The Rule of Nine

FORTY-THREE

It was five A.M. and Flannery and Son’s cement contractors were scheduled for a major pour. The framing crew was finishing up the last few forms as the cement-pumper truck set up over the site at the Fulton Street subway station.

There was already a line of seven heavily laden cement trucks queued up on the street outside the gate, each one waiting to disgorge ten cubic yards of concrete. More trucks were on the way. They would be rolling in and out all day, dropping their load into the hopper of the pumper truck as the cement crew moved the hydraulic-powered chute around, pouring the concrete as they spread and leveled it.

“Hey! You got a problem.” One of the drivers milling around outside the gate yelled over the sound of the idling diesels. He pointed to the second truck in line. Its giant mixer barrel on the back was not revolving.

The driver of the truck leaned out of his open window. “I know. Batch plant didn’t give me enough water. Had to shut my mixer down. How about I get inside to use your hose to get some more water in the mix?”

The guard at the gate looked at the officer in charge. Both private guards and transit police provided security for the construction site. The transit cop nodded, and the private security man with the clipboard wrote down the license number of the truck as well as the owner’s name and contractor’s license number from the driver’s-side truck door. He then swung open the gate and waved the truck inside.

The guard raised his hand and stopped the truck just as it was about to enter. “Two water trucks parked over there.” The guard pointed off to the left, a fair distance from the site of the giant open hole over the subway. “Tell ’em to give you a hose. They should have more than enough water.”

The driver smiled, nodded, and drove through the gate.

Ahmed sat in the left-hand seat as the 727 climbed through twelve thousand feet. He could see the white surf and the azure blue shallow waters just off the beaches on the southwest coast of Puerto Rico as he and Masud held the plane on a steady course headed north.

They had a full load of fuel. The two air-to-air missiles were now slung under the wings, attached to the pylons that Ahmed and his comrade had helped to install.

The two Saudis were mystified by how easily Thorn had managed to bulldoze his way past the inquisitive onlookers on Vieques after the plane landed. A handful of bureaucrats from the U.S. Department of the Interior who worked at Camp Garcia came by to look when they heard the plane come in.

The workers made the trek a half mile or so from the dilapidated offices at the camp to the airfield, some of them in cars and a few on foot. Thorn took charge, showing them some papers and telling them that he’d already called in the incident to the FAA, and that a Federal Aviation Administration inspector was being dispatched from Washington to Vieques to investigate. He would be there Monday morning.

This put an end to all their questions. A few of them lingered, wandering around the outside of the plane for a few minutes, and then disappeared.

As soon as everything calmed down, Thorn went back to work on the plane. He finished the spray job on the company logos just forward of the wings and skipped the big one on the tail section. He told the two pilots it wouldn’t matter.

Thorn arranged for a load of fuel. As soon as it was delivered, he started up the engines and turned the plane around so that its nose was pointed down the runway. Finally he went over last-minute instructions with them and then departed for the airport on the other side of the island.

For two nights Ahmed and his comrade slept on the plane. They were armed and instructed to kill anyone, quietly if they could, who approached the plane or tried to get on board.

Then early Monday morning before daybreak they broke out the two air-to-air missiles from their crates inside the plane, mounted them to the pylons under the wings, and armed them both. Within a half hour they had the engines warmed up and were headed down the runway. It was six thirty A.M. None of the government workers would show up at Camp Garcia for another hour and a half.

Ahmed piloted the plane on a northwest course sixty miles out to sea before heading due north. The plane climbed over puffy patches of tropical clouds casting shadows on the water below. He kept his transponder turned off and stayed well out over the ocean. The plan was to avoid ground-based radar from Puerto Rico and the frequent radio inquiries from the island’s air traffic control towers. Forty minutes into the flight, he turned ninety degrees to starboard and put the plane heading over the ocean forty miles north of Rafael Hernández Airport on the extreme north end of the island.

Formerly known as Ramey Air Force Base, the field had been turned over to civilian use as part of the base closure program a few years earlier. The Air National Guard and the Coast Guard still retained a presence there. It was also used by the airfreight carrier FedEx as its hub for the Caribbean Basin.

Ahmed climbed to twenty-five thousand feet and put the 727 into a circling pattern out over the water as Masud listened to their VHF radio receiver. They had plenty of fuel. He was scanning the frequencies, searching for their quarry.

“Federal Express flight 9303-Squawk 1423, runway two north. You are cleared for takeoff.”

“There it is!” said Ahmed. He couldn’t believe it. It was exactly as Thorn had said. The airport at Rafael Hernández usually didn’t have FedEx flights any farther north than Miami or Memphis, but today they did.

Flight 9303 was headed for Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey. The wide-body DC-10 would dwarf the smaller 727. And anyone familiar with the FedEx flight schedule would know that the carrier never used smaller planes on such long-haul routes. But by the time anyone on the ground or in the air saw the plane, the 727 would be so close to its target that this would be the last thing on their minds.

Ahmed continued to circle, holding his altitude at twenty-five thousand feet and waiting as the huge wide-body took off and slowly climbed toward its cruising altitude.

Almost twenty minutes later Masud spied the larger plane cutting through a cloud deck eight thousand feet below them and still climbing. Ahmed continued his arc around in the circle and fell in behind them, still five thousand feet above the larger jet. He went into a shallow dive and used his altitude to pick up speed and close the distance on the other plane.

When he got within a half mile, he eased back on the throttles and flew fifty feet above the tall tail of the DC-10 to avoid the air turbulence off its wings and its jet wash.

The bigger plane had a slightly slower cruising speed than the 727 and Ahmed wanted to be careful to avoid getting on top of it. He hugged in as close as he dared, knowing that with his transponder turned off, the collision avoidance system on the DC-10 was blinded. From out in front there was no way that the crew on the flight deck of the large wide-body could see them.

In less than a half hour they were more than a hundred miles off the north coast of Puerto Rico, well beyond the range of ground-based radar, in an area approaching no-man’s-land, the heart of the Bermuda Triangle.

Once inside the chain-link gate, the driver of the large cement truck made a broad-arcing turn toward the two parked water trucks. But instead of continuing on, he stopped. He turned the wheel and started to back up. The reverse safety bell on his rear wheels started to clang and by the time the guard at the gate turned and saw him, the truck was moving backward on a direct line toward the open cavern over the subway.

“Where the hell’s he goin’?”

Two of the transit cops looked over. One of them shook his head, then started to wave his arms back and forth. “No. No. Not there.” He took a few tentative steps toward the moving truck. “Hey, dimwit!” he yelled at the top of his voice.

The driver looked at him for an instant before pressing the accelerator to the floor. The weight in the back of the truck was the only thing that slowed it down. The cement truck started to back up faster, its reverse safety bell now ringing frantically. As the transit cop realized there was something wrong, both he and his partner started to run toward the moving truck.

One of the workmen, still hammering forms, hearing the bell bearing down on him, looked up and threw his body out of the way as the rear wheels barely missed him. They rolled right over the wooden forms, crushing them, and kept right on going. The forms didn’t even slow down the heavy quad set of dual wheels.

“Stop!” The workman leaped to his feet and jumped up onto the truck’s running board as it passed by. He reached inside and tried to grab the steering wheel.

The driver wrestled him for control of the wheel, but the framing contractor was big and burly and by now was flowing with adrenaline.

The Somali driver grabbed the Sig Sauer nine-millimeter pistol next to him on the seat, pressed the muzzle against the workman’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. In a cloud of bloodred spray, the workman’s gaze fixed as his body tumbled backward off the truck. A second later the driver felt the steering wheel pull to the right as the front left wheel of the massive truck rolled over the dead laborer.

The two transit cops pulled their pistols and started firing at the truck’s windshield. They unloaded their full clips on the fast-moving vehicle. Two of the rounds hit the driver in the head and chest.

His right foot went all the way to the floor as his body fell forward onto the wheel.

The truck careened to the right and caromed off a pile of steel I beams. The impact jarred the dead driver’s foot off the gas pedal. But the truck didn’t stop. Instead it slowly continued to roll toward the open pit.

One of the transit cops launched himself onto the running board at the driver’s-side door. He pulled on the door handle and found it was locked.

He reached through the open window and opened the door from the inside as the truck continued to roll. He jerked the dead driver out of the seat, threw him to the ground, and climbed up into the cab.

The rolling dolly on the rear end of the truck slid over the edge of the open cavern. It disconnected from the tow gear on the back of the truck and tumbled down into the open shaft.

The cop hit the clutch and jammed his foot on the brake just as the first set of rear wheels went over the edge.

About two hundred miles out, over the dark blue water of the Atlantic, Ahmed told Masud to dial in the transponder numbers and to be sure that the altitude button was pressed.

Masud turned each of the four knobs until he dialed in the squawk number for the big DC-10, the numbers 1423, then he pressed the button that would disclose to ground radar the 727’s altitude. But he didn’t flip the button to turn the transponder on, not yet. “Ready,” he said.

Ahmed eased back on the throttles. He wanted to maintain altitude but increase the distance between himself and the bigger plane. The 727 fell back three-quarters of a mile. The fear was that if he was too close, the jet intakes on the smaller Boeing would suck in debris and stall out.

“What do you think?” said Ahmed.

“A little farther,” said Masud.

Ahmed eased back on the throttle a little more. Suddenly the smaller plane was buffeted by the swirling turbulence off the wing-tips of the big DC-10. Ahmed shook his head and adjusted the throttle forward again. “Do it.”

Masud opened the lid on a metal box bolted to the floor at his feet. He lifted the two red plastic switch covers, looked over at Ahmed one last time, bit his lower lip, and flipped both switches.

The two wing-mounted missiles fell from their pylons and an instant later their rocket motors flared on. They streaked forward on each side of the cockpit, leaving a contrail like a running torpedo as Ahmed lifted the nose of the 727 and pulled to the right.

Two seconds later a massive ball of fire erupted just over the nose of the plane, to the left. Ahmed pushed down on the right pedal and turned the wheel. He lifted the left wing as streaks of smoking-hot debris flew past the window and made a rat-a-tat pattern like flack striking the aluminum skin along the side of the fuselage.

“Transponder!” Ahmed had his hands full with the controls.

Masud reached over and flipped the transponder button on. It was unlikely that ground radar from anywhere would have had them on the screen, but any loitering AWAK flights that might have them on the screen would have noticed only a momentary flicker in squawk signature on their screen for 1423, and only a slight adjustment for heading and altitude.

Ahmed looked out his side window and watched behind him as the flaming debris fell toward the sea.