He held the airliner in the center of the crosshairs and heard a buzz from a small speaker in the sight. The buzz became stronger and higher-pitched, verifying that the missile seeker had locked onto the 757’s heat signature.
Halovic fought the urge to pull the trigger instantly. Instead he pressed a switch that “uncaged” the heat seeker. Now the infrared sensor would pivot freely inside the missile’s nose, and he didn’t have to hold the missile precisely on target.
He angled the SAM launcher upward at the nearly forty-five-degree angle needed to make sure the missile cleared the ground after firing. The buzz continued. At last, sure that the seeker still had a solid lock on the airliner, he pulled the trigger.
A dense, choking cloud of grey and white smoke enveloped him, and the echoing roar made by the rocket tearing skyward seemed incredibly loud more appropriate for a battlefield than a peaceful park. Through the clearing smoke, he looked for Nizrahim and saw the Iranian also sighting on the airliner, still as a statue.
Nizrahim’s finger twitched, and he, too, disappeared in a thick acrid cloud. The second SAM streaked aloft a small bright dot at the end of a curving white smoke trail.
Halovic’s own missile was already closing on the lumbering airliner.
NATO designated the shoulder-fired, heat-seeking SAMs they were using as SA-16s. The Russians who had designed the system called it the Igla-1, the Needle.
The missiles used in this attack were manufactured by the North Koreans, not the Russians. Iran had bought Igla-is and training equipment from the Russians for its Army, but those purchases were aboveboard and easily traced. The North Koreans, experts at selling arms to nations who valued their privacy, had exported others to the war-torn Balkans. And once in that chaotic region, Taleh’s agents had found it easy to covertly appropriate one of the shipments intended for the Bosnian Serbs.
Little more than a four-foot tube with an attached sight and grip, the Igla-1 was a popular design. It had first entered Russian service in the early 1980s and was a great improvement over earlier shoulder-fired SAMs. The missile could attack a target from any angle, and its seeker was sophisticated enough to ignore some early forms of IR jamming and decoy flares. The weapon’s chief flaw was its small warhead, just a few pounds of high-explosive, but Iglas had shot down coalition warplanes during DESERT STORM and NATO attack aircraft in the Balkans.
Compared to a wildly maneuvering military jet, an undefended passenger airliner flying straight and slow made a perfect target.
Halovic stood motionless, still holding the now-useless missile launcher. By rights, he and Nizrahim should be back in the van, speeding away from the scene. This waiting was foolish even dangerous.
But he had to stay. He had to know if the missiles worked. He had been trained well enough to know how many ways the weapon could fail. And so, like two children watching a model plane fly for the first time, Halovic and Nizrahim stood, immobile, watching their SAMs arcing in for the kill.
WHAMM.
Captain Jim Freeman’s first sign of trouble was a loud bang from the left and behind. The 757 shuddered abruptly, bouncing around in the air as though its port wing had slammed into something. Startled, he checked the altimeter. That was impossible. They were over the river and still at a thousand feet.
The pilot’s eyes raced over the array of gauges and dials, looking for the problem. Lord. There it was. The rpm gauge on the port engine was dropping fast. The 757 dipped left, and its airspeed began falling.
Freeman instinctively pushed his throttles forward, increasing power to both engines. He snapped out a quick, “Power loss on the port engine, Sue!”
“Understood.” Susan, his copilot, stopped monitoring the plane’s altitude and distance from the runway and started a frantic check of her instruments. That bang suggested an explosion of some sort, but it was better to go by the numbers. Her eyes flicked first to the fuel flow gauge. No problem there…
The 757’s port wing was still dropping.
Freeman clicked his radio mike. “National, this is Three-Five-Two. Declaring emergency. Repeat, declaring…”
WHAMM.
Another explosion rattled the plane, but this time the resulting shudder went on and on, growing rapidly worse. Both Freeman and Lewis heard a wrenching, tearing screech from the wing.
Halovic’s SAM had functioned perfectly, literally flying up the tailpipe of the airliner’s port engine before exploding. Fragments from the blast damaged the after stages of the compressor fan, resulting in a rapid power loss. But jet engines are relatively tough, and the plane could still have landed safely.
Nizrahim’s missile finished the job.
The Igla-1 blew up only a few feet from the port engine pod. Pieces of shrapnel peppered the pod’s metal skin and sliced into the engine inside. They cut the fuel line and wrecked the digital controls, but most important, they weakened the after stage of the compressor fan again. Spinning at more than ten thousand revolutions per minute, the fan tore itself and the rest of the engine apart.
Freeman saw the port engine gauges run wild and then go dead. Still fighting the wing as it dropped, he looked aft and saw the ruin of the port engine, now little more than a pylon with sharp-edged scraps of metal attached. Damn it.
“Give me full power on the right!” Freeman screamed. He strained on the control yoke, trying to get the port wing up. They were sliding off to the left, veering off course toward downtown Washington. He could see the gleaming white roof of the Lincoln Memorial ahead. Oh, Christ.
He silently cursed their slow speed. They were too close to the ragged edge of the 757’s envelope. The shattered engine pylon was now a liability instead of an asset, creating drag instead of power.
“Gear up!” he shouted.
“It’s already up,” Lewis replied desperately. She’d raised the wheels in an effort to reduce the drag.
Behind them, they could hear shouts and screaming through the bulkhead.
“Pass the word back to brace for impact.”
Freeman had reached the end of a distressingly short list of things to try. He looked at their airspeed. Still falling. They weren’t going to make the runway.
Along the Potomac Halovic followed the dying 757 with satisfaction. The airliner was lower now, and canted to the left. Black smoke trailed from its damaged wing, and even at this distance he could see the shattered left engine.
“Oh, my God!”
The horrified shout from behind them brought the Bosnian out of his trance. He whirled around and saw a tall, stout, middle-aged man in a tan topcoat staring upward at the stricken plane. A small dog, a tiny white poodle, tugged unnoticed at the leash in the American’s hand.
The man’s eyes flashed from the falling aircraft to the SAM launchers still on their shoulders. Horror turned to sudden, appalled knowledge and then to terror. He dropped the leash and turned to flee.
Alexander Phipps had not run anywhere in his life for years. The wealth accumulated over a lifetime of shrewd business dealing had ensured that other people did the running not him. Now all that money meant nothing.
Gasping in panic, he dodged off the canal park path and crashed into the trees. He heard shots behind him and felt a slug rip past his ear. It seemed to pull him along and he ran faster. Another bullet gouged splinters off a tree in front of him.
Phipps skidded on the wet grass and fell forward onto his hands and knees. An impact from behind threw him facedown in a flood of searing, white-hot pain. The world around him darkened and vanished.
Halovic watched the American shudder and lie still. It had been Nizrahim’s shot that felled him.