“Tower, nineteen, be advised, I’ve got a fuel leak. I’m putting her down in the grass.”
“Rog, Delta,” was the reply.
“Help me, Chuck….” called Hotchkins.
Altitude dropping through 30 feet, Hotchkins forced the 160-foot, 125-ton Boeing laterally through the air toward the median. Hotchkins eyed the blue border lights as they whipped under the wing. Almost there… steady… steady… Now!
Hotchkins cut power and flared the jet, lifting the nose slightly as the starboard gear thumped down with a screech. The port gear followed a moment later. Hotchkins held his breath. The gear trembled, then held. The plane shuddered as the wheels plowed through the grass. With a rhythmic ca-chunk, ca-chunk, the wingtip sheared off the border lights. Hotchkins could hear screaming from the cabin.
“Speed?” he called.
“Eighty… seventy-five…”
“Braking… reverse thrust…! Help me… step on ’em!”
At that moment, the port gear snapped.
The 737 lurched sideways. Hotchkins was slammed against the window. He pulled himself upright, hands white around the yoke, the veins in his neck bulging. He scanned the gauges. Sixty knots… 300 feet of runway left. Past the end of the Tarmac stood a row of maintenance sheds. In the middle of the runway a lone Cessna was desperately trying to taxi clear.
“Come on, come on,” Hotchkins chanted. “Stop, baby….”
Slowly, the 737 began slowing, yawing to port as the wingtip plowed through the grass, bulldozing soil before it. Hotchkins fought to keep the nosewheel out of the ditch. He watched, transfixed, as the speed gauge wound down through thirty knots, then twenty-five, then at last to ten. Zero.
The aircraft shuddered to a stop.
Hotchkins exhaled. Down safe.
Outside, emergency trucks were pulling alongside. Workers raced toward the plane as the firefighters began laying hoses.
Hotchkins took a moment to force some spit into his mouth, then switched on the intercom. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain. We are on the ground and safe, but as a precaution, we’ll be deplaning rapidly. Stay calm and follow the flight attendant’s instructions. Flight crew, proceed with emergency egress.”
He switched off the intercom and laid his head back against the seat. He cast a wan smile at the copilot and navigator. They were both pasty white.
Wonder what the hell I look like, Hotchkins thought.
Two hours later, the crippled Boeing was sitting in a hangar at the east end of the airport, illuminated by the overhead fluorescent lights. Fire-suppression foam dripped from the wings and struck the ground with fat plops.
The oblong blast hole measured ten feet and extended from under the wing mount to just below the cabin windows. Through the hole, the passenger cabin and baggage compartment were plainly visible.
Despite the bustling activity, the hangar was eerily quiet. Outside, Port Authority Police held back the already-assembling media. Each time the door opened to admit a worker, flashbulbs popped and reporters shouted questions.
Beside the plane stood a Delta Airlines vice president, a regional VP from Boeing, La Guardia’s airport manager, and the maintenance manager. An inspector from the National Transportation Safety Board stood staring into the hole.
“Hey,” he called to one of the workers, “nobody touches any baggage. Got it? Leave everything.” He turned and walked over to the group. “Gentlemen, can I assume you agree this damage was not caused by a routine malfunction?”
“Well, Jesus!” said the airport manager, “what the hell do you think!”
The NTSB man smiled. The question did sound idiotic. Everyone knew what had made that hole. Still, procedure was procedure. Somebody had to make it official. “Please understand: My initial finding will determine where this investigation goes. It’s awful hard to unring a bell.”
With that, everyone looked to the maintenance manager. The man removed his ball cap and scratched his head. “Ain’t too tough a call. Nothing that was supposed to be aboard that bird could have done that.”
The NTSB man nodded. “Okay, gentlemen, I have some calls to make. Stick around. In a few hours, this place is going to be a full-fledged circus.”
Two hours later, the hangar’s population had tripled. Now reinforcing the rapid-response NTSB team was a full investigative team made up of two dozen men and women. Next came a smaller team from the ATF, or Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, followed by representatives from the governor’s office, as well as the state attorney general’s office. And finally came the FBI, represented by Harry Owen, the SPAIC of the New York Field Office, and Charlie Latham.
Owen and Latham sat in the maintenance office overlooking the hangar. They watched in silence as dozens of figures crawled under, over, and through the crippled Boeing. There was a lot to do, Latham knew, and it had only just begun.
There was luggage to be checked for additional devices; debris to be collected and sorted; samples to be taken, the most important of which would likely come from blast residue, and hopefully, from the bag that held the device — and better still, from the device itself. Considering the nature of the blast, Latham considered this unlikely. It could have been much worse. If the plane had been at altitude, that much explosive would have been overkill. The pilot had done a hell of a job.
Carl Hotchkins had already been debriefed, as had the flight crew and passengers. Their statements would be combined with those of the tower personnel, then checked against the 737’s black box recorder. According to the FAA’s snapshot report, there was no indication of malfunctions, no weather problems, no air control or approach miscues, and no pilot error.
That left one possibility: Somebody got a bomb aboard the 737 and blew a big hole in it.
Latham was guessing the device had malfunctioned. Though landings and takeoffs were vulnerable times for an aircraft, nothing was surer to kill one than violent depressurization while flying 500 miles an hour at 35,000 feet. Pan Am 103 was proof of that.
But instead of hundreds dead, this one had cost only five lives.
Only, thought Latham.
The dead had already been tentatively identified from the plane’s manifest. Visual identification was going to be impossible, since the bodies had skidded along the concrete for more than a quarter mile. There wasn’t much left to look at. Of the other 175 passengers, only 7 were injured.
“So tell me again,” Latham said to Owen. “Why’d you call me? Hasn’t your office got its own—”
“C’mon, Charlie, it was headed for your desk anyway. I just speeded things up,” Owen replied. “To the regular guy on the street, this is the kind of thing that happens in Europe or the Middle East. It happens here, it’s different. Once the media gets its teeth into it, it’s going to turn into a big, ugly circus.” Owen grinned. “Your circus, pal.”
“Thanks a bunch.”
Among its many other responsibilities, the Criminal Investigations Division was tasked with all of the Bureau’s counterterrorism efforts, and Latham was the best they had. CT work was not that different from CE and I, and with Latham, the FBI had the best of both worlds.
Short, wiry, and bald save a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair, Latham was patient and tenacious and flexible — all qualities that made him not only a great spy hunter, but an even better hunter of terrorists.
Latham started out in CI eighteen years before as a brick agent from the academy and immediately fell in love with spy hunting. Playing cat and mouse with superbly trained KGB and GRU officers was hugely satisfying, and through the years he’d been involved in some of the biggest cases: Pollard, Walker, Koecher… and Vorsalov. KGB Colonel Yuri Vorsalov.