Tier One Wild (47 page)

They closed the lockers and returned to the house near Six Flags, and Ali parked his trailer in the lot of his apartment complex. Doyle and his men climbed into the back and began moving the cases of soda around. They lined the walls the length of the trailer with cases of soda, floor-to-ceiling, but they left the center of the space open. Here they loaded the six SAM crates from the back of the minivan.

It took a full hour, but finally they created a nest for themselves, their six SAMs, their rifles, and several duffel bags of gear, food, and water.

At seven in the evening, with David and the five members of the Chicago cell inside the trailer, Ali prepared to close them in. Before he shut the door Doyle knelt down over the older man. “Everything depends on you, my friend. Back in Yemen they told me you were very brave, very intelligent, and very strong. They told me you were in Lebanon in the 1980s, and the infidels took everything from you.”

Ali nodded, his eyes filled with sadness, but then they gleamed with pride. “My family died when the USS
New Jersey
’s shells hit my neighborhood. I have spent the last quarter century waiting for the opportunity to get my revenge. Thank you for this chance, Daoud al-Amriki.”

David smiled broadly. “Thank
you,
brother. Now close us in and go in peace.”

The door shut on David and the Chicago cell, and within seconds the engine started in the truck.

*   *   *

Raynor and Timble drove through Washington, D.C., at 1930, after spending over an hour in Beltway traffic and then stopping for gas and provisions in nearby Alexandria. They parked their vehicle near the mall and walked to the White House. Both men could see the heightened security all over the place as they did their best to look relaxed and nonthreatening.

TJ looked up at the Willard InterContinental, a stately hotel adjacent to the White House, and he leaned over to his friend. In a whisper, lest any tourists misconstrue the meaning of his comment, he said, “You could rent a room over there, arm your SAM on your bed, and then smash out the window as Marine One came in for a landing. The pilot wouldn’t have a chance in hell to get away.”

Raynor looked at the hotel. “I hope like hell we aren’t the first people to think of that and there is some sort of security glass on those windows.”

TJ just shrugged. “Don’t be so sure. Lots of people thought about hijacking planes to turn them into missiles before 9/11. When it happened the authorities just shrugged and said nobody could have imagined it.”

Raynor turned to walk back to the truck. “Dude, we
are
the authorities. Doyle’s not at the Willard. Too many cameras and too much security. If he’s around here at all, he’s in some out-of-the-way place on the route from Andrews.”

“I agree.”

“It will be dark soon. Let’s head down to the water to start looking for a shipping container.”

“
A
shipping container,” TJ said. It was an overwhelming task. “There might be thousands.”

Kolt said, “It’s gonna be a long night, brother.”

*   *   *

The Peterbilt pulled the fifty-three-foot semi-trailer into the lot of Buy-Rite, a big-box discount store on Southern Avenue, just after eight p.m. Ali backed his rig into a space in the lot across from the store’s loading bays. He lined his trailer up alongside three other fifty-three-foot semis, and then he set his parking brake and began decoupling his rig.

The parking lot was officially in Maryland, although just barely. On the opposite side of Southern Avenue was the start of the District of Columbia.

As Ali had expected, the stock manager came out upon seeing the new semi in his lot. He was a heavyset black man and he wore dungarees and black work boots.

“Evening, Ali.”

Ali had liked Larry since he’d started delivering trailers for Buy-Rite two months earlier. “Good evening, Larry.”

“Once again, you are too late to get unloaded. It’s Saturday, everybody’s leaving for the night.”

“Yes, I know. I will leave the trailer and be back by noon on Monday.”

“Sounds good. You want some coffee before you take off?”

Ali shook his head. “Not tonight, Larry. Maybe next time.”

“Take it easy.”

Ali drove his Peterbilt out of the Buy-Rite parking lot, leaving his fifty-three-foot trailer behind.

*   *   *

The trailer sat in the lot as the store closed at eight, and as the last hues of daylight left the sky at nine. It was third in a line of four nearly identical trailers. Four times during the evening Maryland State Police cruisers came through the lot, and each time shined their window light on the trailers as they passed, looking for anyone who might be hiding under or between them.

Doyle had cut three small holes in the bottom of the semi so that they would have fresh air to breathe, but he did not dare chance a look outside the semi. He did not need to orient himself, he had spent many hours over the past two months looking at the scene on Google Earth. He knew that he was in the rear parking lot of the Buy-Rite. He would only need to jump out of the semi and walk around the side of the container to see the green hills and trees of Cedar Hill Cemetery. Beyond the cemetery the sprawling grounds of the Office of Naval Intelligence ran for several acres.

And beyond ONI were the low suburbs of Suitland–Silver Hill and Morningside and, beyond all this, Joint Base Andrews Naval Air Facility.

Andrews Air Force Base.

The President would be landing at eight a.m., and he would fly overhead minutes after that. With this incredible field of view in this location, they would see the President and his helicopters coming for five kilometers. Plenty of time to ready themselves to knock his helicopter out of the sky.

As he pictured the morning to come in his mind’s eye, a whisper of doubt came in the hot dark from one of the men. “Daoud. If the authorities will be everywhere, how can we expect to succeed?”

“They will not be in the parking lot of Buy-Rite at the moment we come out of the trailer. I believe God wills us to succeed, and he will not let that happen.

“But if they
are
there…” Doyle reached for the AK. “There are six of us. We will be fine.”

He put the gun back down. “We will need forty-five seconds to get out of the trailer, and to take a weapon and fire it at a helicopter. Forty-five seconds.” Doyle smiled ruefully in the dark. In Yemen he’d gotten that time down to twenty-seven seconds with his operatives. They were all dead now, his new cell members were not well trained, but the lessons David had learned about how to position the men and ready the weapons would serve him when the time came.

“We will have forty-five seconds, and that will be enough. After that it does not matter what they do to stop us. We will have succeeded.”

The men praised Allah in their hot, tight hiding place.

David added, “There will be many helicopters. They will all look the same. The Americans send them along with the President’s helicopter so that an enemy does not know which aircraft to target.”

“How many?”

“Sometimes there are three, sometimes four. But with the current situation … there may be five. I don’t know. When we see the flight, I will give everyone a number, and that is the helicopter you attack.”

“Which one will the President be in?”

“I only know it will not be the first helicopter. Not today.”

“How do you know?”

“Americans are cowards. And the President is the biggest coward of them all.” Doyle said it as if the answer were obvious.

He then pulled a tablet computer out of his bag, turned it on, and used the 3G connection to check the Internet for news of the President’s arrival the following morning.

*   *   *

By 0500, Raynor and Timble were exhausted. They had spent the previous seven hours driving up and down the roads near the Potomac River, doing their best to avoid the police as well as to look for a twenty-foot intermodal container that they were not even sure existed.

They had done well staying away from the cops, but they had gotten nowhere with their objective of finding Doyle. They had seen shipping containers, yes. But many were behind fences or in the backs of private property. They had wasted hours getting into and out of these locations to find nothing more than empty or sealed containers.

They’d also seen containers hauled by trucks on the highway, and this worried them greatly. Highway 295 ran right through the middle of the area Marine One would cross in just a few hours, and traffic there would not be blocked off. Yes, the highway would be crawling with state police, but Josh and Kolt both knew it took next to no time to operate a MANPAD.

To fight their exhaustion the two men decided to take a break. They sat in their truck at a gas station in Anacostia, sipping coffee and taking a few minutes to rest their brains.

Daylight would arrive in an hour and a half, and with it more police. They knew it would be harder for them to move around the closer it came to time for the President’s plane to land, so they were desperate to find Doyle long before then.

TJ spoke wearily. “What if the container doesn’t have anything to do with it?”

“Possible,” said Raynor. “I don’t know why he’d truck a container up here anyway. Seems like he and his buddies could just hop out of the back of a truck or a van or a—”

TJ sat up, causing Raynor to stop talking.

“You said the container was up on blocks.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Like the same height as truck tires?”

Kolt thought for a moment. “Yeah. They said it was four feet off the ground. Sounds about right.”

TJ nodded. “About right for a semi-trailer.”

“Trailer rigs are longer, though.”

“Yeah. Like fifty-three feet for a full-sized semi. But they wouldn’t need all the space in the trailer to stow themselves and some SAMs.” Timble shut the door of the pickup and turned over the engine. As he left the parking lot of the gas station, he said, “Maybe the container was just a stand-in to practice getting out of a semi with a missile quickly and quietly.”

Kolt just shrugged. “Could be, but we’re grasping at straws.”

“I told you, brother. I know how he thinks. We need to start driving the route looking for semi-trailers parked overnight. I don’t think he’d move into the area right when the cops are concentrating their search. He’s already here, somewhere, waiting to attack.”

FORTY-TWO

At eight a.m. all six of the Al Qaeda operatives in the semi-trailer had donned their chest harnesses, passed a few water bottles around to either drink out of or urinate into, and stood to stretch their legs.

Each man carried four thirty-round magazines of Kalashnikov ammo. This, plus the magazine already in each man’s gun, gave the cell nine hundred rounds to fight off any police or security men if necessary.

They went over the procedure once more for firing the weapons. Everyone was comfortable shouldering the Igla, even in the darkness of their hide.

“And after we fire?” one man asked.

David said, “We pick up our guns and head for the road. The police will descend on us, it is unavoidable. But we will kill many men on the ground before we enter paradise.”

David sat back down and checked his tablet computer. It was open to CNN, and he watched live streaming video of Air Force One as it descended through thin clouds on final approach to Andrews, just a few miles to the southeast of where he sat sweating in the dark.

Doyle said, “Soon, my brothers. Very soon.”

*   *   *

Raynor and Timble could not believe the intense law enforcement presence over the route the helicopters would take in minutes. Although traffic was allowed on the streets, roadblocks had popped up at every major intersection. Four times in the past half hour Kolt and Josh had been slowed while police just looked in the cab of their truck before waving them on again.

In the skies a half dozen police helicopters were visible, although they were spread out at great distance.

The two Delta men were waved through a roadblock for the fifth time just north of Andrews. Kolt said, “If anybody pulls us out and finds our guns, we’re going to be in some serious hot water.”

But TJ wasn’t listening. Instead, he pulled over into the parking lot of an automated car wash, and looked out toward the northeast.

“High ground.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, look over there. That spot in the distance. Where there are no buildings, the rise over there. I can’t make it out. What is that? A golf course?”

Kolt looked. Squinted. “It’s a cemetery. It might be Washington National.”

TJ said, “Pass me your binos.”

Kolt did so, and TJ scanned the area for a long time.

Josh lowered his binoculars slowly. “We’re going over there.”

“What do you see?”

“I see high ground, a great view toward Andrews, and a Buy-Rite. You can’t tell me they won’t have semis on their lot.”

“This whole area is pretty flat, though. Why do you think he’d need high ground?”

“He wouldn’t
need
it. But … like the black site hit the previous year, he took his time, he obsessed over every little bit of the operation, he studied the location of the event. Doyle would have been holed up in some building in Yemen for months planning this day, and you know he picked his terrain carefully. He would have found the highest point on the President’s route, with the fewest buildings to block his view, and he would have picked that as the place to set up.”

Kolt looked back over his shoulder. “Shit. POTUS is landing.”

*   *   *

It took ten minutes for Timble and Raynor to make it off Suitland Parkway and onto Southern. Once on Southern, TJ did his best to keep his speed in check as he passed a police cruiser at every intersection. The two bearded men looked like craftsmen or laborers heading off to work early on a Sunday morning. Since the bed of their pickup was empty and there was no way they could have stashed an SA-24 missile with them in the cab of the vehicle, they did not garner much interest as they passed the checkpoints and roadblocks.