A Vial Upon the Sun

by James Codlin

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Takeshi Ishikawa picked up the phone on the first ring.

  Without salutation Waro Moto said, “Events are getting out of control.”

  Anger welled up in Ishikawa, but he suppressed it. “No,” the president said calmly. “I am in control.”

  “Why did you order the plane to San Juan Diego?” Moto asked.

  “If I refused, Nicolás Ibarra says he has the means to blow it up.”

  “So what? The blame would fall on terrorists.”

  “There are over three hundred passengers, Moto-san. And he has threatened to kill my daughter. He has her. I have seen video of her being held by him.”

  “Ishikawa, you seem unable to grasp the obvious here. I don’t yet know the specifics about how this came to be, but Nicolás Ibarra is now working with Lenin to get to a Spanish passenger on the flight that you have so kindly diverted at Ibarra’s command. I believe that this Spanish woman has information that will be extremely damaging to our cause. And if Lenin is there in San Juan Diego, then your daughter is also. In case you have forgotten, she has suspicions of your involvement in all of this.”

  “And yours, too,” the president said. Moto had shown no surprise upon hearing that Gina was still alive. Ishikawa mentally bookmarked this fact, but did not raise it.

  “My companies and I will survive. You will not survive politically. In any case, Gina is not a hostage—she’s part of their plan.”

  Upon hearing it expressed bluntly, Ishikawa realized this had to be true. Before he could conjure up a response, Moto said, “Get Ibarra on the phone.”

  “I have no way of doing so.”

  “Is he monitoring the aircraft radio frequencies?”

  “Of course.”

  “Call the pilot and order him to Bogotá. If Ibarra blows it up—and I do not believe that he has the capability to do so—we will have our scapegoat. If this was a bluff, we will have called it and the woman will land many miles from Ibarra’s grasp.”

  Ishikawa said nothing.

  “Do it now,” Moto barked. “I want to listen while you make the call, Ishikawa-kun.” Moto put a sneering emphasis on the honorific of inferiority.

  Takeshi Ishikawa sat motionless, stewing in his hatred for the monstrous man on the other end of the line and cursing himself for his involvement with him. His mind raced through the possible scenarios: this Spanish woman reaching Nicolás Ibarra and somehow teaming up with Teodoro Lenin and his own daughter, exposing the financial connection between himself and Waro Moto. The Latino Union would be destroyed, and all the member countries destabilized. Governments could fall, riots would break out, and thousands would die. This, in sharp contrast to the lives of a few hundred on the airliner.

  Potential lives, he reminded himself. Although Ishikawa had no doubt that Ibarra had the means to carry out such an attack, particularly given his new connections within the global terrorist community, there was at least a chance that this was a bluff.

  But what if it wasn’t? Ishikawa weighed the outcomes. A momentary tragedy forgotten within a few months, or years of anarchy? Political expediency for the benefit of millions, or humanitarian morality, unrewarded and soon forgotten, for a few hundred? He knew that there was only one choice.

  He slowly picked up another phone and told the military command center to patch him to the Iberia plane. In a moment, he heard the pilot say, “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “Captain Santiago, there has been a change. You are ordered to continue on to Bogotá.”

  “What, Mr. President? Say again?”

  “I said continue your flight to Bogotá. Ibarra has changed his orders. If you land in San Juan Diego, he will destroy the aircraft.”

  The pilot’s voice rose several octaves. “Mr. President, I don’t have enough fuel to reach Bogotá now. We burned too much diverting to San Juan Diego. Ibarra, I know you are monitoring this channel—you have to understand it is not possible for me to break off this landing and make it to Bogotá! Please, I beg you, let me land!”

  *

  From their makeshift dugout bunker in the forest that ran alongside Runway One-Eight’s Echo taxiway, Nicolás Ibarra and Dennis Prinn peered through the canopy, anxiously awaiting the Iberia 747. Nicolás’s portable radio was lying on the ground between the two men, and he grimaced with intensity as he listened through earbuds. Dennis looked back and forth from the sky to Nicolás’s face, trying to read the situation as it developed. Nicolás spat out a curse and grabbed his radio out of the dirt. He quickly changed the radio to the approach control frequency, hearing the controller acknowledging that Iberia 004 was over the outer marker, inbound, and nine miles from touchdown. Nicolás clicked back to the Iberia company channel, put the radio to his mouth, and keyed the microphone.

  “Iberia 004, this is Nico Ibarra. I don’t know what President Ishikawa is trying to pull, but I have not changed my orders. You are to land at San Juan Diego. I say again, land at San Juan Diego or I will blow up the plane.”

  “Captain Santiago,” Ishikawa responded, “I order you to ignore that impostor on the radio and continue to your original destination.”

  “Goddamn it, what the hell is going on?” Captain Santiago shouted. “I must continue the approach, Mr. President. We are out of options!”

  Nicolás keyed his microphone again. “Do it, Santiago. Land at San Juan Diego, or I’ll blow it.”

  There was a pause, and Nicolás listened to the crackle of dead air, waiting. It was Ishikawa’s voice that came next, measured and severe.

  “Captain Santiago, I’m ordering an LU fighter to intercept you. If you try to land, you will be destroyed.”

  “What?” Santiago shouted. “You’ll be doing the work of the terrorists! I have to land now!”

  *

  Sweat poured down Captain Raúl Santiago’s face as he looked desperately at his first officer, José Dominguez.

  An F-35 streaked across the 747’s nose, shaking the airliner with its jet wash. From behind the pilots, cries of alarm and terror emanated from the passenger cabin. Dominguez reached over with his left hand and shoved the throttles forward. The previously idling engines rumbled back to life.

  “Iberia 004 executing a missed approach!” he transmitted to approach control.

  Santiago reached over and slapped away the first officer’s hand, slamming the throttles back to partial power. Dominguez jerked on the control yoke, and Santiago fought desperately to offset the first officer’s control inputs.

  Santiago keyed his microphone using the button on the yoke. “San Juan Diego approach, disregard that last message—Iberia 004 is continuing the approach!”

  Just behind the battling captain and first officer, sitting in the 747 cabin’s jump seat, was a third pilot. Sergio Gómez had boarded Iberia’s Flight 004 looking forward to a relaxing trip as he deadheaded his way back to Bogotá, where his home and family awaited. He knew the two men in command of the aircraft well, and once the flight was airborne and at cruising altitude the men had chatted amicably. Eventually Gómez had left the cockpit, stretching his legs for a bit during the 12-hour flight. He had even been able to nap for a while in the crew compartment.

  When Gómez returned to the cockpit to check in with his colleagues, everything had changed. He donned a headset, listening with growing alarm and dismay to the improbable series of radio calls pinging back and forth on the company’s channel.

  Why this flight? Gomez thought. Why now?

  And then things had gotten immeasurably worse as the two men in front of him began wrestling for control of the 400-ton aircraft.

  Gómez’s eyes frantically flicked back and forth between the two pilots.

  He reached a decision.

  From his flight bag he pulled a long socket wrench and swung it as hard as he could.

  *

  Nicolás was shouting into his radio. He had run to the edge of the forest with Dennis on his heels and locked his binoculars onto the distant landing lights o
f the 747. The lights veered left and right, then up and down. It was buzzed by what looked to be an American-made F-35, a late-stage capitalism boondoggle of a fighter plane fully idealizing the bourgeois pretensions of the Latino Union.

  With a thundering roar the F-35 shot across the nose from the other direction. The airliner’s nose dropped, came up again, and leveled. As Nicolás watched, it seemed to stabilize on the glide slope, and the engines wound up to a steady whine. He adjusted the binoculars slightly and saw the fighter rolling in behind the Iberia plane.

  “The bastard’s actually going to shoot them down!”

  *

  Pilot Jorge Chavez was monitoring all the radio chatter from the cockpit of his F-35 when the call came in.

  “Shoot it down,” he was told. The passenger plane had been seized by a terrorist and needed to be destroyed before it could endanger civilian lives. The LU’s president did not want another 9/11 on his hands.

  Jorge protested, noting that the 747 was clearly on final approach to the San Juan Diego airport. In fact, other than a few seconds where the plane had jerked wildly in the sky, the approach had been textbook and the pilots had followed approach control’s instructions to the letter.

  “You have your orders, Lieutenant!” barked his commanding officer. “This is way above your pay grade. Do it!”

  Chavez swung the fighter around and leveled it on the jumbo jet’s six o’clock. In front of him, the enormous civilian passenger jet’s landing gear sprouted from its undercarriage, just as it should.

  Madness. This was absolute madness. He suspected that his military career was over no matter what his decision was—either as the scapegoat for a downed civilian aircraft, or the man who disobeyed direct orders from the president of the LU.

  He decided that he could live with one of those outcomes.

  Fuck it, he thought. Let’s at least make it a damned good show.

  Chavez clicked some softkeys on the weapons computer, keyed his joystick, and let the missiles fly.

  *

  The airliner’s landing lights gleamed less than a mile from the end of the runway, and close to the ground. The navigation lights on the fighter were behind it and coming up fast. Nicolás saw a flash as two air-to-air missiles ignited on the rails under the fighter’s wing.

  Nicolás dropped his arms in despair and disbelief. There was no point in transmitting anything to the doomed 747 pilots now. He watched the missiles’ smoky trails track toward the giant airliner, and he braced for the enormous explosion that was about to occur in the sky above him.

  And then the missiles streaked past the Iberia jetliner and raced onward, undetonated. The lumbering behemoth airliner, still intact, continued its steady descent toward the runway. The missiles, now clear of their assumed target, raced forward and for a terrible moment Nicolás thought that he and Prinn had been duped. He looked on helplessly, waiting for the missiles to alter their trajectories and arc toward the edge of the forest where he and Prinn now stood. There would be no time for them to react if that happened, and this is where it would all end for him.

  Obliterated into nothingness because of an old professor’s crazy theories, he thought.

  But as the missiles reached the threshold of the runway, they leveled off about 15 meters above the ground, rocketed on for another moment, and then violently dipped in near-perfect unison, impacting the runway simultaneously with flaming explosions that rose up together in a glowing cloud. A split-second later Nicolás and Dennis winced as they felt a wave of dissipating heat reach them.

  Nicolás looked up and saw the 747 jerk uncertainly from side to side as it approached the threshold. Nicolás wasn’t a pilot, but based upon the rate of descent, the giant plane looked like it had no choice but to land.

  Nicolás heard the engine power throttle back and watched the 747’s landing lights plunge toward the ground. A shower of sparks glittered in the night as the landing gear ripped through the high-intensity approach lights aligned on the runway’s threshold. The fighter screamed over the top of the airliner and then shot almost straight upward, pulling away from the carnage.

  The Iberia jumbo jet dumped onto the runway, the tires shrieking as they slammed into the concrete. Two tires had been punctured by the approach lights and flapped wildly as they spun. The plane thundered down the tarmac toward the smoldering hole.

  “Come on, Prinn,” Nicolás yelled. “We’ve got to be there when it stops!”

  The two men sprinted down the taxiway.

  *

  Captain Santiago desperately worked the rudder, trying to steer the 747 around the crater where the missiles had exploded in front of him. How he and the other souls on board this flight were still alive, and not vaporized, he had no idea, but he had no time to ruminate on it as the plane’s enormous size and momentum propelled it relentlessly down the runway. As the brakes smoked in protest, Santiago managed to pivot the plane just enough so that the nose gear missed the hole. For an instant, Santiago thought perhaps he’d managed to successfully clear the ruined portion of the tarmac, but then he felt the plane lurch to the left as his landing gear caught the edge of the crater and smashed through it.

  Santiago was sure that the gear had been ripped off as the wing dipped downward and made contact with the runway, spewing sparks as passengers shrieked. He glanced to the right, seeing Dominguez’s blood drying on the windscreen from when Gómez had brought his wrench crashing down on the first officer’s head.

  Santiago tried the nose wheel steering, but knew it was useless at this point. The giant plane was skidding off the left side of the runway and into the grass, portions of which had already ignited into small patches of flame from the missile blast. He glimpsed a line of flashing lights as emergency vehicles emerged onto the taxiway, rushing toward the distressed aircraft. The nose slowly pivoted to the left until the plane was facing directly east, perpendicular to the runway.

  Finally, it stopped.

  The captain’s training kicked in and he instinctively followed procedure and punched a switch to pop all the doors open and deploy the inflatable slides.

  *

  Nicolás and Dennis raced up to the airliner that loomed above them in the darkness. It was completely off the runway, into the grass, and listing heavily to the left. Emergency vehicles honked and shrieked, their spotlights flashing back and forth along the fuselage. Nicolás ran toward the front of the plane where a slide now stretched from the open door. A flight attendant stood in the door, calling instructions on a bullhorn. A large, balding man in a business suit was the first to jump onto the slide. Because the plane lay on its left wing instead of standing upright on the landing gear, the slide was at a shallow slope, and the businessman scooted slowly and awkwardly down its length. A woman jumped into it next, slender but older than Nicolás was looking for.

  He glanced around as three men in firefighter uniforms rushed up, their attention focused on the aircraft and the passengers spilling to the ground from each of the five emergency exits. Nicolás, in an effort to blend in and secure Alejandra, helped the woman from the slide. Another woman followed her onto the slide, much younger this time, but in a conservative suit.

  Nicolás looked around and saw there were more than 50 passengers already on the ground, milling around the base of the slides. An officer of the emergency crew was shouting through a bullhorn, ordering the passengers to move well away from the airliner and into the wooded area next to the runway. They looked around in confusion, reluctant to move toward the woods and into the darkness.

  Nicolás began to panic. What if she went out a different exit? How would he find her among all these people? A man was now on the first-class slide with two more men waiting at the door for their turn. Nicolás looked around again at the forming crowd and stopped abruptly when he saw four Japanese men come into the lighted perimeter of the rescue effort. They were peering into the faces of the female passengers on the ground, grabbing them and roughly turning their faces into bright flash
lights. It was clear that they didn’t know exactly what Alejandra looked like either, as he noted that they were demanding to see the passport of each young woman they found.

  Nicolás grabbed the bullhorn out of Dennis’s hands and slapped Dennis’s chest with his other hand, feeling for his phone in his breast pocket. He yanked it out, pressed the voice recognition button on the search engine, and spoke into the mic. The phone chirped, then located what Nicolás was looking for. From the phone’s speaker came a few tentative guitar chords, and a tapping of heels. The guitar increased in intensity, and Nicolás clicked on the bullhorn and held the phone next to it. The strains of “La Malagüeña” blared forth, cutting through the sirens and shouts.

  The guitar swelled, and the furious taconazo thundered. Nicolás weaved between the passengers, turning his head away when he bumped into one of the Japanese men, who stopped and briefly stared quizzically at the man wandering around with his phone pressed to a bullhorn.

  A tall woman with black hair down to her waist wearing an orange silk blouse and a yellow and green cotton skirt whipped her head around. Nicolás saw her reaction and hurried over.

  “Alejandra?”

  She nodded.

  “Come with me now! I am with the professor.”

  Nicolás grabbed her hand and made for the woods. Dennis scrambled after them.

  “Yameru!” someone shouted, and broke into a run.

  “Are you Nicolás Ibarra?” Alejandra asked as they headed away from the plane and into the darkness.

  “You know me?”

  “I have a poster of you in my dorm room.” She smiled as she effortlessly sprinted next to the revolutionary. “My roommate hates it!”

  They ran across the grass separating the runway from the taxiway. Nicolás checked over his shoulder for the Japanese men, who were about 200 meters behind them. Branches whipped their faces as they entered the forest. Nicolás took a step that failed to find the ground and he pitched headlong into a shallow ravine. Alejandra and Dennis tumbled down after him. When they came to rest Nicolás put his index finger to his lips, and they both nodded.