“Oh Lord, that’s the battery! The battery’s dying!” she said.
Holland turned back to the phone. “Rusty? Are you sure? Are you certain they’ve launched the military after us?”
“You’re considered an unprecedented biological threat to humanity, James. There are people making decisions here that are out of control. Can you head somewhere else? If you can get on the ground somewhere remote and sit tight for twenty more hours with no illness, we’re home free!”
“Where the hell? I have limited range with three engines, the airplane’s beginning to stink, we’re almost out of food, and the only thing we’ve got in abundance is water.”
The beeping of the battery warning was becoming more insistent.
“What’s your range, James?”
“I figure four thousand miles safely, that’s a little more than ten hours in flight. Hold on. We’re looking at the maps.”
Rachael helped him spread the aeronautical chart of the Atlantic on the center console as he put the phone in his lap. A four-thousand-mile range could get them to Iceland, Canada, the mainland of the U.S., South America, the West Indies, and a scattering of islands in the South Atlantic, plus most of Africa and Europe.
“Remote. We need a remote spot. We need a place without U.S. military hardware.”
A small dot representing a tiny island—the tip of a mostly submerged mountain peak that rose from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge thousands of miles from nowhere—caught his eye. James Holland measured the distance roughly, then leaned over and entered the latitude and longitude coordinates in the FMC computer as a fix. The island was about thirty-four hundred miles distant.
They were within range.
And no one on Earth would be expecting them to show up there.
“Dick, I’m entering these coordinates. Plug up the LNAV and head for it.”
Dick Robb nodded.
James Holland lifted the Iridium phone.
“Rusty? I’m going to divert south to Ascension Island. I’m going to need to know what facilities they have …”
There was no sound from the earpiece.
Holland looked around at Rachael. “Do you have a spare battery?”
She was already shaking her head. “In our luggage. We can’t, I guess, reach the baggage compartment from in here?”
He shook his head dispiritedly and handed her the phone.
“That was our last friend.” He relayed to both of them the chilling news that the U.S. military had been turned loose to find them.
“Would they really do that, James?” Dick Robb asked, wide-eyed. “Would our own government really try to kill us?”
James Holland snorted and looked out at the darkness of the nighttime sky for a few seconds before meeting Robb’s gaze again and nodding.
“For at least the next twenty hours, Dick, we have no friends. We’re the mouse, and God only knows how many cats are out there hunting for us.”
TWENTY-SIX
WASHINGTON, D.C.—SATURDAY EVENING, DECEMBER 23—7:45 P.M. (0045Z)
The 14th Street Bridge was a blur in the windows of the cab as Rusty Sanders lowered Sherry’s cellular phone to his lap and sighed. “I don’t believe it! The battery died! Before he could tell me where he’s going, the damned battery died!”
“But he’s away and he’s safe,” Sherry reminded him. “That’s the most important thing.”
Rusty nodded, the image of the damaged 747 hanging in his mind. He glanced at Sherry as they shot off the west end of the bridge. The Pentagon was visible on the right, but the cabbie was holding his course to the west, toward Richmond.
Sherry Ellis reached out and held Rusty’s hand, and he looked up at her in response.
“Rusty, it’s out of our control now. You’ve done everything possible. We’ve got to worry about our own asses for a while.”
Rusty shook his head. “I just can’t get rid of the image of that poor guy flying off in the middle of the night, alone, out of contact, no support, and targeted by his own country. Can you imagine, Sherry? Can you imagine what he must be going through? Right this minute out there somewhere?”
She nodded slowly as Rusty continued, his hands in midair in a gesture of helplessness. “He’s got over two hundred and fifty people depending on him—people who a few hours ago were told they were doomed by illness. Now they may be doomed by circumstance.” Rusty turned to her. “What if Aqbah finds them?”
“Rusty, we don’t even know where he’s going. How could Aqbah?” she asked.
Rusty sighed again and shifted his gaze out the window. “I don’t know. But I have the terrible feeling they haven’t given up yet.”
“Where are we going?”
Rusty looked at her blankly. “What?”
“We’re rocketing westbound in a taxi at warp two. Where are we going? What’s our plan?”
He shook his head.
“I … guess I hadn’t been thinking about us. My head’s been out there over the Atlantic somewhere.”
She nodded. “Okay, but our bodies are here, and I’m kinda fond of mine.”
“I suppose they could trace this cab …” he began. She nodded.
“And,” Rusty continued, “I guess we need to assume Roth’s given orders to eliminate us both, though he probably doesn’t know you’re involved.”
“He will if the guy in the kitchen can still talk.”
“Sherry, you were in the field, in Cairo, right?”
She nodded. “A short stint in Covert Ops, yes.”
“So you’re trained in these things. I’m not.”
“You want a suggestion?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Okay. Let’s turn around and head for National Airport. The more people around us the better. They could be looking for this cab by now. You have any cash? Please say yes, several hundred.”
“In fact, I do,” Rusty replied, looking puzzled. “Three hundred or so.”
“Yes!”
“Why?”
“Shuttle tickets to New York. We can disappear more easily up there.”
“How?”
“Find a hotel under an assumed name, bolt the door, and try to figure it out from there.”
Rusty’s eyes were staring deeply into hers. His expression, and the way he’d suddenly shifted himself sideways in the seat as if he were looking at her as a partner and a companion for the first time, made her feel a disturbing bond between them that made clever comments at once unnecessary and trivial.
They were in mortal trouble.
But they were in trouble together.
Sherry felt herself blush as Rusty ordered the cabby to reverse course, never taking his eyes from hers.
NORTHWEST OF LAS PALMAS, CANARY ISLANDS
Roaring into the night from Las Palmas Airport, Yuri Steblinko pushed the Gulfstream IV to redline airspeed trying to get to Tenerife before the radar trace of Flight 66 disappeared to the north.
It was too late. His radar showed nothing where Flight 66 should have been.
Air traffic control had confirmed the 747’s flight plan led to Iceland, but Yuri knew his quarry was no fool. The captain of Flight 66 would expect the unknown assailant to be lurking somewhere close by. He would file a false flight plan and then head somewhere else—somewhere at least ninety degrees away from the northbound course that led back to Keflavík.
“The seven-forty-seven departed eighteen minutes ago,” the Tenerife tower confirmed. With a climb speed averaging between two hundred fifty and three hundred knots, the jumbo should have gained a seventy-five- to hundred-mile lead, Yuri calculated. The attack radar was sweeping a two-hundred-mile area ahead, but there were still no returns, and Yuri could feel his apprehension rising.
He leveled the Gulfstream at fifteen thousand feet, adjusted the throttles, and held a northerly course as his mind worked frantically on the problem.
Where would I go? What would I do in his shoes?
If the 747 were already flying south, the two aircr
aft would be moving apart at a combined speed of a thousand miles per hour! The 747 was out there somewhere and in range, he knew, but he couldn’t search the entire area around the Canary Islands fast enough. If he guessed at the wrong direction, Flight 66 would be out of range before he could try another. The only real chance of catching him was to follow the same path of logic the 747 captain was using. If he could do that, he could figure out where Flight 66 was headed.
He wouldn’t go back to the east because he’d expect me to be waiting there. He would figure that any attempt to fly east toward the Sahara would bring another attack, because coastal radars would see him and they might just be helping me.
East wasn’t the answer.
Okay, how about north? I concluded he wouldn’t go north. Am I missing anything?
Again the answer was no.
That left west and south, and Yuri banked the Gulfstream to the west as he struggled to work out which was more likely.
The radar scope still showed no targets ahead. He flipped the range to three hundred miles, then back to one hundred fifty, but nothing flared on the screen.
If he runs west, he’ll be headed back to the United States. If he runs south, there are only a few islands, South America’s east coast, and more of Africa.
The 747’s fuel tanks had been filled, he had been told by the departure controller. But the jumbo had only three engines, and that meant more drag and less range. He could probably fly four thousand miles maximum. Enough to reach Miami. Enough to reach Recife, Brazil, and maybe even Rio de Janeiro.
A target suddenly flared ahead at the ninety-mile range, held for two sweeps of the radar beam as it appeared to move due south, then disappeared again. When it failed to reappear, Yuri decided it was nothing.
Yuri had monitored as many commercial broadcasts as he could find in the previous hours, and the latest ones had confirmed that the passengers and crew of Flight 66 had in fact been exposed to the deadly virus released in Germany. For a while, the aircraft was said to have crashed at sea, then it was reported at Tenerife, holding the airport hostage. Now, as Yuri monitored a Voice of America broadcast, an announcer echoed the worldwide worry that Flight 66 had become a renegade flown by an out-of-control aircrew that was refusing to go to the desert and die quietly.
Yuri felt a flash of kinship for the American captain of Flight 66. He was a fellow pilot, and even as he chased him in order to kill him, Yuri could feel empathy for the man.
And moreover, he felt he could understand his thinking. Any pilot who could do such a masterful job of evading an attacker had been trained as a military pilot, possibly in fighters. He would know he was still being hunted, and he would do something no one was expecting.
He would head for home. He would fly west.
Yuri keyed in the coordinates of several westbound way points in the flight management computer and executed the changes. He would climb to thirty-two thousand—an altitude commercial jets seldom used—and race westward. His closing rate on Flight 66 should be at least sixty knots, which would mean an intercept within two hours. They would be more than a thousand miles out over the trackless Atlantic when that moment occurred, but with his remaining three missiles, he could finish off what he’d started.
SITUATION ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.—SATURDAY EVENING, DECEMBER 23—8:20 P.M. (0120Z)
At 8 P.M. a running telephone conference that had begun several hours earlier at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and ranged from Washington, D.C., through Bonn, Germany, to the former Soviet Union culminated in the arrival of a United States Army colonel at the White House with word of an urgent conclusion.
Colonel Jerrett Webster, second in command of the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, suppressed the butterflies in his stomach as a cadre of presidential advisors ushered him into the small conference area of the Situation Room. Jon Roth joined the group as Webster sat down uneasily, opened his battered leather briefcase, and pulled out several sheets of paper containing enlarged images taken by an electron microscope and faxed in on secure military communications channels from Germany. The President, he was told, would join them in a few minutes.
“Gentlemen,” Webster began, “although there is some remaining controversy among us, the overall feeling among the epidemiologists working on this is that we’re dealing with a serum-transfer virus. Bottom line? It’s a Level Four pathogen, all right, but it can’t spread by air.”
The President’s foreign policy advisor sat forward and pulled two of the pictures toward him. “Is this it?”
Colonel Webster nodded. “Those are images of the virus isolated from both the laboratory victims in Regensburg, Bavaria. By themselves, they only suggest similarity to a known class of viral pathogen that we do know is highly communicable and without a known vaccine or cure. But this type transfers only through a bodily fluid medium, and then most effectively when blood from an infected victim enters a cut or a mucous membrane of another. We have no reason to believe that a victim can exhale these particles in quantites sufficient to infect.”
“Translate that to English, please, Colonel,” Roth asked.
Webster looked at Roth and nodded. “Okay. In plain terms, there is almost no chance this Professor Helms could have infected anyone aboard that aircraft who didn’t come into direct contact with him, and even then, without a blood transfer, it’s highly unlikely.”
“But several people gave him CPR,” the foreign policy advisor said. “Would that be enough?”
Webster nodded slowly. “Perhaps. But even then, it’s unlikely. I’d certainly want quarantine of everyone for at least four days, but I’d really be far more concerned about separating those who touched him from those who hadn’t. Those who haven’t touched him are at almost zero risk.”
Roth looked stunned. “How can you be so sure?”
Webster shook his head. “We can’t be absolutely certain, sir. But the autopsy team at Keflavík has now examined Professor Helms’s lungs, and the virus isn’t present in any discernible quantity in the alveolus tissue. Without that, there’s no way for the man to have been exhaling viral particles into the air.”
Webster looked around the room at the various faces. They were all waiting for him.
“So,” Webster continued, “if I understand it correctly, our forces have been given a shoot-to-kill order regarding this aircraft. In the most direct terms, that’s not justified by the medical evidence. I’m here to recommend to you—and the President—that the order be rescinded immediately. Wherever those poor people come down, all we need to do is keep them isolated for the requisite number of days. Everything else is quite containable.”
Within minutes the President had been informed and word was flashed to the Pentagon to cancel the contingency rules of engagement regarding Flight 66.
“Have we told the captain?” the President asked when he reappeared in the Situation Room.
All the highly paid, presidentially appointed heads around him began moving slowly from side to side. One of the Situation Room aides looked at Jonathan Roth, who had been so quick to speak in every instance before. Strangely, Roth was silent this time. The deputy director of Central Intelligence seemed to be in shock as an Air Force general spoke up.
“Sir, I believe attempts are being made, but when he departed Tenerife, he went into radio silence. No one has been able to raise him, including his company.”
The President looked over at Jon Roth, who was studying the top of the communications console.
“Jon, what’s the chance he might be listening but not responding?”
Roth cleared his throat, a hundred conflicting thoughts competing for attention in his mind as he tried to work through the contingencies. He had never expected this! He had been so certain …
“Jon?” the President prompted.
Jonathan Roth looked up at the President and tried to smile.
“I, ah, think we might have a chance to r
each him if we saturate world broadcasts with the word. Someone aboard is probably monitoring Voice of America, and maybe we can broadcast out there on the emergency frequency for airplanes. He might still be listening to that.”
“Okay, let’s do it!” the President ordered. “Get that poor bastard safely on the ground somewhere before something else occurs!” The President turned to the Air Force general. “Bill, you and Admiral Tomasson marshal everything you can to find him and escort him safely back to the Canary Islands or somewhere, and if there’s any hint of who shot at him earlier, I want to know about it instantly. And, General, make sure there’s no record of, and no leak regarding, those contingent rules of engagement.”
The general nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Jonathan Roth had already drifted toward a corner of the room as the President left. There was an extremely urgent message that had to be sent almost instantly.
Roth caught one of the aides by the sleeve.
“I need a secure line to Langley. Is the one in the conference room okay?”
“Yes, sir,” the man replied, “the far one on the table.”
Roth hurried into the adjacent room, lifted the handset, and punched in the appropriate number to Langley. Mark Hastings’ voice answered, and the light indicating a scrambled connection and a secure connection blinked on.
Roth spoke in a low voice, watching the doorway. He explained what had happened.
“Send our man a flash message on the satellite to knock it off, disappear, and show up at the appointed place and time as arranged. But do it fast, and have him confirm by return flash. He’s done his job.”
Aqbah had attacked the 747. The fact that they had failed to bring it down was immaterial. That alleged attack would be enough to focus the world’s indignation on the terrorist organization.
“How about our local mop-up?” Mark asked. “Sanders was with Sherry, as I told you. She took out one of our two people downtown, hurt him badly, and took off. We’re searching for them now.”
Roth’s hand was massaging his temple. How in hell could this have become so damned complicated so fast? It had been the perfect opportunity. It still was, as long as they could control the story.
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