Free Ghost by Fred Burton Page B

attack.
    I wish we could get a team in there to dissect what happened. What kind of bomb was it? How did it get past security? What security changes can we implement to ensure this never happens again?
    We don’t know any of this. The truth is, we’re lucky to even have these photographs spread out on my desk. The one sop the Greeks threw to us was to ask for the Federal Aviation Administration’s assistance. The FAA sent one of their best investigators to Athens, and he snapped these images of the 727.
    Gleason asked me to open a CT file on the attack. It is a woefully thin folder right now. I pick up the regional security officer’s report from Athens. It contains the names of the victims. Alberto Ospino, age thirty-nine, had taken 10F, a window seat, in Rome. How did fate pick this average Colombian-American for this cruel end? Given the FAA’s photographs, the bomb must have exploded directly beneath him, probably at his feet. As the blast tore the fuselage open, the sudden decompression sucked him out of the cabin along with Demetra Stylianopoulu, age fifty-eight. She was the grandmother. As she spun out into the void beneath the starboard wing, her daughter Maria Klug, clutching her infant, Demetra, followed her. Falling. Falling.
    I’ve come full circle and cannot escape the image of how these innocents met death. The guilty must pay for this crime. Justice must be served. But if history is any judge, the forces of terror will likely escape their punishment. It is remarkably difficult to catch any of these killers. They have too many safe havens—too many places to hide and too many countries that protect them.
    In the meantime, a few miles up the road in Annapolis, Warren Klug, a grieving husband, father, and son-in-law, awaits the return of his shattered family.
    I cannot bring back the dead. I cannot balm the grief of those who survive such attacks. But here at Foggy Bottom, I swear that I will do everything in my power to see that these killers pay. Vengeance and justice are one and the same in this case. With terrorism, there is never any gray. The visions I have of the Klug family’s fate will always remind me of that.
    Falling. Falling.
Falling.
There will be no sleep tonight.

seven
    THE MAD DOG OF THE MIDDLE EAST
    April 5, 1986
    The Libyans are running us ragged, and thanks to their plots every nerve in the intel world is lighting up with warnings. They’re coming in from every conceivable corner of the globe, from informants in dozens of countries. Police agencies, foreign intel services—they’re all adding to the chatter. It’s like being in a crowded dance hall with everyone talking at once, and our job is to find the one person we need to listen to. We don’t know who that is, so we’ve got to listen to everything. The trouble is, we’re being buried by all the incoming information.
    Historically, this happens all the time. After an event like Pearl Harbor, Beirut I, or the marine barracks bombing, it is easy to sift through all the traffic and find the smoking gun that warned us of the impending disaster. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, and knowing what to look for separates the chaff right away. In real time, though, we don’t have that luxury, we don’t have that vision. All we see are mountains of cables and thousands of clues, all of which must be checked out lest the one valid warning go unheeded.
    On top of all this, word has spread throughout the DSS network that a true CT office is now up and running. Agents have been sending us all sorts of stuff beyond the usual intel. Shell casings, bomb fragments, plastic explosives, timing devices, and photographs have been piling up, sent from embassies all over the world. The office behind the big blue door is starting to look like an evidence locker. We shuttle this stuff over to the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) labs for analysis, and riding herd on it all is taking more and more of our day.
    The phone