The Ghost of Flight 666

by Christopher Anderson

  “General, it’s not here!” Killer told Mertzl, nearly shouting with frustration. He was standing in an empty hanger at Soekarno International Airport in Jakarta. His team and a company of marines from the Enterprise had gone over the hanger with military thoroughness. They found that jihadists had been there with what they could only assume to be the hijacked A380 but they were long gone.

  “We’ve interviewed Soekarno’s people. They’re confirming what we feared. The jihadists pulled hundreds of bodies off the A380 and dumped them in the ocean. The jet was here, but it’s been gone for a week.”

  “Where the Hell is Slade?” Mertzl snapped. “He was with the Uranium—right?”

  “We lost contact with him somewhere around Sumatra,” he explained. “He thought he was heading to Jakarta. Obviously he was wrong.”

  “Well damn it, where could he be? That Skycrane doesn’t have the speed or range to get much farther than Jakarta.”

  “He’s probably on one of the thousands of islands around here,” Killer sighed.

  “That can’t be where that airplane is. The A380 was obviously in Jakarta, the ship was heading to Jakarta—there has to be a connection.”

  “General, we know they want the Uranium for dirty bombs, but an A380 isn’t a very good way to disperse it. Why not just ship it out in parcels on smaller airplanes. Unless—”

  “Sweet Mother Mary three tons of Uranium in the A380!” the general finished. “The A380 is the dirty bomb! Where? We need to know where!”

  “The Skycrane was part of the Iranian plan all along, probably as a backup,” Killer guessed. “They probably bugged out when Slade became a problem on the freighter. It has to be close general.”

  “If they are going to mate the airplane and the Uranium then they have to be somewhere that thing can land. There just aren’t that any airports that can handle an A380.”

  Killer took out his chart, marking the spot where the chopper escaped the Galaxus. “They could get to Jakarta, we know that.” He drew an imaginary circle around the escape coordinates with the radius being the distance to Jakarta.

  Together they answered their own question: “Singapore!”

  The general swore again. “We sent our Singapore assets to Jakarta! Turn it around! Get everyone to Changi International Airport, Singapore! I’ll get on the horn with the Enterprise and see if they can scramble some F-18’s up there! Go!”

  “We’re on our way!” Killer replied, already yelling for his men to get back to their planes.

  #

  Sweat beaded on Abdullereda’s forehead as the hijacked Airbus A380 reached the Top of Descent point. This was it; all of the training over the past few weeks, really all of his aviation career culminated in this moment. All of Abdulleraeda’s life came into focus at this time. As he turned off the transponder and disconnected the autopilot he saw two things: the pride of his family that their ne’er-do-well father would wash his sins away by becoming a martyr, and that his peers, who tormented him as an adolescent would finally envy him.

  The lights of Tel-Aviv rotated up into the forward windscreen. The rush of air buffeting the windows made normal conversation in the cockpit impossible.

  “Allahu Akbar!” Abdullereda shouted as the adrenaline rushed into his head.

  There was the capital of the Little Satan. The Jews would get their just deserts! Their government would crumble. The promise of the Arabs finally recapturing Al Quds and driving the Zionists into the sea would be realized!

  The rumbling of the slipstream grew louder. The airspeed clacker sounded, meaning they were now exceeding the maximum airspeed of the aircraft. He eased the power back; Abdullereda didn’t want the aircraft to break up and veer off course. He wanted to bury it in the Knesset! Over the radio the Israeli controllers were shouting at him, vectoring fighters their way.

  Abdullereda kept the dive going. No one could catch them now. Even a Surface to Air missile—even the American Patriot couldn’t hit them now; and even if it did it wouldn’t matter. Their momentum would take the radioactive debris field directly over the city. The lights of Tel Aviv grew brighter, larger, closer, “Die Zionists—die!

  So excited was Abdullereda that he didn’t hear his copilot shouting at him, not that he could hear anyway! What did it matter? They were hurtling earthward doing Allah’s work! It wasn’t until Zafar clutched his arm that Abdullereda paid attention to him. He looked to the sweating face of the co-terrorist. Zafar was yelling but Abdullereda couldn’t understand him over the roar. The man’s face was straining, sweating; his large white teeth stood out against the dark slick skin and black stubble.

  “Use your microphone!” Abdullereda demanded, keying his mike and shouting into it. These half trained terrorists didn’t even know the basics of the cockpit. Of what worth were they, joining in the honor of martyrdom but adding nothing to the operation!

  Finally over the headset came Zafar’s cracking, panic stricken voice. The man was afraid of death; afraid of martyrdom!

  “Someone is shooting at us!”

  It took Abdullereda a moment to register what Zafar was saying. Shooting at them; were they? He laughed. “Don’t worry, we’ve got enough Uranium to make the entire city uninhabitable!” Abdullereda yelled back. “They can shoot us down. It doesn’t matter anymore!”

  The altimeter dropped precipitously through thirty thousand feet. He yelled triumphantly. There was no stopping them now. The operation was a success!

  Zafar was beating on his arm—coward!

  Abdullereda turned a scathing look upon his co-terrorist only to hear Zafar scream through the microphone, “No, someone on the airplane is shooting!” He pointed back at the bulkhead.

  “What—it cannot be—Allah would not allow it!” Abdullereda exclaimed in panic, but looking back he saw a mass of bullet holes in the bulkhead immediately behind him. One of the guards was clutching at this arm. The other was at the peephole, looking back in the cabin. All at once his head snapped back and he was screaming. He pulled away from the cockpit door with one hand over his eye. Blood streamed from beneath his fingers.

  #

  Slade woke up to the howl of electronic equipment and cooling fans. The E&E compartment was a dim, noisy place that smelled like dust mixed with warm electronics. His head pounded. There was dried blood on the side of his temple where he’d hit the corner of an equipment rack in his fall.

  Fighting off the fog of unconsciousness, Slade checked his watch. They’d been airborne for over six hours—six hours! It struck him; they were within an hour of Tel Aviv. All weariness and pain washed away in a torrent of adrenaline. Slade got up and headed for the ladder.

  Quickly, but with the necessity of caution, he raised the hatch again. The galley area was clear. He could see the cockpit door. It was closed. Damn!

  Slade crawled up through the hatch onto the empty passenger deck. He went straight to the cockpit door, listening. He could hear muffled voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying. He tried the door gingerly, but it took only a slight turn of the lever to know it was locked.

  Slade retreated to the nearest exit doors. Looking out of both sides of the aircraft he tried to gauge his position. It was the middle of the night in Tel Aviv but he thought he could distinguish the dark swath of the Red Sea and the lights of Eilat.

  “Damn!” Slade was running out of time.

  He ran back to the cockpit door. Like most cockpit doors it was bulletproof, but Slade knew something most people didn’t know. Airlines were cheap, their CEO’s were even cheaper. They’d spend money on themselves but not on the security of their aircraft, not unless they were forced to.

  He ducked into the bathroom behind the cockpit. The cockpit door might be armored but the bathroom bulkhead inexplicably was not. Slade pried away the mirror, exposing the thin aluminum skin between himself and the cockpit. He was on the point of cutting a small hole in the aluminum so that he could discover the positions of the crew when the throttles came back.

&
nbsp; Muffled shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” reached his straining ears. He had no more time. Slade put the muzzle of the P90 against the aluminum at a forty-five degree angle, aiming down from chest level. He squeezed the trigger. The bullets cut a hot swath through the aluminum. He rotated the gun from right to left, shooting an arc from the captain’s side of the cockpit to the first officer’s side. There were screams and shouts of anger.

  Slade darted out of the bathroom and behind the cockpit door just as a burst of gunfire erupted into the bathroom. It pierced the bulkhead going the other way, ripped through the opposite wall and tore through the flight attendant jumpseats by the entry door.

  A light suddenly appeared at the cockpit peephole and just as quickly disappeared as someone looked through to see what was going on. Slade shoved the muzzle of the P90 against the glass and fired a quick burst. The recoil nearly knocked the light automatic rifle out of his hands, but he was rewarded with a high pitched wail. The bullets hadn’t penetrated, but they shattered the glass and drove the shards into the jihadist’s eye.

  Slade ran back to the E&E door and flew down the ladder. He’d studied the schematics for the A380 and toured the aircraft meticulously in Paris. Now that knowledge came in handy. Just like his beloved Boeings, the E&E compartment went underneath the cockpit. In fact, you could see the compartment from the rudder pedal wells beneath the instrument panel; it worked the other way as well.

  Standing beneath the deck, Slade fired upward through the floor, spraying the area behind the pilot seats with the remainder of his magazine. Loading the last cylindrical magazine, the buffeting of the aircraft now growing throwing the airplane around and getting so loud Slade couldn’t hear the bark of the gun, he wormed his way up beneath the first officer’s rudder pedals, only able to get his arms and the gun into the narrow space. Sticking the muzzle of the compact gun through the opening he sprayed the first officer’s seat blindly.

  A sharp cry came from above.

  He repeated the operation at the captain’s rudder pedals, thinking he heard a groan but no more. His hammer fell on an empty chamber.

  The noise and vibration in the aircraft was now so violent that Slade could see only in a blur. Staggering back, he crawled up the ladder and bounced from wall to wall to the cockpit door. With great difficulty he entered the emergency code.

  The entry buzzer was lost in the deafening sound of the slipstream, but a warning light would flash, informing the crew that someone was over-riding the lock. Slade waited. They had thirty seconds to deny him entry; if they did there was no way in short of breaking the door down.

  It was the longest thirty seconds of his life.

  With agonizing sluggishness the seconds ticked by until finally he felt the lock open. Slade burst through the cockpit door. Two men lay bleeding on the cockpit floor. One man was slumped over in the first officer’s seat. The captain, bleeding from several wounds, was just grasping the rotary switch that would emergency lock the door—it was on the first officer’s side of the upper panel—he had to unstrap to reach it and was a second too late to deny Slade.

  With an inarticulate roar Slade lunged forward and grappled the captain’s bloody arm, dragging him from his seat. The captain screamed and struggled, but Slade pounded him in the face mercilessly, once, twice, three times with his fist. The captain was no fighter. He sank into unconsciousness.

  The lights of Tel Aviv were close.

  Leaping over the center console and into the pilot’s seat Slade took the stick in his left hand and eased it back while pulling the four throttles back with his right hand. The A380 protested, already hurtling fifty knots beyond the barber pole, the maximum airspeed on the electronic instrument display.

  Slade ignored the warning clacker, continuing to ease the nose up. Slowly the horizon climbed up the display and the speed began to slacken. The aircraft groaned as the metal of the structure, bent by the terrific forces of air pressure, flexed. The sound of the slipstream lessened. After another thirty seconds of gingerly bringing the nose up Slade levelled the huge airplane at three thousand feet and turned it to the west; out to the Mediterranean Sea.

  He breathed a sigh of relief, but then heard the unmistakable sound of fury behind him. He turned to see one of the wounded jihadist guards stirring on the cockpit floor behind him. The man was trying to get his AK-47 in line with Slade, cursing, “Die Crusader dog!”

  No longer armed, Slade was helpless; but his copilot was not. Slade snatched the Glock 9mm from the dead jihadist slumped in the first officer’s seat and shot his recalcitrant comrade in the forehead.

  The blood and brains splashed over the unconscious captain’s face and into his open mouth. The now dead jihadist finally cooperated and lay still. Just to be sure, Slade put bullets into the other two corpses, but the captain was alive and he wanted to keep him that way; Slade shot him in the knees and the hands. The pain alone would keep him from doing anything untoward.

  At long last left to fly the airplane, Slade put on his headset and dialed in 121.5 on his VHF. It was a good thing he did. Looking outside in the predawn darkness he saw the plumes of two Israeli F-16’s joining up on him. He caught the latter part of their last transmission.

  “Singapore Flight 344 remain on course two-seven-zero! If you deviate from your present heading you will be destroyed!”

  “Roger, Singapore 344 acknowledges, boy am I glad to see you guys!”

  “Who is this?” the F-16 pilot asked, obviously surprised at the response.

  “The United States of America has taken possession of this aircraft from Al Qaeda terrorists,” he explained. “Tell Ari Bernstein, your Director for Mossad that his counterpart Director Gann has a gift for him.”

  “Maintain your course and altitude Singapore 344—standby,” the pilot replied.

  “I’ll try, but this thing flies like an electronic brick; I hate Airbuses,” Slade said.

  There was a chuckle of amusement from the fighter pilots. Shortly thereafter Slade was instructed to follow them to a military field. He landed without much trouble and taxied in to a wide empty apron of concrete. Fire trucks, hazmat trucks and armored vehicles followed Slade in and surrounded the aircraft.

  He shut down and opened the exterior door. Israeli commandos stormed in, passing Slade by like water around a rock. Ari Bernstein was behind them. He held out his hand.

  “I understand the people of Tel Aviv owe you their lives!”

  “Mr. Bernstein,” Slade nodded formally, shaking the Mossad King’s hand firmly. “I’m just glad to be on the ground again.”

  “So what do you have for me?”

  Slade gave him his trademark thin, chilling, smile. “How many bombs do you think you can make from three tons of enriched Uranium?”

  Ari grinned and said, “How on earth would I know? Israel can neither confirm nor deny the existence of nuclear weapons in our arsenal!”

  Slade shrugged, “There’s also enough TNT to blow up every Hamas tunnel out of Gaza.”

  The commando came out of the cockpit. A lieutenant reported, “They’re all dead except the jihadist pilot. He’s still alive but in a bad way.”

  “Make sure he gets extra special care will you?” Slade said, meaning it in only the most diabolical of ways.

  “Oh you can be sure of that; you can be absolutely sure of that!” Ari said grimly.

  The commandos carried the bodies out and Ari led Slade down the stairs into the harsh lights of the tarmac. “We’re indebted to you, but I must ask, how is it you managed this? As far as the president is concerned none of this should exist.” Ari said, slapping Slade on the shoulder.

  Slade winced, and then noticed a neat round hole in his wetsuit. He grimaced. “I must have caught one back there.”

  “What in the world have you been doing?” Ari said, looking at the man in sudden concern.

  “It’s just a bullet,” he said.

  “No, no, not that; what’s this?” Ari asked, pointing to a semi-circle of slashes i
n Slade’s wetsuit that went from his left hip to his ribcage.

  Slade all of a sudden felt woozy, “That damn shark bit me! Son of a bitch!”

  Ari saw Slade turn white, and comforted him, “Now, now Slade it couldn’t have bit you on the plane! Sit down in the limousine; I’ve got a doctor right here!” He waved the paramedics over. “Slade, how long ago was it? You flew from Singapore right?”

  “Right, I’m bleeding to death, the wetsuits the only thing holding me together,” Slade said weakly. He slumped into the leather seat.

  The paramedic stripped the suit off one arm and took his blood pressure. He shook his head.

  “That’s it right?” asked Slade. “Damn shark! I knew they’d get me!”

  “No sir,” the paramedic said. “You’re blood pressure’s a little elevated, that’s all. That’s to be expected from the stress you’ve been through. By the way, the bullet’s a through-and-through. You’ll be fine.”

  “To Hell with the bullet!” Slade snapped angrily. “What about the shark bite? That tiger chewed me up!”

  “Well let’s see,” the paramedic said. He carefully peeled the wetsuit off Slade’s side.

  “How bad is it?” demanded the tough as nails CIA agent.

  The paramedic uttered a single surprised, “Whoa!”

  Slade fainted.

  CHAPTER 41: A Short Drop

  Abdullereda Hussein awoke to intense pain in his knees, hands and face. He opened his eyes with difficulty. They were almost completely swollen shut. Forcing them open, Abdullereda witnessed a fuzzy world of light institutional green. It slowly resolved into a hospital room. A doctor and two other people were leaning over him. They wore yarmulkes.

  “There we are,” said a voice in Arabic. “He is coming around.”

  “What am I doing here?” he croaked, his throat dry from the oxygen tube in his nose. “Why am I not in paradise?”

  A man smiled, and said, “You’re in Tel Aviv not in paradise. I’m afraid that journey will be up to someone else.” He laughed and said, “Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait long.”