“Okay, people, we’ve inspected every aircraft we can inspect, I’m afraid,” he announced. “There’s no one left to intercept, and we’re batting zero. Any creative ideas will be appreciated.”
One of the men inside had turned around. “They got the Salt Lake flight, too?”
The agent nodded. “On arrival. They found nothing, provided our people were looking for the right things.”
The Navy officer who had originally commanded the trailer was sitting at a small desk to one side. He turned toward the senior agent now and nodded a brief greeting before turning back to the papers spread out before him. He was obviously searching for something, the senior FBI agent realized, and he was apparently frustrated at not finding it.
The senior agent moved quietly to the Navy officer’s side and took a quick look at the documents he was studying. On the top of the stack was the rapidly prepared list of flights that had taken off from Miami International about the time the gamma ray readings dropped to zero. And sitting next to them were a stack of cargo manifests from the various freight forwarders on the field showing everything that had been shipped as cargo during the same time period.
“Something puzzling you there, Commander?” the agent asked.
The naval officer looked up, scratched his cheek, and frowned slightly, then pointed to the manifests.
“Something doesn’t fit.” He got to his feet and picked up the papers, pointing to the top sheet as he brought them closer for the senior agent to see.
“There was a shipment of high-priority pallets for NOAA which was to have gone out to the Denver area on a 727, but apparently an Air Force cargo jet, a C-141, landed here and took that load for NOAA, according to the notes from whoever talked to the forwarder. I know you intercepted that flight.”
The FBI agent nodded. “We had him land at Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base near Kansas City. We found nothing, of course. Just that one pallet belonging to NOAA. The Air Force crew confirmed they were pressed into service when a contract flight failed to show. They weren’t happy.”
The commander was nodding again, almost rhythmically, as he sat down and pulled more papers toward him. “Right. Right.”
The agent pulled up a folding chair and straddled it backward. “So what’s bothering you?” he asked.
The commander looked at him before speaking. “I … may be wrong, here, sir, but I think there’s yet another cargo departure that isn’t listed on the tower log.”
“That shouldn’t be possible,” the FBI agent replied, following the commander’s index finger.
“I agree, but the freight forwarder also lists a second NOAA shipment in his inventory as of this morning. Instead of the one pallet which left with the C-141, however, this one is a two-pallet combination, also bound for Colorado. Now, we know where the single pallet went. It left with the Air Force. But suddenly that mysterious second set of two pallets disappears from the list. So where’d the other pallets go, or were there ever really two shipments to begin with? For that matter, if there was a second shipment, was it really a pair of NOAA pallets or someone taking advantage of NOAA’s presence to ship something else under an alias?”
The agent rose to his feet and leaned over to look at the papers more closely as the commander continued.
“See the tower log here? There appears to be a double entry for Northwest Nine-Ninety-Four. See how one is crossed-out, as if the tower controller realized he’d accidentally put the same flight down twice? That time corresponds almost perfectly with our reading drop. Now, suppose that crossed-out entry was really some other cargo flight carrying those two mystery pallets out of here, and the controller simply made an error with the call sign? They’re human, too. They do make errors, and obviously someone wrote down the same flight twice.”
The senior FBI agent turned immediately to an FAA inspector a few feet away.
“Charlie, could you find out if there was a flight plan out of Miami filed about this time for a cargo flight whose call sign doesn’t show up on the departure log?”
The FAA man nodded yes. “Miami Center’s computer should have a ready record of all the flight plans that were activated. It’ll take a few minutes to get and compare. If that fails, we could always pull the tower tapes and listen.”
The FBI agent pointed to the papers on the table. “Call the center, please. If there was a departure the tower didn’t log, we need to know what airplane it was, and where it is right now.”
The commander rose to his feet again beside the senior agent. “You know,” he began, “two pallets of cargo could, rather easily …”
“Contain a package of plutonium?” the agent finished. “Commander, even a briefcase is big enough.”
In less than five minutes the FAA inspector hung up the telephone and swiveled around to catch the senior FBI agent’s eye.
“You were right!”
The Navy commander rose from his seat. “You found something?”
“One flight did slip by us. A Boeing 727 belonging to a tiny cargo outfit out of Colorado Springs. ScotAir. He left at exactly the time that Northwest flight was entered twice.”
The FBI agent turned rapidly to an assistant. “Call the forwarder who handled the NOAA stuff and find out if they put anything on that 727.” He turned back to the FAA inspector. “Do we know where he was going?”
“Yep. He was flight-planned to Denver, Colorado.”
“Bingo!” was the reply.
SIX
WASHINGTON NATIONAL AIRPORT—3:30 P.M. EDT
Pete Cooke breathed a sigh of relief as his flight slowed and turned off the main runway. The landing had been hard enough to register on the Richter scale, but the pilots of the McDonnell-Douglas MD-80 had done an outstanding job of negotiating the advance winds of Hurricane Sigrid. After all, they were down in one piece, and as a pilot himself, Pete had been well aware that the two airmen up front were fighting exceptionally wild winds all the way to the ground.
Through the window the Wall Street Journal reporter could see the trees along the Potomac whipping crazily as his flight taxied south toward the terminal. The angle gave him a clear view of the runway they’d just assaulted—Runway 36—and a clear view of a tiny commuter plane struggling through the last part of its approach to the same ribbon of concrete.
It was a small twin-engine Jetstream, being kicked around rather dramatically by the heavy gusts. Pete found himself leaning forward to get a better look, sympathizing with the passengers aboard the little craft who were probably clutching airsick bags by now. As they passed over the runway threshold, a massive gust rolled the turboprop into a dangerous forty-five-degree bank, and, just as suddenly, the wings leveled. Pete expected to see the pilots begin a go-around maneuver.
Instead, amazingly, they continued their landing attempt.
The massive crosswind was blowing the Jetstream off centerline, but the pilots kept coming, determined to make the landing work. They were halfway down the runway and poised to make a normal touchdown, but the aircraft suddenly dropped through the last ten feet, coming down hard and partially sideways. The left main landing gear immediately collapsed in a shower of sparks, whipping the Jetstream around violently to the left. Still moving at more than a hundred miles per hour, the aircraft dragged its left wing, pushing its nose and right main landing wheels sideways against the runway surface until they, too, collapsed, leaving the craft to spin to a halt several thousand feet away in the middle of the intersection of Runway 36 and Runway 33—effectively shutting down Washington National Airport.
Looking back through his window in shocked disbelief, Pete Cooke saw doors and hatches fly open as the passengers and crew scrambled safely onto the concrete. Despite the sparks, there was no fire.
Thank God! he thought.
Pete fumbled with his tote bag beneath the seat in front of him, groping for the new handheld radio scanner he had begun carrying. His hand finally closed around it and he yanked it out and quickly punched in the memorized frequ
ency for Washington Approach Control.
The runways wouldn’t be usable until the damaged Jetstream was removed, but dozens of flights were headed for Washington National. They were going to end up in one massive airborne snarl of diversions and holding patterns, and both the reporter and the pilot in him wondered how the Washington Approach controllers were going to sort out the mess with a monster hurricane approaching.
ABOARD SCOTAIR 50—3:45 P.M. EDT
ScotAir 50 was forty miles south of the Beltway when word came that Washington National Airport was closed.
“How long a delay?” Doc Hazzard asked the controller.
“No information on that, ScotAir. I’ll advise when I know. For now, I can give you a holding clearance or send you to Dulles Airport or Baltimore.”
In the left seat Scott McKay shook his head in agonized disbelief.
Just when I think it can’t get any worse, it gets worse!
He mouthed the word “hold” to Doc, who nodded and punched the transmit button again.
“We’ll take the hold, Approach. We need to get into National as soon as possible, but we do have enough fuel to wait.”
“Roger, ScotAir Fifty, you’re cleared direct to the Georgetown radio beacon to hold as depicted at one-zero thousand feet, right-hand turns.”
Doc adjusted the volume control on the communications radio, then turned to check his work.
“Dammit! Scott, we’ve got to get these radio heads changed. I grabbed the wrong one again.”
Scott’s eyes shifted to the VHF radio control heads. The two were mirror images of each other, the result of Jerry scrounging a refurbished radio when the original equipment delivered with the old leased 727 had broken. Each radio head had two volume knobs, one for air traffic control, the other—usually kept at zero volume—for checking navigational signals. But the number one VHF control head had the important volume control on the left, while number two VHF had it on the right. It was constantly confusing, and more than a few times they’d had the embarrassing experience of flying along for twenty minutes out of touch because the wrong volume knob had been turned down.
“Sorry, Doc. We’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
Jerry had leaned forward. “About the holding pattern. We weigh a hundred and seventy-two thousand pounds, guys,” he announced. “That’s a holding speed of two hundred forty knots.”
Doc repeated the holding instructions and dialed in the radio beacon while Scott guided the Boeing to the left, his right hand retarding the throttles to slow to a speed of two hundred forty knots, trying not to focus on how much he just wanted to be finished with this flight. The desire to crawl off and lick his wounds in private was strong. The impending collapse of his airline—and his dream—was just too painful.
The holding pattern was an invisible racetrack in the sky. They would fly in one direction for a minute, turn right one hundred eighty degrees to fly in the opposite direction for another minute, then another right turn to repeat the exact same path, for as long as they had extra fuel.
Jerry Christian leaned over the center console and handed Scott a slip of paper covered with fuel figures. The 727’s tanks had been filled in Tallahassee at a cost of eight thousand dollars, and somehow ScotAir’s company credit card had been accepted one last time. At least that would get them all the way to Colorado.
“We’ve got forty-seven thousand pounds of fuel remaining,” he counseled, “which gives us about an hour and a half of holding time before we’ll have to depart for Denver. But if we changed our alternate to, say, Louisville, we could hold here in D.C. for over four hours.”
Scott was already shaking his head no.
“In four hours we don’t want to be anywhere close to here, considering the rate that hurricane’s coming ashore.”
Doc Hazzard spoke up. “I just monitored the weather for Dover Air Force Base, almost due east of us on the coast. This is not good, folks. The winds are already howling at over seventy knots.” Doc glanced to the left at their new passenger, who was sitting in the same seat Dr. McCoy had occupied earlier, the observer’s chair right behind Scott. Five-foot-five Linda McCoy had taken one look at five-foot-eleven Vivian Henry back in Tallahassee and decided there was no way the older woman could fold her long legs into the second jumpseat, a tiny affair sandwiched between the observer’s seat and the back cockpit wall. Linda had moved immediately to the smaller seat.
Vivian Henry was restraining herself from asking the obvious questions, but her face betrayed deep worry, and the copilot leaned in her direction to explain what was blocking the runways below. She listened carefully before replying in a quiet, firm voice, “They can reopen their runways, then, in an hour and a half?”
Doc nodded, knowing it was no better than a wild guess. “They’ll have to get permission from the safety board and the FAA to move the wreckage, but they can do it if they hustle.”
Linda McCoy’s face was too expressive to hide the dark worry she was feeling. She leaned between Jerry Christian’s seat and the observer’s chair. “I’m not a meteorologist,” she began, “but I can tell you we’d better not underestimate this storm. The winds down there are going to get worse. Don’t assume it’s going to follow the pattern of any previous hurricane.”
Something in her tone caused Scott to turn around.
“Why, Doctor?”
“This is a new breed of storm—one of the effects of global warming. Atmospheric science is my field, and I can tell you that the engine that’s fueling that storm is a hotter ocean, and more heat coming out of the oceans means more energetic storms. You may have noticed in the last few years how hurricanes seem to be getting stronger, and more fearsome? Well, this is one of that new breed, and the worst is yet to come.”
“You’re scaring me, Dr. McCoy,” Doc said, forcing a chuckle.
“I’m trying to,” Linda replied. “I want you to understand that a cyclonic monster eight hundred miles in diameter has immense power. I don’t want you fellows to underestimate its intensity. I especially don’t want you to underestimate it if you’re planning to land in it with my tail aboard.”
From the engineer’s seat Jerry Christian tried to suppress a smile as he watched the captain’s eyes, waiting for the inevitable, possibly sexist remark about Dr. Linda McCoy’s shapely tail. He knew Scott too well. He knew he’d be unable to resist, and for just a second the anticipation made him forget the inner panic he’d felt for the last few hours.
But there was no smirk on Scott’s face, and no reaction, so profound was his distraction. The silence made Jerry feel even sicker, the hollow desperation welling up inside like the day more than a decade ago when he’d stumbled out of the flight simulator in Minneapolis knowing he’d blown his last chance to pass his copilot check with Northwest Airlines—an exam he had to pass to stay employed.
Jerry studied the captain’s face, trying to sense his thoughts, realizing why the silence dismayed him so: If Scott McKay had lost his puckish sense of humor, it really was over.
Scott turned around as far as he could and tried to look at Vivian. “Mrs. Henry, we could probably land at Dulles Airport right away, if you wanted to change your destination.”
The image of a flatbed truck came into her mind.
“I’ve already arranged my transportation for Washington National Airport, and that was a struggle. I’d much rather go to National.”
“Okay,” Scott began again, “but let’s say Washington National doesn’t reopen. We’ve got to plan for that.”
Vivian sat in high-speed thought for a few seconds. If they couldn’t land at National, Dulles did make sense, even if it took a day to get another truck dispatched.
“I think,” she began, “what I’d like to do is wait and see if National opens up in time, if you can do that safely.”
Scott thought about it before nodding in agreement. If he had come this far and burned up this much fuel to satisfy her, he could burn a little more. “Okay, let’s say we’ll give it
forty-five minutes. If National doesn’t reopen, we’ll land you at Dulles, and I’ll help you arrange transportation before we head west.”
Vivian acknowledged the plan with a weak smile, the words of her Pentagon contact replaying in her mind: “I can’t meet you later than 6 P.M.” Rogers Henry had left extremely detailed instructions. “Once the shipment has arrived in Washington,” he had written, “it must be delivered immediately to the Pentagon within the hour. This is very important! Security demands it!”
She had not concerned herself with why. He had never authorized her to question his judgment, though so long ago when they’d first met at Lawrence-Livermore labs, there had been no need. She was a young engineer specializing in weapon assembly techniques, starstruck to be dating the resident wunderkind, the rising star of theoretical physics. His judgment seemed beyond question until they married, and the kind and caring young husband began metastasizing into a monster determined to maintain total control at home.
She shuddered now to realize that even after his death, Rogers’ iron will could control her thinking.
MIAMI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT—3:50 P.M. EDT
The senior FBI agent in charge in the makeshift command post in the Navy trailer was irritated. It had taken much too long to relay the distressing news that the missing cargo flight, ScotAir 50, was not on the ground at Denver International Airport, after all. He had been worrying about how their cargo should be examined, and how it could be tracked down if any part of what they had flown from Miami had left the Denver airport. The possibility that ScotAir 50 might have diverted somewhere other than its planned destination of Denver had occurred to no one.
And that, he concluded, was poor planning on his part.
This time the word came back in minutes.
“Okay, I understand,” one of the FAA men was saying to the phone as he held up his right hand in a wait gesture. “We may need to contact him. Get me a direct line to that sector controller, please. Yeah, I’ll hold.”
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