High Flight

by David Hagberg

  It took just a moment for the news to sink in. “Does Sugar Hill copy?” Lieutenant Kane radioed as she reversed course in a savage turn back toward the Russian submarine’s position.

  “Eliminator Leader, this is Sugar Hill. We copy!”

  “We have target acquisition,” the Viking’s weapons officer reported.

  “Stand by to launch torpedoes on my mark,” Kane ordered. “Fire one … fire two!”

  Landry was on a direct circuit to Admiral Ryland aboard the George Washington. He got the word on the missile strikes within seconds of impact.

  “Mr. President, they were not nuclear missiles. Al Ryland says they were conventional high explosives. Not nuclear!”

  The President recovered before anyone else. “What was their target?”

  “The radar station at Wakkanai,” Landry said. “We’re engaging that submarine and two other submarines that are attacking a pair of Japanese destroyers.”

  Murphy put McGarvey back on the speakerphone.

  “Mr. President, order everyone to stand down,” McGarvey shouted.

  Lindsay looked accusingly down the table at his DCI. “The attack may not have been nuclear, but it was an attack against one of our allies.”

  “Yes, Mr. President, but it was nothing more than a retaliation for Tatar Strait. It’s gotten out of hand. Stop it now before it’s too late.”

  “Cut that circuit,” Lindsay ordered.

  Murphy reached for the disconnect button.

  “Please, Mr. President, I’m begging you,” McGarvey pleaded. “Set up a three-way circuit between yourself, President Yeltsin, and Prime Minister Enchi.”

  “Now, General!” Lindsay roared.

  “Mr. President, talking is better than fighting! Enough people have died! End it now! At least try to end it now, for Christ’s sake, unless you’re afraid to make a decisive move for once in your career—”

  Murphy punched the disconnect button.

  Lindsay’s face turned red. “Let me talk to Admiral Ryland. I’m ordering our forces to DEFCON ONE.”

  The button on the President’s console for the National Security Agency lit up. He hesitated a moment before pressing it.

  “Mr. President, we’ve finally intercepted an ELF message from the Russian Pacific Fleet Headquarters in Vladivostok. All their submarine forces have been ordered to disengage immediately.”

  “Is it a trick?” Lindsay asked.

  “Sir, the codes are correct. We’re evaluating the order as genuine.”

  The President hesitated a moment longer.

  “Call President Yeltsin and Prime Minister Enchi,” Harold Secor suggested. “Admiral Ryland is standing by for your orders, but he’ll wait. The delay will only be minimal.”

  “The Japanese have asked for our help.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Murphy agreed. “I think you’re in a position now to do just that.”

  “Who attacked us?”

  “Mr. McGarvey gave us the answer. We’ll sort out the details later. Let’s step back from the brink before it’s too late.”

  Lindsay studied the faces of his advisers. Normal color was returning to his face. “Very well,” he said.

  “We can stop the killing,” Secor prompted gently.

  Lindsay sat up straighter. “Send the order for our forces to stand by. Then set up a conference call with President Yeltsin and Prime Minister Enchi.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Murphy said, breathing the biggest internal sigh of relief in his life.

  “Two American Mark 46 torpedoes have gone active,” the Strelka’s chief sonar operator reported.

  “Range and bearing?” Lestov demanded. They’d not counted on the Americans to enter the fight.

  “Above and on our port quarter. Captain, they are in pinging mode! They have us!”

  “Release countermeasures! Come right to one-eight-zero degrees.”

  “Conn, communications. We are receiving an ELF message from Pacific Fleet ordering us to disengage immediately!”

  Lestov looked across the attack center at his XO. “Too late,” he mouthed the words.

  “They’re close!”

  The torpedoes hit, one after the other, breaching the Strelka’s hull, breaking her in two. The forward half of the warship, containing the control center and most of the crew, lazily rolled to starboard and headed down to the bottom of the sea, her waterproof bulkheads failing like dominoes in a row as the pressure increased beyond design limits.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Night had somehow turned to day. When McGarvey awoke in the hospital he looked up into the eyes of Dominique. She smiled uncertainly, distantly.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello to you. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m supposed to be asking that question.”

  “I’ll live,” McGarvey said. He felt stiff, his mouth pasty, his eyes filled with hot sand, and his head splitting with a booming headache.

  “I heard everything aboard the helicopter. What you said, what you did.” She looked away for a moment, overwhelmed by everything she’d gone through.

  McGarvey reached out and touched her hand, but she flinched away.

  “They came very close to succeeding, didn’t they? We almost went to war.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you stopped it. Nobody would listen, so you had to finally force them into it. Is it always that way?”

  “Sometimes,” McGarvey replied tiredly. He wanted to tell her everything, but she didn’t deserve that burden. He was like a soldier home from the battlefield who refuses to talk about his experiences, in part because he does not want to relive the horrors, in part because there is no way to make anyone who’d not been there understand.

  When he awoke briefly, she was gone, and he drifted off to sleep again.

  “Stan!” Carol Moss called urgently from the cockpit.

  Liskey roused himself from a troubled few hours sleep and hurried aft to the companionway. He’d not bothered to take off his wet foul-weather gear in case he’d have to go topside in a hurry. But the motion of the boat was much easier. And the setting sun, now that the skies had started to clear, was red and gold and purple on the western horizon.

  “What?” he said, when he followed her open-mouthed gaze. Fifty yards downwind the gray mass of what he recognized was an American Knox-class frigate rose like the Great Wall of China. The number 1088 was painted on her bow, but there was no name.

  Two officers stood on the starboard wing off the bridge. One of them raised a bullhorn. “Hello, Fair Winds!”

  Liskey cupped his hands over his mouth. “Hello, Navy!”

  “Do you require assistance?”

  Liskey started to shout an answer, but Carol touched his arm.

  “We don’t need any help, do we, Stan?” she asked. “We went through all that, and now it’s okay?”

  “It’s up to you, Carol.”

  “We came out to sail. To be together.”

  Liskey cupped his hands over his mouth again. “Negative, Navy! We’re just fine!”

  “Where are you heading?”

  “South.”

  One of the officers ducked back onto the bridge for a few moments. When he came back he took the bullhorn. “The weather is clearing. Long-range forecast looks good. Do you need any supplies?”

  “No, thanks!”

  “Good sailing, Fair Winds.”

  “Thank you,” Liskey shouted. “Can you tell us what happened this morning?”

  The officers heard him, he was sure of it, but they didn’t answer, and the frigate slowly pulled away, thoughtfully waiting until it was a half-mile off before accelerating.

  They watched the warship until it disappeared over the horizon, leaving them alone on the sea.

  “South,” Carol asked. “Back to Okinawa?”

  “We’ll take our time,” Liskey replied. “You said something about a ten knot breeze in a sheltered cove?”

  Murphy showed up at the hospital on We
dnesday as McGarvey was checking out over the doctor’s protests. His bodyguard stood watchfully to one side. It had been a busy few days, and the strain showed on the DCI’s face.

  “Every time we underestimate you, we end up with egg on our faces,” he said, helping McGarvey with his coat.

  “Have you come to apologize?” McGarvey asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, at least that’s honest.”

  “The President asks that I convey his thanks. It was close.”

  “Has everything settled down?”

  “For the time being. But our relationship with Japan has been strained, even if it wasn’t Enchi’s government. We’re still figuring out what to do. Half the country is calling it another Pearl Harbor, and the other half thinks it’s our own fault. The disintegration of the family has turned us into the most violent country in the world.”

  “Live by the sword, die by the sword?”

  “Something like that,” Murphy said. “But how did you figure it out when everything pointed toward the Japanese?”

  “It was a Japanese plot. But they didn’t push the button on the Guerin flight to Dulles. They weren’t ready. It meant someone else was involved, and Yamagata was just as desperate to find out who it was, and why, as I was.”

  “How the hell did Reid stumble onto it?”

  “Ask him.”

  “For profit? Was that it?” Murphy asked.

  “And idealism,” McGarvey explained. “He’s convinced that we’re going to have another war with Japan. He wanted to wake us up to the fact, so that we’d do something about it before it’s too late. Thing is, I think he’s right.”

  “Even if that’s true, we won’t do anything about it.”

  McGarvey shrugged. “Am I under arrest?”

  Murphy shook his head. “No. But I’d like you to come in for a debriefing.”

  “Give me a few days.”

  “Fair enough,” the DCI said. “Can I give you a lift?”

  “NTSB,” McGarvey said. “Socrates and some of the others are meeting with the board.”

  “Did you hear about Al Vasilanti? He died last night in his sleep. Heart attack.”

  “I’m sorry. He was a good man.”

  “A lot of good people are dead. They’re still identifying bodies.”

  They walked out of the hospital and got into Murphy’s limousine. The sun was out, and the city looked lovely under the fresh blanket of snow.

  “How’s Howard Ryan?” McGarvey asked.

  “He got in over his head. Thanks for saving his life.”

  “He should look for a new line of work.”

  “He’s a good attorney.”

  “But a lousy spook,” McGarvey said. He watched out the window for a few seconds. “Have you spoken with JoAnn Carrara?”

  “Not yet,” Murphy said.

  “He was a good man.”

  “One of the best. Dick Adkins will do okay for us. He and Phil were close.”

  McGarvey looked at Murphy. “It goes on, doesn’t it?”

  Murphy nodded. “Howard’s internal investigation into your background is finished. We didn’t come up with much of anything, except that we made a mistake firing you over that Santiago assignment.”

  “I don’t want the job, General.”

  “I wasn’t offering you a job, Mac. I’m just telling you that those records … all the records … are being sealed for fifty years.”

  “Thanks,” McGarvey said.

  “Take care of yourself,” Murphy told him in front of the NTSB headquarters downtown.

  “I’ll try.”

  Reid stood on the edge of the chair in his holding cell thinking about the future. He’d told his interrogators everything they wanted to know within the first few hours. But they’d recoiled from him as if he were a poisonous snake. He’d seen the look in their eyes. There’d be more questions, of course, because it was impossible for people like them to understand anything in more than small bites.

  He’d managed to tear several long strips out of his bed sheet, which he had fashioned into a long rope, a simple slip knot forming a noose at one end. Standing on a chair he’d tied the other end of the rope to the ceiling grille that covered the single light bulb. With the noose around his neck, all he had to do was kick the chair away and in a few minutes he would be dead. Only a few minutes of pain and it would be over.

  He contemplated his own death. Not such a frightening idea, although he didn’t relish the idea of pain.

  But another idea came to mind. They’d not allowed him to see a television news broadcast, nor had they brought him a newspaper, despite his repeated, and he felt reasonable, requests. They were frightened of him, which on reflection he thought was a good thing. It meant that although they might not understand, at least they were listening.

  There would be more questions, more answers. And almost certainly there’d be a public trial at which he would be allowed, by law, to state his case.

  Twenty-six hundred people had been killed at Pearl Harbor, and the war with Japan had resulted. At least that many men, women, and children had given their lives on Sunday across America. But their deaths would be wasted unless he remained alive to get this message to his countrymen. This time he would make certain that the tragedy would not be repeated. This time twenty-six hundred deaths would be used to prevent war with Japan.

  Reid smiled as he reached up to slip the noose from around his neck. He would become their advocate. It was the least he could do for them and his country.

  His left foot slipped and in panic he kicked the chair out from under him. The pain was sudden and intense. He thrashed blindly, trying to find a foothold, his fingers clawing uselessly at the fabric biting into his neck, cutting off his air, cutting off the blood supply to his brain. It wasn’t fair! He wasn’t ready to die! He had so much to live for now! So much he had to tell his fellow Americans! Somebody would come to help him! They had to come now! His vision blurred, and he knew that he was dying. No one was coming. No one cared.

  The fifth-floor auditorium in the Department of Transportation on Independence Avenue was nearly full. As chief investigator for the NTSB, Sam Varelis, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth, sat at the head table, along with representatives from the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI, and the House Subcommittee on Aviation. George Socrates stood at the podium explaining how the sabotaged engines had caused catastrophic wing failures that brought the airplanes down. Behind him a slide of an uncowled Rolls-Royce engine was projected on a large screen. As the Guerin engineer spoke, he used a light pencil to point to the various critical components in the engine.

  “It’ll be a long time before we recover, if we ever do,” Newton Kilbourne said, sitting next to McGarvey at the back of the auditorium.

  “I heard about Al Vasilanti,” McGarvey said after a couple of minutes.

  “It was more than he could take. He was from the old school where honor and fair play still meant something.” Kilbourne nodded toward Socrates. “We’ll figure it out so that it won’t be so easy the next time.”

  “Don’t believe it.”

  “We’re coming up with a redundant cross-check system. Anything fails for any reason, no matter how slight, and the on-board monitors will catch it and automatically kick in the fix.”

  “If you design it, someone will find a way around it.”

  Kilbourne looked at McGarvey. “They won’t go through ATC either. We’ll have that covered.”

  “Then they’ll plant a bomb, or shoot it down with a missile, or hijack the flight. If they want you, they’ll get you. No way of stopping them, at least not one hundred percent.”

  “You didn’t do such a hot job,” Kilbourne retorted, but he backed off immediately. “Shit. I’m sorry, Mac. You were right from the beginning. You and Dave Kennedy.”

  “Doesn’t give me much pleasure.”

  “No, I suspect it doesn’t. I’m sorry.”

  “You were doing your job,” McG
arvey said.

  “And you were doing yours, only I didn’t want to listen.”

  “It’s a problem we all have, Newt.” McGarvey got up.

  “Aren’t you going to stick around?”

  “I have a couple of things to do. You people know the situation now. As you say, you’ll figure out how to build a safer airplane.”

  “That’s not the problem,” Kilbourne said. “The problem is figuring out how to make a safer world.”

  “That’s a thought,” McGarvey said tiredly. He started to go, but Kilbourne stopped him.

  “Dominique wants to see you.”

  McGarvey looked down at him. “She tell you that?”

  Kilbourne shook his head. “Not in so many words. But she does.”

  “Sure,” McGarvey said.

  “Did he make a difference, Mac?”

  McGarvey sat at the kitchen counter drinking a cup of coffee laced with brandy that JoAnn Carrara had fixed for him. “Of course he did.”

  “Are you sure? You’re not lying to me? Because Phil said that you were one of the few men he knew who never lied about anything important. Have any of you made the slightest bit of difference?”

  “We won the Cold War.”

  She waved it off. “So many innocent people were killed on Sunday. Are you saying it was just an act of terrorism?”

  “That’s exactly what it was, JoAnn.”

  “Funny, I don’t know if I can believe you.”

  “Phil did.”

  “It could have been worse?”

  “A lot worse,” McGarvey said.

  She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead, and managed a slight, off-center smile. “Thanks, Mac.” She looked toward the den where her children were watching television. “You can find your own way out?”

  “I think so.”

  “You won’t mind?”

  “Not a bit.”

  Finally he drove over to the Watergate. He parked in the visitors lot and took the elevator upstairs. He’d thought about returning to his classes at Milford, but it wouldn’t be fair to Dominique. She was confused and frightened, as she had every right to be. Her carefully constructed world had been torn apart. It was as if she’d been living in a small town that was safe from the real world, and one morning she’d awakened to find out that a mass murderer had been living next door all along.