Tucson (TUS)
Flt#: Southwest Airlines SWA694
Dest: Chicago, IL (MDW)
Departure: June 6, 6:45 p.m. Mountain Time
Boeing 737–300, twin-engine jet
150 passengers, 8 crew
El Paso (ELP)
Flt#: Continental 545
Dest: Boston, MA (BOS)
Departure: June 6, 7:41 p.m. Central Time
Boeing 737-300
150 passengers, 8 crew
San Antonio (SAT)
Flt#: SkyWest Airlines OO5429
Dest: Los Angeles, CA (LAX)
Departure: June 6, 7:40 p.m. Central Time
Canadian CRJ900LR, twin-jet (tail)
76 passengers, 4 crew
The planes would be lifting off within minutes of one another, and all of Samad’s crews had finished checking in to say that their equipment was ready and that all of their flights were running on time, despite some earlier concerns about summer storms. Samad no longer had any uncertainties. He’d realized that even if he gave up, walked away, guided by the guilt imposed upon him by the memory of his dead father, that Talwar and Niazi would go on without him, that the others would go on without him. There was no stopping the jihad. He would die a fool and a coward. Thus before leaving for the mission, he had lit a match and had burned the photograph of his father, had left the ashes in the bathroom sink. They said their afternoon prayer, and then Samad had driven away from the apartment with narrow eyes and a clenched fist.
An airport police car cruised through the lot, the officers searching for unattended vehicles. Samad lifted his cell phone and pretended to speak. As he’d seen before, the other drivers were entirely consumed by their electronic devices, and there was an eerie calm that settled over the lot, broken momentarily by the next flight thundering on by.
5:36 p.m.
Samad brought up the iPhone app as their secondary source of identifying their target plane. He’d come to discover there was a thirty-second delay in the information the app gave him, but that didn’t matter. All Talwar needed to do was sight the target, and the missile would do the rest.
5:37 p.m.
The seconds were minutes, the minutes hours, as his pulse began to race. The sky had turned a bluish yellow, streaked by beams of the setting sun, with only a few finger clouds to the east. They would have a spectacular and unobstructed view of the launch.
His phone vibrated. And there they were: the text-message reports from their team inside the airport.
At the age of sixteen, Dan Burleson had soloed in a Cessna 150 over Modesto, California. He was flying planes before he had a driver’s license. He’d saved all of his lawn-cutting money for two years to take flying lessons. He’d grown up in the Salinas Valley and had been mesmerized by the crop-duster pilots swooping down to deliver their cargo. He knew that’s what he wanted to do. For the next three decades he pursued his passion for flying, spraying cotton fields in Georgia, serving as an airborne traffic reporter in Florida, and flying banking cargo and medical specimens out of the Southeast. He piloted single-engine planes, Cessna 21 °Centurions, and twin-engine cargo planes, Beechcraft Baron 58s. He’d experienced every conceivable equipment failure imaginable, flying on one engine and nearly crashing when his plane was flipped over during a storm. He could hear the rivets popping and felt certain he was going to die.
All of which was to say that Mr. Dan Burleson was not your average commercial airline passenger. He had a keen interest in what was happening in the cockpit and could tell you when the pilots were switching command to the flight computer to literally take over the plane during the climb out to altitude. The pilot would input turns and altitude directions via keyboard tabulation or by rotating a dial to the direction desired. For example, Airport Traffic Control might call with “Delta 1234, turn right to 180 degrees.” The pilot would rotate a dial on the FMS (Flight Management System) to 180, and the plane would start turning in that direction to meet that instruction received from ATC while the plane was being controlled by the FMS computer. Every time he flew, Dan would sit there imagining what was happening in the cockpit. Call it force of habit.
On this particular evening, he was seated in 21J, the exit row, with the window at his right shoulder. At over six-feet-five and three hundred pounds, he never had much choice in seat selection. Exit row was the name of the game. He was on his way to Minneapolis for a weeklong fishing trip with two high school buddies who promised him trophy-sized smallmouth bass. The wife had given Dan the okay, and his grown son, who’d been invited, had been forced to work instead.
They were taxiing along toward the runway, and Dan leaned back and glanced across the aisle: a college- aged girl was reading a textbook with the word
“Please slide your tray tables to their upright position …”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dan said with a groan.
The fifty-space San Park cell-phone lot was located across a tree-lined drive from the Coast Guard Station’s main gate and its rows of tiled-roof buildings. The lot was a rectangular strip of pavement with a single row of angled parking spaces set along tall rows of shrubs and a chain-link fence, beyond which stood hangars and other airport service facilities.
“Meyers split up his people. He’s got six across the street at the Coast Guard Station, and he’s got another four getting up on the roofs of the hangars to the north,” said Towers. “The red Nissan is parked at the far end, south side. We’re the team moving in.”
“Not you, just me,” said Moore, pulling into the lot and taking the nearest spot to their right beside a yellow Park-n-Ride van with dark tinted windows.
“I’m good,” argued Towers. “I’m coming.”
Moore winced. “You’re the boss, boss.” He unzipped his jacket so he’d have quick access to his shoulder holster, then hustled out of the SUV, keeping close to the shrubs, Towers tight to his shadow. A few SWAT team operators crawled catlike up the backside of the Coast Guard Station’s roof. Moore caught movement up on the roofs of the hangars to their right, and for just a second he saw a head pop up, then vanish. These SWAT unit guys were hard-core assaulters, breachers, and sniper/observers, outfitted for war with Kevlar helmets, goggles, bulletproof vests, MOLLE (Modular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment) gear buckling with attached equipment pouches, and H&K MP5 submachine guns — the standard-issue rifles for everyone but the snipers, who fielded the Precision Arms.308-caliber sniper rifle. One of Moore’s buddies from SEAL Team 8 had left the Navy to become an FBI SWAT team member, and he’d schooled Moore in their weapons, tactics, techniques, and procedures. He’d even tried to recruit Moore, who at the time was being heavily courted by the CIA. The point was, Moore felt comfortable supported by these determined and highly trained operators.
The sign posted at the lot’s entrance warned of a one-hour time limit and that vehicles must remain running
