Six planes. Six airports. June sixth.
While some of his Muslim colleagues disagreed, Samad firmly believed that 666 was the Qur’an. It was Allah. It was not Satan or the number of the beast, as many Christians believed. It was the perfect number.
And so, too, should be the mission — perfectly executed, precisely timed, the planes carefully chosen after months of research and observation by Taliban and Al-Qaeda sleepers working inside and around each airport, all coordinated by Rahmani himself, who’d spent hundreds of hours downloading documents via the Internet, all readily accessible to him: FAA layouts of the airports, plane departure routes, everything freely and easily accessible by anyone with a connection to the Web. He’d enlisted the help of several computer engineers, who’d created three-dimensional models to simulate each of the six attacks, models that allowed him to plug in various launch coordinates and determine launch radii.
With that data, and with the might of Allah fueling their hearts and minds, the destruction they wreaked would be simultaneous and complete.
The target in Los Angeles was Delta Airlines flight 2965, departing on Sunday, June 6, at 5:40 p.m. for New York’s JFK airport. Equipment: Boeing 757 passenger plane, two engines, one on each wing. Wide-body large aircraft; 202 passengers, in addition to pilot, copilot, and attendants. The Sunday-night flights tended to be full, with many business folks and vacationers heading back east to be ready for work on Monday morning.
The capabilities of the weapon had been the first consideration and had dictated both their target selection and location. The MK III missile’s guidance system was a dual-band infrared homing seeker, a “fire and forget” system that allowed the operator to launch even if he wasn’t pointing at the target. The MK III did more than just chase the target, though; it was a smart missile that would choose the shortest path, cruising at six hundred meters per second. Its warhead contained 1.42 kg of HE fragmentation that would thoroughly destroy the plane’s engine, which was mounted on a pylon under the wing but located fairly close to the fuselage. Residual damage to hydraulic lines, electrical systems, control surfaces, and fuel tanks could also occur — and those issues could result in a catastrophic failure.
In November 2003 a DHL A300 was struck in the wing by a missile while taking off from Baghdad. The pilot was able to limp back to the airport, as only the wing had been hit. Samad felt certain that none of his teams would fail in that way, as the MK IIIs would most assuredly find the hottest heat source as the 757 ascended slowly on full power and with full fuel tanks. Not only were commercial airliners most vulnerable at that moment, but once struck, they would go down over heavily populated areas, allowing thousands of gallons of jet fuel to burn, causing maximum damage and loss of life.
While the MK III’s range was 5,000 meters, or 16,400 feet, the goal was to be in a location to launch while the target was still below 10,000 feet. This not only increased the likelihood of a good hit but decreased the time the crew had to save the aircraft, which would roll from lift from the undamaged side toward the damaged side. Best-case scenario was that the engine would explode, shearing off the entire wing, in which case the plane and its crew were doomed from that second on.
Indeed, all of these scenarios assumed that only one missile had been launched — when Samad and his teams had two MK IIIs, and the teams had every intention of launching both of their missiles.
One driver. One shooter. One assistant to help reload the weapon. Total time to launch both missiles and get out of there: thirty seconds. Should anyone attempt to stop them after the first launch, the assistant was armed with two Makarov semiautomatic pistols, an AK-47, and six fragmentation grenades. The driver was equally armed. A second car with a backup driver would be stationed just ahead of them.
How could any of the citizens waiting in the cell-phone lot stop them? Most were probably armed only with cell phones and bad attitudes. Perhaps a couple of gangsters from South Central would be there, waiting to pick up one of their fellow thugs from Oakland or Chicago, but even so, they would drop quickly to the asphalt in a barrage of fire.
Samad and his men could thank the United States government and the airlines for doing nothing to thwart their plans. Equipping all commercial airliners with military-style countermeasures, such as white-hot flares (chaff) and/or infrared jammers, high-powered lasers to burn out the seeker heads on missiles, or using fighter planes to escort jets in and out of the highest-risk areas, were all extremely cost-prohibitive in view of what government officials called a “lack of actionable intelligence.” The Federal Aviation Administration did state that the government provided some “war risk” insurance to the airlines, but they were unclear if the program accounted for surface-to-air missile strikes. Samad could only chuckle to himself. While five-year-olds were being patted down at airport security checkpoints, nothing — absolutely nothing — was being done to secure planes against such missile strikes.
Allahu Akbar!
The Israelis had not allowed themselves to be caught in the legal and political quagmire concerning this subject, in part because they knew they would forever have targets on their backs. They had equipped their El Al planes with sophisticated antimissile systems that had already proven themselves in one notable case of a 757–300 managing to evade not one but two missiles. The Israeli government denied that the plane was equipped with any countermeasures, although it was the same one often used by the Israeli prime minister.
They drove toward the northeast end of the cell-phone lot. Their Hyundai had a wide-enough trunk to accommodate both the launcher and missiles if they were loaded at the correct angle. They pulled into a space where just ahead to the northwest lay the soccer and baseball fields of Carl E. Nielsen Youth Park. To their right stood a residential neighborhood that abutted the park. Samad got out and stood there, taking in the cooler night air.
Talwar parked the van a few spots down, got out, and joined them.
“The journey here was far more difficult than the actual mission will be,” said Niazi.
Samad grinned. “Look around. These people won’t even react. They’ll stay in their cars, and pretend they’re watching this all on TV.”
“Someone will have a phone camera on us for the second launch,” said Talwar. “And then we will be on CNN. And they can watch it all again.”
A car came around the row — airport security — and Samad quickly lifted his cell phone and pretended to talk.
The car paused before them, the window going down. “You need to get back in your vehicles,” said a bored-sounding black man.
Samad nodded, smiled, waved, and they headed back.
They’d return tomorrow evening for a true dry run, and then, the following night, the phone calls would be made, the teams positioned, and their destinies would unfold before them.
Towers turned over the flash drive to analysts at the office and was eager to remain with them to study Corrales’s purported evidence against the cartel. Moore told the man that the spirit was willing but the flesh had been shot at a bit too much, and he was happy to return to the hotel for some shut-eye. He didn’t actually fall asleep until nearly two a.m., and when he did, he found himself back on Zúñiga’s roof, watching as bullets riddled Frank Carmichael’s chest and he plunged to the dirt. Sonia kept telling Moore to stop weeping and that he had a mission and that he’d saved her life and that had to account for something. Not everyone died around him. Not everyone.
She was a stunning woman, and he felt guilty over feeling that way, as though he were betraying Leslie. But Leslie was so far away, and they both knew in their hearts that what they had was no more than a fling, two desperate people trying to find happiness in a land with so much misery and death. He could easily fall in love with Sonia, her youth very much appealing to a man his age, and he hadn’t realized until now that saving her really did mean much more than completing a mission objective.