Final Vector (10 page)

They jumped into their cars and fired up the engines. Tony, who had been sitting motionless in the backseat of Jackie's sedan, had already clambered into the Army transport truck, still idling in the middle of the road. The three vehicles moved out, traveling single file to the west along the highway for two miles, where they picked up their compatriots waiting behind the big billboard and then continued into the quiet desert night.

The vast desolation of the Arizona desert was pockmarked by clumps of scrawny scrub brushes sprouting randomly from the ground, casting skeletal shadows from the washed-out light of the full moon. Thousands of stars glittered in the cold sky. The few buildings visible in the alien landscape were spaced far apart, appearing delicate and insubstantial. Three vehicles--a sedan in the lead, followed by an olive drab U.S. Army truck with a canvas-covered cargo box, followed up by another sedan--approached a massive parking lot.

As they turned into the property, three sets of headlights flashed across a mammoth sign: Welcome to Cactus RV Center--

Arizona's Largest! Below, in only slightly less enthusiastic letters it proclaimed, RVs, Campers, Motor Homes of all Sizes for Sale or Rent--Long-or Short-Term! All Price Ranges! The three vehicles snaked around the campers and motor homes. In less than a minute the convoy had arrived at the back of the lot.

The vehicles parked neatly in a row next to a plain panel truck.

One by one, the drivers shut down their engines. The truck they parked next to was obviously a recent addition to the RV center's lot and just as clearly did not belong. It had been stolen the day before in Tucson and would be used to transport the Stinger missiles Tony's group had successfully acquired. The Army transport truck was much too conspicuous for Tony's taste, and he knew it was imperative they lose it immediately. Once the bodies of the two murdered soldiers were discovered, the authorities would seal the entire area off like a drum, and they would risk being apprehended.

The men piled out of their vehicles and stepped onto the tarmac, stretching their backs and yawning. Cactus RV Center may have been Arizona's largest, as the sign proclaimed, but the facility's owners certainly hadn't spent much of their income over the last few years on pavement maintenance. The acres of blacktop were cracked and rutted from exposure to the relentless desert heat, with sandy potholes forming dangerous and randomly located land mines all over the lot. To step in one meant the possibility of a turned ankle or worse. An injury now was something the group could not afford.

Tony pulled out a Maglite and examined the area immediately surrounding the four vehicles until he was satisfied there was no possibility of injury to himself or one of his men. Shining the light around was a risk, but it was a minimal one. This portion of the big parking lot was mostly invisible from the road, with dozens of bulky campers and RVs forming a very effective screen, and ve-hicular traffic was virtually nonexistent anyway.

His men stood next to the vehicles smoking cigarettes and mumbling quietly to each other until he was ready.

After a couple of minutes, Tony swung the tailgate of the transport truck down and said, "Let's get this done." He left the rest of his crew to do the heavy lifting and strolled toward the front of the deserted facility, semiautomatic weapon slung over his shoulder and toothpick hanging out the corner of his mouth.

The men set to work unloading the crates containing the precious cargo from the Army vehicle and into the stolen panel truck.

There were no markings of any kind on the truck; it was completely anonymous and would blend nicely into the landscape as the team moved west to east across the United States until arriving back home outside Washington. There they would go to ground and prepare for the next step in the operation.

First things first, though. They needed to get the missiles loaded into the new truck and put as many miles between the dead soldiers and themselves as possible before morning. The U.S. Army didn't take kindly to its soldiers being murdered, particularly on American soil, and the search for the murderers would be more intense even than the search for the thieves who had taken the Stinger missiles. These were weapons that were useless without the appropriate guidance system, and the government had no way of knowing the group was in possession of that critical component as well, but they would find out soon enough.

Tony leaned against the side of a massive camper and watched as his four men worked quickly and efficiently at their backbreak-ing task. Dimitrios knelt in the back of the Army truck sliding the Stinger crates along the floor of the cargo bed to the open tailgate, where Joe-Bob and Jackie trundled them the short distance to the waiting panel truck. There, they dropped the crates on the cargo bed with a thud. Then Brian slid the crates along the wooden floor, the wide pine strips worn smooth from years of service, as close to the front of the cargo box as possible, securing each crate with bungee cords to ensure there would be no shifting of the material as they made their way across the country.

They were breathing heavily but moving rapidly, a light sheen of sweat coating each man's body in the cool desert air. Their breath crystallized and then disappeared as it rose slowly skyward.

Conversation was kept to a minimum, with each man concentrating on his own role in getting the heavy crates secured so the group could get on the road as soon as possible and disappear.

The reinforced wooden crates contained two Stingers apiece, each weighing about thirty-five pounds. With the palletlike boxes added into the equation, each one weighed in at close to eighty pounds. Tony knew even the heavily muscled young men were beginning to tire as the job approached completion.

Joe-Bob and Jackie were precisely halfway between vehicles, duck-stepping one of the heavy crates toward the back of the panel truck, when an impossibly bright spotlight blazed on, bleaching the scene in its glare.

From beyond the light source, a tense voice grated, "Tucson Police! You all stay right where you are, and keep your hands where I can see them!"

The Tucson police officer crouched behind the open door of his vehicle, bracing his weapon in the crease where the door's hinges connected to the cruiser's body, keeping it trained on the men trapped in the intense brightness of the spotlight. Nothing at all happened for what seemed like minutes, although it was undoubtedly only a few seconds. Then the cop eased the door open fully and stepped slowly and cautiously around it, eyeing the surreal scene playing out in front of him. "Let's all just take it nice and easy, and nobody gets hurt, all right, boys?"

As he finished the upward inflection on the word
boys
and took one step away from the patrol car toward the men, a burst of automatic weapon fire erupted from behind him.

***

The cop's body stuttered forward from the impact of the gunfire, twisting and writhing forward before falling to the ground.

His body thudded to the brittle pavement with the slightly hollow, moist squishing sound of a pumpkin being smashed in the street on Halloween night. He died without uttering a sound.

The sharp smell of cordite filled the air, the sudden quiet disorienting after the AK's throaty roar. Nobody moved.

Finally Tony spoke casually, almost lazily. "Well, what are you waiting for? Let's wrap this thing up and get the hell out of here.

Undoubtedly that cop radioed his location into his dispatchers and advised them he was checking out a possible breaking and entering. When he doesn't report back in within a few minutes, they will send another car out here to investigate. It would seem to be in our best interest to get as far away from this place as possible before that happens, so let's pick up the pace."

While the men hurriedly finished transferring the last few crates and lashing them securely into the cargo box of the panel truck, Tony bent down and put both hands under the armpits of the fallen officer. With a grunt, he muscled the man's bleeding body into the back of his own police cruiser. Blood immediately began pooling on the vinyl bench seat beneath the fresh corpse.

Tony then slipped behind the wheel and put the idling Crown Vic in gear, moving it the short distance from the scene of the massacre to the chain-link fence at the very back of the dealership. He nosed in behind the rusting hulk of a decades-old used Airstream trailer that the franchise owner had apparently given up on ever unloading, hoping the cruiser's semiconcealment behind the big rig might buy the team a few more minutes before the authorities became aware of the murder. It was their third in the last two hours, and Tony knew they were tempting fate as the bodies piled up.

He shut down the engine and jumped out of the patrol car. He thought for a moment about taking the dead cop's riot gun--after all, he reasoned, the cop certainly didn't need it anymore, and you could never have too many weapons, especially high-quality ones like the Remington 870--but ultimately decided that it might be detrimental to his freedom if he were to get pulled over with a murdered law enforcement officer's weapon lying next to him in the front seat of his vehicle.

Tony had no doubt he could shoot his way out of any confrontation if necessary, but it was important to keep his eyes on the big picture, on his sacred destiny as it were. Getting into a shoot-out with the police during the drive back to D.C. was a distraction he didn't need when he had been given the honor of ridding the world of the president of the United States, the oppressor of so many of his people in the Middle East, Robert Cartwright.

Tony slammed the door of the cruiser, closing 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."

Tony decided he must be extremely tired. There was no way any of these American pseudoterrorists, despite graduating from the rigorous training program in the mountains of Afghanistan, 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 told 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 that no one made that closer 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 on the highway less than two hours ago, while Tony slid behind the wheel of the panel truck. They left the military transport vehicle parked in the rear of the lot. There was no way to hide it effectively, and it would be discovered very soon in any event.

The three-vehicle caravan snaked its way back along the rutted tarmac to the front of the Cactus RV Center and pulled onto the road, moving west toward Interstate 10. The plan was to travel 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 to their home base in Washington, D.C.

A few cars populated the roads, perhaps 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.

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. A tiny LED on the card reader changed color from red to green when the chip was recognized, and Nick had always thought that visual signal should be enough.

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.