Stuffy Brit! she thought. He’d been quiet ever since, but the effect of his verbal attack back in London had been to intimidate her from making her normal PA announcements, and that was irritating. She loved to get creative on the PA. Lying, indeed! It wasn’t lying; it was creativity. So what if the Queen was in India or somewhere else? Who cared? Passengers just wanted to hear a plausible explanation. She’d never worried about the truth.
Judy picked up the handset again and began to punch in the PA code, but hesitated. There was that unsettling feeling again that she was losing control. She closed her eyes and shook her head to expunge it. This is B.S., she told herself. I’m the queen of passenger control.
Judy pushed in the last digit for the PA system as she watched the sea of coach passengers. The sound of the PA coming alive triggered yet another wave of movement as they raised their heads to look at the speakers. It was a sight that usually excited her, a confirmation of her power to raise three hundred heads anytime she pleased.
Okay, people, this is your lead flight attendant once again. Remember I told you we were returning to London because our pilots told me to tell you that? Well, put your British pounds away once more because it turns out they’ve changed their minds again in the cockpit. Now we’re back to Plan A. We’re going on to Cape Town as planned.
She paused, trying to think of something else to say, and was startled that the words weren’t coming.
Ah, our engine problem was apparently cured, and for those of you who felt it was too hot, I’ve asked the pilots to boost the air-conditioning to its coolest level, so if we get you too cold, let one of us know.
Good! Judy thought. The old crowd-psychology lessons are kicking in. Tell them they’re too cold in order to psychologically cool them down.
She replaced the handset, feeling off balance. That was the strangest PA I’ve ever given, Judy thought, feeling a small flush of embarrassment coloring her cheeks. The sound of the passenger call buttons being pushed again was already chiming through her consciousness.
Judy turned to go back to the first-class galley as Elle and Cindy pushed through the curtains in search of her.
“Judy, help!” Elle said.
“What?”
Cindy arched a thumb in the direction of coach. “Several people are asking if this is the same engine that needed maintenance in London, and I think they’re scared.”
“I’m scared, too, if it is,” Elle added.
Judy crossed her arms and looked at them for several uncomfortable seconds. Elle was a strikingly tall blonde with angular features, and Cindy was a pretty five-foot-four compact brunette, but both of them now looked frazzled.
“You need to fix your eyeliner,” Judy said to Elle, receiving a startled reaction in response.
“Judy!” Cindy pressed. “We have to know the answer. Have the pilots said anything?”
Judy licked her lips and glanced toward the stairway leading to the upper deck and the cockpit before looking back at Cindy. “No. I’ll have to call them. Wait.” She turned and moved to the interphone handset again, punching in the two-digit cockpit number and relaying the question before hanging up and turning back to the women who were now standing with two more crew members.
“Yes, it is the same engine, but it’s an unrelated problem.” She relayed the remainder of Garth Abbott’s explanation about a false fire warning.
“So, all of you okay with that?” Judy asked, letting a little sarcasm slip into her tone.
Elle looked around at the others, then back at her. “We’re okay with that, Judy, but these people—they don’t believe us anymore. They’re pretty upset.”
“Didn’t they hear my PA?”
Cindy was nodding. “Yes. But, Judy, after that guy said what he said back in London, they … I mean …”
“They don’t believe a word any of us are saying,” Elle added.
Judy saw the movement in the corner of her eye and looked around as Janie Bretsen pushed through the curtain from first class. “Judy?”
“Oh, hell. What do you want, Bretsen?”
“We’ve got some problems in the cabin.”
Anger instantly replaced uncertainty, and Judy felt a tiny flash of gratefulness for the interruption. “I certainly do have problems, Bretsen, and they’re all you. Get back to your seat.”
“No. That physician …”
“I’ll take care of my own cabin, thank you,” Judy added.
“Dammit, listen to me!” Janie insisted, startling Judy and the others. “I’m assigned to this crew whether you like it or not. Dr. Logan isn’t far away from coming unglued, Judy. I’ve been talking to him, and the man is hair-trigger angry for a reason that …”
“Who gives a rat’s patootie? He gets out of that seat once more, I’ll handcuff him.”
“Cute, Judy. Good answer. Problem is, every time you come on the PA he tenses, as do most of them.” Janie looked around quickly at Cindy and Elle, then back at Judy. “By the way, are we all female on this crew?”
Judy snorted derisively. “What’s the matter, babe? Little bitty Janie hungry for a big, well-endowed man?”
“Oh, grow up, Judy. You know darn well what I mean. Are there any male flight attendants on this crew with hand-to-hand training? Someone physically intimidating?”
Judy was standing with her hands on her hips glaring at Janie Bretsen. “Not unless one of my girls had a sex change operation on layover.”
“Well,” Janie continued, “I doubt seriously that any female’s going to be able to contain some of the male passengers if they get physical. There are at least a half dozen really angry men in the second and third coach sections, if you hadn’t noticed, and two of them, physically, are really big boys.”
“So?”
“So, unless there’s a deadheading crew aboard of barrel-chested male pilots who can bench-press a small car, and you can talk them into violating the new rules and coming out of the cockpit, it’s all up to us if someone really loses control. Neither of the working pilots can come back and spend much time getting involved, just in case you’d forgotten that.”
A shadow of concern passed across Judy’s face. “So what do you expect them to do?”
Janie shook her head, glancing back over her shoulder quickly to make sure they weren’t being overheard. “I don’t know, but I’ve got a very bad feeling. Did you also know we have the chairman of the board of English Petroleum up there in three-F?”
“No.”
“Well, he is. Mr. MacNaughton.”
“MacNaughton …,” Judy replied, her lower jaw betraying her surprise.
“That’s right. And, I’d say you’ve already encountered problems with attitude in coach I haven’t seen, right?” Janie addressed the question to Cindy and Elle, who both nodded affirmatively.
“Okay. So what I’m saying is, I’d get that captain up to speed and get this quelled before it becomes a revolt.”
Judy’s hands had migrated to her hips again, her tone hardening. “Thank you very much, Professor Bretsen.”
Janie had her arms folded as she met Judy’s hostile stare head on. “You know, Jackson, I don’t care whether you like me or not, but if things get rough this evening, we’d better be a team. And right now I’d say you don’t even know the meaning of the word.”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CAMP DAVID, MARYLAND
11:10 A.M. EDT
The President of the United States fairly burst out of the door of the main lodge at Camp David with two casually dressed men close behind, their progress tracked, monitored, and coordinated by several Secret Service teams arrayed around the grounds of the Presidential retreat.
Don Nederman, a senior CIA analyst, took the President’s right flank while Ryan Jacobs, a deputy director of the FBI, kept pace on his other side.
“It’s really beautiful out here, isn’t it?” the President said as he turned up the lane toward one of the pathways into the woods.
“Certainly is,” Rya
n Jacobs said.
“All right, fill me in, guys. And by the way”—the President dodged a water-filled pothole in the road—“I appreciate your both coming up here on short notice. The helicopter ride smooth enough?”
“Absolutely,” Jacobs answered.
“Up this way,” the President said, pointing to an intersecting lane as he glanced at the two men. He’d assembled them into a special advisory team on terrorism months before with the job of filtering the daily avalanche of intelligence warnings, searching out ones that really mattered to the leader of the free world.
They were walking as fast as possible up a small incline, the President pushing himself, and slightly out of breath. “Okay … I read the alert you sent this morning, and I’m alarmed, too.
“And the Pentagon is wholly in sync with your worries?”
“Yes, sir.”
“After all, they’re in charge of pressing the battles.”
“We have everyone’s authority to brief you, Mr. President,” he replied, stifling a flash of growing irritation and the desire to remind the President that he knew his job, thank you very much.
“Okay,” the President was saying. “I understand we’re watching middle Africa for some sort of airborne chameleon … What’d you call it, a Trojan Horse?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But what I got from your message is that the broader intelligence community you guys represent isn’t taking it seriously because they think the target has to be North America. Right?”
The two men exchanged glances and nodded.
“I want to make sure I understand this. We’ve … made two major, seemingly unrelated arrests in the past week in two different places, and you two think the arrests are not only related, but that they may be a setup to mislead us. Right?” The President topped a small rise and picked up his pace.
“Yes, sir,” Ryan Jacobs responded as he struggled to keep up.
The President stopped suddenly and turned around, hands on hips. “Go ahead.”
Jacobs and Nederman both stopped.
“Yes, sir,” Jacobs replied. “This threat comes, we think, from some of the remaining overseas cells of the one we pretty much destroyed in Iraq last spring. Of course they’ve vowed revenge. The usual saber rattling and silly statements of defiance. But we also know this subgroup has some capability left, and we can’t find them. They’re well funded, and we think they’re trying to create a diversion. But we think they’ve inadvertently tipped their hand that the attack they’re planning is not going to be on our shores, but in Europe. That’s the opposite of what they want us to think.”
The President looked at both men in turn, then inclined his head down the lane. “Let’s continue walking. Keep going.”
Ryan Jacobs summarized the arrest in Canada of two men who had quietly sailed a forty-foot yacht into Halifax harbor and tried to clear customs at dockside with two thousand pounds of plastique explosive hidden in the hull, along with nearly a hundred pounds of biological lab apparatus.
“I figured that was just great police work,” the President said over his shoulder. “You know, a sharp officer with a sixth sense?”
“We thought so, too, at first,” Jacobs said, trying not to pant, and wondering how he’d ever make it through the FBI Academy physical training again in such lousy shape. “I think … we were all supposed to think so. Whew! Could you slow down a bit, sir?”
The President looked around and chuckled. “Going too fast?”
“The pace is all right for the CIA, sir,” Nederman said, grinning.
“All right. I’m just a bit out of shape.” Jacobs smiled back. “It happens to all headquarters types. Sir, the small things that made the Halifax officer suspicious could have been planted in order to accomplish precisely that result.”
“They wanted to get arrested?”
“Not the two men. They were probably dupes. Couriers. But whoever packed the boat almost certainly arranged the little flaws that caught her attention just to make sure they’d be caught. For instance, there was something off-kilter about a couple of odd, poorly built hatches leading to the bilge area.”
“Okay.”
“The officer spotted the incongruous hatches and couldn’t get a good answer out of the two men because we think they themselves didn’t know they’d been set up. If she hadn’t caught it, there would have been some anonymous phone tip, we think. They were both naturalized Canadians from Pakistan and ripe for manipulation, and we’re sure they were set up.”
“And the other incident?” the President asked.
“This one’s even more interesting, sir. This was an aircraft part, a hydraulic landing gear piston with components for a nuclear trigger carefully hidden within and shipped to an aircraft parts company in Atlanta with a great reputation for quality. Whoever sent the parts knew the contraband would be discovered by the Atlanta company, and they were right. The FBI arrested the two green-card Japanese who showed up to take delivery, but we think they were dupes, too.”
The President held up a hand to stop them again and pointed to a distant tree line. “An eagle. Just over the trees there.”
The three men squinted in the glare of the noonday sun for a few moments before the President put his hands on his hips and turned to face the two men. “So, we’ve got terrorists sending shipments into North America which could be used in weapons of mass destruction, and the masterminds intend that those shipments will be intercepted. Why? To divert us from Europe?”
Ryan nodded. “If we take the bait and decide these two intercepted shipments mean they’re attacking North America, the surviving splinter group knows we’ll get frantic and deploy all our investigatory talent to prevent a U.S. attack. While we’re scurrying around in a frenzy on our shores, we’re far less likely to see a European attack coming, even with all the forces we’ve got deployed in the Middle East.”
“Mr. President,” Don Nederman interjected, “there simply isn’t enough evidence to get the British, French, or Germans interested in this theory. They still think the U.S. is the real target. All the evidence we have seems to point over here, and that leaves these cutthroats an open field, provided they don’t make any mistakes on the Continent and call attention to themselves before they’re ready.”
“How would they move a weapon of mass destruction into Europe?”
“Could be by rail through a weak border,” Ryan continued, “or by air through a type of threat Langley’s labeled a flying Trojan Horse, or even through incremental shipments over time through normal commercial means.”
“What, like using FedEx to send in their anthrax?”
“Almost that bizarre, but we’re convinced the method of choice will be a commercial airliner either pretending to be on a regular flight or actually on a regular flight, and we think this morning’s alert that the threat will come in the next forty-eight hours from middle Africa dovetails perfectly. We think, in other words, that this is it. Imagine delivering a weapon by using one of thousands of regularly scheduled airline flights. No hijacking. No assaults on the cockpit. No using the airplane itself as a bomb but as a delivery system. No one aboard knows there’s something deadly in the cargo hold or the wheel well. If someone on the ground is waiting for the flight, that operative could use simple radio control to explode the aircraft on approach over Rome, or Paris, for instance, or just pop a bagful of dust and unleash a thousand pounds of anthrax or something else equally terrifying. A nuclear weapon is possible, but I vote for a biothreat. Our satellites do a very good job of spotting fissile material from space whenever its being moved, and they know it. If the warning is right, then we’ve got a chance to intercept this because we know what to watch for.”
“And that would be?”
“Any commercial or private jet big enough to carry such a weapon. We need your immediate authority to track virtually everything coming north into Europe for the next few days, examine flights on the ground before departure, keep tight communication with a
ll affected airlines, and look for anything out of the ordinary, no matter how slight. We have the Seventh Fleet in the Mediterranean as a buffer, but we need a presidential finding.”
The President looked at each man in turn and nodded. “You’ve got it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
ABOARD MERIDIAN FLIGHT SIX
5:15 P.M. Local
Judy Jackson pushed through the curtains into the first-class cabin and walked quickly to the small closet at the pointed front end of the 747’s main deck. She pretended to search for something there, then reclosed the door and started walking slowly back, catching the eyes of as many passengers as possible as she approached the passenger she’d tangled with before over the PA. She had noticed his briefcase was sometimes beneath the seat in front, but more often on his lap, and the image was making her suspicious.
Janie Bretsen was working away on something with a pen and paper in her window seat, a small set of reading glasses balanced on her nose, and she looked up as Judy approached.
Brian Logan had spotted her as well and the pupils of his eyes retracted to mere pinpoints when he saw who was approaching him She could almost feel the animosity radiating from him. Janie had said he was on the verge of losing control, and his leather briefcase was on his lap again, his hands resting on it protectively.
“Would you like me to put that in the overhead for you?” she asked as nicely as she could force herself to sound.
“No,” he replied, his eyes still boring into hers.
Judy leaned over slightly toward him. “Doctor, I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot back there, but surely you can understand my reaction when you grabbed the PA microphone.”
There was no response, and Judy felt a strange crawling sensation up her back.
“So, ah …” she continued, “… I just wanted to apologize for being rough with you. Of course, you were pretty rough with me, but …”
“Leave me alone!” Brian Logan snapped. “Go arrest the rest of the passengers.”
Turbulence Page 16
