The 9/11 Machine Read online

  The TV changed back to the announcer.

  “President Cheney is scheduled to make a prime-time speech tonight on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11,” the male anchor said soberly. He turned to another camera and continued. “In news from the war front, today marked the 35th straight day of bombing, as coalition forces from the United States and Britain pounded entrenched forces near the Iraqi city of Mosul. The U.S. Army Forward Command acknowledged their use of infamous ground-penetrating ‘bunker busters’ to flush out top-level Iraqi and al Qaeda personnel, hiding in deep concrete bunkers beneath Mosul, Baghdad, and other major Iraqi cities, despite international outrage.”

  The scene changed to show a military helicopter landing on the lawn of the White House. “In Washington, D.C., General Franks has returned from the front lines in Iraq today to meet with President Cheney to discuss the progress of the war. Last week, during a press conference with the pool of embedded reporters in Kuwait, Franks mentioned that the use of tactical nuclear weapons was on the table for the first time. The weapons are now being considered to end the stalemate in Baghdad and other entrenched locations in Iraq. Known as Battlefield Nukes, these smaller, portable nuclear weapons have a variable yield of between 40 and 80 kilotons. Dr. Hawkins, an expert in such weaponry, joins us now to explain why the U.S. military is turning to these types of weapons to halt the Iraqi stalemate, now entering its fifth year. Tactical nukes were used to win the war in Afghanistan in 2004, paving the way for the beginning of the war on Iraq, which started the same year as victory was declared in Afghanistan.”

  Don muted the interview and finished cooking his breakfast. He carried it over to the table and read the paper and ate, looking for anything out of the ordinary. The headlines were the same as always—war. War in the Middle East, war in the Balkans, war marching across the globe like a cloaked figure with a scythe.

  The war in Afghanistan had gone well, quick and successful, except for the guerilla holdouts in the north. President Cheney had taught them a very valuable lesson, “glassing” the area in and around the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the fourth largest city in Afghanistan. Something like 40,000 people had died instantly, with a hundred thousand more sickened by the nuclear cloud that had drifted north into Uzbekistan. A hundred square miles now made up the “Cheney Zone,” as the uninhabitable stretch of desert was known.

  But that brutal, horrendous attack ended the war. The Taliban had fallen, and every insurgent captured was executed by Hamid Karzai’s forces. But oddly, the tactical nuclear obliteration of Mazar-i-Sharif had emboldened the rest of the world for more fighting, including the United States. A dozen smaller wars, brewing since the months following 9/11, grew in breadth.

  Cheney had then laid out his case against Iraq. Chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda training camps, active terrorist funding. Only months after victory in Afghanistan, as the troops were coming home to a grateful nation, the president embarked on another war. Weary, but understanding the need to fight terror anywhere in the world, the American public had backed the invasion, cheering as forces gathered in Kuwait and stormed across the border, hell-bent on racing each other to Baghdad.

  But in Iraq, the invading United States and British forces had found an embedded and embittered enemy who would seemingly stop at nothing to repel the invasion and, more importantly, maintain Saddam Hussein’s stranglehold on power. The front page in Don’s hand said it all:

  SADDAM’S CHEMICAL WEAPONS

  UNLEASHED AGAIN

  Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (AP) – Saddam Hussein announced on Monday the use of chemical weapons again, this time on a battalion of U.S. forces, saying that “the infidels must be pushed back into the sea.” There have been several reports of casualties from the attack, thought to be mustard gas or some other highly-toxic nerve agent. The U.N. further condemned Iraq’s use of banned chemical weapons and munitions. After the fall of Afghanistan in August 2004 and Basra in May of this year, U.S. military planners had expected to take the country by summer, but resistance forces from neighboring Iran and Syria have poured into the country, stemming the invasion and...

  The story continued onto another page, but Don shook his head. He didn’t need to read the rest—it was always the same. He flipped through the rest of the paper and finished his breakfast, then stood to do his dishes.

  On the TV, he saw images of car bombs and turned up the sound to hear the report.

  “Three more car bombs ripped through the newly-occupied Palestine Territory,” the anchor said over footage of wreckage from car bombs and mass casualties. “The exiled leader of Israel, Yasser Arafat, again called for Israel to withdraw from Palestine. In the months after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Israel invaded and occupied the Palestine territories, citing security reasons. Since the 2002 invasion, more than twelve hundred suicide bombings have taken place, as the Israeli government takes more divisive and controversial preemptive action to counter terrorist threats. Forcible removal of Palestinians resulted in Yasser Arafat’s resignation as president of Israel in protest. Most of the leaders of Hezbollah were assassinated in the months after 9/11. Israel also has accelerated construction of a controversial security fence around the occupied…”

  Don flipped the TV off, disgusted. The situation around the world had been unstable enough after 9/11, with the United States temporarily occupied with a constitutional crisis.

  Of course, the Israelis had gone off the reservation and used the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to take back the Palestinian lands. Now, it was an all-out war, with air strikes on one side and waves of suicide bombers and Iranian-made missiles on the other.

  And Israel had nukes.

  Don wondered how long the Israelis would be able to control themselves before resorting to wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian squatters. Or how long the Iranians would sit on the sidelines—of course, their focus now was sending as many “martyrs” into Iraq as possible to fight the Americans. But they were reportedly close to developing their own nuclear weapons and recently had successfully tested a short-range ballistic missile. He was sure the Iranians had already picked out their list of targets in Israel.

  Don didn’t know a lot about politics, or geo-political movements, or international relations—he was a physicist. He didn’t want to know anything about this stuff, but it had been important for him to steep himself in it, to learn enough about international relations to understand it and, more importantly, accurately predict future events. He’d called on a few of his former colleagues at the university, political science and international relations professors, to give him a crash course in the thinking that drove national leaders and dictators.

  Don preferred theoretical physics, and meson particles, and string theory. Those concepts were cut-and-dried, true-or-false constructs, not abstractions based on mood, or revenge, or petty political gain. Next to trying to ascertain and predict shifting political allegiances and backroom deals, quantum entanglement was easy to understand. Don was far more comfortable in the world of the real. But he was learning enough to wander his way through areas that, just a couple of years before, would have been unnavigable.

  And now, his research was complete.

  Don gathered his keys and briefcase from the side table near the front door—he double-checked to make sure he had his USID. The checkpoints were bad enough without trying to explain that you had left your card at home.

  Sarah had always been good at remembering where he’d left his keys. One time, she’d found a printout of a wayward PowerPoint presentation that he’d spent a solid and panicked half hour searching for; he’d inexplicably left it on the top of the refrigerator. She’d always needled him relentlessly about the time, when they’d first started dating, that she had found his car keys in the freezer. To this day, he still didn’t understand how they could’ve gotten in there.

  On the small table next to his keys and cell phone sat a dusty, framed certificate:

&nb
sp; The 1999 Sakurai Prize for

  Theoretical Physics

  Awarded to Dr. DONALD ELLIS for discoveries related to the

  properties of spontaneous and

  repeating symmetry in four-dimensional theory and of the

  consistent generation of gluon and meson masses.

  Don glanced at the framed certificate—he remembered that dinner. He’d been presented the award at a very fancy black-tie dinner in the city. He’d been so nervous, but Sarah had calmed him. The university had sent a limousine for them, the first and last time he’d ever ridden in one. He remembered sitting in the back of that limo, sweating bullets and agonizing over his speech.

  She’d climbed into the car next to him, looking amazing in a slinky black number that he hadn’t seen before. Sarah had taken away the note cards he’d been nervously fingering. She’d held his hands and told him stories of her youth in the Texas panhandle as the long black car glided into the city. Those were the stories that he remembered, goofy tales that she’d told him over the years. They had always helped him get through the tough days or long nights of research. Without effort, Don could recall several. He missed hearing those stories.

  Don glanced around the house, seeing the pictures on the walls and reminders of her everywhere. Tina and Sarah. Sarah’s old leather coat still hung on the hook by the front door. He never had people over—who would want to visit the house anyway, a mausoleum that he maintained in their memory? It was just creepy: the preserved rooms, the coat hanging by the door, as if Sarah would return at any moment, annoyed that she’d forgotten it.

  Don could just imagine the looks he would get from visitors, sideways glances that made it clear how strange they thought the whole situation was.

  And then there was the living room.

  Don spent most of his time in there, anyway. Three walls were hidden behind bookshelves, next to the large fireplace she had loved. He slept many nights on the couch in the living room, when he wasn’t sleeping at the warehouse.

  He hated sleeping in their bed.

  But the fourth wall of the living room was the one he imagined people would notice first. It was covered from floor to ceiling with newspaper clippings and photos and articles printed from the Internet. The collage now covered the whole wall, with strings tacked into articles and running down the wall to other articles. Pages torn from newspapers, with sections circled and handwritten notes in the margins. Printouts and mathematical formulas and a large “timeline” of events leading up to 9/11 covered the wall. Even to him, the wall looked like the lair of a crazy person, someone pathologically obsessed with the events of 9/11.

  But the articles and pictures and research were important—there was no way for a visitor to understand what he was doing, or why it was important that he study these things, to commit them to memory, to capture scans and PDFs of all of the facets and details of the months and years leading up to 9/11.

  Don didn’t think any visitors would understand, and he didn’t really care. He knew that afterward, the cops would search his home and find all of his notes—well, not all of his notes. Not anything really important and certainly nothing to give away what had really happened. But Don was pretty sure they’d look at the wall of his living room and shake their heads and assign him the official label of “nut job.”

  Don knew it was bad to surround himself with their things, but he had been unable to remove them, even though they had both been dead for ten years. Leaving all of this behind would be the hardest part—Tina’s room and her books. Sarah’s closet, filled with clothes that somehow smelled like her, even after all this time. Don still kept his things on his half of their closet. He still slept on his half of their bed.

  Sometimes, in the morning, he still absentmindedly started her coffee for her. Once, his mind so distracted with a new set of calculations on the machine, he’d even made her an omelet, setting it out for her on the dining room table. It had been there, untouched, when he’d returned that evening from the warehouse.

  Don sighed and opened the front door, stepping outside. It was a beautiful, blue sky day. He’d washed his car once on a day like this, a crisp September day ten years ago. While he’d washed his car, the most important people in his life…

  Don shook his head. He turned, looking for a long moment down the dark hallway of a home that had become a museum.

  Quietly, he closed the door behind him.

  When Tina had been a baby, Sarah had always asked him to close the front door quietly, so as to not wake her. He’d gotten into the habit at the time.

  It was a habit that he could not break, no matter how illogical it seemed.

  1.2

  Liberty, Texas

  The smartly-dressed Asian man in dark sunglasses was watching a cloudless Texas sky when his earpiece cracked. He reached up and tapped at it.

  “Yes?”

  “Lin, it’s Tuan,” the speaker said in Korean. “We have the tower. There was only one American, and he’s dead.”

  “Good,” Lin answered. “What about the plane?”

  “It should only be a few more minutes—they’re on approach now. I’ll be contacting them soon.”

  “OK,” Lin answered, using the American idiom that had become universal, even in his home country. “Once they’re down, direct them to the hangar.”

  Lin stood near the open doors of the airport hangar, watching the skies to the north. After a moment, he turned and glanced at the boxy white van inside the hangar—two Asian men stood next to it with machine guns. Lin could see Hyun at the back of the van; both doors stood open. The man was still tinkering with the large device inside—it was covered with wires and was the result of hundreds of hours of work for Lin and the others. Now, it rested quietly in the back of a van in a dusty airport hangar. It had traveled quite a road. And Lin saw no reason why Hyun should still be fiddling with it.

  Lin tapped at the small earpiece/microphone in his ear.

  “Hyun—can we lift it?”

  Hyun turned and walked over. “It weighs almost six hundred pounds,” he began, his English excellent. He’d schooled in California. “It will take all of us to get it into the plane. If that doesn’t work, I found a small forklift at the back of the hangar, but that will delay takeoff.”

  Lin nodded, smiling. “Excellent.”

  “Are they approaching yet?”

  “Tuan’s directing them in now. His English is almost as good as yours, my friend.”

  Hyun nodded, taking Lin’s arm.

  “Are you sure about this? The remote operator will work—I’ve perfected it. There is no need for you to fly…”

  “No, I want to,” Lin answered quietly, tapping the back of his friend’s hand. “It’s the only way to be sure.” They had been on this assignment together for a long time, and it was now coming to the end.

  In the distance, they heard the sound of a small plane.

  Lin nodded. “Here we go.”

  He turned and walked out of the hangar.

  Turning to look to the north, Lin watched as a small plane approached the small airfield. The Cessna 182 turned, gliding in over the low trees and scrub that surrounded the landing strip. Lin noticed that there were oil wells pumping on the rise above the airport.

  The plane slowed, the engine purring. The unseen pilot feathered the plane expertly to bleed off speed as he approached the runway, the wheels touching down lightly. The plane moved slowly south and then turned, taxiing to the only hangar at the tiny airport. It was one reason Lin had chosen this strip, a few miles outside of the small Texas town of Liberty.

  The Cessna buzzed loudly as it taxied up to the hangar and came to a stop. Two large men climbed down from the plane, one of them wearing a cowboy hat, just like in the movies.

  Lin walked up to them slowly, greeting them. “Welcome to Texas,” he said, producing a handgun from his coveralls.

  The pilot and passenger stopped—the look on their faces was comical. The other Koreans emerged from
the hangar and escorted the men inside as Lin climbed into the plane and fired up the engine, taxiing it into the hangar. It only took a few moments. When the plane was in place, as close to the back of the van as he dared, Lin cut the engine. He secured the plane and climbed down, getting started on the pilot seat.

  Across from him, the passenger door opened and Hyun poked his head in, smiling. He nodded and began using a large wrench to remove the passenger seat. The Cessna was a small plane, a four-seater, but to get the bulky device in, all of the seats would have to come out. Lin worked on the driver’s side at the same time. Within minutes, all four seats had been removed and thrown on the floor of the hangar.

  Lin walked over to the two men who were now tied up on the floor.

  “You know,” Lin said, looking down at them. “I’ve always wanted a cowboy hat.” Lin leaned over and took the man’s large hat, trying it on. He looked at the other Koreans. “What do you think?” he asked, giving them a thumbs-up.

  One of them smiled. “You are cowboy!” he said, his accent thick.

  Lin nodded and gave his friend a big smile, then drew two imaginary six shooters from his belt and started shooting with his fingers. “Bang, bang!” The others laughed as Lin walked over to the van, joining Hyun.

  “Ready?” Lin asked. Hyun nodded.

  Together, the men worked to pull the large device out of the back of the van. They and the three other Koreans lifted the device gingerly and slowly walked the device over to the open doors of the Cessna. It wasn’t as heavy as Lin had feared, especially with five men carrying it. They slid it easily into the plane. Hyun went to work, connecting the final wires. Lin took a small folding chair out of the back of the van and walked over, standing it up inside the airplane.

  “Not much of a seat,” Hyun mumbled as he finished securing the device inside the plane. It was important that the device not move around in flight—managing the center of gravity in a small plane like this was difficult enough without a quarter-ton amalgamation of metal and wires moving around.