“But he’ll still be clear of Libyan airspace, right?”
“Yes, sir. No question. NRO says they’ve checked and rechecked these projections to exhaustion, and they’ve got a host of videotapes rolling.”
The computer projection of the Libyan border showed it jutting out more sharply to the west as the jet flew north and the boundary edged to its westernmost point. The four MiGs were moving rapidly behind the 747, now clearly in Algerian airspace, though the Algerians had inadequate radar coverage in that section of the Sahara to monitor anyone accurately.
“NRO says at least two of the missile warheads are in active tracking mode,” the Air Force major said, his background some eight years in F-15 Eagles. “They have tone. In other words, one missile now has locked him up. There’s a second … and now a third.”
Bill Sanderson took a deep breath as he watched the high-speed geometry unfold.
“How much longer do we have with this satellite?” Sanderson asked, aware of the echo of his question being passed to Chantilly and the almost immediate answer.
“Four minutes, but there’s no gap. The next one is in position over the horizon now.”
“We have lockup for missiles five, six, and seven … and eight. Eight missiles locked.”
The fighters were now in four-abreast formation trailing the 747 by eight miles.
“He’s three miles from the border as it curves in toward him,” the major was saying. “Closest passage in forty seconds.”
“They’re going to try engineering the wreckage into Libya,” Sanderson said. “Bet you anything they’ve locked up the right engines to force a right turn after impact. They’ll fire four now at the right side, then finish him off when he’s clearly across the border.”
There had been flashing red aircraft beacons in the night sky to the east for the previous ten minutes, but no one aboard Meridian Flight Six had noticed in the initial confusion following the depressurization attempt. Suddenly a startled passenger on the right side spotted the other aircraft and told her seatmate, and the realization spread through the cabin that they were not alone.
Cindy was the first crew member to hear the report, and the first to lean down and spot the same lights blinking away steadily in the distance to the right side of the 747. She passed the information to Janie, who asked Robert MacNaughton to take a look.
“Hard to say,” he concluded. “There are several beacons, so those are probably some nation’s fighters tracking us.” Robert turned back to his seat and flipped out the Airshow screen, toggling on the picture. He watched the display until it shifted to the tighter view of North Africa with political boundaries displayed, and let out a low whistle.
“Good heavens,” he said, mostly to himself, unaware that Brian Logan had also plastered his nose against a right-side window to see the same thing.
“What?” Janie asked.
Robert tapped the display. “Libya. We’re extraordinarily close, and that’s very dangerous. I’m not willing to guess that our crazy captain has bothered to get clearance across Libya.”
“What happens without it?” Janie asked.
“You remember Korean Airlines double-oh-seven in the eighties when they strayed over the Kuril Islands and the Soviets shot them down?” Robert asked, maneuvering out of the seat.
Janie nodded.
“Well, that was a 747, too, and Qadhafi’s crazier.” Robert pointed to the galley. “Where’s that interphone?”
In Phil Knight’s mind, word from the cabin below that they were being paced by fighters became immediately secondary to the fact that the caller was apparently the pilot Logan had said was standing by to seize control.
So it hadn’t been a bluff, Phil thought. The man had made too many references to aeronautical terms and procedures to be faking. He’d spoken of things only a heavy-jet pilot would know, and that realization slowed for a few seconds the additional shock that the other pilot was none other than the chairman of English Petroleum.
Wait, Phil told himself. He claimed to be MacNaughton, but that’s got to be a lie. He’s obviously a pilot, but MacNaughton’s a damned corporate chairman carried around on a lettuce leaf. He’d be lucky to know how to drive, let alone fly.
Yet, the caller was worried about being too close to Libya. Why? Even Libya had to respect a civilian aircraft in emergency status. The whole world had to know by now that Meridian Six was hijacked and not responsible for wherever it’s captain was forced to fly.
Phil strained his neck to look to the right for the flashing red beacons the man had mentioned, but it took unsnapping his seat belt and leaning over the empty copilot’s seat to do so.
There they are! Behind the right wing, and off a considerable distance to the east. Obviously whoever was out there presented no immediate threat.
Probably just the standard escort of a hijacked airliner.
Phil brushed by the ACARS control head as he settled back in his seat. It was the same system he’d used to transmit the hijack message to the company, and he realized with a start that the message light was on and yet he’d been canceling the chime without checking to see what was waiting. He triggered the printer and waited for it to finish before tearing off the paper and snapping on a light.
Captain, Flight Six, from Ops—London ready to receive you with security as requested on arrival. Please note, no air traffic facility has had contact with you, nor do you have ATC clearances. Can you coordinate through us? Do you have time to describe nature of radio failure or permit troubleshooting from here? Please respond.
Phil looked behind him at Judy Jackson, who was asleep and snoring softly, her head against the left window frame. Just as well, he thought. The axe lay in her lap, one hand still gripping it, but his threats had apparently calmed things down in the cabin. He could let her sleep for now.
The lights to the right were worrying him. Ops was correct. He had no air traffic control clearance because he was squawking the international hijack code. He’d reply to them on the ACARS in a minute, he decided.
Where is that damned map? Phil thought, scrambling around on the floor in search of the high-altitude chart. He remembered vaguely that it had fallen as he was yanking the jet around to keep Logan out.
There! He pulled the map from the floor and opened it to the general area they were traversing, turned up the overhead light, and checked the latitude and longitude on the flight-management computers before looking for that exact spot on the map.
There. We’re right … here.
Phil sat back, thinking quickly. The border between Libya and Algeria was a curvy line moving roughly southeast to north-northwest He’d been tracking well to the Algerian side, but just ahead a part of Libya jutted into Algeria, and it looked like they would pass almost squarely over the tip.
He checked again. Just a few miles to go. He looked out to the right but the flashing lights were gone now, and he wondered whether they’d broken off or just fallen back some more.
He’d read something about Libya in the past week, but the names seemed to fold into one another. Libya, Chad, Egypt, and whatever else. He was hanging in the sky over a trackless desert. Why would anyone give a damn about borders out here? After all, he’d been flying them over Algeria for more than an hour with no consequences.
But the name “Libya” was sounding sinister, and there was Libyan territory just ahead.
Phil reached up to the auto-flight panel and took the aircraft out of the navigation mode that hooked it into the computer navigation system. Instead, he punched “heading select” and slowly rotated the course knob around to the left some fifteen degrees, then let the big Boeing steady out. Undoubtedly, he thought, it was a useless gesture, but maybe it was wiser to give Libya a wider berth.
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE,
120 miles East of Boise, Idaho
4:12 P.M. MDT
For ten minutes the President had been watching the computer-enhanced images uplinked by secure military satellite from Chantill
y as the distinctive and ghostly infrared image of the 747 became the clear prey of the four MiG-21s now trailing it, their missiles armed and locked. The thought of effectively presiding over the destruction of an American airliner had triggered several anxious moments of reexamination, but he’d returned each time to the reality that there were no passengers or crew members, as far as they knew, aboard the flight. In fact, there was every reason to believe that Meridian Six was a flying weapon of mass destruction, so why not applaud the Libyans’ efforts if they blew it out of the sky?
Yet, he’d been holding an unconscious vigil and waiting for the first bright streak of light indicating the first missile launch from one of the MiG-21s.
Now, at the last second, the 747 began turning left and away from the Libyan border with the fighters in hot pursuit.
The President came forward in his chair and pulled the telephone handset back to his ear. “Bill? What’s he doing?”
“I don’t know, Mr. President … turning, of course, but …”
“He’s right on that border protrusion!”
“He was going to miss it by about two miles, now … more like three or four. More important, even if they go for the right engines, he may not go down in Libya.”
“Dammit! Are they still trailing?”
“Stand by … we’re talking to Chantilly. They say they’re picking up excited radio communications between the pilots and their command post.”
The President put his hand over the receiver and turned to his national security advisor. “I thought for sure they were going to go for it. Now I’m wondering if this doesn’t look like a Libyan operation. You know, are they putting on a charade?” He repeated the question to the Situation Room.
“Chantilly’s still in shock that he turned at the last moment,” Bill Sanderson replied. “Okay, wait … the MiGs are standing down. The radar locks are coming off.”
“I see it, Bill. The MiGs are breaking off to the east. Dammit!”
“Well, sir, the best laid plans …”
“Their plans, not ours, Bill.”
“Are you ready for Plan B?”
“Plan A, actually.”
“Understood, Mr. President.”
“Get the Seventh Fleet ready and tell me who’s first up?”
“The Enterprise has the first intercept group. I’m sure we won’t need the Ike, but she’s ready, too. Engagement in about forty minutes. You … still want a visual inspection first?”
“Unless someone has a good reason why that might imperil our pilots, the answer is yes. Now that they’ve slipped past the Libyans. Keep me posted, Bill.”
IN FLIGHT,
ABOARD MERIDIAN FLIGHT SIX
12:15 A.M. Local
Jimmy Roberts had emerged confused from the fog of hypoxic unconsciousness with a splitting headache. He found his wife collapsed in the seat beside him. Someone had put oxygen masks on both of them, but she remained unconscious for several frightening minutes while he massaged her face and hands and called her name, fighting down the profound fright that he might lose her.
Brenda Roberts came around at last, somehow aware that both of them had been in great peril. Her tears didn’t stop for many minutes as he held her and let her sob away as much of her fear as possible.
“Okay,” she said, after drying her eyes and blowing her nose. “I don’t want to know another blooming thing about this airplane or its captain or anything else. Where are those earplugs?”
“You mean those headphones, darlin’?” Jimmy asked.
“Yeah. That entertainment system.”
Jimmy located her headset on the floor and his in the seat back and hooked them up to the in-seat entertainment system.
“You flick that little thing, and it changes the channels to whatever you want, I guess.”
“That screen there?” she asked pointing to an embedded liquid crystal display on the seat back in front of them that suddenly bloomed with color as Jimmy hit the right switch. He stepped through the various channels while Brenda studied an information card and looked up.
“It says here they’ve got CNN, Jimmy. How ’bout that? CNN in the middle of nowhere.”
“Really?”
“Live broadcasts … by … satellite, it says. Try channel thirty-nine.”
He entered the numbers, but a scrambled picture of static appeared over the occasional background noise on the headsets, then suddenly stabilized. One of the CNN anchors in Atlanta was in the middle of a story with a background graphic of an airplane.
… no more details from the remaining pilot, and, in fact, there has been no further communication from the aircraft for the past hour, according to sources close to this emerging story. To recap, a passenger riot aboard a Meridian Airlines Boeing 747 over northern Africa earlier this evening has apparently resulted in the passengers hijacking their own fright. The captain and one flight attendant have barricaded themselves in the cockpit in an attempt to retain control. Meridian officials refuse to comment on preparations to storm the aircraft and arrest all aboard when it lands in London. Whatever is really happening aboard, the possibility of air piracy charges being filed against a large number of passengers would be unprecedented in U.S. airline history. Air piracy is a capital federal crime that carries a maximum penalty of death.
Jimmy Roberts felt his insides contract at the same moment he saw Brenda’s eyes flutter open in shock.
“Jimmy? That’s … that’s us he’s talking about, right?”
“Damn,” he said, feeling wholly inadequate at being unable to find something more profound to say. “The death penalty? Good God, Brenda, he’s saying they consider all of us hijackers!”
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
NRO HEADQUARTERS,
CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA
6:18 P.M. EDT
David Byrd replaced the receiver once again in George Zoffel’s office and sat in growing frustration, wondering what was happening to Meridian Flight Six and whether there was any point in trying to follow his hunch. Locating Senator Sharon Douglas in the middle of the night had proven far more difficult than he’d expected. She was still in London and would undoubtedly be asleep, but there were far too many fine hotels and little time to permit his simply calling down the list.
A phone rang, and David saw one of the lines light up. Ginger, George Zoffel’s secretary, answered it, and just as quickly caught his attention through the open door as she held up two fingers and mouthed the word line.
David punched up line two.
“Colonel Byrd? Ron Olson, Senator Douglas’ administrative assistant. I just got a call from the White House switchboard saying you desperately needed to talk to her.”
David phrased his words carefully. They were on a nonsecure line. “I … have a matter of utmost urgency to discuss with her, and it can’t wait.”
“You can’t tell me what this is about?”
“No, Mr. Olson, I can’t.”
“And yet, you want me to wake her up at, what, three A.M. in London?”
“If you don’t, sir, she’ll probably have you flogged. Look, it really is that vital. Just give me her hotel number, and I’ll call.”
“How the heck do I know you’re who you say you are?”
“Think about it. Who called you on my behalf?” David asked.
There was a moment of silence before Olson responded. “Oh, yeah. The White House operator. Okay, hold on while I get you that London number.”
He returned with an endless series of digits for the London hotel.
The phone in the London hotel room was answered by someone having a hard time controlling the receiver. It banged around on the night-stand and apparently fell to the floor, eliciting an audible grunt before it found its way back to what was presumably Sharon Douglas’ ear.
“Um … Hello?”
David identified himself and apologized for the call before racing through the case for her help. There was a confused sigh on the other end and the sound of the receiver being s
hifted to another hand.
“Who’s this again? David … Byrd?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The Air Force guy I talked to earlier today … yesterday?”
“Yes, Senator.”
“What time is it?”
“Very early, and I’m sorry about that.”
“More to the point, where am I? It’s dark in here.”
“London.”
“Oh. That’s right. What can I do for you, David?”
“That terrible flight from Chicago you were telling me about? Do you recall the flight number?”
“Uh huh. Meridian Six,” she said. “Couldn’t this wait till morning?”
David caught his breath. “I thought I remembered that flight number.”
“But …” She cleared her throat in the background, then composed herself. “Why? Why do you need to know?”
“There are … some aspects of this I can’t talk about on a nonsecure line, but let me give you a quick rundown.” He briefed her on the continuing odyssey of Flight Six since she’d left it at Heathrow. While he talked, he heard the covers rustling as she sat up and cleared her throat again.
“Good Lord! Hijacked? But you said, by the passengers?”
“That’s what I need help finding out, and quickly. The captain reported a riot on board, which sounds like an air rage situation, and I’m trying to find out if that makes any sense.” David paraphrased the ACARS message from Flight Six. “The thing is, officially we don’t believe that came from the captain.”
“David, who is ‘we’?”
“Ah … Senator, I can’t tell you. I’ve just been pulled into an official analysis of a situation involving this flight, and all I can really say is this: I need to try to find out if there really is a serious chance the passengers could have revolted on that flight. Have you heard of any passenger anger, for instance, on their departure out of London?”
“Are you joking? If there’s one single Chicago passenger still on that plane, there’s a whale of a chance of passenger fury. All of us were primed to be furious. As a matter of fact, I witnessed a man verbally assault the captain out on the jet way as he got off, and I believe he and his wife were going on.”
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