Ian Slater - Payback

“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?

“Yes,” she told Freeman, “apparently they were.”

“Shooters might have been in U.S. Army uniforms,” added Freeman.

“So zero chance of finding the shooters or the launchers?” said Eleanor.

“Not necessarily.” The general was ransacking his memory for MANPAD hits. In Afghanistan against the Soviet, the U.S.-Stinger-supplied mujahideen had brought down 270 aircraft, and they weren’t big 7E7s or jumbos but agile close-air support attack helos, including the highly maneuverable Soviet Hind gunships and fighter aircraft. For the mujahideen there had been no need to jettison the reusable launchers, but for terrorists audaciously attacking American civilians in three of the nation’s biggest and most heavily populated airports, ditching the launchers of course made more sense.

Then he recalled an attack by Chechen rebels on the sleek, updated international terminal at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. He clicked the mouse to bring up the file on his laptop but remembered the details of the attack before the computer had it on-screen. The crucial point had been that though the Chechen terrorists had fired MANPADs, they’d ditched the launchers and vanished. How? Freeman went to the NYPD’s overhead traffic cam on the expressway and saw the gridlock of traffic — none of it moving except for police and security vehicles — their reds, whites, and blues flashing frenetically all around JFK’s perimeter.

“I’ve got it,” he told Eleanor, recalling the details of the Chechen attack. “They’re hiding out in a safe house close to the airport — waiting until the hullabaloo dies down and…” Switching the computer screen back and forth between the NYPD cam window and the Chechen file, he suddenly announced to Eleanor, “Chechen terrorists were belted,” by which he meant they had had dynamite belts beneath their battle tunics, as Iraqi Shiite “martyrs” had later armed themselves against the Americans in ’03 and ’04. “And they could be in NYPD uniforms.”

“Shit!”

“I don’t want to depress you further, but from the firing point position I saw on the video—”

“Which one?”

“The one with the eyewitness — guy who thought it was fired from a pickup. The point of firing looks close enough to the airport that they could be changing clothing in the airport.”

“My God!” said Eleanor. “It’s a zoo out at JFK.”

“Not to mention LAX and Dallas/Fort Worth,” said Freeman.

Eleanor Prenty knew from her experience of crises involving airport delays that passengers would put up with it overnight, but then would start demanding that they be put up in hotels, be transported back to the city. And there’d be added pressure from delivery trucks and taxis, and toilet facilities would be overloaded. “By the time there are enough cops to cope,” she told Freeman, “it’ll be like a sieve of escape hatches out there.”