Turbulence

by Nance, John J. ;

They exchanged handshakes and sat down, David warily eyeing the general, who had a canary-eating grin on his face. “So, David, you’re probably wondering why I called this little meeting.”

  “Yes, sir. I recall some four-letter words about my testifying and an order to haul my posterior over here within thirty minutes.”

  The general laughed and checked his watch. “And you made it with two minutes to spare. Good man.”

  “May I defend myself, sir?” David asked.

  General Overmeyer shook his head no and leaned forward. “No. The FAA administrator called me three minutes before you walked in to confirm that she asked you to testify, but I already knew that.”

  “Then … I guess I’m confused.”

  “Well, you really should have called me first, but that’s okay. David, I’ve never explained why I agreed to loan you to the FAA last year.”

  “No, sir, you didn’t.”

  “Well, I wanted one of us over there to keep an eye on this increasing problem with passenger rage because of a possible terrorist connection.”

  Byrd looked puzzled. “What?”

  Overmeyer nodded. “Both DIA and CIA have been sweating bullets that some remaining terrorist group might arrange to manipulate a passenger rage situation on a civilian airliner and turn it into an attack.”

  David Byrd was glancing from face to face. “But how? Airborne anger incidents are spontaneous by nature.”

  “Are they?” General Overmeyer asked, his face serious. “Can we be absolutely sure of that? Or could the right group of passengers be goaded into an explosion of rage at a moment convenient for someone with other plans?”

  “I don’t know,” David replied.

  “Neither do we.” The general sighed. “Mr. Monson and Mr. Smith here are going to brief you on the nightmarish possibilities as they see them. It’s all Top Secret, or Top Secret Crypto, and as of now, you do have a need to know at my direction. We’ll talk later.” The general rose from the chair and headed to the door as he motioned to Monson.

  “Billy, you’ve got the floor.”

  HEADQUARTERS, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY,

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  1:00 P.M. EDT

  Among the countless messages moving through the labyrinth of “the Company’s” warrens at Langley, a small communiqué from one of the growing force of clandestine operatives working for the U.S. had made its way through initial screening to the electronic “in-basket” of the appropriate working group. By six-thirty in the morning, the two-man, one-woman group had read what the operative had presumably risked his life to provide, and had decided it was a missing piece to an emerging puzzle.

  “What we don’t have a clue about yet is what type of aircraft, or the type of weapon,” one of the team said as she explained their conclusions to a deputy director.

  “But,” one of the men interrupted, “what we can conclude from this report is the following: Provided this is accurate, the origin of the aircraft carrying the weapon will be Africa, and I mean sub-Saharan Africa. That probably means an intercontinental flight.”

  “Something like a Boeing 777 or a 747 headed for Europe?”

  “Right, or an Airbus 340, a DC-10, or an MD-11. Any of those. We give that a high confidence level.”

  “But we’ve no idea who the target might be?”

  They shook their heads in unison. “Any city in Europe.”

  “Timing?”

  “Within the next forty-eight hours. And our guess is the agent will be biological, such as weaponized anthrax, or something equally terrifying. All they have to do to spread it all over a civilian population is hide a bag of it in the wheelwell. The gear comes out, so does the agent.”

  The deputy director nodded and stood.

  “Okay. We sound the alert and start watching everything that flies over Africa for the next two days.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GATE B-33,

  CHICAGO O’HARE AIRPORT, ILLINOIS

  12:01 P.M. CDT

  In the crowded boarding lounge Martin Ngume felt himself jerk awake before his eyelids fluttered open. A momentary panic gripped him as he searched for a clock, wondering if he had overslept and missed his flight.

  There was a digital clock across the concourse, its readout showing a minute past noon. His flight would leave at 1:30 P.M.

  Martin relaxed, but for no more than a second, his mind flashing back to the chilling news from South Africa that his mother’s tiny house had a padlock swinging from the only door.

  Why padlocked? Where was she?

  There was no telephone in the house. The shanties in Soweto barely had bathrooms, and to use a phone, you had to walk a quarter mile to a dusty store—which is what she did once a month on Sunday to receive a call from her son.

  But this time the phone had been answered by someone else, a stranger who didn’t know his mother. It had taken several more calls to find a villager who would agree to make the trek to her house, and more calls to get him back on the phone for word on what he’d found.

  “She is not there.”

  “You looked inside?”

  “I could not look inside; there is a padlock on the door.”

  “A … what?”

  “A little padlock. A combination padlock, you know. It’s on the door.”

  “Did you ask anyone if she’s been seen?”

  “Yes, but no one knows where she is.”

  Martin rubbed his eyes. He’d been without sleep for two days, trying to find out what had happened to her—trying to find out why a sick old woman who’d used every penny she could save to send her son to school in America was nowhere to be found.

  He was panicked, and he couldn’t help it. He’d ditched his classes for two days to stay on the phone and by the phone, but in the end, there was nothing to do but find a way to fly home. There was simply no one else in South Africa who seemed to care enough to search for her.

  “Excuse me,” a feminine voice said from his left. “You okay?”

  He swept his eyes past the empty seat to the row behind and met the eyes of an attractive woman who’d been watching him.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “You looked so startled when you woke up. I thought you were going to break your neck the way you were sleeping,” she said, smiling.

  There was a bank of public phones to the right, just down the concourse, and his mind had been heading there, but he focused now on her words.

  “I’m sorry.… I don’t understand.”

  “You were falling asleep, and your head would slowly drop down, like this …” She let her head loll forward, then jerked it back up to look at him. “And then you’d pop back up, and do it again.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, feeling somehow guilty.

  “Nothing to be sorry about. But my neck hurt just watching you.”

  He nodded, returning her smile. Normally, he would be pleased that a pretty American woman was concerned about him, but all he could think about now was that bank of telephones, and whether his phone card would still work. He thrust his right hand in his pants pocket, fingering the small amount of cash there. Eighty dollars and a Visa credit card were all he had to get him through the next few days. The plane ticket was another matter. The kindness of his landlord had brought tears when she told him not to worry, that she would get him a round-trip ticket.

  “It will take time to repay you,” he told her.

  “It costs me nothing,” she said, explaining that his three roommates had relayed his plight to her. “I’ve got all these frequent-flyer miles, Martin, and no time to use them. It’s no big deal.”

  She’d only been able to get him a standby listing on the first leg to London, and he approached the podium again now, standing quietly to one side until the agent had finished setting up her computer keyboard before checking in the flight.

  “Excuse me, I …”

  “I’m not ready yet, sir. I’ll make an announcement. Please have a seat.”


  “I’m on standby, you see, and I’m worried …”

  “SIR! I said, please sit down and I will make an announcement when I’m ready. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Martin turned and headed for an idle pay phone. His call went through to the little store his mother frequented, but no one answered.

  He closed his eyes again, trying to convince himself that she had simply gone on some small adventure. Maybe she’d decided to take the train to Cape Town, he thought, knowing better. She was afraid of traveling, and her eyesight was so poor now that she sometimes had trouble walking through her own house without stumbling.

  And the padlock.

  He knew there had been trouble with the landlord. The man had threatened to evict her a year ago, and Martin had taken an extra campus job to send money to remove the threat. Could the landlord have padlocked the house and thrown her out? Surely not.

  But when he’d thought about everything else, it still came down to one fact: A woman who hadn’t left her village in thirty years was suddenly missing, and her house was padlocked.

  His brow furrowed in anxiety, Martin returned to his seat, hardly noticing the woman who had spoken to him before.

  But she was still watching him, and he met her eyes once again and managed a smile, a difficult feat with his heart so low. She appeared to be in her mid thirties and was exceptionally tall and carefully groomed with just a hint of makeup. Her sandy hair was worn shoulder length. Not beautiful, he thought, but a striking Caucasian female.

  “You’re going to London?” she asked.

  “No, Cape Town,” Martin said, and in spite of himself, began to tell her why, stopping a few minutes later when he realized he’d become lost in his own anxiety.

  “You think she’s still in the house, don’t you?” the woman asked. “You’re afraid something’s happened to her, and I don’t blame you, but I’m sure she’s all right.”

  He looked into her eyes and saw a warmth there that began to penetrate his defenses, unleashing some of the wrenching fear and loneliness he’d bottled up, causing tears to well up no matter how hard he tried to be the strong, impervious, twenty-one-year-old straight-A scholarship Northwestern University senior his mother was so proud of. Fleeting thoughts of the classes he was missing passed through his mind. But he had to get home, and fast. That was the only thing he could think about now. He could make up the classes later.

  Twenty feet away, Jimmy Roberts checked the front of his ticket envelope and shifted a bag to his other shoulder as he looked up at the gate number. The aroma of food from a nearby overpriced fast food snack bar was annoying him. He was hungry, but so far nothing they were hawking in the terminal was appealing, especially at the prices they were charging.

  “Is this it, Jimmy?” His wife asked as she lowered her tote bag toward the filthy concourse floor, then thought better of it and pulled it back to her shoulder again.

  “Yeah, darlin’, I think so. B-Thirty-three.”

  The grossly overboosted voice of a gate agent down the concourse was growling an indecipherable announcement over the PA system, wiping out for the moment the elevator music playing in the background.

  “That’s a long line,” Brenda said, looking toward the gate’s check-in counter.

  “Well,” Jimmy began, “why don’t you go find us a couple of seats while I wait.”

  She looked around, confirming her initial impression. “Aren’t any seats here, hon. I’ll just stand here with you, and keep the women away.”

  Jimmy turned to look at his wife. He wasn’t the catch. She was. He couldn’t help but smile, she was so beautiful—blond hair, five feet six, perfectly sculpted in her jeans. Jimmy was acutely aware that her passage was constantly watched by most of the men in the vicinity, like an array of radar antennae tracking a target as it flowed past. As long as they kept their distance, Jimmy figured, their interest in his lady was somewhere between amusing and flattering.

  God Almighty, I’m a lucky guy! he thought to himself for the thousandth time. Lucky to have her as his wife and lover, and unbelievably lucky that she liked to enter raffles and sweepstakes, although he’d always teased her about it—until the registered letter arrived with news that they’d won a free international trip on Meridian Airlines anywhere they wanted to go.

  “Why South Africa?” Jimmy had asked when the shock wore off and she’d decided on a destination.

  “’Cause I’ve never been there, and because I had an uncle who lived there a long time ago and I’ve always wanted to see it, and because …”

  “Okay, okay, okay!” he’d said, chuckling. “We’ll go to South Africa. Hell, darlin’, the only place I’ve ever really visited is Dallas, and that was just one time. South Africa will really be somethin’ to write home about.”

  The flight to Chicago through DFW had been exciting. They’d been on an airplane before, flying Southwest to El Paso once for a funeral, which almost broke their meager bank account. Meridian was different, Brenda thought. They served food instead of peanuts, but the flight attendants all seemed kind of distant and angry. Nothing like Southwest, where they were all friendly good old boys and girls just having fun, as Jimmy put it.

  “I ought to call Roy and make sure everything’s okay,” Jimmy said. Brenda recognized the look. They were scratching out a living running a small auto-repair garage on the western edge of Midland, and Jimmy’s brother had promised to look after things for two weeks. The whole idea of leaving the business in anyone else’s hands had terrified Jimmy, but his brother had a business degree and should be able to take care of things, even if he didn’t understand the mechanics Jimmy employed.

  “Hon, you leave your brother alone. He can handle it.”

  “He’ll probably fire everyone before nightfall as soon as he finds out how strange they are. We’ve got a weird bunch, Brenda.” Jimmy pointed to an overhead sign. “You want to try that rest room?” The other one she’d entered down the concourse had been so filthy she’d come out immediately with her face all screwed up.

  “I’ll just hold it,” Brenda said. “You wouldn’t believe how bad that other one was. I’ve seen outhouses less disgusting.”

  “This whole place is filthy,” he agreed, stepping back slightly as a skycap pushed a wheelchair-bound passenger past him.

  There was a commotion a few feet away in the middle of the concourse, and Jimmy looked up to see two airport cops running past on foot with no apparent quarry in sight.

  The line slowly oozed toward the counter until just two people stood ahead of them. A loud voice caught Jimmy’s attention. He glanced up, surprised to hear one of the female agents raising her voice at a customer.

  “Lady, you’re not on this flight. Okay? Okay? What part of the phrase ‘no reservation’ don’t you understand?”

  The passenger, a petite woman in a conservative suit, was holding a computer case and almost straining to see over the counter. She couldn’t be more than four foot eleven, Jimmy figured, maybe an even five feet at best.

  “Look, it’s got to be there,” the woman was saying in a calm voice. Jimmy had to strain to hear her.

  “Your name again?” the gate agent said, scowling as she glanced up at the long line of other passengers now being held up by the small woman before her.

  “Douglas. Sharon Douglas.”

  The agent began pecking at the computer keyboard, then let out a loud sigh.

  “As I told you, Ms. Douglas, you’re not on this flight, and I’ve got no seats left. We’re sold out. If you’ll have a seat in the waiting area, when the flight’s gone I’ll see what I can do about getting you another reservation.”

  The woman had been rummaging through her purse, and she looked up suddenly and pushed a folded piece of paper across to the agent.

  “What’s this?”

  “My confirmation number.”

  The agent took it gingerly, as if it were contaminated. She examined the print, then slid it back.

  “This is for another date.”


  “Is this the sixteenth?” Sharon Douglas asked evenly.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then you misread it. Look again, please.”

  Jimmy glanced at Brenda, who was listening to the same interchange, a dumbfounded expression on her face. She looked up at him, eyebrows raised in an “I don’t believe this!” expression.

  With another sharp sigh and a disgusted shake of her head, the agent once again took the paper, this time letting an arched eyebrow register her surprise.

  “Well … I wish you’d shown me this before.”

  “I gave you the confirmation number. That’s all a passenger should have to do with an electronic ticket. That shows I’m confirmed on this flight to London, seat fourteen C. I expect a boarding pass for that seat.”

  “Well, Ms. Douglas, you can expect anything you want. That seat’s already taken.”

  The woman shook her head slightly, as if trying to expunge the growing feeling that she’d entered some alien world. “Okay. You know what? I really don’t think you’re listening to me, so I want you to call your supervisor.”

  The agent shook her head. “He doesn’t have time to come over here.”

  “I’m not asking you; I’m instructing you. Call your supervisor. I know your company’s rules, and you have no choice when that request is made.”

  “Call him yourself,” the agent sneered. “They don’t pay me enough money to listen to rude people.”

  “I’m being rude?” Sharon Douglas stood with her jaw open for a few seconds, trying to fathom the chutzpah of someone who could so blatantly accuse a customer of her own behavior. “Listen to me,” she told the agent. “Listen carefully. Your job is on the line here. You do not have the right to refuse. Call … your … supervisor!”

  The agent leaned toward Sharon Douglas with a smirk and widened her eyes in a mocking gesture. “But I AM refusing! How’s that? I’m not calling my supervisor—and, lady, if you try to order me around once more, you’re out of this line. Oh, and when you write your little complaint letter, be sure to spell my name correctly.” She fingered her ID badge and held it out contemptuously as the next customer in line—a tall man in a business suit—moved forward suddenly and tapped the counter for emphasis.