High Flight

by David Hagberg

  It was a few minutes after five in the morning. He’d sent Carol below a couple of hours ago to get some sleep, and to get her out of the way so that she would not see his concern. The hatch slid open, and she scrambled up into the cockpit. Her eyes were wide, her face white, and she was panting. Liskey helped her attach her safety harness.

  “What are you doing up here?” he shouted.

  “I can’t handle it, Stan. I want to be with you.”

  “You need your rest. You might have to take over.”

  “If we’re going to die, I don’t want to drown locked inside the boat!”

  “We’re not going to die. Don’t be stupid.”

  The Fair Winds’ rail was buried again, the motion tremendous. They could not see the waves in the darkness, but from the way they were being tossed around, Liskey figured they had to be twenty footers or bigger. They were not breaking yet, he was thankful for that much. If one of those monsters dumped on top of them, they would go to the bottom without a chance of getting aboard the life raft lashed on deck. But if the storm continued another twelve hours or more, the seas would build to a point where they would have to break. Then they would be in trouble. Liskey’s best guess was that the storm would last much longer than that. The barometer was down farther than he’d ever seen it, except in a hurricane. And the last he’d looked it was continuing to fall.

  “Can we get behind one of the islands?” she shouted. “Can we go back?”

  “It’s too risky.”

  “Why?”

  “We’d pile up on the rocks.”

  “How about launching the life raft? We could key the EPIRB. Somebody would find us in the morning. We’d be a lot better off.”

  “No we wouldn’t.”

  “Goddammit, Stan, I’m scared out of my head!”

  “So am I,” Liskey admitted. “But listen to me, Carol. This is a strong boat. As long as we don’t do anything stupid we’ll ride this out. We’ll be okay. The life raft is just a last-ditch stand. Remember Fastnet in the eighties? Most of the guys who got killed drowned trying to get into their rafts. The next day their boats were found, battered, the floorboards awash, but still floating. We’ll launch the life raft only when this boat sinks out from under us. In the meantime we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “All right, all right,” she said breathlessly. “We’ve got work to do. What can I do?”

  “Get some sleep.”

  “I’m done with that. What else?”

  “Then hang on here. I’ll go below and check the bilges.”

  “I did it just before I came up. It only took ten strokes.”

  “Then we’re okay for now.”

  Carol pulled a package of Marlboros and a Bic lighter out of her pocket. “I brought these along just in case. Want one?”

  “Why not, if you can get it lit.”

  “Lieutenant, we have a target,” the helmsman said.

  The DD Thorn’s senior officer on the bridge, Lieutenant, j.g., Roger Boberg, stepped across to the radar screen, bracing himself against the console. They were painting a small boat on the eighteen-hundred-yard ring, on what definitely was a collision course.

  “I make our rate of closure about twenty knots, sir. Which means he’s doing about five. The sub?”

  “I don’t know,” Boberg said. “Come left to one-six-zero.”

  “Aye, coming left to one-six-zero.”

  Boberg rang engineering to reduce speed to ten knots, which barely gave them steerage way in these winds and seas. He was about to pick up the growler phone to call the captain when the communications officer came onto the bridge with a message flimsy.

  “This just came, Lieutenant. It’s not a drill. We’re at DEFCON THREE.”

  “Holy shit.” Boberg read the brief message from Seventh, then snatched the growler phone and called the captain. “This is Boberg on the bridge. You’d better get in here on the double, sir. We’re tracking an unidentified object on the surface at eighteen hundred yards, and Seventh just took us to DEFCON THREE.”

  “On my way,” Hanrahan said. “Sound general quarters, and pass it on to the Cook and Barbey.”

  “Aye, sir.” Boberg hit the ship’s intercom. “Now hear this, now hear this. General quarters, general quarters, all hands man your battle stations.” He switched on the Klaxon, then radioed the two frigates.

  The skipper was the first on the bridge. He took the message from Boberg, quickly scanned it, then checked the radar. They were no longer on a collision course with the surface target, but they were slowly closing.

  “Good work, Rog,” he told his second officer. He called sonar. “This is the captain, what’s the status on Chrysanthemum?”

  “Sir, we were picking up what might have been hull popping noises a couple of hours ago, but weren’t sure. Still no contact. This surface noise is killing us.”

  “Radar is showing what could be just the sail, sixteen hundred yards on a relative bearing of zero-two-five. Could it be our boy?”

  “Captain, anything is possible in these conditions.”

  “All right, listen up. I want to know if he floods his tubes and opens his doors.”

  “We’ll do the best we can.”

  Lieutenant Commander Willis Ryder came on the bridge. “What’s up?”

  Hanrahan showed his XO the Seventh Fleet message.

  “Authenticated?”

  “Looks like it, but we haven’t received a follow-up yet, so it’s anybody’s guess what’s going on,” Hanrahan said. “We’ve got a surface contact to the south, under sixteen hundred yards now. Could be the sub.”

  Ryder studied the radar screen. “Looks more like a small boat radar reflector than a steel hull.”

  “Could be we’re just catching the sail. Sonar had what they thought was hull popping noises.”

  “But we don’t have a hot contact?”

  Hanrahan shrugged. “Conditions aren’t good. We’ll close for a visual. In the meantime contact Seventh and see what the hell is going on.”

  “Aye, aye,” Ryder said.

  “Bridge, CIC, we have a contact in the air.”

  Hanrahan keyed the phone. “What is it?”

  “Looks like an Orion, Skipper. I’d say Japanese … definitely Japanese. He’s just lit his downward-looking radar.”

  “Contact the Cook and Barbey again,” Hanrahan told Boberg. “Tell them we’re going in for a look.”

  “Could be four contacts up there now, Kan-cho,” the sonarman said.

  Lieutenant Commander Kiyoda stood braced in the doorway to the sonar compartment. They’d slowly come up to thirty meters over the past few hours. The storm on the surface, which was ruining their passive sonar capabilities, was also moving the submarine around.

  “Sierra-Zero-Four and Sierra-Zero-Five fade in and out. They’re about twenty thousand meters at zero-six-zero and closing slowly, I think. But I’m losing Sierra-Zero-Nine. Sometimes it sounds like it has split apart. It’s very hard to tell. No identifiable screw noises now. I just can’t be sure.”

  “They could have launched a life raft,” Lieutenant Minori suggested.

  Kiyoda turned to his XO. “Do you think they are in trouble?”

  “It’s possible, sir.”

  “Then why aren’t the other two ships hurrying to the rescue?” Kiyoda asked thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s a trick.”

  “No way of knowing for certain until the conditions ease.”

  “We’ll go up for a look.” Kiyoda smiled. “Who knows what reaction we might provoke.”

  “Kan-cho, we’re very close to Sierra-Zero-Nine,” the sonarman warned. “I cannot guarantee their exact position.”

  “We’ll take it slow,” Kiyoda said. He went back to the control room with Minori. “Come to periscope depth.”

  “Recommend plus two meters to compensate for the waves.”

  “Make it so.”

  “Diving officer, make your depth one-eight meters,” Minori said. “Five degrees on the fairwater
planes. We’ll do this slowly.”

  “Sound general quarters,” Kiyoda ordered, and he turned to his weapons control officer, Lieutenant Takasaki. “Look sharp. If we get a clear target I’ll want a continuous firing solution. There’s no telling what they’re up to.”

  “Hai, Kan-cho.”

  Kiyoda watched the depth indicator on his CRT command display countdown toward eighteen meters. He started for the periscope when the sonar operator suddenly shouted.

  “Contact closing! Contact closing!”

  A tremendous crash slammed into the optical and electronic arrays on top of the sail, slewing the Samisho almost ninety degrees onto her starboard side. Lights in the control room flickered and died, and water rushed in on them from a dozen places on the overhead.

  “That was a major event,” Ensign Masao Osanai radioed from ELINT in the back of the Lockheed/Kawasaki P-3C ASW aircraft.

  “What happened?” the pilot, Lieutenant Fumiko Miyake, asked. He was fighting the aircraft’s controls. The winds were boiling at this low altitude, making level flight difficult. His co-pilot flew the yoke and rudder pedals with him.

  “A collision, I think. We were painting the Samisho on the MAD as it started to surface. It just merged with the American destroyer.”

  “What are you seeing now?”

  “The Samisho is going down. She’s trailing bubbles.”

  “Comms,” Miyake radioed.

  “Hai, Kan-cho.”

  “Get that off to base. Ask for instructions.”

  Since the brutal murders of the young Japanese woman and the policemen two weeks ago, officials in Yokosuka had become timid. It was a few minutes after five in the morning before anyone challenged the crowd that had been growing along the waterfront all evening. Americans were a violent people from a violent land. The only lesson they understood was violence. If Tokyo could not see this then Prime Minister Enchi’s government would fail. The people would be heeded. It was time to embrace the old values of respect and of bu-shi, Takushiro Hatoyama thought. Now the MSDF had to share the port with the American navy. Both sides of the harbor were busy this morning, lights and movement everywhere, as if both bases were on alert. It was disturbing because it was unexpected. The crowd stopped in front of a line of Japanese policemen in riot gear stretched two deep across the road a half-block from Seventh Fleet’s main gate. Hatoyama went across to them.

  “We are Rising Sun,” he shouted. The police line stiffened. “We are here in the name of the people to arrest Rear Admiral Albert Ryland for crimes against the state of Nippon.”

  A police lieutenant near the middle of the line raised a bullhorn. “You are engaged in an illegal activity,” he shouted. “You are ordered to disperse at once or face arrest.”

  “There are ten thousand of us here, Lieutenant. More are continuously arriving. You cannot arrest us all. Stand aside.”

  “By order of the government, return to your homes immediately.”

  “Do not be a traitor to your own homeland,” Hatoyama shouted. “Contrary to international agreement many ships of the Seventh Fleet are equipped with nuclear weapons. Admiral Ryland is a criminal.”

  A pair of armored personnel carriers came up the road from the navy base and stopped in front of the gate. A dozen Marines in battle fatigues scrambled out of each and took up defensive positions, their weapons at the ready. It was extraordinary. Nothing like this had ever happened before.

  “Disperse at once,” the police lieutenant’s amplified voice carried over the crowd.

  “Look at what is happening behind you!” Hatoyama pointed to the Marines. “Will you let a foreign military power fire on innocent civilians?”

  A few of the policemen glanced nervously over their shoulders.

  “My fellow countrymen, listen to me! Japan must be cleansed of all foreign military! How long must we remain an occupied country?”

  Shotoro Ashia came up from the mob and pulled Hatoyama back a few feet. He had been talking to someone on a cellular phone. “Something is happening.”

  “What is it?” Hatoyama asked. He kept his eyes on the police line and the Marines blocking the gate behind them.

  “The American Vice President’s airplane crashed on take-off just minutes ago. And there are other crashes. All over America.”

  Hatoyama’s breath caught in his throat. “Has it started?”

  “I don’t know. I cannot get through to Kobe. But Takushiro, all American forces have gone to DEFCON THREE. That’s why they are guarding this base so well. They will fire on us.”

  “Do they want war?” Hatoyama asked, stunned.

  “No one knows.”

  Hatoyama looked at the police line. “Perhaps it will start here. Perhaps this is our destiny. Our giri, for the Yamato Damashi of Nippon.”

  “At least six airplanes are down, maybe more,” Captain Reiner said excitedly. “I’m turning back.”

  “Hold on,” McGarvey shouted. He and Socrates scrambled up from the electronics bay. They would cross the coast in another minute or so, the Pacific Ocean stretched to the horizon ahead of them. America was still climbing to a cruise altitude of sixty-six thousand feet, but already the party had started. They could hear music and people talking and laughing. The panel clock showed 12:05:00 PST: Callahan was on the radio with Guerin’s operations center at Gales Creek.

  “Where’d Air Force Two go down?” McGarvey asked.

  “On take-off at Andrews.”

  “What about the others? You said Oakland. Where else?”

  “Dulles, Minneapolis, New York. All over the fucking country.”

  “What kind of equipment?” McGarvey asked, but he already knew. It was starting just as he’d feared it would.

  “I don’t know,” Reiner admitted.

  “All 522s, Mr. McGarvey,” Callahan said. “Ops says the number is up to thirteen.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, that’s fucking impossible!” Reiner blurted.

  “What happened to them?”

  Callahan’s eyes were round. “Six of them lost port engines. They’re not sure about the others. What the hell is going on?”

  “It’s the heat monitor,” Socrates muttered. “The new CPU. The modification came up from InterTech in ’90. Right after the American Airlines crash.”

  “The same one you just pulled?” McGarvey asked.

  Socrates looked down into the electronics bay where the heat monitor lay on the deck, connected only by its input cable. “Has to be something on the engines themselves. The port engines. Something that has a left and right. Mirror images.”

  “The engines aren’t interchangeable, port and starboard?”

  “Yes, but there are some differences,” Socrates said. Then he had it, and his breath caught in his throat. “The heat monitor is connected to the thermocouple frame. One’s for port, the other’s for starboard. My God, it’s as simple as that, but we never saw it.”

  “Call the FAA and ground the fleet, now,” McGarvey told the engineer. “Wait. How would it work? Would it be on a timer? An outside signal. What?”

  “Probably a triggering signal from somewhere. Maybe through the VOR system. Maybe even via satellite—the GPS system. Could be anything.”

  “Any way of blocking it?”

  “Pull the heat monitor, just like we did,” Socrates said.

  “Call the FAA and tell them to get that message out to every 522 whose engines are turning. Do it right now.”

  Callahan relayed that to Guerin Ops. “Mr. Socrates, the company wants a clarification.”

  “No time.” The engineer plugged a spare headset into the phone system.

  “Do we turn back or keep going?” Reiner asked. He scanned his instruments almost continuously.

  “Get us out of the mainland air traffic control system as quickly as possible,” McGarvey said. “In the meantime try to find out which airports have been affected. Maybe it’s not the entire system.”

  “Right,” Reiner replied.

  McGarvey
unlocked the flight-deck door and stepped out into the forward galley. Two flight attendants were opening champagne. They looked up, startled.

  “Oh,” one of them cried out. She dropped the open bottle on the deck. It didn’t break, but champagne squirted all over the place.

  “Is David Kennedy on board?” McGarvey asked. He kept his voice and manner nonthreatening.

  “No,” the other stew said.

  Several people at the front of the main cabin saw what was going on and sensed that something was wrong. They stopped talking in mid-sentence. Two men rushed up the aisle from the back of the plane, drawing their pistols.

  McGarvey stepped back half a pace and spread his hands away from his body. The flight attendants moved out of the way.

  “FBI, Mr. McGarvey,” the lead man said. “You’re under arrest.” He stepped to the left to give his partner a clear firing path.

  “That’ll have to wait,” McGarvey said, keeping his voice low. “We’ve got a problem.”

  Mangled bodies and blood were nothing new to Technical Sergeant Halvorson. He’d been on SARTECH teams in the Philippines, Labrador, and Greenland and had personally participated in five accident rescues and cleanups. Some of them had been a lot worse than Air Force Two. But this time the Vice President was involved.

  A total of thirty-seven persons were aboard, including Eagle Two and his wife, the flight-deck crew, the communications staff, the stewards, the Secret Service, the Veep’s personal staff, and the media. At first glance he estimated more than half of them were dead or critically injured.