Ian Slater: Payback

FOX was rerunning the videotapes obtained to date, one a copy of a video offered to the National Travel Safety Board by a naturalized American Latino in Dallas/Fort Worth who had been filming his mother’s departure on the 777 for Rio, another showing the hit at LAX, acquired, FOX said, from an American host of a Japanese exchange student leaving LAX on the JAL flight bound for Tokyo. And there were two videos, bought or confiscated — no one seemed sure — that the NTSB had obtained from parents of two of the boys on what was supposed to be the President’s sponsored “trip of a lifetime” for the 220 teachers and disadvantaged students of New York.

FOX, having replayed the videos ad nauseam, now varied their presentation, making up for lack of any more information at the moment by playing the videos in slow motion, resulting in the switchboard at FOX, and other networks who were doing the same thing with the FOX-accredited footage, lighting up as thousands of outraged viewers charged the TV stations of “gratuitous” cruelty to those who’d lost loved ones aboard the 7E7 and the two Jumbos and to those distraught families who were still in the agony of trying to find out whether family members and others had been among the victims of what one announcer on a FOX feeder station referred to again as “the terrorists’ Triple Play.”

“It’s not a game of baseball!” Freeman snarled.

“I agree, Douglas.” It was Margaret, the first time Freeman could recall that she had concurred with him about anything he’d said. It gave him a start. Unbeknownst to him, she had quietly entered the living room and sat on the low-slung velour-upholstered love seat across from the La-Z-Boy. He leaned forward during the replay, something suddenly having attracted his attention, so absorbed by whatever it was that he hadn’t responded to Margaret’s agreement with him about the callow description of the mass murderers’ act as a “triple play.”

Margaret felt acutely embarrassed. Having finally, albeit unintentionally, revealed her true feelings for her late sister’s husband — did Douglas know she’d felt like this since the first time Catherine brought him home? — she now felt the vulnerability that often follows the revelation of one’s deeper feelings to another. His only feeling now seemed to her to be one of utter indifference. At the very least, she interpreted his silence as the beginning of the end of any hope that he would continue his annual visits. For a woman whose trademark was absolute control over her emotions, it was the most abject kind of humiliation. And for a woman of such refinement it was as if she’d flung herself at him like some brazen slut. Had he any idea of what she had fantasized about them doing in bed, of what raw sexual desire lay hidden beneath the demure, sophisticated respectability of the mid-fiftyish spinster who had pleasured herself in the lonely darkness of her room, calling his name, biting her arm until the pain smothered her urge to scream what she ached for him to do, to fill her so voluminously that she would swallow and take him until he was bone dry. She had taken courage from a woman, a retired elderly schoolteacher, the very figure of propriety, who, realizing, indeed shocked by, how quickly life was passing her by, had placed an ad in the classifieds in The New York Review of Books saying she was attractive, graying, and that she wanted sex, determined to live the rest of her life enjoying sexual pleasure of a kind she had denied herself for so many years.

“You see that?” asked Douglas.

“What?” she asked, her usually more formal, even stern, tone replaced by a new, at least for Douglas, inquiring tone, as if wanting to share his excitement. Or was it alarm? He pressed Rewind to see the entire footage again.

“That missile. The LAX plane. Watch. I’ll rerun it.”

There was an expectant air in the living room that transcended any unease between them, their momentary sense of awkwardness with each other sidelined by what they were seeing on the TV screen, an event of such moment that, as Bogie had said in Casablanca, suddenly the problems of two people didn’t amount to a hill of beans. The world war against terrorism had invaded everyone’s living room.

“There!” said Freeman, stabbing the DVD’s finicky Pause button — she needed a new DVD — quickly rewinding, advancing, stopping the disk milliseconds earlier than he had the first time. The image, however, was still blurry. “A shoulder -fired missile,” he said, sitting forward on the very edge of the recliner.

In the next few minutes Marte Price had one of CNN’s “on call” stable of instant experts talking about a “Stinger” MANPAD — Man Portable Air Defense — missile. Margaret, though little interested in military affairs, had, like most Americans, heard of the Stinger. Anyone who had lived through the Cold War and who had seen the nightly broadcasts of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 knew what a Stinger was — a long 5.5-inch-diameter pipelike missile fired from a one-man shoulder-buttressed mount, which for the invading Soviets had the nasty habit of downing their HIND attack and troop choppers that tried in vain to dislodge the Afghan “freedom fighters” from the mountain fastness of the Hindu Kush.

While most of the Stingers the U.S. had issued to the anti-Soviet forces had been used against the Soviet Air Force, the CIA, England’s MI6, France’s DST, and Germany’s BfV, all suspected that there were still stockpiles of unused Stingers. But for Freeman, the fact that the missile he now had freeze-framed on Margaret’s outmoded DVD was not a Stinger catapulted the danger to the United States and her allies to an unprecedented level.

Freeman zoomed in on the freeze-framed streak, which he could now see was a long, thin missile about five feet in length with a diameter of three inches. “That’s not a Stinger! Length’s about the same, but the Stinger’s thicker. Like comparing a man’s wrist to a woman’s.”

“Does this mean this one’s weaker?” asked Margaret. A few hours before, such a question would have been perceived by Freeman as yet another wry jab at his macho vocabulary, a comment to get a rise out of him, but now her tone was one of genuine interest, a question that came out of respect for what Douglas knew.

“Powerful enough,” he began. “An Igla, I think. Type 2C — proximity fuse MANPAD.” Pausing and zooming the DVD with some difficulty onto the nose section of the missile, he walked up to the screen, thrusting a forefinger at the front of the long, wrist-thick missile. “Can you see this?” If Margaret couldn’t, it was unlikely anyone at the White House could. “Like looking at clouds.”

“Clouds?” Margaret asked. “I don’t—”

“I mean you often see what you are looking for, particularly when the image isn’t sharply defined. You know, someone says they see a face, a recognizable shape in the clouds. You look up and you say, ‘Oh, yeah, I think I see it.’ Guys on watch are sometimes so hopped up with excitement, fear, or with just wanting to do a good job, they see things that aren’t really there.” He peered at the screen. Without his reading glasses, for which he was feeling his pockets and about which he was mumbling, he furrowed his brow, giving him a distinct Mr. Magoo — like appearance. He was, as he’d tell anyone who’d listen, as fit as many a thirty-year-old marathoner, but momentarily the Magoo-like expression — no doubt a politically incorrect analogy these days, Margaret thought — gave him an endearing, vulnerable look. “Yes,” she said, “I understand. People do see what they want to see. But can you give me a clue as to what I’m supposed to be—”

Now she was peering at the frozen image of the missile, following Douglas’s finger. But the background was made up of heat waves rising from LAX’s tarmac.