High Flight

by David Hagberg

  Putting Louis Zerkel’s repeater somewhere in the Air Traffic Control centers at any airport would present no insurmountable problem (Bill White had assured him that most U.S. airports were similar). But they could only count on keeping them in place undetected for forty-eight hours at most. The real problem was the touchiness of the ATC equipment, which was almost constantly under some maintenance routine. Just about every piece of equipment in a typical Air Traffic Control center was taken apart and cleaned or adjusted every couple of days. The repeater would almost certainly be discovered more quickly than they’d hoped. If that was the route they were going to take, the timing would be tight. Maybe too tight.

  For Louis Zerkel’s scheme to work, a signal had to be sent to every airplane within a Terminal Control Area, the air space immediately above and around an airport. The firing pulse would be sent to the airplane piggybacked, or superimposed, on a legitimate signal, such as the transmissions Air Traffic Control generated.

  But Bill White had given Mueller another idea. Air Traffic Control wasn’t the only unit sending electronic signals to incoming and departing airplanes. A lot of electronic traffic went back and forth between jetliners in the air and installations on the ground, among which were the various airport radars, the navigational beacons, and signals from a flight-management-system research project being conducted by the Oakland Airport Commission.

  The project manager, Ron Herring, met Mueller in the reception area. He was a compact man in his late thirties with an athletic build, boyish good looks, and a direct up-front manner. His hair was cropped short, and his clothes looked as if they’d just been starched and ironed.

  “I’m surprised Bill White even mentioned my name,” Herring said, grinning. He and Mueller shook hands.

  “I don’t think he likes you very much. Seems to think you’re wasting your money and his time.”

  “If we’re irritating the feds, it must mean we’re doing something right.”

  Herring led him back to a small suite of offices that were equipped with computer terminals, large-screen monitors, data recorders, and other electronic gear. Three men and one woman were seated at desks or terminals, and they looked up and nodded and smiled. The atmosphere here seemed far less tense than across the field at Air Traffic Control.

  “Why the difference of opinion?” Mueller asked.

  “Did Bill give you the bit about how air traffic controllers have big egos?”

  “He made it a point.”

  “They’re still bitching about what Reagan did to them, but the fact is they’re outmoded and downright dangerous. Having a man on the ground watching a radar scope and telling a pilot what to do won’t work much longer no matter what kind of new equipment IBM comes up with for them.” Herring shrugged. “Did Bill tell you about the incident with the guy and the walkie-talkie last year? A Northwest flight had just taken off, and departure control told the pilot to climb to six thousand and make a turn to a heading of one-two-oh. A second later some joker on the ground, using a Radio Shack VHF walkie-talkie, got on the air and told the pilot to disregard the last instruction and instead climb to five thousand feet and make a left turn to three-zero-zero. If the pilot hadn’t been sharp and asked departure control for a repeat, he would have collided with an incoming Quantas flight.”

  “It’s a vulnerable system,” Mueller agreed, and after all he’d seen so far he was not surprised.

  “You can’t imagine how bad it is. But every airplane flying with a glass cockpit, and in a few years that’ll be just about every commercial airliner, is equipped with a Flight Management System computer. With the proper ground installation every FMS-equipped airplane can be brought in for a landing or directed on takeoff out of the Terminal Control Area along very precisely defined corridors. And I do mean precise. Every airplane would approach and leave the TCA on a path that would be meters, not kilometers, from a center line.”

  “No chance for errors? Collisions?”

  “Equipment can go down, so we’d provide backup and human supervisors with an override capability,” Herring said.

  “This system is in place now?” Mueller asked.

  “It’s not certified yet, but we are running an ongoing test, with electronic cross-talk between us and the FMS-EQUIPPED airplanes coming into our TCA.”

  “From here?”

  “The transmitters and some of the recording devices are physically located in the basement, but the controls and data outputs all come to this room.”

  It was a stroke of good luck.

  “Actually all of this started out in Minneapolis where a hotshot friend of mine from MIT—and an Air Guard pilot like me—was working on an airport noise-management system. He wanted to precisely regulate the airport’s flight pattern, so he came up with the FMS idea. The feds don’t like him any better than the rest of us.”

  “The rest of us?” Mueller asked as nonchalantly as he could.

  “The same study is in place at Los Angeles, at O’Hare, and Minneapolis, of course, at Dulles, and at New York’s LaGuardia and JFK. We’re working on Miami and Atlanta, but it may be six months or a year before they come on line.”

  “I understand,” Mueller said. “Is there a possibility of seeing the equipment downstairs?”

  “Why not?” Herring said.

  Tokyo was in the middle of rush hour. All the counters at Narita Airport were jammed. The passport and customs officials were polite as usual, but something was different. At first McGarvey couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but the atmosphere in the busy terminal was the same as it had been aboard the flight over. Half the passengers on the jetliner had been Caucasian, while most of the other half were Japanese, or Oriental, and a transparent wall seemed to stand between the two aboard the airplane and here.

  “The purpose of your visit, Mr. McGarvey?” the passport officer asked pleasantly.

  “I have business with Japan Air Lines.”

  “What is the nature of this business, Mr. McGarvey?”

  “It is financial in nature,” McGarvey said evenly.

  “What will be the length of your stay in Japan, please?”

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps two or three days.”

  “Do you have hotel reservations?”

  “Yes, I do,” McGarvey replied. He’d never been asked so many questions coming into Japan. Things were definitely different. It was the growing anti-American sentiment.

  “At which hotel do you have reservations, Mr. McGarvey?” the passport officer asked patiently.

  “Is there some problem with my passport?”

  “At which hotel will you be staying?”

  “The Asakusa View. It is in Taito-ku. Is there some trouble?”

  The officer stamped McGarvey’s passport and handed it back. “Next,” he said, smiling pleasantly.

  And fuck you too, McGarvey said to himself, taking his passport and following his fellow passengers down the escalators and across to customs. There were a lot of uniformed, armed police stationed throughout the terminal. It was something else he’d never seen before. Japan had prided itself on being a nation with an extremely low crime rate. No need, therefore, for such an open show of force. Things had definitely changed. Narita seemed like an airport geared for trouble.

  Mueller had dinner at a Ponderosa Steak House in San Leandro a few miles from the airport, then checked into a Days Inn Motel off Interstate 580 near the Oak Knoll Naval Medical Center. The evening had turned cool with a sea breeze and thick cloud cover. For its size, America was a very easy place in which to travel. Unlike Europe where every border crossing used to be fraught with danger, here people’s credentials were seldom checked. Renting a car required a driver’s license and a credit card. But boarding an airplane or train, or driving across state lines, elicited no suspicion or attention. The country was wide open, and it had always amazed him that there weren’t more acts of terrorism here. Except for a few incidents such as the car bombing of the World Trade Center towers in New York City, t
he country had emerged from the Cold War relatively unscathed. Of course all that was about to change. If their project was a success no one in America would ever feel secure again.

  At midnight he headed back to the Oakland Airport Commission, traffic much lighter. The last flight was due in at 12:25 A.M., and as he got off the freeway across from the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum the big jetliner from Honolulu was touching down. It was a Guerin P522, and he thought how lucky the people flying in tonight were. Chances are most of them would not be flying again so soon. For many of them the flight was the termination of a much anticipated midwinter vacation. California was great, but Hawaii was better. They would go back to work a little sunburned, a little weary, but content that they could hold out now until summer. Most of them would not be taking one of the Guerin P522s that would crash at this airport, killing everyone aboard.

  There were only two cars in the Oakland Airport Commission’s parking lot. Night watchmen. It was one of the additional bits of information he’d needed.

  Mueller drove past and put his car behind a long row of trucks and delivery vans at a warehouse identified by a sign in front as Miramax Distributing Company, Ltd. He made his way on foot back to the rear of the OAC building, keeping to the shadows as much as possible. If he were stopped and questioned here, he would have no reasonable answers. He would have to make the kill and get away. Oakland would be out then, but from what he’d learned already there were going to be very few problems bringing down as many jetliners as they wanted to. When it happened, the day would rank right up there with the day Kennedy was assassinated and the day the shuttle Challenger exploded. No one would forget. But he needed to know one more thing.

  Two vans, one of them windowless, with the Oakland Airport Commission seal on their doors, were parked at a rear entrance. A light over the door illuminated an area fifteen feet from the building. None of the windows showed light.

  Mueller examined the situation from where he stood in the darkness beside a pale-gray Dumpster. From his vantage point he spotted the closed-circuit television camera above the door. Someone inside the building would be monitoring the screen. The OAC was security conscious after all.

  Asagiri Eto left a message at the front desk that he would come to the hotel at six sharp to meet McGarvey for drinks and dinner. If that was not acceptable he’d left a telephone number. McGarvey had instructed the concierge to direct Eto to the sixth-floor communal hinoki—a traditional bathhouse with Japanese cypress hot tubs. Drinks and dinner would come later.

  It was just that hour when McGarvey got off the elevator and crossed to the bathhouse that overlooked a beautiful indoor garden. The place was pleasantly warm and humid and smelled of jasmine and teak and cypress woods. Several of the deep tubs were occupied, all of them by Oriental men who glared up at McGarvey when they realized a Gai Jin had invaded their territory, and watchful that the barbarian would make mistakes in the bathing ritual that would embarrass them all.

  The attendant was a flustered old man who gave McGarvey two large towels and directed him to a changing compartment. He kept bowing and shuffling his feet, almost a parody of how a lot of Americans still thought the Japanese behaved.

  McGarvey got undressed and stepped across a narrow corridor to the showers, where he used a lot of soap to scrub himself, including his hair, before rinsing first in hot, then in cold, water. He wrapped one towel around his waist and the other over his shoulders and went back into the tub room.

  A slightly built Japanese man dressed in a sharply tailored blue pinstriped business suit was talking with the attendant, his gestures animated as if he were angry. When he spotted McGarvey he hurried over.

  “Mr. McGarvey, I am sorry. I thought I misunderstood your message. I was told that you wished to arrange a meeting as soon as possible.”

  McGarvey glared at the man for several long moments. Everyone in the place was watching them. “Eto-san, it has been a tiring trip from the United States. Before I discuss business I would like to sit in a very hot tub, have my back scrubbed, and drink very cold saki. Can you understand this?”

  Eto suddenly looked uncomfortable. “I am terribly sorry.”

  “You may join me, but I caution you we will not talk about business or world affairs.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  McGarvey stared at him for several more moments as if he were trying to fix the man’s face in his mind. “I am a punctual man, Eto-san. The agreed upon time was six. You are late.”

  Eto’s expression sagged even further, and he lowered his eyes. “I am truly sorry, McGarvey-san. I only heard at the last minute that you would be arriving, and my instructions were not precise.”

  “Perhaps I should be meeting with someone else.”

  “That will not be necessary. If you will give me a moment I will join you.”

  “Very well.”

  “And if you will permit me to order the saki, there are a number of varieties you should try.”

  “I prefer my saki very dry, Eto-san,” McGarvey said, and he turned abruptly and went directly to one of the big tubs where he lay his towels aside. Without hesitation, and with no outward indication that the water was so hot it was nearly beyond human endurance, he sat down up to his neck.

  For a long time no one in the bathhouse moved or made a sound, until finally a young woman in a snow-white bathing costume got into the tub with McGarvey and began scrubbing his back with a large, rough natural sponge.

  One point for the Christians, McGarvey thought. And zero for the lions. He’d taken the opening shot. The next move was theirs.

  It was a macabre bit of irony not lost on Mueller that the jetliner taking him back to Washington, D.C., was a Guerin P522. With a crew of seven the airplane could carry three hundred seventy-five passengers nonstop coast to coast. In the past few years most airlines in America had reduced the number of flights made each day in order to get the maximum use out of their equipment, so most U.S. domestic flights were full or nearly full. If ten airplanes went down, at least thirty-five hundred would be killed. That wasn’t counting the possible casualties on the ground. The airplanes they were going to knock out of the sky would be approaching for a landing or taking off and climbing out over populated areas. When these huge birds came tumbling down there was no telling what could happen. Mueller made a note to find out which airports maintained approach and departure patterns over schools or hospitals or apartment complexes where population densities would be high.

  The flight attendants were getting ready to serve breakfast, and the odors of coffee and food actually smelled good to Mueller. If this was one of the flights they were going to bring down, no breakfast would be served. In fact the first-class passengers would be the only ones to have drinks by then. No time for anyone to get over the take-off nervousness. It gave him a rush thinking about it, and he had to consciously stop himself from grinning like a simpering idiot.

  There was little doubt in his mind that Louis Zerkel would come up with the electronic solution to the triggering pulses, and there was little doubt that his brother would hold up his end. Nor, now that he’d seen Oakland’s tower, Air Traffic Control, and airport commission facilities, did he have any doubt about bugging the system. But he did have serious reservations about Reid. The man was a drunk, and he was unstable. If the FBI were to approach him he might try to bully his way out, thereby giving everything away. It was a problem, Mueller told himself, that he was going to have to address soon.

  Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, and Washington. It would definitely be a day all Americans would never forget.

  TWENTY

  “I don’t know if we can be ready in sixteen days,” Newton Kilbourne said. He and George Socrates sat with David Kennedy in the first-class section of the P/C2622 in her Gales Creek assembly hangar. The cabin was ninety-five percent complete. The only major work left to be done inside was on the avionics in the cockpit.

  “Al Vasilanti wants it. He set the date,
” Kennedy said.

  “We all understand why, and I don’t blame him, but it doesn’t alter the facts.” In actuality, except for the hypersonic engines, the airplane was nearly ready to fly. The FAA’s chief regional certification inspector was willing to issue a one-flight airworthiness certificate that would allow Guerin to conduct one test flight over unpopulated areas and for a limited duration. That flight could be conducted tomorrow. The real problem was with unk-unks—unknown problems that couldn’t be predicted but always cropped up in the design and manufacture of anything so complex as a modern jetliner. “We’ve had our share of unk-unks on this project, David. No reason to expect anything has changed.”

  “I understand what you’re saying. But short of the FAA grounding us, or you or George telling us flatly that we can’t fly, we’re on for Honolulu in sixteen days.”

  Kilbourne thumped his fist on the armrest of his seat. “It’s too soon, goddammit, and you know it.”

  “I tend to agree with Newton, but not strictly for technical reasons,” Socrates said. He’d arrived back from the crash investigation yesterday and had thrown himself into the final pre-test flight preparations and inspections.

  “Are you telling me that we can’t be ready to fly?” Kennedy asked.

  Socrates shook his head. “We can do an initial test flight the day after tomorrow, which would leave us two weeks to fix anything that crops up, and make at least three additional one-certificate runs. If we were trying for hypersonic or even supersonic speeds now, I’d definitely say no.”

  “But?” Kennedy prompted.

  Socrates took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with the end of his tie. “Dulles was very bad, David.”