Dead on Arrival Read online

  But instead of answering Omar’s question, Clark asked one of his own. ‘Why did you and Bashar decide to become martyrs? I mean, do you guys really believe all that virgins-in-paradise bullshit?’

  ‘Martyrs?’ Omar said. ‘We weren’t going to be martyrs.’

  Then Omar explained. Their plan had been to drive the truck and another car – the car Muhammad had escaped in – into the tunnel, punch out the tires on the truck so it couldn’t be easily moved, and flee the scene in the second vehicle. They would have been miles away when the bomb exploded.

  That’s when Clark unveiled the part of Muhammad’s plan that Omar obviously didn’t know.

  ‘Omar,’ he said, ‘your pal Muhammad had set the timer to deto nate the bomb two seconds after you armed it.’

  Senator William Davis Broderick, Republican, the junior senator from Virginia, waited impatiently for his turn to speak.

  In the two weeks since those Muslim boys had tried to explode a bomb in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, Broderick had listened to his colleagues say all the usual and expected things. Some senators grumbled that controls for bomb-making materials like ammonium nitrate were still lacking. Yada yada yada, Broderick said to himself.

  Others complained that our borders were still too porous, that ter rorists could obviously enter and leave the country at will. Shake-ups at Homeland Security were coming, they promised. Hearings would soon be held, they warned.

  Yeah, like that was gonna help.

  But what Broderick really liked was that the senator currently speak ing had just given him the perfect lead-in to his speech. Patty Moran, the senior senator from Oregon, had just said that the federal gov ernment was continuing to underfund those poor cops and medics who would be first on the scene the next time al-Qaeda attacked. And then she said the magic words. She said them as if she’d been given an advance copy of Broderick’s speech. She said, ‘We must adequately fund our first responders, senators, because, as we all know, it’s not a matter of if there will be another attack, it’s only a matter of when.’

  Oh, Patty, if you weren’t a Democrat I’d kiss you.

  Finally, Broderick was at the podium. He went through the obliga tory will-the-senator-yield litany and then took his speech from the inside pocket of his suit, knowing he would never look at it. He had this one nailed.

  ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘we just heard the good gentlewoman from the great state of Oregon say what we’ve all heard so many times before. In fact, I’ve heard it said so many times I’m sick of it. She said that another terrorist attack is not a matter of if but when. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you it’s only a matter of if – if nothing changes.’

  Broderick’s aide, Nick Fine, had written the speech, and Broderick had to admit the man had done a good job. He knew Nick didn’t like him – hell, the man hated him – but when writing this particu lar speech ol’ Nick had really put his heart into it.

  ‘Senators,’ Broderick said, ‘I’m here today to propose changes, real changes, changes that will make this great country safer. It’s time to stop being po litically correct. It’s time to stop being afraid to speak the truth because someone will be offended. It is instead time for somebody in this body, this body chosen to represent and protect the people, to stand up and say what needs to be said. And I’m gonna say it.

  ‘The first thing I propose to change is that we quit calling this a war on terrorism. We’re not at war with terrorists. We’re at war with Muslim terrorists. It’s time to quit making redheaded schoolchildren and their grandmothers take off their shoes at airports when we all know the most likely terrorist is a young Muslim man.’

  Broderick could almost hear the redheads cheering.

  ‘And as the near miss in Baltimore clearly showed, the threat isn’t solely from outsiders, from foreigners from across the sea. My friends, even though we don’t like to say it out loud, the fact is that we are at risk from some of our own citizens because some of them – hopefully a very small number – have more allegiance to Islam than they do to their own country.’

  Broderick looked around the Senate chamber. It was half empty, and most of the senators in attendance were busy talking to their aides or reading e-mail on their BlackBerries. That’s the way it usually went. Politicians didn’t give speeches to change the minds of other politi cians; they gave speeches to get their faces on C-SPAN and their names in the papers. And Broderick’s name was going to be in the papers. As he was speaking, Nick Fine was e-mailing the text of his speech to everyone, friend and enemy alike, and Broderick figured that on this occasion his enemies were going to be at least as much help as his friends.

  ‘My fellow Americans, I’m going to introduce a bill that contains three provisions that will make this country safer. Some of you will be shocked, some of you will be angered, but as I said before it’s time for us to start doing something other than praying that we don’t have another nine-eleven. Yes, it’s time for somebody in the United States Senate to do something other than hold a bunch of daggone hear ings after we finish mopping up the blood from the latest Muslim attack.’

  And lay out his bill he did. He noticed that as he spoke a few sena tors actually began to pay attention – or, to be accurate, he could see them chuckling and shaking their heads. But they’d see who had the last laugh.

  His first proposal was to eliminate a large part of the threat by shipping every Muslim who was not an American out of the coun try. And he wasn’t kidding, he said. Students, visitors, immigrants with green cards … Well, adios, or whatever the Arabic word was for goodbye. He noted that Prime Minister Tony Blair had had a similar reaction toward foreign Muslims when the London subways were bombed. Blair, however, had wanted to deport only the rabble-rousers and agitators; Broderick wanted to take Tony’s good idea one large step further.

  His second proposal was that future visits by people from Mus lim countries would be significantly limited, carefully controlled, and primarily allowed only for business purposes. Being a good Re publican he knew that business mattered, but Muslims could send their children to Europe for school and if they wanted to take a vacation they could visit the Fijis. He knew some would argue that education and tourism were businesses, but hey, you had to draw the line somewhere.

  Muslims desiring to enter the country would have to apply for entry months in advance to permit time for background checks. Upon ar rival they would be photographed, fingerprinted, and DNA-sampled, and they would have to have an American sponsor who would be responsible for their conduct. Naturally, these people would be care fully monitored while they were in the States.

  But Broderick knew it was his last proposal that would draw the most attention: he proposed that background checks be performed on all Muslim Americans. These background checks would identify if a Muslim belonged to a radical group or supported radical causes and, most importantly, would identify who these people knew and were related to overseas.

  ‘The near demolition of the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel – God only knows how many would have died – showed that radical Muslims in this country, American citizens, can be proselytized and turned into weapons of mass destruction. We must take steps to guard against this very real threat.’

  Later, he wished that he hadn’t used the word registry, but he did. He said that all Muslims who successfully passed the background checks he was proposing would then be entered into a registry, one of the benefits of this being that airport travel for these folks would become less bothersome. He wasn’t saying they wouldn’t have to go through the metal detectors, just that they were less likely to be pulled off to the side and patted down. He noted that the idea of travelers having some sort of special identification to speed up airport screen ing was nothing new.

  ‘I’m just saying let’s start with the Muslims,’ Broderick said.

  Joe DeMarco saw Mahoney sitting on the warped wooden bleachers with five black women and a couple of toddlers. The football players they were watching appea
red to be ten or eleven years of age, their helmets too big for their heads. The team in the hand-me-down, wash faded orange jerseys was called the Tigers; the other team, their color blue, their uniforms just as worn, were the Cougars. Just as DeMarco reached the bleachers, the Cougars’ quarterback threw a perfect ten yard spiral to a kid who was about three feet tall and who was imme diately buried under a sea of orange shirts.

  ‘Good hands, son!’ Mahoney yelled out. ‘Way to stick. Way to hang on to that ball.’

  DeMarco had no idea why Mahoney did this – the stress of the job, a need for some time alone – but whatever the reason, every once in a while he’d leave his office and sneak over to southeast D.C. and watch the kids play. He’d sit there on the sidelines with the mothers, completely out of place, a big white-haired white man dressed in a topcoat and a suit in a part of Washington that was predominantly black. The other odd thing was that he wasn’t usually recognized; this was odd because John Fitzpatrick Mahoney was the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. It seemed as if folks who lived in this section of the city had lost their faith in politicians a long time ago and no longer paid all that much attention to the players, including those at the top of the roster.

  DeMarco took a seat on the bleachers next to Mahoney. Mahoney glanced over at him – clearly irritated that he was there – and turned his attention back to the game. DeMarco took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Mahoney. ‘I ran into Martin Born up in Boston,’ he said. ‘He asked me to pass this on to you.’

  Born was a Boston developer, one of Mahoney’s wealthier constitu ents, and he had his small avaricious heart set on a wetland area known to be home to some variety of slow-breeding duck. Mahoney, at least for the moment, was siding with the ducks.

  Mahoney started to open the envelope, but the Cougars’ quarter back was sacked just then by a ten-year-old who looked big enough to play for Notre Dame. ‘You gotta double-team that guy, boys. Protect your quarterback!’ he yelled.

  One of the mothers, a woman as big as Mahoney, turned to him and said, ‘They gotta triple-team that one. That chile, he must weigh a hundred fifty pounds.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mahoney said, ‘but that kid playin’ right guard, he’s stoppin’ him by himself about half the time. That kid’s got game.’

  ‘You got that right,’ the woman said. ‘That’s my sister’s boy, Jamal.’

  When the Cougars took a time-out, Mahoney ripped open the envelope and fanned out a number of hundred-dollar bills, maybe ten of them. ‘What the hell’s this?’ he said. ‘A tip?’

  DeMarco just shook his head. He was a lawyer, although he’d never practiced law, and he occupied an unusual position on Mahoney’s staff. If asked his job, he would have said he was the speaker’s personal troubleshooter, but one of his duties was bringing Mahoney envelopes like the one he’d just delivered. There were times DeMarco didn’t like his job.

  ‘Mavis sent me over here to get you,’ DeMarco said. Mavis was Mahoney’s secretary. He didn’t bother to add: Which I wouldn’t have had to do if you’d ever turn on your goddamn cell phone! ‘You got a roomful of people waiting to talk to you about Broderick’s bill.’

  Mahoney shook his head. ‘What a waste of time. That bill’s not goin’ anywhere. Broderick’s a fruitcake.’

  DeMarco shrugged. ‘I dunno. People are scared.’

  ‘So what?’ Mahoney said. ‘Just because – ’ Mahoney leaped to his feet. ‘Offside! Number eight, he was offside!’

  ‘Yeah, Lionel,’ the big woman said. ‘You shoulda seen that, for cryin’ out loud. Them glasses you got, they thick enough to see stuff on the moon.’

  Mahoney whooped.

  Lionel, a man in his sixties, a good guy who had volunteered his time to ref the game, glared over at the woman – and the speaker.

  ‘What are you lookin’ over here for?’ the woman yelled. ‘If you wasn’t always lookin’ at the women in the stands, you’da seen that boy was offside too.’

  Mahoney sat back down, happy. Nothing he liked better than start ing a ruckus.

  ‘Mavis said the meeting was supposed to start half an hour ago,’ DeMarco said.

  ‘Aw, goddammit,’ Mahoney said, but he rose from the bench. He started to walk away, then turned back to the woman. ‘Hey, you got some kind of fund for uniforms and stuff?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, suspicious now, not sure what Mahoney was up to.

  ‘Well, here,’ Mahoney said, and handed her the envelope that Mr. Born had stuffed with cash. ‘Get those boys some new jerseys – and football shoes too. You know the kind with little rubber cleats on the bottom, so they won’t be slippin’ all the time.’

  1

  The two F-16 Falcons screamed down the runway at Andrews Air Force Base.

  Pete Dalton – Lieutenant Colonel Dalton – lived for this. There was absolutely no other experience on the planet like flying an armed-to-the-teeth air force fighter.

  It was the week before Thanksgiving, and when the klaxon went off, Dalton and his wingman had been sitting in the ready trailer at Andrews, bitching that they’d been assigned to work the holiday, although Dalton didn’t really care that much. Then the klaxon blared and they were out of the trailer, into their planes, and tearing down the runway five minutes later.

  As they were ascending into the skies over Washington, they were briefed on the situation. Some idiot in a small slow-moving plane had just taken off from an airfield in Stafford, Virginia. The guy was at three thousand feet and doing eighty-six knots, almost a hundred miles an hour. He had flown briefly to the south, then turned northeast and crossed into the outer zone and was not responding to air traffic controllers at Dulles.

  There are two air defense zones around the nation’s capital, an inner and an outer zone. The outer zone has a ragged, roughly circular boundary that extends thirty to fifty miles outward from the Washington Monument. This zone is called the ADIZ – the Air Defense Identification Zone. To enter the ADIZ a pilot has to identify himself, must have an operating transponder that broadcasts a signal identifying his aircraft, and must remain in continuous two-way communication with FAA controllers. The second zone, the inner zone, is the no-fly zone. The no-fly zone is a perfect circle extending out sixteen miles from the Washington Monument. The only aircraft allowed to enter this area aside from commercial traffic going in and out of Reagan National Airport have to be specially cleared.

  The fool in question hadn’t identified himself, his transponder was either malfunctioning or disabled, and he wasn’t responding to queries from FAA controllers. He was doing everything wrong. When the unidentified aircraft was two miles inside the ADIZ, thirty-three miles and approximately twenty minutes from all the government buildings in D.C., a whole bunch of things began to happen.

  An air force colonel in Rome, New York – the officer commanding NORAD’S Northeast Air Defense Sector – scrambled the F-16s out of Andrews; Blackhawk helicopters under the control of Homeland Security lifted off from Reagan National; the Secret Service and the U.S. Capitol Police were alerted and told to be prepared to evacuate the White House, the Capitol, and the Supreme Court; and men in secret locations throughout Washington who are qualified to fire surface-to-air missiles were notified and told to stand by.

  At the same time, four people were paged: the secretary of defense, his deputy, a navy admiral located at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado who had overall command of NORAD, and an air force major general located at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida who was responsible for NORAD’S operations in the continental United States. These four people were paged because they had been delegated the authority by the president of the United States to shoot down a plane entering the no-fly zone.

  Dalton was fairly certain, however, that it wouldn’t come to that; it never had in the past. He expected that within the next two minutes the dummy from Stafford would be on his radio saying, ‘Oh, shit, sorry,’ about sixteen times and then get headed in the right direction, and Dalton would be
ordered back to Andrews before he could have any fun.

  But these incidents, pilots breaching the ADIZ, occurred two or three times a week, and once Dalton had been on duty when it happened three times in one day. These muttonheads who couldn’t read a map or a compass, who had their radios turned off or set to the wrong frequency, would blunder into the ADIZ and then have the livin’ shit scared out of ’em when two F-16s went roaring past them at six hundred miles an hour.

  ‘Huntress. Hawk Flight. Bogey still not responding. Snap vector three-twenty for thirty. Intercept and ID. Noses cold.’

  Huntress was the call sign for the colonel com manding the Northeastern Air Defense Sector. He had tactical command of the F-16s. Hawk Flight was the two F-16s: Hawk One was Pete Dalton; Hawk Two was his wingman, Major Jeff Fields. Snap vector 320 for 30 meant the bogey was on a bearing of 320 degrees and 30 miles from the Hawk Flight’s po sition. Noses cold meant they were to approach with their weapons systems unarmed – which was a damn good thing for the bogey.

  Dalton responded. ‘Hawk One. Huntress. Copy that. Proceeding to intercept.’

  The unidentified aircraft was now twenty-four miles and fourteen minutes from Washington, D.C.

  Dalton could see the bogey on his radar, and a minute later he could make out a dot in the sky that had to be it. He and Fields headed directly at the dot, and when they were half a mile away, and the bogey was clearly visible – and they were visible to it – Dalton split to the right and Fields to the left, and they blasted past the plane, coming within a hundred yards of its wingtips. Dalton looked over his shoulder and saw the bogey wobble in the jet wash caused by the F-16s, and he figured that whoever was flying that baby was sitting there right now in a puddle of his own piss.