The Lion's Game (7 page)

Kate, Foster, Nash, and I walked through the big Customs and baggage carousel area and down a corridor to the Passport Control booths where no one even asked us our business.

I mean, you could show some of these idiots a Roy Rogers badge and walk through with a rocket launcher over your shoulder.

In short, JFK is a security nightmare, a teaming cauldron of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the stupid, where thirty million travelers pass in and out every year.

We were all walking together now, down one of those long surreal corridors that connect the Passport and Immigration area to the arrival gates. In effect, we were doing the reverse of what arriving passengers do, and I suggested we walk backwards so as not to attract attention, but nobody thought that was necessary or even funny.

Kate Mayfield and I were ahead of Nash and Foster, and she asked me, “Did you study Asad Khalil’s psychological profile?”

I didn’t recall seeing any psychological profile in the dossier and I said so.

She replied, “Well, there was one in there. It indicates that a man like Asad Khalil—Asad means ‘lion’ in Arabic, by the way—that a man like that suffers from low self-esteem and has unresolved issues of childhood inadequacy that he needs to work through.”

“Excuse me?”

“This is the type of man who needs an affirmation of his self-worth.”

“You mean I can’t break his nose?”

“No, you may not. You have to validate his sense of personhood.”

I glanced at her and saw she was smiling. Quick-witted fellow that I am, I realized she was jerking me around. I laughed, and she punched my arm playfully, which I sort of liked.

There was a woman at the gate in a sky blue uniform holding a clipboard and a two-way radio. I guess we looked dangerous or something because she started jabbering into the radio as she watched us approaching.

Kate went on ahead and held up her FBI creds and spoke to the woman, who calmed down. You know, everybody’s paranoid these days, especially at international airports. When I was a kid, we used to go right to the gate to meet people, a metal detector was what you took to the beach to find loose change, and a hijacking was what happened to trucks. But international terrorism has changed all that. Unfortunately, paranoia doesn’t necessarily translate to good security.

Anyway, Nash, Foster, and I went up and schmoozed with the lady, who it turned out was a gate agent who worked for Trans-Continental. Her name was Debra Del Vecchio, which had a nice ring to it. She told us that as far as she knew, the flight was on time, and that’s why she was standing there. So far, so good.

There is a standard procedure for the boarding, transporting, and deplaning of prisoners and their escorts; prisoners and escorts board last and deplane first. Even VIPs, such as politicians, have to wait for prisoners to deplane, but many politicians eventually wind up in cuffs and then they can deplane first.

Kate said to Ms. Del Vecchio, “When you move the jetway to the aircraft, we will walk to the aircraft door and wait there. The people we’re meeting will deplane first, and we’ll escort them down the service stairs of the jetway onto the tarmac where a vehicle is waiting for us. You won’t see us again. There will be no inconvenience to your passengers.”

Ms. Del Vecchio asked, “Who are you meeting?”

I replied, “Elvis Presley.”

Kate clarified, “A VIP.”

Foster asked her, “Has anyone else asked you about this flight?”

She shook her head.

Nash studied the photo ID pinned to her blouse.

I thought I should do or say something clever to justify the fifty-dollar cab ride from Manhattan, but short of asking her if she had an Arab boyfriend, I couldn’t think of anything.

So, the five of us stood around, trying to look like we were having fun, checking our watches and staring at the stupid tourist posters on the wall of the corridor.

Foster seemed suddenly to remember that he had a cell phone, and he whipped it out, delighted that he had something to do. He speed-dialed, waited, then said, “Nick, this is George. We’re at the gate. Anything new there?”

Foster listened to Nick Monti, then said, “Okay ... yes ... right ... okay ... good ...”

Unable to entertain himself any further with this routine phone call, he signed off and announced, “The van is in place on the tarmac near this gate. The Port Authority and NYPD have also arrived—five cars, ten guys, plus the paddy wagon decoy.”

I asked, “Did Nick say how the Yankees are doing?”

“No.”

“They’re playing Detroit at the Stadium. Should be fifth inning by now.”

Debra Del Vecchio volunteered, “They were behind, three to one, in the bottom of the fourth.”

“This is going to be a tough season,” I said.

Anyway, we made dumb talk for a while, and I asked Kate, “Got your income tax done yet?”

“Sure. I’m an accountant.”

“I figured as much.” I asked Foster, “You an accountant, too?”

“No, I’m a lawyer.”

I said, “Why am I not surprised?”

Debra said, “I thought you were FBI.”

Kate explained, “Most agents are accountants or lawyers.”

Ms. Del Vecchio said, “Weird.”

Ted Nash just stood there against the wall, his hands jammed into his jacket pockets, staring off into space, his mind probably returning to the good old days of the CIA-KGB World Series. He never imagined that his winning team would be reduced to playing farm teams. I said to Kate, “I thought you were a lawyer.”

“That, too.”

“I’m impressed. Can you cook?”

“Sure can. And I have a black belt in karate.”

“Can you type?”

“Seventy words a minute. And I’m qualified as a marksman on five different pistols and three kinds of rifles.”

“Nine millimeter Browning?”

“No problem,” she said.

“Shooting match?”

“Sure. Anytime.”

“Five bucks a point.”

“Ten and you’re on.”

We shook hands.

I wasn’t falling in love or anything, but I had to admit I was intrigued.

The minutes ticked by. I said, “So, this guy walks into the bar and says to the bartender, ‘You know, all lawyers are assholes.’ And a guy at the end of the bar says, ‘Hey, I heard that. I resent that.’ And the first guy says, ‘Why? Are you a lawyer?’ And the other guy says, ‘No, I’m an asshole.’”

Ms. Del Vecchio laughed. Then she looked at her watch, then glanced at her radio.

We waited.

Sometimes you get a feeling that something is not right. I had that feeling.

Crew Chief Sergeant Andy McGill of the Emergency Service unit, aka Guns and Hoses, stood on the running board of his RIV emergency fire and rescue truck. He had pulled on his silver-colored bunker suit, and he was starting to sweat inside the fireproof material. He adjusted his binoculars and watched the Boeing 747 make its approach. As far as he could determine, the aircraft looked fine and was on a normal approach path.

He poked his head into the open window and said to his firefighter Tony Sorentino, “No visual indication of a problem. Broadcast.”

Sorentino, also in his fire suit, picked up the microphone that connected to the other Emergency Service vehicles and repeated McGill’s status report to all the other ESV trucks. Each responded with a Roger, followed by their call signs.

McGill said to Sorentino, “Tell them to follow a standard deployment pattern and follow the subject aircraft until it clears the runway.”

Sorentino broadcasted McGill’s orders, and everyone again acknowledged.

The other crew chief, Ron Ramos, transmitted to McGill, “You need us, Andy?”

McGill replied, “No, but stay suited up. This is still a three-three.”

“It looks like a three-nothing.”

“Yeah, but we can’t talk to the pilot, so stand by.”

McGill focused his binoculars on the FAA Control Tower in the far distance. Even with the reflection on the glass, he could tell that a number of people were lined up at the big window. Obviously the Control Tower people had gotten themselves worked up about this.

McGill opened the right side door and slid in beside Sorentino, who sat in the center of the big cab behind the steering wheel. “What do you think?”

Sorentino replied, “I think I’m not paid to think.”

“But what if you
had
to think?”

“I want to think there’s no problem, except for the radios. I don’t want to fight an aircraft fire today, or have a shoot-out with hijackers.”

McGill didn’t reply.

They sat in silence a few seconds. It
was
hot in their fire suits, and McGill clicked up the cab’s ventilating fan.

Sorentino studied the lights and gauges on his display panel. The RIV held nine hundred pounds of purple K powder, used to put out electrical fires, seven hundred fifty gallons of water, and one hundred gallons of lite water. Sorentino said to McGill, “All systems are go.”

McGill reflected that this was the sixth run he’d made this week and only one had been necessary—a brake fire on a Delta 737. In fact, it had been five years since he’d fought a real fire on an aircraft—an Airbus 300 with an engine ablaze that almost got out of control. McGill himself had never had a hijack situation, and there was only one man still working Guns and Hoses who had, and he wasn’t on duty today.

McGill said to Sorentino, “After the subject aircraft clears the runway, we’ll follow him to the gate.”

“Right. You want anyone to tag with us?”

“Yeah ... we’ll take two of the patrol cars ... just in case they have a situation on board.”

“Right.”

McGill knew that he had a good team. Everyone on the Guns and Hoses unit loved the duty, and they’d all come up the hard way, from crap places like the Port Authority bus terminal, bridge and tunnel duty, or airport patrol duty. They’d put in their time busting prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, and drug users, rousting bums from various places in the far-flung Port Authority empire, chasing toll beaters and drunks on the bridges and tunnels, taking runaway kids from the Midwest into custody at the bus station, and so forth.

Being a Port Authority cop was a strange mix of this and that, but Guns and Hoses was the plum assignment. Everyone in the unit was a highly trained volunteer, and theoretically they were ready to fight a blazing jet fuel fire, trade lead with crazed terrorists, or administer CPR to a heart attack victim. They were all potential heroes, but the last decade or so had been pretty quiet, and McGill wondered if the guys hadn’t gotten a little soft.

Sorentino was studying a floor plan of the 747-700 on his lap. He said, “This is one big mother.”

“Yup.” McGill hoped that if it was a mechanical problem, the pilot was bright enough to have jettisoned the remaining fuel. It was McGill’s belief that jetliners were little more than flying bombs—sloshing fuel, super-heated engines, and electrical wires, and who-knew-what in the cargo holds, sailing through space with the potential to take out a few city blocks. Andy McGill never mentioned to anyone the fact that he was afraid of flying and in fact never flew and never would. Meeting the beast on the ground was one thing—being up there in its belly was another.

Andy McGill and Tony Sorentino stared out the windshield into the beautiful April sky. The 747 had grown larger and now had depth and color. Every few seconds it seemed to get twice as big.

Sorentino said, “Looks okay.”

“Yeah.” McGill picked up his field glasses and focused on the approaching aircraft. The big bird had sprouted four separate bogies—gangs of wheels—two from beneath its wings and two from mid-fuselage, plus the nose gear. Twenty-four tires in all. He said, “The tires seem intact.”

“Good.”

McGill continued to stare at the aircraft that now seemed to hover a few hundred feet above and beyond the far end of Kennedy’s two-mile-long northeast runway. McGill, despite his fear of flying, was mesmerized by these magnificent monsters. It seemed to him that the act of taking off and landing was something near to magic. He had, a few times in his career, come up to one of these mystical beasts when their magic had disappeared in smoke and fire. At those times, the aircraft had become just another conflagration, no different than a truck or building that was intent on consuming itself. Then, it was McGill’s job to prevent that from happening. But until then, it seemed that these flying behemoths had arrived from another dimension, making unearthly noises and defying all the laws of earth’s gravity.

Sorentino said, “Almost down ...”

McGill barely heard him and continued to stare through his field glasses. The landing gear hung down with a defiant gesture that seemed to be ordering the runway to come up to them. The aircraft held its nose up high, with the two nose-mounted tires centered above the level of the main landing gear. The flaps were down, the speed, altitude, and angle were all fine. Shimmering heat waves trailed behind the four giant engines. The aircraft seemed alive and well, McGill thought, possessing both intent and intensity.

Sorentino asked, “See anything wrong?”

“No.”

The 747 crossed the threshold of the runway and dropped toward its customary touchdown point of several hundred yards beyond the threshold. The nose pitched up slightly just before the first of the main tires touched and leveled themselves from their angled-down initial position. A puff of silver-gray smoke popped up from behind each group of tires as they hit the concrete and went from zero to two hundred miles an hour in one second. From the touch of the first main tires until the pair of tires on the nose strut dropped to make contact with the runway had taken four or five seconds, but the grace of the act made it seem longer, like a perfectly executed football pass into the end zone. Touchdown.

A voice came over the emergency vehicle’s speaker and announced, “Rescue Four is moving.”