Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (277 page)

Tony slammed the door of the cruiser, sealing the dead cop inside with a satisfying clunk, then jumped when Brian, standing right behind him, announced, “We’re all done and ready to roll.”

He decided he must be extremely tired. There was no way any of these American pseudo-terrorists, despite graduating from the rigorous Afghanistan training program, should have been able to approach from behind without him being aware of it.

He closed his eyes and centered himself, focusing on the steps he needed to accomplish to achieve his goal. Right now that meant getting the Stinger missiles out of here and as far away from Tucson as possible before daybreak. Sleep would have to wait.

“Thank you,” he said to Brian, forcing himself to remain calm and doing his best to keep the annoyance out of his voice. He hated for these nonbelievers to see him at anything less than his best, although he doubted Brian or any of the others would even notice.

A quick inspection of the back of the panel truck convinced Tony that the missile crates were well secured with bungee cords and completely covered with wool blankets. Anyone looking into the back of the truck would see only piles of unidentifiable material. A closer examination would reveal the true nature of the truck’s cargo, but Tony would ensure no one made that examination. Anyone attempting to do so would suffer a fate identical to that of the cop lying dead in his own vehicle just a couple of dozen feet away.

The team climbed into the two cars that had been used to stage the accident, while Tony slid behind the wheel of the panel truck. The military transport vehicle they left parked in the rear of the lot. There was no way to hide it effectively, and it would be discovered soon enough in any event.

The three-vehicle caravan snaked its way along the rutted tarmac to the front of the Southwest RV Center. It was now nearly four o’clock in the morning, and the horizon to the east would begin lightening soon. Already the sky in that direction looked a little lighter than it had a few minutes ago.

The team pulled onto the road, moving west toward Interstate 10. The plan was to take the highway north, hoping to lose any initial pursuit in the urban sprawl of the Phoenix/Glendale/Scottsdale metropolitan complex, before continuing on to Flagstaff and then turning east on I-40 to begin the long drive back to their home base in Washington, D.C.

A few cars were beginning to populate the roads, early risers getting a jump start on the workday or perhaps a few heading home after a long night of drinking and partying. The team observed no law enforcement activity between the RV center and the highway. They hit the interstate and accelerated to an invisible sixty-five miles per hour and drove for ten hours straight, stopping only for food and fuel. Things were right on schedule.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Nick had taken just a week off from work following Lisa’s death, but as he walked through the double doors into the Boston Consolidated TRACON operations room to begin his workweek, he felt as though nothing and everything had changed. He flashed his key card at the scanner mounted outside the door and flinched like always as the annoying, high-pitched beep sounded, signifying the reader had recognized the chip embedded inside his ID card and he was permitted to enter.

The door swung open noiselessly, and Nick stepped into the massive room. Built in 2004 to house four separate radar approach control facilities, the building was currently home to just two—the controllers formerly quartered at Logan International Airport in Boston, and those from Manchester-Boston Regional Airport in Manchester, New Hampshire. This meant that the majority of the radar scopes placed side by side around the outside of the room—shaped more or less in a fair approximation of a giant Roller Derby rink—were unmanned, giving it the look of an air traffic control ghost town of sorts.

Glancing to the right as he entered, Nick saw the controllers in the Manchester Area, at the moment operating with three radar sectors plus a flight data position. Each controller sitting at a scope was responsible for his or her own sector within the Manchester airspace; that is, a slice of the airspace “pie” belonging to Manchester was delegated to each position.

The flight data controller answered landline calls, handled coordination for the radar sectors when they were too busy to do it themselves, and took care of routine paperwork. Fully certified controllers rotated among positions and most tried their best to avoid flight data, which was almost universally considered boring.

Nick walked toward his own area of specialization: the Boston Area, located in the rear of the operations room. At the moment it was running with five radar sectors plus one flight data position.

Within the giant oval of the operations room was what controllers referred to as the inner ring—a console built approximately ten feet inside the room, running in a complete circuit around the oval like the radar scopes but with five openings, each roughly four feet in width, allowing people access into and through the ring.

The inner ring was where management tended to congregate when in the ops room. The workspace for each area’s supervisor was inside the inner ring, and the Traffic Management Coordinators—tasked with the responsibility of ensuring a smooth flow of traffic into and out of the facility’s airspace—worked inside it as well.

The history of FAA air traffic control was filled with decades of animosity between controllers—who often considered themselves the only ones who did any real work in the FAA’s Air Traffic Division—and management, many of who were viewed by controllers as “weak sticks” who couldn’t handle the constant unrelenting pressure of separating airplanes and had moved on to positions with more authority but fewer challenges than live air traffic control.

For their part, many in management—especially those above the level of first-line supervisors who worked next the controllers in the ops room and faced many of the same pressures the controllers did—considered air traffic controllers independent, overpaid prima donnas, to be kept in line by any means necessary, up to and including management by fiat and the imposition of strict disciplinary measures for minor, non-safety related infractions.

From the disastrous PATCO strike of 1981, when nearly all of America’s air traffic controllers participating in an illegal job action against the government were summarily fired by President Reagan and replaced with an entirely new workforce, to the rancorous contract negotiations of 2005 and 2006, when management finally broke off talks and simply imposed their own set of work rules on controllers in an attempt to break their union, now known as NATCA, controllers and management were often at odds. In the eyes of controllers, management was often arrogant and militaristic, while to management, controllers were often arrogant and disrespectful of their authority.

This historically adversarial working relationship eventually led to a situation where controllers often tried their hardest to avoid anything more than a purely professional relationship with representatives of FAA management and vice versa, even though most of the personnel populating management ranks were made up of people who had, at one time or another, done the very same job the controllers were doing now.

The inner ring at the BCT was a perfect example of this fundamental disconnect. Management considered it their province within the ops room, and controllers tended to stay outside it.

As Nick walked toward the back of the ops room, skirting the inner ring, he glanced at the giant plasma screens placed high on the walls above the radar scopes encircling the room. Displayed on one screen was a depiction of the equipment monitoring the status of all the approach aids serving both major airports in the airspace, Manchester and Boston. Another featured a real-time display of all the traffic inbound to each airport from across the country and overseas, and still another screen showed the status board indicating which runway configurations were in use at each airport.

To the uninitiated, the darkened ops room looked impressive and intimidating, with its electronic equipment and flashing lights and buzzers and alarms. Even to people who moved thousands of airplanes through a congested chunk of airspace every day, it was pretty impressive when they actually stopped and thought about it, which controllers rarely had the time or the inclination to do. The ops room was just where they went to work and did their thing. Another day at the office.

Nick trudged through the dimly lit room, approaching the Boston Area slowly and with some trepidation. Air traffic controllers tended to be strong-willed, decisive people, with take-charge personalities and irreverent senses of humor, given to regarding virtually any situation as fodder for a joke. Nick supposed it was a natural coping mechanism in a job where you held more lives in your hands every single day than a brain surgeon did in his entire career.

Today, though, Nick wondered how he would be received. Losing a spouse, especially at such a young age, was no joking matter, and he felt nervous, on edge, and reluctant to face his coworkers. It was almost as if he thought people would view him with suspicion, like he had done something wrong, which, of course, he hadn’t. His wife had been killed, for crying out loud, murdered; it wasn’t like he had something to be ashamed of.

He needn’t have worried. No sooner did the controllers spot him in the gloom of the low TRACON lighting than a shout went up from John Donaldson working the Bedford sector. “Futz, welcome back, my man. We’ve missed you! It’s been boring as hell around here. There’s nobody as much fun to heckle while they’re running their airplanes together on Final Vector as you!”

Nick grinned in spite of himself. The nickname Futz had been bestowed on him by someone—he couldn’t remember who—when he had first arrived at the facility as a wet-behind-the-ears trainee years ago. It was short for Fucking Nuts, which had been his style when working Final Vector. He would aim everybody at the same point in space, then at the last minute begin to sort them out. As an operating technique, it was not the sort of thing you would ever train someone to do, but from his earliest days as a controller Nick had possessed an uncanny ability to visualize the sequence of arrivals developing well before anyone else could, so what appeared random and accidental to the uninitiated was in reality a well-choreographed aerial ballet.

“Hey, John, thanks a lot. I’d like to say it’s good to see you too, but I still find your hideousness repulsive, even in the dark.”

“Jeez, now you’re starting to sound like my wife,” Donaldson shot back. “Of course, she would say, ‘
especially
in the dark,’ if you get my meaning.”

By now, everyone along the line of scopes had turned their attention away from their sectors long enough to add their own welcome-back message to John’s.

Even Larry Fitzgerald, working the intense Final Vector position, took a second to shout, “Hey, Futz, enough with the hearts and flowers. Make yourself useful for a change, and come give me a break,” before turning back to his scope and leaning so close to it his nose practically scraped the screen.

Final Vector was generally considered the busiest and most pressure-filled position because the goal was to get the airplanes as close together as legally possible and keep them that way, all the way to touchdown on the landing runway. Often that meant taking a steady stream of arrivals from four or more different directions and running them almost directly at each other—a task requiring intense concentration and nerves of steel, and one not to be undertaken by the faint of heart.

The watch supervisor, Dean Winters, leaned his head around the opening to the inner ring and said, “Okay, everybody, the comedy act’s over; let’s keep it down, shall we?”

As the controllers working the operational positions once again began transmitting to the airplanes inside their sectors, Dean beckoned Nick into the inner ring and to his desk. When he had moved inside, Dean told him, “Take a seat. We need to talk.”

Nick rolled a chair over to the supe’s desk and sat down. He had expected to be grilled by someone in management upon his return and had figured it wouldn’t take long. He didn’t blame them—his wife had just died, and the FAA would want to make absolutely certain he was in the proper frame of mind before assigning him to work a sector where one wrong move could spell disaster. Generally speaking, CYA was the rule of the day in FAA management, and no one would want to be known as the guy who sent the controller with the dead wife back to working airplanes if he then fucked up and ran two of those planes together. It would be a real career ender for the supervisor who made
that
decision.

“Nick, I’m really sorry about Lisa. How are you holding up?”

“Thanks. I’m okay, I guess. I’ve never had a wife up and die on me before, so I don’t really know how I’m supposed to react. I don’t know whether I’m behaving typically or not. I’ll tell you this, though: as much as I appreciate the well-intentioned gestures of support from everyone, I really need to get back to some semblance of normalcy; you know what I’m saying?”