by Fritz Galt
Turning its transponder box off and maintaining radio silence added up to the small jet defying the flight ban. That had to be their man. There was only one problem. As it had just entered California airspace, it would be within striking distance of populous coastal cities within half an hour.
Meanwhile, on the bottom right of his console, he watched a cluster of blips, identified by the AWACS’ receiver as friendly fighter jets. They were only now just passing from Utah into Nevada.
The Air Force should scramble fighter jets in California to intercept the bastard.
He rolled a trackball that zeroed a crosshair onto the cluster. Within seconds he had their ground speed. Seven hundred miles per hour. He pulled up a calculator on a separate console and figured out the distances. The fighter jets could still beat the terrorist to California’s coast with minutes to spare.
It was time to give his commander an update on the rogue plane. He selected the scrambled military frequency on his radio and spoke into his lip mike.
“Our target is passing over northeastern California, cruising due west at 450 miles per hour. It’s headed in the direction of San Francisco and should reach there in 27 minutes. Over.”
“Roger that,” several voices came back.
“I calculate that our fighters should reach him before he makes the coast,” Burt said.
Then from a longer distance away, “I’ll convey this information to Army, Navy, Coast Guard and FBI.”
It was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.
Leo Pollo was a five-star Army general, highly decorated in Korea and later in Vietnam. He had every reason to be the Pentagon’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he was.
As the nation’s top-ranking military officer, he didn’t exactly command all branches of America’s military, but he came damn close. The connection point between the administration and the services, he was in a nuts and bolts position. Just the way he liked it.
Standing in the Pentagon’s Operations Center, Leo took the secure radio transmission from the AWACS with an air of calm. But the short hairs on the back of his neck still bristled against his uniform’s collar.
The Ops Center had direct lines to the president, the secretary of defense and all the other cabinet posts related to national security.
And one of the buttons connected him directly with Hank Gibson, head of the FBI.
“Hank,” Leo thundered. He knew no other way of speaking. “Our AWACS over the Rockies has detected what we presume to be the terrorist George Ferrar heading for San Francisco. He is either piloting or has commandeered a jet. His ETA is approximately twenty-three minutes.”
“San Francisco,” Hank repeated thoughtfully. “Where’s he landing?”
“Landing? We’ve scrambled half a dozen fighter jets to intercept him and shoot him down. He won’t land anywhere.”
“Leo, this is important,” Hank said angrily. “Now listen to me carefully.”
Leo adjusted his military stance. He wasn’t used to being dressed down by anyone, especially a civilian, even if it was Hank Gibson, Director of the FBI.
Hank tore into him. “Police interviewed an eyewitness in St. Louis. She confirmed that Ferrar doesn’t, I repeat does not, have the bombs. They left St. Louis on another plane. He’s on a smaller plane and he’s not going to blow anything up. What we need are the bombs. And he’s our only lead now to finding those bombs.”
Leo shook his head. “What other plane? There’s only one in the air.”
“It is a larger jet and it departed earlier. It probably already arrived at its destination.”
“Okay, then let’s work with what we’ve got,” Leo said. “We don’t have the bombs, but we have the terrorist’s ringleader, and that’s Ferrar. What the terrorists still need is the brains to position and detonate the bombs, and we’ve got that man under our thumb. We can stop Ferrar from setting these things off. My boys are under orders to knock him out of the sky.”
Ferrar sat in the pilot’s seat looking down at the dark Sierra Nevada range when he felt a buffeting sensation.
It felt like a blast of wind.
He checked his wind indicator. No shift in wind direction and no wind sheer or updraft.
His cell phone hadn’t thrown off the altitude and navigational equipment. Oakland lay dead ahead in twenty minutes.
Then another blast rocked him in the other direction.
What the hell?
Two more jolts sent him flopping against the instrument panel. Looking up, he suddenly realized what was happening. He was being buzzed by a handful of fighter jets.
One by one, their sizzling tail flames shot by overhead, nearly melting the Gulfstream’s glass canopy above him. They were toying with him, like sadistic hawks swooping on a smaller bird mercilessly until it died of fright.
Ferrar leaned on the control yoke, dipping the nose straight toward the mountaintops. His entire weight leaning forward against his shoulder harness was compensated by the gathering g-force load. Within several seconds, he would be weightless.
He wondered what velocity the aircraft could take before breaking apart.
Evasive maneuvers in a civilian airplane couldn’t outrun a fighter jet. He didn’t have a prayer.
General Leo Pollo at the Pentagon Ops Center detected a slow burn on the other end of the line. The Director of the FBI was close to shouting.
“I am not,” Hank said testily, “going to lose my prime suspect to a bunch of overeager airmen.”
“Okay,” Leo finally relented. “I get your point. Let me see if I can call off the engagement.”
“Great,” Hank said. “This will give me a chance to scramble my field offices in the Bay Area.”
“We’ll escort Ferrar from a safe distance, and you can start looking for the bombs.”
“Yeah, chances are they arrived from St. Louis in the past hour,” Hank said. “I’ll have my men start by checking the airports.”
Leo’s mind was already on the next phone call he would have to make to the commander at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. Letting go of a tight leash did not come naturally.
After alerting his field office in San Francisco, FBI Director Hank Gibson felt it was his duty, but not his pleasure, to phone Lester Friedman with an update on the chase after the CIA’s fugitive employee.
Hank’s secretary phoned around and found Lester at home.
Hank began his briefing at once. “Ferrar appears to be heading for San Francisco.”
“And the bombs?”
“They seem to be heading independently to some sort of tourist destination,” Hank said. “That’s the best information we have at present.”
“That’s excellent information,” Lester replied. “If Ferrar is heading to San Francisco, then you can bet the bombs are heading for San Francisco, too.” He seemed to wait for confirmation from Hank.
Hank couldn’t dispute the probability. Of course Ferrar would be heading where the bombs were going, but possibly not for the same reason that Friedman assumed.
As head of the operation, Hank couldn’t trust Ferrar to do the right thing. He couldn’t take the risk of allowing Ferrar to diffuse the situation. But he could rely on Ferrar to lead them to the bombs and the FBI could take it from there.
“How’re you going to capture Ferrar?” Lester asked.
Hank told him about the fighter jets scrambled from Colorado and chasing the lone jet over California.
“Then you can blast him out of the sky,” Lester said with glee.
“We aren’t taking that approach,” Hank said. “The fighter jets will escort the plane to its destination. At that point, our men will apprehend Ferrar.”
“Apprehend?” Lester tried several times to start a sentence. Finally, he spluttered, “Has Ralph Connors gotten to you or what?”
“Let’s just say that cooler heads must prevail.”
Hank set down the phone before Lester could unburden himself of all his emotional b
aggage once again.
Five hundred and fifty miles per hour was pushing it, Ferrar decided as he plunged two thousand feet over central California to evade the fighters on his tail.
How many g’s could the Gulfstream IV take in pulling out of its rapid descent?
He quickly checked the night sky for the fighter jets. They had abandoned him during his freefall. Maybe they didn’t care to play such dangerous games, or they had time to spare before acquiring their target and firing on him.
It took more than arm strength to pull upward on the yoke. In his weightless state, he needed a brace against which to pry back the nose of the jet.
He freed his left foot and wedged it against the instrument panel, crushing a glass fuel gauge with his heel. Then he raised his other foot, relinquishing all control of the jet’s ailerons and flaps. With that leg, he braced himself further against the instrument panel, then began to stretch gently backward.
The jet’s trajectory slowly began to change. The mountains, now distinguishable through the front glass panel, rushed up toward him, a black mass of peaks and ravines and trees.
The acceleration began to decrease. He suddenly found himself flung full force against his harness. He stretched backward, his knees flexing, his thigh muscles bulging, his back nearly cracking under the strain
The control yoke moved slightly. He strained his biceps and forearms, curled his fingers tightly and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see what would happen next.
As the plane’s pitch altered further, deceleration increased and the wings began to torque to the left side.
He dropped his feet underneath the panel and adjusted the ailerons and flaps, instantly compensating for the slight roll. But his lunge for the foot pedals had overcompensated into a roll to the right. He eased down on the other pedal and the jet straightened out, level with the ground.
He had checked his fall.
It was time to take another look out into the night.
He was flying through a forest. Trees swept by out his left window.
He yanked upward on the controls. Needing more speed for control, he pulled the throttle full out. The plane zoomed to 520 miles per hour. The glint of a stream flashed below. The jet ran parallel to it for a few hundred yards. He flew past rounded boulders, then alongside a cliff.
Then, gently, he began to ascend.
He fought to make out the twists and turns of the canyon. He skewed left and right, following the terrain immediately to his left. Then he looked up.
A stone mountain lay dead ahead.
Lester Friedman came to the chilling realization that Hank Gibson and the FBI had been put solely in charge of national security. Although it was late in the evening, he ordered his limo to his house. He had to get to the real center of national security. He had to get to the Pentagon, fast.
“And get me Ferrar’s personnel file.”
He was waiting on the curb when the car arrived.
Inside the limo, his aide Charles White was just receiving a faxed multi-page printout of Ferrar’s complete service record.
The rear wheels spun out on slick, fallen leaves in Georgetown as Lester grabbed the faxed pages and began to flip through them.
The file contained every official detail about Ferrar’s life since his inception into the Agency, from his promotions to his citations, both good and bad.
Lester immediately turned to Ferrar’s security clearance, where page after page of interviews with persons who knew him had been carefully assembled. There was his mother’s account, his high school counselor’s interview, his residential advisor’s comments from Berkeley. Then Lester’s eyes landed on a more familiar name. Tray had given a full accounting of his high school buddy.
As the limo angled downhill toward the Potomac, Lester adjusted his reading light and let the page speak to him. Tray had known George Ferrar as a high school sophomore when the Friedmans had moved to the submarine base near Bar Harbor. Tray had spoken highly of Ferrar’s athletic ability and commended his friend’s steadfastness throughout high school. It brought a tear to Lester’s eye. How deceived Tray had been at the time.
Within minutes, they were passing over Key Bridge into Virginia.
Tray’s depiction of Ferrar became more detailed during their college years at the University of California. The two had competed at Arabic studies, both earning the highest grade point averages possible for a full three years. Their tastes ran to Persian cuisine, lamb kebabs and hummus. Then things seemed to go sour between them, according to Tray’s account of events.
Ferrar had turned hostile and predatory, unpredictable and unreliable. Tray had regretted this change in his friend’s nature, but had allowed Ferrar his freedom to explore the other side of his personality.
Circling closer to the Pentagon on the expressway, Lester saw where floodlights illuminated the gaping hole and construction crews were hard at work. Less than three months earlier, hundreds had died there from the al-Qaeda attack.
Tomorrow, the nation was facing a different attack.
Quietly, he vowed that such a tragedy would never take place again on American soil.
Then his attention returned to Tray’s interview. When asked what had brought about the changes in his friend, Tray had given a simple answer: “women.” When asked to elucidate, Tray had added the stinging comment, “He stole my woman, he took her to bed for an entire summer back in Maine and he turned against me in every way. With such shifting loyalties, I would not trust his patriotism in the least.”
It was amazing that the CIA had cleared Ferrar at all.
The driver eased off the highway and ramped down toward the Pentagon. Security let them pass through the parking lot without reducing speed. But they weren’t stopping at the parking lot. Another military policeman waved them through to a ramp that led under the building, directly into the executive parking garage.
Lester snapped the folder shut. He knew the woman in question. Her name was Bonnie something-or-other, the love of Tray’s life.
Soon Lester and Charles were traveling up the elevator to the office of Murrow Hughes, the Secretary of Defense.
These people knew how to defend the nation.
Ferrar couldn’t raise the Gulfstream’s nose fast enough to avoid the dark mountain that loomed ahead.
But did he have a choice? He scanned the murky horizon for some sort of an escape.
Then a series of lights twinkled over the shoulder of the mountain. It was a medium-sized city.
He pulled hard to the right, toward the lights. If he could clear the topmost branches, he might find himself hurtling over a valley, or even a plain.
The sound of his twin engines reverberated off the canyon walls. The fuselage vibrated from the excessive speed. Pressed deep into his rattling seat, he gently banked the small jet away from the mountain, over the treetops and toward the grid of streetlights.
With a last whoosh, he swept past the mountainside, treetops scraping against the underbelly of his fuselage. At the last moment, when it seemed that he might have finally freed himself, a loud bang shook the jet. Then he heard a ripping sound. A rush of air sucked out of the cabin.
A tree or boulder must have torn a hole in the fuselage.
He eased back on the throttle. Trying to maintain his speed, he gently prodded the jet for lift. If he could avoid crashing into the city, he would be a lucky man. It might spare a life or two below as well. It might even allow him to rescue the nation from another stunning terrorist attack.
Get off it, Ferrar. Just stay alive.
Then he began to drift to a higher altitude. There was hope.
He took the luxury of scanning the skies.
The fighter jets were gone.
Chapter 24
Murrow Hughes was normally an imperturbable secretary of defense. But not after the personality profile that Lester Friedman of the CIA showed him.
Murrow’s face turned beet red as he stormed into the Ops Center, slamming Ferrar’s
record down on a table in front of General Leo Pollo, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“Leo, this George Ferrar is a complete psycho. We’ve got to stop him at once, no matter what the cost. Even if he’s hijacked a civilian airliner, we’ve got to shoot him down.”
Lester was about to add a description of Ferrar’s performance at Tora Bora when they were interrupted by another radio message.
“This is Whiskey Five Two,” the voice sounded over the speaker. “We lost our man.”
“Lost Ferrar?” Lester said incredulous.
Leo Pollo took the news with his usual calm. “Boys,” he ordered over the radio. “I want you to find him, and you’ve got new orders. Shoot at will. I want you to kill the target.”
Seated at his station aboard the large AWACS jet flying from Nevada into California, Reconnaissance Officer Burt Huett anxiously scanned the humming radar console. Where was the anomalous blip?
Then, finally, near the capital city of Sacramento, he picked up a faint signal. He took a second look at the altitude reading. Could Ferrar be flying just twenty yards above the terrain?
“We’ve picked him up, sir,” he said into his microphone, and read out the exact coordinates.
“That’s Sacramento,” General Leo Pollo exclaimed over the phone.
“That’s right, sir. Ferrar is flying low over Sacramento, California.”
Two bright stars shone on the western horizon, tracking Ferrar’s every turn.
And they were glowing brighter.
The fighter jets had found him and were forming a familiar attack formation, one group off the right wing and the other off the left wing, both slightly above and behind him.
He calculated that the fighter jets were just clearing the crest of the mountain range, two miles behind.
“Okay, baby, take her away,” he told the trusty Gulfstream as he pulled her nose upward and jabbed the autopilot button. Then he unsnapped the pilot’s seat belt and headed back into the icy, sucking wind of the damaged cabin.
