Director Coltrane sat stunned. “How can you be sure?”
“Sure?” Davis said. “That’s a strong word. I can’t use it yet. But if I’m right, you need to find this airplane fast.”
“You think it’s a threat?”
“I do, and in a way we’ve never seen before.”
Davis took one of the binders he’d brought and dropped it on Coltrane’s desk. It landed with a thud, and the director and Sorensen stared at it. The title was MD-10 VLAT. Curiously, there was a dime-sized hole just off-center on the front cover.
Coltrane lifted it, turned the manual sideways, and leafed through pages until a flattened slug of metal fell onto his desk.
“Is that what I think it is?” Sorensen asked.
Davis shrugged. “Let’s just say I’m glad I wasn’t looking into a Cessna crash—those manuals are a hell of a lot thinner.”
Sorensen said, “Now I know why that guy in Oregon had such a cold night.”
Coltrane asked what that meant, and Sorensen, realizing her mistake, was forced to fill him in on Davis’ indiscretions. An indifferent director set the binder back on his desk. “VLAT,” he said, looking at the manual’s title. “What does that mean?”
“Very large air tanker. It’s designed as a firebomber, a unique airframe that’s been modified to drop five thousand liquid gallons in a matter of seconds—enough to cover a football field. It’s effective in dealing with forest fires, although the idea never exactly took off. MD-10s are expensive to operate, and they have operational limitations, things like how low and slow you can drop. It’s all right there in the manual.”
“What else could you use it for?” the director asked warily.
“A good question. Maybe anthrax or plague … if you’ve got the right agents and could put them in solution. Drop it high enough, you could cover a whole city, even a small country. I’m sure there are people in this building who could come up with some pretty frightening scenarios. We’re talking about a highly specialized airplane—only a handful like it exist. Now, out of the blue, somebody goes to a lot of trouble to buy one and make it airworthy. Then they want everyone to think it crashed.”
“But it didn’t,” said the director.
“That’s how I see it. She’s out there somewhere, maybe on a quiet airfield in some small, out-of-the-way country. Those drop tanks could be getting charged right now with something that will make September 11 look like child’s play.”
The director’s well-groomed façade vanished. Davis had given Sorensen hints to his concerns, but even she was speechless. The two stared at the bullet-shot binder as if it were the devil’s playbook.
“If I were you,” Davis prompted, “I’d drop everything and find out where the hell this airplane went.” He stood and reached out a hand to the director as if expecting a shake. “So that’s my report. I’m sure you both have work to do.”
Director Coltrane remained frozen. He finally said, “I appreciate your help on this, Mr. Davis. Will you stay on a little longer? We could use your expertise.”
Davis paused. “I did have a rugby match this afternoon, but I suppose I could put it aside … in the name of national security, and all. But there’s also the matter of dinner with my daughter tonight. She’s a student down at Duke and has to head back to school tomorrow.”
Coltrane rubbed a finger over the hole in the binder on his desk. “This trouble you had out west—I’m not sure exactly what happened, but it looks somewhat serious. If you were to help us find this aircraft … I’m sure we could make any repercussions go away.”
Davis leaned forward and hovered over the director of the CIA’s nameplate—much as he’d done the previous day over another nameplate, one whose owner spent the night hog-tied and freezing inside a scrapped helicopter. “With all due respect, Director, if I miss dinner with my daughter there’s going to be trouble in the east.”
“Jammer,” Sorensen intervened in a tight voice, “I think what the director is trying to say is that—”
Davis held up a hand to silence her. He waited for Coltrane.
The director grinned. He was a man not used to being challenged, here of all places. But no one reached the seat he was sitting in without understanding the art of negotiation. “All right. Perhaps I should put it differently. I’ll make certain this trouble from Oregon gets lost. No strings attached. But I’m scheduling a briefing on this matter for three this afternoon. I’d very much like it if you’d be in attendance.”
Davis smiled. “Well, since you put it like that—how could I say no? In the meantime, sir, you really need to start a search for this airplane. SIGINT, HUMINT, CYBER. Whatever it takes.”
“Any suggestions where to look?” Coltrane asked.
Davis looked up as if calculating. “We can take out some time for refueling, but they’ve had roughly a forty-hour head start. At five hundred miles an hour—the average cruise speed of a jet like that—your search radius is close to twenty thousand nautical miles. Which, of course, is nearly the circumference of the earth. Meaning—”
“Meaning,” Sorensen said, breaking in, “it could be anywhere in the world.”
* * *
The aircraft they were looking for was, at that moment, six thousand miles southeast and six miles up. It was going nowhere with the greatest possible precision.
There are two hundred million square miles of sky above the earth, and while certain air corridors see continuous traffic, wide swathes of airspace remain effectively a void. These are the black holes, areas where radar coverage is minimal or nonexistent, and where aircraft are not watched, tracked, scanned, or monitored. As a consequence, pilots rarely venture into these frontiers unless absolutely necessary, and then at their own risk. Government oversight is dubious—where there is any government at all.
The tropical air thirty-four-thousand feet over the west African nation of Gabon is just such a place. Surrounded by the likes of Equatorial Guinea, Congo, and Angola, the federation’s very name is derived from gabão, the Portuguese word for cloak. Gabon wears its name well, resting on the equator in a seasonless languor, blanketed year round by heat, humidity, and an unrelenting sun.
CB68H had been there for the best part of thirty-six hours, boring holes through blue sky and thunderstorms, night and day, clinging to the dense air at its best endurance airspeed—a ponderously slow 230 knots, this being the aerodynamic sweet spot at which its massive wing and engines merged to the point of maximum efficiency. The jet had so far made four landings at Leon M’Ba Airport in Libreville, each time remaining on the ground only long enough to take on fuel and oil, and to meet briefly with a mechanic who’d been contracted in advance to address technical discrepancies. So far, fortunately, there had been few.
By way of a satellite link, Tuncay was in regular contact with the chemist, Ghazi, who would provide the coded signal to send them to their next destination. Ghazi also gave updates on the reports of their demise; so far, there was nothing in the news to suggest that their staged crash off the coast of Brazil had been debunked. But then, they assumed that if the ruse had been discovered, it would not be made public knowledge—particularly if anyone realized the significance of the airframe they’d stolen. If that happened, the hunt would be on.
The critical thing was keeping the airplane out of sight for as long as possible. Unfortunately, to conceal a wide-body airliner from the world’s finest surveillance assets was no easy trick. After considerable debate in the planning stages, it was Tuncay who had made the case, to good effect, that the best place to hide an airplane was in the sky.
He was staring bleary-eyed at the fuel gauges, which had become a clock of sorts, when Walid came forward from the cockpit bunk. The Druze stretched his arms over his head and yawned. “When do we land?” he asked.
“Ninety minutes. Come take a shift, I am getting tired.”
Walid sank heavily into the copilot’s seat. “I think I have logged more flying time in the last two days than in four years of flying for the Syrian Air Force.”
“Perhaps so—but I wouldn’t bother putting the hours in your logbook. Once this is done, neither of us will ever fly for hire again.”
Walid chucked wearily. “True. But in two days, if we want to fly again, either of us could buy a private jet.”
Tuncay might have smiled if he’d had the energy. He punched a button on the center instrument console. “The controls on this navigation selector are worthless.”
“I’m sorry,” replied a contrite Walid, apologizing for the third time. He had earlier toppled a can of Coke he’d set on the console, and despite a ten-minute blotting session with a package of napkins, the control head for the number-two VHF navigation receiver remained a sticky mess. The rest of the cockpit was hardly better: food wrappers and magazines tossed on the floor, an uneaten sandwich moldering behind one rudder pedal. It was the kind of housekeeping one would expect from owners who had no financial stake in their home. Or in this case, owners who knew their home was on the brink of condemnation.
Tuncay added, “The number-two autopilot has tripped off twice, but it seems to reset. And your radar altimeter is useless.”
“Do we need it?” Walid asked.
Tuncay swept his hand in the air as if sweeping the question aside. “Of course not. We are limping along, but none of that matters. If we can keep two of the three engines running and lower the landing gear a few more times, our mission will get done.”
“When do we go north?”
“If all goes to plan, one more fuel stop, and then we will make our dash. Hopefully the chemist and the Israeli will have everything complete on their end.”
“I’m not sure I trust them, the chemist in particular. You think such a man will be able to carry through on his part?”
Tuncay stood and took his turn to stretch. “Will any of us?”
The two pilots, who had met only months earlier, exchanged an awkward look. “He is Sunni,” said Tuncay, trying to lighten the mood. “Have you ever known a Sunni who was not trustworthy?”
Walid could not contain a smile. His captain went to the bunk, and for amusement he typed the coordinates of their next destination into the flight computer. Two thousand, nine hundred and seventeen nautical miles on a zero-six-one degree bearing. Six hours of flying time, more or less. After that they would have only two more flights in the old jet, each shorter than the previous.
And each progressively more perilous.
He was erasing the coordinates when an alarm suddenly sounded. A wide-eyed Walid stiffened in his seat, but then relaxed when he realized it was only the autopilot disconnect warning. The big jet drifted lazily to port, a shallow bank that Walid easily countered using the control wheel. Manual flight was always available as a backup, but tedious and rarely used in the age of automation. He reengaged the autopilot and it came online smoothly. The big ship righted, once again flying herself.
Minor crisis averted, Walid pushed his seat rearward. He put his heels up on the instrument rail, reclined his seat, and did his very best to keep his eyes open.