Air Force One is Down

by John Denis

  Jagger’s gaze ranged from face to face as though seeking confirmation of Fairman’s words. The flight engineer – they were all now under the spell of the weaving gun – had paused within range of the circuit breakers which would cut the liner’s communications – or most of them. But now he tripped the switches, and then made the mistake of letting his eyes flicker nervously to a metal box fixed to the bulkhead.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Jagger rapped, following the man’s eye-line. ‘Just some more circuit breakers,’ the engineer replied in a tone which was a little too casual to be credible.

  ‘Open it,’ Jagger commanded, and the engineer rummaged in his bag for a screwdriver. ‘You, Colonel,’ Cody said turning to Fairman, ‘can have your eyes, but get this aircraft down to sea-level.’

  Fairman ordered Latimer to illuminate the ‘fasten seat-belts’ sign, and then he set the new heading. Latimer confirmed that he had carried out the necessary checklist of procedures for the descent, and the flight system put the Boeing into a slow right-hand turn on to the course Jagger had directed.

  Cody kept an eye on Latimer until his attention was distracted by a screw falling from the cover-plate of the mysterious box on the bulkhead. The engineer lifted the plate off to reveal more circuit breakers.

  The hijacker gestured with his revolver. ‘Those too,’ he said, ‘trip them.’

  The flight engineer looked helplessly in Fairman’s direction, but Jagger transferred the gun to within six inches of his face and said, ‘Now!’

  Reaching up with a trembling hand, the engineer obeyed. The green light on Philpott’s wall display twinkled out.

  Philpott rubbed his eyes. He turned to Sonya, who said, ‘My God, it’s gone.’

  The green snake was still somehow imprinted on Philpott’s retina. He closed his eyes and creases gathered at the bridge of his nose. ‘It was – turning,’ he said slowly. ‘Just before the track went out, the plane was definitely turning.’ He opened his eyelids and glared at the wall map, as if willing the green trace to return. ‘It was turning maybe forty-five degrees.’

  Swann’s voice, small but oddly consoling, came from the computer console. ‘I can confirm that, sir,’ he said, ‘it appeared to be changing course to take it up the Adriatic Sea instead of the Mediterranean and Tyrrhenian Sea.’

  ‘But why?’ Philpott murmured. ‘And why have we lost the trace? Or is this just another “localised difficulty”?’

  The telephone rang, and Sonya, who was nearest the receiver, snatched it from its cradle. She identified herself and listened in silence, then said to Philpott, ‘It’s General Morwood, Malcolm. They’ve lost the trace as well.’

  Philpott jumped to his feet. ‘Tell him I’ll be back to him shortly,’ he said brusquely. ‘Basil – those fighters. I want them airborne like thirty seconds ago, and out on the track of Air Force One.’ Swann bent his head to the console and flexed his fingers. Then Sonya Kolchinsky shouted, ‘Wait.’

  Philpott turned to see her with a hand raised, listening intently to Morwood’s operations centre. She covered the mouthpiece and said quickly, ‘Morwood says Gibraltar Radar reports that AF One is still, repeat still, on track. They’ve picked her up on the fringe of their area, and they’re certain of their identification. There’s no other comparable traffic.’

  The UNACO director cursed under his breath, and snapped, ‘Basil, do as I said. Get the fighters off. I don’t care what the Pentagon says, or Gibraltar Radar. Something’s wrong out there, and it’s not happening by accident. It’s Smith. I know it’s Smith.’

  Sonya waved at him and pointed to the telephone. ‘General Morwood,’ she whispered, handing him the receiver.

  ‘What the blue bloody blazes is happening, Philpott?’ Morwood shouted. ‘First we lose the track and then Gibraltar say they’ve got her all safe and sound. What does it mean, for God’s sake?’

  ‘It means that I’ve requisitioned an Eagle flight from Naples Command,’ Philpott replied tersely. ‘It means that I’m convinced something has gone wrong with the President’s plane, and I’m not taking any chances.’

  ‘You’ve done WHAT?’ the General roared.

  ‘You heard.’

  Silence reigned in the Pentagon operations room. Then, from Morwood, ‘Good thinking, Malcolm. I should have done it myself. Keep me posted. I’ll ring you if anything comes up at this end.’

  ‘There is, of course, one thing you can do, George,’ Philpott continued airily. ‘Raise Air Force One through Andrews and get them to check that everything’s A-OK on board. Tell them to confirm without any possibility of doubt that things are absolutely normal there, and as they should be.’

  Morwood grunted, and snarled an order to his aide. The false Air Force One had long since finished her steep climb and was giving a passable imitation of an on-course flight to Gibraltar Radar when Andrews AFB finally raised the flight deck. Her speed had dropped to barely 150 miles per hour, and she was stealthily losing altitude as well.

  ‘What’s going on there?’ Andrews demanded. ‘Naples and Athens said they lost you, and your own communications are on the blink. The inertial guidance track has gone, too. Do you read?’

  ‘Systems malfunctions at both ends, I suppose,’ the skipper replied in a more than adequate imitation of Latimer’s languid drawl, filtered to an indistinguishable metallic rasp by the communications equipment.

  ‘Is that you, Pat?’ Andrews asked.

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Is Tom there?’ Andrews pressed.

  ‘Fairman here,’ the co-pilot replied. ‘What’s all this about? We are on schedule and raring to make Geneva. McCafferty sends his love. Got something special lined up for tonight, I think.’

  Andrews probed gently at other openings, but eventually retired satisfied. They passed the good news to Morwood, and Morwood informed Philpott, whose Eagle flight was by now airborne and beyond recall … even if Philpott had any intention of summoning them back to base, which he hadn’t.

  The skipper of the ‘identikit’ Boeing checked his precisely calculated schedule and suggested to his co-pilot that it was time they were gone. They strapped on parachutes and made for the emergency exit. The plane was on autopilot, and at their greatly reduced speed and height, the two men would easily clear the freighter’s slip-stream.

  The skipper kept an ear cocked to the radio desk, waiting for a particular signal to pierce the fuzzy sound. It came, transmitted from a ship in the Mediterranean two miles below them. He turned to his colleague with a ‘thumbs up’ sign, and crossed to join him at the exit door.

  Then he reached up a hand, slid off the top of a black plastic box wired to the emergency exit sign, and pressed a switch.

  The aircraft was plunged into darkness, and the two men jumped out into the swirling breeze …

  In the stateroom of the real Air Force One, Sabrina saw the ‘fasten seat-belts’ sign flash on, and felt the liner dip as it banked to starboard. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, and then gave an experimental cough and tried again, a little more loudly. Heads turned and inquiring eyes fastened on her.

  Sabrina indicated the sign and said, ‘The Commander requests you to put on your seat-belts, please.’ Hemmingsway looked at the electric wall clock and pointed out that they were still the better part of a thousand miles short of their destination.

  ‘Probably a little turbulence?’ Sheikh Dorani, the Libyan, asked.

  ‘Something of the sort,’ Sabrina replied.

  ‘We appear to be going downwards,’ Sheikh Zayed Farouk Zeidan observed.

  ‘We are,’ his grandson Feisal confirmed, ‘at a rate of perhaps fifty feet a second, or thereabouts.’ The news, coming as it did from a boy of twelve in precise and clipped Oxford English, sounded so incongruous that Hemmingsway started giggling.

  He fell silent when the Iraqi, Sheikh Arbeid, addressing the room at large for the first time, since he was not gifted with the capacity for smalltalk, said, ‘The young one is correct. We are diving.’

&
nbsp; Eyes turned again on Sabrina, who flushed and said, ‘I’ll – uh – I’ll try to find out what’s happening. No doubt we’re just getting under some bad weather or something.’

  ‘No doubt,’ Sheikh Zeidan commented urbanely.

  ‘Unlikely, though,’ Feisal ventured.

  ‘Why?’ Hemmingsway asked, curious, and then cursing himself for seeking an opinion on aeronautical practice from a lad younger than his own children, whose knowledge of anything beyond sex and pop music could be safely abandoned to the back of a small postage stamp.

  ‘We would not need to dive as steeply,’ Feisal replied, ‘and we do not seem to be encountering turbulence or an airpocket. We are, simply, descending.’

  Hemmingsway pulled himself together. ‘Now look here,’ he said, ‘I am your host aboard this aircraft in the absence of the President of the United States, and while I’m sure the opinions of our young friend are of consuming interest, I see no reason why we should not be told what is occurring, rather than having to guess. Airman,’ he said to Sabrina, ‘we will follow the Commander’s orders and keep our seat-belts fastened. You will get a member of the flight crew to come out here now, and give us an explanation.’

  Sabrina started to obey when the Boeing gave a sudden, violent lurch. Sheikh Dorani clutched the arms of his seat. Doctor Ibrahim Hamady, of Saudi Arabia, leaned forward to rescue a cup that was skating off the table, and Sabrina heard a noise from the rear of the plane, which she correctly identified as kettles and pots crashing to the floor. Sheikh Zeidan’s imposing face registered startled apprehension when a gasping, retching sound came from the seat beside him. He bent over the boy, who was battling for breath, taking in huge gulps of air.

  The Bahraini turned to Sabrina and snapped his fingers imperiously. ‘His medication. Quickly, young lady,’ he urged.

  Fighting the angle of the aircraft to stay upright, Sabrina started for the rear galley where she had left the syringe and insulin capsules.

  She encountered no one else along the route, which for some reason that she could not pinpoint worried her more than it should have done, and reached the galley. She jerked open the door, and her astonished gaze fell on the bodies of Master Sergeant Pete Wynanski and Airman Jeanie Fenstermaker …

  One at each side, the two leading fighters in the Eagle flight drew abreast of the dark and sinister shape of the Boeing. The Eagle leader called the plane, but his only reply was an impenetrable buzz of static.

  ‘There’s not a single light showing on her,’ the pilot of the second fighter reported. ‘Anything visible your side?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Eagle leader replied. ‘Drop back a bit, will you? Get as close in as you can. See if you can spot anything – anything. A movement, the flicker of a match. Any Goddamned thing you can see to convince me and Naples Control and UNACO that this isn’t just a ghost, because that’s how it looks to me, and I can’t make a report like that without getting a free pass to the funny farm.’

  The second plane peeled away and came up behind the Boeing again, adjusting his speed to that of the huge grey shape. The pilot, insofar as he was able, examined every inch of the liner, checking the external markings and scrutinising each window along the fuselage as the moonlight briefly caught her. He speeded up and peered into the darkened, empty flight deck.

  The pilot dived and resumed a course parallel with his leader. ‘Nothing,’ he confirmed, ‘absolutely one big fat zero. Not a sign of life anywhere. Something God-awful, unimaginable, must have happened. She’s just been abandoned – crew, passengers, everybody.’

  ‘Zilch!’ his leader retorted, and then, more graphically, ‘Balls! that’s Air Force One there, baby, not some mystery joy-rider – and not the Marie Celeste, either. The crew of AF One don’t just chuck the passengers overboard and jump out of a ship that’s to all intents and purposes flying perfectly normally. Are you sure you didn’t spot something, overlook something? It could have seemed unimportant, but it may be the clue we’re after.’

  There was silence, except for the crackle of static, and then the second pilot’s voice, hesitant and confused, came over again. ‘There was something – yeah … you know, that didn’t seem quite, sort of, right, kosher. But I thought I was just seeing things – or not seeing them, even.’

  ‘What was it?’ Eagle leader demanded. ‘For Christ’s sake, tell me!’

  ‘Well, it was the—’

  The sky was lit by a blinding flash and a glare of orange, then crimson, light, shading to a fierce yellow. The shock-wave reached the two fighters fractionally before the huge blast of sound boomed in their ears. The two little planes bucked and leapt through the wispy clouds and screamed away to right and left, each performing tight circles to come round again and dive towards the wreckage of the Boeing as it dropped from the night sky.

  The fiery cigar shape of the Boeing’s fuselage was now starkly illuminated as the fighters chased it down to the sea. Eagle leader made his panic-stricken report to Naples base, where it was received with uncomprehending horror.

  ‘Shot down?’ Naples queried.

  ‘No!’ Eagle leader roared, ‘not shot down. It just – exploded. There was no missile. It must have been a bomb. A bomb – on an empty aircraft.’

  ‘Empty?’ from Naples.

  ‘Positive. Empty, and in total darkness.’

  ‘And it was Air Force One,’ Naples pressed.

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘No.’

  There was silence from Naples, then the robot voice said, ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Eagle Two,’ the pilot of the second fighter confirmed.

  ‘And you’re saying—’ the Controller left the question hanging in the air.

  ‘I’m saying I don’t think it was Air Force One,’ the airman rejoined.

  This time Naples refused to break the silence, and the USAF pilot said, ‘First, some information. What kind of main hatch, you know, the actual door, did Air Force One have?’

  ‘What kind of door?’ Naples echoed in bafflement. ‘An ordinary one, as far as we know.’

  ‘Dimension, say, four feet?’

  A busy, almost frenetic, silence occupied Naples now. Then the Controller came back. ‘We have the specification of the Boeing in front of us. It had a normal-sized hatch, built for average height and weight passengers. Why do you ask, Eagle Two?’

  ‘Because this bird didn’t,’ the fighter pilot crowed triumphantly. ‘I checked it in the air on the level, and again on the way down. This Air Force One’s door measured all of seven feet wide.’

  ‘Then it was—’ began Eagle leader.

  ‘Then it couldn’t have—’ put in Naples Control.

  ‘No,’ replied Eagle Two, ‘it wasn’t a VC-137C stratoliner nor any other kind of Boeing 707-320B airliner. My guess is that it was some old freighter tarted up to look like Air Force One …’

  ‘… My guess, too,’ murmured Malcolm Philpott, who had been patched through to the three-way conversation. ‘And what’s more, I know who did it.’

  Sonya Kolchinsky burst into his office, her face alive with strain and concern. ‘Is it true?’ she asked. ‘General Morwood says Air Force One has been shot down or bombed. Is it true?’

  Philpott turned in his chair and chuckled up at her. ‘Oh yes, it’s true, my pet. But tell General Morwood not to worry: we’ve got another one.’

  NINE

  A crumbling outcrop of wartime ruins framed against the night sky above the remains of a concrete bunker lay just to the right of the runway where it ended in a sudden crevasse. Dirt ramps had been banked up to mark the very limit of usable track, but they would be frighteningly ineffective against the weight of a plunging jet.

  Paraffin lamps, spluttering noisily, their flames dancing and weaving, paralleled each other down the entire length of the runway, with a battery of them at the end, but there was no disguising the fact that Mister Smith’s Kosgo airstrip had not been
designed to take a Boeing 707.

  Smith lounged against a low concrete wall, directing the placement of the forty-strong reception committee – all in rough battle fatigues, all heavily armed.

  ‘Why are we here?’ the girl asked. Her elfin face peeped out from the hood of a sable fur coat;

  her hands were encased in a matching muff, and her feet in sable-lined grey leather boots.

  ‘We wait,’ Smith replied in Serbo-Croat.

  ‘For what?’

  Smith raised a finger to her lips and said, ‘Hush, little one.’ She followed his gaze as he peered into the sky.

  Barely audible on the breeze, the throaty growl of a jet engine cut like an idling bandsaw through the thick, low cloud. Smith ran his fingers over the girl’s lips and she licked the tip of each one …

  ‘How long?’ Fairman rasped.

  ‘Most of five thousand feet,’ Jagger confirmed.

  ‘Most?’

  ‘Uh-huh. The strip was built for jets, but not very big ones.’

  ‘It’s impossible,’ Fairman protested.

  Jagger shook his head. ‘Good, old-fashioned airmanship, Tom. But mind the gully at the far end.’

  ‘Gully!’

  ‘Yeah. The runway sort of – well, peters out. It’s quite a deep drop.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Jagger smiled and said, ‘Maybe a prayer would help.’

  Kowalski remarked that there was an island coming up to port.

  ‘Well don’t tell us,’ Latimer remarked peevishly, ‘you’re the navigator. What is it?’

  If they were on course, Kowalski explained, it would be the island of Vis. ‘See any others?’ he asked.

  ‘To where?’

  ‘Starboard.’

  Latimer probed the blackness, and identified two shapes looming on the right. He passed the news to the navigator. ‘Spot on,’ Kowalski said, ‘the first one’s Hvar and the second Brac. It’s dead straight now until landfall.’