Ian Slater - Payback

“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—”