by Stuart Woods
“How do we know one will show up?” Stone asked.
“One will, if we ditch within helicopter range—maybe a couple of hundred miles.”
“And if we’re out of helicopter range?”
“Then a very large airplane, a C-130, will come and find our raft, using the GPS location sent out by our emergency transmitter, then circle overhead, tossing out food, water, blankets, and whatever we’ll need until the ship shows up.”
“What ship?”
“One that’s passing not too far away from us that the C-130 has contacted.”
“What if the ship’s captain doesn’t want to come for us?”
“He has to—law of the sea, and all that.”
“How long will it take for him to come?”
“Oh, two, three days, depending on how far away he is when he gets the call.”
“We’d have to spend two or three days in that raft?”
“Unless we’re within helicopter range, then it would be only a few hours.”
“How are we going to, ah, entertain ourselves while wearing these suits?” Stone asked.
Pat laughed. “Ingenuity.”
“Nobody is that ingenious.”
“Now, here’s the drill,” Pat said, ignoring that. “We’ve lost both engines. We start gliding in the direction of the nearest helicopter, say, in Reykjavik. At twenty thousand feet we attempt a restart of both engines. If neither restarts, we prepare to ditch in the sea. You leave your seat and buckle yourself into the nearest rear-facing seat. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Oh, no you don’t. My airplane, my ditching. You will strap yourself into a passenger seat.”
“Oh, all right, exercise your ego, but have you ever ditched an airplane in the water?”
“Yes, I have,” Stone replied firmly. “I took off from LaGuardia in a Citation Mustang, and at three thousand feet I encountered a flock of geese and they destroyed both engines. I tried to return to the airport but didn’t have enough altitude, so I headed for the Hudson and ditched at about Forty-second Street. Nobody got hurt.”
“In your dreams,” she said. “If you had pulled that off, you’d be the new Sully Sullenberger.”
“Fortunately, I was in the Mustang simulator at Flight Safety, in Orlando,” Stone conceded.
“They let you do that?”
“I insisted, so I am not without experience in matters of ditching. How about you?”
“Oh, all right,” she said, “I’ve never ditched, either, but I’ve got a lot more hours than you.”
“Buy your own airplane, and you can do the ditching.”
A voice came from the doorway. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
Stone turned to find Dino standing there. He’d forgotten they had a lunch date. “Nope, we’re just rehearsing our ditching in the North Atlantic after a double engine failure.” Stone picked up the other duffel and tossed it to Dino. “Your turn.”
“I’m not getting into that thing,” Dino said.
“Tell him, Pat.”
“It will save your life if Stone has to ditch the airplane. You have to try it on now, so you’ll know what to do.”
“It’s just a precaution,” Stone said, unzipping his survival suit and wriggling out of it with Pat’s help.
Dino shook the suit out of the bag and regarded it dolefully. “I have to?”
“You have to,” Pat said.
Dino took off his jacket and struggled into the suit; it took him the better part of ten minutes. Pat zipped it up for him.
“Okay,” Stone said, “everybody ready for some lunch? Pat, you’re joining us.”
Dino began struggling with the suit. “How the hell do I get out of this thing?”
“The same way you got into it,” Stone said, “only backwards.” He got into his jacket. “Come on, Pat, we can have a glass of wine while we wait for Dino to join us.”
“You miserable son of a bitch!” Dino hollered.
Pat dissolved in laughter, then went to help Dino extract himself from the thing. Then they went off together to the Four Seasons.
24
MILLIE WAS GETTING dressed to go back to work when her cell rang. “Hello?”
“It’s Quentin.”
“That was fast. Have you solved my problem?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“In what manner of speaking?”
“I took your problem to my ultimate boss, the assistant director of counterintelligence.”
“Did you tell him my name?”
“Not only did I not tell him your name, I told him you were a guy.”
“Well, that was insulting.”
“He knows nothing but the vague outline of what you want. The thing is, he was stationed in the San Francisco office at the time you’re interested in, and after some thought, he thinks he might have something for you.”
“Okay, shoot. What is it?”
“Hang on, he won’t tell me, then let me tell you. He wants to meet you face-to-face.”
“If I do that, then I’m working outside the boundaries of my assignment, and there will be hell to pay.”
“It’s the only way he’ll tell you what he knows.”
“I’ll call you back in an hour,” Millicent said, and hung up. She finished dressing and drove to the White House; five minutes later she was seated in Holly Barker’s office. “I’ve got something on the third man, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Millie,” Holly said, feigning patience, “that puts us at yesterday.”
“I’m sorry, what I meant to say is . . . Oh, shit, here’s what’s happened.” She told Holly of her two conversations with Quentin Phillips while Holly nodded along with her.
“I’ve done business with Lev Epstein before,” Holly said when Millie had finished. “He’s very smart—so much so that you can’t let him outsmart you.”
“How do you want me to handle him?” Millie asked.
Holly pressed a button on her phone. “Please get me Lev Epstein at the Bureau.” A minute later, Epstein came on.
“Aha, it’s you, Holly!” he said.
“I know,” Holly said. “I’ve always known.”
“But now I know,” he said triumphantly.
“How are you, Lev?”
“Just great, thanks.”
“And the wife and kids?”
“Just great.”
“Are you still eating your noon meals out of your six-year-old’s Mickey Mouse lunchbox?”
“Only every day. So it’s your minion that’s got my young agent’s knickers in a twist?”
“I haven’t explored their relationship to that point,” Holly said.
“So why do you need to know what I know?”
“So that I can see that some very bad people don’t harm our nation.”
“Okay, you show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”
“In your dreams. I know it’s been a long time since anyone told you this, Lev, but what I know is above your pay grade.”
“Oh, come on, Holly, I’m the assistant director for counterintelligence—nothing is above my pay grade.”
“If you like, I can have the president call your director, then he can explain it to you.”
“Oh, come now, Holly.”
“This is what we’re going to do: you and Mr. Phillips are going to have a nice lunch with my assistant, Millicent Martindale—not at our mess nor at yours, but at a cozy McDonald’s somewhere, and you’re buying.”
“Why should I buy?”
“I can arrange for your director to explain that to you, as well, if you like. Now I’m going to put Millie on the phone with you, and the two of you will arrange a lunch date.”
“Oh, all right.”
“And, Lev, don’t show
up with the Mickey Mouse lunchbox.” She handed the phone to Millie. “He’s all yours.”
—
MILLIE FOUND the McDonald’s in Arlington and sat in the parking lot until she saw Quentin Phillips get out of a car with a companion. The companion was short, thickly built, and looked more like how she thought an agent of the Mossad would look, rather than an FBI executive. She followed them into the restaurant and gave Quentin her order, then commandeered a booth and waited for them to join her.
“Millie, this is Lev Epstein, assistant director of counterintelligence. Lev, this is Millicent Martindale.”
“Hi,” Epstein said, digging into a Quarter Pounder with cheese.
“Hi, yourself,” Millie said, following Holly’s advice not to try to charm him. “I’m all ears.”
Quentin flinched.
“Tell me what you know, first,” Epstein said.
“Agent Phillips has already told you what I know.”
“Oh, come on, you know more than that.”
“I’m here for no other reason than to find out what you know, Lev. I believe Holly Barker already explained that to you.”
“Okay. About a year before nine-eleven I got assigned to the San Francisco office,” he said, “and then I got assigned to mingle with students—I was pretty young at the time. My orders were to detect dissident students who might become a problem for us. I did not hang out at Hillel House.”
“So where did you hang out?”
“I adopted the pseudonym of Ali—I had spent two years in the Israeli army, and I’m very good with languages—so I spoke Arabic, which gave me some street cred with the Middle Eastern students, of which there were several dozen. I started going to discussion group meetings, which were informally organized and held at a different place every week or so. There were three people whose obvious assignment was to winkle out people like me, but I took them on and won their trust.” He paused.
“Did someone in that group resemble the parameters I outlined to Quentin yesterday?”
“No. There was no one in the group who could pass as a non-Arab. They were too angry, mostly. However, after a dozen meetings or so, an observer appeared. He was young—not much older than I—handsome, and wore expensive clothes. He came to only one meeting, and he never spoke, but he made an impression on everybody. When the meeting showed signs of breaking up, he left immediately, without speaking to anyone. I made a point of not asking anyone about him, but I overheard two other students talking about him, and one of them said that he was an assistant professor in the economics department who had specialized knowledge of the Middle Eastern oil industry, and that he taught some sort of course that dealt with the subject.”
“And you never learned his name?”
“No. And there was no point in asking about him, because nobody in the group seemed to know anything else about him, either, except that he was thought to be important.”
“Did you pursue identifying him?”
“I wanted to, but about that time we lost an agent to a firefight with a bank robber, and I was promoted into his position. I wrote a one-page memo for my files before starting the new job, saying what I just told you. No one was appointed to fill my slot, so I suppose my memo went the way of all paper. It’s probably in a file box in a salt mine somewhere out West.”
“Describe him thoroughly, please.”
Epstein closed his eyes and furrowed his brow. “Six feet, one-seventy, dark hair, fashionably cut, a permanent five-o’clock shadow, excellent teeth, skin on the pale side. If he’s your boy, then he probably had a European parent.” Epstein took another chomp of his Quarter Pounder. “Now tell me what you know.”
“I know what you just told me,” Millie replied. “That’s all.”
Epstein sighed. “All right, then this is what I want from you: if you’re able to put what I told you with information from somewhere else and you start a hunt for this guy, I want dibs on the search. Got it?”
“I’ll pass that on to Holly Barker,” Millie said. She wiped the fry grease off her fingers with a couple of paper napkins and offered him a hand. “Neither you nor Quentin is to speak about this with anyone anywhere. Thank you so much for a marvelous lunch. I’ll tell all my friends about this place.”
He shook her hand, she leaned over and whispered to Quentin, “Call me. I owe you dinner.”
Then she left the two of them to their sumptuous lunch.
25
STONE TAXIED onto runway 01 at Teterboro and smoothly shoved the throttles of the Citation M2 forward. The airplane accelerated as Pat Frank called the speeds: “Airspeed is alive . . . seventy knots . . . V1 and rotate.”
Stone pulled back on the yoke and concentrated on keeping two angled bars nestled together, which gave him the proper climb rate.
“Positive rate,” Pat said. “Gear and flaps coming up.” She dealt with both levers.
Stone changed frequencies. “New York departure, Citation 123TF, off Teterboro.”
“November One Two Three Tango Foxtrot, climb and maintain six thousand, direct BREZY,” Air Traffic Control replied.
Stone dialed in six thousand feet and selected the intersection BREZY on the flight plan, and the button Direct. “Citation 123TF, out of twelve hundred for six thousand.” They were off on the first leg, to Goose Bay, Labrador, in eastern Canada, the most popular airport en route to Greenland and Reykjavik.
ATC handed him off to Boston Center, which gave him an immediate climb to forty-one thousand feet, or flight level 410. Twenty minutes later he leveled off at that altitude.
“Free at last,” Pat said. “Thank God Almighty.”
“Have you been feeling unfree?” Stone asked, pressing buttons on the iPad-like controller and tuning in satellite radio and some jazz.
“Not until Kevin Keyes murdered two of my tenants,” she said. “Ever since then, though. I’m so happy to be back in the air at the start of a long flight.”
The satellite phone rang, and Stone pressed the appropriate icons to connect. “Hello?”
“Stone? It’s Bob Miller.”
“Hi, Bob, what’s up?”
“Just an update: we’ve checked the FAA computer for flight plans with Kevin Keyes’s name on them and came up with zilch.”
“He’ll turn up sometime, somewhere,” Stone said.
“Right, he will. What was the number I dialed?”
“The satphone on my airplane. I’m getting Pat Frank out of town.”
“Good idea. I was going to mention that.”
“You can reach me at this number or on my cell while we’re gone.”
“I’ll keep you updated. Bye.”
“Bye.” Stone broke the connection. “Did you get that?” he asked Pat.
“Most of it. I was fiddling with my headset. No luck with the FAA, huh?”
“Suppose he was flying as copilot?”
“Then his name wouldn’t be on the flight plan.”
“Oh, well.”
They flew for nearly three hours with a light tailwind and landed at Goose Bay, a large airport without a lot of traffic at the end of a fjord. They taxied to the Fixed Base Operator, Irving Aviation, and found a cozy operation with coffee and cookies on offer. Stone ordered fuel while Pat checked the weather and filed their next flight plan, to one of two Greenland airports. She returned shortly. “It’s Narsarsuaq,” she said.
Stone groaned inwardly. He had heard a lot about the former U.S. air base, dating to World War II, from other pilots. The field was up a Greenland fjord, rimmed with mountains, and no one wanted to go in there except in excellent weather. “Not Sondrestrom?” he asked. This was also an ex–U.S. air base, now operated by the Danish Air Force, but it had a very long runway and a localizer approach, easier than the non-directional-beacon approach at Narsarsuaq, and it often had better weather.
“It’s Narsarsuaq. The forecast is for six thousand overcast and light winds. That’s good for us.”
Stone shrugged. It would be a learning experience. They got back into the airplane, started the engines, worked through the checklist, and got a clearance from the tower. Their assigned altitude was 290 and their Mach speed, .67. “What the hell?” Stone said, outraged. “We filed for 410 and .70. Why are they giving us lower and slower?”
“The Canadians seem to think that the skies between here and Greenland are thick with airplanes, and since there’s no radar en route, they space them out to avoid conflicts.” She argued with the tower and got an increase in altitude to 310. “That’s the best we’re going to do,” she said.
Shortly, they were over the North Atlantic Ocean at 310, and Stone throttled back to Mach .67. The multi-function display in the center of the instrument panel displayed two rings around their current position, the first a dotted one that showed their range with a forty-five-minute fuel reserve, and a solid one that indicated where they would have dry tanks. “We’ve got fuel for Narsarsuaq,” he said, “even at the lower-than-best altitude.”
“It’s only a two-hour flight,” she said. She pointed at a mark on the Greenland shore, labeled SI. “That’s the first of two NDB beacons,” she said. “We’ll cross that at five thousand feet, then proceed to the next NDB, NA, which is on the field. If the forecast holds, we’ll be able to see the airport and make a visual approach. If it gets lower, we’ll have to fly the NDB approach.”
Stone had not flown an NDB approach since he was a student; they were hardly ever used in the States, and his airplane was not even equipped with the relevant radio. He knew he could fly it using GPS, though.
They were out of radio contact with ATC for an hour or so, then at the assigned point, they contacted Narsarsuaq Radio and told the operator their plan.
“That’s fine,” he said, “as long as you can see the mountains. We have no radar here, so we can’t advise you.”
Stone set up the vertical navigation feature to cross SI at five thousand feet, and at the appropriate point, the autopilot started them down. They were in solid instrument meteorological conditions, or IMC, until they passed six thousand feet, when the landscape below them emerged. Stone took a deep breath. All he could see was a snow-covered landscape with mountains. The fjord was filled with ice floes. “I’d hate to ditch here with all that ice in the water,” he said to Pat. “It would destroy the airplane. We’d never get into the raft.”
