He may have pushed her a tiny bit, just because he was surprised at her quick move and to keep his pocket from ripping right off. If he did, he didn’t put any force behind it. But whatever he did, suddenly the little girl yelped in pain and flew backward as if she had been body-slammed by a WWF wrestler. She hit the linoleum floor hard. She lay on the floor, staring straight up; at first, Willison thought—no, prayed—that she wasn’t hurt. But he knew kids better than that. Seconds later, the little girl let out an earsplitting scream so loud that he thought for sure she had cracked open her skull or fallen on an ax or something.

The only reason they stopped being concerned for the child’s welfare was that they were more concerned about their own—because now Sasha the Doberman was all teeth, hair, and eyeballs. None of them had ever seen a more vicious-looking animal in their lives. They instinctively backed away and reached for side arms before realizing they no longer carried them.

“Get that animal away from us!” Willison shouted. The girl screamed even louder. Finally one of the guards behind the counter, a younger one with kids, was able to pick her up, and he carried her to a chair and let her cry on his shoulder for a while until the security guard waved the FBI agents through. The dog watched them, snarling, facing them the entire time. By then, the girl was over her crying, and she watched silently, tearlessly. With one word from the little girl, the Doberman stopped snarling and sat down, impassively watching the door close behind them.

“For Christ sake, Larry,” one of the other agents admonished him, going over to the little girl. “What’d you do?”

“I didn’t do anything!” Willison protested. “She came at me, and I—”

“She ‘came at you’? Who’d you think she was—Freddie Krueger? Hannibal Lecter?”

“Her mom probably makes more dough than all of us combined,” another agent said over the now ear-piercing screams.

“I hear the new office in Greenland needs a janitor,” another joked.

“Har har.” Willison looked mad enough to chew the chain-link fence as he walked through an X-ray machine, then submitted to a pat-down search. “What in hell is a little kid like that hanging around this facility, anyway?” he grumbled. “I’m going to look into that next. This place is not a day-care center. And what the hell is it with that dog? I thought we were goners!”

“Let it go, Larry,” one of the other agents said as they emerged through yet another chain-link entrapment area into the street behind the hangar complexes. They saw the assistant security director, Landow, just emerging from a hangar, coming to meet them. “You just forgot how to handle little kids, that’s all.”