Final Vector (11 page)

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 paperwork. 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 Inner Ring.

The Inner Ring was where management generally congre-gated. The workspace for each area's watch 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.

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 circling 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. On another, 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 and what pertinent NOTAMs, if any, were affecting the daily operation.

NOTAMs, or Notices to Airmen, were constantly updated bulletins intended to keep pilots and controllers abreast of the latest information affecting aviation--from equipment outages to weather alerts regarding pending thunderstorms or turbulence or airborne icing--applying to specific areas of the country.

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 you 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, so to speak.

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 on edge, nervous, 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 as you while they're running their airplanes together on Final Vector!"

Nick grinned in spite of himself. The nickname Futz had been bestowed on him by someone--he couldn't even 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 all 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 gimme 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 be 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 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 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?"

"I can understand that," Dean replied, nodding, "but are you sure you're ready to come back to all this? After all, you took only a week off; that's not very much time to grieve."

"Oh, I'm sure. I need this. I need to start working airplanes again, if for no other reason than it will help take my mind off what happened. If I were to wait until I was done grieving, you'd probably never see me again, because I don't think I'll ever
be
done."

"I don't know . . ."

"Listen, sitting around my empty house with the ghost of my wife, waiting for her to come walking through the front door when it's never going to happen, is not doing me any good. Accomplishing something positive and contributing even a little bit to the operation of this facility will go a long way toward helping me get back on my feet, believe me."

Dean searched his eyes for a moment and then sighed. "I understand. If you want to ease back into it and work a slow position every now and then, just let me know. But I think I would look at things just the way you do if anything were to happen to Cheryl.

Anyway, welcome back."

"Thanks a lot. I appreciate it, probably more than you know. Is there anything else, or can I get to work?"

"Actually," Dean said, "there is one more thing. You're scheduled to work the midnight shift this Saturday night with Fitzgerald. I need to go over a couple of things with you before then."

"What things?"

"President Cartwright is flying into Logan early Sunday morning."

"Okay, well, you said I have the mid shift on Saturday night.

Shouldn't you be having this conversation with the Sunday day shift guys?"

"No, by early Sunday morning, I mean like 5:00 a.m. when you and Larry are still going to be the only Boston controllers here."

Nick shrugged. "That's fine; I've worked Air Force One before plenty of times. So has Larry. It won't be a problem."

"I know that. But someone in charge has to plug in and monitor the controller whenever he's working the president's plane."

"That's not a problem, either. Who's been designated as CIC

on that shift?" Controller in Charge was the designation given to the air traffic controller assigned the responsibility of running the watch when a supervisor wasn't available, and supervisors were never assigned midnight shifts at the BCT.

"You're CIC Saturday night on the mid."

"Well, then, I'll plug in behind Larry when he's working the president's plane. End of problem."

"I know you could do it, but Don Trent wants to be here just in case. He wants me here, too."

"Just in case? Just in case what?"

Dean sighed again. "I don't know. But Don is the operations manager, and if he says we need to be here, then we need to be here."

"So let me get this straight. Larry and I are good enough to handle the airplanes that don't matter--you know, the ones with several hundred
regular
people on board--but when it comes to the president of the United States, we need the assistance of two guys who haven't done the job in twenty years?"

Dean's face tightened in annoyance. "It's not like that. I know you and Larry would be fine here by yourselves and so does Don.

But he wants us to be here, so we're going to be here, whether you like it or not. Work your midnight shift as normal, but be ready for Don and me to walk in a little before five."

"Fine. Whatever. That it?"

"That's it."

"Then what do you want me to do now?"

"Go get Fitz out of Final Vector. He's backing up the whole East Coast."

The garage was cool and quiet in the middle of the night, which was exactly the way Tony liked it. He had been out of the Middle East so long now that he wasn't sure whether he would be able to withstand the relentless baking heat when he was finally able to return. He was anxious to find out, though, and thrilled to know that day was rapidly approaching, after many long years of waiting and doubting he would ever go home again.

Tony had been living legally in the United States for nearly a full decade. In the beginning it had been difficult. At times during the first long, lonely years, he questioned the judgment of those who had given him this assignment, even though he had been well trained and thoroughly prepared for his insertion into the U.S. as the leader of a Jihadist sleeper cell.

For that initial period, Tony did nothing but live quietly in the community, scrupulously learning the customs, working hard to obey all the laws of his adopted country, and avoiding any activity that might suggest he was anything other than a hardworking immigrant, anxious to make a new life for himself in this alleged land of opportunity. He reported to his superiors via secure satellite phone once a month, but otherwise, to anyone paying attention, Tony Andretti could have been the poster boy for the American dream, post-9/11 melting pot edition.

He worked long hours at his job, provided by an anonymous patron sympathetic to his organization overseas and its revolution-ary cause. Driving a delivery truck for a uniform services company gave Tony ample opportunity to insinuate himself into multiple different law enforcement and military agencies. After years of seeing the same quiet, respectful man come and go, serving them with all their uniform needs, many within these organizations came to view Tony as one of their own.

When Tony had established a standing in the community, he expanded his activities, using the Internet and the connections he had painstakingly developed in his job to identify and begin recruiting potential additions to his team. He also began stockpiling the impressive array of weapons and gear that was now practically overflowing the garage in which he now sat. He accomplished all this while never knowing precisely what his assignment would be or even when it would come.

Before Tony had arrived in America, he wondered whether his hatred for all things Western would begin to diminish as he fell into a routine and made a life for himself. After all, he would be forced to do the acting job of a lifetime: to convince everyone around him that he was not disgusted by the very sight of them.

Perhaps at some point he would lose his edge and feel some empa-thy for these people and their twisted and heretical culture.

It never happened. In fact, the opposite was true. The longer Tony lived away from his true home, the more he missed it and the more he despised these strange people for their silly religions and their materialistic lifestyles and especially for the sexually suggestive way they permitted their whorish women to dress while advancing the ridiculous notion that women were the equals of men.

Several years into his mission, Tony received more specific direction regarding his eventual assignment, and he was able to finalize the recruitment of the men who now made up his team.