”

She shakes her head. “I don't know.”

“It's time to cough it up. The name,” I tell her. “Who have you been talking to?”

 

“Zeb, sorry to break in, but we got another problem.” This time it wasn't Thorpe's secretary but Ray Zink, his assistant. And from the look on Zink's face, Thorpe knew it was trouble.

“We've got reports that there's a commercial air-freight flight, a FedEx plane originally bound for Newark, reporting some kind of onboard emergency and requesting permission to land at Reagan National. Air traffic control tried to divert the flight to Dover Air Force Base and then lost radio contact. But the plane is still in the air and bearing down fast on Washington.”

“Well, there's nothing we can do? Did they scramble fighters?” said Thorpe.

“Yeah. Two F-16s out of Andrews,” said Zink.

“Okay, well, keep me posted.”

Zink turned and started to leave.

“Just out of curiosity,” said Thorpe, “where did the wayward FedEx flight originate?”

Zink turned and looked at him. “Puerto Rico.”

It took about two seconds of cold fusion before all the circles and rings began to link up in Thorpe's brain. He slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Of course. That's it!”

“What is?” said Zink.

“The plane from the boneyard,” said Thorpe. “It was where Madriani was headed the last time we talked, Puerto Rico. Madriani told me that Thorn had purchased a commercial jet. I didn't pay any attention. We had Soyev, a bird in the hand. But he didn't know anything because his client kept him at arm's length. He'd never met him. The phone call from North Korea to Cuba. It would be the perfect location for Thorn to hide out while he waited for the two bombs. And Little Boy is still out there.”

“You think it's on that plane?” said Zink.

“I'd bet my life on it,” said Thorpe. “Madriani and I have been chasing the same man. We just didn't know it. Thorn was Victor Soyev's other half. The client who stiffed him and turned him in. It all makes sense.”

Thorpe jumped up from his chair. “Ray, get me Madriani's cell number. My secretary has it. Do it now.”

Thorpe's attention suddenly turned toward the White House and the Capitol Building. He was confident that the fighters and the other layers of air defense deployed since 9/11 could take down the plane. The question was whether they could defend against whatever was on board.