Lockout

by John J. Nance

  “Yeah, Jaime, I get that.”

  “Yes, but what you probably don’t get, and why I was trying to at least read through everything, as your lawyer, and consider all the implications, is that if one of our guys speaks out of school in a bar or whispers something in a whorehouse at midnight, even if he’s only guessing and BS’ing, if that crosses their line and they find out, we’re done, man! Investment gone. Game over.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Jaime.”

  Jaime Lopez released the contents of his lungs in a long and weary sigh. Ron Barrett was an energetic guy but thick as a rock sometimes, and his almost total lack of understanding of legal obligations was a constant trial.

  Jaime studied his shoes and mentally calmed the growing need to explode before trying one more time to get across the staggering scope of what had just been promised.

  “Okay … what I’m getting at, Ron, is that when it comes to anything that happened with their aircraft or even rumors thereof, you just promised to nursemaid, monitor, shadow, and control every single solitary employee, full-time or part-time, and their families and friends and kids and concubines, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, essentially forever!”

  Aboard Gulfstream N266SD

  Holding a relatively fresh cup of coffee in hand from the unattended galley, Air Force Lieutenant General Paul Wriggle eased himself back into the left seat of the business jet and glanced at Lieutenant Colonel Don Danniher in the right seat. There was no trace of a smile on either man’s face.

  “That was quite an act we just put on, Don. Do you think they bought it?”

  “You mean, that we’re on a mission for the Secret Service?”

  “Yep. Will they comply and stay quiet? Did I tell them too much?”

  “The Barrett guy’s an emotional moron, General. He’s terrified, and his lawyer … who’s a bright guy … will do his best to keep him and their entire operation quiet. Probably about now he’s explaining to Barrett the promise he just signed. And I think you had to tell them what you told them.”

  “That’s good. Of course, we’re not using their storage services again in this life.”

  “Amen,” Danniher replied. The two men sat in silence for a few seconds before Don Danniher glanced over at his boss, a thin smile on his face.

  “Sir, may I speak frankly?”

  “Certainly.”

  “If I called Central Casting in Hollywood and ordered an actor to play a Secret Service agent, I would be upset if they sent you. Sir.”

  “So, what are you saying, Don? That I’m a bad actor?”

  “No sir, but you are far too authoritative to be a Secret Service agent. You look like and sound like and are, in fact, an air force general officer, sir. Not a weasel with a badge. Where’d you get that thing, anyway?”

  “Directly from the president.”

  “Really? The current one?”

  “Can’t tell you, Don. But it is a real badge and a real commission directly from POTUS,” referring to the acronym for the president of the United States. “Only problem is, even the Secret Service doesn’t know about this little commission. And, by the way, our Secret Service guys are not weasels.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, Don … we’ve got some serious thinking to do,” Wriggle continued.

  “I’m the one who agreed to park our bird with Mojave to get it away from prying eyes around Colorado Springs, but we’re going to face this need again very quickly. We’re not going to have the budget to resume testing for at least six months. So where can we fly it and store it in the meantime, so no one’s aware of it?”

  “There are still hangars available at Groom Lake in Nevada, General, but we rejected that choice because of the intense satellite scrutiny. If the Russians and NSA aren’t watching every move there, a hundred civilian UFO hunters are.”

  “Yeah, that’s all we need,” Wriggle snorted. “Big headlines: US government flying space aliens on strange Airbus A330 … with the following tail number!”

  The two men fell silent for a few minutes before Paul Wriggle shook his head again.

  “Okay … let’s keep thinking,” Wriggle continued. “Provided we can make the swap with Pangia today, we’ll need a hiding place inside three days.”

  “How high did Sharon have to go in Pangia’s management, General?”

  “Not high at all, since she never called.”

  Don Danniher looked startled.

  “Really? When did you and Sharon arrange that?”

  “Minutes before. I taught her a code phrase that, if she hears it, means to invert whatever I just said.”

  “What is it?”

  “You have no need to know, now do you, Colonel,” Paul answered, smiling at the copilot.

  “I guess not.”

  “I wasn’t kidding when I said I know Rick Hastings, their CEO. He’s a fellow retired air force general, but I haven’t called him yet. Sharon found a civilian at one of the FBO’s in Tulsa who agreed to go over to the other side to check Pangia’s ramp and make sure our airplane hasn’t been painted yet … as well as check the fuel load. “

  The cockpit door opened, and Major Sharon Wallace slid into the space between the two pilot seats without a word. Paul Wriggle looked at her and frowned.

  “What’s the matter, Sharon? Did you get through?”

  “Yes, sir. A line supervisor at one of the fixed base operators at Tulsa International. The fellow called me back and said he saw our airplane, November Three-Three-Romeo Mike, on hardstand eighteen in front of that giant hangar in Tulsa.”

  “The old World War II aircraft factory?”

  “Yes. He also said that hardstand twenty is open, so we can probably just slide our A330 into that spot, and they’ll send a fuel truck out to give us enough for the flight back to the Springs.”

  “Excellent.”

  “One other thing.” She handed him a piece of paper.

  “I just found this on the BBC wire. One of Pangia’s international flights is in trouble. Sketchy details, an unexplained course reversal on a Tel Aviv to JFK flight, the crew is radio silent, and it may be a hijacking into the Mideast. I’m sure Pangia is dealing with a kicked over ant hill about now.”

  “Please explain the deeply worried look, Sharon,” he pressed.

  “Because, sir, the plane involved is an Airbus A330, and this is going to put an internal spotlight on their A330 fleet, which means we should make the swap as soon as humanly possible.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Cockpit, Pangia 10 (2220 Zulu)

  “Jeez, Dan, we’re idiots!” Jerry Tollefson said as he lunged for a small panel on the center console.

  “What?” Dan Horneman jerked his head to the left to read Tollefson’s expression, alarmed at the tone.

  “What do we do with the transponder when the radios are out?”

  “I don’t … oh, Christ! You’re right. The radio failure code”

  “Hell yes! We should have been squawking 7600 on the transponder.”

  “Probably no one out here to see the code anyway, Jerry. Don’t chew on yourself. I didn’t think about it either.”

  “Yeah, but air traffic control’s radar goes out a lot further than they admit.” He dialed in 7600 and sat back, looking anything but relieved. “I’m assuming this thing is still transmitting. If so, when we’re approaching Newfoundland they’ll figure it out. Dammit! I can’t believe we forgot that!”

  “This cirrus layer is clearing,” Dan remarked, peering out of the forward windscreen at the starfield beginning to come into view. “I kind of expected it would be with us all the way.”

  “Doesn’t solve our radio problem, but it may help air traffic control keep everyone comfortably clear. I mean, we’ll follow the assigned routing exactly, but they need to know we can’t hear them or respond.”

  Dan chuckled. “Somehow I think they’ve probably got that one figured out. We’re at least one position report behind.”


  The two of them fell silent for a minute until Jerry gestured outside.

  “This really unsettles me, Dan. I know we can easily call Kennedy Approach or New York Center by cell phone as soon as we get over Canada, but what if there’s a war going on down there and they’re not talking to us because they can’t.”

  “A war?”

  “Well … we’re out of touch with the world, okay?”

  “I doubt the planet’s coming to grief, Jerry. We’re the ones with the radio problem and a strange power failure.”

  “You think it’s all us?”

  “Yes,” Dan replied. “There’s zero static on our VHF radios, which means our radios are dead, not theirs. Ditto with the satcom … no lock, no sign the unit’s working. We’re not even sure the transponder is working. I mean, I see the little reply light flashing …”

  “That means the radar beams are hitting us, Dan. And boy, look at that.” Jerry said, pointing to the transponder readout. “We’re … what, 700 miles west of Ireland and that thing is blinking like a hundred beams are hitting us per minute.”

  “Could mean it’s malfunctioning, too.”

  “You try the high frequency radios? I mean, it may be World War II technology, but …”

  “I tried, Jerry. No static, no nothing.”

  “I pulled out my cell phone a minute ago, and, believe it or not, for a second I got a signal.”

  Dan laughed ruefully. “The captain left his phone on, huh? So that’s the problem! Your cell phone’s fried the equipment!”

  “Yeah, right,” Jerry replied, smiling in spite of himself.

  The starfield overhead was in full bloom now, the constellations coming clear as Dan let his mind drift away from the radio problem and admire the beauty of the celestial show they’d been denied for the past few hours. He found himself searching for Polaris, the North Star, to the right, but couldn’t be sure which one it was. Sometimes this time of year he could see the Aurora Borealis, the so-called Northern Lights, as they danced like moving curtains of colored light over the North Polar Region.

  Strange, he thought. Polaris has to be there of course, but I can’t find it and I can’t even see the big dipper. I must be really tired or something.

  Dan tore his gaze away from the window and reached down to dial up the lights on his side of the cockpit as he noticed a distant glow far away to the right. He peered out the right side window for a better look at what had to be light filtering through the bottom of an overcast beneath them. But that made no sense, given their position practically over the middle of the North Atlantic. The Azores were way to the south, to their left, and out of sight, even with a clear sky.

  Must be the lights of a fishing fleet, he thought, recalling the intense floods of commercial fishing vessels working off the Washington coast as a kid. Or maybe those were a collection of deep sea drilling rigs, though he remembered those as being hundreds of miles to the north. Whatever they were, it was an interesting phenomenon.

  Dan returned to the task of boosting the cockpit lights as Jerry started paging through diagrams of the electrical system on his iPad, searching for an answer. Dan watched for a few seconds before forcing his attention to the various panels and displays, trying to sense if anything was amiss that they hadn’t seen. And for some reason, at the end of his scan and almost as a personal joke, he decided to consult the all but forgotten little mechanical compass at the top of the center windscreen, the so-called “whiskey” compass which owed its name to open cockpit days when cheap bourbon was often used to float the internal compass rose when the normal alcohol solution leaked out.

  Dan pulled out a pocket flashlight and pointed the tiny beam on the compass rose, mechanically reading the numbers.

  Zero nine five degrees … zero nine six, something like that. He turned off the light and automatically flipped the number around in his mind, knowing their planned heading was 278 degrees magnetic. Pilots had an easy mental shortcut—a crutch—for quickly adding or subtracting 180 degrees, the same way pilots flip the compass heading of one runway number around to read the reciprocal. Start with zero-nine-five degrees, add 200, subtract 20, and in this case, voila! 275 degrees. That would be about right, he thought.

  Dan replaced the flashlight in his pocket, overriding the sudden suspicion that he was missing something.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CIA, Langley, Virginia (5:30 p.m. EST / 2230 Zulu)

  “Sir, you are not going to believe this!”

  As Jason Duke knew well, the use of such a breathless phrase was not the most judicious or professionally sophisticated way of approaching a veteran CIA leader—especially if delivered while leaning into his office doorway in early evening. But with all the mind-numbing routine intelligence traffic he’d handled over the past few months as the man’s overeducated gopher, breaking the news of this unfolding situation was almost a breath of fresh air.

  Walter Randolph—a rumpled-looking, 40-year veteran spook and now deputy director of Central Intelligence—motioned the younger intelligence officer in with an unmistakable gesture to close the door behind him. Randolph took the reading glasses off his craggy face and sat back in his chair, focusing on the younger man while nibbling on the earpiece of his glasses.

  He looks ridiculously like Lyndon Johnson when he does that, Jason thought.

  “What, exactly, am I not going to believe, Jason? You sound like an overly exuberant intern.”

  “The Pangia flight, sir. We pulled the passenger list. Moishe Lavi is aboard.”

  Randolph carefully closed a classified folder he’d been studying and leaned forward to place it on his blotter before responding. He looked up, studying Jason Duke’s face, his hands folded in front of him.

  “You are correct, Jason. I don’t believe you.”

  “I confirmed the inbound information with Homeland Security. It’s an Israeli passport, non-diplomatic, but it’s the number we have in our database.”

  “What the hell would Lavi be doing aboard an American flag carrier? He only flies El Al.”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Who’s with him?”

  “A secretary, apparently, from the Israeli Defense Force, by the name of Ashira Dyan. Her passport checks as well.”

  “We know Ashira. She’s his official IDF mistress. Any idea why Lavi is inbound?”

  “Well, why he was inbound, we think, may have something to do with the UN, but we’ve found no appointments or arrangements for him yet. Not even a car company to pick him up at Kennedy, which is a bit odd.”

  “You think?” Walter Randolph rolled his eyes. “Newly defeated warhawk prime minister of Israel who’s used to an entourage of dozens buys a commoner’s ticket to the US, and, what, a cousin is going to meet him in a beat up Ford?”

  “We’re checking all the car companies.”

  “I don’t doubt that, I’m just … holy crap! And this airplane is headed right back to Tel Aviv?” Randolph was on his feet and pacing.

  “The airline says their airplane is electronically reporting that it’s still westbound toward New York, and all the reported GPS coordinates are fiction as well. They’re saying it’s not possible for someone to mess with that automated datastream in flight, so they’re clueless as to what’s happening. But European air traffic control confirms that if the aircraft remains on the same eastbound course, it will pass over Tel Aviv hours from now. The aircraft came from Hong Kong before Tel Aviv, so if there’s no one in control up there and the computers steer for Hong Kong after passing Tel Aviv, they’ll pass just south of Tehran.”

  “Wonderful excuse for the Iranians to overreact. Do the Brits know Lavi is aboard?” Randolph asked.

  “Not yet, I think. But I need you to sign off on informing MI-6 formally.”

  “Do it. They’re on our side … usually.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where’s the director?”

  “Home, sir.”

  Randolph took a deep breath. “Very well, I’ll wak
e him.”

  “It’s that serious, you think? They’re still hours from the Mediterranean.”

  Walter Randolph fixed Jason with a questioning gaze which quickly morphed to amusement. “A little reality test, Jason, if you please. The man who wanted to commit Israel to a preemptive nuclear strike on Tehran in the last few months is thrown out of office when his government collapses and even his supporters react to the exposure of his plan with utter horror. The head of the IDF revolts, and the president of the United States has to publicly flail and repudiate our ironclad ally for even momentarily thinking such thoughts. Iran remains on what for us would be DEFCON 2,” referring to the nation’s defense readiness condition, “a hair-trigger from launching one of the nukes we know the mullahs have to wipe Israel off the map, which is their stated goal. Then Moishe Lavi leaves office ranting and raving that he will not give up until they are neutralized. Now this same wild-eyed man ends up on a rogue jetliner with an American flag on the tail … and did I mention that the mullahs don’t trust us? So the damned French-built A330 is headed back toward the Middle East with no radio contact and apparently a clueless crew, and even though the plane is still over the English Channel, and, as you say, hours away from the Med, it’s headed straight for Tel Aviv, which, coincidentally, is a very short distance from Tehran, geopolitically speaking. So, who do you think we should notify? Walter Cronkite?”

  “He’s … dead, sir.”

  “Which is a damn shame, but you get the point.”

  “Yes, sir. I do see your point. Ah, points.”

  “I’m not beating you up, son … you brought me into it immediately … but this is potentially a very big problem. A White House Situation Room level problem. And guaranteed, Defense Intelligence is all over this as we speak. We can’t let them get ahead of us.”