Lockout

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

The Kirya, Tel Aviv, Israel (7:20 a.m. local / 0520 Zulu)

The military leaders of Israel had gathered in their war room for a real-time update. Prime Minister Zamir was acutely aware of the possibility that he would soon have to make a split-second decision based on little more than guesswork, intelligence, and reports from their pilots. The moment was almost upon him.

“Proceed, please, General,” Gershorn said as he sipped a seriously strong cup of coffee.

“Here’s the tactical situation. We have six F-15s in formation with Flight 10, and they’re eight minutes from Iranian airspace. They’re in a solid cloud deck up to 38,000 feet, but it’s now daylight. The Pangia crew is aware of only two fighters. We did not want to frighten them. We have sixteen more fighters in stealth mode on the deck, largely below Iranian radar, ready to pop up as necessary. The crew still does not have control of their aircraft, and they have almost no fuel remaining.”

“And the Iranians?”

“Eight fighters in the air flying combat air patrol just on the other side, all, we’re sure, ready to engage.”

“Engage who?”

“Flight 10, although our six F-15s at 38,000 feet aren’t necessarily invisible.”

“And we believe they’re prepared to shoot down this jetliner?”

“Yes sir.”

“If I don’t decide to do it for them.”

Silence greeted the rhetorical question.

“And the strategic picture with their ballistic force?”

“At least six ballistic missiles in four Iranian locations fueled and on their respective pads. We have real-time monitoring by satellite… the Americans are locking arms with us on this… and we believe that only one of the missiles is nuclear equipped, but the others may be biological.”

“What is the rhetoric from Tehran?”

“Shrill to hysterical, all because of Moishe Lavi’s presence.”

“Is anyone still in charge in Tehran?”

“We can’t confirm that control has been shifted to the field. We do think that if Flight 10 was to get more than a few miles inside the border, whoever is in charge is going to be hard pressed not to fire because the presumption would be that, as idiotic as it sounds, our friend Lavi is riding a nuclear bomb meant for them.”

Gershorn referenced the main digital clock at the end of the room.

“Very well, bring up the live connection with our lead pilot.”

An aide scrambled to punch up the connections as someone else handed a receiver to the prime minister.

“The White House, sir.”

Gershorn looked at him in puzzlement but wasted no time saying hello.

“Mr. Prime Minister, this is General Paul Wriggle calling for the president. I know we have only a few minutes, but we now have what we think is the correct release code for that airliner, and we need your pilot to try again. Can you patch me to that pilot?”

The White House

Paul Wriggle waited for the connection with the Israeli fighter pilot flying formation with the imperiled Airbus A330 and re-read the code sequence Jenny had handed him: 62993178. How anyone could figure out something that arcane from an encrypted satellite message he did not understand, but in lieu of any word from Gail Hunt’s bedside, it was their best shot.

“We have a problem, General,” the Prime Minister was saying, jolting Wriggle back to the moment.

“What is it?”

“Our pilots are already being radar locked by Iranian fighters and they’ve got to defend themselves. They may not have time to transmit the code again.”

“This is a different code, sir. This will solve the problem if we can get the code transmitted on UHF.”

“I’ll do my best, General. We all will. Stay on the line with my aide. We passed the code to our pilot.”

Airborne, 38,000 feet, approaching the Iraq/Iran border

Patyish 21, the call sign of the Israeli major leading the flight of six F-15s accompanying the Pangia A330, saw his tactical radar register the hostile intentions of the Iranian fighters long before they could be in visual range. Against his better judgment and instincts, he took the few seconds to jot down the eight-number sequence before ordering his wingmen into the appropriate formation for engagement. There was no time to explain to the Pangia crew what was happening, but presumably the airliner’s captain had seen him pull away.

“Engaging enemy fighters,” was all he had time to say, and that was probably too much, especially since he couldn’t now recall with adrenaline levels rising whether he’d said it in Hebrew or English.

“Patyish 21 engaged, bearing zero-eight, fifty out,” was followed by the pulsating cursor on his heads up display as he walked the pipper to the left and locked up the oncoming target who had gone “to tone,” locking up his F-15 as well.

“Patyish 21, Fox Two,” he said on tactical channel as he pickled off two of his air-to-air missiles. The bright plumes of their rocket motors disappearing into the indistinct clouds was startling enough to a veteran fighter pilot, but to the adjacent commercial airline crew, they had to look terrifying.

Normally he would have ordered his wingman to climb and join him in a tight left turn while dispensing chaff to throw off the incoming missile the Iranian pilot had probably fired, but that would leave the Airbus a sitting duck, and he lit his burners and pushed ahead of the Airbus into a tight right turn instead, launching two flares to pull any incoming missiles off of both of them.

The tactical channel was now full of his wingmen’s voices and their clipped, cryptic reports as one by one they locked up and engaged various members of the oncoming Iranian formation, preparing to fight a high-speed battle with an enemy still thirty miles distant. The larger Israeli force below shot skyward now to join the battle, throwing overwhelming numbers at the oncoming Iranian pilots who were undoubtedly not expecting to see their tactical radar screens break out in Israeli warplanes.

Light years from Hollywood’s concept of a World War II aerial dogfight, the radar-based battle revolved around digital images on the heads up displays, and whatever was about to happen would be over in minutes, without either side actually ever seeing the other.

A large explosion in the distance marked the apparent end of one of the enemy fighters as one of the radar returns fragmented and disappeared from the Israeli scopes. The major’s radar picture showed the Iranian pilots breaking formation, which was expected, but what type of fighter was flying toward them was a mystery. With the rag-tag roster of single-seat aircraft Iran still flew, he wouldn’t have been terribly surprised to find himself in mortal combat with the one ancient American F-14 from pre-revolution days that Iran still tried to keep operational.

The major studied his radar picture once more, expecting to see a second wave of Iranian aircraft backing up the first, and as expected, the images now moved onto his screen. The eight digits he was supposed to transmit to the airliner were still on his kneeboard but there was no time to pull back in position with a screen full of oncoming enemy, yet…

He handed off command to his number two wingman and lit his afterburner for a few seconds to get back on the left wing of the Airbus, matching speeds before pulling out his personal cellphone again to go through the cumbersome task of typing in the numeric string with his oxygen mask off, pressing the phone’s little speaker against the microphone, all the while maintaining formation at 460 knots.

An explosion to his left told the tale of an Iranian warhead that had barely missed one of his men, but the fact that the enemy had succeeded in pickling one in the middle of his formation to begin with was very disturbing.

The sounds of the battle were picking up in the exchanges among his men.

“Patyish 23, engaged, bandit ten o’clock, six, Fox Two.”

“Patyish 24, supporting.”

“Dyan 12 is in, engaged, tally on bandit at two o clock, six miles.”

“Dyan 11, break left, break left, flare. Bandit on your six with lockup!”

Digit by digit he kept his jet steady as he punched the numbers in, forcing himself not to react to the intense tactical exchanges of his pilots or the new chirping of a ground anti-aircraft missile battery that had acquired them as they continued to deal with the oncoming Iranians. Somewhere just behind him was the border, and they were now streaking into heavily defended enemy airspace.

The White House

The call from St. Paul’s Hospital in Denver and Steve Reagan had come right on the heels of passing Jenny Reynold’s code to the prime minister.

“Paul, we’ve got it! We’ve got the code! Ready to copy?”

“Go ahead,” he said, not wanting to reward what had to have been Herculean effort with the news that it was undoubtedly too late.

He wrote the numbers down as Steve intoned them.

“Stand by,” Paul Wriggle said, feeling a rush of adrenaline as he pulled the other note containing the Reynold’s code across the table and placed it side-by-side with the numbers he’d just inscribed, reading them with the care of a potential lottery winner making certain his wishful thinking was not overriding reality.

My God! Paul thought to himself, confirming one more time. They’re the same!

He forced himself to take a deep breath, the urgency suddenly gone.

“How is Gail?” he asked.

“She’ll be okay.”

“Thank her deeply for me.”

“She’s still pretty balmy. She thinks we’re married, sir,” Steve Reagan said with what sounded like a nervous chuckle. “I’ll have to let her down easily.”

“Or, you could just marry the girl! I always thought you two made a great team.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have to go.”

Jenny Reynolds and Will Bronson were both watching him carefully from halfway down the conference table as the general turned to them, the shadow of a smile playing around the edges of his mouth.

“Well, Miss Reynolds.”

“Sir?”

“It seems you cracked the code. Your numbers were correct. That was the unlock sequence.”

She came forward slightly, eyes wide. “Really? How do you know? Did it work?”

“We don’t know if they got it in time, and I can’t tell you how I know, but…” he said, aware that he was stumbling linguistically, his mind’s eye a half world away with a civilian airliner flying into combat unarmed with anything more than a string of digits in the night.

He yanked himself back to the Cabinet Room. “I’m impressed that you figured it out, and, I assume, Mr. Bronson, that your efforts led to getting it here. Thank you. In fact… if it worked… I am deeply in your debt.”

“When will we know, General?” Will asked.

“Soon. Very soon.”

The Kirya, Tel Aviv, Israel (7:40 a.m. / 0540 Zulu)

Clearly, Gershorn Zamir thought, this is the moment.

An aerial battle just over the Iraq/Iran border was raging, and both he and whoever was in charge in Iran had their fingers poised over respective nuclear buttons.

“Four splashed for certain, perhaps a fifth kill,” the air force chief was intoning as he monitored several radio channels with a phone to each ear. A widescreen depiction of the battle zone was before them on the latest technology screen, along with each of the potential Iranian ballistic launch sites deeper into Iran. The airliner had lumbered through Jordanian and Iraqi airspace with the respective countries either unaware of the Israeli fighter escort, or unwilling to get involved. Despite their public rhetoric to the contrary, every responsible government in the Middle East was secretly hoping the Israelis would disregard American advice and go for Iran’s throat.

Gershorn glanced around the room, recounting the advice of his fellow civilian leaders who were nervously standing by to sign off on any doomsday launch decision.

Surprising, he thought, that no one was pounding on him for a preemptive strike. With all the logic of that terrible move and Moishe Lavi’s suspected orchestration of this opportunity, he had expected a full court press. Yet only one of the generals and one of the Knesset members had taken him aside for the hard sell, and even they seemed tepid in their support for the nuclear option.

In truth, he was on the fence, teetering on a knife edge of indecision with his country’s fate in the balance. Everything he’d ever read or studied about great men making great decisions made him feel small and terrified in the face of such awesome responsibility. He was no John Kennedy facing down Nikita Khrushchev, yet… hadn’t even Kennedy waffled back and forth with agonizing indecision as his generals begged him to have it out?

“Gershorn,” the air force chief was addressing him.

“Yes?”

“This is the last chance to consider shooting Flight 10 down ourselves.”

“Are you recommending that we do so?” he asked, as evenly as possible.

“No, but… we must decide. That… would eliminate the provocation to Iran without question.”

“I understand that.”

“We’ve ordered our lead pilot to make one last attempt at transmitting that disconnect code, then they are to fall back into firing position awaiting your orders if the pilots don’t regain control and turn back.”

“Only if I give the order, understood?”

“Understood.”

So the challenge was joined, he thought. Pangia 10 was over the border, an air battle was already underway, and he could either eliminate the provocation of the Iranians by shooting down the Airbus and killing hundreds of innocent people, or let the flight continue, permitting the Iranians to do the hideous deed of murdering everyone aboard.

And, he thought, there would never be a better moment, a more justified moment, than this. Iranian fighters were essentially attacking a civilian airliner, and hundreds of miles ahead Iranian ballistic missiles had been erected, fueled, armed, and clearly targeted at Israel, at least one of them carrying a nuclear weapon. He had every reason and every right to push the metaphorical button as fast and as hard as he could and launch the very preemptive strike Lavi had proposed so passionately. Yes, the world would be outraged, and Israel would be hamstrung with sanctions pushed mainly by the Russians and Chinese. And yes, oil prices would go through the roof, and the planet could end up in an unprecedented economic depression.

But, Iran’s nuclear program would be back to the stone age, especially since the Iranians had no idea how much Israel knew—how vulnerable they had been to human intelligence, and how successful Mossad’s efforts had been. At a great cost, of course, measured in the lives of seven Mossad agents—some barbarically tortured before being killed—Israel knew where the fissionable material was and how to destroy it. Information not even fully shared with Washington.

Now, indeed, was the moment, and why not launch? Didn’t the mullahs want to slaughter every man, woman, and child in Israel? Wasn’t radical Islam’s hatred and lethal intent just another version of Hitler’s final solution? Wasn’t he dealing with mad dogs who did not deserve the consideration afforded fellow humans?

Gershorn took a deep breath, registering in the back of his mind the fact that an Israeli jet had been hit, the pilot trying to limp back to the west with considerable damage. He looked into a sea of faces all belonging to serious and experienced men and women, and all of them looking to him for a decision.