“It’s your show,” Prost said, knowing how Scott operated. “You call the shots, no questions asked. Whatever you need — just extract Ms. Gunzelman from the terrorist camp.”
Scott and Jackie exchanged glances.
“Is that acceptable to you?” Scott asked. “I make the final decisions?”
“Fair enough,” she said with a sly smile. “Unless, of course, you make faulty decisions.”
Scott saw the self-satisfied gleam in her eyes. He sensed that she was going to be a formidable challenge.
Prost broke the undercurrent of tension. “Scott, do you want to use O’Donnell as your drop pilot?”
“Absolutely,” Scott replied as he shifted his gaze to Prost.
“Ah, yes, the brotherhood,” Jackie deadpanned.
With his eyes reflecting a devilish trace of humor, Scott turned to her. “Now that’s what I like — a woman who is direct and honest.”
Refusing to take the bait, she smiled serenely and changed the topic. “Are you acquainted with Ed Hockaday?”
“I know of him,” Scott admitted with apparent indifference. “But I’ve never met him.”
Edward “Eddy” Hockaday was an eccentric and savvy English-born journalist who covered the Arab world. In addition, he pocketed a second income as a freelance spy for the Agency.
“I have arranged a meeting with him in Dallas late this afternoon.” Her eyes never wavered from his. “He’s been in the compound and has interviewed Shakhar for CNN, and he spoke at length with Maritza. He’ll be able to give us a detailed description of the training facility and the surrounding area.”
“Is he in Dallas for the seminar on terrorism?” Scott asked.
“Yes, he’s one of the guest speakers.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting him.”
“Then let’s get moving.” She reached down and retrieved two American Airlines tickets from a pocket on the leg of her flight suit, then handed one to Scott. “The Air Force has a plane standing by to fly us to DFW as soon as you’ve packed your gear and briefed O’Donnell. He can fly back to Washington with Hartwell.”
“Whoa — wait a second,” Scott said, smiling faintly. “That assumes Greg will join the show.”
“You’re former Marine jet jocks, aren’t you?” she taunted.
“That’s right.”
“He’ll go,” she said with undisguised cockiness. “We’ll meet Eddy at DFW and fly back to Washington with him. If everything goes as planned, we’ll leave the following day for Athens — our staging area.”
She tilted her head to meet his gaze. “Any questions?”
“Not at the moment,” Scott said lightly.
Prost signaled the helicopter crew and started walking toward the helo.
“Well,” Scott said as he glanced at her, “we better not keep Mr. Hockaday waiting.”
“You’re the boss,” Jackie demurred with practiced ease.
5
Monitoring the A-4 Skyhawk’s Global Positioning System, Khaliq Farkas noted his progress and the course to his final destination near Huntington, West Virginia. This was real flying; exactly how he remembered the sensation during his jet transition training at Tampa International Airport. In a matter of seven weeks, he had mastered both the Cessna Citation II and a civilian-owned former Navy TA-4J Skyhawk.
To Farkas, this was the ultimate experience in the world of aviation. He was captivated by the exhilaration of flying high-performance military aircraft to the edge of the envelope — and sometimes beyond.
Considered one of the world’s most dangerous and cunning terrorists, Khaliq Farkas had successfully eluded an international manhunt for over sixteen years. During that period, in addition to learning how to fly jets at the expense of Bassam Shakhar, Farkas had mastered the art of building remotely triggered bombs while he and his devout followers watched the bounty on his head steadily increase to $4.35 million.
Operating with various special action cells of Islamic Jihad, he had been the mastermind behind numerous ambushes and bombings, including the suicide truck bombing on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.
More recently, Farkas had assisted Shakhar in planning and executing the bombing of the Khobar Towers military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
Farkas was also directly responsible for the bombings of two U.S. embassies and the kidnapping and assassinations of a number of political and religious leaders. Along with his record of murder, torture, and bombings, he proudly took credit for downing two U.S. airliners and a French corporate jet. Now, with the strong encouragement and considerable financial backing from Bassam Shakhar, Farkas was stalking new prey in the heart of America.
Known as a merciless chameleon by his pursuers, Farkas lived for the banishment of American and French influence from the Middle East. An explosively bitter little man, his hatred of “Western imperialism” was a crippling emotion that sometimes blinded him from reality. His campaign of zeal and fury would not end until the Americans and their cultural “pollution” disappeared from the Persian Gulf.
A thin, energetic man with dark, deeply set eyes, Farkas was a cruel, cold-blooded sociopath who could kill without compunction. At times he frowned and his eyes glazed over before he would suddenly smile so horribly that people would step back from him. The father of the “human bombs” suicide battalions, Khaliq Farkas was the frightening product of an extremist ideological culture.
Farkas unsnapped his oxygen mask and took off his crash helmet. He rubbed his scalp to stimulate the blood flow and watched the scattered clouds rush under the compact fuselage of the single-engine, single-seat Skyhawk. Refreshed, he donned his helmet and snapped the mask in place.
A moment later he grinned while he raised the Skyhawk’s nose fifteen degrees above the horizon and completed an aileron roll to the left. Stopping precisely upright with the wings level, he then executed a snappy roll to the right. In his mind, there wasn’t any comparison to the thrill of flying a military jet — except perhaps the thrill of flying one loaded with live ordnance.
Farkas had flown the restored McDonnell Douglas A-4 attack jet from a short, narrow airstrip near Portland, Oregon. Even with the two auxiliary “drop tanks” empty, the departure from the restoration complex had required every inch of available runway and full power from the moment of brake release. A cold shudder ran down his spine when he remembered the charred wreckage of another jet that hadn’t cleared the tops of the trees at the end of the less-than-adequate airstrip. The inexperienced pilot had overestimated the power of the jet fighter, and his own flying ability. He died a fiery death in the blazing cockpit of his F9F-2 Panther.
Due to his light load of fuel on departure, Farkas had been forced to make an en route refueling stop at Casper, Wyoming. The gray and blue Skyhawk, complete with two operational Mk-12 cannons and wing stations for two heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles, had attracted unwanted attention at the airport.
Outfitted in a dark gray flight suit, Farkas had made every attempt to be friendly to the curious onlookers at Casper Air Service. He tried to keep his distance whenever he could, but the immaculate warbird had piqued the curiosity of the local hangar fliers.
Now, in less than a half hour, the airplane would be in the barnlike hangar at its new home. Checking his high-altitude navigation chart and the GPS, Farkas decided to wait a couple of minutes before he began his descent.
His base of operations had been selected by drawing a boundary line from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, then a line connecting the nation’s capital and Mobile, Alabama. Approximately 300 miles west of Washington, D.C., and close to equal distance from the parameters of the boundary lines, was the ideal place to set up a staging area to shoot down Air Force One. Although the president’s 747 was equipped with electronics that could create false echoes to divert radar guided missiles, Air Force One remained vulnerable to heat-seeking missiles and twenty-millimeter cannon fire.