The same flashing red light on the panel caught Phil’s attention. It had been going off periodically for the past two hours and he’d been routinely canceling the warning, checking the engine temperature, and trying not to think about it.
Damned number four!
It had been the progenitor of all his problems, and Abbott had apparently been right. The continuous fire warning he was still getting was obviously false. Number four was running as steadily as the other three, mocking all the decisions he’d made before, and making the loss of Garth Abbott even more of a travesty.
The presence of the sophisticated digital flight data recorder in the tail of the 747 was something all pilots took for granted, but Phil thought of it now with disgust. Every time that engine fire warning light had illuminated, it had also recorded itself on the flight data recorder. Phil realized his right hand still wanted to grab and pull the fire handle for number four. He’d been overriding the urge, and he did so again. There was no point.
Janie Bretsen and the rest of the flight attendants had worked quickly to pass out the last of the bottled water and snack packs along with every aspirin or Tylenol she could find to those still suffering from altitude-related headaches. Three passengers were showing some signs of decompression illness with tingling sensations in their elbows, and one woman couldn’t stop scratching her arm—a symptom, Janie knew, of a mild form of the bends. Amazingly, however—despite the physical stress of the decompression on all three hundred passengers spanning an age range from infants to octogenarians—everyone seemed to be calming down under the constant attention of what was now her crew.
Janie toggled on the PA at the forward part of coach. She began in a gentle tone of voice:
Folks, I know a lot of you are as weary as I am. Could I see a show of hands on how many of you would like me to turn off the cabin lights? It would be easier for you to try to sleep, and you’d still have the reading lights …
More than half the hands went in the air.
Thank you. Those who didn’t raise your hands, do you have any really strong objections if I go with the majority and turn them out?
No hands. Good, she thought. If we can hold on a few more hours, this will be over.
Okay. I’m turning them out now. Thanks.
She turned back to the galley and worked the appropriate switches, then leaned against the sidewall for a moment to close her eyes and regain a little strength. She needed a second wind, and it wasn’t coming.
Eighty feet toward the rear of the Boeing Jimmy Roberts had raised and stowed the armrest separating himself and Brenda, pulling her close after turning off the small TV screen. She’d accepted the explanation that they weren’t in legal trouble. Janie, the flight attendant who’d returned with her husband, had seemed so nice and so concerned, and Brenda had believed her. Now she was sleeping softly and Jimmy held her, his mind slowly becoming aware of a small sound it couldn’t place: a tiny, periodic sound somewhat like static and somewhere behind him. It sounded like the business radios he used at the shop back in Midland. Static and voices, and more static. Faint and barely audible, but pricking his curiosity too profoundly to permit sleep. He was in grave need of getting rid of pent-up nervous energy from sitting for so many hours. The inactivity was causing his muscles to tickle.
He looked down at his wife and began slowly, carefully moving her to the left as he adjusted a pillow for her head against the window frame. She was an incredibly sound sleeper when they were together. He’d joked that a freight train in their bedroom couldn’t wake her. But those few times he’d had to work all night on someone’s truck, she’d been bleary-eyed and exhausted in the morning because the slightest noise during the night had jolted her awake.
Jimmy covered her with an extra airline blanket and leaned over to kiss her gently, then quietly undid his seat belt and slipped into the aisle, moving back row by row until he was standing beside the shadowy form of a young boy in a window seat three rows back. The aisle seat next to him was vacant, and Jimmy could see enough in the dim light to tell the boy was in his mid-teens. He was hunched over the digital controls of a small radio with an earplug in his ear—the source of the small sounds Jimmy had picked up. The boy noticed him and looked up.
Jimmy smiled and pointed to the radio. “Whatcha got there?”
“Just a police scanner,” he said.
“Mind if I sit?”
“No,” the boy said as Jimmy maneuvered into the aisle seat.
“You’re picking up police calls way out here?”
“Not really … airplane stuff mostly, and some of it I can’t understand.”
“May I listen?”
“Sure,” the boy replied, pulling the earpiece connector out of the radio and turning the volume down. A male voice crackled over the speaker, ordering someone to turn right, and receiving a quick response.
“What was that?” Jimmy asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve got it on the aviation band right now, and it’s scanning through a bunch of frequencies. I think that one’s a control tower or something, and it sounds like Spanish they’re speaking.”
Another voice, a different one carrying distinctly American tones, broke the squelch:
Meridian Six, Meridian Six, Navy on guard, respond one-twenty-one-point-five. Repeat, Meridian Six, U. S. Navy on guard. Come up immediately one-twenty-one-point-five.
“Wait a minute …,” Jimmy began, but the boy was already nodding.
“Yeah. That’s our flight, but the captain’s not answering. That’s been going on for the last few minutes.”
CHAPTER FORTY FOUR
COMBAT DECISION CENTER,
USS ENTERPRISE, CVN-65
12:23 A.M. Local
As always when air operations were in progress, the quiet efficiency of the electronic nerve center of the USS Enterprise had been shaken every few minutes by the whoosh of the steam catapults on the flight deck as several flights of F-14 Tomcats were launched fully armed into the night. Twenty minutes had elapsed, and the Tomcats were now on station at thirty-seven thousand feet and waiting for their target as the ship continued to broadcast on a variety of frequencies in an attempt to raise the pilot of the renegade 747. Meridian Flight Six was approaching the midpoint of its track across the Mediterranean, and the plan was to bring it down as far from land as possible.
In the cockpit of the lead Tomcat, Lieutenant Commander Chris Burton, radio call sign “Critter,” checked his position once more and began a turn back to the south. The 747’s radar target was already crawling onto the radar screen of his backseater, Lieutenant Luke Berris, his weapons officer. The plan was to fly the flight of four southbound for thirty miles and do a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn to come up behind the Boeing, with the other flight of four coming down from thirty-nine thousand only if needed. It would be up to Lieutenant Commander Burton to report what, if anything, he saw in the windows of the craft, as well as try to turn the 747 back to the south, but the final, private word at the door of the ready room had put a special spin on the mission. “The skipper wants you to know,” his OPS officer said, “that we may be piping any description you give directly to Air Force One. The President wants a live hookup.”
“What’s the range, Blackberry?” Burton asked, using Berris’ formal call sign, which he normally shortened to Blackie.
“Coming up on ninety. Five-point-five minutes to the turn.”
NRO HEADQUARTERS,
CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA
6:23 P.M. EDT
David Byrd got to his feet and leaned over to speak in John Blaylock’s ear. “I need to talk to you outside. Urgently.”
John looked at him, hesitated, then nodded as he stood and addressed George Zoffel.
“We need to step outside, George. How do we get back in?”
Zoffel kept his eyes on the screens as he answered, “Use the phone out there on the wall, and I’ll come out and get you.”
They exited into the corridor and made sure the
security door was closed behind them.
“John, I know you’re the expert and I know very little about the intelligence community,” David Byrd began, “but they’re making a huge mistake in there, and somehow we’ve got to stop this.”
“Why? Because you have a hunch?”
“Yes, I have a hunch. Just like you, I’ve been around the Air Force and aviation a long time and I’m not beyond having solid hunches.”
“Didn’t say you were, Davey. But convince me. Tell me why, with solid photographic evidence that the passengers are off that airplane, and both pilots are dead, and with all the warnings the community has received that something like this might be tried, why shouldn’t we blow that tub out of the sky before it incinerates or infects part of Europe?”
“Because it isn’t what it seems.”
“Meaning?”
“I think the captain is still alive and on board.”
“So, perhaps he’s the turncoat, and he thinks he’s going to survive whatever they want him to do.”
“Now where’s your evidence?” David asked.
“My evidence is in those shots of the rebel camp in Nigeria, David. You saw them, too. We had the circumstantial evidence with the evacuation slide and the buses, but we have real, live pictures of human beings, the majority were light skinned, and we’ve now counted close to two hundred of them in and around that shed. What did they say a while ago? The other section someplace here in the building that was analyzing those shots?”
“They said they thought they were over eighty percent Caucasian,” David repeated, chewing his lip and raising an index finger. “But! We have not seen them all, and there may be a bunch more of the passengers on the airplane. Hell, John, that captain may not even know people were forced off.”
“Describe the main burr under your saddle. What’s the number-one incongruity in their reasoning in there?”
David nodded, thinking it through and glancing in both directions to make sure they were still alone in the corridor.
“What the alleged captain said in that message has not been disproven. Because of the hostage pictures we’re concluding … they’re concluding … that a passenger riot, an air rage incident, is not possible simply because there are no passengers. But we don’t know as an indisputable fact that there are no passengers aboard.”
“I disagree,” John Blaylock said.
“Go at it in reverse, John. If there is any reasonable possibility that a bunch of furious passengers could have seized control, even if few in number, then we cannot discount the captain’s message as a cynical component of an overall master plan. Any possibility! And there is a reasonable possibility and perhaps even probability. I’m here to tell you that, as bizarre as it may sound, I’ve studied passenger groups that were on the ragged edge of just such a revolt. Why is it so hard to believe they could frighten a captain into thinking he was in danger? Especially in an aircraft that’s already made an emergency landing in the middle of an African civil war. A passenger revolt wouldn’t seem much more bizarre.”
“The point, Colonel?”
“I’m giving you the damned point, John.”
“Intelligence proceeds on assessments of reliability, confidence levels, and guesses, all based on available evidence. You’re trying to trump the proverbial thousand-word picture with a philosophical argument.”
“The hell I am!” David replied, turning and pacing a few feet away in thought before turning suddenly and snapping his fingers.
“Okay, John, you want hard facts? Here’s a hard fact. I talked to Senator Douglas a while ago in London. Woke her up. She was on that flight, Meridian Flight Six, on its first leg from Chicago to London.” David related the litany of delays and abuses Sharon Douglas had outlined. “I also talked to the station manager at Heathrow. Over one hundred of those upset people continued on to Cape Town.”
“I see,” John replied, unconvinced but listening.
“In addition, the Meridian London manager had a nasty encounter with an angry American physician yesterday boarding this flight to Cape Town. He’s trying to find his note about the man’s name because he’s not sure, but the physician’s wife died on a Meridian flight last year because the crew wouldn’t listen to her when she asked for emergency help. He’s suing the airline for millions. So why is such a guy flying that airline himself? Maybe because he’s planning to start a riot.”
“Or maybe because he’s arranged a hijacking and been paid by a terrorist group,” John added, holding his hand out, palm up. “Okay, David, look. Let’s agree that the passengers had a preloaded amount of anger. There are dozens of ways this could have been a planned terrorist action. Fact is, whoever staged the commandeering of that 747 probably had either a confederate or a hireling on the flight from Chicago, and that’s how they knew about the angry passengers, and how they would have decided at the last minute to utilize that information to make what they were about to stage sound even more real. Remember, we’re up against a very sophisticated group here. They would have had numerous contingency plans.”
“If we’re up against a group at all. See, we’ve been stampeded, John. We’ve been stampeded by a totally legitimate determination never to be caught with our pants down again, but it’s still a rush to judgment, and if we’re wrong, our Tomcats are going to blow a bunch of innocent Americans out of the sky in a few minutes and the fallout and conspiracy theories and political damage will be immense, not to mention the lost and shattered lives.”
“Wait, David. You’re saying the process has been prejudiced in the direction of attacking?”
“They’re assuming that no radio contact and no clearance and no evidence of passengers mean you automatically get a Trojan Horse. That’s just not supportable. That’s why it’s a prejudiced decision. There could be other explanations, for Christ’s sake! I mean, John, do we have any hard evidence, even anecdotal or circumstantial evidence, of a weapon?”
“No.”
“No! We don’t. We’re just assuming that the suspicious nature of the 747’s flight path and the no-passenger conclusion mean that there has to be a bomb or a biological weapon aboard.”
John Blaylock was shaking his head.
“If they were approaching New York or Washington, would you hesitate?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“You haven’t been privy to what I’ve seen, David. The warnings that the remains of the terrorist networks we’ve been slowly rooting out all over the world have been planning something exactly like this has been increasing in intensity for months, and … there are two recent incidents that make this a higher probability than you know.”
David fell silent for a second, thinking through his words. “John, you’ve got to listen to me now. We’re about to make a historic error in there. I asked if there was any evidence of a bomb or anthrax or anything, and you said no. The warnings on which we’re basing the conclusion that this is a flying weapon are even more circumstantial and suspect than the evidence I’ve just given you. How, John, could a terrorist pilot or a terrorist group know that there was enough anger aboard to justify spinning up the story of a passenger riot?”
“I told you, maybe they had a confederate in London, or aboard the plane.”
“But, John, even if they did, they wouldn’t have been planning on using an air rage story. Think about it. All the other elements of the plan were already in place. These thieves and terrorists, if they exist, wouldn’t have left that message from the cockpit to chance, to be written at the last minute. It was too important. It was designed to keep everyone off their back and divert any suspicion. Who in hell would have thought up a passenger riot, let alone written it in an American voice? No, John, that’s a real Meridian pilot up there, and he’s got passengers in the back, and we’re about to murder them.”
“Onitsa’s been pretty convincing, Dave. Nigeria just blew our minds and wired him ten million dollars to keep him from starting the threatened executions. Eventually they’ll
want to recover that from us.”
David sighed and shook his head. “They may have some of the passengers, but not all. And, again, where’s the weapon that was supposedly loaded on board? The satellites saw no big packages or bombs coming aboard.”
“Could be a small package, or maybe Onitsa had the satellite schedules memorized and worked around them.” John was nodding to himself. “Yeah. That would be like him.” He looked back at David. “Look, what you’re arguing has solid logic, David, and it’s well thought out, except for one fatal flaw.”
“What?”
“I’m going to raise this in there anyway, but … the pictures of the passengers as hostages are so close to conclusive, and the actions of the aircraft are so innately threatening, that in the minds of this community, they simply override your logic and constitute all the proof they need. Remember, we’re fighting a war, and there’s no spot on the planet not included in our alert zone.”
“What will it take to convince you, John?”
John Blaylock shook his head and sighed as he studied his uniform shoes for a second, then looked back up. “I’ve gotta see something in that message that no one but the real captain could know. And we’re just about out of time.”
123 MILES WEST OF THE USS ENTERPRISE
12:24 A.M. Local
Chris Burton watched the beacon and position lights of the Meridian 747 slide by five miles to the left with a closing rate of over a thousand miles per hour. With his three wingmen in an extended trail position, he rolled into a left ninety-degree bank to turn and pull up behind Meridian Flight Six as they followed in close interval. Burton steadied the Tomcat out on the same heading and accelerated toward the 747 as his wingmen followed.
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