“Bad news?” Jackie asked, knowing the answer.
“Well…” He hesitated and shook his head. “Are you familiar with a terrorist named Khaliq Farkas?”
For a split second she froze as the line of her mouth became grimly straight. “I sure am,” she said in disgust. “I’d like to get my hands on that—”
Scott’s eyes grew large.
“SOB.” She softened. “What’s he done now?”
“Nothing yet.” Scott’s nerves were suddenly on edge. “He was spotted in Wyoming this morning, but that isn’t the bad news,” Dalton said as his gaze wandered around the immediate area.
“I’m waiting.”
“He was seen flying an A-4 Skyhawk complete with missile racks.”
Jackie drew back. “Missile racks?” she asked, trying to make sense of the fragments of information. “Wyoming?”
“That’s right,” he quietly said. “Hartwell said the attorney general just briefed the president and he wanted us to be on guard.”
“Wait a second,” Jackie queried with a suspicious look. “I think I missed something. Maybe you better start from the beginning.”
With the hair standing up on the back of his neck, Scott glanced around the area. “Some local pilots at the Casper airport took pictures — Prost said videotape — of the plane and pilot when he stopped for fuel early this morning. The people at the airport became suspicious of Farkas and contacted their local FBI office. The agents viewed the tape, and after picking themselves up from the floor, they called Washington.”
“Are they positive it was Farkas?”
“No question about it. He’s clean-shaven now, but Hartwell said that they don’t have any doubt. And, surprise surprise, the Skyhawk didn’t have any registration numbers on it. That’s probably what made the people at the airport suspicious.”
“No markings of any kind?”
“Not a thing, except for a blue-and-gray camouflage paint scheme.”
“Fearless Farkas has surfaced again,” Jackie said with cold frustration, then glanced around the concourse. “This is absolutely crazy. There’s a multimillion-dollar bounty on him, and he’s blissfully flying around our skies in a military jet. Go figure.”
“Yeah,” Scott said as he studied the other travelers, “he’s definitely a gutsy little bastard, but he won’t be able to elude us forever.”
A brilliant flash of lightning caught her eye. “Do they have any idea where he’s headed?”
“All the witnesses at Casper agreed that he initially headed southeast, then turned due east about three miles from the airport.”
The sound of rolling thunder suddenly drifted through the terminal.
Stiff and tense, Jackie stared at Scott. “He’ll do anything, and I mean anything, to complete his mission — whatever it is.”
“Or to escape being captured,” Scott said, pointing to a small reddish scar on his neck under his right ear. “A little souvenir from a recent encounter with Farkas.”
Her eyes opened wide in disbelief. “You’re kidding,” Jackie said as she examined the scar.
“No.”
“I didn’t see anything in your records.”
“That’s because I didn’t say anything about the wound.”
“What happened?”
Scott allowed a lazy smile to touch the corners of his mouth. “I was in Tel Aviv on a tip that Farkas had been spotted in the area. I was checking security systems when we literally bumped into each other at the entrance to a hotel. He fired three or four shots at me, one of which grazed my neck.”
“Were you armed?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t return fire. There were too many people in the way. He grabbed a pedestrian and used her as a shield until his driver pulled up beside them. Farkas shoved her away, then jumped in the car and disappeared in the traffic.”
“I’m amazed that no one recognized him?”
“He was masquerading as an Israeli general.”
“That’s what I mean,” Jackie declared with a shake of her head. “He isn’t afraid of anything, and he gets away with murder — literally.”
“His day is coming,” Scott said mechanically. “He knows I’ve been dogging him ever since our unexpected meeting.”
“Well, he’s here now,” Jackie said, restless with energy. “You may get a chance for a second meeting.”
“I would like nothing better.”
She picked up the solemnity in his expression. “Let’s change our reservations,” she said on a high note. “Then how about a drink?”
“You’ve got a deal.” A thunderbolt of lightning prompted Scott to study the dark clouds. “I hope this weather clears before we take off.”
“That makes two of us.”
10
Relaxing in the first-class section, Ed Hockaday flinched when a loud clap of thunder boomed across the airport. A nervous flier in the best of conditions, he glanced at the dark storm clouds, then tilted his glass to finish the last of his double martini. He loosened his seat belt and relaxed slightly as the effects of the alcohol took hold.
By the time the terrorist conference was over, Hockaday and the other experts had made one point abundantly clear to their audience; in the past, when terrorists wanted to attack U.S. forces or American citizens, they did it overseas. Now, with the growing animosity between the West and the Iranian leadership, the rules had changed. More and more attacks would likely be taking place on American soil.
Citing the Defense Department study Terror 2000: The Future Face of Terrorism, a specialist in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict predicted that Iran’s network of state-sponsored terrorism would rapidly progress to larger-scale operations in the United States.
The experts also believed that incidents that caused few fatalities would no longer have the shock value the terrorists desired. They would concentrate their efforts on inflicting mass casualties, the kind likely to capture U.S. media coverage for extended periods of time. Expressing their mounting fears, Ed Hockaday and most of the conferees agreed that open warfare would have to be waged against terrorists and their supporters.
Across the aisle from Hockaday, Senator Travis Morgan signed an autograph for an exuberant flight attendant assigned to the coach section. After the vivacious young woman thanked Morgan and returned to her duties, the chairman of the vice-president’s task force on terrorism took a sip of his bourbon and resumed his conversation with his wife. The smiling couple held hands as they quietly discussed their new grandson.
Morgan had delivered the keynote address in Dallas, noting the serious problems stemming from the spread of terrorism. When he called for open discussions, a lively exchange erupted between law enforcement officials and antiterrorist experts.
When Senator Morgan felt the jet being pushed back from the gate, he asked for another bourbon on the rocks, then opened his Wall Street Journal to skim the political news and the op-eds.
A spattering of warm rain was pelting the terminal building at DFW when Captain Chuck Harrison taxied the twin-engine jetliner away from the passenger boarding bridge. Harrison was in command of Flight 1684, a McDonnell Douglas MD-80-series aircraft. Scheduled to depart Dallas-Fort Worth at 4:50 P.M., the nonstop flight was running a few minutes late as a result of weather-related traffic slowdowns.
The former B-52 aircraft commander and his copilot, First Officer Pamela Gibbs, surveyed the ominous rotor clouds as a massive storm began to engulf the northern perimeter of the sprawling airport. Placing her personal handheld GPS in the side pocket of her flight bag, Gibbs watched the advancing greenish-black squall line, then glanced at Harrison. “I’m just waiting for a funnel cloud to drop out of this mess.”