— Power: 49" Hg/2700 rpm. Check.
At this point, something shattered the port cockpit window. He looked outside. What he saw resembled a scene from the Gaza Strip. The three muddy men in black were dodging around the terminal building and hangars, shooting rifle bursts around corners.
Damn it! The cops must be here.
Illumination flares lit up the sky over the runway.
With the port window gone, he could hear automatic rifle fire on the tarmac, pitched above the low engine sounds. Explosions from the area of the hangar village echoed inside the open cockpit.
Why had he stopped to look… even for a moment? He needed to ignore the firefight and get the damn plane in the air.
— Liftoff speed: 120–130 mph. Check.
— Apply power smoothly and gradually. He pushed the four throttles forward about one quarter. Then he released the brakes.
Here we go….
CHAPTER 54
Gunner had been sleeping hard when he received Bull’s call. But the message had him wide awake in seconds. Help was needed at the Red Wing Airport. Someone was trying to steal the B24.
He first contacted his own office and mobilized as many Ottawa County Deputies as he could. Then he scrambled the BCA SWAT team, using the emergency communication link established specifically for that purpose.
With everyone else already headed toward the airport, Gunner quickly pulled on his own uniform, clipped his sidearm onto his belt and raced for the squad car parked in the driveway.
It was a tense four-minute drive for Deputy Chief Gunderson. He was hearing things on his police radio that he didn’t want to hear. But even considering the radio transmissions, nothing could have prepared him for what he found when he arrived at the Red Wing Airport.
His deputies and the SWAT team had beaten him to the airport. And it looked like they had attempted to establish a perimeter around the hangar village. That was standard procedure. SWAT would surround the opposition and then use its superior weaponry and tactical training to quickly overwhelm its adversaries.
But the tactics clearly hadn’t worked here. The perimeter was in disarray. Tan-uniformed county deputies and black flak-jacketed BCA SWAT members alike were scrambling madly for cover.
What the hell was happening?
Gunner’s car screeched to a halt in the asphalt parking lot. He grabbed his shotgun and raced toward the action. The air hung thick with blue smoke. And the unmistakable smell of freshly fired gunpowder was everywhere.
Now that he was outside his car, Gunner could hear automatic weapon fire coming from the vicinity of the brick terminal building. It must be the fierceness of the criminals, he thought, and their strategic location behind the only defensible structure at the airport, that had scattered the law enforcement personnel.
As he ducked behind one of the hangars in the darkness, Gunner found the SWAT commander. He was cool-headed, but clearly concerned.
"What the hell’s goin’ on out there?" Gunner whispered.
"You tell me. You invited me to this party. Those assholes have got Kalashnikovs, hand grenades, RPGs, and god knows what else. We’re totally defensive here."
Then the realization hit Gunner. These weren’t the kind of criminals he was used to dealing with. They were terrorists! Actual goddamn terrorists!
"Al Qaeda," Gunner said solemnly. "It’s fucking Al Qaeda."
The two officers looked at each other for a moment. Neither could seem to get his head around the thought that Al Qaeda was really here… in Red Wing… or that the men they were fighting were highly lethal, brutally efficient, soldiers.
SWAT possessed tactics, coordination and firepower that was more than ample to overwhelm typical Midwestern thugs. The commander now realized that this was a military situation — not a routine drug bust. Attempting to surround the terrorists had been the exact wrong decision. The maneuver had allowed the terrorists to assess the numbers and weaknesses of their targets.
He should have used his superior manpower to establish positions to the enemy’s flank and rear before attempting an assault. A few well-placed sniper bullets from behind the adversaries might have made short work of this situation. As things stood, those options were no longer available. Any police moves to circumvent enemy defenses were met with a hail of fire.
"They’re going to fly that plane into the nuke," Gunner said, referring to the B24 that had already begun taxiing toward the runway. "We’ve got to stop it from taking off."
The SWAT commander immediately directed his troops to concentrate as much of their fire as possible on the plane.
"Aim for the engines and the fat part of the wings. That’d be where the fuel tanks are," he ordered. "Don’t waste your shots on the tires. There are too many and they’re too tough."
The commander was right about the tires. But it was unfortunate that he did not know that the B24 had an extremely unusual fuel tank location — between the wings and above the fuselage. So although the SWAT members and deputies did their level best to halt the bomber by aiming at the engines and wings, their bullets had no effect on the rolling behemoth. They couldn’t even slow it down.
As the officers tried to maintain a steady stream of fire at the bomber, the terrorists continually hampered their efforts. One by one, fire from the Kalashnikovs chewed up the corrugated steel and wood hangars behind which the officers had been forced to take cover. And RPGs flattened any parts of a hangar that survived the rifle fire. The police had to keep falling back to new defensive positions, just to avoid being slaughtered.
Eventually, the plane had taxied beyond reasonable shooting distance. And law enforcement focused their efforts exclusively on self-preservation.
By this time, an additional posse of deputies from Lewiston County, Wisconsin had arrived at the airport — raising everyone’s hopes that the increased manpower would make a decisive difference in the battle.
The SWAT commander tried to advise Lewiston of the tactical situation. But like the Minnesotans, the Lewiston Deputy couldn’t conceive of a true military action happening in his county.
After an initial headlong rush into the fray, it hadn’t taken long for the Lewiston force to come to grips with the situation. They soon sought cover alongside their Minnesota counterparts. Ultimately, the additional forces could do little more than add their Hail Mary shots to those of the other officers.
Hopes for law enforcement survival were fading fast. But as best they could, the officers bravely continued the fight.
The SWAT team had devised some alternate tactics to expose the enemy. Illumination flares now filled the air over the terminal — above the area from which the Kalashnikovs seemed to be firing. The added light allowed the officers an occasional glimpse of the black-clothed guerillas as they darted in and out of positions inside and around the brick terminal building.
The terrorists quickly countered the flares with smoke grenades, once again occluding all view of their movements.
As the fighting raged amid the blue chemical smoke, Gunner could hear the B24 roaring down the runway and into the air. They had failed to stop the plane. Would they even be able to stop the enemy?
Once the plane was safely away, it was obvious that the terrorists were on the advance. Their previous priority had been protecting the plane. Now they were attacking the law officers in earnest.
Having been driven backward from tin hangar to tin hangar, the police officers had all eventually ended up in about the same place — ducked behind the final row of hangars at the edge of the airport, shooting blindly around corners at their seldom-seen opposition. This is where they would have to make their stand.