Steve Martini - The Rule of Nine

Two hours after the fiery wreckage splashed into the Atlantic, and eleven hundred miles to the northwest, the phantom FedEx 727 passed over the outer continental shelf just a few miles north of Cape Hatteras.

Ten minutes later Ahmed and Masud saw the coastline as it passed beneath them somewhere near Virginia Beach. They could see the mouth of the Chesapeake yawning directly in front of them.

Suddenly the onboard VHF radio came to life. “Squawk 1423, this is Potomac air traffic control. Please identify yourself.”

“Take over.” Ahmed turned over the flight controls to Masud, reached over, and flipped the switch on the radio. “Potomac, this is FedEx flight 9303, on route from Rafael Hernández Airport in Puerto Rico bound for Newark Liberty Airport. We’re showing a serious hydraulic problem, requesting permission to land at Reagan National.”

“Flight 9303, this is Potomac air control, say again? Are you reporting an in-flight emergency?”

“Affirmative,” said Ahmed. “We have shut down starboard engine overheating and show loss of hydraulic controls. Requesting permission to land at Reagan National.”

Ahmed looked at Masud, who glanced over at him.

“Flight 9303, this is Potomac. Descend to eighteen thousand feet and await further instructions.”

Ahmed reached over and pushed the throttle controls all the way forward. He goosed their speed to just over six hundred miles an hour and told Masud to maintain their present heading and altitude. They were on a beeline flying directly toward downtown Washington, D.C.

Ahmed knew that air traffic control would never clear them to land at Reagan National Airport. The tactic now was to stall for time. The plane was nothing more than an aerial platform for the fuel-air thermobaric bomb tucked away in the ramp of the airstairs in the rear. In order to deliver it to the target, speed and elevation were everything.

Ahmed did some quick calculations in his head. They were roughly a hundred and twenty miles out; at six hundred miles an hour, ten miles a minute, they only had to stall for twelve minutes to reach the target, and not even that if they could maintain altitude. At their current altitude with its front-end canard controls and big rear fins, the bomb had a glide range of almost thirteen miles.

“Potomac air control to flight 9303, you are instructed to descend to eighteen thousand feet, do you read?”

“Potomac, this is flight 9303. We are having problems with flight surfaces due to hydraulic failure. Trying to descend at this time,” said Ahmed.

“This is Potomac air control. How serious is the emergency?”

Ahmed looked at Masud, shrugged his shoulders, and smiled.

“Potomac, we’re not sure at this time. We are having some difficulty with flight controls.”

He muted the radio for a second. “Descend. We’ll give them two thousand feet and then report more problems,” he told Masud.

It was as if the bottom fell out of the plane. They dropped quickly down to twenty-three thousand feet.

“This is Potomac air control. One moment.”

The air defensive zone around Washington had been beefed up and expanded following the attacks on 9/11. The no-fly zone had been extended out to a radius of between fifteen to seventeen statute miles from the Capitol and the White House. But politicians had already compromised the system, and the military had tipped their hand concerning their willingness to use dire tactics in the event of aircraft violating the zone.

At one point the governor of Kentucky had accidentally wandered into the defensive zone in a private plane, which had caused the entire Capitol to be evacuated.

It was the problem with Washington. Wherever there were people of wealth and power, you could expect that rules would be broken. It was one thing to shoot down a commercial jetliner with a few hundred tax-paying drones on board, all strapped into their seats so they couldn’t even pee for the last hour of the flight. It was another to fire on a jet-powered ego container taking members of Congress to some lobbyist-paid junket. And around Washington, odds were that if you shot down a plane, there was more than a fair chance it might have somebody important on board.

Ahmed was banking on all of this, vacillations, indecision, and delay just to get the nose of the 727 under the tent. All he needed was just a few miles inside the no-fly zone, and at ten miles a minute that wouldn’t take long.

“Flight 9303, this is Potomac control. You’re being diverted to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Dover tower has been advised of the emergency. They have facilities and a long enough runway to allow a landing if your brakes fail.”

Masud gave Ahmed a worried look.

“Potomac control, this is flight 9303. We may not be able to make Dover. We’re having problems with the rudder controls, a lot of vibration.”

“This is Potomac control, are you sure your starboard engine is shut down? Radar control shows your current speed at approximately 520 knots.”

Ahmed reached over and switched off the radio. “Take it back up to twenty-five thousand feet.” He pushed the throttles all the way forward. The plane screamed toward Washington.

After more than an hour of desperate work, transit authorities managed to pull the cement truck back from the brink and away from the open hole over the Fulton Street station.

They emptied out the subway down below and one of ATF’s bomb-disposal units was gingerly moving in on the vehicle. ATF had already been briefed by the military on the fuel-air device that authorities believed was on board. If Thorpe was right, it was the big one from North Korea, the one that Soyev called Fat Man.

The mixing barrel on the truck was about the right size. Thorpe wanted to know if the cement truck could be safely moved from its present location to somewhere outside the city where the bomb could be safely defused. But the bomb squad said no.

While the manual triggering device in the cab could be controlled, and the trembler switch, if there was one, wouldn’t present any particular difficulties since the truck had already been driven to the site, they couldn’t be sure until they looked whether there was a timing device.

Given the size and potential destructive power of the fuel-air device, the bomb squad couldn’t guarantee that if they moved the truck through the streets of New York it wouldn’t go off.

They could try to move it onto a barge and haul it out into the Hudson. But it would take time to get all of the necessary equipment together. And time was the one thing they didn’t have if the bomb had a clock on it.

They were probably lucky in one respect. If whoever put the device together had mounted a pressure switch under the driver’s seat, the bomb would have gone off when the transit cop pulled the dead driver out from behind the wheel. They were guessing that the bomb maker probably didn’t want the device to go off until it was down in the hole, where it would do the most damage.

The short answer to their dilemma was that they couldn’t move the truck. Instead they would have to move all of the news helicopters and anybody with a television feed away from the scene so that viewers wouldn’t be able to see what was happening when one of the members of the bomb squad crawled inside the tumbler of the cement truck and tried to defuse the detonator.

The fear was that the detonator could also be remotely controlled by someone close enough who, if he saw what was happening, might set it off.

They assumed, given the nature of the device, that the detonator was probably electronic. If they could safely clip its power source, they could then cut the wires to the manual trigger, make sure there was no secondary detonator, and then haul the truck away to dispose of the massive bomb somewhere safe.