The Intercept Read online

  “I heard it, Anders.”

  “Everything is under control at the moment. Maggie is hurt.”

  “How badly?”

  Anders looked at Maggie. The woman passenger lifted her jacket from the wound. Anders nodded, smiling at Maggie.

  “It looks like she is going to be fine,” he said.

  “Are you secure?”

  Anders looked back at the two men lying on top of the bomber. He saw the blond holding the supposed detonator, and his own crooked wrist.

  “He said he had a bomb, but it . . . looks like it was just a hoax. Just a trigger with wires. And a knife.”

  For ten seconds, the line was silent.

  “Here are my orders,” said Captain Granberg when he came back on. “Move all passengers from business class to the rear of the plane except those controlling the hijacker. Tie him up with lap belt extensions and the plastic slip ties from the emergency electrical repair bin. You know the one.”

  Anders said, “Overhead, just forward of the galley.”

  “When you have him tied, carry him back to the last row in that cabin, recline the inner middle seat, lash him tightly in it. You supervise at all times. I want him handled humanely, but securely. Be sure he cannot move. Remove his shoes and his pants also. Post at least two guards over him. Do not let him get his hands anywhere near his own mouth or throat. Do you copy?”

  “I copy,” Anders Bendiksen said.

  “For security reasons, I will not be opening the flight deck door again. You will remain posted at the door in view of the attacker. I have already squawked the hijack code on the transponder. I will now get clearance for an emergency descent and landing.”

  The captain’s voice came over the Airbus’s cabin loudspeakers.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Granberg. We have successfully averted a cockpit intrusion in the forward cabin.”

  The gasp that went up throughout the length of the aircraft was unlike any human noise the crew had ever heard.

  “There is no danger currently. Please remain in your seats unless instructed directly by First Officer Bendiksen, myself, or members of the cabin crew. I repeat—please do remain in your seats. The airplane is still in perfect condition, and we will be diverting for landing with law enforcement members standing by. Please do not be alarmed by the flashing lights after we land, nor the medical support equipment. We have had one minor injury, and I am assured it is not serious or life-threatening. As soon as possible, we will resume our journey to Newark. I would like to apologize for this inconvenience on behalf of the airline, and for your missed connections with ongoing flights. Thanks to all of you for your patience and understanding, and flight attendants, please prepare the cabin for landing.”

  Chapter 15

  Bangor International Airport, some 230 miles northeast of Boston, is the largest, easternmost airport for incoming European flights. A former air force base, the remote airport offers relatively uncluttered skies and, at more than eleven thousand feet in length and two hundred feet in width, one of the longest, widest runways on the East Coast.

  Once the stopover point of choice for refueling international charter flights, with the advent of longer-range jetliners Bangor International became, in the air-rage era of the 1990s, a convenient drop-off point for drunk or unruly passengers or medical emergencies.

  After 9/11, it became the go-to destination for transatlantic flights diverted due to terrorist concerns. Most often this applied to passengers discovered to be on the Homeland Security Department’s no-fly list once a plane was already in the air. A few other times the airport had received aircraft beset by inebriated or psychotic passengers.

  The apparatus was therefore already in place, and the response team drilled and ready—but when word came that it was not merely an undesirable passenger but in fact a thwarted terrorist hijacking, the extraction proceeded with additional electricity.

  Captain Granberg set down the big Airbus just after 1:00 P.M. Eastern and followed Bangor ground control orders to taxi, park, and shut down his main engines on a hardstand approximately one mile away from the passenger terminal.

  Granberg watched from the cabin while a swarm of emergency vehicles—in chartreuse green, as opposed to cherry red—took positions around his plane with fluid choreography. For a silent minute, none of the fire trucks and ambulances and foamer tanks moved. Then ground control advised Granberg to open the galley access door on the starboard side of the vestibule. Granberg relayed these instructions to Bendiksen, who opened the door into the gray Maine light.

  The tactical team boarded the plane from an elevated food service truck nuzzled up to the galley door. Four members of the Bangor Police Department hostage extraction team in black body armor, accompanied by two special agents from the Bangor FBI field office and two emergency medical technicians, entered the plane. Automatic weapons drawn, the team rushed past the flight crew and the remaining passengers who had captured the hijacker, through the business-class cabin curtain into economy extra, greeted by the passengers’ gasps.

  Once they were aboard, Captain Granberg opened the cockpit door and emerged from the flight deck, surveying the damage in the vestibule. He followed the extraction team, showing his captain’s bars.

  “We’ll take him off first, Captain,” said the team leader. “The injured attendant and those involved in the fight next.” He nodded toward them. “You will then taxi to the terminal to unload the rest of the passengers.”

  Granberg acknowledged the orders and, after a quick appraisal of the would-be hijacker—anger starting to set in now—he returned to the cockpit.

  With an efficiency that comes only from drills and endless rehearsals, the extraction team released the hijacker from the improvised bonds, replaced them systematically with Velcro straps around his ankles, thighs, waist, and shoulders, and pinned his arms to his sides. In a move the hijacker tried to evade with a violent shake, they covered his head with a black, breathable cloth bag and cinched it closed at his neckline. Three of them hoisted the prisoner to shoulder level like a rolled-up carpet. In step, they moved swiftly up the aisle and out onto the food service truck, into the cargo compartment.

  The compartment was lowered into the driving position, and the hijacker was secured to a bare steel gurney with two thick leather belts. The truck pulled away, escorted by two police cars, roof racks alive with flashing blue and chrome-white lights.

  The fourth team member led the five passengers and Maggie, the injured flight attendant, to the elevated platform of a second truck, which was similarly lowered and driven away under escort. Trude Carlson and Anders Bendiksen remained aboard the aircraft, as did the paramedics and the two FBI agents. The Airbus door was shut and secured, and Captain Granberg started up the engines again, turning the aircraft around and taxiing to the passenger terminal.

  The airport detention facility was on the south end of the main terminal. The driver of the food service truck, a policeman in a black Windbreaker, backed down a sloping ramp into a subterranean garage. A corrugated steel door slammed down behind it, and the clanging reverse caution alarm of the truck stopped.

  On the opposite end of the garage, wide double doors opened to a room with a steel picnic table bolted to the floor surrounded by four cells, two of them fronted by bars, two with pale green steel doors. Beyond the cells were two interrogation rooms, ten-by-ten concrete chambers with drains in the floors, all of these post-9/11 renovations paid for by Homeland Security. The extraction team rolled the would-be hijacker of Flight 903 into the first interrogation room, turned off the light, and closed the door.

  The pinioned man was held fast. No room even to squirm. The straps felt like they were crushing his bones—his ribs especially. The pressure on his lungs was immense. He breathed shallowly, fighting for oxygen in the stifling blackness of the hood. Sobbing hurt too much.

  After ten minut
es of immobility and silence, he became convinced he had been left alone to suffocate and die. He imagined himself already buried. Even as his mind wanted to fly into panic, he fought to be strong.

  The FBI’s terrorist reaction team was airborne even before SAS Flight 903 landed.

  Four agents, three men and a woman, specialists in urgent interrogation techniques, flew at two hundred knots in a UH-60 Black Hawk from Boston. Covering the distance to Bangor took them a little over an hour.

  The tactical assumption was that a terrorist incident is rarely a solitary event. The loose strictures of the U.S. Patriot Act allowed the team expanded interrogation tools. They could go into his head like an extraction team, removing information by force if necessary. Time was at a premium. Minutes wasted on back-and-forth exchanges with a knowledgeable suspect could mean the difference between saving or losing countless lives if a massive plot was under way.

  The team entered the interrogation room and worked quickly. The subject’s head jerked to the side at the sound of the door opening; isolation had softened him up. The team carried in their own chair—steel, with plates at the feet of all four legs for bolting the chair into the floor. That was not necessary here. They manhandled him into the seat, leaving the hood covering his head.

  They bound his wrists to the chair arms, his calves to its front legs, then removed the other restraints. He was fingerprinted digitally, each fingertip and full palm.

  The woman rolled up his left sleeve. He tensed at the preternaturally smooth touch of a latex-gloved hand.

  The hypodermic needle went in. The chamber filled with a sample of his blood. The vial was capped and taped, the puncture wound left without a bandage. A thin stream of blood rolled down to the crook of his elbow.

  After the silent ministrations of physical identification, the first word came at him with the force of a slap.

  “Name?”

  A man’s voice, speaking in a common Saudi dialect.

  The hijacker clenched his teeth within his hood.

  “Name,” again. Then: “We already know who you are. We have your passport. Name?”

  He gritted his teeth. His heart was leaping out of his chest.

  He felt the chair go back at an angle, and was startled he was going to fall. He prayed, giving himself to God as he had every day of his life.

  “We have water,” said the voice. “Would you like the water?”

  They did not mean a drink. They meant torture. Waterboarding.

  The hijacker held his breath, expecting a torrent at any moment.

  Instead, another tugging at his left arm. He felt the prick of another needle.

  Only this time—no blood was taken.

  Within moments, he felt groggy and elated. He sank into a warm bath . . . or, rather, the warm bath sank into him.

  His name came soon after, without much effort. Awaan Abdulraheem. The words walked out of his mouth like freed prisoners. Awaan felt a tug at his hair and the hood came off, giving way to a beam of light.

  He felt a devil inside of him, a chatty demon, delighted to talk.

  “I am from beautiful Yemen,” he said, his voice like a song. “Arabia Felix, as the Roman conquerors called our fertile home on the Red Sea. My people have grown mangoes on the outskirts of Sanaa for five generations. I am twenty years old. I am mujahideen. I serve one true God.”

  Awaan began to weep, crippled by his failure. What had they done to him—turning him into someone else? Demons. Their questions elicited responses as though through dark magic.

  “I am not a pilot. I learned how to turn the dial on an autopilot to get the plane to New York. My strike into the heart of that city of devils would have been my gift unto God!”

  They want to know about the others. Hold on to yourself, he thought. He focused on his mother back home. How proud she would be. He was not the misfit they all thought he was, after all. He was capable of great things.

  “I am an obedient soldier,” he said, his tears hot and stinging. He bore down, remembering his pain, nattering on through a forced smile. Hold fast, he told himself. Answer literally.

  Who else planned attack?

  “The plan grew from only my heart. No others.”

  They pressed, wanting more from him. Wanting everything. He choked back his own words, convulsing, struggling for air. He gagged, finally, and a bilious stream of vomit splashed warm into his lap.

  Chapter 16

  Once SAS 903 had declared the attempted hijacking and was diverted for landing at Bangor, the FAA shut down the airport to all traffic with the exception of law enforcement aircraft. Inside the main terminal, no more than one hundred passengers due to meet or depart on midday flights were inconvenienced.

  Airline workers joined with the small food service shops to make the 230 unexpected visitors as comfortable as possible. By the time the Airbus taxied to the jetway, they had coffee, sandwiches, and soft drinks set up on a buffet in the main arrivals hall inside the security screening gates.

  The mood was distinctly cheerful, even exuberant, as the passengers deplaned: all of them grateful that the worst had not happened, that they were on the ground, that they were alive. Airport representatives were coordinating with the airline and Homeland Security to reroute passengers and their luggage. The airport lockdown kept media at bay, and the passengers were encouraged to call their loved ones but not to contact any media outlets for the time being.

  Maggie and the five heroic passengers who had come to her aid were escorted to a lounge converted into a mini-emergency room, in accordance with airport disaster planning. With the FBI agents and police standing guard, each person was greeted by a physician and a nurse. Maggie’s bleeding had stopped, but she was dizzy from both blood loss and stress, and experiencing shocklike symptoms.

  Trude, the other flight attendant, had become hysterical once the passengers and crew had exited the airplane. She was dosed with antianxiety medication, but when that did not settle her down, she was taken to a local hospital for evaluation. The pilots were both questioned, but because neither was in fact an eyewitness to the attack, their value to the investigation was limited.

  The blond man who had snatched the bomb trigger from the hijacker’s hand was thought to have broken his wrist and received immediate medical attention.

  A female FBI agent took the floor, speaking loudly. “Could I have everyone’s attention, please? Very quickly, we want to get the injured treated right away, and everyone else looked over. I need to ask that your cell phones be turned over to us at this time, so that we may contact your families and associates for you. You of course will be able to contact them yourselves at a later time.

  “I need to insist that no one talk to anyone else until we have had a chance to debrief you. This is very important. You have all been instrumental in disrupting a terror attack, saving the lives of your fellow passengers. It is imperative that we begin our investigation into this incident with uncorrupted witness accounts, so we’ll ask you to bear with us for the next few hours.

  “Other than that, once you have been evaluated and medically cleared, feel free to help yourselves to sandwiches, coffee, tea, and sodas. Restrooms are through those doors, and you do not need an escort but we do ask that you go one at a time. Any other questions or issues, please seek out one of the officers. Thank you.”

  Jeremy Fisk and Krina Gersten rushed over to Teterboro Airport just in time to hitch a ride on a Treasury Department jet carrying three quick-reaction investigators from the Joint Terrorism Task Force from New Jersey to Bangor, Maine.

  Intel Division was being included because the flight had been bound for Newark Airport, and the plot apparently involved a target within the New York metropolitan area. The mood on the jet was cordial, but mistrust continued between the JTTF and Intel. In the wake of the averted Times Square subway bombing, the heads of both departments had publi
cly pledged their support for each other, but the reality hadn’t trickled down to the street agents.

  Fisk had been on his way to lunch when he got the alert. He was told to take one other Intel cop with him, and the decision was an easy one. Krina had been relegated to various shit assignments recently. As a female cop investigating a largely Muslim population, there were some obvious limitations on her assignments, but over time Fisk had come to defend her allegation that there was more to it than that. She never complained, except privately to him. Cop work was still largely a boys’ club, and as she told him, she had been dealing with this sort of thing her entire career.

  They touched down smoothly, taxiing right up to the main terminal. An airport representative escorted them to a common room outside the detention center, where the terrorist reaction team had nearly finished their postmortem. The fellow FBI agents acknowledged one another, then everyone took a seat around a conference table while the lead agent spoke from his notes.

  “Looks like this guy Abdulraheem was the whole thing,” said the agent. “We’ve got everything he had. His story is so common among these young wannabe terrorists that it can’t be a legend. He loved the attention he got in Sanaa, Yemen, when he was recruited into one of those puppy cells at his mosque. They sent him to Peshawar for indoc, gave him a cutout contact, and told him to wait until he received orders. For a year he waited. And waited. And maybe went a little crazy. That’s how they do it, they test your fidelity, your patience. Abdulraheem failed the test. The wait was too much. He took a page from the nine-eleven playbook, bought an undetectable obsidian knife, jumped on the friendly old Internet, and watched some British flight school’s taped lectures on controlling an airliner’s course and altitude with the autopilot. That was it. He made his move alone on SAS 903, that is confirmed. His target was undefined in midtown Manhattan. He was planning on figuring that part out once he got inside the flight deck. This actor’s gonna be with us for a long, long time at Club Gitmo. Very small potatoes, seems to me, but who knows? He might know a few more names. He’s proven he doesn’t have the stuffing to wait the long wait. If he’s got anything else, it will come out, sooner rather than later. But the critical threat here is over.”