“Yes,” she replied, as she tentatively flipped through the plastic sleeves and stopped at his airline ID.
“Okay, sister. I was the copilot. We were shot down, and I’ve been blinded. The woman you’re questioning here plucked us out of a jungle in the middle of a hail of bullets. She is precisely who she says she is, and if you don’t help, we’re dead.”
The woman looked hard at the Meridian ID, and flipped to his FAA pilot’s license before closing the wallet and handing it back.
“Stand back,” she said, and turned toward the door to wrestle it closed, waving the wide-eyed gate agent back. “Pull the jetway and stand by. You didn’t see any of this, okay?”
The agent nodded.
As soon as the door was closed, the flight attendant motioned toward the front. “Let’s go. The captain needs to hear all this.”
With Dallas and Dan following, Kat and the flight attendant entered the large DC-10 cockpit, where Kat repeated the explanation. The captain sat with his right arm partially over the back of his seat, listening and looking hard at the group that had invaded his airplane, saying nothing as the nervous flight attendant added that she had seen the blinded copilot’s ID and license as well.
Kat felt her apprehension rising as the captain waved the flight attendant away and sat motionless for a few seconds, leaving an uncomfortable silence unbroken by the copilot or the flight engineer. Finally, the captain held out his hand.
“I don’t need an ID, Agent Bronsky. I’m proud to have you aboard. You bet I’ll help.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
“I know what you did to end the AirBridge hijacking last year, and how humanely you treated that poor captain.” He looked at the flight attendant. “Judy? Get them all into first class if we’ve got it, take good care of them, and give Agent Bronsky anything she needs. She’s a fellow pilot, too. Commercial and instrument rating, if I recall correctly, am I right?”
“That’s right,” Kat said. “Thank you, Captain …”
“Holt. Bob Holt,” he said.
“Captain Holt, when we get to Seattle, I’ll arrange payment of the fares.”
“Tell you what, Agent Bronsky,” the captain said. “After we get up to cruise, have Judy bring you back up here and let me ask you a whole bunch of things, okay?”
“You got it.”
Kat started to turn toward the door, but a sudden, chilling connection finally snapped together in her mind. She sat down hard on the jump seat behind the captain with her index finger in the air. Meridian 5 had been attacked by the weapon they had found aboard the Global Express, and now the weapon and the Global Express were airborne in the vicinity of Honolulu, from which they were preparing to depart. What if they’ve discovered where I am … where Robert is? I can’t let them fly into the path of another attack, unaware!
“Ah, Captain Holt,” she said, taking a breath and shaking her head, “there’s one more thing I’d better explain to you in detail right now, because by stepping aboard, I may have just placed you fellows at risk.”
chapter 33
HONOLULU INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, HAWALL
NOVEMBER 13—DAY TWO
4:40 P.M. LOCAL/0240 ZULU
A young couple in a holiday mood moved toward a public telephone along the concourse, laughing and talking. The man reached for the receiver, but another arm was already in front of him, reaching for the same instrument. The young man kept one arm around his girlfriend and adopted a reproving glance at the interloper, who in turn fixed the pair with a cold, reptilian stare, his demeanor a whirlwind of fury and challenge.
The young man backed up immediately, pulling his girlfriend with him and raising his free hand. “Oops! Sorry about that.” The adjacent phone booth was empty, but the couple ignored it and quickly headed down the concourse.
The man who’d identified himself as Agent Hawkins yanked the receiver to his ear and punched in a series of numbers. He was perspiring from the marathon search among the various departure gates, and trying to figure out where his charges had gone. The possibilities expanded with each passing second as flight after flight pushed back. The six had vanished without a trace, and the heavy-handed use of the FBI badge had netted him nothing but hostility from the various gate agents.
“Yes?” The voice on the other end was slow and deliberate and in control, quite the opposite from the way he felt.
“This is Taylor, in Honolulu.”
“You’re certainly not going to tell me you’ve lost them, are you?”
“Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I have to report. I’m sorry—”
“You certainly are,” the voice interjected, the slightest hint of anger tingeing the otherwise rock-steady control. “Schoen screwed up, and now you.”
“Sir, look. We did get back the jet, the item in the box, and one of our pilots.”
“Wonderful,” was the sarcastic response. “But the jet can’t run to the wrong people with information that can ruin this entire enterprise, now can it?”
“No, Sir. We did the best we could. They went out a window.”
“We’re almost out of time before the next phase commences, Taylor, and I’ve got too many of you in the field running around on unplanned cleanup missions. Schoen’s the only one left from the Hong Kong debacle, and he’s on the way back. And now this.” There was a long sigh. “Do you believe them to be still in Honolulu?”
“No. We think they slipped on an outbound flight somehow. I’ll have it figured out in a half hour. They’re headed to Los Angeles, Denver, or Seattle.”
“When you’re sure, coordinate the intercept with San Francisco directly, since you have descriptions and names. Provided you follow through in the next half hour, they have time to get in position anywhere in the West. Tell them to expect the FBI to be there in force wherever they land. Those six will have to be taken cleanly before the feds get a chance to get close. And Taylor, my orders are simple: Take those six to the nearest warehouse, shoot them, make absolutely certain they’re dead, secure MacCabe’s computer and destroy it, then ditch the bodies where they won’t be found. Ever. As soon as that’s done, I want everyone to reassemble here.”
“Yes, Sir.”
ABOARD UNITED 723, IN FLIGHT,
HONOLULU TO SEATTLE
Kat left the cockpit and gently closed the door behind her, feeling profound relief that they’d reached altitude safely. If there’s a medal for commercial airmen who go above and beyond the call of duty to help the FBI, these guys qualify, she thought.
Captain Holt had listened carefully to her worries that the crash of Meridian 5 could have been the result of an attack against the eyesight of the pilots, and the fear that the same group could come after his aircraft. At the flight engineer’s suggestion, they used maps and pillows and a blanket to block the windscreen on the copilot’s side.
“That,” the captain told her, “leaves at least one of us fully functional. I don’t care what they use, unless they blow up the cockpit, they can’t hurt an eyeball they can’t see.”
“Maybe,” Kat suggested, “that’s the best way to protect all airliners against a Meridian-type disaster.”
“If,” Captain Holt told her, “it’s some kind of anti-eyeball device, and if every flight crew blocks their cockpit windows as soon as they’re airborne, then yes, it will work. But how about takeoff and landing? How about the situation where there’s a hillside or a building nearby that someone could use as a platform to fire that thing you described? As commercial pilots, we’re still going to be vulnerable on every flight, because ultimately, we’ve got to see outside.”
“So there’s no way to defend against someone trying to flash-blind pilots?”
Holt shook his head. “Kat, if somebody’s really going to make a habit of this, we’re sitting ducks. Hell, even an ordinary laser could damage our eyes. It’s happened twice in Las Vegas in the past four years from nothing but show-business lasers. What if that thing you found is an antipersonnel version?”
&
nbsp; “Antipersonnel?” Kat echoed.
“I’m an Air Force reservist,” he said, “now retired, but I … let’s just say I knew my way around the intelligence sector during my years in the saddle. I can tell you that one of the things that terrorized us in the fighter community was the prospect that one day the Russians or the Chinese or someone in the Mideast who doesn’t like us a lot would decide to develop a powerful handheld laser for the simple purpose of destroying a pilot’s eyes with one burst.”
“The Air Force studied that?”
He nodded. “For decades. For nuclear blasts, we gave B-fifty-two pilots solid gold-foil eye patches, so they’d have one good eye left if someone touched off a nuke a hundred miles ahead of the attacking bomber. But fighter pilots have to use both eyes, we don’t fly all that much by instruments, like the transports. So what happens when we can’t look without losing our eyes? Simple. We can’t see, we can’t fight.”
“Was anything developed that you know of to—to—”
“Neutralize the threat and protect the eyes? They tried. Nothing worked well enough to be foolproof. A laser or particle beam travels at the speed of light. Any shutter device or goggle device takes too long to close up. If the blast is powerful enough, it’s going to fry your retina. I mean, literally, instantly, and permanently.”
“Good grief!”
“Can you imagine the value of that to a pipsqueak nation with a pitiful air force who’s purchased a hundred or so eye-killing light weapons? They could use Cessnas to neutralize F-fifteens. Bit of an overstatement, but the point is valid.”
“Captain, did we build any? You know, we may want to stamp out biological weapons, too, but if there’s a suspicion the other side’s going to have them, we’ve got to have an even bigger, better arsenal.”
“Ridiculous cycle, isn’t it?” the captain replied evenly.
“But you didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t need to, Kat. You just answered it yourself.”
She hesitated, smiling thinly. “What was your rank, Captain Holt?”
“In the Air Force? Brigadier general.”
“I rather thought so. Your level of knowledge sounded flag rank.”
“And you’d like to ask me more, wouldn’t you?”
She nodded. “Such as, whether there’s a stockpile somewhere of American-built antipersonnel laser guns.”
Holt smiled. “It’s too bad I can neither confirm nor deny that possibility.”
Kat felt a shiver ripple down her back, but hid it and smiled at Holt as she turned to go.
The captain caught her sleeve. “Kat? If that’s what was used against Meridian and SeaAir … in other words, if those things are being sold … you’ve got to get the word out, no matter how that impacts the economics of airline flying, and no matter where they were built.”
“Understood.”
“No, I mean it. No one’s going to want to hear it. The FAA will want to run for cover and study the threat for a year while the Air Transport Association will want to flatly deny it could happen again. Meanwhile, whatever intelligence agencies screwed up and didn’t see this coming will want to bury the whole thing while their covert-ops people move frantically to crush the organization that decided to use it this time. The public, for their part, will want to stick their heads in the sand and call the threat too technical to understand, and Congress, as usual, will sit around and convince each other that no action is needed. But if these weapons are really out of the bag now and being sold—we’ve got to ban them worldwide, just like land mines.”
Judy, the lead flight attendant, spotted Kat entering the cabin and showed her to the first-class seat next to Robert, who had been looking out the window at the last glow of sunset behind them. Kat saw the wave of recognition cross his face, leaving behind a broad smile.
“Kat! I missed you.”
She returned the smile, feeling extraordinarily good about sitting next to him, as if they’d known each other as old friends for years instead of hours. She could see Dallas sitting with Steve, and Dan seated next to Graham Tash, who had been sleeping but woke up suddenly, turning to look around at Kat.
“How’re you doing, Doctor?” she asked.
He rubbed his forehead and sighed. “Trying not to dream or think,” he said, settling back in the seat.
“How’re you holding out?” Robert asked her.
“You mean, fatigue?” Kat laughed. “I’m walking wounded, and didn’t even have to survive a crash … or see all the horrors you all witnessed at the crash site.”
She started to stand, to pull her satellite phone and a fresh battery out of her purse, but the thought of the captain’s words caused her to sit down again and turn to Robert. “We’ve got to talk. Carnegie knew something very, very vital, and we’ve got to figure out what that was. We don’t have much time.”
“I figured you’d be convinced,” he said.
“Robert, I’m convinced of something else. Regardless of what happened to that SeaAir MD-eleven, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m sure that thing we found on the Global Express was an eyekiller. A laser, a particle-beam weapon, an exotic new ray gun … something designed to destroy eyesight. Apparently our military has been studying these things for decades, and that means we’ve been building them as well. I think some very clever bunch of cutthroats has found a new tool to use for international terrorism-for-hire, and they probably stole it from us.”
“Where are you going with this, Kat?”
“To the phone, in a second. I’ve got to report in to my boss, and we need to find out what kind of eye-killing weapons are secretly stockpiled somewhere, and have someone go check to see if there aren’t a few of them missing.”
“The ID plate on that thing did look military and American-made.”
“My point exactly.” She tried to stifle a huge yawn and inclined her head toward the aisle. “I’m going to go splash some water on my face and try to get my hair under control, but if you can stay awake, I think we’re going to need to connect up your computer to one of the sky-phones and go fishing. We’ve got to find out what your friend knew.”
He nodded. “I don’t know how we’re going to do that, but sure, I’ll be awake. I’m too exhausted to sleep, anyway. And I’ve probably crossed the threshold into social unacceptance by now.”
She chuckled, shaking her head. “You know, for someone who’s not only slept in his clothes but survived a major plane crash, a race through the jungle, and a helicopter ride with a maniac for a pilot, you look ‘mah-vellous.’”
“As long as I’m not too ripe. We all used that tiny shower on the Global Express, but I still feel grubby.”
“Well, Sir, you sure don’t look it. Call it jungle chic. I think it suits us.”
Her left hand was resting on the divider between the seats, and Robert had covered it with his right hand so gently she hadn’t noticed until she started to get up. She looked up at him with a little smile and he smiled back and squeezed.
“You know, I like the ‘us’ part of that, Ms. Bronsky, Ma’am.”
“You do?” she asked, feigning surprise. “And why is that?”
“I don’t know. It’s just that girls with big …”
“What?” she shot back, interrupting him, her eyebrows arching up.
“Guns! Girls with big guns.”
“Uh-huh. And what about them?”
“They turn me on,” he said.
“It’s only nine millimeters,” she added.
“I’d hate to have you say that about me,” he replied.
Kat pulled herself up from the seat, rolling her eyes and trying not to laugh as she pulled the battery and satellite phone from her purse and looked down at him. “You worry me, MacCabe.”
After coordinating with the flight attendants, Kat and Robert unfolded the antenna on the satellite phone, positioning it against the Plexiglas window and verifying the signal indication before she punched in the number of Jake Rhoades�
�s cell phone.
He answered on the first ring.
“Jake? Kat.”
“Good Lord, Kat, what the hell is going on?”
“There’s been virtually no way I could call before now.”
“Okay, okay. Where are you?”
“Where are you, Jake? Not at headquarters, I hope?”
“No. I came home for a few hours. How’d you know to use this line?”
“I needed to talk to you with minimal chance of being monitored. My previous call to you was intercepted somehow. I think we have a leak at the Bureau.”
“What?”
She gave him a quick synopsis of the bogus FBI team and their near success.
“Jake, I’m … ashamed to tell you this, but we lost the jet, the weapon, and the prisoner.” She filled in the details of watching the Global Express depart, presumably with the weapon aboard.
There was a long sigh from the other end. “Oh, boy. I though we had it just about cracked, Kat. That weapon, or whatever it was, was pivotal.”
“You saved our lives with that fast message response a few hours back. We were in the middle of a lethal charade.”
“I couldn’t fathom what you were doing in Honolulu when we’d been told you were on approach to Midway Island. We had no one waiting in Honolulu. So those names you sent were the aliases.”
“That’s right,” she said.
“They were that convincing?”
“Even the special ID marks and the hologram on the ID card, Jake. These guys, whoever they are, are consummate professionals with access to the best equipment, and on top of that, they’re good actors. I didn’t have a clue.”
“Then there’s nothing you could have done, except, I suppose, call on arrival.”
“They told me Assistant Deputy Director Rhoades had issued a specific order that I was to call no one.”
“Wait a minute, Kat, they used my name?”
“They did. He did. The one calling himself Hawkins. As I said, there was virtually nothing that didn’t fit, until it was almost too late. Do you have any idea how all that information could have fallen into their hands?”
“Did you tell anyone else you were coming, and where? I mean, it may be your satellite phone that’s being monitored.”
Blackout Page 32
