The Last Enemy - Part 2 - 2011-2023

by Luca Luchesini

  Chapter 26

  The plane took off from Abu Dhabi on time and began its route to the first waypoint, just south of Pakistan. The flight was scheduled to land in Taipei, Taiwan eight hours later. At the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar, four hours of flight away from the destination, the plane banked deeply to the right.

  Most of the passengers did not notice, as they had fallen asleep after lunch was served.

  Rasim, however, who was used to always being on the lookout for danger since his childhood, immediately noticed. He turned on the flight tracker of the entertainment system and it showed the plane was turning south, veering off its route and heading straight into the South Indian Ocean. After a few minutes, the flight tracker was switched off, and the flight service manager was called into the cockpit. When he came back, his face had turned pale. Rasim called him to his first class seat, he stated his identity and asked to talk to the captain. The flight service manager did not even bother to ask questions and walked him through the cockpit door.

  There, the captain was hastily talking to the first officer in Urdu, their mother tongue from Pakistan, and sending messages in English via radio. As soon as the two crew members noticed Rasim, they stopped talking and sent him an inquisitive look.

  “Good evening, gentlemen. You do not have to worry about me, I should only mention you that I am a high ranking officer in the mukhabarat, the State security service, and I personally know Abdel-Rahman Al-Thaimi, your airline’s chief security officer.

  I understand something strange is going on here. You can call me Ibrahim. Can you tell me exactly what is happening?”

  Hearing the name of the chief security officer, plus the calm and collected manners of Rasim, persuaded the crew to trust him. The captain dismissed the flight service manager.

  “Sir,” the captain responded, “my name is Naveed Shaheen, and I have nearly fifteen thousand hours of experience flying. What happening here is simple and yet impossible to understand. About ten minutes ago we completely lost control of the aircraft. I mean the flight management system has been reprogrammed to follow a new route, and there is no way we can reset it.

  We tried to disengage the autopilot, and fly the plane manually, but it does not respond to any command. The radio does not work either. All the identification signals that every airliner normally sends out, have been switched off too. It is as if someone has taken control of the plane, and is flying us where he wants.”

  “Where is the plane heading now?” asked Rasim. “Could the hijacker be someone in the plane with some advanced technology?”

  “We are going straight into the South Indian Ocean, in an area where the sea is so deep that the wreckage might never be found. Especially if we do not manage to switch the radio back on. Right now, we are invisible to the flight control centers. Military radars might detect us, but they rarely pass through this area. As for the passengers, I ordered the flight service manager to quietly search for anyone with any active electronic device.”

  Before the captain could finish his report, Rasim fired his orders.

  “Naveed, please give me the passenger list and the cargo loading bill, I want to check them. Next, I want the crew to carry out a full inspection of the cargo hold. If the culprits are inside the plane, they could very well be hiding below. And be careful, they could be armed.”

  The captain nodded, and the first officer left the flight deck. Rasim sat next to the captain, who handed him all the flight documentation.

  There was a total of two hundred and forty-seven people on board, of twelve different nationalities. Most of them were Taiwanese and Europeans but there were also some Russians, no Americans. None of the names sounded familiar to Rasim. He went on, to read through the cargo bill.

  After a few minutes of sifting through the list he found it. In the cargo hold below the main deck, there were two separate shipments of Telomerax. One was the original one, in the disguise of Swiss chocolate.

  The other one was the Russian imitation, which traveled under cover as lokum, the traditional Turkish sweets. And that was not it. The plane also contained some base chemicals from the very same factory, that had been used to manufacture the weapons Rasim had gotten from the Russians. The materials had apparently been ordered by a local Taiwanese company.

  Rasim stopped reading, he turned towards the captain and asked how many hours they had left.

  “Counting fuel reserves, just below five hours,” the captain answered calmly. “Considering our current position, if we do not regain control of the plane in the next two hours, we will crash into the sea.”

  “Captain Naveed,” said Rasim, “this is not by chance. I am the target, along with part of the cargo. Let’s assume the plane is being controlled by an evil entity like the NSA or some similar company. What could we do to regain control as a last resort?”

  “I have been thinking about it while you were reading the flight documents. The only thing we can do - which is very dangerous - is to completely switch off the entire flight management system and try to fly the plane using just the hydraulics and the basic electrical system. Except passengers will notice..”

  A few minutes later, the co-pilot returned after inspecting the cargo, with nothing to report. The captain explained what he had to do and dispatched him to the avionics bay. Rasim decided to go with him. As he was stepping out of the cockpit, the flight service manager hurried in.

  Worry was growing in the cabin, the entertainment system had stopped working for more than one hour, and some passengers who were used to flying the route were asking why they could not see the lights of Vietnam and China below them.

  Rasim, the flight service manager, and the captain talked briefly, then the captain took the intercom.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Unfortunately our flight has been affected by some minor issues. As you have noticed, we have a problem with the entertainment system, which we are now working to solve. We will need at least another couple of hours to fix it. Additionally, the Chinese air traffic control has put us on a route much further south than planned, and we are now passing above the South China Sea. It will take us a bit longer than scheduled, but we will be landing in Taipei four hours from now.”

  Rasim smiled to reassure the passengers and followed the co-pilot to the electronics room, below the passenger deck.

  The co-pilot switched off the main electrical board, and the protection system activated automatically as expected. He then moved to switch off the flight management system, making sure the seat belt lights were still off, not to panic passengers. He then called the captain in the cockpit. The computers were off, but the autopilot was still engaged and it was impossible to regain manual control. The copilot switched to Urdu again, and the conversation quickly got animated. Then he stopped and turned to Rasim.

  “Sir, our strategy is not working. Somehow the route has been installed into the system. There is only one option left, and the captain wants your advice. The idea is to completely switch off the engines and the auxiliary power systems, hoping this resets the computers and allows us to regain control. There is a risk though that we are not able to restart the engines.”

  “Switch everything off, now,” Rasim calmly responded.

  The engines stopped first, then the auxiliary power system was shut down and the plane became completely dark. Left suddenly without power, the aircraft reduced speed, and started to descend. Some passengers started screaming.

  The captain immediately initiated the restart procedure. After a few seconds, the hum of the engines was vibrating through the cabin again, lights came back and eventually the plane regained speed and altitude.

  Hostesses and stewards were running through the cabin, desperately trying to calm down passengers.

  The captain announced that the failure in the entertainment system had created the major malfunction they had just experienced, but now everything was back under control and they would safely be landing in Taipei, in a cou
ple of hours. Rasim went back into the cockpit.

  “How can we ever be landing in Taipei, or anywhere else, if the plane has not changed direction?” he asked calmly.

  “It didn’t work,” responded the captain. “And I think my passengers have already suffered enough panic and fear over the last few hours. I beg your pardon for not discussing it with you first, but I decided they would live the last two hours of their lives in peace.”

  Rasim agreed. He had always imagined that death would come to him swiftly and unexpectedly, in an ambush of some sorts. He was instead given two hours, that he did not know how to use.

  In the meantime, the captain reactivated the entertainment system and turned to his co-pilot.

  “Sir, it was a pleasure working with you over these last two years.” He shook hands and hugged him. The co-pilot, a man in his thirties, was quietly crying in front of the control screens, as he was going through the photo gallery of his smartphone, looking at the pictures of his family for the last time.

  Ten thousand miles away, in Colorado, Major Andrew F. of the US Strategic Air Command was observing the plane route in a room placed in the depths of Cheyenne Mountain. Zeus, the system he was now trying out for its first live mission, was being managed with the same procedures that regulated the launch of the US nuclear missiles. Just like every other member of the US strategic forces, Andrew was trained to take action without questioning orders. Even if it implied the death of thousands or millions of innocent people.

  He was relieved that his duty caused minimal collateral damage, involving just a few hundred lives, in order to block the imminent and serious threats to the US and their allies. The procedure had been efficiently carried out, with presidential approval.

  The screen showed that the plane still had about one hour and a half left of fuel and it was already on its way into the Indian Ocean, in an area where sea depth exceeded fifteen thousand feet, which made any rescue attempt impossible. Major F. had observed the remarkable attempt of the crew to regain control of the plane and decided it was too risky to leave the plane for another hour in the air. Maybe the crew could come up with a new idea to control the plane, or they might manage to re-establish radio contact.

  So he typed the maximum engine power command on the keyboard, and then ordered the rudder to put the plane in a deep dive, to maximize the impact with the sea. At five hundred miles per hour, and with the help of gravity, the plane disappeared into the sea in less than forty seconds.

  Major Andrew F. recorded the completed mission, as he fought the disgust that he started to feel, by using the techniques he had learned during his psychological training.

  After a few minutes, his struggle was over. He had nothing to reproach himself. He had executed orders, and nothing in the procedure had gone wrong. This was war, and war has victims. In this case, he knew that the vast majority of them were innocent, but he knew what he was getting into when he was first offered the job.

  Eventually he stood up from his chair, shut his computer, and went to the coffee machine to get a well-deserved mocaccino.