To The Death, page 7
And all through the morning, the underwater men worked at securing the cables, in order to avoid breakage and facilitate a neat, clean lift from the riverbed. In the opinion of Chief Coulson, the critical moment would come when the aft section of the fuselage was lifted and, hopefully, snapped off from the for’ard part.
If the metallic outer skin did not break, they would probably have to blow it apart with explosive, and that was never easy underwater. It was easily achievable but inclined to make one hell of a mess. However, Grabber’s cranes would not lift the whole fuselage, and time was not on their side.
By 1530, they were ready for the lift. But there was traffic on the river, and Commander Wallace was not about to begin lifting what he called “darned great hunks of civilian jetliner” out of the river, in broad daylight, in full view of anyone who might be looking.
Their journey from the shipyard had been conducted in the utmost secrecy, with nothing to announce they were Navy ships. And once on station, even with periodic visits from the patrol vessels out of Indian Head, they appeared just like a regular Navy exercise from the Surface Warfare Center. Strictly routine.
Every twenty minutes, two divers returned to the riverbed to check that all was well, and the rest of the salvage crew just hung around, glad to be warm, hoping to hell the fuselage of Flight 62 would not fall off the goddamned crane or some other unforeseen bullshit.
Winter darkness descended over the river before 1700. The flashing lights of the buoys went active; the big deck lights, fore and aft, illuminated the lifting tackle. Chief Coulson and LPO Flamini were over the side in company with six other divers, tending the huge cables. Signals were given, the controllers snapped out commands, and at 1724 Grabber’s foredeck crane began to lift.
Swimming slowly through the water, thirty yards off the starboard beam of the aircraft wreckage, Chief Coulson watched the cable take the strain. Slowly the rear section lifted out of the silt, dragging with it the still-attached front section.
For a split second, the chief thought the whole fuselage was going up together. But then there was a crunching thud, like a POP! played in slow motion. And the for’ard cabin vibrated, then snapped off, dropping back into its hole and sending a massive cloud of silt and sand billowing into the calm water. It would take two hours to clear. But, fortunately, the second set of cables was already attached.
Chief Coulson moved slowly upward, through the water, with the smashed hull in front of him. He could see a barge being moved into position for the crane to deposit its load onto the deck. By the time the chief had surfaced and once more climbed aboard Grabber, the aircraft hull was on board, with a team of twenty seamen swarming all over it, covering the huge cargo with tarpaulin and lashing it down in preparation for the journey back to Norfolk.
During the next three hours, many of the other remnants were brought up and loaded, until all the pieces of Flight 62, save for the tailplane and the front section of the cabin, were on board and covered. At 2300, the barge pulled out between the buoys and turned south for Norfolk.
To both port and starboard were escort patrol boats from Indian Head. Leading the way was a Navy frigate, which had materialized from nowhere. Just like the Big Man had specified. No chances. Take no chances whatsoever. The Navy escorts would stay close to the barge for the first hundred miles until dawn, and would then peel away, permitting the big unmarked vessel to continue her journey alone in broad daylight. The barge, however, with her highly classified load, would never be out of sight of the escorts.
On board Grabber, the teams took a break for an hour; shortly after midnight, the divers returned to the riverbed and hooked up the cables on the final, smaller section of the main fuselage, the part that contained the cockpit and first-class kitchen.
Having already been hauled off the bottom, this time it came away easily, moved slowly up through the water, and swung onto the second barge. The tailplane was easiest of all, comparatively light and manageable. The crane lowered it onto the stern part of the deck, and immediately the engineers set about cutting off the jutting, perpendicular part. They used oxyacetylene cutters and sledgehammers. The exercise took almost an hour. Finally the second barge was ready, its load covered, unobtrusive.
In company with Grabber, it turned south, back along the Potomac. Every last piece of the aircraft, every piece that could be located, had been gathered up and brought to the surface. No one would ever know her fate. A subsequent search, out in the deep Atlantic, of course, yielded nothing. Flight 62 was officially deemed “lost over the ocean, no trace, no evidence.”
Her passengers and crew would never be found. Only the barest details of their existence were discovered when the Navy searched the bodies before placing them in coffins. Passports yielded names, but the fire on board in the moments before the crash had incinerated all paperwork in the forward section before the waters of the Potomac extinguished it. Only fifteen coffins were required. No one else was left; the swift-running tidal waters through the aircraft had carried the ashes away.
They had not, however, carried away the big metal boxes in the hold which contained a quarter of a ton of TNT, hidden under papers and books. The explosive was wired but not activated. Detonation devices were identifiable in the forward section where the fire had obviously been most ferocious.
The Navy investigators came to the conclusion that the Sidewinders had hit with such sudden and devastating force that the terrorists on board were taken entirely by surprise. And all of them were in the forward section. There had been no time to arm their somewhat crude bomb to explode on impact.
Had they done so, however, and managed to hit the Capitol as planned, that much high explosive coming in from the southwest would have blown the Capitol building straight into the Reflecting Pool, and with it all the hundreds of government workers who served there. In his tenure as President of the United States, this was most certainly Paul Bedford’s finest hour. And no one would ever know. Well, not many people.
All fifteen of the recovered bodies carried Canadian passports. None of them had Middle Eastern names, and all of them were from either Montreal or Toronto. It was plain that the terrorists had effectively been cremated during Flight 62’s long, burning fall from five thousand feet. They left no trace behind.
Inquiries made at Palm Beach airport yielded little. Yes, the 737 had requested a refueling stop, and yes, permission had been granted. Further inquiries in Barbados revealed that no, the airport had not run out of fuel, and Flight 62 had taken delivery of all the jet fuel it required.
This particular piece of information caused Lt. Commander Jimmy Ramshawe almost to have a seizure. And his thoughts were clear:
This means there’s some kind of terrorist agent operating right there in Palm Beach airport. They did not have to stop there; they chose to. And if they don’t discover that the explosive was loaded right there in Palm Beach, I’m a fucking wallaby . . . GET ME ADMIRAL MORGAN RIGHT NOW.
1630 Tuesday 18 January 15,000 Feet above West Virginia
Meanwhile, there was the somewhat vexing problem of getting rid of the fifteen Canadian bodies. Thus it was that a three-engined Sikorsky Super Stallion helicopter was making its way across the Allegheny Mountains on a 700-mile journey to the enormous military base of Fort Campbell, which lies fifty miles northwest of Nashville, right on the Tennessee-Kentucky border.
They were flying through the last of the light, even at this height. In place of the standard cargo of fifty combat Marines, the Super Stallion now carried fifteen coffins.
In a remote corner of the military base, down to the southwest, near the banks of the wide Cumberland River, there was a small graveyard, unused for decades. Tonight it would be used for a mass burial, the grave would be unmarked, and the huge mechanical diggers, already waiting, would accomplish their task very quickly.
The country around the little graveyard was soft, picturesque, and wooded. It was a fitting place, perhaps, for those who had died violently, unknowing victims of Muslim terror, and silent guardians of a very deadly secret.
The big Navy helo would be refueled and back in Norfolk before midnight. Less than a dozen people would ever know the purpose of its mission.
Lt. Commander Ramshawe raised a very loud alarm. His call to Admiral Morgan took mere moments, and the sudden realization that Palm Beach International Airport housed a treacherous jihadist who had assisted in a plot to kill hundreds of Americans caused an electronic vibration of anxiety to shudder through CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. As an operation, the CIA prided itself on staying at least two steps in front of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, and several more in front of the FBI and all of its branches.
Ramshawe’s call caught them on the hop. An unnamed terrorist working in a U.S. airport represented a five-alarmer, and there were a thousand questions to answer. These included: Precisely who gave Flight 62 permission to land? Were the security operators informed? Who designated the stand she should occupy during refueling? Was there an opportunity for five metal trunks to be loaded into her hold? Was anyone paying attention?
The answers to the latter questions were most disturbing. Yes, there had been an opportunity for those trunks to be loaded on board. No, no one was paying the slightest attention to this Canadian 737 that apparently wanted extra fuel. No problem.
Florida’s state police, keen to assist in any way, joined forces with the CIA and the local branch of the FBI, and they swooped down upon that airport like a 21st-century Gestapo. They confiscated miles of closed-circuit television film, and one by one they interviewed employees.
In the end, it transpired that the five metal trunks with the illicit cargo had been wheeled into the near-empty baggage room at 0300 on the morning of Friday, January 14.
Around 0930, they had been quietly attached to a line of baggage trucks being towed out to an aircraft. However, a new baggage tractor then came out into the area and unhooked the last cart from the main line of six being loaded onto a United Airlines passenger jet. No one took the slightest notice.
But right now there was a quarter-ton of TNT being towed around the loading area of Palm Beach International Airport, by an employee, wearing the right uniform, on a properly qualified vehicle. Again, no one noticed. Why should they have noticed?
At 0945, Flight 62 from Barbados came in to land and was directed to a stand in the refueling area. She took on board her jet fuel, and, while she was doing so, one single employee brought out a luggage cart on which were five identical boxes. The pilot ordered his engineer to unlock the door to the hold, and the boxes were loaded. Everything looked absolutely normal. And no one batted an eyelash. The al Qaeda hitmen were in business. Before Flight 62 took off again at 1040, she had been converted into a massive flying bomb, and she was headed directly to Washington, D.C.
The question for the CIA to answer was, plainly, who was the mysterious truck driver who delivered the explosive to the aircraft? The answer was not long in coming.
The man had avoided the CCTV cameras, but everyone knew who he was. A youngish guy, aged around thirty-four, named Mo Dixon. He was in bed in his apartment when the CIA men burst in at four o’clock in the morning in West Palm Beach. The place was clean, but that was not Mo as in Maurice; it was Mo as in Mohammed. The police found two passports, one of them Syrian. One American. Both of them featuring Mo, unsmiling, innocent-looking.
Under questioning, he revealed he had worked at the Syrian embassy in Caracas, Venezuela. Then he’d conned his way into the USA on a false passport back in the year 2001. He’d had a variety of jobs, with long periods of doing nothing. Well, nothing useful to the USA. Mohammed Rahman was a Syrian agent with close ties to the Middle Eastern terror organization Hamas.
In the opinion of Lt. Commander Ramshawe, he must be subjected to the most rigorous military questioning—mostly to see if he could be connected to the missing Saudi, Ramon Salman. Admiral Morgan arranged for the obvious illegal combatant, Mohammed Rahman, to be transported forthwith to Guantánamo Bay.
The New York City Police Department is mildly jumpy about two main subjects, drugs and street crime, mostly because the first infuriates the government and the second infuriates the mayor. But there is one subject, above all others, which makes them really nervous. That’s terrorism. That infuriates everybody.
And all through the city, there were small mom-and-pop stores that had literally had the “frighteners” put upon them by New York’s finest. Mostly they sold electronics, batteries, timing devices, plugs, wires, light-bulbs, and electrical fittings. But some sell industrial fertilizer, various chemicals, small electric motors. The kind of stuff that might be needed by someone planning to blow something up.
The New York Police Department stayed in touch with these store-owners on a regular and consistent basis. They asked very little, except to be informed of any suspicious-looking characters who might be purchasing any commodity that could possibly be used in the construction of a bomb.
At 9 P.M. the previous evening, Mr. Sam Goldblum of downtown West Broadway had called his two pals at the precinct and informed them he was preparing a timing device for a couple of guys who stated they were fitting a homemade alarm system into their warehouse in the Bowery.
Sam did not believe them. He had family in Tel Aviv, and in his opinion his two customers were either Palestinian or Iranian. Either way, he did not trust them one inch, and suggested that Officers Mike Carman and Joe Pallizi might like to pay him a visit in the morning and take a look at the device Sam was building for them.
Mike and Joe turned up at 9:30 sharp. The electronic timer was being attached behind a small clock face, geared to go active any time in a 24-hour cycle. The two cops were not world-class experts on live detonation gear, but they disliked what they saw, and they decided to wait it out until noon and then apprehend the two suspects and find out what the hell was going on.
They took up their positions on Prince Street, south of Washington Square, just east of West Broadway, and watched. At 11:02 A.M., two young men hurried across the street and entered the shop. Officer Carman’s cell phone bleeped.
Mike—they’re here.
Got ’em, Sam. Thanks a lot.
Ten minutes later, the two men emerged from the shop, both of them wearing black sneakers, heavy jackets, and scarves. One of them carried a large white plastic bag marked Goldblum Electrics. Sam was right. Both of them were distinctly Middle Eastern in appearance.
The two cops broke cover and walked quickly toward the two men, coming from behind. Mike Carman overtook them and motioned for them to stop. Joe Pallizi, standing right behind them, drew his service revolver and ordered them against the wall. Mike grabbed the package and demanded to be shown what it contained.
“It’s just a burglar alarm, man,” said one of them.
“Then I guess you won’t mind us coming home with you, to check out what kind of device it is and where it’s going?”
This was not greeted with absolute joy by either man, and one of them attempted to run for it. Mike grabbed him by the neck and Joe snapped the bracelets on the other man. They were marched at gunpoint to the home address printed on a New York driver’s license found in the pocket of the man who had tried to escape.
The result was an outstanding arrest and a spectacular discovery of a bomb-making factory just around the corner, in a fourth-floor apartment. It contained bags of chemicals, enough bundles of dynamite to knock down the George Washington Bridge, a large sealed container of white powder that would later be identified as anthrax, and enough electrical wires and batteries to light up Yankee Stadium.
The two cops made their report instantly by telephone, and before they even left the premises, before even the forensic guys were in, the main security agencies had been informed of the police coup.
Jimmy Ramshawe, firing questions at the precinct chief in downtown Manhattan, demanded, on behalf of the National Security Agency, to know the address of the premises where the arrest was happening.
“Wait a minute, sir . . . okay, right away . . . it’s 75 West Houston, corner of Broadway.”
“Mother of God,” breathed Jimmy. “Don’t let any of them leave. No one leaves. Everyone stays right in that apartment. Don’t let anyone make a phone call, ’cept for your own guys, right? Just wait.”
“You got it, sir.”
One hour and ten minutes later, the Boston terrorist mastermind, Ramon Salman, formerly of Commonwealth Avenue, walked into the al Qaeda headquarters, straight through the door of Apartment 4D, 75 West Houston, New York. Mike Carman and Joe Pallizi, who had bound and gagged their original captives, instantly grabbed the startled Ramon in a headlock and an armlock, and he offered no resistance.
Twenty-four hours later, Salman was with his highly lethal buddies, Reza Aghani and Mohammed the baggage man, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, special courtesy of Arnold Morgan and the President of the United States.
Lt. Commander Ramshawe slightly sheepishly informed the CIA that the intense police search for Salman, currently in progress in Houston, Texas, could now be called off.
“That bloody Ramon,” he muttered, as he rang off. “That’s one cunning little Arabian bastard, and no error.”
Almost fifteen hundred miles to the south, lost in the gigantic sprawl of the oldest overseas base ever occupied by U.S. forces, Salman, Aghani, and Mohammed Rahman faced up to the rigors of military interrogation in the chilling regime of Guantánamo Bay.
Here on the 45-square-mile compound there are still close to ten thousand U.S. troops, training and working, right on the southeastern edge of Cuba, on the only U.S. base in the world located on Communist soil.
No interrogation center in the free world has a more feared reputation. Outside of the more barbaric nations, no interrogation center has ever been more successful at prying information out of known terrorist hard men, at mentally breaking down illegal combatants, at making them reveal to the U.S. military precisely what their cutthroat brothers-in-arms are planning.
