Rules of Deception

62

The Pilot held the stopwatch in his right hand. “Five minutes. Go.”

The men moved quickly, but never hurriedly, from their positions at the foot of the garage. Breaking themselves up into three two-man teams, each group approached one of three man-sized stainless-steel packing cases called coffins standing against the wall. Two of the cases contained convex aircraft wings, each broken into two four-foot sections. The third case held the fuselage, which housed the aircraft’s operational guts: the inertial navigation system, Ku-band satellite communications processor, fuel tank, primary control module, turbofan engine, and nose camera assembly.

Locking the landing gear into place, the first team set the fuselage on the ground. The men responsible for the wing assembly bolted the sections to one another, and then attached each to the fuselage by means of tungsten pinions. At the same time, the Pilot wheeled a low-slung gurney across the floor. Cradled in the gurney was a tear-shaped metallic nacelle, the size of a large watermelon, weighing thirty kilos, or some sixty-six pounds. The nacelle contained a powerful explosive charge.

The design was similar to the warhead used for Sidewinder missiles. In fact, the blueprint had come from Raytheon, the defense contractor responsible for the air-to-air missiles created over thirty years before. Little had changed in that time. Only the explosives had grown more powerful.

The nacelle consisted of a case assembly, twenty kilos of Semtex-H plastic explosive, an initiator device, and five hundred titanium fragmentation rods. When the proximity sensor detected the target-in this instance a passenger airliner-it would activate a fuse mechanism that ignited the explosive pellets surrounding the Semtex. The pellets would in turn ignite the twenty kilos of high explosive, causing it to release a huge amount of hot gas in a very short time. The explosive force from the expanding gas would blast the titanium rods outward, breaking them up into thousands of lethal flechettes that would effectively obliterate the aircraft’s fuselage.

The goal was to destroy the drone as well as the plane. No trace of the delivery mechanism would ever be found.

As soon as the nacelle was attached and the wiring plugged into the main instrument panel, the Pilot rolled the gurney from beneath the aircraft and called, “Time.”

He read the stopwatch. “Four minutes, twenty-seven seconds.”

The men did not cheer or evince any satisfaction. As quickly as they had begun, they disassembled the drone. They couldn’t take the chance that a random check might uncover the aircraft sitting in the garage assembled and ready for launch. In minutes, the three coffins were loaded and stored in locked cabinets inside the house.

Having supervised every aspect of the drill, the Pilot walked into the living room where a picture window looked down on the Zurich Airport. At eight o’clock, he spotted the landing lights of an incoming airliner approaching from the north. He was happy to note that it was precisely on time. But then, this particular flight had one of the best arrival records in the world.

He followed the lights until the Airbus A380 landed. The plane appeared oversized even from a distance of four kilometers. He knew its specifications by heart. Seventy-three meters in length. Twenty-four meters high. A wingspan of nearly eighty meters, nearly that of a football field. It was in every way the largest commercial jet aircraft in the world. It was configured to carry 555 passengers. This evening the manifest put the total at a shade under five hundred. Tomorrow it was set to carry a maximum load.

The aircraft lumbered into its parking space. It was so large that even a special jetway had been built to accommodate it. It was then that he was finally able to make out the five-pointed star painted on the tail.

El Al Flight 863 from Tel Aviv had arrived.