Lockout

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Baghdad International Airport (8:10 a.m. local / 0610 Zulu)

After fanning out and racing down both aisles of the passenger cabin to make sure no one had been left aboard, both pilots converged at the front left entry and stood together momentarily in an air of mutual disbelief, watching the sea of humanity they’d skippered for the last ten hours being herded away from the smoking aircraft.

Dan started to move toward the exit slide, but Jerry caught his sleeve.

“I wasn’t sure we could pull this off, you know? So I want to… to thank you…”

There was a haunted look to the captain’s face, the suspicion of inadequacy casting deep shadows on the glow of success, and Dan recognized it all too well from his own deep well of personal experience.

“But we did pull it off, Jerry! That’s what counts.” Dan replied, extending his hand to the captain who took it, covering it with his other hand as he looked Dan in the eye.

“You saved us, Danny! You did it, man! I choked…” the words trailed off.

Dan Horneman interrupted him quickly, before the word “choked” could lead to something more emotional.

“No. You didn’t choke. You hung in there and led a good team. We did it. All of us.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Hey!” Dan said sharply, smiling as broadly as he could manage. “Where do you get off thinking you cornered the market on being scared shitless?”

“I was that.”

“So was I. But what say we get out of this crate before we burn to death congratulating each other! Okay?”

“Okay.”

Dan stepped out and jumped onto the slide for the quick trip to the bottom with Jerry right behind. They got to their feet as Carol waved them to follow the passengers she’d been marshalling aggressively off to the west side of the runway and clear of the fire trucks that were still spraying down the smoking main landing gear.

“I don’t know if the whole plane’s going to go up or not,” she said. “Come on, you two. Hurry!”

“The brakes are carbon, Carol. They don’t burn.”

“Yeah? But they smoke pretty well.”

It was Dan who thought to fish out his cell phone, turn it on, and try to punch up the direct number to Chicago, shocked when it rang without hesitation. He reached out and stopped the captain.

“Jerry, I’ve got Chicago on the line. I asked for Rick Hastings. You should talk to him.”

Jerry took the phone somewhat reluctantly.

“Captain, Rick Hastings here. Congratulations, sir. I have a room full of people here in Chicago who haven’t taken a breath in ten minutes! We are in your debt.”

Situation Room, The White House

Strange, Walter Randolph thought to himself as the smiles and congratulatory handshakes ran their course. This is a subdued response compared with other successes we’ve shared in this room. Of course, we were hardly in charge of anything.

The fate of everyone aboard Pangia 10 was just one scene in an unfolding play. Much was left in motion: an Israeli pilot still evading in the Iraq desert waiting for rescue, a lethal set of ballistic missiles still standing, fueled, and ready on several would-be launch sites deep inside Iran, and he could just imagine the tension in the Hole in Tel Aviv. The president had already diverted two airborne US Air Force C-17s to Baghdad to pick up the passengers and crew within the next hour, and no one seemed to know the precise reason for his also ordering a Special Forces team in to secure and guard the airliner. What was clear to everyone in the Situation Room, however, was that something was aboard the Airbus that must not be allowed to fall into unaffiliated hands. It was unspoken common knowledge that both DIA and CIA were nearly desperate to examine the mysterious electronics, as well as find out how Lavi had pulled it off.

The president had paused minutes before leaving the room, then turned to both Walter and his DIA counterpart with a chilling request for a meeting and a post mortem in two days. Clearly the chief executive was not happy with the performance of his intelligence community, and that posed a major problem.

Walter Randolph sighed internally. The next two days would be exhausting as they tried to build a defense for every conclusion, every action, and every opinion the CIA had rendered, and DIA would be doing the same. The worst part, he thought, was that neither agency yet knew precisely what the hell had just happened, or why.

Or, for that matter, how.

He pulled out his pen and made a quick note regarding the mysterious William Piper. The company’s conclusion in the heat of the battle had been that Piper was, in fact, the missing employee at Mojave who dispatched the wrong jet and the former Mossad agent was even supposed to be in Washington masquerading as a DIA operative. The president had been insistent on getting to the bottom of that. But then, on return to the Situation Room, the president had surprisingly appeared to lose interest.

Why? Walter wrote, underlining the word four times.

Baghdad International Airport

Ashira Dyan needed no briefing about the dangers to an Israeli agent who found herself suddenly in Iraq, even in post-Saddam Iraq. Being alive and on the ground was a positive thing, but the ground they were on was anything but good for an Israeli. That was especially true when you were in the company of the one Israeli official the Muslim world hated above all others.

As soon as Ashira’s feet had hit the ground, she was struggling with her satellite phone for a connection to Tel Aviv and some sort of plan. Casually blending in with the passengers to wait for alternate transportation would be unthinkable, and perhaps lethal, on a host of levels.

Moishe Lavi was equally aware of the dangers, but the urgency of the call he was struggling to connect took precedence even over the sudden sweating and pain in his left arm, both of which had come out of nowhere after he slid down the exit chute.

A male voice, heavy with sleep, answered from somewhere in London, but the fact that he had picked up at all triggered a quiet flood of relief in Moishe.

“I’m alive, it turns out,” Moishe said in Hebrew.

“So I hear. There is no war, you know.”

“You mean, tonight?”

“Of course, tonight. Your letter… you said…”

“I know what I said. It was all for nothing. Please destroy it. Forget it. Please.”

There was a tired sigh on the other end, and he understood completely. What might have been one of the major scoops of the decade had just evaporated in the journalist’s hands. But Moishe knew he would keep his word.

“Very well,” the man replied. “It would not make a lot of sense now anyway, would it?”

“Next time I’m in London, we’ll get together, okay?”

“Certainly. Until next time, shalom. And, by the way, old chap?”

“Yes?”

“I am truly glad you’re still among us.”

“Thank you.”

Moishe punched off the phone, angry at the rising pain and the shortness of breath he was experiencing and concerned that Ashira would notice. He stood for a moment, forcing the pain to subside and composing himself, then motioned her over to him as his mind raced through the tasks he would now have to accomplish.

“First, we have to evaporate from here. You know this, yes?”

“Of course,” Ashira replied. “I am working on it.”

“Very well.”

“Are you all right?” she asked, studying his face in the subdued lights of the airport.

“Certainly. Just a bit fatigued.”

“You look very pale, and you’re perspiring. Let me find a place for you to sit…”

“No!” He had his hand out, palm up, fending her off. “Do nothing to attract attention to me, or you, for that matter. I will be fine.”

The White House

The air force chief of staff had been asked to walk with the president back toward the Oval, but the chief executive stopped short of the door and turned.

“General, I don’t care what you have to send in to do it, but get Lavi and his entourage out of there immediately.”

“Yes, sir. We’ve got the transports en route…”

“No, I mean sooner. Do we have a diplomatic mission in Baghdad with an aircraft? One of our 89th Squadron birds? A charter? A business jet? Anything?”

“I… don’t know, sir, but we’ll get on it immediately.”

“Coordinate with Tel Aviv, but get them out of there. The Iraqis must not know Lavi is there until he’s long gone, if then.”

Kathy Swanson, the press secretary, was waiting with the chief of staff as the president swept back into the Oval and leaned wearily against his desk.

“Where are we with the media?” he asked her. “How much do they know?”

“They know that Pangia 10 was hijacked… that’s the word they’re using… by its own electronics, but so far no one is openly speculating about sabotage or external control. They know the aircraft did a U-turn over the Atlantic and headed back to Tel Aviv and then turned toward Iraq and Iran. They know the aircraft has made an emergency landing in Baghdad, and that it was out of fuel. They do not know, as yet, about the explosion on the right engine or the Iranian attack.”

“And they know that Lavi was aboard, right?”

“To my utter shock, not yet!”

“Really? Are any of them hinting at an Israeli-Iranian faceoff?”

“Reuters threw that into the air four hours ago, but no one else saluted it. ABC has been asking the question, but refrained from open speculation.”

“And the thundering herd here?”

“Our White House press corps know something big is afoot beyond a distressed airliner, but what I’m hearing from them is just their own speculation about what happens if an American flight originating in Israel ends up at an airport in Iran with Jewish passengers aboard.”

The president’s phone rang, and he scooped it up, spoke a few words, and replaced the receiver, turning back to the group.

“Seems the Israelis have already launched a business jet to Baghdad to get Lavi and his lady out of there, and he’s supposed to be on the ramp in twenty minutes.”

He looked back at the press secretary, who was holding up a cautionary finger.

“Go ahead, Kathy.”

“It’s going to accelerate, sir. The aggressive speculation we’ve had so far will flow into any available pathway for an explanation. Most of it at the moment revolves around what might go wrong with flight computers and complex avionics on highly automated Airbus airplanes, and we can expect the usual round of broadcast analysts chewing over the subject on the morning shows. From there, they will eventually realize this can’t be explained by a malfunctioning autopilot.”

The president nodded. “But Lavi’s name might not surface?”

“No way to tell.”

“Kathy, keep me informed regardless of the hour if speculation on the why and how begins to turn toward anything domestic, including us.”

He could see her seize on the word “us,” the look in her eyes betraying the realization that there was something important she did not know, and in the interest of plausible deniability as press secretary, she needed to keep it that way.

He waited until she had gone and the door had closed behind her before turning to his chief of staff.

“Walk with me. We’ve got two whistle-blowing government employees sitting with Paul Wriggle in the Cabinet Room and I’m going to have to risk filling them in on what this whole project was really about.”

“You may have to fill in more than them, sir. This could come unraveled.”

“I know it. It’s all or nothing. But if we do start down the mea culpa slide, we tell it all.”