“My God, Sherry! They got him! The poor guy wouldn’t believe me. He saw something out there—he was starting to believe me—but it was too late,” he said, feeling dead inside.
The 747 would still be streaking toward the dark waters of the Atlantic. The horrid image was looming in his mind, like the day he had stood with thousands of others at Cape Canaveral and watched the Challenger blow up, the pieces—including the crew compartment—falling almost lazily toward the ocean surface. At that moment in Florida he had known the cockpit contained living human beings contemplating their deaths as their craft spun crazily out of control. Now it was happening again, only this time two hundred fifty-five civilians were facing their end.
At this very moment! he thought.
Sherry’s voice cut through the horror of the realization. “Try it again, just in case.”
Her voice was quiet and low, and Rusty gave her an incredulous look.
“I mean it,” she said, more forcefully, “just in case.”
He nodded at last and toggled the telephone to get a dial tone for what he knew would be wasted effort. His hand began to shake as the enormity of the preceding events washed over him.
Yuri pulled his finger from the trigger. With the 747 fully enveloped in the cloud cover, it would be a wasted shot. He had been holding just below Mach 1, and with the slipstream screaming in his ears, he now began to nudge the Gulfstream back to a more shallow dive.
I’ll go down and look for him! he decided. He would try to confirm impact—or look for a 747 on the run.
With three missiles left, if Flight 66 was still in the air, it wouldn’t be for long.
The instant the cloud deck swallowed Quantum 66, James Holland reversed the turn to a more shallow bank angle.
“What now, James?” Robb asked, his voice still a strained shadow of its normal tone.
“He’ll be behind us. He won’t really believe we’re down. We have to get low enough to get lost in radar surface clutter and pretend we’re dead. We’ll run on the surface, in ground effect if necessary, until we’re sure he’s not back there. That’s literally our only chance.”
“Six thousand,” Robb announced. “You’ll need to shallow your descent around three thousand.”
Holland nodded. “We’ll do it at two.”
Robb nodded hesitantly. They were screaming out of the sky in a damaged airplane. If Holland mistimed it, they might not be able to pull out without breaking up or hitting the water.
“Okay, there’s two thousand!” Robb announced. “Pull out, James. PULL OUT!”
Holland began pulling the yoke back as the vertical velocity indicator began winding down, but the yoke was resisting. A thundering shudder shook the aircraft as he applied more back pressure, but to release it would mean impacting the water.
There was nothing but blackness outside the windscreen. The level-off would have to be done entirely on instruments, and if he leveled too soon or too high, another missile could streak up an engine tailpipe and blow them apart. Holland knew the assailant was behind them, trying to lock up a final shot. He had to get within two hundred feet of the waves, perhaps closer.
The radio altimeter flashed through one thousand feet. The descent rate was slowing, but the shuddering was making the cathode-ray tube displays hard to read.
“Five hundred feet! Level off, James!” Robb called.
James Holland gave a last, mighty pull on the yoke, feeling the shuddering increase slightly as the radio altimeter unwound through the last three hundred feet.
Yuri Steblinko circled to the right and continued his descent. The target had reappeared on his scope, then faded again. Now it had disappeared entirely. He searched either side, of course, then did a complete three-hundred-sixty-degree turn, spotting nothing but random returns from the waves below. The Gulfstream broke out from beneath the undercast at three thousand feet, but with the jumbo’s lights extinguished, there would be no way to spot the aircraft visually over the pitch blackness of the water.
Especially if it had impacted.
Lights suddenly loomed up in the distance on his right, and Yuri banked in that direction and accelerated. Nothing registered on the radar, but the lights were distinct. As he neared, Yuri could see that they were stationary and low.
It was a ship of some sort.
He broke off and circled back in the direction of the original coordinates, still scanning with the radar and still getting nothing.
Perhaps I was successful after all, he mused. Perhaps the explosion was simply masked, or perhaps the missile entered the engine tailpipe before blowing up.
There was a momentary flare of a target to the west. He turned in that direction and tuned the radar. For a few sweeps there was nothing, then a faint return, somewhat west of where it had been before.
Yuri pushed up the thrust levers and gave chase, mentally calculating whether the 747 could have reached that position, some twenty miles away.
The answer was yes.
But the target disappeared, and the scope remained empty of all but surface noise.
He circled twice more, increasing his altitude both times, until at twelve thousand feet and back above the overcast, he decided the deed was done.
Yuri Steblinko sat back exhausted, momentarily adrift. He needed to decide on the next move. He would have to land and disappear until he could reach the appointed rendezvous. He’d already worked out where.
At some point the United States would officially discover what he had done, and a furious search would ensue. No one would be looking for the Gulfstream yet, but later the aircraft’s involvement would be terribly easy to establish.
His involvement would not—unless he made a major mistake.
Yuri set climb power on the prince’s Gulfstream and headed back to cruising altitude and tried to focus on what came next. Fuel was getting low. There were several island archipelagoes within range that had airfields. It would be a simple choice to pick one, land unannounced, leave the aircraft, and slip away. But an isolated island would be more difficult to leave. He had his trusted collection of fake passports in the lining of his briefcase. He could be one of three different men, a Canadian, Jordanian, or Pakistani—the advantage of being a trained Russian agent with a swarthy complexion. The passports were vintage KGB issue, updated just before the collapse.
An image of the impossible throng of people in Cairo imposed itself in his mind. There were a thousand ways out of Cairo and Egypt for a Jordanian with money, and given the Egyptian aviation authorities’ normal speed, it would take them a week to figure out that the abandoned Gulfstream at one of their airports was the same one being sought worldwide by an angry Saudi prince.
Then, and only then, would the empty missile rack be found. He could be halfway around the planet by then.
Yuri calculated the distance. Egypt was thousands of miles to the east and well beyond his fuel supply. He grabbed a map and glanced at the circles he had drawn many hours before around possible recovery fields. The Canary Islands were to the west and within range. Another expensive transatlantic business jet dropping into the central airport of Las Palmas would hardly be noticed. He could pay cash for the fuel, refile a flight plan eastbound, and be gone within thirty minutes.
Yuri punched the coordinates of Las Palmas into the navigation computer as conflicting images of Anya and a well-endowed young woman he had known many years before in Cairo played in his mind.
Anya won out, as she always had. As he knew she always would. With the Jordanian passport and a considerable amount of cash, he would evaporate from Cairo like a ghost, only to reappear later at the agreed-upon place and time with Anya—and a Swiss bank account in seven figures.
Yuri’s thoughts returned briefly to the 747. Since there had been no trace of an airplane leaving the area, the only possible conclusion was that the attack had been successful. Somehow, he had blown off enough of the 747’s wing without seeing the explosion.
The mission was successfu
l.
But in the back of his mind was a nagging little memory of the 747’s course reversals.
TWENTY-THREE
SITUATION ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.—SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23—5:50 P.M. (2250Z)
The news of the Mayday call from Flight 66 flashed into the Situation Room from several sources almost simultaneously. It had been picked up by other aircraft, an orbiting satellite, and HF radio stations all around the Atlantic.
And there had been no further contact with Flight 66, indicating they were truly down.
Jonathan Roth had been summoned from the adjacent conference room.
“The nearest radar is on the Canary Islands, and that’s too far out,” one of the staff members told him. “We’ve got an aircraft carrier, the Eisenhower, about two hundred miles west. They’re launching a search and rescue effort immediately. The emergency locator satellite is due to pass overhead in another thirty minutes, but so far there are no reports of an ELT, an emergency locator transmitter.”
“What conclusions can you draw from that?” Roth asked.
The briefer hesitated. “Well, I’m told it could mean that the impact was too catastrophic even for the emergency beacon, or whoever shot him down hit the tail and destroyed the beacon.”
Roth nodded, a grim expression covering his features. He turned to a young woman at the communications console.
“Get the President on the line for me, please.”
She nodded, and within seconds handed him the phone.
In funereal tones, Roth outlined the earlier intelligence of an Iranian-backed threat, and the fact that Flight 66 had reported being hit and going down.
“Mr. President,” Roth continued when the news had sunk in, “I know this isn’t my area, but the entire world has been watching, and if we get any confirmation of Iranian involvement—this group Aqbah, for instance—I would highly recommend you and your advisors consider a televised statement of condemnation. If enough outrage is created, we may finally get the other intelligence services to help us eradicate these vermin.”
ABOARD FLIGHT 66
For just a moment, James Holland had thought they were dead. In the last few seconds of the descent, the radio altimeter seemed to be disproving the idea that the 747 could be leveled before striking the water. But suddenly the trajectory had flattened and the altimeter had stabilized at eighty feet. Holland climbed back to a hundred feet above the surface and held it there for ten agonizing minutes while Robb searched the radar screen, watching for telltale signs that they had been locked up again by the pursuer’s attack radar.
But the 747’s radarscope was clear of anything but wave clutter.
“How’re the controls?” Robb had asked. “Any flight control problems?”
Holland shook his head no. “Only the asymmetric thrust, with one engine missing on the right. I’ve got a lot of left rudder trim cranked in.”
Finally, Holland dared to climb to three hundred feet and turn the aircraft over to Dick Robb as he reached for the PA microphone:
“Folks, this is Captain Holland. I … there’s no other way to explain what just happened other than just … telling you. So here goes. The explosion you heard was an air-to-air missile aimed at us. We’ve been shot at—by whom, I don’t know. Whoever was trying to bring us down succeeded only in blowing off the outboard engine one on the right side. We can fly just fine with three remaining engines, and we have plenty of fuel, but what we don’t have is an explanation of who would want to shoot us out of international airspace. What we also don’t have is a safe place to go, since I can’t gamble. Whoever shot us will probably expect us to fly on to the desert airfield our country’s set up for us. We can’t run the risk of encountering that fighter again, so we’re running in a different, unpredictable direction. Now. Remain calm, say a few prayers if you like, but understand that we’re still safe and flyable and simply going to plan B. I’ll keep you informed. As before, don’t lunge at the cabin crew for more information. They don’t know anything I haven’t just told you.”
Holland replaced the microphone, with his thoughts returning to the overriding problem—they were still airborne, but headed where?
Unseen below him wives, husbands, lovers, and strangers were clinging to each other in shocked silence as the flight attendants—at Barb Rollins’ insistence—began fanning out through the cabin to reassure any panicked passengers.
“We’re burning fuel at a furious rate, James!” Robb had cautioned as he frantically searched the map for a destination.
Jet engines gulped vastly more fuel at low altitude, yet they couldn’t climb again without risking detection. Holland examined the fuel gauges once more. The consumption rate was normal, but the fuel tank gauges told a different story, with one gauge moving rapidly toward empty.
“We’ve got a fuel leak in number three reserve tank, Dick! I’m going to start feeding everything out of there. Calculate what that does to our range.”
Robb buried himself in the appropriate charts for a few seconds, then raised his head and looked over at Holland.
“If we stay on the surface like this, we couldn’t even make the Mauritania airfield.”
Holland shook his head. “We can’t go there anyway. That CIA doctor was right. They’ll be waiting for us.”
“Where, then, James? We’re on three engines, we’re losing fuel, if you so much as pulse your wrist downward we’re in the water, and we’re being hunted. Shouldn’t we turn on the radios and call for help?”
Holland shook his head. “What if the fighter back there is listening, or there’s a squadron of them looking for us? They think we’re down. Let’s keep it that way. Make sure all the radios are off. Transmit absolutely nothing.” He turned back to focus on the radio altimeter.
Robb nodded and chewed his lip. “Yeah. Yeah, I see that.” He seemed in deep thought for a few seconds. Suddenly he sat bolt upright. “Jeez! The passenger satellite phones on the seatbacks! Anybody back there could be using one right now!”
Holland snapped his head around to the right briefly before returning his eyes to the critical radio altitude reading. “You’re right. We could be pinpointed with a satellite transmission. Get them off. The circuit breakers are behind you, Dick.”
Robb found the breakers and pulled them. He turned toward Holland, who was looking out the window to his left in deep contemplation. Robb glanced at Rachael Sherwood in the jump seat. Her eyes were on Holland, who finally turned back to the right and spoke, resignation and anger tingeing his words.
“Look, we’d better realize something. We’re totally alone! We’ve got no contact with the outside world I can risk, not even the satellite phones, and we’re not sure who we can trust until we get this bird safely on the ground somewhere—and maybe not even then.”
Rachael was shaking her head, a gesture only Robb saw.
“James, we have at least one friend on the outside. Maybe that CIA fellow can help us. This handheld satellite phone still works, and it’s not registered to this aircraft.” Rachael held up the receiver slightly.
Holland turned around, spotting the phone in her hand. He thought for a minute, then nodded and reached for it, punching the ON button.
GRAND HYATT, WASHINGTON, D.C.
In the main elevator alcove of the Washington Grand Hyatt, an unremarkable man in a dark business suit scanned the faces spilling from the latest opened elevator door with quiet intensity and cursed to himself. He had memorized the file photo, and the matching face wasn’t there. The elevator door closed, and he turned slightly with a studied disinterest that would attract no one’s attention. He melted smoothly into a corner and cupped one hand to his face as if in thought, effectively covering both his mouth and the tiny microphone in his palm, which connected him to an equally frustrated partner several floors above. Despite years in the field and a coolheaded determination to carry out orders, the two men were frustrated and running out of ideas. The pursuit was becoming a stakeout, and for that
, two were not enough.
Yet there could be only the two of them, devoid of badges or official sanction, and they were expected to surgically remove an operational threat.
On the fourteenth floor another dark-suited man paused near a stairwell, feeling the same frustration as his partner down below. The target’s Blazer had been secured and bugged, but the target—a low-level Company analyst named Sanders and his female companion, identity unknown—had effectively been absorbed by the warrens of hotel rooms and corridors. That fact had left both men quietly furious. Office types were not supposed to be able to handle themselves so professionally.
“I’m checking the fifteenth floor now,” the man upstairs added. It was the only floor he hadn’t cruised. What he could find behind closed doors was probably nothing. But there were no other options, and their orders were clear.
In room 1443 a deep gloom prevailed. Rusty Sanders sat on the edge of the bed repeatedly dialing the number of a satellite telephone he suspected was already on its way to the bottom of the Atlantic.
Sherry Ellis had sat for a few minutes with her arms around him, cradling him briefly as she rested her head on his shoulder. He didn’t remember when she had disengaged to turn on the TV to CNN, but the first flash of the Mayday message had cut like a knife through both of them. Even though they had heard the very same words through the Iridium phone, the fact that it was now on the international airwaves made it real.
Flight 66 was down. No one could survive such an impact. Over two hundred fifty people were dead.
The fact that they, too, might have become the hunted was not a consideration.
Hanging up the phone and redialing had become rote for Rusty Sanders. How many times he had done it, he didn’t know, but the sudden change on the other end of the telephone almost didn’t stop his finger from hanging up once again.
The ringing had stopped, and in its place was a voice.
“Is this Doctor Sanders?” it asked.
“Yes,” he said, thoroughly confused. If he had misdialed, how did the speaker know who he was? Or had the bad guys tapped into the line at last?
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