Razing Beijing: A Thriller Read online

  Suddenly the analyzer and its digital displays—every electronic device in sight, flickered twice and went completely blank.

  Fearing a loss of electrical power Sandy lunged for the breaker switch. The restraining straps tugged against her shoulders as she realized the breaker hadn’t tripped. She shouted into the open microphone, “I just lost everything!”

  THEY COULD NOT have been directed to a better location, Gloria Jackson realized as she assembled her sixty or so invitees for the fly-by a mere fifty feet from the edge of the runway. She saw to it that everyone, particularly the cable television crew, had an unobstructed view of the airliner. The mustard Mojave foothills provided exceptional contrast as the glistening jet leveled off and approached from the distant end of the runway. Most folks were accustomed to the sight of a large passenger plane flying low to the ground, but usually with landing gear extended in preparation to land, and certainly not at so high a speed. Glints of light reflected off the wings as the airliner dipped down, down, close to the runway.

  Tom Hickok of WMJV-TV focused through the video camera’s eyepiece on the rapidly approaching aircraft. For Hickok, the view conjured memories of air shows with his father back in Dayton, Ohio. “Awesome,” he breathed.

  The increasing pitch of the approaching engines, as the pilot advanced the throttles, prompted the cameraman to disengage himself from the eyepiece and double-check the audio gain. Then Hickok heard something else that made him look up.

  When a rumble announced the approaching jet, none inside the IDR could resist the temptation to look up from their monitors and gaze expectantly toward the runway. Any moment the plane would materialize from behind the huge hangar and roar on past.

  “I just lost—” Sandy Cole’s screech was loud enough to clip the loudspeaker circuit. Everyone in the IDR lurched. Confused, they began searching their instruments.

  “We lost the signal!” “All channels OUT!” Technicians and engineers lunged at consoles, all arms and hands pressing buttons and spinning dials in a desperate effort to reestablish contact.

  Stuart’s stomach turned when he saw Vickers clutching his headset and shouting into his microphone: “Sandy...Sandy...Sandy...Fuck.” Vickers turned toward his boss. “She ain’t answering.”

  “Try the cockpit—”

  “Nobody’s responding!”

  Stuart looked around. “Where the hell’s Murdoch?” From outside came the sound of a dull pop not unlike that of a car backfiring, but in reality a jet engine’s violent reversal of airflow known as a compressor stall. Stuart started for the window and stumbled over a chair. A technician with thick eyeglasses and waist-long hair spun from his console and yelled, “Does anyone know if we lost the friggin’ satellite?”

  A reverberating BOOM rocked the glass plates encasing the IDR. Headsets went tumbling in the dash for the windows that followed.

  Stuart pressed his palms to the glass as a hundred yards away the plane roared into view from beyond the hangar, trailing a stream of flame and smoke. Near the rear of the fuselage was a pulsating ball of fire, dark shapes within gyrating as if struggling to escape—Stuart’s eye was drawn to the gaping slash in the cabin. A bright flash and splash of dirt delivered a BOOM as something struck the ground—

  —the windowpane shattered and somebody screamed. Stuart dropped to the floor beneath a hot shower of glass and desert air.

  “Holy shit, look!”

  Dazed and disbelieving, Stuart blinked open his eyes. Embedded in the wall on the opposite side of the room was a smoldering slab of metal.

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE EXPLOSION, it dawned on the crowd by the runway that they were standing in the path of an advancing wall of shrapnel. Blind panic erupted. Instinct sent many running for the nearest building—a hundred yards away, it might as well have been a mile. Dozens scrambled for cover behind the television van.

  Tom Hickok quickly weighed the odds—clutching his camera, he threw himself to the ground.

  SANDY’S INSTRUMENTS WERE AS DEAD as her headphones, which only muffled the whine of the runaway engine. The terrifying thought over-speed gripped her when a violent explosion rocked the plane and a ball of flame shot forward out of the engine. What followed came far too quickly for her brain to discern. Ninety milliseconds after the compressor stall, each of the sixteen propeller blades exerted a centrifugal force of some thirty tons. Along with fragments of the rotors to which they attached, the propellers ripped free of the engine. Half of these deadly projectiles slammed into the runway at the speed of sound. The aircraft’s highly effective Kevlar armor had not been designed to absorb the massive energy release of the rotors. One three-bladed sector of titanium spool hardly slowed as it tore through the fuselage and nearly severed the aircraft in two.

  Sandy’s headphones were torn free. Her eardrums ruptured, she forced her eyes open to witness the source of blistering heat. Violent shaking caused by the mangled rotors made the act of focusing all but impossible. Shards of metal and severed cables were whipping around an enormous tear through the skin of the plane. Blazing debris streaked across the cabin inches behind her. If I stay here, she realized, I’m going to die.

  Sandy fought against panic as her fingers tore at the buckles of her restraining straps. Mustering all of her strength she dove into the aisle, rolled onto her side and stared, mesmerized by the destruction behind her. Oh God I have to get forward. She struggled to her feet...

  Like an animal dismembering itself from a trap, a final shriek of tearing metal freed the engine from the plane. Bright blue air rushed inside the plane to engulf her.

  FROM THE FIRST SHUDDER and eruption of cockpit klaxons, to the red annunciator lights flashing warnings across the instrument panel, Vic Reilly knew that his starboard engine had failed. The loss of symmetrical thrust pulled the plane’s nose down and to the right. In the blink of an eye Reilly had driven his left foot hard onto the rudder pedal. He eased back on the yoke.

  “Hold it—hold it—hold it—bring it up! Okay... Jesus, straighten it out!” Harris shouted as if needing to get his point across. “Just bring it up, bring IT UP!”

  As true for any pilot, flying this close to the ground under these conditions was Reilly’s worst nightmare. “Gear DOWN!” he shouted.

  “Gear down!” Harris grabbed the landing gear handle and shoved down hard, not realizing he’d bent it past the stop. Now both men fought the controls.

  The old DC-9 was not a ‘fly-by-wire’ aircraft, its cockpit controls were instead directly connected to aerodynamic control surfaces through a series of cables, linkages, and actuators. The vertical tail rudder—over-stressed from the combination of massive engine vibration and Reilly’s efforts to keep the plane flying straight—communicated its enormous oscillation to the pedal under Reilly’s foot. He had never experienced the sensation of standing on a raging beast, even on the simulator, as the procession of failures presently unfolding had never been conceived. This realization compounded the pilot’s sense of doom when a sharp jolt brought the violent shuddering to a halt—and his rudder pedal slammed to the floor.

  Harris snapped his head around. “Hydraulic pressure zero!”

  The pilots looked at each other as the controls in their hands went all the way slack. As the nose of the airplane pitched up, filling the windscreen with blue, neither man was aware that the aircraft’s severed tail and engines were already tumbling down the runway. In a burst of denial Reilly grunted as he frantically worked the controls; the plane wandered with a mind of its own. The nose yawed freely to the right and gyrated down.

  Both men knew they would not pull up again. With the asphalt runway looming ever closer, Reilly’s final regret was that he could do nothing for the wild-eyed people frantically running away.

  “We bought it!”

  “Shit—”

  4

  The Next Day

  Washington, D.C.

  SAMUEL MCBURNEY was led through the pouring rain past several dozen Metro police cars, ambulances,
and government-issue sedans lining the curb in front of the Rivergate apartment complex. McBurney knew few of the facts surrounding the double murder which had occurred inside, even less of the unexpected discovery supposedly responsible for his being summoned. The rear door of an idling car swung open, he climbed inside, and was handed a towel.

  McBurney mopped his face dry. He asked, “What is it the CIA can do for you this morning, Mr...?”

  The square-jawed man wearing wire rim glasses presented him with a manila folder. “I’m Special Agent Peter Kosmalski, and I’m in charge here. Can you identify this man?”

  McBurney was aware of the gaze of both Kosmalski and the agent behind the wheel as he hesitantly opened the folder of photographs. He realized by the infamous date on each still image that they were probably taken from a passing tourist’s camcorder; several such recordings had surfaced following the recent terrorist attack on Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum. McBurney considered himself good at remembering faces and he looked closely at one profile of particular clarity. As he did, he felt a cold chill of unease. He looked up. “This is bullshit—no way.”

  “We lifted matching prints from inside the van,” Kosmalski explained.

  “Matching what?”

  “They match the set you took in 1982.”

  McBurney stared again at the photograph with diminishing disbelief—at the line of the man’s jaw, the Roman nose, the heavy brow and cheek bones. Beneath a dark wool cap were the graying sideburns consistent with a man in his fifties, so the age was about right. The Aryan facial features had weathered with time, but McBurney’s memory of that fateful November night in 1983 was sharp; he recalled the view through binoculars of city rooftops in Old Achrafieh, Beirut, and the smell of the Mediterranean Sea. His clandestine operation had begun, ironically, with his having been officially declared dead, a young case officer among the 63 casualties of the brutal suicide attack on the U.S. embassy in Lebanon. He had watched breathlessly as the man who had betrayed his personal trust—Nijad Jabara, an Islamic Jihadist with American blood on his hands—brought his Renault to a stop inside his gated residence, climbed from the car and entered the modest stone house. McBurney himself had coordinated the placement of the explosives inside. The muffled explosion shot fingers of flame through every window and collapsed the roof in a cloud of debris.

  “He can’t be who you believe him to be. We killed him over thirty years ago.”

  “And did you verify the remains?”

  McBurney resumed sorting through the photographs and didn’t respond.

  Kosmalski said, “Mr. Jabara sure seemed like one angry honcho before punching his own ticket. Maybe a man with a score to settle? Any way, we know it’s him on the videotape.”

  “How do you know for certain?”

  “Well, the bastard took two good men along to meet his seventy virgins, but he forgot to bring a few of his fingers, his head, and other assorted DNA material.”

  McBurney recalled the accounts of the final seconds of assault on the Holocaust Memorial. Tossing out their spent RPG tubes, two terrorists followed immediately by a third burst from the rear of their van on motorcycles. The first, tandem pair escaped after taking off in the direction of the Mall. The solo biker raced up the narrow lane between stalled traffic toward the intersection of Jefferson and 14th—where a police officer stood taking aim. The motorcyclist tried to stop, fell sideways, and bounced between vehicles before sliding to a halt. A brief wrestling match involving the officer, the terrorist, and an angry motorist ended abruptly when the terrorist detonated his final avenue of escape. All three men vanished in a violent burst of flying body parts.

  McBurney referred Kosmalski to the curious presence of a Caucasian male in one of the photographs. “This guy near the van seems a little casual about things, doesn’t he?”

  Kosmalski studied McBurney’s face for a moment. “The time and sequence of the images are a little deceiving. But yeah, he’s probably not just some pedestrian happening by.”

  “Where’s the driver of the van?”

  Kosmalski cleared his throat. “We’re using a variety of methods in order to locate him as a witness.”

  “Do these murders inside have something to do with the Holocaust attack?”

  “We believe they do.”

  “And so, you hauled me in here—”

  “To rub your nose in the FBI clean-up of your costly operational failure? Not entirely.”

  McBurney dropped the photos on the seat between him and Kosmalski. “Then besides maybe a pound of flesh, just what is it you want from me? I’m the chief of East Asia Division. The Middle East has not been my purview for quite a few years.”

  “Your Mr. Jabara had a friend named Mohammad Ahmadi.”

  Staring outside through the reflection of his own scowl, McBurney did not have to struggle over this name, either. Mohammad Reza Ahmadi had been working for Iranian intelligence and was assigned to advise the fledgling Lebanese resistance during the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon—a man known to be skilled in the art of designing bloody attacks. He recalled his last meeting with both Ahmadi and Jabara over lunch inside a Beirut café some thirty years ago. “What little I remember isn’t going to help you track him down.”

  “No need. For the past two years he’s been working at the Iranian consulate as deputy charge d’affaires, among other things, apparently. We’ve actually been becoming well acquainted with Mr. Ahmadi.”

  McBurney was aware of the scuttlebutt; word had it that FBI counterintel had tapped into a terrorist source with the potential of becoming another Penkovsky, or a Nosenko—there were few walking the corridors at Langley who could personally recall such successes. But a thug like Mohammad Ahmadi, on the loose in Washington?

  McBurney suspected more bloodshed was about to be laid at his feet. “It’s been a while. I don’t remember Ahmadi as being much of a player.”

  “We weren’t exactly running him. I think it was more the other way around.”

  McBurney was almost afraid to ask, “You suspect this man of committing the murders?”

  “This is his residence. He’s one of the victims.”

  McBurney nodded slowly. “So he had been talking to you, and somebody didn’t approve. Who’s the other victim?”

  McBurney’s question prompted Kosmalski to exchange a look with his partner. “Mr. McBurney, the Bureau requested your presence this morning as a courtesy. And frankly, only because I was overruled.”

  “I understood that you were referred to me regarding something unexpected. Just what did you find?”

  “I’m obligated to provide you the minimum background in order that you understand the context of what it is we found. Beyond that, the murders are not your business.”

  “Understood. How soon do I get to leave?”

  Kosmalski ignored the remark in order to answer his cell phone. “Kosmalski here...uh-huh. Thanks.” He ended the call.

  “Media on their way?” asked Kosmalski’s partner.

  “Hell, it is five-forty in the morning. I’m surprised it took this long.” Kosmalski heaved a sigh. He turned toward McBurney. “I guess we’d better take this up inside.”

  5

  MCBURNEY WADED BEHIND Special Agent Kosmalski through a lobby brimming with FBI, police, and other officials conducting interviews of the building’s tenants; several dozen more appeared to be comparing notes or simply milling around sipping coffee. Outside the Iranian diplomat’s seventh floor apartment, the designated crime scene coordinator requested that he and Kosmalski don surgical gloves and stretch Rayon socks over their shoes before entering. McBurney noted the absence of any apparent damage to the door. Inside, the place had been thoroughly ransacked. Three forensics investigators clad in green overalls and baseball caps were in the process of cataloging objects, most of them scattered about the floor amid pieces of furniture. The sofa had been over-turned, slashed, and eviscerated. Doors of cabinets and drawers had all been flung open, their cont
ents in broken pieces throughout the living room. A woman wearing blue FBI overalls carefully dusted a water glass on the floor for fingerprints.

  McBurney was familiar enough with the exclusive Rivergate address—the Iranian’s tastes had certainly evolved since his days blowing up the neighborhoods of Beirut. Even so, an overturned wine rack and liquor cabinet struck him as particularly out of character. He asked Kosmalski, “Ahmadi lived here alone?”

  “I guess his wife and kids are back in Tehran.”

  “It might be insightful to verify if they’re even alive.”

  “Noted. So the police responded to a 911 disturbance call and the manager let them in. Upon identifying the female victim they gave the Bureau a call. We in turn called the Secret Service.”

  McBurney turned toward Kosmalski. “Secret Service?” The strobe light of a photographer’s camera flashed from beyond the archway leading out of the living room.

  Kosmalski jutted his chin. “The dining room.”

  McBurney realized upon rounding the archway that nothing Kosmalski might have said could prepare him for the aftermath of a slaughter. Two FBI crime scene investigators hovered over the victims, a man and a woman seated back-to-back and slumped forward against what looked like lamp cord strung tightly around their torsos. A starburst of blood and gore on the wall drew McBurney’s eye to the bullet hole in each of their temples.

  McBurney heard Kosmalski ask him, “Does that look like Ahmadi to you?”

  The murderer clearly had taken his time before delivering the moment of death. Both victims’ faces were cut, swollen, and mottled purple with bruises but it was the woman, young and probably attractive, who had taken the brunt of abuse. One of the investigators flashed a photograph and stepped back—McBurney’s stomach turned. The woman’s left breast was mangled beyond recognition. Her chest and inner thighs were awash in coagulated blood. Averting his eyes, he saw arranged like surgeon’s instruments on the dining room table a pair of pliers, a bloodied broom handle, and a carving knife. “Could be him,” McBurney replied.