by Jack Mars
“Trudy, we don’t have a lot of room for hope,” Stone said. “What’s the problem with…”
“Acetone peroxide?” she said. “It’s unstable. If you shake it too much, it goes off. Michaela is strapped to the jib of a construction crane hundreds of feet in the air. That crane is subject to high winds, and has a certain amount of give, so we know it’s definitely shaking. If it shakes too violently…”
“Boom,” Ed said.
“Exactly. Swann, can you pull that in any more? Maybe we see if there’s a detonator.”
Swann pulled the image even closer.
“There it is.”
Clearly taped to the front of the vest was an old Nokia cell telephone. Two red wires extended from the phone and ran inside the vest.
“Those wires are likely soldered to the speaker output circuit inside that phone. The wires run from the phone, and are probably clipped with tiny alligator clips to fuses which will set off the explosives. If you call that phone, it’ll send a current along the wire to the fuses. When the phone rings, that’s it. Game over.”
“They’re dinosaurs now, but in the early 2000s, Nokia cell phones were the gold standard,” Swann said. “They were super-reliable, simple to use, and could stand up to the elements. For a consumer product, they were also rugged as hell. I once ran one over with my car, just to see if it would still work. It did.”
“So that’s how they plan to do it,” Luke said. “If they see us coming, if they see anything out of the ordinary at all, they call that phone and Michaela dies. Meanwhile, she’s five hundred feet in the air, strapped to a walkway that’s hard to reach.”
“Yes.”
“Trudy, can you give me the dimensions of that crane walkway?”
Trudy typed something into her computer. She pulled up a diagram. “The walkway itself is a meter and a half wide, so about five feet. It’s steel grating and men walk back and forth on that thing all the time during a typical workday. There’s a steel railing about four feet high. The longer side you see is called the jib or the working arm. That’s the side they use to lift heavy equipment to the rooftop. It’s fifty meters long. The shorter side of the arm is twenty meters long. Those boxes you see that look like shipping containers are machinery to drive the arm, as well as counterbalancing weights. They lift immensely heavy objects using that crane. The little windowed box beneath the arm is the operator’s cab.”
“So how do we get to the girl before they kill her?” Luke said.
There was a long pause during which nobody spoke.
“For starters, we could jam the telephone,” Swann said.
“Tell me,” Luke said.
“It’s basically a denial of service attack,” Swann said. “Very similar to when hackers take down websites. The major difference is there’s a lot less security on cell networks. The whole system is based on trust. We can breach that trust.”
“How do we do it?”
Swann sat down at one of the laptops. “Cell phones go through a five-step process before they answer a call. It goes like this. During step one, the base station sends out a broadcast page with an identification code for the phone. Step two is the phone recognizes the identification code. Step three is the phone wakes up and responds to the base station, more or less saying, ‘Yeah, that’s me. I’m here.’ In step four, the base station assigns a private channel for the call, and the phone accepts it. Step five is the phone authenticates the incoming call. That’s when the phone rings. It takes just a couple of seconds, but it’s a little bit of a cumbersome process. The fact that it’s cumbersome is what gives us our opportunity.”
“So you can interrupt the process?” Trudy said.
“Better than interrupt it. I can hijack it. I need to do a quick search for modified baseband code which can run ahead of early generation Nokia phones. Normally, I’d modify the code myself, but there’s no time. It shouldn’t matter though, because you can find tons of this stuff ready-made across the hacker networks. Because the phone doesn’t authenticate the incoming message until step five, we can broadcast a signal that will race the system and get there before the phone answers the call. We’ll listen to the broadcast pages in step one, pick up any targeted for a broad array of old-school cell phones, race their phone to step five, and win. Their call won’t come through.”
“Where will it go?” Luke said.
Swann picked up his black iPhone off the table. “If I do it right, it should come right here to me.”
“And if you do it wrong?”
Swann shook his head. “I’d prefer not to think about that.”
“So if you can block that phone call…” Ed began.
Swann waved his hand. “Then you guys are free to do your rock and roll thing with guns and bombs and karate chops and whatever else you do.”
Ed was already on his crutches and moving toward the elevators. Luke picked up his big gear bag, slung it over his shoulder, and followed Ed. On the top floor of this building was a helipad. Rachel and Jacob were parked on the pad up there. As the elevator doors slid open, Luke looked back at Swann and Trudy.
“Don’t do it wrong, Swann. I’m counting on you. So is the President.”
Swann raised an eyebrow. “When do I ever do something wrong?”
Luke entered the elevator just before the door slid shut. Instantly, the car started moving upward toward the roof. For a moment, he and Ed stared straight ahead at the door. Then Ed turned to him.
“There’s a first time for everything,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
They called it the Little Bird. Sometimes they called it the Flying Egg.
It was the MH-6 helicopter—fast and light, highly maneuverable, the kind of chopper that didn’t need room to land. It could come down on small rooftops, and on narrow roadways in crowded neighborhoods. The chopper was beloved by special operations forces, and Rachel and Jacob had borrowed one from the Air Force this morning.
Luke and Ed climbed into the small cargo hold. Downstairs, about twenty minutes before, they had both dropped a Dexie. The effects were starting to kick in.
This far up, you could begin to see the curvature of the Earth. He looked across at the target building, Number 9 Lansing Street. The construction crane rose close to ten stories above the building proper. Near the top of that crane, on the working arm that extended out over nothing, a little girl was tied up and terrified.
It had been a long and brutal couple of days. Luke had slept on the flight out here, but it wasn’t enough. As the Dexie hit him, he began to feel a surge of guarded optimism. Even so, he also felt that familiar tickle of fear. Today it was even more than a tickle. He was about to do something he hadn’t done in a long time.
Ed sat near the open cargo door, loading thirty-round box magazines for an M4 assault rifle. He already had a little stack of them going. That was Ed’s way now. With his cracked hip holding him back, he had improvised a way to belt himself into a standing position and man the heavy weaponry.
“I’m not sure if you’re brave or stupid,” Ed said.
“I thought I was weak,” Luke said. He opened his gear bag and pulled his black wingsuit and helmet from it. Then he pulled out his parachute pack.
“Yeah, let them SEALs try this. If they’re out of the hospital yet, that is.”
Luke began to shrug into the suit. As he did so, the chopper’s engine kicked to life and the blades began to turn.
The helicopter was tiny. Luke could reach out and touch both the pilots. He poked his head between them. Jacob and Rachel sat inside the cockpit, going through their pre-flight checklist. They seemed serious today, more serious than ever.
“How you kids doing?” Luke said.
“Tired,” Rachel said. She looked back at Luke. Inside her helmet, Luke could see it. Her eyes were little bigger than slits.
“We’re tired. We’ve been zooming back and forth across the country in fighter jets for two days, then flying choppers on insane missions that you
dream up. And this time we’re also worried. We’re worried that you’re finally going to die, that you’ve dreamed up an impossible mission even you can’t survive.”
Luke didn’t like the sound of that. What he didn’t want was doubt from anyone. There was no room for that right now.
He looked at Jacob. “You worried, Jacob?”
Jacob shook his head. He looked tired, but not worried. “Nah.”
“Good man.”
“How do you want to do this?” Jacob said.
“Okay,” Luke said. “We take off and loop around, away from that building. We want them to think we’re just some typical city chopper traffic. So we don’t go anywhere near them. We go up to about twelve thousand feet and take this thing out over the water. Trudy will give you the exact distance she wants you from the building. Math isn’t my thing. All I ask is you get me an open straight line from the chopper to the roof. If there’s anything in my way, I’m not going to make it. Once I leave, loop back the way you came and race me to the building. Try not to give anything away until it’s too late for them to act. But do me a favor and beat me there.”
“Luke,” Rachel said, “you are the craziest man I ever met.”
Luke smiled. “From an old 160th Night Stalkers Special Ops pilot, I’ll take that as a compliment. I’m sure you’ve met a lot of crazies. Now let’s hit it.”
He backed away from the cockpit and the chopper lurched into the air. As the chopper banked to the right and gained lift, he slid his helmet on.
“Trudy, you on here?”
“I’m here,” she said. “Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Are you sure you want to go through with this? I mean, do you even know what you’re doing? You never even mentioned you were a wingsuit flyer before.”
“I used to do it for kicks back before Gunner was born. When Gunner came, Becca…” Luke hesitated. He thought back to the night before with Trudy. An awkward moment passed between them. “Anyway, you see my point. I was a dad now, so it was reckless and irresponsible to get myself killed for some weekend thrills.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Trudy?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to need you to walk me through this thing.”
“I know,” she said.
“Good. I’ll get back with you in a few minutes.”
Luke looked at Ed.
“You ready, partner?”
Ed nodded. He was wedged against the open cargo door and belted into an upright position. He held the big machine gun, one hand on the trigger hard, one hand resting along the top of the barrel. He gazed out at the vast city moving below them.
“Born ready.”
“Today we’re going hard,” Luke said.
“Yes,” Ed said.
“Hard as we can.”
“Yes.”
“Be conservative around the girl. But other than that, when I hit the roof, you kill anything up there that isn’t me.”
Ed smiled behind his sunglasses. “With pleasure.”
Luke finished pulling on his suit. It was a tri-wing suit with three individual wings, one under each arm and one between his legs. It hung flat right now, but he knew it would fill when he jumped. He yanked his parachute pack on. It fit over his wingsuit like a backpack.
A few moments passed. The flight didn’t take long. Soon, they hovered high above the city. The chopper turned, giving Luke a sweep of the Pacific Ocean. Giant container ships coming into port were like grains of rice on the sparkling water.
Jacob’s voice spoke into Luke’s headset. “Luke? How does this look to you? Is that a clear enough shot?”
Luke looked out the bay door. The sky was pale blue with streaks of white cloud. He could see the crane and the skeletal frame of the building below them, and what seemed like far away. The big San Gabriel Mountains were there again, a distraction now. He tried not to think about the distance, both to the building, and to the ground. There was an open channel between skyscrapers from here to there.
“Looks okay to me,” he said. His voice sounded small. “Trudy, you on here?”
“I’m here.”
“What’s my story?”
Her voice was firm. “The story is you’re jumping from a static hover. With no forward movement, you’ll have no initial airflow, which means you’ll go straight into free fall. The free fall will generate the velocity you need to gain lift.”
“Got it,” he said. “Like riding a bicycle.”
“Once you get some lift, I’m estimating a one point five to one or maybe two to one glide ratio, meaning for every meter you fall, you’ll glide forward a meter and a half or two meters. If this holds true, you should still be a couple thousand feet up when you reach the building. You’ll want to pull both your main chute and your auxiliary at that point, and drop down slowly.”
“Trudy, if I drop down slowly, I’ll lose the element of surprise. We’ve got gunmen on that crane tower and all over that roof. I’ll be a sitting duck up there, and they’ll have time to get to Michaela.”
“Hopefully, that’s where Ed comes in,” Trudy said.
“What if I go for a sharper angle of attack, like a ratio closer to one to one? And I come in almost level, or just above the roof?”
“Luke, the lower the glide ratio, the faster you’ll be moving when you hit. You don’t want to hit that roof, or that crane, at seventy or eighty miles per hour. Even if you get your chutes open, there won’t be time to slow down. You want to come in above the building, at a low instantaneous velocity, pull your cord, and then drop in vertically. Do it any other way, and we’ll be scraping you off the side of a steel girder.”
“I’ll take that under advisement. Will you be monitoring my air speed and altitude?”
“Yes.”
“If I’m almost to the building and I’m going too fast, scream.”
“Luke…”
He took a deep breath. He was almost ready to go. There was no sense doing a lot of thinking about this. It would either come back to him or it wouldn’t. Ed would either be there ahead of him or he wouldn’t. Michaela would still be alive or…
“Yes,” he said.
Trudy’s voice was quiet. “Please be careful.”
“I’m always careful.”
“I love you,” she said.
Luke looked at Ed. Had he heard that? Of course he had. So had the pilots. Ed made no sign.
“Jacob? Rachel?”
“Yes,” they said, almost in tandem.
“Beat me there.”
He was still staring at Ed.
Ed gazed out the door. “Ever been to the Capital Grille?” he said. “Best steakhouse in DC. If you’re still alive, we should go there some night. My treat.”
“See you on the ground,” Luke said.
He spread his legs, held his arms aloft, and leapt out the open cargo door.
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
The man’s name was Pious. He stood alone on the metal walkway.
He was just above the cabin from where the operator would normally control this crane. A low railing flanked him on both sides.
He was very high in the air. Never mind that. He was high above the building’s roof. The roof itself was forty stories above the street. The crosswinds made the whole confounded apparatus he stood upon tremble and shake. Sometimes it seemed like it would tumble into the abyss. But Pious was not afraid of heights today. Allah gave him the courage to stand here.
Perhaps thirty meters from him, the girl was strapped to the same walkway. From here, she looked like a bundle of rags. She was still alive, though. He knew this because once in a while, she tried to kick the straps from her ankles. She was a brave little girl. Perhaps she would not be as brave if she could see where she was.
It was Pious’s job to make sure the girl died. If anyone tried to rescue her, the girl died. If noon came and went and there was no word about her fate, then the girl died. If anything out of
the ordinary took place, the girl died.
It was almost noon now. In five minutes, he was to call the cell phone that served as the girl’s detonator. Pious had a prepaid phone, and the detonator was the only number in its address book. He could call it with the touch of a button.
Perhaps he would wait one extra minute, or even two. He wasn’t sure. The jihadis below him on the roof wouldn’t like that. But it was his job, his responsibility. He would decide when. He didn’t want to make a mistake, kill her, and find out it would have been better to keep her alive.
Someone began shouting. He couldn’t make out the words. Down on the roof. They pointed to the sky.
Pious watched where they were pointing.
Something was coming from above. At first, it looked like a bird. Then it looked like a large bird, much too large. Was it a missile? Was it a man? It looked like a man, flying through the air.
Of course. It was an attack.
He threw himself to the metal grating. He pulled the phone from his jacket. Sorry, girl. This was no time to hesitate. You won’t get your extra minute of life.
The number of the detonator came up. He pressed the button and covered his head, waiting for the explosion.
The phone was ringing.
Should it ring?
A man’s voice answered. “Hello?”
“Hello,” Pious said. “Who is this?”
“My name is Mark Swann,” the man said. “And your name is mud.”
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
11:56 a.m.
United States Naval Observatory – Washington, DC
“Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”
Susan was ready to vomit. She was having trouble breathing. She couldn’t seem to get enough air. The chanting came out of speakers all around the room.
Kurt Kimball moved to her seat. He leaned down and spoke into her ear.
“We had an incident with the Saudi Air Force about forty minutes ago.”
“An incident?”
He shrugged. “It seems they took your threat seriously. They fired on a patrol of our F-18 fighter jets over the Persian Gulf. We’ve stepped up patrols for obvious reasons, but they were the aggressors. One of our guys shot down one of theirs. Their pilot was killed. That was the end of it. But the Saudi air defense is on high alert, and their pilots are on a hair trigger. I think they’re really expecting us to attack Riyadh.”