They Watch Every Blip
"The Flight Watchmen" by Laura Blumenfeld of The Washington Post is a fine example of how to tell a larger story be tracking a few people through an ordinary day. The day starts slowly as Chan Browne, 44, makes a sandwich for his girlfriend's daughter's lunch. The little girl goes off to school, and Browne goes to his job as an assistant special agent in charge at the Freedom Center, a counterterrorism compound in Northern Virginia. There the officers have one assignment: Stop another 9/11. Much of the day is "vanilla," but then there's a report of a suspicious airline passenger.
An officer named Lee starts typing, black letters crawling across a large white screen at the front of the room: "MIAMI SUSPICIOUS LEBANESE PASSENGER, CHECKPOINT/SECONDARY SCREENING. HE DISAPPEARED --"
"Hey, Lee!" Chuck barks. "He didn't 'disappear.' They tackled him! He left behind a bag."
As partners, Chuck and Chan know each other's tension ticks. Chuck gets loud; Chan gets quiet. Chuck slashes the air with his powerful arms, pointing. Chan paces like he's "on a dog run."
The two men are starting to slash and pace.
Chan's investigator, Mike, pulls up a picture of the 42-year-old suspect online, along with his real passport from Lebanon. He discovers in a commercial database that the suspect had bought his American Airlines ticket as well as tickets for two other men. Like him, the two men were flying from Miami to Los Angeles that afternoon, though, notably, on a different airplane.
Chan's agent pulls up a diagram of the Miami airport. Something about the police chase bothers Chan. The Lebanese man had fled the terminal, dashed outside. As the Miami-Dade County Police approached him, the man jumped from a second-story parking ramp. He hit the pavement and shattered his arm. Yet even with a broken limb, the suspect continued to struggle.
"Why jump?" Chan wonders. "Why so extreme?" He'd seen a lot before, but "we never have people running away." Abandon a bag? Leap off a ramp?
Chan says to an agent, "Send out an alert notification page."
Tom Shroder asks in his editor's note, is it now safe to fly? Blumenfeld's story helps provide the answer.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/19/AR2008061902627.html