The Rule of Nine

TWENTY-EIGHT

Mid-September, the clock was running, and for once everything seemed to be coming together nicely.

Thorn had struck a deal with the property owner in Puerto Rico, slipped the man ten grand in cash and taken a six-month lease on a hundred and fifty acres of worthless scrubland including the old airfield. Happy to have the cash for the worthless ground, the man didn’t ask any questions.

Thorn brought in his crew and readied the airfield. They knocked down the grass with a harvester and put up the camo netting.

While the crew was finishing up in Puerto Rico, Thorn had gone to work lining up the plane and all the equipment at the boneyard. He found the old 727-100C online, and gathered all the documentation, including maintenance records, long distance, having the paperwork sent to a commercial mailbox in Tampa. Thorn didn’t want to spend any more time than necessary dealing face-to-face.

The plane’s airframe was old, dating to the early seventies, but the engines showed less than a thousand hours since the last overhaul. He checked the records and found that none of the engine work had been outsourced to any of the overseas repair stations where skill levels were sometimes questionable and parts could be unreliable. The avionics were dated, but for the single flight he had in mind it didn’t matter. There were no passenger seats to remove since the plane had last been used for hauling freight.

The seller was a regional bank in Texas. Thorn could tell by the tone of the e-mails coming back from the boneyard that the bank was wetting its pants trying to unload the plane and get it off their books. Passenger volume had imploded along with the economy. Airline leasing companies were holding fire sales on new planes that made the old 727 look like something out of the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop. It was probably no more than a few months from being parted out and cut up for scrap.

Thorn made them squirm while he negotiated long distance on the extra equipment he needed. This included a good-size generator and a new mode C transponder unit. The boneyard agreed to throw in the transponder for free if the deal on the plane went through.

Thorn knocked the price down to rock bottom in a series of e-mails and made the final purchase subject to approval by the buyer’s representative, one Jorge Michelli of Bogotá, Colombia.

When Thorn arrived at the boneyard as Jorge “George” Michelli, an expat commercial pilot out of California, the pump was already primed and ready to go. He kicked the wheels and checked the critical onboard components. He had them start up the engines and reverse the thrust for braking to make sure it would work when he got to the airfield. Then they checked the hydraulics and looked for leaks. The two items he checked carefully were the landing lights and the altimeter. He had one of the service attendants at the yard make sure the altimeter was perfectly calibrated and then checked the external pitot tubes to make certain they weren’t plugged with debris. Except for two breaker switches that needed replacing, the plane was in good shape for its age.

Thorn had the title put in the name of a Colombian corporation, Gallo Air, SA, and paid for everything, the equipment, the plane, and a full load of fuel, with a certified check. He told the boneyard that the plane was destined for overseas service, a small regional freight carrier in Latin America. Nobody seemed to notice that the word “gallo” in Spanish meant rooster, and that roosters don’t fly.

The yard crew loaded the extra equipment on board and in less than two hours Thorn was taxiing down the runway headed for Puerto Rico.

The flight was uneventful, but for Thorn the approach for the landing was white-knuckle time. Flying in at wave-top altitude in the dark, in the middle of the night, required either a kind of sixth sense or a twisted death wish. He slipped in under the radar, over the line of white water splashing on the beach ten miles south of Ponce and the airport at Mercedita. Thorn’s crew had put out the portable beacons so that the perimeter of the field was outlined, at least enough for Thorn to see it. Depth perception was tricky, as Thorn waited until almost the very last second to turn on his landing lights. The wheels smoked as they hit the grass stubble over the crumbling macadam and Thorn threw the engines into reverse. In less than three minutes he taxied to the end of the runway and with the help of his crew salted the plane away under the camouflage netting. They buttoned it, and all of them disappeared into the darkness.

Thorn watched the airfield and the plane for four hours from a distance with field glasses to make sure no one came by to investigate. When they didn’t, he knew he was home free. The plane wouldn’t have to move again until the day of the operation.

The ducks were aligned. He now had both of the fuel-air devices, Fat Man and Little Boy, in hand. One of them had arrived by sea in the port at San Juan two days earlier. It was in a box labeled INDUSTRIAL TOOLS. U.S. Customs opened and inspected it only to find exactly what the label said, a large industrial compressor with an air tank almost nine feet long. Customs had one of the dogs sniff around it for drugs, then nailed the crate closed and tagged it as inspected. The crate was loaded onto a rental truck driven by one of Thorn’s crew members.

Little Boy now rested quietly, still in its wooden crate under the camo netting, no more than thirty feet from the plane.

With all of the ordnance now in his possession, Thorn started thinking about cutting his overhead. He no longer needed Victor Soyev.

The Russian arms merchant had screwed up and nearly cost him the job when the plane carrying Fat Man was forced down in Thailand. Thorn wondered if Soyev might not have planned it that way so he could hold him up and make Thorn pay twice. He wouldn’t put it past the Russian to cut a side deal for a kickback with his North Korean hosts. As far as Thorn was concerned, they all played in the same sandbox, where the name of the game was “screw over the buyer.”

The Russian had served his purpose. Now it was time for him to serve another. Besides, there was the cost factor to consider. Thorn had paid Soyev half up front for the two devices, with the balance due on delivery. If Soyev wasn’t around to collect, Thorn could put the second half of the payment in his own pocket and Thorn’s client would never be the wiser.

Three days later and seventeen hundred miles to the north, Thorn was now busy in upstate New York. He was scrambling to finish work on the delivery vehicle for Fat Man.

The place where they were working was a large commercial garage rented from a boarded-up GM truck dealership just outside Albany. As far as Thorn was concerned, it was great having the U.S. economy in the dumps. Not only were commercial airliners cheap as dirt, it seemed whatever he needed was readily available, and at cut-rate prices. Now if he could only figure out some way to pad his bills and make sure the country didn’t blow away and disappear before he could destroy it, everything would be just peachy.

There were only three of them, a welder from Thorn’s crew, a Muslim taxi driver from Manhattan who’d quit his job two days earlier to join them, and Thorn. For muscle they were using a three-ton electrical chain hoist on rollers suspended from an overhead I beam. The welder had been working for nearly a week on a giant steel barrel that now encased Fat Man.

The barrel was slung under the chain hoist using heavy nylon tow straps and rolled along the overhead beam until it was centered over the open frame of the truck. Carefully they lowered it into place.

“Once I do this it ain’t gonna turn anymore. You sure you want me to do it? You want I could make it so it could turn? Might take two, maybe three extra days,” said the welder.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Thorn. “Time’s running out. Get it done.”

“Your call.” The welder had already made a small fortune. The job had taken the better part of a week. Five days earlier he had removed the large metal paddles from the inside of the barrel. Using a torch the welder then cut the huge steel barrel in half.

Working alone with nothing but the hoist, the welder had lifted the rear half of the barrel away with the chain hoist and spent three hours of backbreaking labor maneuvering the bomb into the remaining front half of the barrel. Another two days was spent cutting angle iron and welding the bomb in place. He kept reminding himself to keep the hot end of the arc welder away from the area that housed Fat Man’s initiating charge. Otherwise the authorities would be searching for his identity from the spray of DNA taken from air samples in the stratosphere.

Now that the two halves of the barrel were back together, Thorn wanted it welded to the frame of the truck where it wouldn’t move, giving the bomb a stable platform. As the welder worked, throwing sparks of hot metal around the truck, Thorn spent his time assembling the parts for the detonator.

This was the one item he hadn’t purchased. It was supplied and delivered by his employer, a last-minute change in their agreement. As Thorn examined it closely, he realized why. It was clear that they didn’t want any mistakes on this.

The truck’s driver, the Muslim taxi man, was handpicked by Thorn based on references from some very nasty associates he’d met while hiding out in Somalia. Whether they were pirates or jihadists, Thorn trusted the Somalis because he knew they would go to their deaths either for their wants or for their beliefs.

The driver was to be well armed, both a handgun and two fully automatic AKs with half a dozen spare clips. He was to reach his target at all costs, driving through barricades and shooting his way in if he had to. It was without question a trip to paradise. Whether there would be virgins waiting at the other end, Thorn would leave to the driver. But he began to reassess his earlier assumptions as to the national origins of the people who had hired him. It wasn’t oil money that was fueling the venture. He was now certain of that. They were not part of the jihad. The detonator had been made in Germany by a well-known industrial electronics manufacturer. It had come to Thorn by way of a circuitous route that took it through a buyer, an unnecessary middleman in Yemen. The detonator carried with it, like a neon sign, a paper trail of invoices and shipping labels. At first Thorn thought this was a bold and naked claim of accountability, until he looked more closely at the detonator itself. Thorn didn’t ask any questions. It was what the client wanted, and he was paying the freight.

Time was now getting tight. By morning Thorn had to be headed back south and he couldn’t wait to be gone. He had a mountain of work ahead of him in Puerto Rico.

He carefully soldered the two lead wires from the mercury trembler switch to the terminals on the electronic detonator. Then he climbed the metal ladder and crawled into the opening up high on the rear of the barrel. Once inside, Thorn wired the detonator to the initiating charge on Fat Man. Then he taped the detonator to a piece of metal angle iron using three rounds of electrical tape and another round of duct tape to make sure that the detonator wouldn’t be torn from the bomb by the impact of the fall, that is, if the driver reached his final target.

Thorn had to crawl on his back and squeeze his gut under the massive bomb in order to rig the final set of wires. These were about thirty feet in length. They had to be fed through a small hole drilled in the front end of the barrel and from there through a hole in the back of the truck’s cab.

Inside the cab was a small metal box, and inside the box was a toggle switch. This was a manual trigger designed to detonate the bomb if all else failed.

It took him several minutes and a lot of sweat to drag his body under the bomb once more and climb out of the slippery steel barrel. By the time Thorn had his feet on the ground again, he was huffing and puffing. He was getting too old for this.

Time for a break. He grabbed a cold beer from an ice chest in the corner and sat down for a minute to check his e-mail. He used a small Netbook with a 3G connection.

Two minutes to boot it and Thorn opened his messages. There was one from Soyev asking why his money on delivery hadn’t been wired to his overseas account, a couple pieces of junk mail from the 3G provider, and a news story from Thorn’s customized Google news site.

The last item caught his attention. Thorn had set it up to provide regular searches for news items that turned up any of a number of names, the recent aliases he had used as well as the name Thorn itself. If the authorities were looking for him, it was one way to stay alert. He could discontinue the use of an alias the second he had any warning.

He opened the e-mail and started reading: “Chicago Lawyer Warns of D.C. Terror Plot.” The moment he saw the name Snyder it set off bells. Bart Snyder was accusing a man named Thorn of being involved in the murder of his son, James, in Washington, D.C. The old man had held a news conference. The story was brief, only six short paragraphs, but it was enough to make the hair on the back of Thorn’s neck stand up. “Mr. Snyder stated that the man he identified only as Thorn, also known as Dean Belden, is believed to have extensive ties to international terrorist organizations. He claims that his son, James Snyder, may have inadvertently discovered evidence of terrorist activities, and believes that he was killed for that reason. Mr. Snyder told reporters that he is conducting his own investigation and will be releasing further information early next week.

“A spokesman for the FBI confirmed that James Snyder was the victim of an apparent homicide in Washington, D.C., earlier this summer, but declined further comment, stating that the matter was under investigation by the Metropolitan Police. A spokesperson for the police department confirmed that Bart Snyder had been attempting to assist police in the investigation of his son’s murder, but that at this time police have no credible information concerning any terrorist activities in connection with the case.”

Thorn’s blood ran cold. How in the hell did Bart Snyder get his name? And what else did he know? This was trouble with a capital T. From the tone of the story it sounded as if the cops weren’t taking Snyder seriously, unless they were playing it cool.

It was now Thursday. One thing was clear. If Snyder was planning to go public with further information early next week, Thorn didn’t have much time.