Payback

revealed only part of it. He had a prodigious memory but there were so many different types of MANPADS and their subspecies, SHORADS, Short Range Air Defense Systems, and VESHORADS, Very Short Range Air Defense Systems, designed to answer every infantryman’s dreams of a quick, light, “fire and forget” antiaircraft missile, that he knew he’d have to consult his scores of computer and old Rolodex files. The worrying detail — the part that didn’t fit the Stinger profile, given the evidence of a full air sock, that is, a head wind at JFK at the time — was the Mach 2.2.

As Freeman and Aussie were considering the possibilities on the general’s cell phone, he heard the White house line go dead. Must’ve been accidental.

He was correct. In the excitement of the White House receiving an on-the-spot discovery by the NYPD’s JFK detachment, Eleanor’s aide, in trying to contact the Pentagon, had killed the Prenty-Freeman connection. She rang back within minutes. “General, I’m sorry you were cut off.” She sounded breathless. “NYPD have found what they believe is a missile launcher. LAPD have also found one near LAX.”

Freeman wasn’t surprised. The moment you unleashed a “fire and forget,” you ditched the launcher and walked, as Oswald had done after he’d fired the shot at President Kennedy, though the general was astonished by the number of people who, though they didn’t know the difference between a rifle and a toy cap gun, naively believed that Oswald was the only shooter. In any event, Freeman was in no doubt that all three airliners had been downed by shoot-and-scoot teams. Another launcher would probably turn up at Dallas/Fort Worth.

“Painted blue?” he asked Eleanor Prenty.

His know-it-all nonchalance annoyed her. “Blue? I don’t know. Why?”

“Ever since the attack on the Israeli Arika plane in Mombassa back in ’02, terrorists have been painting the launchers blue, the PDC, practice designation color, for all U.S. MANPAD launchers when dummy warheads are being fired. So,” Freeman continued, “if any other — real — U.S. troops had seen the blue-colored launchers, they would have thought they were just more practice dummy warheads.”

“Hold on,” she said sharply. There was a ten-second wait as he heard her ask someone, “JFK and LAX launchers, yes — were they both blue?

“Yes,” she told Freeman, “apparently they were.”

“Shooters might have been in U.S. Army uniforms,” added Freeman.

“So zero chance of finding the shooters or the launchers?” said Eleanor.

“Not necessarily.” The general was ransacking his memory for MANPAD hits. In Afghanistan against the Soviet, the U.S.-Stinger-supplied mujahideen had brought down 270 aircraft, and they weren’t big 7E7s or jumbos but agile close-air support attack helos, including the highly maneuverable Soviet Hind gunships and fighter aircraft. For the mujahideen there had been no need to jettison the reusable launchers, but for terrorists audaciously attacking American civilians in three of the nation’s biggest and most heavily populated airports, ditching the launchers of course made more sense.

Then he recalled an attack by Chechen rebels on the sleek, updated international terminal at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. He clicked the mouse to bring up the file on his laptop but remembered the details of the attack before the computer had it on-screen. The crucial point had been that though the Chechen terrorists had fired MANPADs, they’d ditched the launchers and vanished. How? Freeman went to the NYPD’s overhead traffic cam on the expressway and saw the gridlock of traffic — none of it moving except for police and security vehicles — their reds, whites, and blues flashing frenetically all around JFK’s perimeter.

“I’ve got it,” he told Eleanor, recalling the details of the Chechen attack. “They’re hiding out in a safe house close to the airport — waiting until the hullabaloo dies down and…” Switching the computer screen back and forth between the NYPD cam window and the Chechen file, he suddenly announced to Eleanor, “Chechen terrorists were belted,” by which he meant they had had dynamite belts beneath their battle tunics, as Iraqi Shiite “martyrs” had later armed themselves against the Americans in ’03 and ’04. “And they could be in NYPD uniforms.”

“Shit!”

“I don’t want to depress you further, but from the firing point position I saw on the video—”

“Which one?”

“The one with the eyewitness — guy who thought it was fired from a pickup. The point of firing looks close enough to the airport that they could be changing clothing in the airport.”

“My God!” said Eleanor. “It’s a zoo out at JFK.”

“Not to mention LAX and Dallas/Fort Worth,” said Freeman.

Eleanor Prenty knew from her experience of crises involving airport delays that passengers would put up with it overnight, but then would start demanding that they be put up in hotels, be transported back to the city. And there’d be added pressure from delivery trucks and taxis, and toilet facilities would be overloaded. “By the time there are enough cops to cope,” she told Freeman, “it’ll be like a sieve of escape hatches out there.”

“Those two discarded launchers,” Freeman said. “Have we got their MIDs?” It was obvious she didn’t know what he meant, and so he added, “Manufacturer’s identification numbers. Without them you can’t keep track of inventory in a factory. Do we have them from the launchers?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll find out.”

In fact, the FBI field forensic lab was already examining the launchers for MID numbers. It had proved helpful in the past — the same launcher used in the near-miss against the Arika Airlines’ Boeing 757–300 of November ’02 had been used in other attacks.

“If we can find out where the launchers came from,” said Freeman, “we could pay it a visit.”

“The President’s already determined to do that, but we’ve had so much stuff coming in, I don’t know whether anyone’s determined the actual source, even if they’ve got those MID serial numbers. My God, Douglas, how are they getting them into this country?” Eleanor asked exasperatedly.

“Through slimeballs like unlicensed arms dealers.”

“I’ll press the agencies for the serial numbers.”

“If I can be of further help…”

“Don’t worry, Douglas. The Pentagon might have exiled you; I haven’t.”

He was at once gratified and humiliated that his only conduit as a “retiree” to the halls of power was not via his reputation, his past reputation, as a gung-ho leader of Special Forces in America’s defense, but only through the goodwill of Eleanor Prenty. A civilian.

“I appreciate what you said,” responded Freeman, then said good-bye, his tone, one of a forgotten champion, noticed by Margaret — who, getting ready for bed, passed by in her robe, beneath which she was wearing a brand- new translucent pink nightgown, of a kind that her mother would have condemned as “blatant.” And Margaret would have agreed, but the awful carnage of today, the sight of the black, smoldering heaps that only seconds before had been hundreds of human beings pulsating with life and hope, had been an epiphany in Margaret’s life, provoking a determination to no longer simply exist, to vegetate in a lonely world of restrained, reined-in spinsterdom, but to cast off her uptight, buttoned-down feelings of guilt about the love she’d felt for her sister’s husband all these years. Catherine was long deceased. Anyway, wouldn’t she have wanted Douglas to be, well, comforted? Margaret felt it was time for her need to be comforted. And today they had broken the ice, through the deep freeze she had built up between them, but she was afraid that now that the ice of her guilt had cracked, she would be — well, she would be humiliated.

She said good night. He was still working at his laptop but gave her a smile. “Good night, Margaret. You’ve been a great help.” After all this time, it was as if he’d kissed her.

“Don’t—,” she began, quickly aborting the phrase “stay up too late” and instead encouraged him. “Don’t forget there’s lots of food — in the icebox.”

He laughed. She smiled, but was nonplused. “What’s so funny?”

“ ‘Icebox.’ It’s — such an old-fashioned term. I like it.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“God bless,” she said, and went to her bedroom. “Icebox,” she said softly. Well, she wasn’t going to be an icebox. She searched in her dresser drawer for a small six-by-one-and-a-half-inch square white box purchased in a moment of fantasy years ago in an out-of-town drugstore. She took the tube of viscous liquid from the box and, removing her robe, admired her figure in the mirror — full breasts, firm tummy and bottom, front and side-on beneath the slinky film of pink silk. “Not bad,” she dared whisper, “for an old-young girl of fifty-five.”