The Rule of Nine

FORTY-NINE

Ahmed was back in the rear of the 727, huddled up against the raised ramp over the bomb on its custom-built carriage. Using a ratchet and a set of sockets, he first unbolted the three metal straps holding the bomb in place.

Thorn had trained him thoroughly on all of the preattack procedures and had provided a checklist.

As soon as Ahmed removed the last strap, he went to work on the four long bolts holding the rolling carriage in place. Before he removed that last bolt, he replaced the third one with a soft piece of pine doweling the same length as the missing bolt.

When he was finished the only thing keeping the rolling carriage and the bomb that was on it from moving was the single wooden dowel. When the ramp was lowered, the shifting weight of the carriage, and the two-thousand-pound bomb resting on it, would snap the dowel like a twig. Their fearless leader, the Australian who ran the show, had tested it on the ground using simulated weights, not once, but several times, and each time the dowel snapped as if on cue.

The only difference this time was that the carriage and the bomb would roll down the rails and sail into the open sky from the lowered airstairs of the plane. The carriage would fall away, free, as the large rear fins and the front canard on the bomb slowed its descent and the laser sensor in the nose cone began searching for the signal.

Ahmed put the ratchet and sockets back in the toolbox and placed the box, along with loose bolts and metal straps, into a storage bin in the plane’s cargo area. He made sure the lid on the bin was latched and locked. Then he checked all of the other equipment in the cargo bay to make sure that it was all lashed down tight.

When the airstairs opened at their current speed and altitude, the plane would experience a sudden loss of pressure. This would suck anything and everything that wasn’t secured or tied down out through the open door. One loose piece of equipment colliding with the bomb in midair could destroy the entire mission.

Ahmed took one final look and then headed back to the flight deck. He wasn’t a minute too early. Just as he settled into the left-hand seat and started to buckle up, two jet fighters screamed past the nose of the plane.

Ahmed nearly got whiplash trying to turn his head to follow the path of their flight. He saw one of them start to take a wide, arcing turn to come around behind the 727, then lost sight of him.

Ahmed took over the controls. A few seconds later one of the F-16s pulled up alongside the nose of the larger plane, about forty feet off the port-side window of the cockpit. The fighter pilot turned his head and looked directly at Ahmed.

“Take the controls,” said Ahmed.

Masud did as instructed.

Ahmed reached down and picked up his radio headset, held it up to the side window, and then signaled thumbs-down, a sign that their radio was out. As far as Ahmed was concerned, he would now use anything just to buy another minute of flight time.

The fighter pilot looked at him, stern eyes from over the top of his oxygen mask, nodded, then maneuvered to wave his wings, the sign that Ahmed was being instructed to follow him. Both of the Saudi pilots knew they were on a suicide mission. But the goal was worth it. What they had been told was that the bomb was destined for downtown Washington, and the destruction of the United States Capitol Building.

Thorn sat on one of the concrete benches along East Capitol Plaza just above the ramp to the Capitol Visitor Center. The subterranean monstrosity was a disaster. Its construction was nearly 1,000 percent over budget and three years late, but it did have a consistent theme.

Forcing taxpayers in a hole to see their government in action couldn’t help but remind them of the bottomless pit Congress kept digging with their galactic budget deficits.

As far as Thorn was concerned, the last building any reputable terrorist would want to blow up would be the Capitol. Why kill your most potent ally? Congress had done more damage to the country in the last twenty years than a legion of suicide bombers. And they were still hammering away.

He knew that Joselyn Cole and the two men with her had been tracking him since before he’d left Puerto Rico. His employer had kept him informed through the elaborate telephone code system. How the employer found out about the trio Thorn didn’t know. Nor did he care. In ten more minutes it wouldn’t matter. By then it would all be over.

He opened the snap locks on the attaché case and checked his watch. He lifted the lid and punched the power button on the laptop inside. Thorn scooted a little sideways to make sure that the computer’s antenna would have a clear line of sight to the copper dome over the reading room in the Library of Congress across the street. He watched as the screen lit up and the program booted. The computer battery had plenty of life. The only one he had to worry about was the small NiCad battery on the little brown bat.

Thorn held his breath and hit the keys. A few seconds later the camera on the back of the bat came to life. He breathed easy and glanced around a little to make sure no one was watching. He pulled the lid on the attaché case closed just a bit to gain shade on the screen and to conceal it from prying eyes. Gently Thorn put his finger on the track pad and the camera lens began to move as the gimbal rotated on the back of the bat.

To Thorn, who had been at war for thirty years, the new micro-technology was nothing short of stunning. During the First Gulf War, doing what he was doing now would have required a device known as a “mule.” It was a cumbersome black blunderbuss, a sawed-off shotgun on electronic steroids. It had a shoulder stock so you could steady the laser beam on the target. And when the words “light ’em up” were used, it didn’t mean “smoke ’em if you got ’em.” It was the order to paint the target with the mule, a laser designator, to aim it and turn on the switch so that the receiver on the incoming ordnance could home in on the laser beam and strike within an inch of its center.

To anyone standing near a target that was painted, the laser was invisible. The target designator, unlike a laser pointer in a classroom, did not emit a continuous beam. Instead it sent out laser light in a series of coded pulses. These signals were designed to bounce off the target and into the sky. There the pulse would be detected by the seeker on the laser-guided ordnance. The incoming bunker buster would steer itself toward the center of the reflected signal, and unless the people inside had access to laser-detection equipment, the only thing they would hear would be the ear-splitting detonation from the blast that killed them.

Because the device emitted no heat signature and only a tiny radar profile, the gravity-directed bomb would be largely immune to antimissile defense systems, including other missiles and Phalanx, a high-speed radar-directed Gatling gun designed to destroy incoming missiles in flight.

To Thorn, size was everything.

Laser designators came in a number of sizes, generally ranging from a black box that resembled your grandfather’s eight-millimeter movie camera mounted on a tripod to a sleeker model that looked like a squared-off set of large binoculars. But the little brown bat could never carry that big a payload.

The key for Thorn was miniaturization. The answer had come from a small firm in Delaware. The company had lost out on a bid with the army to design a miniaturized laser designator. They already had two prototypes, laser-targeting diodes not much bigger than a watch battery. In fact, it was a large watch battery mounted on the back of the bat that provided the power for the camera and the optically linked laser. Thorn had already turned on the camera just for a few seconds in order to train it on the section of roof across the street from the Library of Congress. The beam, when it was turned on, would pulse off the roof of the Supreme Court Building, the area directly over the courtroom. The small watch battery would last only about ten minutes, but for Thorn’s purposes that would be long enough.

The reason Thorn’s small point-and-shoot camera did not set off the metal detector the day he scoped out the target from inside, the gullible Jimmie Snyder in tow, was that it wasn’t a camera at all. It was a laser range finder capable of measuring minute distances with amazing precision. It was made of carbon fiber and plastic.

What Thorn needed to know was the exact distance between floors, from floor to ceiling at each level, as well as the distance from the front edge of the gabled roof to the bench in the courtroom. What bothered him most was the area of the gymnasium with its basketball court. What they jokingly referred to as “the highest court in the land.” Thorn had to be sure that the bunker-busting munitions would “breach the monastery” and penetrate to the correct depth, where it would detonate on cue, directly over the angled bench.

The bunker buster was designed to penetrate up to one hundred feet of earth and twenty feet of steel-reinforced concrete before detonating. To receive his final payment, he had to be certain that the fuel-vapor charge would level the building and leave not a single survivor among the nine justices sitting at the bench.

The rapid consumption of oxygen resulting from the firing of the mixed-fuel mist in a confined area would produce a near vacuum followed by shock waves that would collapse the entire structure where the blast occurred.

Those caught inside a hardened structure by such a blast, if not incinerated or suffocated by the depletion of oxygen sucked from their lungs, would likely die of massive concussive injuries to internal organs resulting from the heat-driven pressure wave.