by John Barnes
Samuelson’s image appeared, too big, too grainy, and with the color uncorrected. They watched him speak the plane’s position, the terrorists wrestling him, the knife at his neck, Samuelson dragged off camera. The network helpfully supplied subtitles so that they knew someone had shouted in Arabic not to kill Samuelson on camera, and “read our statement, read it now, we may have no time,” over the sound of the vice president shouting Bullshit! and Barrels on the plane!, and that the thuds off camera must mean he was being beaten.
An announcer cut off Samuelson’s scream of Bullshit! “We’re taking you right away to live coverage from our San Diego affiliate where—excuse me, I’m not sure—” The man listened intently to his earpiece. “Should I?”
“That’s some last words,” Zach said.
Jason nodded. “How many vice presidents ever say anything that close to the truth?”
The announcer said, “We are going direct to live video from the traffic reporting plane from our network affiliate in San Diego. We have—”
A blink in the feed cut the anchor off; the picture stabilized into a military jet streaking across the blue sky, seen from beneath and behind.
“That’s an A-10,” Zach commented. “I built a model of that when I was a kid. Weird. It’s a ground-attack plane, basically a tank-buster, not a fighter. Maybe something is going on on the ground?”
The camera angle widened to show four streaking contrails around the A-10, then rotated down to include the empty, ridge-scarred desert below. Sound resumed: “—believe are US Air Force A-10 attack planes en route to intercept a terrorist attack aimed somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area, which is apparently being delivered via the hijacked Air Force Two—the plane carrying Vice President John Samuelson. For those of you who just joined us—”
“Television is the medium for people who just got here,” Jason said.
Zach nodded. “That’s why children love it.” The planes flew on, parallel white streaks in the blue sky, two of them big enough to show as glints of metal. The voice-over commentator began to go through it all again. Very softly, he added, “And why we need Daybreak.”
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. YUMA. ARIZONA. 5:42 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Ysabel plunged down the stairs just slow enough to be silent; above her, she could hear Neil’s high old voice, like an unhappy child, over and over, asking if anyone knew what that sound was, and didn’t they smell smoke?
She popped through the ground-floor fire exit and walked quickly across the street, making herself not look back.
Stunned, exhilarated, scared, she held her cell phone to her ear and walked along the busy street, saying “unh-hunh, unh-hunh, yeah you’re right.” At the corner pay phone, she let herself look up and see the people staring over her head and behind her. Just like acting class back at the community college, “acting is re-acting,” nothing hard here.
She turned and gawped like everyone else. The aerostat was sinking slowly, a tangle of junk hanging from it, but it didn’t look like the diesel fuel had caught fire; good, less chance that anyone would be hurt. The Stinger had torn some big holes in the lower, air-filled part (to judge by the flapping bits of fabric) and small holes in the upper, helium-filled part (to judge by the way it was sinking).
Aaron had explained about the upper and lower parts, and it had been one of the few things he said about the aerostat that she could follow. She liked the way he tried so hard to be non-condescending and non-technical for her. That and his Latin-poet eyes.
Ysabel pictured campesino families, desperate for work, over the border in San Luis Rio Colorado. They would see the big balloon that had always been like a Yankee fist in their face sinking like a bad dream. She imagined them packing their few treasures from the old village and heading north tonight. Her face was aching for a chance to grin, but she kept it slack as she slumped heavily against the pay phone’s metal hood and slid her phone onto the little metal shelf. Someone looking to make a pay-phone call would be happy to find a prepaid cell phone with no security on it.
The aerostat sank faster in the late-afternoon sun. More people stopped to stare, point, and yell. Time to go.
ABOUT TEN MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 8:50 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
“How the fuck did a local TV station plane get that close without permission?” Garren demanded.
I think a man can be allowed an f-bomb under the circumstances, Heather thought.
The radar balloon shot down in Yuma had pulled a whole flock of Air Force and ANG fighters too far west, and they were now out of the chase. Nonetheless, now we’ve got him. A Global Hawk had picked up the 787 as it flew northward, hopping over ridges in the empty desert east of San Diego and just north of the border—an area slashed by ridges and draws with no more apparent pattern than the folds in a crumpled sheet of newspaper, striped and blobbed in green and brown brush. Smart choice of approach, she thought, but we got you anyway. In the last few minutes they’d been able to pull Fullbacks, the A-10 Warthogs, off point defenses south of LA and send them on interception courses.
The A-10s wouldn’t have been as fast as the Dreamliner at high altitude in a straight-line chase, but the airliner was flying low and slow and zigzagging among the ridges, and they’d be able to dive on it. One of the Warthogs might well be first to the kill.
If Bad Dreamliner somehow dodged through the closing arc of A-10s, there were other chances. CVN 76 Ronald Reagan, just off North Island, had already catapulted two Super Hornets, which could overtake the 787 in a stern chase before it reached LA. Three Marine F-35s that had been returning to North Island had enough fuel to divert to intercept as well, and a flight of Utah ANG F-22s would be able to intercept just south of Long Beach, if Air Force Two somehow got that far.
Someone was going to shoot down that plane. She hoped Samuelson wasn’t still alive.
“They’ve got an interception vector for an A-10,” one of the DoD people announced. “First shot in about four minutes. Less than a minute after that we’ll have a window for an F-18 to put an AMRAAM on his tail. If he’s headed for somewhere around LA—and it looks like he is—we get at least five good tries to bring him down, plus three long shots.”
Kim Samuelson was talking with President Pendano, their arms around each other as if they were already at the funeral.
Cam spoke beside her. “Do you have Jim Browder on the line, Heather? Urgent question for him.”
“I’ve got him standing by on secure IM.” She typed, Phn me, encrypt #.
Her phone rang; she docked it in her terminal, set it for Record, Transcribe, and Speakerphone, and said, “Jim. Mr. Nguyen-Peters of Homeland Security has a question for you. Cam, Jim is fully briefed per your instructions.”
“Good. Dr. Browder, the vice president yelled ‘barrels on the plane’ three times. We’re about to shoot it down over uninhabited desert, almost nothing human downwind for hundreds of miles. Is there anything that they could have put on it that will cause massive problems if we just blow the plane up? Anything that will be made worse if it burns?”
“Probably not in uninhabited desert,” Browder said. “Planes burn hot. Fire should kill any weaponized germs or toxins we know about. Most nerve gases are destroyed by flame and heat, except maybe Novichok-5, which hasn’t been seen since the 1990s and it’s possible the formula is lost. Depending on which ex-Soviet scientist was telling you which self-serving mixture of lies and truth, that stuff might or might not have been heat resistant, but its chemical cousins are not. So I don’t think you have to worry about anything chemical or biological.”
“Nuclear? Radiological?”
“Nukes require very complex moving parts to work exactly right very, very fast. They’re the last thing in the world that you could set off by just whacking them or burning them. So if it was gas, germs, or nukes, they were planning to pull the trigger or open the nozzle before crashing the plane, and shooting it down in the desert should take care of it.”
“Th
at leaves radiological.”
“Yeah. If the drums contained flammable radiological material, of course, that doesn’t stop being radioactive when it burns, and burning it might spread it around more. Either something like tritinated hydrocarbons or something like radiosodium might be kept in barrels. But I don’t think it’s likely; the physics is all wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
“The flight time is too long,” Browder explained. “The shorter the half-life, the stronger the radiation. If they used something with a short-enough half-life to be quickly, immediately deadly, that’s going to be a half-life of hours rather than weeks or years. They’ve been on that plane for close to fifteen hours with it, and short-half-life radioactives are too energetic for any shielding less than tons of lead to deal with. They’d all be dead of radiation poisoning.
“That rules out things like sodium-24, which I thought of at first because it’s the classic radiological weapon—real strong radioactivity and chemically super active, so it would burn its way right into the body and would catch fire easily and be hard to put out. That’s why they store sodium in barrels, immersed in oil so it doesn’t spontaneously combust from the air around it. But the reason sodium-24 has been talked about as a fallout enhancer is because you make it by putting ordinary sodium in a strong neutron flux, like around a hydrogen bomb or in a nuclear reactor. Even if they made it in a reactor the day before they seized Air Force Two, and loaded it right on, it would be mostly gone now—and would have killed them in the early hours of the flight.
“The other family of radiological weapons is long-half-life stuff that isn’t very strong radioactively, and it could be on that plane—say tritinated methanol, methanol with superheavy hydrogen substituted for the ordinary hydrogen. If that burned it would put radioactive water into the air—but because it’s comparatively feeble, it’s purely a scare weapon, years or more likely decades before people would get sick from it, and you’d treat inhalation with lots of water and diuretics, it could be flushed out fast before it hurt most people. And on top of that, a long half-life means a small cross section of neutron absorption—”
Cam held his hands up in self-defense. “Whoa. I only got through one year of college physics.”
Browder closed in for the kill. “The cross-section for neutron absorption is closely related to how easy it is to make something radioactive. The weak stuff, that would last a long time and wouldn’t kill them while they flew here, is much more difficult and expensive to make than the strong stuff, which wouldn’t last all the way here and would already have killed them. So, the only things they could deliver on a flight that long are pretty mild and expensive and difficult to make. If it was any of the really bad kill-you-right-now stuff, it would already have killed them. If they are using the weak stuff, it’s mostly just a scare tactic, not something you really have to worry about; you need a good PR campaign, is all.”
Heather rolled her eyes; leave it to the science guy to think that all you had to do was explain things calmly and rationally, and everything would be fine.
Browder added, “But in case there’s something I didn’t think of, definitely warn the pilots not to fly through any plume of smoke after the crash, and if you can bring it down without blowing it all over, that might be extra safe. You probably don’t want the hero who saved us all to die of radiation poisoning next week.”
Cameron nodded infinitesimally. “Excellent. We’ll do that. Thank you, Dr. Browder, that’s what I needed.”
“Talk to you again soon, Jim.” Heather undocked her phone. When Cameron finished relaying Browder’s advice, she asked, “Wasn’t that really more of a question for someone at the Department of Energy? I mean, they’re the ones that build atom bombs and have all the physicists.”
“I wish,” Cameron said. “But there was no time—I’d’ve had to ask twenty of them and each one would have told me about one small detail. Your guy Browder used to be a science reporter, so he—”
“Fullback Fourteen will be on the target in thirty seconds,” Marshall said. “Going to feed from the Pentagon’s war room.”
The big screen wavered a moment and then they were looking southward across the mountainous desert through the cameras on the A-10. A tiny white bird shape just showed in a corner of the screen. The room was so quiet that they could hear the static in the link.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. THE DESERT BETWEEN SAN DIEGO AND ENGINEER SPRINGS. 5:57 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Greg Redmond didn’t have spare time or attention to be surprised when he heard, “Fullback Fourteen, you’ve got first shot.” His hands and feet mechanically did the necessary tasks as he listened. “Begin your attack immediately on sight. We have confirmed there are no civilian or military airliners anywhere in the vicinity. Investigative personnel have requested you bring it down with gunfire to preserve more evidence. Make one pass with the cannon, and if it’s still flying afterward, send both Sidewinders after it.”
“Roger.”
“We have also been warned that any plume, smoke, or flame from the plane should be considered extremely dangerous, and you are not to fly into it.”
“Roger. I have visual contact,” Redmond said.
Far below, Bad Dreamliner was coasting between two red-brown ridges spattered with deep green; in his head, Redmond was already solving the problem of coming in on it in a steep dive, figuring his pathway, and the old Hog was as familiar as his own body.
He banked, waited for his angle, and pushed the yoke forward to dive.
John Samuelson knew something was happening from the excited gabble. He’d been playing possum again, or just possibly he was actually dying because they had kicked his kidneys hard, over and over, and he might be hemorrhaging. Didn’t matter. He was awake with a chance to see it play out.
He flung himself hard sideways, rolling onto his back, and opened his eyes. Two of his captors jumped at him. He screamed into his gag, and cocked his feet to kick at them.
A row of fist-sized holes appeared in the bulkhead above him.
We won. We did it. He had been so afraid this was the beginning of the dive onto the target.
But the home team had pulled this one out.
The two men approaching Samuelson fell backward, and he seemed to be weightless. The plane was flipping—perhaps it had lost a wing?
Samuelson looked down to see a gushing stump instead of his foot. No matter, he had no more walking to do, anyway. He left the deck and felt as if he were flying, still trying to shout, “We won!” through the gag.
When he hit the forward bulkhead, the pain in the back of his head was nauseating, and his neck felt all wrong. Maybe that was just disorientation from the spinning plane? He wasn’t sure where his tormentors had gone. He saw only carpet, a bolthead, and someone’s cell phone sliding around.
He shut his eyes and tried to take a deep breath. He couldn’t feel whether his lungs responded or not, so he just prayed. God, please take care of things from here on out. Please accept me, forgive all my foolishness and pride, and make sure Kim knows I loved her.
He gave up trying to breathe, and tried to smile, because he’d handed it off to higher authority, and it was all taken care of, but somehow his face wouldn’t—
Shock, heat, darkness.
ABOUT THREE MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 9:02 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
The image on the big screen was live from a camera on an A-10 flying figure-8s upwind of the wreckage. Air Force Two had shed a wing and rolled when the Warthog’s big nose cannon, designed to pierce Russian tanks, had perforated a diagonal line across its body, down the wing root, and back across one engine. The 787 Dreamliner had corkscrewed against the mountainside like a missed football pass, breaking into a cloud of parts and flame as it bounced uphill. The long streak of blazing metal was now setting fire to the autumn-dry brush; ammunition and fuel cooking off made more bursts and explosions.
But there were also a half dozen hot yellow-white fires, as bright
as flares, pouring dense white-gray smoke into the air. The heat of their burning punched wavery updrafts through the red flame and black smoke pouring out of the wreckage. As they watched, another one erupted, first with a burst of orange fire and black smoke, but almost instantly becoming another yellow-white flare pouring out the gray-white smoke.
“No need to repeat the order about staying out of the plume,” Lenny remarked, “if the pilots have half a brain.”
“We’ve got a specialty hazmat chopper from North Island on its way,” one of the controllers said, “and there’s a couple teams in trucks on their way as well. We’ve already started emergency evacuation of Engineer Springs—we were preparing that for the last twenty minutes, just in case. Not too much wind today, so they’ll have a half hour at least to clear people out of Engineer Springs, and they’re doing a reverse 911 to the few people that live out in the desert itself, and trying to backtrack everyone who’s used a cell phone in those areas in the last couple days in case of hikers or backpackers. We shouldn’t have too many people exposed to it.”
“But,” Cam said, “what the hell is it?”
A voice said, “Oh, no,” just as Heather looked back at the screen and saw a non-military plane pass right through the plume. It took her only a moment to realize that it had to be that traffic plane from the TV station; during that moment, the plane tumbled, then seemed to regain control. The little jet descended rapidly, lowering his landing flaps, as if trying to make an emergency landing—but there was nowhere good to land on a slope covered with desk-sized boulders and tangled brush. As it touched down, the plane flipped onto its back and burst into flames.
“Marshall, we need the last minute or so of that broadcast up,” Cam said.
“Got it.” The central screen flashed, scrambled, and re-congealed into a view of the burning remains of the 787 from much lower down. The audio feed came on with a feedback squeal—“try for a closer look at this amazing tragedy from—”
