“No, sir. He had not been told.”
The President sank back down in his chair.
“Those poor bastards. They thought we were trying to trap them. They’re headed east?”
“Yes, sir. Apparently.”
“Call them! Explain what happened. Get him back!” the President snapped.
“Sir, we’re trying everything to contact him. He’s not responding. With the hurricane and the weather, radar returns are difficult for the controllers to sort out, since he has his transponder off. He’s been flying, we believe, at low altitude, but he was last spotted as an intermittent target headed east over the Atlantic.”
The President stared in silence for an uncomfortable period of time before replying, “He’s going to try to dump it himself!”
“No, sir,” the general responded as he studied the table.
“Why not? What else could he be planning? You’re not suggesting a suicide?”
“Sir, that’s a Boeing 727 with a side cargo door. I’m told it can’t be opened in flight, and even if it could, you can’t jettison cargo in flight.”
“Then where is he going?”
“Mr. President, to his death, apparently.” The statement was spoken without emotion or inflection, but the general felt very cold inside. Whether from fear of presidential reprisal for further screwing up the operation, or from the impending loss of a few hapless civilians about to perform a selfless act, he couldn’t tell. He just felt cold and sick. He thought of his son, a young airline pilot based in Seattle. That could be his son out there, about to sacrifice his life for his country. That’s what they were doing, of course. That was the only explanation. Anyone who’d flown jets in the modern Air Force or Navy knew well what a simple nuclear bomb could do to a civilian population.
“General, did you hear me?”
The general snapped to attention suddenly. “No, sir, I’m sorry.”
“I said let’s get those F-16’s in the air. Don’t you think we should chase him down? Try to make contact?”
The general nodded. “We’ve already given that order, sir. But we should also be prepared to shoot him down if he turns back toward the coast too late for us to dispose of the bomb.”
It was the President’s turn to go slightly numb. Shoot a civilian cargo airliner down? He would have to issue the order if the plane decided to return and it was too late. The F-16’s would be too close to survive the nuclear blast that would result from any missile impacting the aircraft. Apparently, thanks to the scientist in Santa Fe, there was no longer any doubt that such an explosion would be nuclear.
“Ah, General, the electromagnet idea. Could we get one to that airfield? If so, could the fighters get him back there, and if there was enough time, even ten minutes to turn it on, would that do the trick?”
“All unknowns, sir. We’ll work on it.”
“General?”
“Sir?”
“How many people did you say are aboard that airplane?”
A thin man in civilian clothes stepped into the frame and introduced himself as FBI. “Five persons, sir.” He reeled off the names and professions, and the fact that the captain had been a naval aviator.
The President nodded. “Thank you.” Then he turned back to the Air Force Chief of Staff, who had come in quietly to stand beside General Kinney. “How long do we have now?”
“Less than an hour, Mr. President. If they get much more than twenty minutes offshore, there won’t be enough time left to bring them back.”
TWENTY-TWO
ABOARD SCOTAIR 50—7:10 P.M. EDT
“About the cargo door, Jerry,” Scott said suddenly. “Get ready to tell me again how we could do it.”
“Whenever you’re ready, I’ve got the systems and maintenance manuals open back here.”
“A few minutes more.”
Scott banked hard to the left and flew northeast for precisely two minutes before turning back to the right and flying southeast as he dropped the 727’s altitude back to five hundred feet.
“Scott, our fuel is not infinite,” Doc said.
Jerry was already leaning over the center console with the aircraft’s performance manual. “We need to get higher, much higher, if we’re going to get any range. We’ve got thirteen thousand pounds of fuel remaining. That’s barely enough for ninety minutes at cruise, Scott, but if we stay low like this, we’re talking an hour, tops, before we flame out.”
“There are fighters back there,” Scott said in a steady voice. “They were brought in to hold us on the ground, but they’re armed and dangerous, and I bet they’ll be chasing us within minutes. If they find us now with no time left, they’re liable to get mindless orders to just blast us out of the sky if we won’t return. Who the hell knows what those fools in the Pentagon are thinking? We’ve got to stay low to the water for at least another twenty minutes.”
“That’s about eighty miles,” Jerry said, “and we’re flying farther into the hurricane. It’s going to get increasingly rough down here.”
Scott nodded. “All right. The cargo door. How are we going to do this?”
Jerry took a deep breath and let it out slowly before answering.
“Okay. Normally we have to be on the ground to get power to the cargo door. While we’re in the air, the ‘Open Door’ switch won’t work. However, I’ve got two possibilities. The cargo door has its own hydraulic system. I’ve just got to find a way to hot-wire the electric motors and pumps, but I think I can shunt the wiring to get around the ground sensing relays. It won’t be pretty, but I think I can do it. The other way is simply to open the rear cabin door. The manual pump handle and selector valve is back there, and I could manually pump it open.”
Scott sat in thought for a few seconds. “To get through the back door we’d have to depressurize, and I’d rather delay that as long as possible. How long to hot-wire it?”
“Ten minutes, tops. But that’s not the real challenge.”
“Go on.”
“Once we get the circuit powered, we’ve got to guess at what airspeed to use for opening, because we want a high enough speed to rip the door off, but not one so high that the door takes most of the top of the fuselage with it.”
“What do you mean, Jerry?” Doc asked over his shoulder. “You mean, like that United Airlines Boeing 747 that lost its cargo door and nine passengers south of Honolulu in 1989?”
Jerry was nodding vigorously. “Yes. Exactly. We’ve got some substantial advantages over that situation, though. For instance, they were pressurized when their door blew. We won’t be. That makes a big difference in the opening force. Second, their cargo door was much larger in area, and it flopped into a high-speed airstream. They were zipping along at two hundred eighty knots at twenty-three thousand feet. We’ll be low, around, say, five thousand feet, and our door’s smaller. When their door blew open, it did so with so much force that instead of pulling loose at the hinge, it peeled the skin of the aircraft back like a tin can. If that happens to us, the fuselage structure could crumple and we could theoretically break up in the air.”
“Which, when translated, means we’d be theoretically dead,” Linda said. “Wonderful prospect.”
“Our most likely problem isn’t that,” Jerry added quickly. “It’s either having the door damage us as it leaves or having it stay on the airplane.”
“I don’t understand,” Linda said. “I mean, I know it’s not important that I understand …”
“Yes, it is, Linda,” Jerry reassured her. “You need to know what we’re dealing with because we’re going to need your help every step of the way.”
“You’ve certainly got that,” she said.
“Okay,” Jerry continued. “If the door opens but stays on, it becomes a giant air surface influencing the control of the aircraft. The ailerons and elevators and rudders out there are all much smaller than the cargo door. If it opened and partially came off the hinge, so it wasn’t aligned with the fuselage anymore, and if it, say, was coc
ked fifty degrees to the relative wind … the air flow streaming by … Scott and Doc might be unable to maintain control.”
“And if it tears off?” Linda prompted.
“It could hit the T-tail and damage it, destroy it, or create some other massive control problem we couldn’t overcome. In addition, it could feed debris into any or all of our tail-mounted engines and leave us with engine failures, or fires.”
“Oh, is that all?” Doc grinned, shaking his head. “Piece of cake!”
GRAND STRAND AIRPORT, NORTH MYRTLE BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA—7:10 P.M. EDT
With engines running, the lead F-16 pilot had remained in his cockpit monitoring the radio, his wingman sitting just to the right. The short supersonic dash from Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base had been ordered seconds after the Boeing 727 departed without clearance, and they had used a lot of their fuel in the process—a fact that was worrying both of them.
One of the KC-10’s had already landed and taxied by, but there was no sign of either the C-141 or the civilian 727, and that was strange.
The major checked his watch. The other transport aircraft should have been there by now.
He looked at his wingman and gave a palms-up sign of puzzlement. The winds had picked up in the past few minutes, and intermittent rain showers were alternately pelting them with rain and small hail, which also had him worried. He glanced at the fuel gauges again, calculating how much fuel they were burning. They had to keep the engines running, since there was no ground equipment at the civilian airport to get them started once they shut down, but the engines were drinking fuel every minute.
“Shark flight lead, this is your number two on button three.”
“Yeah, Two.”
“What, exactly, are we supposed to do? We don’t have enough gas to go very far offshore, unless we take a tanker with us. Do they expect us to escort that C-141 out to sea?”
“I haven’t a clue, Two. Maybe we’re here for moral support.”
AIR FORCE COMMAND POST, THE PENTAGON—7:12 P.M. EDT
“We can’t reach the F-16’s, sir,” the Air Force senior master sergeant explained. “They lost radio contact with their command post when they landed at that airfield. We’re calling one of the tankers right now to relay the orders.”
A two-star general threw a pencil across the command post and muttered something obscene between his teeth before looking back at the startled sergeant.
“Just … do your best.”
“Yes, sir.” The sergeant pulled up another telephone receiver and punched one of the buttons on the console before him, cautioning himself not to shake his head or otherwise react to the general’s outburst.
A lieutenant colonel had been waiting briefly for the general’s attention. He now pulled him into an urgent huddle.
“Sir, there is a magnetic crane in Myrtle Beach, about twenty miles from that airport. The power supply is part of the thing, and it is self-propelled, but …”
“Great! Something’s finally going right!”
“No … sir. The crane can only travel at ten miles per hour. The way I figure it, there’s virtually no hope of getting it there in time. It’s a simple time and distance impossibility.”
FAA AIR TRAFFIC SYSTEM COMMAND CENTER, ROSLYN, VIRGINIA—7:12 P.M. EDT
Pete Cooke’s reportorial instincts had cautioned him against leaving the FAA facility, though he was tempted to do so. There was a nation in frantic motion just outside. At first, residents of the Washington–New York corridor had been in shock and wondering where to run against the possibility of a nuclear detonation over their heads, unsure whether it was real. But when ScotAir 50 and its lethal cargo had been reported heading away from the Beltway, the public’s attention turned to the Medusa Wave the media kept describing. People began frantically shutting down computers nationwide and protecting memory and monetary systems as the winds from Hurricane Sigrid began to do real damage to the eastern seaboard.
But Pete’s instinct told him to stay put. The core story was ScotAir 50 and how Scott McKay was dealing with the nightmare that had engulfed his plane barely two hours before.
He’d lost his exclusive track on the flight when it flew south and out of range of his radio scanner. He had picked up bits and pieces of reports since then, of course, most of them relayed through the constant phone calls from Ira at his office back in New York. But staying in the air traffic control facility had provided the best intelligence as ScotAir moved south. Several of the men in the control room had tossed him strategic crumbs of information as the drama progressed. He’d been witnessing their efforts to put all air traffic over the continental United States on the ground within ninety minutes.
What a story! Pete thought. I’m in the midst of the biggest, most unprecedented shutdown of American airspace in modern history.
Earlier, someone had come by to tell him ScotAir 50 had indeed been headed to Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base as had been rumored. But then reports circulated that suddenly it had left, and a frantic phone call to the FAA system command center from Washington Center confirmed that the Air Force was now aggressively searching for the 727.
Pete looked at his watch for the hundredth time in the last half hour. He had programmed one of the digital functions to count backward to the detonation time announced on Rogers Henry’s weapon.
The numbers now stood at 00:49:00 remaining.
He sat back in a swivel chair and tried to think. The voice of Scott McKay was still in his ears, and he wondered what could possibly have happened. Was he down? Was he running, and if so, to where?
“Pete?”
One of the facility directors had appeared beside him. Pete hadn’t heard him coming.
“Yes?”
“We just got word from the Pentagon that they need help tracking ScotAir.”
“Where do they think he is?”
“Heading out over the Atlantic. They think he’s going to try to dump the bomb himself, which means he might get it as far as two hundred miles out before it explodes.”
“Can he do that? Can he dump it in flight?”
“From a Boeing 727, you mean?” the director asked.
“Yeah.”
“Not a chance in the world. What’s worse, two hundred miles won’t have much of an effect on a Medusa Wave.”
“So you’re still shutting down the system?”
“No choice. When that thing goes off, any aircraft flying that’s got a single computer circuit on board is in trouble.”
“You’ll make it in time, though?”
He nodded. “We will. But God help us if we don’t have the computers to restart the system tomorrow.”
GRAND STRAND AIRPORT, NORTH MYRTLE BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA—7:13 P.M. EDT
Within two minutes of the call to get airborne, both F-16’s lifted into the storm to the north off Runway 5 and contacted their command post directly.
The orders were simple: Find the ScotAir 727, try to establish radio contact, and try to get him to return.
“We’re limited on fuel, sir, to about twenty minutes out.”
“That’s not a problem,” the lead was told. “You’ve only got fifteen minutes in which to find him anyway. If you can’t locate him and turn him around in that time, the only task left may be to make sure he doesn’t return.”
ABOARD SCOTAIR 50—7:14 P.M. EDT
Linda McCoy felt like a broken record in bringing it up, but once again the men around her in the cockpit of the Boeing 727 had forgotten a frightening truth about the specter holding Vivian Henry hostage.
“Even if the device can’t sense motion,” Linda told them, “if we get it overboard, it will sense that Vivian isn’t beside it. I’m no nuclear scientist, but I do know we’ll need a thirty- to fifty-mile headstart to be safe when it goes off. Without her, it may go off a lot sooner.” The washboard turbulence was becoming more difficult to deal with, and Linda tightened her grip on the back of Scott’s seat for support as she partially leaned over the center con
sole.
“I was kind of hoping,” Scott said, “that we could rely on it to bluff and bluster for a while before exploding. But you’re right. We could get everything else accomplished, only to get fried by that little problem.”
A sound of metal against metal caused Linda to turn toward the flight engineer’s panel. Jerry was partly wedged to the right of it, lying on the floor, his long frame barely contained in the lateral confines of the rear cockpit. He was holding a flashlight and working on the lower part of an opened circuit breaker panel, using two heavy gloves from his flight bag for insulation against electrical shock.
“Don’t touch me,” he warned Linda, “and if I accidentally latch onto a high-voltage wire, stay back.”
Linda looked back toward the two pilots.
“Is there any way we could rig a receiver to find what frequency she’s broadcasting on?”
“The extra circuit in her pacemaker, you mean?” Scott asked.
Linda nodded.
Jerry’s voice wafted up from the floor. “If I had a scanner and a lot of time, maybe, but not here and now.”
Scott sighed loudly enough to get her attention. “Linda, I’m afraid we’re working with some limited possibilities. With or without her signal, the bomb may go off when it impacts the water. If so, there’s nothing we can do. We’ll experience a few seconds of intense light, and that will be that.”
They fell silent as Doc continued banking left and right through the increasing turbulence, holding the aircraft at around five hundred feet over the cloud-shrouded Atlantic only intermittently visible below.
Linda unbuckled her seat belt. “I’m going to see if Vivian has any ideas about the pacemaker’s frequency. Anything might help.”
She stepped over Jerry and opened the cockpit door, aware, somehow, that Scott was watching her. She paused at the door and turned to look at him, surprised at his fleeting smile and the small thumbs-up gesture. She smiled in return and moved into the cargo cabin feeling strangely calm inside.
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