Payback wi-10, page 5
part #10 of WW III Series
“Okay, mate,” Margaret heard Aussie Lewis say. There was nothing wrong with the volume at all — the flat Australian drawl perfectly audible.
Freeman hung up the phone and turned to Margaret. “Thanks, Margaret, but I’m going to make some calls from a public phone.”
Margaret looked surprised.
“Ironically,” he explained, “a public phone is more secure. I know, probably no one’s listening — after all, as far as the Pentagon and the press are concerned, I’m a has-been — but I don’t want to run the risk.” He smiled at her, looking pensive. “On the off chance someone has been watching me, I don’t want you to be in any danger.”
“I’m always careful,” she assured him calmly, but she was reveling in his concern for her, trying not to exaggerate it in her mind as evidence of some deeper feeling he might have for her. She kissed him on the cheek. “Bless you.”
As he left to walk down to the call box by the local 7-Eleven, he saw the blue flickering of TV sets in the houses. It seemed as if everyone was watching the news. Passing by a group of youths drinking and watching a set from a condo balcony he heard “Holy shit!”—the same phrase of alarm and surprise Freeman remembered hearing uttered by a New York fireman witnessing the first hit on the Trade Towers on 9/11.
“Another attack?” Freeman called up to the youths.
“No,” one of them answered. “New footage of the Dallas/Fort Worth hit.”
“Damn!” Freeman said, and hurried to the call box. As he dialed quickly, he wondered whether Aussie had seen it.
He had. “Nasty stuff,” he told the general. “Andra’s rewinding the video now so I can watch it frame by frame.”
“Fine.”
“Andra” was Aussie Lewis’s nickname for his Jewish wife Alexsandra, whom Freeman’s SALERT team had rescued from the JAO — Jewish Autonomous Oblast — region during the U.S.-led U.N. intervention in what was the old far-eastern USSR when Alexsandra had provided vital intelligence. She loved America, her only real irritation being with those who were naive enough to believe that since the fall of the Wall in ’89, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, the breakup of the USSR, Putin, et cetera, Russia had forgone its dreams of empire. There were, she knew, anti-American terrorists in Russia. Didn’t her fellow Americans realize that the collapse of the USSR by no means meant the end of Russia’s drive for hegemony in the Far East? In the short run, the Soviet Union did suffer an economic and military disaster. But, as after a terrible fire or a great flood, and after having gotten rid of the nonproductive, parasitic elements, the new Russia, doing as Japan had done after the U.S. bombers had destroyed all her factories, was now building newer state-of-the-art manufacturing plants and a computer infrastructure that would allow Russia to regain her power.
Alexsandra viewed all this with a marked ambivalence. She applauded Russia’s advance, but she feared the terrorists. It was not just the Muslim fanatics, but the old guard, Communist diehards who, temporarily pushed into the background by the surge of economic activity, were patiently waiting to once again seize the reins of power — with, if necessary, the help of terrorists.
Aussie was watching the rewound tape on frame-by-frame advance while listening to Freeman describe the thin, wirelike probe and other features of what he believed had been an Igla 2C missile, which in 4.2 seconds had ended the lives of 375 people in the LAX attack, and which, with the other two missiles fired at JFK and Dallas/Fort Worth, had now shut down every airport in the United States and Canada, stranding millions, and causing so many cancellations — computer banks literally burned out — that two-thirds of the airlines were facing immediate receivership. The impact on the economy, especially on the airline industry and its dependent industries, was as immediate as it had been following 9/11. But insofar as foreign carriers — JAL at LAX and Brazil Air at Dallas/Fort Worth — were involved, the impact on the airline industry worldwide was far more dire than on 9/11. Indeed, it was such that Alan Greenspan’s heir at the Federal Reserve said that to describe the terrorist attacks as having a ripple effect “would be disingenuous, to say the least. Another tsunami,” he said, “has hit the American economy. Every single person in America, from newborn to the most aged, has been directly and catastrophically affected in the financial network that binds this country together, from passengers to subcontractors who provide the important services that a modern aviation industry requires.”
“Is it another Igla?” Freeman pressed Aussie impatiently.
“No, General,” began Aussie, replaying the Dallas/Fort Worth video. “I don’t—”
“Don’t tell me it’s a Stinger?” said Freeman. “One of our own—”
“It’s a Vanguard,” replied Aussie.
“Damn!” said Freeman. It was a Chinese MANPAD. Momentarily he was back in England, early nineties, at the Farnborough Air Show, the biggest and best in Europe. The Chinese were alarming foreign military observers with the claim that their MANPADs were now much faster, their warheads more powerful, their TARSCAP, or target-seeking capability, vastly improved, even against the latest LAIRCOM — Large Aircraft Infrared Countermeasures — and were also superior, their killing and slant ranges being greater than America’s state-of-the-art Stinger. In particular, Freeman, then only a brigadier general, remembered seeing the face of one of India’s military reps, the wing commander’s eyes widening to saucerlike proportions as he watched the Chinese NORINCO — PLA — industries’ rep and a Pakistani general speak excitedly to each other. The Chinese salesman, eschewing the stereotypical reserve of Chinese officials, had returned the Pakistani’s garrulous, back-slapping bonhomie in full measure. The salesman had obviously sensed, as the CIA later confirmed, a lucrative sale of a Chinese Vanguard shoulder-fired surface-to-air MANPAD.
“You said it was a Vanguard,” said Freeman. “Mark Two or Three?”
“Mark Three D, I think,” said Aussie, getting a further close-up with the zoom. “About the same diameter as a Stinger. Dual thrust by the look of the segmented exhaust trail on the video. I’ll do an overlay of the video of the airport. Or do you want to do that yourself, General?”
“Can’t. I’d like to, but I’m on a landline away from my laptop. You do it. I’ll wait.”
“Roger, I’m doing it now,” Aussie told him. Freeman could hear the clacking of Lewis’s PC keys in the background. It was a noise that the general found intensely irritating. An Igla and a Vanguard — Russian and Chinese missiles. What in hell was going on?
As Aussie Lewis enlarged the airport map and superimposed it like a transparent sheet over MSNBC news shots taken from an NBC affiliate feed, he was able to quickly compute the distance back from the black, burning hulk of the jumbo at Dallas/Fort Worth and the island of ambulances, fire trucks, police, and assorted vehicles to the point at which the video had caught the bluish-tinged yellow light that had been the MANPAD’s fiery exhaust.
“General, it’s difficult to pinpoint the speed, given we can’t be sure of the exact point of firing. But given the slant angle on the video, I’d say we’re looking at about two thousand feet a second.”
“ ’Bout the same as our Stinger,” commented Freeman. “Mach one point seven.”
In fact, subsequent videos that came in—“patched” by the airport’s perimeter security cameras — revealed that the terrorist’s firing location at Dallas/Fort Worth was in fact closer than Aussie Lewis’s estimate. The information being communicated to the White House by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security was that the missile that had struck the Brazilian Airline jumbo had been traveling at 2,268.5 feet per second. Mach 2.
And so, when Douglas Freeman, still relying on the greater security of the pay phone’s landline, called the White House and was put straight through to an exhausted Eleanor Prenty, the National Security Advisor already knew the speed. With the ego that, along with moments of unexpected compassion and empathy with his men, had made him such a legendary figure, the retired general felt deflated. Despite his fast work he’d been preempted by the FBI and DHS.
“Well, of course,” he told Eleanor, “whatever the speed, the real problem is that there were two types of missiles used.”
“Two types?” inquired Eleanor, the previous tiredness in her voice replaced by a tauter tone. “What do you mean?”
“Well, one being Chinese, the other Russian.”
The silence at the other end told him either she didn’t know there’d been two different types of missiles used, that they weren’t Stingers as reported by the press, or that she hadn’t grasped the ominous implications.
“Chinese and Russian?” she repeated.
“Yes, ma’am,” Freeman told her. “The one that hit the JAL at LAX was an Igla 2C, a Russian-made shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile for pinpoint antiaircraft protection of Russian troops. It’s ARFIR-3 capable, that is, against approaching and receding fixed-wing jets, helos, or cruise missiles. Engagement range is between five hundred and fifty yards and three miles. It’s also all-airport targeting, which means its optical seeker can outfox antimissile flares and alternate infrared sucker deflectors. The other missile was a Vanguard. It has a range of seven miles up. At around twenty-four pounds total weight of missile and shoulder-launcher, it’s a lot lighter than the Russian thirty-seven-pound Igla.”
“General,” Eleanor cut in, “these have to be terrorist attacks.”
“Right.”
“Then what’s it matter where the missiles come from? I — Hold on, General.” He heard her conferring with someone in the background, not clearly but enough to pick up “MANPADs…thousand bucks…anyone…”
“General,” Eleanor cautioned, “I’m told there are an estimated five hundred thousand MANPADs in existence. Many of them unaccounted for. On the black market. Apparently of all the Stinger missiles we shipped to Afghanistan, we’re missing at least forty.”
“Forty-eight,” said Freeman.
“Well then, Douglas, the source hardly matters, does it?”
“It matters one hell of a lot if you know where they’re stored, don’t you think? Shut it down. Destroy the inventory.”
“Of course,” she said, her tone of alarm suffused with impatience. “But if there are over a half-million MANPADs in the world—”
“I believe I know where these terrorist MANPADs are stored. At least the Russian Igla. But I haven’t seen the close-up of the Chinese Vanguard yet. I’m calling from a public phone booth. Soon as I get back, I’ll watch it on the video of the third attack.”
“Can you do it quickly, General?”
What happened to “Douglas”? he wondered. Stress? Or was she in the Oval Office, surrounded by pooh-bahs who would resist any advice from the “outsider” or “Loose Cannon Doug,” as some of them called him?
“If it’s a good video the networks are airing,” he continued, “I should be able to tell you more in an hour or so. I’ll have to do some cross-checking in my files.” These weren’t computer files but well-thumbed three-by-five-inch Rolodex Organizer cards, some of them typed, most written on in a scrawl so appalling that when his second-in-command, Norton, had first seen them during the Russian campaign he thought it was some kind of ancient Sumerian hieroglyphics, the scrawl including symbols that subordinates referred to impolitely as “chicken shit.”
“Surely Russian missiles come from Russia?” said Eleanor.
“I’ll call you as soon as I confirm my suspicions,” he promised.
Back at Margaret’s house, he found her watching CNN.
“Worst of all,” CNN’s Marte Price was saying on her “Target America” special, “is that all three airliners were apparently equipped with antimissile defenses.” She was talking about Northrop Grumman Corporation’s LAIRCOM, the Large Aircraft Infrared Countermeasures System. From the background panel of instant experts, a talking head elaborated to the effect that the countermeasures relied on a modulated high-intensity laser beam that had been touted by industry experts as state-of-the-art. The LAIRCOM’s laser beams, he added, had had a better than 95 percent success rate in trials, the system’s laser beam blinding various MANPADs, including the U.S. Stinger’s missile “seeker,” that is, its guidance system.
“None of these missiles,” said a painfully puzzled aeronautical guru, “should have reached their target.”
“I guess,” said one of the other experts on the panel “they’re making better missiles.” This otherwise banal line amid the numbing reruns of the amateur videos was seized upon by the detail-starved networks as both an explanation for the American public and a challenge to the administration.
FBI, Homeland Security, NSA, CIA, and all other government security and defense agencies were stymied by how such MANPAD technology could have become so advanced and so hidden from U.S., British, and other friendly agencies whose agents were supposedly at the forefront of antiterrorist intelligence.
Upon hearing the expert’s nonchalant response, Eleanor Prenty called Freeman again and asked him what he thought about the prognostication.
“I think he’s probably correct,” said the general and, though careful on Margaret’s home phone not to mention the missiles he’d identified to Eleanor earlier from the phone booth, he added casually, “If so, the product we’re talking about is being held in a very secure place. If we find out where they are—”
“General,” Eleanor cut in, “FOX is broadcasting another video from JFK. Stay on the line.” He did and, while waiting, clicked to FOX, feeling a moment of empathy for the President, knowing that, contrary to public belief, the Chief Executive of the United States seldom if ever had enough hard intel to make a 100 percent clear decision. All his perks notwithstanding, the President, like most other folk, including generals in the field, sometimes had to make tough decisions without having as much information as he’d like but was forced to react by the unyielding pace of the market and pressing national security concerns.
The new FOX video from LAX was the clearest yet, with the alert photographer, whoever he or she was, having the smarts to immediately reverse the left-to-right direction of the camera that was following the missile’s yellow streak, filming back right to left immediately after the hit. Where the bluish-tinged yellow smoke trail ended was the point of firing. The missile’s speed could be accurately put at Mach 2.2.
While he was still on hold with the White House, Freeman’s cell phone rang. It was Aussie. “Have you slowed down the JFK tape?”
“No. I just got back to the house. Margaret’s been taping. Why?”
“Video shows four canards on it, General.”
“A Stinger?” said the general, visualizing the four steering vanes.
“Mach two point two? Dunno. Got me beat. But one eyewitness on the freeway who was going out to LAX said the missile, whatever it was, was fired from a pickup truck. He also said the ‘launcher’ had a kind of— Just a mo, General.” Freeman could hear Aussie calling out to Alexsandra. “What that bloke call it, Andra?”
Freeman heard her in the background. He loved the sound of her Russian Jewish accent, had ever since the moment they’d got her out of the JAO.
“He zed,” intoned Alexsandra, “it had like two metal ears on ze front — like sluts.”
Despite the tension on the line, Aussie couldn’t help but laugh. “Slats, not sluts!”
“Zat’s what I said, metal sluts.”
“Sounds to me,” Aussie told the general, “like it was a box antenna. Like a Stinger’s.”
When Freeman reran the JFK video and slowed it frame by frame, he could see the blurs of three of the flight guidance canards, or steering vanes, the fourth hidden by the angle of the missile’s flight path to the amateur photographer. He also glimpsed the slatted, “boxy” antenna. It could have been a Stinger, but again the angle revealed only part of it. He had a prodigious memory but there were so many different types of MANPADS and their subspecies, SHORADS, Short Range Air Defense Systems, and VESHORADS, Very Short Range Air Defense Systems, designed to answer every infantryman’s dreams of a quick, light, “fire and forget” antiaircraft missile, that he knew he’d have to consult his scores of computer and old Rolodex files. The worrying detail — the part that didn’t fit the Stinger profile, given the evidence of a full air sock, that is, a head wind at JFK at the time — was the Mach 2.2.
As Freeman and Aussie were considering the possibilities on the general’s cell phone, he heard the White house line go dead. Must’ve been accidental.
He was correct. In the excitement of the White House receiving an on-the-spot discovery by the NYPD’s JFK detachment, Eleanor’s aide, in trying to contact the Pentagon, had killed the Prenty-Freeman connection. She rang back within minutes. “General, I’m sorry you were cut off.” She sounded breathless. “NYPD have found what they believe is a missile launcher. LAPD have also found one near LAX.”
Freeman wasn’t surprised. The moment you unleashed a “fire and forget,” you ditched the launcher and walked, as Oswald had done after he’d fired the shot at President Kennedy, though the general was astonished by the number of people who, though they didn’t know the difference between a rifle and a toy cap gun, naively believed that Oswald was the only shooter. In any event, Freeman was in no doubt that all three airliners had been downed by shoot-and-scoot teams. Another launcher would probably turn up at Dallas/Fort Worth.
“Painted blue?” he asked Eleanor Prenty.
His know-it-all nonchalance annoyed her. “Blue? I don’t know. Why?”
“Ever since the attack on the Israeli Arika plane in Mombassa back in ’02, terrorists have been painting the launchers blue, the PDC, practice designation color, for all U.S. MANPAD launchers when dummy warheads are being fired. So,” Freeman continued, “if any other — real — U.S. troops had seen the blue-colored launchers, they would have thought they were just more practice dummy warheads.”
“Hold on,” she said sharply. There was a ten-second wait as he heard her ask someone, “JFK and LAX launchers, yes — were they both blue?
