The following day, Martin Garcia procured for the Viper an official 4x4 service truck that belonged to Operadora Aeroportuaria Internacional, or OPAIN, the consortium of construction and engineering firms that managed the airport’s operations in conjunction with Flughafen Zurich AG, a Swiss company.
El Dorado is twenty minutes from Bogotá’s downtown area, which is itself an urban space the size of New York or Mexico City. El Dorado is one of the largest airports on the continent and one of the busiest in the world. This meant tight security, including a US Air Force Combat Arms Training and Maintenance (CATM) contingent, but the Viper knew that even the strictest security systems were still fallible to human error
The main passenger terminal area was presently undergoing extensive renovation, and there was another construction project underway to expand the cargo terminal, so the airport was even more hectic than usual, with all manner of construction vehicles coming and going, and the Viper fully intended on using this to her advantage.
The Viper travelled with Benito Trujillo in the borrowed OPAIN truck. Trujillo drove. Wearing worker’s overalls with her hair concealed beneath a cap, Arianna sat in the passenger seat. The forty-two pound, five foot long launcher with a twenty-six pound missile sat in the truck’s bed, wrapped in canvas and concealed beneath rolled-up tarps and a ladder. The OPAIN staff badges clipped to Arianna’s and Trujillo’s shirts allowed them to breeze past the Colombian security officers and onto an access road leading onto the airfield.
If the security officers could have been bothered to take half a minute to stop the truck and give the IDs even the barest cursory examination, they would have seen that the pictures on the badges did not at all resemble the occupants of the truck. Instead the officers demonstrated the laziness and complacency common to those doing a long shift of guard duty.
Trujillo slowed but didn’t come to a complete stop as he approached the security checkpoint. He lowered his window and held up his ID and security badge, and the guard waved him through without a second thought.
The Viper directed Trujillo where to go.
He swung the truck behind the cover of the maintenance building and pulled to a stop several yards into the grassy field near the southern banks of the Bogotá River, just over a mile from the control tower and even further from the airport terminals.
The truck barely came to a complete stop within the five hundred foot gap between El Dorado’s two main runways before the Viper swung her door open and hopped down from the cab. She came around to the back of the truck, unrolled the canvas wrapping around the missile, and heaved it out of the bed. She leaned it upright on the ground against the truck’s fender and checked the time. It was 4:43PM.
The target was Avianca Flight 224, departing at 4:45PM on Runway 13L-31R for New York. The plane was an Airbus A320, and well over a hundred of its one-hundred-fifty seats were to be filled, according to the ticketing information Ibarra had obtained. Many of the passengers were Americans.
The whine of the A320’s two turbofan engines picked up and carried over the airfield, and the Viper heard the jet accelerating down the twelve-thousand foot long runway. She had her back to the maintenance building, the open grassy field and river in front of her, so that she would be presented a clear field-of-fire.
The Viper hoisted the SA-24 onto her shoulder, angling the long missile/launch tube combo upwards into the sky. She placed her left hand beneath the battery coolant unit at the front of the launch tube to help support the weight, with her right hand clasped around the grip stock. Her index finger reached around right of the grip stock to flip the arming switch from “safety” to “arm.” The battery powered up the missile’s systems. Once activated, the battery lasted less than a minute and needed to be replaced after each launch.
There was the howling scream of the engines as the Airbus lifted off the ground, but the Viper did not see the aircraft until two seconds later as it passed over the low maintenance building behind her. The aircraft’s nose was pointed steeply up as the Airbus darted into the sky. The Airbus’s massive shadow passed over the Viper as she tracked her target through the launcher’s iron sights while half-applying the trigger. She recalled the words of Mirsad Sidran in her head, instructing her on how to use the weapon in both a manual engagement and automatic mode. The latter was necessary for use against fast moving targets, like a fighter jet equipped with defenses. The former was sufficient for the giant, helpless civilian airliner.
The Viper elevated her aim to match the aircraft’s ascent. The Airbus was at a thousand feet altitude and sharply rising, maybe a mile away from her now. Her finger depressed the trigger the remainder of the way. She felt the kick of the grip stock and the back blast of the heat exhaust several feet behind her. She flinched for a second, blinked, and when her eyes flicked open they followed the smoke contrail through the sky as the missile, guided by the infrared and ultraviolet sensors in its thermal seeker head, travelled at four-hundred-seventy meters per second toward its target.
Adding to SA-24’s lethality, even if the missile did not achieve a direct hit, its proximity fuse would detonate when it passed within five feet of the target, spraying the targeted aircraft with high velocity shrapnel fragments. Quite simply, there was no escape from SA-24.
The plane’s flight crew had no warning of the missile launch and, even if they did, they had no defenses against it, like chaff, flares, or jamming capabilities. The missile impacted the Airbus in the undercarriage below the rear inlet for the auxiliary power unit, which provided the power to start the aircraft’s engines. The impact immediately detonated the fragmentation warhead’s two pounds of high explosives.
If the missile had hit a wing, where fuel is stored, the entire aircraft could have exploded in mid-air. Instead, in this instance, those inside the doomed Airbus felt the impact and the extreme turbulence as the aircraft’s flight was destabilized as a result of the shredding of its tail structure and rear fuselage by the explosion and the subsequent shrapnel. This was followed by the quite abrupt and terrifying descent as the Airbus dropped through the sky and returned toward the earth. The pilots tried to maintain control of the aircraft. It was a futile effort from the start, but they weren’t going to simply give up without at least giving the people under their care a chance at living through this. Passengers screamed, held onto whatever they could, and others were thrown from their seats. Some remained quiet, accepting and making peace with their impending end. Several of the passengers seated in the very back of the cabin were already dead or wounded, bloodily sliced apart by shrapnel. Thick black smoke poured out of the flaming hole in the fuselage where the missile hit, while pieces of luggage flew into the sky through the perforated cargo bay.
The second the missile connected with the Airbus, the Viper had turned around on her feet and climbed with the launch tube into the cab of the truck. When the 110,000lb plane collided into the earth and broke apart, she felt the ground shake beneath her feet.
Trujillo threw the truck into gear and pressed the accelerator, taking them back across the airfield. Not long later, fire trucks and ambulances with sirens blaring raced past them, heading in the opposite direction toward the crash site. The presence of the emergency vehicles and first responders was exactly why the Viper opted not to use the narrow access road cross the Bogotá River on the northwest end of the airfield, near the crash site.
They abandoned the OPAIN truck and proceeded on foot through the terminal building, which was now filled with police and USAF Security Forces personnel as word quickly spread of the crash. Despite personnel in the control tower having witnessed a smoke contrail, indicating a missile launch, this information had yet to be passed along, so the authorities thought they were dealing with an accident.