The Ghost Pattern

by Leslie Wolfe

  “Are we finally going to war? What are you building?” Dimitrov asked, his interest piqued.

  “Not in the traditional way, but, yes, we are going to war. Just imagine one day, all the police force in one city becoming a little more aggressive, enough to beat and kill people in the streets and wreak havoc, enough to become a menace.”

  Dimitrov frowned.

  “What are you trying to do, Vitya?”

  “Keep our enemy busy from within. I want to ignite deep dissent in the ranks of the American people. It will be as if a cancer they can’t control is attacking them from within. They can’t control the attack, but we can. I want them killing one another in the streets. I have the best researchers in the world working on this.”

  “Bozhe moi!” Dimitrov replied. “Oh, my God! Another one of your genius ideas…Abramovich might like it. Does he know?”

  Myatlev cleared his throat before replying.

  “No, not yet. His mind is set on a traditional war. He wants us to drop a few nukes, attack frontally. But I think this is better, more prudent. Radiation is tricky once it’s released into the atmosphere. It can go anywhere; it can come here. I don’t want my dick to fall off.”

  They were silent for a while, both frowning, deep in thought.

  “How the hell did you pull this off?” Dimitrov finally asked.

  “Trust me,” Myatlev replied, “you might not want to know.”

  ...21

  ...Tuesday, May 3, 8:07PM Local Time (UTC+10:00 hours)

  ...Undisclosed Location

  ...Russia

  ...Six Days Missing

  Dr. Gary Davis sat in front of the idle mass spec, watching his colleagues engaged in a bitter debate. The weather had gotten hot, and the air in the lab was stuffy and hard to breathe. They were all sweating, and, in the absence of daily showers, that heat was becoming increasingly difficult to endure, making everyone irritable.

  To make things worse, the Russians had put Adenauer, Dr. Arrogance himself, in charge of the team, and, for some reason, everyone obeyed that decision. Of course, one of the reasons they obeyed was that Adenauer instantly started behaving as project lead, taking his responsibilities seriously. Yet something was eating at Adenauer. He’d turned grim, more silent than his usual self. He loved hearing himself talk, and wouldn’t miss an opportunity to speak to save his life. Yet he sat silent, watching, just as Gary did, how the others argued about the ethics of building a chemical weapon for their enemy.

  “You’re insane! All of you!” Dr. Mallory declared from the bottom of his lungs. “I respect everything I’ve heard here today, starting from one’s duty to survive, and ending with pure, unbridled fear of pain and death, but how does creating a dangerous chemical weapon and putting it in the hands of our enemies make it better? It just delays the issues, while magnifying it! You will suffer, and you will die, or be forced to see others suffer and die, and know that you’re to blame for it!”

  “Didn’t we agree to release weak formulations?” Dr. Crawford intervened, in a pacifying tone.

  “If we create this, no matter how diluted, their scientists will be able to run with it and finalize the research,” Dr. Mallory replied. “We can’t assume they won’t.”

  “But we can’t stall any longer,” Dr. Fortuin intervened. “It’s been almost three days, and they’re growing impatient. We have to make something happen, to prove that we’re actually working.”

  “Three days? Humph,” Dr. Mallory scoffed. “This type of research can take years!”

  “Agreed,” Dr. Fortuin replied, “but they won’t hear it!”

  Tension crackled among them in the loaded air, and Adenauer didn’t intervene. What’s eating him? Gary wondered. He approached the group slowly.

  “We all want the same things,” he said gently. “We want to live, and we want to do so while maintaining our code of ethics and our humanity. Why don’t we focus on that, instead of going at one another’s throats? We’re not to blame for this, none of us are.” He stopped talking, searching their faces to see if his message made it across to them. They relaxed a little, imperceptibly almost, all except Adenauer. “Good. Then let’s build the most harmless chemical compound we can think of, something inherently useless and wrong, and give them something without giving them anything. How’s that for a challenge?”

  “Huh…interesting,” Dr. Crawford chuckled. “I’d go with steroids. Everyone knows their effect, it depends largely on the subject’s body mass so it will be unpredictable in results, and it’s freely available at the world’s gyms anyway. We wouldn’t be telling them anything they don’t already know.”

  “How about testosterone?” The feeble voice of Dr. Chevalier rolled the “r” and elongated the words, making her question sound almost musical. “It could work. Studies show that compounds that enhance the production of naturally occurring testosterone, like branch chain amino acids, taurine, or the direct intake testosterone supplements need to be monitored closely. Psychotic breaks and violence are listed as side effects.”

  “A little too effective for my taste,” Dr. Mallory replied. “We need something more benign. Remember, we don’t want the compound to work.”

  “What if we formulate a selective serotonin reuptake enhancer? An enhancer, not an inhibitor. Something like Tianeptine, for example, but without its antidepressant stabilization function. It will effectively and harmlessly deplete the serotonin levels in the synapses, temporarily.” Dr. Adenauer spoke, for the first time in more than an hour. “Balanced subjects will get depressed and mildly angry, and depressed subjects will have somewhat stronger symptoms, but they’re already used to self-managing those with food, medication, et cetera. Not really a solution they could ever use, but in tests it might work enough to buy us some time.”

  No one replied, but they seemed encouraged by Adenauer’s suggestion.

  “Sounds good,” Gary summarized. “Let’s get to work. While Dr. Adenauer will lead the actual research, I will stall by asking for some more equipment and supplies, and Dr. Bukowsky will attempt to hypnotize our lovely guard.”

  As they fell silent in approval, a distant quarrel caught their attention.

  “Get serious, Lila, is this because I cheated on you?” The pilot’s tone was patronizing, annoying.

  “How dare you?” Lila yelled. “How dare you even ask me that? You bastard!” Lila pounced and hit him in the chest with her fists, but the pilot didn’t budge; he just chuckled.

  “What’s going on here?” Gary asked, heading toward them fast, followed closely by the rest of the doctors.

  “You wanna know why we’re here?” Lila asked, wiping tears off her face with her sleeve. “Ask him!”

  “Lila—” the pilot started to say, but Gary interrupted. He never liked the pilot; there was something slimy about him.

  “What is this about?” he asked.

  The pilot didn’t answer. He sat there, in the same corner where he’d spent the past couple of days, staring at his boots.

  “Tell them,” Lila snapped. “Where’s your courage now, you sick son of a bitch!”

  Dr. Bukowsky came closer to Lila and gently grabbed her arm. “What’s going on, my dear? I’m sure we can help, if you just let us know what happened.”

  Gary expected to hear about some lovers’ quarrel. Regardless of how stereotypical it sounded, pilots and flight attendants got involved romantically more times than not. Probably everyone else had the same expectations, more or less.

  Then Lila spoke.

  “He brought us here…he’s the one who sold us out. And he killed Captain Gibson. He shot him, right there, in his pilot seat, so he could take the plane to Russia.” She sniffled and wiped her tears again, then added, “There…now you know who he is.”

  The pilot looked at her with mean eyes, almost squinting, grinding his teeth, and pursing his lips. “You fucking bitch,” he muttered.

  “Is that true?” Dr. Adenauer asked, drilling his eyes into the pilot.

&n
bsp; The pilot remained silent for a while, then spoke quietly, “Yes.”

  “Why?” Dr. Adenauer asked quietly.

  “This was not supposed to happen,” the pilot replied, talking fast in a pleading tone. “You have to believe me. Please.”

  There was no sympathy for him anywhere in that room. Gary felt a wave of anger clenching his fists and tightening his chest. He could barely breathe.

  “Talk,” Adenauer commanded.

  “They paid me to change direction and land the plane here, that’s all. It wasn’t supposed to end like this.”

  “What did you expect, you fucking moron?” Gary snapped, and immediately got stared at by Adenauer, who hated profanity. He didn’t care. “Did you expect to get your cash and fly out of here, free as a bird?”

  “Y–yes,” he stuttered.

  “God, you’re such an idiot,” Gary said, turning his back to the man. He couldn’t stand looking at him. Never before in his life had he wanted to kill a man with his bare hands, not before that moment. “You make me sick.”

  “I’ve always wondered how we got here,” Dr. Crawford said, “but I had assumed it was the other pilot, because we haven’t seen him since. Unbelievable.”

  “There are many chemicals here that can kill you without leaving a trace,” Dr. Fortuin said, surprising everyone. The composed, calm Dutch didn’t seem like the type to think that. “Most likely, one chemical or another will kill you at the right moment. Count on that.”

  Fear flickered briefly in the pilot’s eyes, quickly replaced by a hint of a superior smile.

  “You’re forgetting,” he said, “that I’m the only one who can fly that 747 out of here.”

  ...22

  ...Tuesday, May 3, 3:03PM PDT (UTC-7:00 hours)

  ...Tom Isaac’s Residence

  ...Laguna Beach, California

  ...Six Days Missing

  Alex stood in front of the wall-sized map, staring at the piece of Russian territory shown on it, northeast of China and north of Japan. Where could a plane that size go? Where could it land? With the amount of fuel it carried, it could be anywhere on continental Russia.

  She held the fresh cup of coffee close to her nose, inhaling the delicate French Vanilla flavor that filled the room. Where are you? Where on Earth are you?

  A quick tap on the door, then a bulky man in his sixties entered the war room hesitantly, followed closely by Tom.

  “Alex, meet Roger Murphy, former ATC shift supervisor at LAX,” Tom said. “Mr. Murphy, this is my associate, Alex Hoffmann.”

  They shook hands, and the man sat down with a quiet groan, giving the map on the wall a furtive glance. Medium height and heavy set, the man wore thick-rimmed glasses and an untrimmed moustache that had lost its symmetry a long time ago. One edge was hanging lower than the other was, but it wasn’t just the hair longer on his left side; his features were slightly lower too; his lips and cheek lopsided. Alex wondered if Roger Murphy was aware that he had probably had a small stroke recently.

  “Mr. Murphy, thank you for coming here today,” Alex said.

  “Yeah, how can I help?” His speech was a little slurred too.

  “I need to understand how someone might make a plane disappear in a different spot than it had actually disappeared.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  She backtracked a little. “How would one know where a plane is at a certain moment in time?”

  “All commercial planes are equipped with transponders,” Murphy replied. “The typical transponder emits an identification signal in response to a received interrogation signal. Radar operations depend on transponder signals to pinpoint aircraft position and altitude with precision.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Secondary radar pings the transponder, then sends what we call an interrogation signal. Upon receipt of this interrogation, the transponder will return its code or altitude information. Some transponders are designed to be used in busy airspace areas, and are compatible with automatic collision avoidance systems. What kind of aircraft are we talking about?”

  “Umm…” she hesitated a little, looking at Tom for a split second. “A Boeing 747-400,” she replied, causing Murphy to pop his almost bald eyebrows up in an a skewed expression of surprise.

  “Oh, then it most likely has best-in-class transponder equipment onboard.”

  “So how can one grab a 747?”

  “What do you mean?” Murphy fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat. His concerned expression showed he was becoming less and less at ease with the direction their conversation was going.

  “Let me tell you what this is about,” Alex said, thinking she needed him to open up, not hold back. “We’re trying to locate flight XA233, and we’re thinking that it could have somehow made it to land, but ATC never knew about it.”

  “Ah…” Murphy said, slouching a little in his chair, more relaxed. “I see where this is going. Yeah, well, I guess you could make the plane disappear if you would just turn the transponder off. Really, that’s all it takes.”

  Unbelievable. Modern aviation in the twenty-first century. Huh…“That’s all it takes? No GPS onboard?” Alex probed.

  “All aircraft have GPS, but it’s for the pilots’ use while in flight. It doesn’t transmit anything to anyone.”

  “The pilots do get their info from satellites, right?”

  “Yeah, but the airlines aren’t equipped to retrieve, interpret, and use that type of information from the satellites. No one is.”

  “So, if you wanted to grab that 747 and land it here, somewhere,” she asked, pointing her laser spot casually at the Russian mainland near the Pacific coast, “how would you do it?”

  He stood with difficulty and scratched his balding head. “This is where they were last tracked?” Murphy asked, pointing at one of the red pushpins.

  “Yes.”

  “You could do that two ways, I guess. It depends, really. You could start by dropping altitude, then kill your transponder, do a course change, fly back these few hundred miles, then land.”

  “Why drop altitude?”

  “So that the last transponder ping sees you in distress, losing altitude right before the so-called crash, right?”

  “Ah, yes. You’re right.”

  “But there’s a small problem with this method. Ideally, you’d want the plane out of the air when the alarm sounds.”

  “What alarm?”

  “When a plane is assumed crashed, all nearby radar stations will start searching everywhere, and everyone starts looking. At that time, you want your hijacked plane to have landed already.”

  “So how do you pull that off?”

  “Easiest way? With another plane, a plane no one will be looking for. You’d bring the second plane really close to the 747, above it or under it would be best. Then you synchronize transponder codes. The Boeing turns its transponder off, at the same time as the other plane turns its transponder on, using the same code. It’s programmable from the cockpit, you know. Then the Boeing changes course and heads for the mainland, while the second aircraft continues for a while on the 747’s original flight plan, pretending it’s the Boeing, then simulates the crash.”

  “Wow…This way, the 747 lands before anyone even looks for it, right?” Alex confirmed.

  “Right.”

  “What kind of plane does the other one need to be? What would work?”

  “Even a personal jet would do. They were out at sea, and radar doesn’t have the accuracy you’d expect. It can’t distinguish that well between hull sizes. That’s why we need transponders. So any jet can do it, as long as it can match the 747’s cruise speed and altitude.”

  “Which is?”

  “Speed? 500 miles per hour, maybe 550.”

  “Which jets can match that?”

  “Non-commercial? Cessna jets would do that, a Dassault Falcon 50, Learjet, there are a few.”

  She exchanged a quick look with Tom, barely able to hide her enthusiasm. If there was a way,
there was hope. She refocused.

  “Why would you grab a 747? Can you reuse it?” Alex asked.

  “I guess I could, if I’d repaint it, strip it of all Universal Air markings, replace its black box, yes, I think I could.”

  “How much is one of these planes?”

  “About 200 million dollars,” Murphy replied without hesitating. The man was a walking and slightly slurred talking aviation encyclopedia.

  She frowned. This theory didn’t make much sense.

  “I think there are easier ways to steal 200 mil,” she voiced her doubts.

  Roger Murphy stood, ready to leave. He showed an uncanny way to know when she’d run out of questions.

  “Depends on what you’re after,” he concluded.

  That’s right, Alex thought, barely refraining from hugging the man. That’s precisely right. What are you after this time, my dear V?

  ...23

  ...Wednesday, May 4, 1:24PM Local Time (UTC+10:00 hours)

  ...Undisclosed Location

  ...Russia

  ...Seven Days Missing

  Adeline Bernard woke up with a start. Someone moved very close to her, and her senses, hypervigilant, caused her to wake up abruptly. She looked around her, a little dazed, until, within seconds, she remembered her reality.

  Captive!

  Crammed together with hundreds of others, in what seemed like a large, round industrial area or warehouse, with barely enough room to stand, sit, and lie down, for what seemed now like an eternity. The air, stuffy and heavy with the smell of human waste and sweat, was hard to breathe and brought little oxygen to her thirsty lungs.

  Food and water were brought once daily, stale water tasting of swamp and rusted metal, and cabbage or potatoes for food, boiled and tasteless. Prisoners rotated through kitchen duty, having to prepare their own food in precarious conditions. They boiled the cabbage and potatoes in huge pots over an open fire, in a smaller room fitted with a massive stove and a chimney of sorts. Every day, right after the meal was cooked, someone came in and took a large pot of it away. That’s how Adeline knew the doctors and Lila were still alive.