Crashers

by Dana Haynes

  He’d done his part. It was up to Silverman and the Red Fist now.

  VALENCE AIRFIELD

  Peter Kim had taken over the Internet-linked keyboard. Walter Mulroney had been joined at the chalkboard by Isaiah Grey, the only pilot in the hangar with experience in commercial carriers. The chalkboard had been covered by notations and rough-drawn schematics, then erased, covered again, erased again. More than thirty download printouts from the Net cluttered the evidence tables where Peter sat.

  Walter had called Dennis Silverman to get his help but got his “I’m out of town until . . .” recording. He was surprised Susan had okayed a trip out of town but guessed that, with last night’s presentation of the Gamelan data, Dennis’s job was mostly over.

  Susan Tanaka was at the human-size door of the hangar, signing a receipt. She motioned toward the Go-Team and three men carried in twelve boxes of pizza and cartons of soda. When the food had been distributed throughout the hangar, Susan returned to the crew leaders working on the Gamelan project.

  “This still seems far-fetched,” she said, picking olives off a slice of pie.

  Tommy Tomzak and Kiki Duvall sat hip to hip on the motorized stairway leading to the swap-out. The pizza smelled great but, after wading through the abattoir of Flight 818, neither of them had much appetite.

  Isaiah rubbed the back of his neck. He looked tired, Susan thought. Nothing’s more draining than spending time with the bereaved, but Isaiah had volunteered to be with the Danvers family. Russ Kazmanski, the co-pilot on the doomed flight, had no family.

  Isaiah studied the chalkboard. “I’m just a jet driver, guys. I can race that Vermeer around the globe and land it on a pool table with room to spare. But all this math is beyond me.”

  “The amazing thing,” Peter said, not looking up from his terminal, “is that Kiki was right. It is possible the Gamelan could have ordered a partial reverser deployment. God knows I’ve never heard of such a thing, but it’s possible.”

  “Walter?” Another engineer hurried over. The man wore a lab coat, white cotton gloves, and thick, enlarging goggles hanging around his neck. He carried a manila folder and a plastic bin the size of a cigarette pack. Inside were tiny lightbulbs, much smaller than peas. All were broken.

  He showed them to the crew leaders. “This is from the monitor bank for the starboard power-plant complex.”

  He set down the bin, opened the manila folder, and took out slick black-and-white blowups of the bulbs. “You see how the filament is fractured? Here, and here? When these lightbulbs burst, there was no electricity going through them. They were cold inside.”

  It took a moment for that to be absorbed by the nonengineers. Tommy said, “So, no electricity means no light. No light means no warning from the monitor. And—”

  “And no warning means no pilot error,” Kiki finished, then high-fived Tommy.

  Peter turned from his keyboards. “Grey. Can you fly in this weather?”

  “Yes.” No equivocation, no doubt.

  Peter turned to Susan. “I think we can test this hypothesis in the swap-out. I’ve done the math. I think I can send a pulse through the infrared input as the plane passes overhead. Something innocuous: turn on the DVD player for the in-flight film.”

  Susan pursed her lips. “It’s all right with me. What’s our IIC say?”

  All eyes turned to Tommy Tomzak. “Any danger of something going wrong? Accidentally touching off some sort of crisis with this experiment?”

  Peter and Walter Mulroney exchanged glances. “No,” Walter said. “Either nothing will happen, or it’ll do just what we tell it to. But I’m betting good money that nothing will happen. This is feasible, but it stretches believability.”

  Tommy turned to Isaiah, “You good to go?”

  “Let me file a flight plan and find a copilot. Shouldn’t take long. Taking off and landing on the same runway—while no other traffic is using it—cuts down on the paperwork.”

  “I have one on my crew.” Walter turned and walk-jogged over to the scaffolding on the far side of the hangar.

  Peter stood. “Let me move the recorder out of the empennage and up closer to the cockpit. I can hardwire it directly into the monitor. It’ll save time removing it so we can download the data.”

  Tommy glanced around, sensing a new energy from the crashers, a shared sense of excitement. The idea that a flight data recorder could crash a jet was just this side of science fiction, but all of a sudden, it seemed possible. If they were right, the Go-Team was about to make history.

  Tommy grinned. “You know what my daddy would say, times like this?”

  Susan Tanaka said, “What?”

  “Oy vey.”

  GAMELAN INDUSTRIES, BEAVERTON

  Dennis Silverman was sweating bullets. He’d watched, sickened, horrified, as his terminal echoed Peter Kim’s.

  It was unbelievable. Unthinkable. Somehow, those dumb shits on the Go-Team had figured out what every other engineer at the Gamelan company had failed to even guess at.

  Dennis had bragged to the investigators about the wondrous qualities of the Gamelan flight data recorder: its ability to check about two thousand aspects of a flight; its ability to fix some small, repeated problems; its ability to be downloaded via a remote infrared beam.

  But there was another trick of the Gamelan he’d never mentioned to them. Each machine had a chip in it that let the company headquarters know when one of their FDRs was airborne. At any given minute of every day, the company knew how many Gamelans were in the air, and how many air miles each logged.

  As a precaution, Dennis had tapped in to that monitoring system. The second Isaiah Grey began the preflight check of the Vermeer swap-out in Valence, Dennis’s monitor pinged.

  Dennis, alone in the privacy of his cubicle, said, “Oh, shit, man. . . .” The room had begun to reek with his fearful sweat. The fuckers were going to test the hidden capabilities of his Gamelan. They were going to find their smoking gun.

  Dennis shut down his computer and dashed from the room, down the stairs three at a time, through the lobby, and out into the pounding storm. He fumbled for his keys, dropped them in a puddle. His glasses were smeared with rain by the time he finally popped the trunk of his Outback. He rummaged around inside, found his laptop and infrared transceiver.

  BOCA SERPIENTE, CALIFORNIA

  By 2:15 P.M., Feargal Kelly and Keith O’Shea pulled off Route 247, shaking off the dust of the Mojave Desert and arriving at the crappy little motel. The temperature hit 105 as they arrived. Overhead, the sky was a too-bright blue, no clouds from horizon to horizon. Two thin condensation trails from commercial jetliners trisected the sky.

  Despite the heat, O’Shea looked good. With dark, curly hair and darker skin than that of his associates, Daria assumed he was the so-called Black Irish, descendants of some shipwrecked Spanish fleet.

  The men hugged, slapped one another on the back. “The missus is still with you,” Kelly said, winking at Daria. O’Shea, more hostile, just glared at her. “And where’s himself, then?”

  O’Meara said, “Johnser’s dead.”

  The others froze. Just for a second, Daria forgot to be surprised, but O’Meara was looking away from where she sat, perched on the room’s one table, next to the TV.

  “Ah, the fuck.” O’Shea fell heavily into the hard-backed chair. “How?”

  “Got himself into a sports bar. Came out with no wallet and a broken neck, near as I can tell.”

  Kelly, who’d known the big Belfast man for years said, “Tha’ prick. Endangering the mission for a fucking bet?”

  “It’s past,” O’Meara said with a horizontal swipe of his hand, as if slicing through something. “We’ve got a job to think about. I’ve met our suppliers. Take a look.”

  He pulled back the thread-thin bedspread, revealing the collection of shotguns and one professional sniper rifle, the Heckler & Koch PSG1. O’Shea went immediately for the PSG, cradling it.

  “What about me?” Daria asked,
just to see what would happen.

  “Aye, and what about herself?” Kelly eyed O’Meara warily. “Why’s she still along with you? I’d’ve thought ye’d shag the bitch and kill her and have done with it.” He turned languidly to Daria. “No offense.”

  She nodded. “No no. It’s actually a good question.”

  O’Meara pointed at Daria’s nose and said, “Less of you.” He turned to his men. “She shows more brains getting out of L.A. than Johnser did, and you know Johnser was me mate for life. Now shut it. We’ll wait for the call.”

  Wait? Daria thought. So this was the final destination. She stirred. “I’m hungry. P’rhaps we should see what’s in that little town we passed through?”

  O’Meara sat and hit the TV’s remote control. “We wait.”

  JFK

  Airport officials helped Representative Riordan and the Irish delegates make it to the gate for the next leg of their flight to Los Angeles. Nobody had told anyone at the airport why these officials were important. They just did as they were told.

  The delegates may have had little in common but they did share this one thing: none of them had flown before on the gargantuan beast known as the Airbus A380. The wide-body double-decker so vast that there are four aisles on both the upper and lower decks.

  The delegates gathered at the windows of the international terminal at JFK and marveled at the size of the new jetliner, which had come off the line six weeks earlier at Jean-Luc Lagardère, Airbus’s facility near Toulouse.

  FBI, LOS ANGELES FIELD OFFICE

  Assistant Director Henry Deits got the call from a team of Ireland watchers in New York. Catholic and Protestant leaders had left Dublin on an Albion Airlines flight, although no one seemed to know why. No further talks in the power-sharing agreement had been scheduled, as far as almost everyone knew. Even the State Department was in the cold. Deits was told that the delegates had all arrived at JFK and were en route to Los Angeles via Albion Air.

  He issued an interagency alert. Soon, every law enforcement and intelligence organization in the West would know that a prime, grade-A threat magnet was airborne, heading to California.

  44

  DENNIS SILVERMAN BROKE EVERY traffic law known to man, heading out of the metropolitan area, southbound on Interstate 5. He couldn’t let the swap-out take off before he caught his own flight south. Praying that he wouldn’t hit a speed trap, Dennis screamed off I-5 at the Valence exit and stomped on the brakes, swerving to a stop. He cut quickly into the town, calculating the direction the airfield’s one runway stretched, relative to the community.

  “Jesus, God, please,” Dennis prayed, not feeling the slightest bit odd about what he was praying for. All he’d wanted to do was crash a couple of airplanes and get paid handsomely. In return for which, he’d vastly increase the profitability of his company. And since, in his heart, Dennis knew that the Gamelan FDRs were superior to every other competitor’s, why, in the long run, he was actually making airline travel that much safer.

  Was that so bad?

  VALENCE AIRFIELD

  A copilot named Burke, certified in visual and instrument-aided flight, was picked from Walter Mulroney’s structures crew to assist with the test flight. He cinched himself into the right-hand seat as Isaiah Grey began walking them through the preflight.

  “Shoulder harness,” Isaiah asked.

  “On.”

  “Parking brake.”

  “Set.”

  “Fuel quantity.”

  “Ah, let’s see.” Burke fiddled with a monitor. “Twenty-two three.”

  Isaiah nodded, he knew that 22,300 pounds of fuel should be much more than enough for Peter Kim’s mad-scientist experiments. He said, “Twenty-two three, check. Pneumatic cross feeds?”

  Burke said, “Open.”

  “Anticollision light.”

  “On.”

  “Fuel-boost pumps.”

  “Got ’em.”

  “Ignition.”

  “On.”

  Isaiah peered down at the tangle of cords and wires that ran from the Gamelan monitor to the orange “black” box, now secured in first class. The English ex-cop, John Roby, had supervised as crews moved the Gamelan from its place in the empennage, to make it easier to download diagnostic information after each test.

  “Is that thing ready?” Burke asked.

  “Guess so. Let’s get upstairs.”

  He eased the Vermeer 111 out of the protection of the hangar and into the rain.

  In first class, Tommy Tomzak sat down in a randomly selected seat. Kiki Duvall, John Roby, and Ray Calabrese had come along, too. Tommy and Ray exchanged glances. They both knew that if they could prove sabotage, the title of Investigator in Charge would be handed off like a baton.

  A bundle of yellow and black wires led from the flight deck to first class, where John had organized four technicians. Under Peter Kim’s direction, they’d established a series of monitors that would “ambush” information coming in and out of the Gamelan flight data recorder. Techies had disassembled a bookshelf—a bricks-and-boards affair—in the pilots’ lounge of the airfield and carted the boards to the Vermeer. Laying them across the tops of three seats, they had a fairly stable platform for the black box, as well as their computers and monitors, situated right at stomach height if you were standing in the aisles. John had volunteered to monitor the black box.

  The Vermeer crawled slowly out of the hangar and into the rain. Kiki had chosen a seat across the aisle from Tommy, both of them two rows behind Ray, and all three of them behind John and the Gamelan black box.

  “Nervous?” Kiki asked.

  Tommy nodded. “A little. We just crawled through a jet that looked an awful lot like this one, except . . .”

  Kiki reached across the aisle, palm upward. Tommy took her hand.

  She said, “I know.”

  Two rows forward, Ray pretended he couldn’t hear the couple—and hell, they were clearly a couple—behind him.

  “November Tango Sierra Bravo One, you are cleared for takeoff. Don’t suppose I got to tell you which runway. Over.”

  Isaiah adjusted his voice wand. “Thank you, tower. Be advised, this is a test. We’ll be returning shortly. Over.”

  “Roger that, November Tango. See you soon. Valence tower out.”

  VALENCE AIRFIELD

  Dennis skidded to a stop in the parking lot behind a Glidden Paint store. If he’d calculated right, he should be lined up with the runway.

  He scrambled out of the car. The parking lot, and that entire end of Valence, sat on a little hill, maybe ten feet higher than the valley floor where the airfield lay. Dennis dashed to the end of the parking lot, stared through a chain-link fence and between two bedraggled yew bushes. He was looking down and almost directly into the mouth of the single runway, which was separated from the hillock by maybe a hundred yards of flat land and low brush. The Vermeer was just now turning onto the path.

  One hundred feet away from Dennis, one of the ubiquitous rented Sentras idled. Two figures in NTSB windbreakers stood behind the car, their identities obscured by an umbrella.

  Sitting on the trunk was a Gamelan infrared transceiver.

  “You shits!” Dennis hissed to himself and scrambled back to his car.

  Isaiah Grey toggled the switch for the intraship communications. “Can you folks hear me?”

  John Roby’s voice came back. “Oy! There’s a baby crying. Can I get an upgrade?”

  Isaiah said, “Tourist. We’re about to leave the ground. Peter called in. They’re ready.”

  John said, “We’re ready as well. Let’s give it a go, mate.”

  With a nod to his copilot, Isaiah throttled forward.

  Next to the rented Sentra, and under one umbrella, stood Walter Mulroney and Peter Kim. Walter was leaning over Peter’s shoulder, staring at the infrared transceiver. “You know what you’re doing?”

  “Yes, Walter,” the engineer replied with an irritated sigh. “I do know a little something about com
puter programming.”

  “I’m just asking. Here comes Grey now. Let’s hope he’s as good a pilot as he brags.”

  A hundred feet away, Dennis Silverman had his laptop and transceiver out. He’d set them up on the driver’s seat of his Outback, the driver’s door open, then perched himself sideways on the passenger’s seat, thus protecting the equipment from the slanting rain. He had no idea what set of instructions the Go-Team was about to send to the Gamelan in the swap-out jetliner. It didn’t matter. He knew what signal he’d send.

  The plane rolled forward, rain drumming on its aluminum skin. Ray was on his cell phone in the back of first class. He hung up.

  “L.A. says Irish delegates are in the air, flying from New York to Los Angeles, right now.”

  Tommy and Kiki twisted in their seats. “Catholic?” Kiki asked.

  “Catholic and Protestant both. Show of hands: who here likes big, fat, whopping coincidences, when we’re right in the middle of this shit with the Red Fist of Ulster?”

  Tommy said, “So who on Flight Eight One Eight had ties to Ireland?”

  Ray said, “Not a damn soul. We’ve triple-checked them.”

  Tommy rubbed his neck, still aching from hours at the autopsy tables. “This makes no sense. I like what you’re saying about a delegation heading to Los Angeles. That’s gotta fit in somehow. But downing the Vermeer on Monday? The telephone call from the Valence airfield? I got nothing, Brooklyn.”

  Kiki stood to face Ray and put one knee up on her seat, her arm resting on Tommy’s shoulder. “If the Gamelan is involved, I wish we could have reached Dennis Silverman. Doing this without our designated expert is a handicap.”

  Tommy was not aware that he touched her arm. “Pete and Walter know what they’re doing. My money’s on them.”