Into the Fire

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Anne Sullivan planned for eventualities like the full Op-Center staff hunkering down in their basement building for an extended period. No one would leave, nor could she make them, but she could make them comfortable. It was the unfulfilled mother in her. She had a large quantity of high-end futons stashed for just such eventualities, along with a supply of light blankets and pillows. She also made arrangements through the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency deputy director to have the NGA gym remain open so the staff could shower as their stay there wore on.

About a third of the staff was bedded down already when Maggie Scott sat bolt upright in her chair. She had previously been a star employee at Amazon, and Aaron Bleich had assigned her to monitor phone calls between Manhattan and North Korea. As the calls hit the Op-Center servers, a translation algorithm changed the words to English and displayed them on one of the monitors on Maggie’s desk. Of the many calls, most were of no interest to the goth-clad Scott because they involved business transactions or routine calls between North Korean visitors and their families in North Korea. But one call on her feed had caught her attention. She noticed the call had been placed about ninety minutes ago and was just now coming up in the queue. She replayed it twice:

Mother, I am sorry I missed you. Please take care. You know I am on an important assignment. Before he died, you and father agreed this was a worthwhile undertaking. I cannot tell you much, but we have been called to action. It is an endeavor that he would have been proud of and I hope to make you proud as well. I think I will be all right, but I am unable to say for certain. Please remember I love you.

Convinced she might have stumbled onto something, she sent the file to Aaron Bleich and made a beeline for his small office. She needed Aaron to trace the location of the call.

Bleich was asleep on his futon, but Maggie didn’t hesitate a second. “Aaron, wake up. Get on your computer and open the file I just sent you.”

Groggy to the point of incoherence, Bleich half-walked, half-crawled to his desk. He maneuvered his mouse and clicked on the file.

Maggie could see him reading it through a second time. Then Bleich let out a long, slow whistle. “This looks like the real deal, Maggie. There are some trigger words in there.”

“Can you trace it from this workstation?”

“I think so,” Bleich replied as he opened a program on his desktop. An unintelligible series of numbers flashed across his screen, and soon a map appeared in the background.

“There. The Murray Hill section of Manhattan. That’s where it came from. I don’t have an exact location. We need our triangulation algorithm to run for a while, but I think I have it nailed to a several-block radius.” He grinned, but with more than a hint of smugness. “These throwaway phones are just so tedious.”

“Where is that? Where is Murray Hill?” the California-born-and-raised Scott asked.

“Only several blocks from the United Nations,” Bleich replied, and took off running toward Chase Williams’s office, pausing only briefly for a shout into Roger McCord’s office.

Jim Wright was in their makeshift command center on Governors Island, feeling in his gut they might be called into action at any time. Yet he also knew he needed to be prepared for a long ordeal. He wanted to pace himself but knew he couldn’t. He knew adrenaline could carry him for a while, but perhaps not the whole way. His watch stander called out to him.

“Mr. Wright, I have Mr. Williams on the line. He wants to talk to you, and then he wants to talk to Mr. Dawson.”

“I’ll take it right here,” Wright replied. “Wake up Dawson and ask him to come in here pronto.”

“Boss, what do you have for me?”

“Jim, we think we’ve located the North Korean cell that plans on bombing the United Nations,” Williams began. “Aaron’s folks have traced a call made from the Murray Hill neighborhood on Manhattan’s east side.” As Williams spoke, Wright looked at a large map of Manhattan they had posted in their command center.

“That’s damn close to the United Nations, boss. If the attackers are that close, we need to move and move fast. Wait one, sir.” Turning to his watch stander, he shouted, “Call Mr. Kim and tell him we’re moving. Get his on-deck team aboard the standby helo and get that bird turning. We need to go now!”

At the team rest area near the makeshift command center, Allen Kim answered his cell phone on the second ring. After exchanging a few words with Jim Wright, Kim swung into action. He alerted his teams, and they moved swiftly. He could already hear the Blackhawks spooling up, knowing the flight crews were quickly pushing through their prelaunch checklists.

While his on-deck team piled onto the two lead helos, the backup team boarded the second two. Kim huddled his fire-team leaders and command pilots at the edge of the pad. “Okay, listen up. This is the real deal. We’re gonna mount up in four Blackhawks and head north along the East River at dash speed. We think this attack is going to come from somewhere in the Murray Hill area and then head directly for the United Nations. Our job is to stop it before it gets going.” He looked at the pilots and team leaders. They nodded in understanding.

He paused to bring up a map of Manhattan on his secure iPad and then scrolled up toward the East Side around Thirty-fourth Street. “All right. We’re mounting up all four birds. I want the first bird — that’s yours, Fred — to drop a fire team off right here at St. Vartan’s Park, between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Streets. That’s the heart of the Murray Hill neighborhood. They’ll have the best chance to surprise these terrorists, or whoever the hell they are, before they can get moving.” Turning to command another pilot, he said, “Zack, I want you to take your fire team and drop them right here at Robert Moses Playground. You can see it’s between Forty-first and Forty-second Streets and hard by the East River. These locations’ll be our goal-line defense. Once you drop your fire teams, I want both of you to hold right here at the southern end of Roosevelt Island in case you have to pick up your fire teams and move them.”

The two pilots and the two fire-team leaders all nodded assent.

“Marty and Sandee, that leaves you two and your fire teams. You’ll be our on-call units if these attackers aren’t where we think they might be. I want you to hold right here at one hundred feet off the water and at best fuel-conservation airspeed,” he said, pointing at tiny Belmont Island in the middle of the East River. “You’ll be up on several nets, but I also want you to carry Iridium satellite phones and stay in contact with me in real time.” He paused to look around. “The idea is for the teams on the ground to flush the game so one or the other or both the remaining fire teams can move to intercept them. I’ll be aboard Sandee’s chopper with that team and will coordinate from there.”

Kim paused a moment, looking for any signs of confusion or hesitation. He saw none, only purpose. “All right. Time hack. On my mark 0426 … mark.” Now I’ve got to pull this off. Have I made the right decisions?

As Allen Kim boarded the third helo, Brian Dawson and Jim Wright were on their phones alerting all the other players.

As they had planned, Paeng Min-ju was the first one to leave the apartment and begin walking toward the garage where their van was parked. As she walked the deserted streets, she wrestled with her guilt. Not guilt that she had disobeyed their strict orders to avoid communicating with anyone while they were on this mission, but guilt about the message she’d left for her mother. How would her lonely mother take it? Would she worry? Of course she would. She vowed she would use the calling card and the disposable cell phone to again call her mother once their mission was complete. She would tell her not to worry, that all would be well. That would put her mind at rest.

While it was nothing compared to the bitter-cold Pyongyang winters, there was a bite to the chilly November morning air as she trudged toward the parking garage. A few days ago, one of the men had asked Seung Min-jae why he chose to park their van in a parking garage so far away, almost ten blocks south of their apartment. But Seung had bitten his head off, so she knew better than to ask. She just lowered her head and plodded south along Second Avenue toward the parking garage.

Chase Williams had established a strong working relationship with the FBI director, and he, in turn, was accommodating to Williams’s requests to equip “his” CIRG element with the most modern technology, technology the other CIRG units had yet been equipped with. It was a delicate balance, since the director did not want his teams to feel they were being underequipped while Op-Center’s CIRG element got everything they wanted. They had finally worked out an arrangement where the Op-Center’s CIRG element would test prototype gear, and, if it was found useful, the entire FBI CIRG would consider adopting it. And it helped that the upgrades came out of the Op-Center’s budget.

One piece of gear they were beta testing was the upgraded remote-control drone. In commercial use for years, the tiny, battery-powered, four-bladed unmanned drone had been upgraded to military standards. The mini-heli drone was equipped with a high-resolution camera and sophisticated communications gear. Kim had two of these drones flying over, as well as north of, the Murray Hill area looking for anything out of the ordinary. It wasn’t the best arrangement, but it was the best shot they had. They viewed the video in real time in their command center on Governors Island, and the same video feed was piped to Op-Center in real time. A skillful controller could fly the little drone through doorways and into parking garages, but it had yet to be tested operationally.

The other two flight crews had dropped their fire teams off as instructed at St. Vartan’s Park and at Robert Moses Playground and now held in a tight racetrack at the southern end of Roosevelt Island. There was no need for night-vision goggles as the lights of Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, as well as a crisp horizon, made for easy flying.

On the ground, the fire teams set up overwatch stations. They wore blue coveralls, not unlike those of New York’s finest, and tried to blend in as best they could while awaiting events to unfold. Brian Dawson had coordinated with the New York City Police Department, and they had put up barriers on the streets surrounding both parks to keep vehicles from approaching. They had also posted patrol cars strategically to keep looky-loos away. Now all the SWAT teams could do was to wait for a break. If nothing broke soon, Dawson would put another team on the ground to patrol the area — again, hoping to flush out the game. But for now, they did what they could to maintain tactical surprise.

At Op-Center, Hasan Khosa was assigned to monitor the radio-controlled drone feed. Something had caught his attention, so he played it back on one screen at four times the speed while he monitored the live feed on another screen. A woman had emerged from an apartment in Murray Hill and walked a long way to a parking garage, but no car came out of the garage. He pulled up a file and found several parking garages closer to the apartment she emerged from. Curious. Then a man left that very building ten minutes later and walked to the same garage. Still no car. When a third man came out of the building and started walking in the same direction, it was too much of a coincidence for Khosa. First he called Jim Wright on Governors Island. Then he called Aaron Bleich.

Bleich was there in thirty seconds. “What’s up, Hasan?”

“Here, look at this.” Khosa ran the playback at sixteen times the speed. “Three people, leaving the same building, walking past several garages, and all ending up at the same garage, but no car has come out of the garage since the first person arrived. And the building is close to where Maggie picked up that cell-phone call hours ago.”

Bleich considered this for a moment. “Call Brian and Jim back and get them to anchor one of the drones over that garage — and get them to play back the same segment you showed me. And get Allen Kim into the loop. I think he’s going to want to have one of his fire teams roll in on that garage.”

Chase Williams and Brian Dawson had a short but intense phone conversation. Williams made it a point not to second-guess his senior leaders, especially when they were on scene and he was at Op-Center headquarters. Dawson knew this, but he also knew the stakes involved, and he welcomed the dialogue. Both knew if there was going to be an attack on the United Nations, that attack was imminent, and there was a better than even chance it would be launched from the South Plaza garage at the intersection of Second Avenue and East Twenty-sixth Street. Dawson had free rein to use his CIRG element to investigate and to take out the threat. Williams took the assignment to keep the president, AG, and FBI director appraised.

Like Chase Williams, Brian Dawson was not wont to megamanage those working for him. He had handpicked Jim Wright as his domestic crisis manager; it was in his hands. Wright now focused on stopping whatever vehicle came from the South Plaza garage and approached the United Nations building. Wright had control of all the Op-Center CIRG assets. Dawson would coordinate with the New York City Police Department.

Jim Wright reached Allen Kim on his bird’s secure link. “Allen, I think your units on the ground are still in the right places. How do you want to handle intercepting the vehicle we think is going to pop out of that garage and head for the U.N.?”

Kim considered this for a moment. He was still turning over the options in his mind as he monitored the map of Manhattan on his laptop screen. “If the truck, or whatever they’re driving, comes out of the garage here and they head directly for the U.N., they’ll likely drive south a half block and turn west on East Twenty-fifth Street, then head straight up Third Avenue, or go further south to East Twenty-third Street and drive east to First Avenue. Not much traffic this hour of the morning on either of those avenues, and the drones will keep an eye on them. As soon as the vehicle starts moving north, I’m going to redeploy the fire team at St. Vartan’s Park and have them take up a blocking position either here at Third Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street or at First Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street. I’m gonna ask you to coordinate with Brian and have the New York police block traffic from flowing onto either First or Third Avenue, depending on what route they pick.”

“Good, Allen. How about your two backup fire teams?”

“They’re my insurance policy. Once we see the vehicle emerge from the parking garage and it heads north on whatever route it takes, I’ll have both Blackhawks in loose formation trailing about six to eight blocks behind them. If they break through my fire team at Thirty-fifth Street, I’ll have one of the helos dash ahead and fast-rope a team on the ground and block them from moving north.”

It was shortly after 0500 when Kim addressed his two backup Blackhawks. “Marty, Sandee, here’s the plan…”

Seung Min-jae arrived at the garage at five ten, right on time, and joined the others in the van. They had overfilled the Honda Odyssey’s tires to support the weight of the C-4 that filled every square inch of the van behind their seats. The rear rows of seats had been removed a week ago, and it was all cargo space now. Their bags of produce were jammed on the floor at their feet.

Seung looked at Paeng Min-ju. “You look nervous, sister. Don’t worry. Our plan is well thought out.” He tried to sound more confident than he felt. “It will be over soon, and we’ll be on an airplane before lunchtime.”

“I’m not nervous. I know my assignment.”

Seung looked at the driver. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Turn south out of the garage and then west on Twenty-fifth Street. We’ll drive north on Third Avenue as we discussed.”

Sandee Barron and Marty Axelson were anchored in a tight racetrack orbit at five hundred feet, just south of the intersection of Second Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Marty was the senior pilot of the two — he had been with the CIRG almost three years and, subject to Allen Kim’s instructions, would direct the airborne operations. He called Sandee on the tactical net. “We got a good brief from Allen, Sandee. Any questions from your perspective?”

“No. I think I’ve got it, Marty. If they go up First Avenue, you will follow them, and I’ll fly trail. If they go up Third, I’ll follow as lead with you in trail.”

“That’s affirm. If they get past our fire team on Thirty-fifth Street, there’s still the team at Robert Moses Playground, but that’s damn close to the U.N., too close for my money. One of us will be asked to put our team on the ground and take them out, if they get past the first fire team.”

“Roger that, Marty, but still no weapons free, right?”

“Right. Allen says the New York police have told them the city is waking up by now. Too many people already on the streets, which makes the possibility of collateral damage too high. As the vehicle approaches Thirty-fifth Street, we’ll be following a block or two behind. We’ll either fast-rope our SWAT teams onto the avenue ahead of them, or, if the traffic’s clear, we’ll land, and they can jump out.”

“I like the landing option better,” Sandee replied. “Faster than fast-rope.”

“Roger that. But we’ll have to make that call in real time. How’s your fuel?”

“I’ve got one plus four-five. You?”

“About the same. For now, we wait.”

The heavily laden van emerged from the garage and headed south. Seung Min-jae had told the driver to move at five miles per hour less than the speed limit. The last thing they needed to do was attract the attention of the New York City police. They had planned well, and now they were close to success. It was the little things, Seung reminded himself. They did not want to have a patrol car pull them over.

The van turned right on Twenty-fifth Street as planned and then, one block later, turned north on Third Avenue. They were headed north and would arrive at the United Nations’ garage as planned at five thirty sharp.

Jim Wright and Allen Kim were watching the drone feed from their respective perches — Wright in the command center, Kim airborne. They saw the van nearly simultaneously. “Allen, there — our van just came out of the garage, made two turns, and is on Third Avenue, moving north. I’m having my operator maneuver the drone to get a look at the logo on the side of it.”

The drone operator sitting in front of Jim Wright maneuvered the little bird skillfully. At his bidding, the little quadro-copter dropped to street level and came alongside the van. “It says, ‘Angelo’s Produce,’” the man said over the tactical net, “but I can’t read the address or any of that. What would a produce van be doing parked in a residential parking garage?”

“No reason I can think of, at least no good one,” Kim replied. “Let’s treat them as a target. I’ll talk to Brian, and he’ll get the New York police to cordon off all the streets leading to Third Avenue. Let’s stop these guys now!”

“Sandee, I just heard from Jim on the tactical net. Your target is moving north along Third Avenue. Move into close trail. I repeat, move into close trail.” As he spoke, Allen Kim shucked his seat belt and moved up between Sandee and her copilot. He wanted a real-time view of their prey.

Sandee Barron needed no further urging. As briefed, she headed up Third Avenue to give chase. And as they had prebriefed, Marty paralleled her course and was back several hundred yards, but along First Avenue in case the van jogged that way. In the back of both helos, the CIRG-SWAT operators waited patiently, each hoping that his team would get the call to action.

“I’m heading north on Third Avenue at ninety knots,” Sandee calmly reported over the net, “crossing Eighteenth Street now. Tell me what street the van’s crossing; I don’t want to overrun this guy.”

“It’s approaching Thirtieth Street, Sandee,” Hasan Khosa chimed in, as if he were flying formation with her and Marty, which in many ways he was. There were advantages to just monitoring the drone’s feed and not having to fly it — you could analyze what you saw dispassionately. “You can kick it ahead. Our fire team will intercept it at Thirty-fifth Street.”

“Roger. Tell me what I’m looking for. What does this guy look like?”

“It’s a white Honda Odyssey van with ‘Angelo’s Produce’ painted on the side — red lettering. It’s moving at just under the speed limit.”

“And if our ground team can’t stop them,” Jim Wright interjected, “Get your people on the ground ahead of it.”

“Understood, control.”

“You copy, Allen?”

“Roger that, Jim.”

On the ground, Jack Duffy had his men splayed across Third Avenue. While all signs pointed to this van’s being a hostile target, they couldn’t be sure, so deadly force wasn’t authorized — yet. The CIRG-SWAT team was armed with light wands to signal the van to stop in the predawn hours. If the van ran their barrier, they were ready. A half block north, they had laid out spike strips across the entire avenue. They would blow the van’s tires and bring it to a screeching halt.

As the driver crossed Thirty-third Street and looked ahead, he did a double take. “It looks like armed men ahead. They look like policemen.”

Seung Min-jae sat bolt upright in his seat. “Don’t slow down. Speed up.”

“They are waving us over,” the driver said, now past Thirty-fourth Street and only a few hundred yards from the armed men.

“I said speed up, speed up! Floor the accelerator!”

The driver followed Seung’s instructions as Paeng Min-ju, crouched between the van’s two seats, just hung on. The van picked up speed and was now approaching sixty.

The fire-team leader was waving the lighted wand insistently, signaling the van to slow down and pull over. But it was speeding up! He needed to make an instantaneous decision: Use deadly force to stop the van or let it pass and count on the spike strips to do their job.

“Clear the street,” he shouted as he picked the second option. His men all scattered up onto the sidewalks.

On seeing the SWAT-clad men scatter, something triggered for Seung Min-jae. This was too easy.

“Sidewalk,” he yelled to the driver.

No reaction.

“SIDEWALK!” he shouted, but the man sat mute, uncomprehending, still pointing the van straight ahead in the middle lane of Third Avenue.

Seung leaned over, grabbed the wheel, and jerked it to the right. The van’s tires squealed, and it tilted, and they bounced up on the sidewalk.

“Keep driving straight on the sidewalk until you reach Thirty-sixth Street, then turn right. They planned this ambush, and there’ll likely be another one up ahead. We’ll head north on Second Avenue.”

“But that’s one way heading downtown,” the driver protested.

“I know. It’s the one street they’re likely not covering.”

The driver knew better than to argue with Seung. He wheeled right on Thirty-sixth Street and then took a hard left onto Second Avenue. The New York City Police Department had cleared First and Third Avenues of traffic, but not Second. Oncoming cars beeped their horns but swerved to avoid the speeding van, now barreling ahead at close to seventy miles per hour.

Airborne, Marty Axelson and Sandee Barron watched all this play out and knew that, other than the fire team at Forty-first Street, they were all that stood between the van and the U.N. Sandee was only two blocks behind the van when it broke through the fire team on the ground. She immediately dropped down to one hundred feet and moved up to fly right behind the van. For his part, Marty saw no value in remaining on First Avenue and made his own maneuver. In order to see ahead, Allen Kim had all but crawled into the cockpit with Sandee Barron.

For the first time since he had taken this assignment, Seung Min-jae was losing faith in his ability to carry out his mission. It was already clear they’d not be able to park their van in the United Nations’ garage, calmly walk away, and detonate their C-4 remotely.

Once the iron gates of the U.N. garage were open in the morning, there was no lifting-arm gate at the entry booth to slow down vehicles. He knew they could blow through there without stopping; the guard at the booth was just a badge checker and not armed. Maybe they could drive into the garage, stop the van, and then run out the way they came in. He could use his remote detonator once they were safely away. Maybe, just maybe, they could still escape in the confusion of the explosion.

When he heard the whap, whap, whap of the Blackhawk’s blades coming up from behind, he recognized that option was wishful thinking.

“Faster, faster,” he shouted, urging the driver forward.

Instincts took over for Sandee Barron. She was now flying at fifty feet off the deck, just a few yards behind the van, as she kept it in her chin bubble. She was multitasking, watching the van and looking for obstacles. Those in the van had to know she was there, and it didn’t look like the vehicle was going to slow down. There wasn’t enough time to sprint ahead and deploy her fire team, and there was no way to turn obliquely so one of her fire-team members could take a shot; she’d impale herself on a building along Second Avenue.

Sandee took the helo down until she was directly over the van. Once there, she jerked the collective down a fraction of an inch and jerked it up again.

Inside the van, the driver had a death grip on the steering wheel as the main landing gear of Sandee’s eleven-ton helicopter smashed into the top of the van. The impact was massive, and he barely kept control of his vehicle.

“Faster, faster,” Seung urged.

Again the landing gear smashed into the van’s roof, this time even harder. The three passengers were near panic but still determined to carry out their deadly mission. Seung went into his mental map of the target area. He decided they would turn hard right on Forty-fourth Street and approach the UN building head-on.

As the van passed Fortieth Street, Seung Min-jae and his two fellow travelers looked up ahead. To their horror, a helicopter was hovering just a few feet off the ground several blocks ahead. It was turned sideways, and they could see the barrels of weapons pointing at them.

Airborne over the van, Sandee Barron saw Marty Axelson’s helicopter just as the assassins in the van saw it. Then she heard Marty’s voice. “Sandee, pull up, pull up now!”

She was less than thirty seconds from broadsiding Marty’s bird and needed no further urging. She pulled the cyclic into her lap and yanked an armload of collective, and the Blackhawk leapt into the sky. She kept the engines near redline until they had climbed to a thousand feet. In the back, the SWAT troopers held on for dear life.

Seung Min-jae was dedicated to his cause but knew the Blackhawk hovering ahead was about to blow his van to bits. His mission would be a complete failure, and his family would be shamed. Huge buildings housing the wealthy and their wares loomed up on either side of them. He was dead anyway. With scarcely a thought to what might await him in the next life, he activated the detonator.

Even anchored overhead at a thousand feet, well above the skyscrapers below, Sandee Barron felt the shock wave as the van’s C-4 registered a massive explosion. She knew they had stopped the assassins, but she looked down in horror as she saw Marty Axelson’s Blackhawk blown out of the sky. Allen Kim, leaning out the side of the Blackhawk, felt as if he’d been stabbed in the heart. One of his fire teams was now entombed in the hulk of what had been the Blackhawk.