The Intercept (8 page)

Chapter 15

B
angor 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.

T
he 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 minutes 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.

T
he 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

O
nce 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.”

J
eremy 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 publicly 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.”

Gersten and Fisk sat through the rest, Fisk noting his thoughts on paper. The briefing broke up, and he and Gersten went into the interrogation room alone, spending a half hour’s face time with Awaan Abdulraheem.

With his language skills, Fisk took the lead, speaking to the subject in Arabic while Gersten played the intractable female presence. Fisk laid down a few baseline questions, in order to establish a rudimentary rapport, but the narcosynthesis of the mild hallucinogen the subject had been administered had not fully worn off yet. For Fisk, it was like interviewing a sleepy drunk.

Abdulraheem was loquacious, neither fierce nor defiant, and often pathetic, like a neglected child who had been bad and looked forward to the attention punishment would afford him. The drug contributed to Abdulraheem’s mood, clouding his true character, but to Fisk it was evident that the would-be hijacker was not very bright. He was hardly the embodiment of the fear, suspicion, and anxiety one might expect, as he would no doubt be portrayed by the media.

As they huddled outside afterward, Fisk translated a few of his answers for her. He could not mask his annoyance. He understood the need for immediate intervention, but mood-altering drugs should be a method of last resort. Especially when the administrator was unsure of the proper dose, as had been the case here.

“Bottom line?” said Fisk. “Not a major player.”

“A lone wolf?” said Gersten. “The odds are against it.”

“I’m not making any final pronouncements,” said Fisk. “Maybe he’s dogging me—maybe he’s Keyser Söze. But I don’t think so. More likely he’s double-digit IQ, led more by religion than reason.”

“He got himself on the plane,” said Gersten. “He got a knife on there.”

Fisk nodded, rechecking his briefing notes, finding the passenger list. “And he—or someone else—paid for a business-class seat.”

B
efore Fisk and Gersten finished, the task force released the other passengers and crew, and SAS Flight 903 departed for Newark, its original destination. Each passenger answered direct questions about departure points and destinations, and each was completely rescreened by TSA. In all, their total inconvenience time was seven hours.

By the time Fisk and Gersten got to the five remaining passengers and one crew member, the balm of free food, relief, and camaraderie had worn thin. Someone made the mistake of telling them about the plane continuing on without them. Now the flight attendant and five passengers just wanted to be someplace else—anywhere but Bangor, Maine.

Fisk was immediately impressed that a group of people this disparate could come together in the heat of the moment and swiftly overwhelm the hijacker. He supposed that this was part of the legacy of 9/11: when faced with an onboard threat, very few airline passengers would risk waiting to let things play out. These five happened to be the first into action.

He knew he risked a backlash if he inconvenienced them much further, but he needed to get some additional perspective on Abdulraheem. Like radioactive matter, eyewitness accounts degraded over time, so he put on his most friendly face and went around the room to each in turn.

The Six, as the preliminary report in his hands had christened them, all gave approximately the same response when asked about their heroic moments in the vestibule outside the cockpit of SAS 903.

Alain Nouvian, a fifty-one-year-old cellist returning to New York from a brief concert tour in Scandinavia, was a small-eyed man with an unruly comb-over of dyed black hair. He approached the questioning with great care, like a man interviewing at a job fair. “I . . . I didn’t think. I didn’t think I had it in me to do what I did. It looked like I was dead no matter what . . . and I wasn’t going to just sit there. To be frank, I’m still coming to grips with my actions. This is the most alive I’ve felt in thirty years. There was a test earlier today, life or death . . . and I acted. As they say, I rose to the occasion. That maniac was going to blow up the plane, for Christ’s sake—or at least crash it into something. Instead, I crashed into him.”

Douglas Aldrich, a sixty-five-year-old retired auto parts dealer from Albany, had been returning from a four-day visit to his daughter and grandson in Göteborg. “Instinct. I don’t even have to think about it. I was more worried about getting some feeling back into my legs at the end of the flight—you know, that thrombosis stuff. I was standing in the aisle trying to stretch out these old muscles when I heard the commotion. I’m a Vietnam vet, which was a long time ago, but today it felt like yesterday. I don’t think of myself as a brave man. There was no orchestra music, you know what I mean? No moment of heroic decision. I—and I think the others—just did what I had to do. The people I’m thinking about right now? Those others on the plane. Who just sat there. All the people in business who didn’t stand up when this terrorist attacked. That’s what’s spinning my mind at this moment. Them getting into their beds tonight. Lying there in the dark with their thoughts. Tell you what—I’m going to sleep like a goddamn baby.”

Colin Frank, forty-five and paunchy, was a journalist working on an assignment for
The
New Yorker
on a piece about the rise in popularity of Swedish crime literature. His reading glasses were perched high on his forehead, one of the lenses showing a threadlike crack. He had not yet come to grips with what happened. “I haven’t the slightest idea why I did it. I’m being honest—I remember nothing. My body was moving without thought. It’s like a switch was flipped. One minute I was in my seat reading Henning Mankell—and the next I was on top of a terrorist at the front of a plane. I went from reading a crime thriller to starring in one—kind of seamlessly. It didn’t seem extraordinary, the situation . . . and at the same time it didn’t seem real either. Like I was still in the book.” He smiled, lifting off his glasses and admiring the imperfection in the lens, as though needing evidence of his actions. “Sort of like reading a baseball book and then finding yourself rounding home plate. Right place, right time, I guess. I just feel so goddamn lucky to be alive.”

“When do we get to Newark?” asked Joanne Sparks, thirty-eight, the general manager of an IKEA store in Elizabeth, New Jersey. A fit frequent-flyer business-class traveler, she was returning from the company’s home office in Stockholm and had been seated next to Abdulraheem for the entire flight.

“Soon,” answered Fisk.

“How soon?”

Unlike the others, Ms. Sparks addressed Fisk and Gersten not as an interviewee, but as an equal, with the candor and polish of a combatant on a television talk show.

“I’m not aware of the exact details, but I—”

“So we’re not going right home. Are we.”

Fisk smiled, changing tactics. “Probably not. Again, it’s not my call. But my guess is you six will be bundled onto a government aircraft and flown to LaGuardia for further questioning. This is a big deal, you should realize.”

“How long?”

“How long in New York? At least a day.”

“Bullshit. What am I, under arrest?”

Gersten jumped in. “No, ma’am. You are not under arrest. You are material witnesses to a terror attack—”

“He’s a fucking malcontent with delusions of grandeur. There was no boom at the end of those wires. There was nothing. False alarm.”

Fisk said, “It’s not that simple. But I suggest you take up your complaints with the FBI.”

“The FBI?” said Sparks, doing a double take. “Wait a minute. Then who are you?”

He explained himself again. “I’m just trying to get some context on the hijacker. You were seated next to him for the entire flight. Is there anything you can give me?”

Sparks threw up her hands. “You know how often I travel? I board, the eyeshades go on, the shoes come off, I’m gone.” She softened a little, Fisk’s earnestness working on her. She was angry about the inconvenience, but proud of her courage. “Look, it was pure reaction. Pure fucking gut reaction. Adrenaline, whatever. Fight or flight. Or rather—fight on a flight, right? This guy . . . he had been asleep the entire way. And I mean sound asleep, to the point that I presumed he’d taken something for the flight. In fact, when he first got up and went right at the flight attendant, my thought was, you know, Ambien. I’ve seen that before on a plane. Jesus. You fly enough, you see crazy things. But there it is. I can’t give you much more than that. Didn’t pay him the slightest attention, nor he me. It was like he was dead next to me for hours, then all of a sudden he was up like a zombie and trying to take over the plane. Crazy motherfucker.”