The Enemy Within

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.

The Iranian trotted over to the slumped figure and fired once more this time into the man’s head. Then he calmly holstered his weapon and walked back toward Halovic. He stopped a few feet away and asked flatly, “What about the dog?”

The little white poodle had emerged from its hiding place and now stood nuzzling its fallen master, whimpering softly. The Bosnian shrugged. “Leave it.”

He turned away, striding toward the missile launchers they’d thrown aside to hunt down the dead man. It was time they were on their way.

Northwest Flight 352

The crippled airliner was down to three hundred feet above the Potomac.

Freeman yanked desperately on his controls and felt the 757 roll right a hair not much, not more than a couple of degrees. It was just barely enough.

The white bulk of the Lincoln Memorial flashed past the cockpit’s portside window and vanished astern. They were heading back for the center of the river. Then he felt the controls go mushy under his hands and grimaced. He was out of airspeed and out of options.

The jetliner dipped again, sagging toward the water.

Susan Lewis screamed suddenly, staring straight ahead.

Freeman looked up and saw the long, gray, car-choked span of the Fourteenth Street Bridge filling the entire width of the cockpit windscreen. He sighed softly. “Oh, shit.”

Northwest Flight 352 slammed nose-first into the bridge at more than one hundred knots and exploded.

The Pentagon

The thundering, prolonged sound of the titanic blast barely half a mile away penetrated even the thick concrete walls of the Pentagon’s outer ring.

On his way back down to the ILU’s Dungeon after another unsuccessful sparring match with his counterparts in other DOD intelligence outfits, Colonel Peter Thorn paused with his hand on the staircase and stood listening. What the devil was that?

A young naval rating thundering down the stairs behind him supplied the answer. “A passenger jet just hit the Fourteenth Street Bridge, sir! Saw it out my window!”

The young man kept going.

Jesus. Thorn stood stunned for a split second and then took off after the sailor, taking the stairs down two at a time. He didn’t stop to think about it. If anybody on either the plane or the bridge had survived the impact, they were going to need help, and soon.

By the time he reached the ground floor, the hallway was filling up with dozens of men and women, most in uniform, some in civilian clothes. All were racing toward the Pentagon’s northeastern exit, the one closest to the crash site. He joined them.

A blinding cloud of thick black smoke hid most of the Fourteenth Street Bridge from view until Thorn crested the highway embankment and gained a clear line of sight. What he saw was worse than anything he had imagined.

Orange and red flames danced across the entire length and width of the span, fed by thousands of gallons of spilled aviation fuel and gasoline. The cars and trucks that had once crowded the bridge were unrecognisable mere heaps and lumps of blackened, torn, and twisted metal. The impact itself had gouged an enormous crater out of the roadway at the midpoint across the Potomac. Only one scorched wing of the passenger jet remained visible obscenely protruding above the water near a buckled bridge support like a giant shark’s fin.