Wave (6 page)

He cursed in Arabic and lunged for the can. Some of the other passengers forgot about the turbulence and trained their eyes on him. For a flicker of an instant the personal charm was gone and the terrorist stood before them.

No one moved. Time dragged and warped, became meaningless. Zaeef knew his cover was blown, knew it was time to improvise. But he waited anyway, just in case. If there was a move to be made, he wanted one of them to make it first.

Someone did—one of the fashion-model flight attendants. She’d been at the far end of the aisle helping an older woman to her feet. She rose slowly and, keeping her eyes locked on the Syrian, knocked on the cockpit door. She had a brief exchange with someone on the other side, then the door opened and the captain appeared.
The only one who looked like he had a brain in his head
, Zaeef thought bitterly. The man studied him for only a moment, but in that moment Zaeef could see the intelligence working, the years of training being accessed. He also noted that one of the copilots was on the radio, no doubt sending a distress call to the ground.

The captain approached cautiously. He didn’t appear to have a weapon, but Zaeef sensed danger nevertheless. There were people all around him, many of them Americans who would be more than happy to take part in a heroic effort. He had no intention of letting that happen.

The revolver he pulled from the bag was a modified Glock, the notorious “plastic gun” that had had anti-firearms activists in a state of perpetual frenzy for years. Made from high-tech polymers, and easily assembled and disassembled, this type of gun was often used by government agents working undercover. Although typically some of the internal parts were metal, plastic parts could be substituted where a weapon would only be fired a few times. This was the case with Zaeef’s gun, which could pass undetected through virtually any airport security system.

There was a collective gasp and more screaming. Everyone near Zaeef backed away. The captain, whose nametag identified him simply as “Casey,” froze as if he’d been hit with some kind of stun ray. Zaeef’s eyes were wild, insane. He aimed the gun at the nearest window.

“Everyone back,” he shouted twice in passable English, “or I’ll shoot it out!”

He had the shaving cream can in his other hand, held against his chest with his thumb on the button. The fear in the captain’s eyes reassured him, made him feel in command of the situation. If he could control this guy, his instincts told him, he could still carry out this mission. Inspired by this, a new plan fell together in his mind.

“This is a detonator!” he said, holding the can up. “I push this, the plane goes!”

“I don’t see anything here large enough to be a bomb,” Casey said calmly. “I think you’re bluffing.”

“With the luggage, in the plane’s belly, you stupid fool.” Zaeef permitted himself a tiny smile. “Getting it on was so easy.”

A few passengers were crying, convinced the end was at hand. One elderly man in a plaid jacket went down on his knees and began praying. At the very back, a boy of five watched with a mixture of curiosity and confusion. His mother, an attractive brunette in her thirties, held him close, drawing as much comfort as she was giving.

Casey was watching and waiting. Zaeef could tell what was going through his mind—
Just give me one
chance. One chance and I’ll take care of this little
bastard.
A John Wayne type. A real American hero.

“Turn around,” Zaeef snapped, motioning with the gun. When Casey refused to comply, he took aim at the window again. His was the perfect poker face because there was no bluff—Casey had no doubt this lunatic would be more than happy to get sucked out the window if it meant taking everyone else with him.

He turned around.

“Back to the cockpit. Anyone moves, I kill them.”

They began moving forward, roughly ten feet apart. The copilots, who had been watching through the narrow rectangular perspective of the open doorway, looked up into their captain’s face as he reached it.

As he approached them the captain said under his breath, “Tony, empty the cargo bay.”

A brief pause.

“Captain?”

“If he has a bomb let’s drop it here.”

Tony nodded.

Zaeef appeared at the threshold just as Tony initiated the opening of the cargo doors. Within seconds there would be hundreds of suitcases falling from the sky. Zaeef peered inside and motioned angrily with the gun. “I want to see all of you. Stand up!”

The men obeyed, standing alongside each other as if posing for a group photo. Except there were no smiles. Just thinly contained anger and obvious hatred. No fear, though, and that irritated Zaeef.
Arrogant American
bastards.

“Take off your jackets and turn around slowly.”

Again they obeyed. The sight of the three grown, uniformed men revolving like ballerinas would have seemed oddly comical under different circumstances.

None were armed, Zaeef observed, and a feeling of relief flowed through him. “Get back to the controls and keep flying.”

The pilots exchanged silent glances that transmitted the same message:
He doesn’t know how to fly the
plane.
Reading their faces Zaeef realized his blunder, and felt an overwhelming desire to detonate the bomb. To kill all of them then and there.

“The controls!” he screeched.

The captain looked him straight in the eyes and said, quietly yet firmly, “No.”

“I will shoot you dead and your passengers will all die!”

Zaeef’s small audience offered no response, which served only to enrage him further. The captain put his hands in his pockets, a smug expression on his face.

It was their easy willingness to die for their principles that pushed Zaeef to the breaking point. He took aim at Tony and fired. A splash of blood leaped from his chest, and he slammed into the controls.

Amid the screams of the other passengers, Zaeef said, “You will be next! Fly the plane! Fly the—”

An arm slithered around his neck like a tentacle. It was thick and hairy, and very powerful. The owner, whoever it was, tried to pull him backward. But Zaeef was experienced in close-quarters combat and managed to stay on his feet. He brought the gun up and shot blindly over his shoulder. More screams, and the arm lost its strength and fell away. Zaeef didn’t bother looking back and would never know who the attacker was.

During this brief scuffle, the captain took his chance. One of the last cognizant thoughts the Syrian had was that Casey moved with remarkable speed and agility for a man of his age. He came through the door and brought his hands up in one fluid motion, as if he’d practiced it a hundred times. Maybe he had. Regardless, he wasn’t quite fast enough. Zaeef swung the pistol back around and fired again, aiming for Casey’s head. It was a foolish move, as the torso was a much bigger target, but he was possessed by hatred now and wanted to see the man’s face disintegrate. Instead the bullet strayed left, missing its target entirely and blowing out one of the cockpit windows.

The sudden depressurization forced the plane into a dive, the terrified screams of the passengers blending with the sound of violent air displacement to create a deafening symphony of horror. Tony’s body went out first, then Casey’s. The third pilot—a man named Adam Rodas who was making his first international flight—went along with Zaeef. Both hit the frame at the same time and looked for a second like two kids emerging from the sunroof of a limousine. They were already unconscious and would die in minutes. Their bodies left blood stains and strips of flesh around the frame where they had dragged against the jagged edges.

The cockpit door slammed shut with near-sonic force, and for a moment it appeared as though this segment of the nightmare was over. Then the door began to bend like a deck of cards and finally snapped off its hinges, zoomed through the window, and spun into oblivion. Since the plane had been flying at twenty-six thousand feet, unconsciousness occurred in less than a minute. If they’d been cruising a bit lower—say, fifteen-thousand—some people, with the aid of the oxygen masks that now dangled over their seats like snakes from a tree, might have been able to do something.

More bodies went out. One by one, those who hadn’t remained in their seats with their belts on sailed down the aisle along with empty soda cans, magazines, napkins, and paper plates. Aleida, the woman who had befriended Zaeef at the airport, went out at one point. Her head struck the cockpit doorway with such force that the skull cap was sheared clean off. It took nearly three full minutes for the depressurization to complete. Of the original one hundred and twenty-nine people who boarded the plane, ninety-one remained.

Continuing its kamikaze run, the 747 broke through cloud cover at three thousand feet. Minutes later, against the paradoxically beautiful spring sky, it drove into the Atlantic Ocean and exploded into bits. The bodies inside evaporated as if made of papier-mache, while those that had been sucked out of the plane before impact were spread far and wide, and eventually consumed by sea life. When the NTSB personnel combed the crash site weeks later, they would find no trace of the aircraft or any of its passengers.

A few miles away, a well-packed wooden crate weighing more than a hundred and fifty pounds and bearing the stenciled words “BONE CHINA AND SILVERWARE—PLEASE HANDLE CAREFULLY” hit the ocean and went under. It seemed in no hurry as it moved through the sun-stippled water, down and down into darkness. When it reached a depth of about two hundred feet, the pressure caused the poorly constructed bomb to detonate. The core of it was an eight-kilogram sphere of Pakistani-bought plutonium about the size of a baseball. It was crudely refined—what was popularly referred to as “dirty”—but packed enough explosive force to create an uninhabitable radius of about twenty miles.

A water column filled with hot gases and bomb residue shot up more than three thousand feet and grew to nearly a full mile in diameter. Shock waves traveled through the sea in every direction. Most eventually shrank to a whisper, but those that moved downward were met by an unstable barrier—a sea slope nearly four miles long. As in any other instance when one force meets another head-on, a battle for dominance ensued. In this case there were no winners—the inhuman power released by the bomb would eventually be absorbed, but not before jarring a great portion of the slope loose, which triggered an undersea landslide.

According to the laws of physics, when one solid object in a tightly confined space occupied by other solid objects changes position, the position of the relative objects must also change. As the rocks and sediment began their violent journey downward, an equal parcel of the Atlantic Ocean was, in essence, drawn down, and it chose the only available direction to go—up. When the sea level rises, another law of physics states that it must eventually fall again. For that to occur here, the excess had to find a place to settle…

At 8:34 Eastern Standard Time on the morning of May twenty-fourth, a massive tsunami was born roughly six hundred miles off the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States. Then it began radiating in all directions.

In
Control Tower B at Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, four men in short-sleeve shirts and ties stood in a small huddle around the radio and waited. They’d heard nothing from American Flight 334 for nearly fifteen minutes.

“Play the last one back,” one of them said. He was slightly overweight and had a harsh, gravelly voice from years of smoking. Ken Dawson had worked in the airline industry his entire professional life, starting as a baggage handler in 1967, and was now less than a year away from purchasing that big boat and heading down to the Keys.

One of the others pushed a button on the control panel, and the late Tony DeFranco’s voice came through the tiny speakers along with a rush of static: “We have a situation here…a man with a gun and an object he claims is a detonation device. He appears to be in his early thirties and of Middle-Eastern descent. Captain Casey is in the cabin attempting to deal with him.”

And then Dawson’s voice, loud and clear: “Understood. Are you able to shut and secure the door of the flight deck?”

DeFranco said, “I believe I can do th—wait…no. The captain has turned around and is coming back. The passenger with the weapon is behind him. I—”

Then silence.

Dawson shook his head and said, “Jesus, what’s going on up there?” He consulted his watch; a cheap silver job wrapped around a beefy, freckled arm. “We’ll give it another minute, then we’ve got to contact the NTSB per procedure. Have you got their current position?”

“Yes, they’re roughly six hundred miles off the central New Jersey coast, heading southwest.”

Then someone asked: “Can I run to the can, chief?”

Justin Malone was the youngest and least experienced of the crew. Twenty-six, slim and handsome, he still gave off the vibe of the wild college boy he’d been back at Loyola, respectable post and formal attire notwithstanding. He was so exuberant and irreverent that the others still weren’t sure if they loved or hated him.

Dawson didn’t take his eyes off the control panel. “Yeah, go ahead.”

“Thanks.”

Malone hustled out and hit the stairwell running. Two flights down he entered the quiet ground-floor hallway and went to a door at the far end. Behind it was a bathroom so tiny there was barely enough space to turn around. He told his colleagues he preferred it over the larger one upstairs because it reminded him of the bathroom in his parents’ trailer, which, inexplicably, he’d spent countless hours in as a child. His coworkers laughed and told him to just make sure he kept it clean.

He locked the door and flicked on the light. The ceiling fan groaned into life. The fan was the real reason he came down here—it was so loud it smothered all other noise.

He sat down and took a small cell phone from his pocket. Then he tapped in a number that he knew by heart but didn’t dare enter in the phone’s memory. Someone answered after the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Hi, it’s Justin.”