High Flight

by David Hagberg

  From that point he could only assume that help would be nearby. His orders were to shoot, then turn and run for the protection of Kuznetsova thirty miles north on Sakhalin Island. But that was at least an hour away. Long before they reached safety, the Japanese would respond.

  The time for self-doubts and recriminations was gone. He was a military commander, and Russia was trying to become a nation that lived by the rule of law, which meant civilians controlled the military. He would follow his orders. Someone had to know what was going on.

  “Bridge, CIC.”

  Anishchenko walked back to the phone. “This is the captain.”

  “Captain, the bogies have turned away! They are no longer in formation!”

  “Are they returning to base?” Anishchenko demanded.

  “Nyet, nyet! I think they’ve fired their missiles. Recommend we commence our attack now.”

  “I concur,” Anishchenko said without hesitation. “Launch the twenty-twos. Get a re-lock on the bogies, and fire at will!”

  Almost instantly two anti-surface missiles were fired from a launcher on either side of the ship just forward of the bridge. The flash of their rocket motors temporarily filled the bridge.

  “Many weapons radars …” CIC shouted, when something crashed in on them from overhead, and a tremendous yellow light filled the air.

  The Harpoon came straight through the overhead into the bridge before exploding. Anishchenko and the others never knew what hit them. One moment lights were flashing, and in the next they ceased to exist as sentient beings.

  Technical Sergeant Halvorson hesitated a moment at the open door of the Marine VH-3 helicopter. The emergency response team from Bethesda worked frantically on the Vice President, while the Secret Service detail watched, their guns at the ready. Everything that could be done to save Eagle Two’s life was being done. In the meantime, there were thirty-six other people aboard Air Force Two, many of them still alive. He headed back to the downed aircraft.

  “Eagle Two is transferred,” he radioed SARTECH control. “We’re going back in, but we’re going to need more help.”

  “Roger, able leader one. Can you say condition of Sea Gull Two.” It was Sally Cross’s code name.

  “Deceased,” Halvorson replied tersely. Sometimes he hated this job.

  Behind him the chopper’s engines came to life, and it lifted off, swinging toward the northeast beneath a lowering overcast.

  James Lindsay had wanted to be President of the United States all of his life. As a schoolboy he wrote essays about it. In the Air Force his fellow officers kidded him about his ambition, telling him he should have joined the Navy so he could have gotten a PT boat command like Jack Kennedy. And in his first years as a state senator and then a U.S. congressman, he’d been ignored. But by the time he became Senate Minority Leader he didn’t have to talk about his dream; everyone else told him.

  All of his life he’d studied and prepared for the job, had become an expert on every facet of every agency of government, had read the writings of every president including his predecessor, with whom he’d vehemently disagreed, and had himself written a book called Crisis Management—Preparations Before the Storm. But he’d not expected this. In order to manage a crisis, Lindsay told himself, he needed an enemy. A Russian, not a Japanese, adversary.

  “The number is holding at fourteen, Mr. President,” Jay Hansen said on the speakerphone. “It looks as if eight airports plus Andrews were affected. I’ve ordered them closed until we get this straightened out.”

  “Any word on casualties?” Lindsay asked.

  “Not yet. It’ll be high, but the worst should be over. We never expected this. There was no way to prepare.”

  “No one ever does. You’re doing a good job, Jay. I’ll let you get back to it.”

  “Can you tell me what’s going on, Mr. President?”

  “Not yet.” Lindsay broke the connection and picked up the conference call to the CIA and NSA. “Has General Murphy arrived yet?”

  “He’s on the Parkway, Mr. President. Should be here within the next couple of minutes,” Tommy Doyle answered.

  “Has CIA come up with anything new?”

  “Sir, we’re getting information from all over the place, but none of it is conclusive. We can tell you that the Yokosuka riot has spread to Tokyo and several other cities. It started as a Rising Sun demonstration, but we think they’ve lost control of it.”

  “You are aware that fourteen airplanes have gone down, including Air Force Two, and that the Japanese may be involved in some way?” the President’s National Security Adviser Harold Secor said.

  “The traffic between their embassy here and Tokyo remains heavy,” Amundson replied from Fort Meade. “But we’re monitoring another incident in the Soya Strait. That’s the water passage between the Japanese north island of Hokkaido and the Russian island of Sakhalin. The Japanese Air Force may have gotten into it with another Russian destroyer. The latest satellite infrareds show the heat signatures of multiple explosions consistent with air-launched missiles.”

  “How do you know it was a destroyer?” the President asked.

  “We copied traffic between the ship—she’s the Sovremennyy—and Pacific Fleet at Vladivostok.”

  “What does the CIA know about this?”

  “We’re reading the same satellite data as NSA,” Doyle said. “But the attack is not unexpected. The Japanese self-defense forces are at DEFCON TWO. Under the rules of engagement they would view any near incursion into their waters as a hostile act. By whomever.”

  “We have American people dead on American soil. Where’s the connection?” the President demanded. “Who is doing it? Can somebody give me a straight answer?”

  “The airplanes were sabotaged. There’s no question about that,” Doyle said. “And the Japanese may be involved, but we’re in the middle of another developing situation. One that we just don’t understand yet, Mr. President. But it may have some bearing on what’s going on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Carrara, our deputy director of operations, has been working with one of our former case officers on the idea that a former East German Stasi assassin may somehow be involved. There has been a series of murders involving Guerin Airplane Company and our air traffic control system that the FBI is investigating. It’s possible that another group is responsible for the sabotage and for some reason wants the blame to fall on the Japanese.”

  “The Russians?”

  “It’s possible, Mr. President, but not likely.”

  “Let me speak with Carrara.”

  “Sir, he’s dead. His body was found last night in Baltimore.”

  None of this was making any sense to Lindsay. “It could be the Russians after all.”

  “Yes, sir. Or the Japanese, or a third group. We just don’t have enough information to say for certain.”

  “Fine,” the President said.

  One of the Marine communications specialists turned from his console at the far end of the room. “Mr. President, you have an incoming call. It’s Prime Minister Enchi.”

  “Just a moment,” the President said. “Who is this former case officer of yours?” he asked Doyle.

  “Kirk McGarvey.”

  “Isn’t there a warrant for his arrest over this business?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Did he kill Carrara?”

  “It’s not likely.”

  “In other words, you have nothing conclusive.”

  “No, sir,” Doyle admitted.

  The President broke the connection, and looked at his advisers. “Now what the hell do I say to Enchi that’ll make any sense?”

  McGarvey stood in the forward galley, the telephone to his ear wondering what he was going to tell JoAnn Carrara when he faced her. “Was it Mueller?”

  “We think so, Mac,” Dick Adkins said. “But it’s crazy here. No one knows what’s going on, and everyone’s afraid to make a decision until the General arrives.”<
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  “Has the system been shut down?”

  “Just the eight airports. There haven’t been crashes anywhere else, and nothing in the past few minutes. Everybody is holding their breath. But the Japanese and Russians have gotten into it again, and our Seventh Fleet has been ordered to DEFCON THREE. The White House is about to start a war.”

  “Have the Japanese made any moves against us?”

  “The submarine north of Okinawa …”

  “Besides that.”

  “There are riots all over Japan.”

  “Goddammit, Dick, has the government of Japan made any official move against us? Any military move? Has our fleet been bottled up in Tokyo Bay? Has Seventh’s flag been moved off shore?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Find out,” McGarvey said.

  “Doyle went to bat for you, but the President wouldn’t listen. Are you so goddamned sure it isn’t the Japanese? They need facts up there now, not speculation. NSA is reading heavy traffic from the Japanese embassy here to its Ministry of State in Tokyo. Some of it has to do with the crashes.”

  “I’ll be on the ground in a few minutes. Have the General convince the President to hold off for as long as possible.”

  “Where are you landing?”

  “Gales Creek.”

  “That’s within Portland’s air traffic control area, isn’t it?”

  McGarvey was caught off guard momentarily. “You said the eight airports have been shut down. What do you mean by that?”

  “Just what I said: shut down. It was your suggestion. No traffic in or out, especially no Guerin 522s.”

  McGarvey pushed his way past McLaren to the flight deck where Socrates was on another phone. The engineer looked up, sensing more trouble.

  “Pull the heat monitor, George,” McGarvey said calmly. “Now.”

  Socrates’ gaze turned toward the windshield for a moment. They had closed the coast, and in the distance to the northeast they could make out a hint of Portland, snow-covered Mount Hood rising behind it. “Right,” he said. He put the telephone aside and climbed down into the electronics bay, Reiner and Callahan watching him.

  “You’ll have to go manual,” McGarvey told them.

  “Too late, Portland ATC has us,” Callahan announced.

  “It’s disconnected,” Socrates called up.

  McGarvey held his breath for a long moment, waiting for their port engine to explode, but it never happened. He looked down at Socrates, who was grinning weakly.

  The Vice President was slipping away from them. Excessive blood loss, early untreated shock, and severe trauma to the left side of his brain, which was swelling inside the cranial cavity, and to his heart, which was not responding to their treatment. Navy doctor Captain David Scorse, primary ER physician working on Cross, had suspected they were too late when he’d first started his examination and treatment. Now he was certain.

  “What’s our ETA?” he asked without looking up.

  “Five minutes,” someone said.

  “We need to relieve the cranial pressure before then,” Scorse said, knowing they were just going through the motions. But the man was Vice President.

  FORTY

  Prime Minister Ichiro Enchi stared at his cabinet around the long table as he waited for President

  Lindsay to come on line. His advisers were suggesting one thing while his heart was telling him something else. If the attack against the Vice President and the airplane crashes were not a result of Morning Star, either the Americans themselves were doing it or somehow the Russians were involved. They’d just learned about the attack on Wakkanai. Combined with Seventh Fleet’s increased alert status, the unthinkable was suddenly becoming plausible. It made a terrible sense. Yet he could not believe, would not believe, that a battle between Japan and the United States was imminent.

  The telephone chimed, and Enchi picked it up. “Mr. President, we are monitoring news reports on CNN of terrible disasters at several of your airports. And our observers in Washington have notified us of the developing situation. It is my understanding that Vice President Cross was on his way to Tokyo when his airplane crashed. May I offer my condolences for him and his wife, and for the crew and other passengers aboard Air Force Two.”

  “Mr. Prime Minister, thank you for your concern. At this point it looks as if Larry Cross will be all right. But at least thirteen passenger airplanes have crashed in the past twenty minutes with a great loss of life. My security advisers believe that the crashes may have resulted from acts of sabotage by an as yet unknown group … or government.”

  The call was on the speakerphone. President Lindsay’s voice was kept at a lower volume so that the voice of the simultaneous translator could be more easily heard and understood. The delay caused by this arrangement was negligible. But the inflection in the President’s voice was unmistakable.

  Hironaka, seated at the end of the table, bridled, but Enchi did not wait for him to speak.

  “If your advisers are correct, and if this attack was made by terrorists or by a government-sponsored terrorist group, then it could be considered an act of war.”

  “That is how we view the situation. We believe we have it under control for the moment, but the economic summit between our countries will have to be delayed until our investigation has been completed.”

  Enchi touched the mute button. “Can they know about Morning Star? Should I say something?”

  “It’s possible but not likely,” Nubunaga said. “They do know about our military readiness, however.”

  Enchi released the mute button. “I agree that we should delay the summit, Mr. President. As you may know by now, a Russian destroyer attacked one of our radar installations on the north coast of Hokkaido. We had to take action to protect ourselves. Since we cannot rule out the possibility of further attacks I have placed our military forces at DEFCON TWO.”

  “We are aware of the attack, and of your response, Mr. Prime Minister. I have advised the Russian government against such an action, and I shall do so again. Because of the attack against us, I have placed our military forces at DEFCON THREE. But this must not be taken as provocative except by our enemies. We are merely taking a stronger defensive position.”

  Again Enchi pressed the mute button. “Have all their forces gone to DEFCON THREE?”

  “Only the Seventh Fleet and the Marine and Air Force installations on Okinawa,” Hironaka said. “It’s obvious whom they consider their enemy to be.”

  “It could simply be a response to our increased alert status.”

  “They were ordered to DEFCON THREE after the attack on their air traffic system.”

  Enchi released the mute button. “Your actions are understandable, as I hope ours are to you. I advise caution. Both of us face difficult situations that must first be resolved before we can go on.”

  “I agree,” President Lindsay replied.

  “May we keep this line of communications between us open, Mr. President?” Enchi asked.

  “By all means. Let there be absolutely no misunderstanding between us. We have been friends for too long to act otherwise.”

  Enchi cut the connection. “What can we do?”

  “Defend ourselves,” Hironaka said. “There is no other consideration.”

  “The number’s up to fourteen if you count Air Force Two,” NTSB duty officer John Hom said.

  “I heard some of that on the way in,” Sam Varelis replied, heading for his office. He was having a hard time accepting it. “Has the FAA issued any orders?”

  “Yes, sir. You were right about them all being Guerin 522s. So far it looks as if eight airports, plus Andrews, were involved. The FAA has shut them all down. Nothing in or out.” Hom handed him the list.

  “That’s a start.” Varelis dialed the FBI’s counterespionage number. “We’re going to have to dig deep to come up with that many teams. Have our regional offices been notified?”

  “New York, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles. We’ll have to handl
e Dulles from here. But our last team is still in town. The 89th Air Wing is covering Air Force Two.”

  “Any word on Cross?”

  “He’s still alive. They’re taking him to Bethesda.”

  “Get Sweedler on the phone. I’ll talk to him next.” Alan Sweedler was President Lindsay’s appointment as chairman of the NTSB. As a Washington insider, he had the connections to cut through the red tape.

  The FBI’s duty officer answered. “Three-nine-three seven-one hundred.”

  “This is Sam Varelis, National Transportation Safety Board. I’d like to speak with John Whitman.”

  “Sir, Mr. Whitman is not available.”

  “Tell him this concerns Kirk McGarvey. I’ll hold.”

  Dominique drove east on Interstate 66. Her numbness after seeing the news bulletins about the air crashes had given way to anger. Kirk had been right all along, and she felt like a fool for not believing him. They’d all been fools. Even David hadn’t believed what McGarvey had come up with. And now this. They’d have to live with their mistake for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t just the Japanese, as the news media was suggesting. There was more, and she was going to do something about it. She phoned a Georgetown number. It was answered on the fourth ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Thank God it’s you, Edward. When I saw the news about the Vice President … I had to call to make sure.”

  Reid hesitated. “Who is this?”

  “It’s me. Dominique. We had lunch together at the Rive Gauche.”

  “Ms. Kilbourne?”

  “You were right, Edward. McGarvey was dead wrong. It is the Japanese. We have to convince Guerin, and the FAA.”

  It seemed as if Reid suddenly came back from a long distance. “Do you know where Mr. McGarvey is?”

  “He’s working with the FBI, I think. But I need your help, Edward. You’re the only person who makes any sense.”