by Ward Larsen
Nothing happened.
The roar of turbines reached a crescendo, quite literally tearing apart the night air. The second aircraft passed just underneath the MD-10, and the prospect of cataclysm faded as quickly as it had arrived. The MD-10 nosed forward and faded into darkness. The second aircraft, almost as large, wasn’t so lucky. It was destined for the ground, a crash imminent, until the nose rotated upward at the last instant. The murderous rate of descent eased, and the wheels slammed onto the runway in a storm of dust. The big jet bounced twenty feet into the air, more a carnival ride than a landing, but the wings remained level and its wheels met the earth again, this time with a degree of control.
In a flurry of dust and noise the thrust reversers deployed, and the new jet came to rest at the far end of the runway. Its silhouette, reflected in its own landing lights, was enough for Slaton to make an ID: dark gray paint, distinctive T-tail, and a subdued emblem on the rear empennage to settle any doubt. He was looking at a United States Air Force C-17.
Slaton ventured one last look skyward. He saw nothing but black. The aircraft carrying Moses Nassoor’s cache of cesium was riding the wind.
SIXTY-SIX
Slaton made his weapon safe and sprinted downhill, hurdling rocks and weaving through tangled undergrowth. Twice he nearly fell, and on reaching the concrete runway he took up a dead sprint to the far end, slowing only when he approached the C-17.
The jet’s four engines seemed to be shut down, but he recognized the high-pitched whine of an auxiliary power unit. The aircraft was eerily still, shrouded in a dissipating cloud of dust with its landing lights still on, illuminating the desert ahead like a massive flashlight.
Slaton was walking under the port wing when the crew entry door opened and a ladder extended. A lieutenant colonel in a flight suit came down the boarding steps, cussing a blue streak all the way to the ground. The man noticed Slaton, who still had a rifle in his hand, just as his feet hit the ramp.
“Are you with the embassy?” the pilot yelled.
Without hesitation, Slaton said, “Yeah.”
“Well I don’t know what’s going on here, but this is bullshit! Somebody almost got me killed just now, and my jet is probably damaged.” He strode back and began inspecting the C-17, paying particular attention to the landing gear. “The governor of Mississippi is not gonna be happy about this!”
A second pilot, this one a captain, descended to the tarmac, followed by an enlisted man who Slaton assumed was the loadmaster. Both looked pale and shaken. Slaton continued watching the door, expecting a Special Forces squad to follow. There was no one else.
The captain said, “Colonel, I just got off the line with command post. I told them we almost had a midair collision trying to land.”
“What did they say?”
“They pushed me to another channel and said stand by for further orders.”
“Further orders? I’ll tell ’em exactly where they can put their further orders!” The livid aircraft commander strode to the boarding stairs, but halfway there he stopped and veered to a course that ended one step in front of Slaton. The light colonel was about to say something when he seemed to register for the first time that he was addressing a man with a gun. Together with the civilian clothes, it implied that he and this stranger were not necessarily part of the same organizational food chain.
With the good sense of an old soldier, the pilot—Lieutenant Colonel Gus Bryan, according to his name tag—ratcheted down.
“I will assume,” Bryan began, “that the airplane we nearly met at two hundred feet was the one we were trying to keep on the ground?”
Slaton considered this. The CIA must have realized its intervention team wasn’t going to arrive in time. “So that’s what you were trying to do? Block the runway?”
The Mississippian nodded as his crewmen circled the aircraft for their own inspections.
“Too bad you didn’t get here sixty seconds sooner,” Slaton said. “It would have worked.”
“So who the heck are you?”
“Not relevant.”
“Would it be relevant to tell me what that airplane was doing here? They closed this airfield around the time I was partying at Ole Miss.”
“I don’t see much more than a strip of concrete, but apparently that still works. As for the airplane you almost ran into—it’s carrying a load that’s making a lot of people nervous.”
Bryan eyed him seriously, probably because what Slaton said made sense. “What kind of load?”
“Radiological.”
The lieutenant colonel’s anger subsided.
The loadmaster and captain came back from their walk-around inspections of the jet. “It all looks in one piece,” the loadmaster said. “The brakes are hot but they should be fine after maybe thirty minutes of cooling.”
“Thirty minutes?” the colonel remarked. “They’re gonna have a lot longer than that to cool. This runway is a mess.” With a boot toe he turned over a chunk of loose concrete. “Potholes and cracks everywhere. Flying this jet out isn’t going to happen until a team of civil engineers shows up and makes some serious repairs.” He surveyed his airplane, then turned back toward the stranger. “Radiological you say?”
Slaton nodded.
“Who was flying it? Lebanese Air Force? Terrorists of some kind?”
“I’m not exactly sure. In this part of the world, things like that can be a little hard to nail down.”
“Where is it headed?”
“I don’t know that either. But I’m going to find out.”
“How do you propose to do that?”
“Easy—I’m going to use your radios.” Slaton shouldered his weapon and headed for the boarding stairs.
* * *
Davy had been crying for the best part of two hours. It was out of the ordinary, and when he began running a low temperature and sneezing Christine guessed he was coming down with a cold. Mercifully, he fell asleep in his crib just after dinner. She too was exhausted, having not had a good night’s sleep in days.
She found Stein downstairs, standing with a sandwich in one hand and the television remote in the other. He was surfing through channels. “I’m going to try and get some sleep. I think Davy is coming down sick, and he probably won’t sleep through the night.”
“Okay. Anything I can do to help?”
“I suppose a run to the pharmacy for an antihistamine is out of the question?”
Stein shot her a disapproving look.
“Right.” She hesitated, and he seemed to read her mind.
“No—I haven’t heard from David.”
Christine nodded and went upstairs, and spent a full five minutes watching Davy sleep. His breathing was steady, punctuated by the occasional sob after his earlier meltdown. Has to be that, she thought. The nightmares don’t come until later.
She went to her room, and instead of undressing changed into a pair of comfortable jeans and a loose sweatshirt. Her running shoes went to the foot of the bed, which would please her not-so-dead husband. Always be ready on a moment’s notice. Of course, that sage advice presumed one was on the run. Her situation was quite the opposite, bunkered up with a bodyguard in her home. Her eyes fell closed, and she easily ignored the sound of the television down the hall and a rattle of wind at the window.
Minutes later she was fast asleep.
At that same moment, across the street, the front door of the house on a right-hand diagonal swung slowly open. A large man dressed in layered clothing emerged. He moved with palpable caution, and from the travertine-wrapped porch, he looked left and right up the street before closing the door. He moved with an unnatural gait, this due to the heavy metal bar hidden in the recesses of his jacket, which partially immobilized his right side. So encumbered, the man set out at determined pace toward the snow-encrusted sidewalk, and on reaching it he veered slightly to his right. He crossed the street heading directly for Christine Palmer’s house.
SIXTY-SEVEN
The Midd
le East is a region unlike any other. In a geographic footprint that would fit within the state of Nevada lies a combustible merger of eight troubled nations: Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey. Starting from the center, in Lebanon, a typical jet aircraft might reach any of those borders within twenty minutes. Not by chance, each of these surrounding nations is capable of launching fighters to intercept intruding aircraft, or if a more direct approach is desired, to shoot them down using surface-to-air missiles. If this brew of weapons, mistrust, and cross-purposes is not perplexing enough, most of these eight countries are home to warring tribes and religious factions that keep some degree of autonomous military capability. Finally, as a coup de grâce to any hope for regional stability, the majority of shrines holy to the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religions reside in this same unsettled outline. The birthplace of so many of the world’s religions, in a somber paradox, is no better off for it.
Director Thomas Coltrane had a monumental problem on his hands.
Their efforts at containment had failed miserably, which meant he and his Ops Center team were now little more than witnesses to a radiological bomb gliding through the world’s most unfriendly skies. They knew precisely where the aircraft was, the U.S. Air Force having excellent radar coverage in the area, but without some idea of where it was going there was little hope of setting countermeasures in place. As far as they knew, the plot unfolding before them involved seven individuals, five of whom had already been dispatched by an assassin, a man not under Langley’s control, yet who had proven brutally effective. Unfortunately, not quite effective enough.
“Our target is fifteen nautical miles from the Syrian border,” said a front-row voice. “Heading is steady to the southeast.” The specialists, on their own initiative, had already taken to calling it a target.
Sorensen said, “We need to get fighters in the air for an intercept.”
The Ops Center’s DOD liaison, already thinking along those lines, said, “We have the carrier Reagan in the eastern Med, roughly three hundred miles west. I’ll find out how soon they can have Hornets in the air. CENTCOM is checking what else is available—the Air Force always has fighters deployed somewhere on the Saudi peninsula.”
Everyone nodded agreement, and someone suggested that the neighboring U.S. consulates should be put on alert. Another voice observed that because the MD-10 was traveling southeast, it would soon be within range of Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries in both Israel and Saudi Arabia. Coltrane had already made notifications up the chain of command, a chart in which there were few boxes above his own. The director of national intelligence would soon brief the president on the impending disaster. Sidebar agencies had also been notified, but these were largely a distraction. In proof of this point, facing Coltrane’s big leather chair was a communications suite whose blinking lights represented no fewer than six government entities waiting to speak to him.
“All right,” he said, “I’m going to bring everyone in on a conference call and ask for help on this. Foggy Bottom can handle embassy notifications and dust off their response plan for a radiological attack. I want CENTCOM and the Joint Chiefs to coordinate—”
“You don’t need any of that crap!” a voice boomed from the back. A room full of busy chatter went silent and everyone looked at Jammer Davis. “You need a pilot, a meteorologist, and a chaplain.”
Davis was situated at the back of the room, planted in a chair far too small for his massive frame. He was chewing on a vending machine burrito.
Coltrane said, “Let me guess—you’re the pilot?”
“I’ll go out on a limb here and say I’m the only person in this room who’s ever shot down an airplane.”
“Mr. Davis, you’ve proven yourself useful, but I think the situation has progressed outside your area of expertise.”
“I think it’s outside your area of expertise. You’ve got a large airliner flying over foreign soil that’s loaded with a radiological agent. There’s a strong chance this material will be dispersed before it lands. The list of potential targets in this part of the world is overwhelming. You’ve got population centers, economic targets, military facilities, religious shrines. We need to get ahead of the curve and figure out where this jet is headed.”
“Which is exactly why I need to bring others in.”
Coltrane turned away, picked up his handset, and initialized the first of his calls. He’d been talking for less than five seconds when a big hand swept in and cut off the call. A furious Coltrane looked up and saw Davis at his shoulder. “Do you realize you just hung up on the Secretary of State? You are out of line, mister!”
In a calm, low voice Davis said, “If you spend the next ten minutes on interagency coordination, your chance to stop this will be gone. You are facing a crisis, sir. But you’ve also got twenty good, capable people right here in this room. Use them!”
Coltrane’s eyes swept out, and a sea of eager, competent faces stared back.
“Would you like to know where this jet is headed?” Davis asked.
“You can tell me?”
“No, I’d just be guessing. But there’s no need for that. The pilots flying it have already told us where they’re going—we just haven’t been listening.”
Coltrane’s eyes narrowed severely, but his anger gave way to curiosity. He set down the handset. “What do you mean?”
Davis pointed to the white dot on the map. “Those pilots know perfectly well where they’re operating. If they try to cross any border without a flight clearance, it’s an invitation to be intercepted. So unless the captain is planning on staying in Lebanese airspace, which makes no sense, you’ll find a flight plan on file with Lebanese air traffic control. The crew might have called it in by phone, or maybe filed it by computer. They might even have coordinated a clearance by radio after they got airborne. Of course, the paperwork isn’t going to say they’re flying an MD-10—they know we’ll be looking for that. It’ll say the aircraft is an Airbus or a business jet. That’s what I would do. To the air traffic controllers there’s no difference—they see nothing but a blip on a screen. But there is a flight plan in the system. Has to be.”
After a brief pause, Coltrane pointed to a woman at the communications desk. Her fingers began racing over her keypad.
Coltrane said, “I’m not sure I buy into your theory. These people have gone to incredible lengths to hide what they’re doing. They managed to chop up a derelict airliner in the middle of the night, remove the pieces, and park another jet in its place without anyone noticing. You think they’ll just publish a route to their target for the world to see?”
“No—it won’t be that simple. It won’t be a straight line. If this is truly the strike mission, they’ll plan a feint, an ordinary flight path that takes them near their target but not directly to it. When the time is right, they make a hard turn and push up the throttles. Three minutes, maybe five, and they’ll be right where they want to be before anyone can react.”
Coltrane sat rail-still in his seat. “What else?”
“We’re talking about the aerial dispersal of a contaminant. Your typical firebomber will drop its load all at once, from maybe five hundred feet. That covers a linear mile, more or less. If they fly lower, down in the dirt like a crop duster, the footprint becomes smaller and the radiation more dense. In that case, we could be talking about an area the size of a football field. However, either of those cases present one problem. Flying a wide-body airliner at five hundred feet is tricky at night—it would require special equipment and some training.”
“Which leaves us where?”
“The nightmare scenario.” Davis waited, but no one asked. “Drop five kilos of cesium from thirty thousand feet, and you can rain gamma emissions over a whole city, maybe even a country. Not as dangerous, obviously, from the standpoint of radiation density or the threat to a population. But as a terror weapon?”
Coltrane nodded. “It would be devastating.”
“It would be Chernobyl with wings.” Davis took another bite of his burrito. “The flight plan will include a cruise altitude. Put the two together, and it might help you predict the target. Once you know that, you can decide how to handle it. Next, any response is going to require accurate information on the winds aloft at every altitude. Like I said, you need a meteorologist.”
Coltrane set a woman to that task.
Davis picked up. “Miss Sorensen is correct—you need fighters in the air as soon as possible to shadow this jet. You could use the Air Force of one of the neighboring countries. Israel and Jordan are reliable, and probably Saudi Arabia. Their pilots are well-trained, and disciplined enough to not screw this up by getting trigger-happy. Personally, I’d prefer relying on our own assets. In any event, whoever you use has to be capable of shooting this airplane down, which is a very messy last resort.”
“No,” Coltrane said, “we have to avoid that.”
Davis pointed again to the white dot on the monitor that represented CB68H. “That’s your call. But you should pray to God that this blip doesn’t turn north. There’s no telling how the Syrians or the Turks would react to a threat like this.”
“And that,” Coltrane ventured, “is where the chaplain comes in?”
Davis smiled.
SIXTY-EIGHT
The odyssey of Charlie Bravo Six Eight Hotel continued to unfold on the main monitor in the Langley Ops Center. The flight plan was discovered within minutes. It had been filed electronically—when and from what source was put aside for the time being—and activated with Lebanese air traffic control as soon as the jet was airborne.
The most relevant sections were transparent: a proposed cruising altitude of fifteen thousand feet, and a route shaped by a more or less direct path through central Saudi Arabia, with a final destination of Abu Dhabi International Airport in the United Arab Emirates. The subterfuge Davis had predicted was also there—the aircraft type on the flight plan was not listed as an MD-10, but instead a Hawker 1000, a business jet with suitably comparable performance characteristics.
