“That’s a no-brains plan,” Meyerson commented, finding it hard to believe the idiocy of everything. Then again, their idiocy had been quite effective so far.
“Jackson was a no-brains guy, apparently. All he needed was a million-dollar motivation and his part was in the bag, but he just didn’t put it all together. Clean up the guns and rockets, make them untraceable, and then put them back in the marked boxes. It’s stupid, no doubt about it, but it happened. So the FBI traced the crates back to Rock Island, to the armory. Lo and behold, who’s one of the soldiers with the armory for a duty station? Samuel Jackson, Marcus’s little brother. Now we have the source of the weapons and a direction for the trail, but there is still the question of how the plan originated.”
“There would have to be a connection on this side of the Atlantic, especially to show a connection to the hijacking,” the president said.
“Right. The Khaleds didn’t just call up Marcus Jackson and ask for his help. This thing took time to set up. Someone had connections in place.”
“Who?” the chief of staff asked.
“Another Jackson.”
“What?” Meyerson asked rhetorically.
“In Joliet, serving time for something or other, is Ernest Jackson, the oldest of the three boys. He’s apparently one bad fellow, and smart.”
“The smart ones get greedy and get caught,” Landau said.
“Exactly. Plus, it gave him the perfect base of operations, and the absolute perfect alibi — almost.”
“You’ll explain, of course,” the president said, raising a curious eyebrow.
“Ernest Jackson was, and still is, a member of a Chicago terrorist group known as El Rukn. Most people just thought of them as a street gang, but they were much more. So much more that Qaddafi ‘chose’ them as his American revolutionary arm.”
“It didn’t work out too well, I remember,” Meyerson added.
“Mostly rhetoric, like we’ve expected from the colonel for a long time, but it got the ball rolling.” Bud wrote the three Jacksons’ names on one side of the paper, then drew a line down the center. He then wrote the two Khaleds’ names on the other side of the line. “The Jackson brothers had the link to Libya, a semi clean one with Ernest safe behind the walls, and they had the source of the weapons with Samuel in the Army.”
“And Marcus was the man on location,” Gonzales completed the point.
“Exactly,” Bud said. “That’s the benign link.”
“The benign link?” The president wondered how a conspiracy that killed so many could be termed benign. “That is definitely an interesting way to put it.”
“It may not be a proper classification under normal circumstances, but it is when you compare it to the really dangerous connection.”
“Which is?” Meyerson asked.
Bud put a question mark below the Khaleds. “Brother number three. There’s another Khaled.”
“And he fits into this how?” the president inquired.
“He is the concrete link. If this third brother is involved, his likely place is aboard the hijacked jet. I believe he is. It is the only scenario that makes complete sense: Qaddafi has a mind for revenge because of our rogue operation, maybe rightfully so in his mind. Imagine this: Qaddafi is successful in this whole thing and then dies, or is replaced by a crony who claims that the colonel acted without sanction of the people. In their twisted minds they might really believe that we’d accept that and do nothing. Of course, they’re wrong, but Qaddafi has played the wide-eyed innocent many, many times before. But that’s ahead of the point. The Khaleds were probably recruited by Qaddafi’s terrorist apparatus, and then the two who carried out the attack in L.A. were almost certainly trained in one of the training camps. This is just about stone-cold proven when we consider the similarities between what happened and what our asset warned us of. If we then follow that the third Khaled brother is also on a suicide mission, which is a prudent bit of conjecture, we have to consider what effect he is hoping for.”
“If this is the case, then there has to be greater effect desired than the obvious ones we’ve looked at,” the DCI said.
“Right!” Bud exclaimed. “We were looking in multiples of effect, not in multiplications of effect The two operations were not meant to be a one-two punch. The assassination was a setup. It was meant to set the stage for the real show. Think about it. We already know there is something on the aircraft meant to do damage to people other than the hostages, namely large numbers on the ground.”
“But it’s not a bomb, Bud,” the chief of staff commented.
“It doesn’t have to be. If he’s on a suicide mission, why land? He can activate those things in the air over the population, and they’ve already secured the target: There will be over a hundred world leaders in Washington, D.C., which is on a direct path from Tenerife to Chicago. That was their original intended route. A slight course change would have put them over D.C. in a matter of minutes. Even on a Havana-to-Chicago flight path all they’d have to do is stray a few hundred miles east, or even announce a new destination — say New York. They could be on top of us with no warning.”
“Oh God…” Gonzales sighed, his head sinking forward.
The thought was frightening. “It’s brilliant,” the DCI observed. “Qaddafi must know that we know about the cargo: He’s aware of our satellite capability. If the plane gets over the funeral procession and activates those things, he’s probably killed thousands of people, a lot of them heads of state. If we shoot the plane down, then we’ve killed hundreds of our own people. Those are the only two alternatives he sees.”
The president filtered the developments in his mind. “You were right, Herb. We may still have to shoot the plane down.”
“But Qaddafi didn’t think about Delta, or he didn’t consider them to be a viable threat,” Meyerson said.
“Let’s damn well hope that the secretary can get them into Cuba,” the president said, sounding hopeful. “That will make them viable.” He saw the DCI’s mindful look. “But… Bud, that contingency I approved you to get ready — give the go- ahead. No matter what happens, that plane gets nowhere near the States.”
The president knew he had just given an order that might result in Americans killing Americans. The only hope for that not to happen was in Delta. In either eventuality, people would die. He just hoped it would be those who deserved to.
Seventeen
NEUTRONS
Joe was scribbling calculations and verifying them with his calculator. The noise of the engines was finally relegating itself to background status in his ears. Those who frequently were passengers in Starlifters and other large-cargo aircraft soon became used to the continual buzzing that resonated through the fuselage. It was the same reaction that workers in machine shops experienced.
Joe could only wish. Someplace benign like a machine shop would suit him just fine…if only there wasn’t a nuclear whatever-it-was on that plane. That was his job, and it occupied his thoughts almost completely.
The calculations so far, and all the information — hard information — proved nothing more than that he shouldn’t have to be here. For all he knew the Libyans had mustard gas, or some other chemical weapon on the plane; they had plenty of those. It would be a hell of a lot more reliable and the terror factor involved was equal to, if not greater than, any threat from a nuclear weapon, especially one that might fizzle. He knew what gas could do, and the thought of his lungs being on fire was infinitely less appealing than being vaporized instantly. Most people would feel the same, he believed, but then he had lived and breathed everything radioactive for a long time now and had become somewhat desensitized to its real power. He had not, however, lost any respect for, as he called it, ‘the dance of the neutrons.’