By Order of the President

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Because it’s unfair,” Castillo said.

  “Well, what the hell are you going to do?” Halloran said. “They’re the goddamned FBI and I’m a small-time used airplane dealer. Who’s the insurance company going to believe? ”

  “You said,” Mrs. Halloran said, pointing a finger six inches from Miller’s nose, “—what the hell did you say? That you didn’t think Alex voluntarily did something or other?”

  “I think you’re going to have to consider the unpleasant possibility that Captain MacIlhenny was forced to fly that airplane off Quatro de Fevereiro,” Miller said.

  “Off where?” Mrs. Halloran demanded.

  “That’s the airport in Luanda,” Halloran said and then turned to Miller. “How did you know that?”

  “The full name, Mrs. Halloran,” Miller said, “is Quatro de Fevereiro Aeroporto Internacional. It means ‘the Fourth of February,’ the day Luanda got its independence from Portugal. ”

  “So, what the hell?” she replied.

  “I was there, ma’am, when the airplane took off,” Miller said.

  “You were there?” she challenged.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said and handed her his Army identification card. “I’m an Army officer. I was the assistant military attaché in Luanda.”

  “I thought you said you was from the Homeland Security? ”

  “Jesus, Mary-Elizabeth, put a lid on it!” Halloran snapped. He snatched the card from his wife’s hand, examined it, and handed it back to Miller.

  “Major, huh? You said you was there when it took off?”

  “I happened to be at the airport,” Miller said. “I saw it take off. And then, when we—the embassy, I mean— learned it had refused orders to return to the field, I was sent to the hotel to see what I could find out about Captain MacIlhenny. The manager let me into Captain MacIlhenny’s room. And it was clear that he hadn’t taken his luggage with him. Or even packed it . . .”

  “Leading you to believe what?” Halloran interrupted.

  “I think somebody made him fly that airplane off,” Miller said.

  “Like who?”

  “Like someone who wanted to use it for parts, maybe,” Miller said.

  “Yeah,” Halloran said. “So what are you doing here, Major? ”

  “I’ve been temporarily assigned to Homeland Security to see if I can find out what really happened to that airplane. And Captain MacIlhenny.”

  “So what’s your theory, Mr. Assistant Attaché, or whatever you said you are, about what happened to my brother?”

  “I just don’t know, ma’am,” Miller said.

  “They got him to fly the airplane where they wanted it and then they killed him,” Halloran said.

  “How can you even think such a thing?” Mrs. Halloran challenged.

  “I’m facing facts, is what I’m doing,” Halloran said.

  “We just don’t know,” Miller said.

  “What we’re wondering is if there’s a Philadelphia connection, ” Castillo said.

  “Meaning what?” Mrs. Halloran demanded from behind the handkerchief into which she was sniffing.

  “Meaning the airplane was there for over a year,” Miller said. “Maybe somebody here—somebody who works for Lease-Aire—knew it was getting ready to fly . . .”

  “Bullshit,” Mrs. Halloran said. “You see what he’s doing, Terry, I hope? He’s trying to get us to say we let somebody know the airplane was there available to get stolen. They stole it and we collect the insurance.”

  “That’s just not true, Mrs. Halloran,” Castillo said.

  Mrs. Halloran snorted.

  “We don’t have many employees,” Halloran said. “We contract out just about everything. But that’s possible, I suppose. ”

  “All it would take would be someone who could overhear something, maybe Captain MacIlhenny saying he was going to Africa, saying when he expected to be back, something like that,” Castillo said.

  “About the time he was packing up to go over there, we had an MD-10 in the hangar,” Halloran said. “Got it from Delta. We were cleaning it up. I mean, we had ACSInc.— that means ‘Aviation Cleaning Services, Inc.’—in the hangar. But what they send us is a bunch of North Philadelphia blacks. You know, minimum wage. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to wash an airplane. I can’t believe any of them would be smart enough to get into something like that. No offense, Major.”

  “None taken,” Miller said. “But maybe if the thieves— let’s go with the idea there are thieves—maybe they told the airplane cleaners what to look for.”

  “Yeah,” Halloran said, thoughtfully.

  “Have you got the payroll records of these people?” Betty asked.

  “No,” he replied. "ASCInc. does all that. We pay by the body/hour. And ASCInc. handles the security, you know, to get them onto the airport. But they’d have a list of the names.”

  “Where are they?” Castillo asked.

  “Out at the airport,” Halloran said. “Two hangars down from ours.” He looked at Castillo. “Would you like me to go out there with you?”

  “We’d appreciate that very much, Mr. Halloran,” Betty said.

  “Well, let me change clothes and get a quick shave,” he said. “Could I interest you in a beer while you wait?”

  “You certainly could,” Castillo said.

  “I sure hope you know what you’re doing, Terry,” Mrs. Halloran said.

  “I’m doing the best I can,” he said as he bent over the cooler. He came out with three cans of Budweiser and passed them around. “At least these people don’t think we’re trying to rip off the insurance company.”

  The next step, Castillo thought, once they had the names of the work crew, was to see if there was a match with any names the cops had. There were several problems with that. For one thing, if there was a terrorist connection they would probably use a phony name. Or if they used the name they were born with the cops might not have it. They would know John James Smith as Abdullah bin Rag-head, his Muslim name. Or if security was anywhere near as tight as it was supposed to be, airport passes would not be given to anyone on the cops’ suspicious list. That didn’t rule out a bad guy, who couldn’t get a pass because the cops were watching him, getting his brother or girlfriend, who had not come to the attention of the cops, a pass to look for what he wanted to know.

  Or a bad guy who couldn’t get an airfield pass knew somebody who had a pass and borrowed it to get on the field. It was unlikely that anyone took a close look at a work gang coming onto the airfield. If they had a pass hanging around their neck, that would be good enough.

  They would have to do a check on friends and relatives of everybody who had worked in the Lease-Aire hangar when MacIlhenny had been getting ready to go to Luanda. That was going to take time—a lot of time.

  This was likely to be a wild-goose chase.

  If anything was going to pop up, it probably would come from the undercover cops Chief Inspector Kramer had inside the AAL—African American Lunatic—groups.

  But you never knew. Wild-goose chase or not, it had to be done.

  “It won’t take me long,” Halloran said and headed for his house.

  Castillo held open the front door of the unmarked car.

  “Why don’t you ride up in front with Sergeant Schneider, Mr. Halloran?”

  Halloran considered that.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll get in the back with the major. That’ll really give my goddamned neighbors something to talk about. ‘You saw the cops hauling Halloran off?’ ”

  “They won’t think that,” Castillo said.

  “You don’t know my goddamned neighbors,” Halloran said and got in the backseat.

  Castillo got in beside Sergeant Schneider.

  “Lucky you,” she said, softly.

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” Castillo said.

  She smiled at him and their eyes met momentarily again as she started the car.

  Castillo wondered if Chief Inspector Kramer ha
d managed to make contact with one or more of his undercover cops.

  And he wondered how long it was going to take for somebody—probably a spook using a CIA-controlled satellite —to find out whether the 727 was, or had been, in Abéché. All Secretary Hall had said was that they hoped to have confirmation, one way or the other, soon.

  Castillo looked at his watch.

  It was five minutes after eleven. He thought that made it five after five in the afternoon in Abéché. He wondered what time sunset was there. Not long after that, certainly. If the CIA had not managed to get satellites over Abéché by now—or, say, in the next hour—daylight would be gone and they’d have to rely on heat-sensing techniques, which were not nearly as good.

  [THREE]

  Aboard Royal Air Maroc 905 Altitude 35,000 feet (FL 350) 19.55 degrees North Latitude 22.47 degrees East Longitude 1705 9 June 2005

  “About seven minutes, Colonel,” the pilot’s voice came over the cabin loudspeaker. “Starting to slow it down now. I’ll depressurize in about five minutes. I’ll give you a heads-up.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J. Davenport, Special Forces, U.S. Army, a tall, lithe thirty-nine-year-old, glanced at his team of paratroopers prepping for the High Altitude, Low Opening (Halo) jump and nodded. He touched a small microphone button on his chest. “Understand seven minutes, ” he said. “How do you read?”

  “Loud and clear,” the pilot replied.

  Colonel Davenport’s mouth and nose were hidden by a black rubber oxygen mask. The rest of his face and neck were just about covered with a brownish black grease. He was wearing what looked like black nylon tights.

  Davenport looked at his watch. It told him that he—and everybody else in the rear cabin—had been taking oxygen for the past hour and eleven minutes. On one wall of the cabin was a rack of oxygen bottles and a distribution system to which everybody was connected by a rubber umbilical cord, which also carried current to the jump suits.

  What looked like black tights were actually state-of-the-art cold weather gear. Several thin layers of insulating material were laced with wire—like a toaster—providing heat. The heating wire current would be activated just before depressurization of the rear cabin began. Timing here was critical. The heating system was very efficient. If the heating wire was turned on too soon—when the cabin temperature was not double digits below zero—the jumpers would be quickly sweat soaked and suffering the effects of too much heat.

  In theory, the heat generated was thermostatically controlled. And that usually worked. Usually.

  Presuming it did and the jumpers exited the aircraft neither sweat soaked nor frozen, when the umbilical severed, a battery strapped to the right leg would continue to power the heating wires. Similarly, at the cutoff of the umbilical, oxygen would be fed to the jumper’s mask from an oxygen flask strapped to him.

  In theory, an hour of the oxygen—which everyone called “Oh-Two” because of its chemical symbol—was sufficient to drive the nitrogen from the blood of the jumpers, so they would not suffer the very-high-altitude version of the bends when the cabin was depressurized and then when they were falling through the sky. Flight level 350 is in the troposphere.

  The theory presumed that every jumper had breathed nothing but pure oxygen for an hour and that he had not taken off his mask long enough to have taken even one breath of the “normal” air in the pressurized cabin. Taking even one breath of normal air set the one hour on Oh-Two timer back to zero.

  The cabin was pressurized to protect the jumpers against the temperatures of the troposphere. The temperature outside an aircraft at 35,000 feet above the earth is about forty degrees below zero—on both the Fahrenheit and the Celsius scales, interestingly.

  Colonel Davenport moved a lever that changed his microphone ’s function from PRESS-TO-TALK to VOICE ACTUATED.

  “Okay. In six-fifteen, we will start to depressurize. Balaclavas and helmets now. Carefully. Carefully.”

  The balaclava mask came from the ski slopes. It was knitted of wool and covered the entire head except for the eyes. The ones used by Gray Fox were black. They were protection against cold, of course, but they also effectively concealed facial features.

  Holding their breath, the jumpers removed their oxygen masks, quickly pulled the balaclavas over their heads, replaced the oxygen masks, and then quickly put their helmets on. The helmets had plastic face shields.

  “Everybody manage to do that the way it’s supposed to be done?” Colonel Davenport inquired, almost conversationally.

  Three “Yes, sir”s and two “Check”s came over the earphones.

  Captain Roger F. Stevenson, Special Forces, U.S. Army, who was also lithe and a head taller than Colonel Davenport but whose skin did not require what he thought of as makeup to hopefully give the appearance that he was of the Negroid race, walked up to Colonel Davenport.

  “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

  “Right now, anything your little heart desires, Roger. What’s on your mind?”

  “With all respect, sir, you don’t look like one of us. When you take off the balaclava, you’ll look like Al Jolson.”

  “Oh, and I tried so hard,” Colonel Davenport said with a feminine lisp as he put his hand on his hip. “You’ve just ruined my whole day, Roger.”

  Stevenson smiled but went on.

  “One look at you, Colonel, and the sure to be unfriendly natives are going to say, ‘Who dat skinny white man wit all dat black grease on his face?’ Or words to that effect.”

  “I think you’re trying to tell me something, Roger.”

  “Sir, I respectfully suggest (a) that we’re prepared to do this job by ourselves and (b) your presence is therefore not necessary and (c) if anybody sees you . . .”

  “That has been considered by General McNab,” Davenport said. “Who has ordered me to go. It doesn’t mean that either General McNab or I think you couldn’t handle what has to be done. You should know better than that by now.”

  “Did the general, sir, share his thinking with you? Can you share it with me?”

  “He used the phrase ‘If there’s a change in the orders, I want you there.’ I think he thinks we may be ordered to take out the airplane. If it’s there.”

  “I know how to do that, sir.”

  “I know you do. What I think he was really saying was that if the circumstances look like it’s the thing to do, we should take the airplane out without orders. And he wants me to make that decision. You shouldn’t be put in a spot like that. If there’s a flap, all they can do is retire me; I’ve got my twenty years. You don’t. And Gray Fox needs you, Roger. I’m actually getting a little too old for this sort of thing.”

  “I’ll take my chances with a flap, sir.”

  “You just proved, Captain, the wisdom of General Mc-Nab ’s reasoning,” Davenport said, and now there was an edge in his voice. “Think that over as we float silently through the African sky. Now, go see to your men.”

  For a moment, it looked as if Stevenson was going to say something else but all that came over the earphones was, “Yes, sir.”

  Stevenson walked toward the rear of the aircraft where four other men in black tights were checking—again, for the fourth or fifth time—their gear. With their balaclavas and helmets in place, it was hard to tell by looking but two of them were African American, one was a dark-skinned Latin, and the fourth Caucasian.

  When the latter two took off their masks, as they almost certainly would do sometime during the reconnaissance phase of this operation, they would also look like Al Jolson about to sing “Mammy” in the world’s first talking movie, Captain Stevenson thought.

  One of the modifications to the aircraft had been the installation of an airtight interior door about halfway down the passenger compartment. This permitted the rear section of the fuselage to be depressurized at altitude while leaving the forward section pressurized.

  The seats had been removed from the rear section. The walls held racks for weapons, radios, parachu
tes, and other equipment, as well as an array of large bottles of oxygen.

  The rear stair door had been extensively—and expensively —modified. It had come from the factory with fixed steps, for the on- and off-loading of passengers. They had been designed to be opened when the aircraft was on the ground and not moving.

  Metal workers had spent long hours modifying the steps and their opening mechanisms. Three-quarters of the stairs—the part that had been designed to come into contact with the ground—had been rehinged near the foot and fitted with an opening mechanism that, when activated, allowed the steps to be raised into the fuselage.

  The original opening/closing mechanism had been modi fied to handle what was now a four-step doorstep. The lowering mechanism now had enough power to force open the door into the air flowing past the fuselage at 170 or more miles per hour. It had also been necessary to reinforce the door itself to stand up against the force of the slipstream, and everything on the step that could possibly snag equipment had been faired over.

  The parachutes the jumpers would use were essentially modified sports parachutes. That is, when deployed they looked more like the wings of an ultralight aircraft than an umbrella. And they could be “flown.” Instead of falling more or less straight downward as a parachutist using a conventional canopy does, the “wing chutes” could, by manipulation, exchange downward velocity for forward movement. They could travel as much as thirty miles horizontally after exiting the aircraft.

  The parachutes—the wings—were larger than civilian sports parachutes because they had to carry more weight. The jumpers would take with them a large assortment of equipment, including weapons, radios, rations, water, and what they all hoped would turn out to be authentic-looking clothing as worn by native Chadians.

  Each jumper would carry with him a Global Positioning System satellite receiver connected to him by a strong nylon cord. The coordinates of the field at Abéché were known within feet. A position one hundred yards off the north end of the runway had been fed to the device. The GPS device had two modes. Mode I showed a map of the area and the present position of the GPS receiver—the jumper—with regard to the selected destination. Mode II showed, with an arrow, the direction to the selected position and the distance in kilometers and meters. In Mode II, the GPS device also combined GPS position, GPS altitude, and topographical mapping to give the jumpers a remarkably clear picture of the terrain onto which they were dropping.