Dead on Arrival Read Online Free

your goddamn cell phone! ‘You got a roomful of people waiting to talk to you about Broderick’s bill.’
    Mahoney shook his head. ‘What a waste of time. That bill’s not goin’ anywhere. Broderick’s a fruitcake.’
    DeMarco shrugged. ‘I dunno. People are scared.’
    ‘So what?’ Mahoney said. ‘Just because – ’ Mahoney leaped to his feet. ‘Offside! Number eight, he was offside!’
    ‘Yeah, Lionel,’ the big woman said. ‘You shoulda seen that, for cryin’ out loud. Them glasses you got, they thick enough to see stuff on the moon .’
    Mahoney whooped.
    Lionel, a man in his sixties, a good guy who had volunteered his time to ref the game, glared over at the woman – and the speaker.
    ‘What are you lookin’ over here for?’ the woman yelled. ‘If you wasn’t always lookin’ at the women in the stands, you’da seen that boy was offside too.’
    Mahoney sat back down, happy. Nothing he liked better than start ing a ruckus.
    ‘Mavis said the meeting was supposed to start half an hour ago,’ DeMarco said.
    ‘Aw, goddammit,’ Mahoney said, but he rose from the bench. He started to walk away, then turned back to the woman. ‘Hey, you got some kind of fund for uniforms and stuff?’
    ‘Yeah,’ she said, suspicious now, not sure what Mahoney was up to.
    ‘Well, here,’ Mahoney said, and handed her the envelope that Mr. Born had stuffed with cash. ‘Get those boys some new jerseys – and football shoes too. You know the kind with little rubber cleats on the bottom, so they won’t be slippin’ all the time.’

1
     
    The two F-16 Falcons screamed down the runway at Andrews Air Force Base.
    Pete Dalton – Lieutenant Colonel Dalton – lived for this. There was absolutely no other experience on the planet like flying an armed-to-the-teeth air force fighter.
    It was the week before Thanksgiving, and when the klaxon went off, Dalton and his wingman had been sitting in the ready trailer at Andrews, bitching that they’d been assigned to work the holiday, although Dalton didn’t really care that much. Then the klaxon blared and they were out of the trailer, into their planes, and tearing down the runway five minutes later.
    As they were ascending into the skies over Washington, they were briefed on the situation. Some idiot in a small slow-moving plane had just taken off from an airfield in Stafford, Virginia. The guy was at three thousand feet and doing eighty-six knots, almost a hundred miles an hour. He had flown briefly to the south, then turned northeast and crossed into the outer zone and was not responding to air traffic controllers at Dulles.
    There are two air defense zones around the nation’s capital, an inner and an outer zone. The outer zone has a ragged, roughly circular boundary that extends thirty to fifty miles outward from the Washington Monument. This zone is called the ADIZ – the Air Defense Identification Zone. To enter the ADIZ a pilot has to identify himself, must have an operating transponder that broadcasts a signal identifying his aircraft, and must remain in continuous two-way communication with FAA controllers. The second zone, the inner zone, is the no-fly zone. The no-fly zone is a perfect circle extending out sixteen miles from the Washington Monument. The only aircraft allowed to enter this area aside from commercial traffic going in and out of Reagan National Airport have to be specially cleared.
    The fool in question hadn’t identified himself, his transponder was either malfunctioning or disabled, and he wasn’t responding to queries from FAA controllers. He was doing everything wrong. When the unidentified aircraft was two miles inside the ADIZ, thirty-three miles and approximately twenty minutes from all the government buildings in D.C., a whole bunch of things began to happen.
    An air force colonel in Rome, New York – the officer commanding NORAD’S Northeast Air Defense Sector – scrambled the F-16s out of Andrews; Blackhawk helicopters under the