would be hurled at you and you’d feel like melting into the floor. When it was just you and your tormentors, it was bad enough, but ironically that was much easier to deal with than when you were with friends. Even now, at twenty-nine, the memories of the childhood humiliation made her face burn with indignation.
Oh, to heck with the paranoid, no-touching rules. She put her arm around young Michael. “What are you looking forward to most, Michael?”
His smile was golden, and it struck Susan then that the boy was starved for affection at home.
“The guards at Buckingham Palace,” he said, “with the big bearskin hats.”
“Not bearskin!” cut in Tony. “Can’t kill bears anymore. It’s artificial fur. I read about it.”
“Well, before artificial fur came along,” said Susan, “people had to keep warm in the winter with animal skins and fur.”
“Gross,” riposted Tony.
“Tony Rivella,” she said in a tone seldom heard from her, “what is your problem? Aren’t you looking forward to seeing London?”
He glowered up at her. “Yeah.”
“Well, what would
Tony shrugged. “Dunno. Big Ben, I guess.”
She turned to Michael, raising her voice above the high scream of the engines approaching full pitch. “How about you, Michael? You want to see Big Ben?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve seen it in the movies,” boasted Tony, but his tone was suddenly less pugnacious.
Susan put her other arm about Tony. “We’re going to have a great time. Right?”
Both of them said, “Right.” As the Dreamliner lifted off, Susan instinctively held them closer.
Michael glimpsed the buildings of JFK rushing by, the Manhattan skyline in the distance and headlights coming on along the expressway, a wink of one bright light pretty against the purple dusk.
It was the last thing he saw, the missile slamming into the starboard-side engine, fragments penetrating and igniting the wing’s fuel tank. The pilot had no chance. The 7E7 plummeted hard right from seventy feet, the wheels not yet retracted, their spinning throwing off burning fuel like a grinding wheel spitting sparks, the fully loaded and fully fueled plane slamming into the tarmac at 122 miles per hour; the time elapsed between the Boeing taking off and it crashing into an inferno, 3.8 seconds. It was 4:48 P.M., Eastern Standard Time.
In Los Angeles it was 1:48 P.M. West Coast time. Japanese Airlines Jumbo Flight 824 taking off from LAX was struck on its port-side number-two engine. At Dallas/Fort Worth, the terrorists, in the final act of simultaneous horror, brought down a Brazilian Air jumbo bound for Rio.
Unbeknownst to the general public, as CNN’s anchorwoman Marte Price explained during the network’s sensationalist “Triangle of Terror” report on the New York — L.A. — Dallas/Fort Worth hits by the three MANPADS — Man Portable Air Defense System — missiles, modern jet engines and their mountings are built to contain a wide range of explosions. But what had presumably happened in all three crashes, as Marte Price’s audience of 14 million were told, by virtue of quickly generated computer graphics and by aeronautical experts, was that shrapnel had probably penetrated the wings, and thus the fuel, which in LAX’s case the air traffic controllers saw spewing out of the starboard wing in a plethora of high-pressure leaks, had been ignited by sparking nine seconds later. Exit stairways were deployed by flight attendants on the JAL plane, allowing some people to temporarily escape, even though most of these perished in the flash fire that swept under the fuselage from starboard to port, once the flood of fuel had been ignited, the flames fanned by the brisk San Fernando breeze.
“Tragic though it is,” Marte Price continued, “those nine seconds probably saved some of the two hundred and fifty passengers aboard.” She paused. “Unfortunately we cannot say that about either of the attacks on the Boeing 7E7 at JFK or the Brazilian Airlines Boeing 777 flight out of Fort Worth/Dallas. For more details of the attack at Los Angeles International, we go to Adrienne Alamada.”
“Marte, the scene here, as you can tell, is horrendous. The smell, smoke, and confusion…” Alamada covered her left ear in an attempt to muffle the screaming of sirens as dozens of fire trucks and ambulances sped away from the remains of the JAL 777 Jumbo, only its blackened, smoking tail section and cockpit resembling anything like the remains of an aircraft. “Marte, it’s too early for any details, but ground crew who’ve asked to remain anonymous have suggested that many of the dead probably succumbed from lack of oxygen because of the dense black and white toxic clouds. There have been reports of people in the airport hearing an explosion prior to the crash, but this has not been confirmed.”
Some burn victims had mercifully died while waiting on the tarmac for medical attention, which was slow in coming because of what initially had been a paramedics’ strike against the city. The labor protest, however, collapsed the moment the alarm bells began ringing in the various precincts, but by the time the fleet of ambulances arrived at LAX, more burn victims, many of them children, had died from shock and/or multiple burns, others expiring en route to area hospitals.
Half an hour later, Marte Price announced on CNN that while precise numbers were not yet available, airline officials had confirmed that there had been at least a thousand passengers and crew aboard the two fully loaded jumbos and the one fully loaded Dreamliner.
CHAPTER THREE
As the nation and the world watched the first reports from Marte Price and Adrienne Alamada, stunned by the three — obviously simultaneously timed — attacks, they heard the usual unthinking comments of survivors who proclaimed that they’d prayed to God — as if those who had lain dying hadn’t — and that “He was looking out for me.” On FOX, there were near-distance shots of the unidentifiable dead being carted away.
Numbness and sadness momentarily took over the nation, flags at half-mast, forlorn impromptu roadside monuments sprouting overnight. The one image in particular that filled the country with disgust, simultaneously arresting the attention and inciting the rage of everyone — except the terrorists and their apologists — was the black-and-white photograph of three black, charred bodies sitting together, the remains, a coroner said, of a woman, who had obviously been pulling two children protectively to her at the moment of their death. It was impossible to tell until further tests and passenger list verification were completed, but the coroner said he thought that the two children — the trio had been aboard the JFK Boeing 7E7 flight bound for London — were boys. National Transportation Safety Board investigations hadn’t been able to get inside the burned-out hulk of the $130 million Dreamliner for an hour and a half, the tangle of superheated alloys and melted materials that had earned the 7E7 fame as the first all-composite-wing aircraft still too hot to approach.
Within hours of the three shoulder-fired missile attacks, during FOX’s 10:00 P.M. newscast, it was announced that a group calling itself “Army of Palestine,” loosely allied with Hamas, claimed “credit” for the triple attack “against the Great Satan, the United States.”
“Army of Palestine, my ass!” thundered retired general Douglas Freeman, punching his TV remote back to CNN.
“Douglas!” came an imperious command from his sister-in-law, who was busily preparing dinner. “I’ve asked you before, please watch your language!”
Douglas Freeman, the legendary and voluble general made famous throughout the armies of the world for his outspokenness and for what had become celebrated as his brilliant WUA — withdrawal U-turn attack — against state-of-the-art Russian-made main battle tanks in a U.S.-led intervention around Lake Baikal, now said nothing, sitting like a chastised boy, glaring at the TV screen, mouthing an obscenity at CNN’s BBC hookup in the Middle East.
“What’s wrong now?” asked his sister-in-law, Margaret, a woman who, in her mid-fifties, still possessed the striking beauty of a gracefully aging film star and whom he was obliged to visit once annually, in Monterey, fulfilling a promise to his beloved wife, Catherine, who had died years before.
“Douglas, what’s the matter?” Margaret pressed. She knew his silence usually betokened disapproval. “You aren’t sulking, are you?”
“Certainly not! What’s wrong is that I’m listening to the latest anti-American sh — nonsense from the BBC. They’re yapping about ‘root causes’ again. Root causes for butchering hundreds of Americans, many of them
