CHAPTER 12

LANGLEY, Virginia


It was a good thing Jedediah Jones’s people could only see his outsides.

Outwardly, he staked his position at the center of the cubby with his usual calm, assured demeanor. His face was a Venetian mask their eyes could not penetrate. His shirt, which he had changed sometime in the middle of the night, did not have a wrinkle on it.

It was his insides that were a rumpled mess.

His power was based on having made himself a go-to guy for other powerful men over the course of years and decades. Presidents. Senators. Cabinet members. Other parts of the CIA. They all came to Jones to fix their problems. They all needed Jones.

This was what drove him. His work ethic was something akin to a lifelong manic phase. His standards, unyielding for all those around him, were even higher where his own behavior was concerned. If an issue could be solved with hard work — and Jones believed more or less everything could be solved with hard work — he was equal to the task. He was the man who never let anyone down when it mattered.

Until now. Facing the most serious threat to national security since that horrible September day in 2001, Jones was foundering. It was now nearing twenty-four hours since planes had started falling from the sky, since the powerful men had turned to him for help, and he had no solutions for them.

What he had was Derrick Storm’s conjecture that some kind of laser beam was causing this. Jones knew not to doubt Storm. If anyone could intuit from looking at one piece of metal what had happened to a whole plane, it was a man like Storm, a man whose intuition seemed to border on clairvoyance.

But Jones had also not taken Storm’s theory to any of the powerful men. Not until Storm had more than just a piece of metal to go on. It was too unformed, too likely to be flawed. Jones had made a career out of not being wrong, and he didn’t want to start now.

In the meantime, Jones had set agents in all corners of the globe to work. He had ordered them to break laws, confidences, bodies — whatever they had to do to get him information. He, himself, had not slept. The powerful men were depending on him, waiting for him to produce. And he was disappointing them.

What was the opposite of power? Impotence. That’s what Jones felt. It was splashed across his face: the sheer misery that he wasn’t doing enough, that he was slipping. It was the most horrible sensation imaginable.

Then it got worse.

Standing in the middle of the cubby, surveying his people at work, he recognized that something was wrong before he even knew what it was. One of the techs was sitting up in his chair, pounding furiously on his keyboard, horror in his countenance. He had headphones clamped over his ears and was perhaps unaware he was suddenly exuding stress from his body.

Jones reminded himself that he was the boss. His people needed his unflappable, steady leadership. They would be rattled if they saw him react in any overly demonstrable way. Making sure he was composed, he walked slowly over to the young man in question, and gently placed a hand on his shoulder.

“What is it, son?”

“Sir, the computers picked up unusual voice patterns from Emirates air traffic control. The number of discrete sounds per second went off the charts, much more than what you’d get for a sandstorm or a near miss. I had to backtrack the algorithm in order to switch from passive to active listening, but as soon as I tapped in I—”

“Spit it out, son.”

“Sir, a plane has gone down.”

“Where?”

“It was on approach to Dubai International Airport. It was approximately seventy nautical miles from the field and it went into a spin. Sir, York, Pennsylvania, is approximately seventy nautical miles from Dulles. Those planes also went into—”

“What are the coordinates of where it crashed?”

The tech pointed to a series of digits on his screen.

“Wallace,” Jones said to another one of the nerds. “Get me eyes on 24.344057 north, 55.559553 east.”

“Yes, sir,” a voice from three desks away said.

“Put it up on the main screen when you have it.”

The other techs were, by now, aware of what was unfolding. Jones could see their heads moving, their attention being ripped from their terminals. The volume in the room had increased threefold.

“What towns or cities are nearby?”

Another voice volunteered: “Sir, that’s just outside Al-Ain, right near the border of Oman. Al-Ain is a city of a little more than a half million that’s known for its—”

“I’m not going on vacation there, damn it!” Jones barked. “Tell me about the highways. If we’re seeing a repeat of the Pennsylvania Three, the weapon will be near a highway.”

“There are several major ones connecting Al-Ain to Abu Dhabi and Dubai. E-16, E-95, and E-66 go north. E-22 and E-30 go west. E-7 heads west into Oman. We’d need more information to narrow in on which one is being used.”

At that moment, the thirty-foot screen at the front of the room blinked onto one image. In the middle of a tan, empty stretch of desert, there was the splintered husk of what had once been a commercial airliner. Several of the plane’s pieces were strewn on the desert around it. Smoke poured from where one of the engines had come to a rest.

“Damn it,” Jones said. “Bryan, who do we have on the ground in Dubai who might already be compromised?”

Kevin Bryan consulted the roster he kept in his head and spat out several names. Jones picked Michael Reed, a man whose bungling had led to his exposure to the Emirates intelligence community a few days earlier. Reed was due to ship out of the country before the Emirates special police force could gather enough evidence to arrest him.

“Tell Reed to alert UAE authorities immediately,” Jones barked. “They have to get all planes off this flight path. If this is like Pennsylvania, any other plane coming in on this approach is in danger.”

“Is it possible this crash is unconnected to the Pennsylvania Three?” Bryan asked.

“We’ll find out in the next few minutes. In the meantime, it won’t hurt to act like we’re seeing the second act of this attack.”

“Yes, sir,” Bryan said.

Jones turned to another one of the techs. “Figure out which flight that is. Download its flight plan. Trace backward over the last fifty nautical miles from where it crashed and set a search grid of two miles along either side of the line. Pay particular attention to areas near highways. If Storm is right, there’s going to be some kind of laser beam stationed somewhere in that grid. I want it found.”

The tech balked. “Sir, that’s…that’s a needle in a haystack.”

Jones glared at him. “Then you better sift through it until one of your fingers gets pricked. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jones swore. All around him, the considerable computing power he had assembled — and the talent he had brought to the cubby to work it — was being strained to its limit. Jones realized his fists were balled. He forced himself to flex his fingers.

It was possible that plane had gone down due to natural causes. But Jones knew the odds. Commercial airline travel was, statistically speaking, about as safe as a walk across your living room. Maybe if it was a third-rate airline in a developing country that didn’t have the money to maintain its fleet, there could be problems. But the Emirates was one of the most sophisticated countries in the Middle East, one that had smartly reinvested its oil money into infrastructure, education, and health care — things that would still be there even when the oil finally ran out.

A sick, sinking sensation was spreading to Jones’s stomach. He realized he was holding his breath. He exhaled softly. The Pennsylvania Three went down within twelve minutes of each other, at 1:55, 1:58, and 2:07. It had already been seven minutes since the first plane was stricken. If they could just get through the next —

“Sir!” one of the techs called out. “Another plane over Al-Ain has gone badly off course. The tower in Dubai has lost contact. I’m listening in now. They’re freaking out.”

“Coordinates?” Jones asked.

“Twenty-four point four-nine-nine-six-four-six north, fifty-five point six-nine-six-five-oh-nine east.”

“That’s maybe fifteen miles from the first crash,” Bryan said. “The first was just to the west of E-95 highway. This was just to the east of it.”

“Narrow our search grid to the E-95 corridor,” Jones ordered. “Can someone get me eyes on this plane?”

On the large screen, there came the satellite image of a plane in flight — but only barely. The sight was so incongruous as to even shock Jones: the aircraft’s starboard wing was missing. What was left of the plane had entered a tight, clockwise spiral. There was not nearly enough lift coming from its one remaining wing to keep it in flight or on course. It was difficult to gauge its altitude from a two-dimensional picture, but whatever height it had, it was losing fast.

The cubby had gone silent. Some of the best and brightest computer jockeys in America had been reduced to horrified spectators. There was nothing any of them could do to save the doomed souls aboard.

All they could do was watch as the plane plowed into a dune in an empty stretch of desert. It kicked up an enormous cloud of sand that obscured their view of the aircraft breaking apart under the enormous force of hitting the ground at such a steep angle and such a high rate of speed.

Jones slammed his fist on a desk next to him. Several techs snapped their heads in his direction.

They had never seen him lose his cool.


THE NEXT THIRTEEN MINUTES were ones Jones did not want to ever relive.

Two more planes that had not been able to scramble away from the danger zone over Al-Ain were struck and fell to the desert like wounded birds.

Jones and his people could only sit and watch, cataloguing each disaster, trying to find patterns. The similarities to the Pennsylvania crashes were already obvious, except they were happening half a world away.

When it had stopped — partly because the UAE authorities, warned by Reed, had gotten all the planes out of the air — Jones sat in the chair at the desk he kept in the middle of the cubby. He buried his face in his hands. The Pennsylvania Three had been joined by the Emirates Four. And yet, even having narrowed their search grid, they had not been able to locate whatever was making it happen.

“Sir?” Bryan said, holding a phone toward him. “It’s Storm.”

“Jones,” he said into the mouthpiece, his voice cracking slightly. “I assume you’ve heard about what just happened on the Arabian Peninsula.”

“I have.”

“Please tell me you know something.”

Storm spent the next five minutes briefing Jones about his strengthening conviction that a high-energy laser was responsible for the crashes. Jones, in turn, told Storm more about what they had just witnessed taking place above the Arabian Desert.

“And you said you watched the whole thing from satellite?” Storm asked when he was done.

“That’s right.”

“I assume you saved that footage.”

“Of course.”

“How close a view could one of the nerds give me on that severed wing?”

“About as close as your nose is to your toes. You know that.”

“Could you have them send the image to my phone?”

“Absolutely,” Jones said.

Jones set the phone down for a moment, walked over to one of his techs, and asked her to comply with Storm’s request.

“What are you thinking?” Jones asked when he returned to the line.

“I have an idea. I just want to be sure of something.”

The woman whose desk Jones had just visited gave him the high sign.

“Okay,” he said. “It should be landing on your phone any moment.”

Storm paused, but only briefly. His phone was connected to the government’s secret beta version of a 5G satellite network. It was a hundred times faster than 4G and didn’t come with the blind spots of land-based networks.

“Yeah, I got it,” Storm said. “Give me a moment.”

Jones waited for Storm to study the picture. Storm had saved Jones from seemingly hopeless situations in the past. At this point, the Head of Internal Division Enforcement could only pray that whatever Storm had forming in his mind would work the same kind of magic again.

“Okay,” Storm said. “It’s a laser. There’s no doubt.”

“Is it the same weapon that did the Pennsylvania Three?”

“I would imagine its specs are identical, but it’s not the exact same unit. A weapon capable of producing a laser this powerful would be fairly large. The crystals themselves weigh several hundred pounds. And then there’s the issue of heat displacement. A weapon like this gets incredibly hot when you fire it, and unless you divert that energy somewhere — a large pool of water, the ground, something — it would melt stuff you didn’t want melted. The high-energy laser I saw demonstrated a few years ago needed a truck to haul it around, mostly because of the heat factor. Even if you had managed to miniaturize some of its parts, you’d still have something reasonably large. The fact that there seem to be highways near the crash sites suggest to me this weapon is being towed around by a car or truck. The only way to get something that size from Pennsylvania to the Middle East in a day would be to fly it. And all nonmilitary flights out of the U.S. have been grounded.”

“Good point. So what’s this idea of yours?”

“We go on the offensive. We have to. Right now, this guy can strike anywhere. He’s been using highways because they provide quick access, but there’s nothing to say he has to keep operating that way. If it’s a large truck, all he needs is blacktop. If it’s a light truck, he could even go off-road. No one flying over land is safe.”

“I agree. But how do we go on the offensive?”

“We set a trap,” Storm said. “Draw the enemy out.”

“I’m listening.”

“Whoever is doing this has two very powerful lasers on two continents, but they also have a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“A lack of targets. No one is going to be flying anywhere in the foreseeable future. Seven plane crashes in two days? Every airport in the world is going to be shuttered. That means our terrorist is out of business for the time being. And, bear in mind, whoever has this weapon knows his window of opportunity to use it is going to be somewhat limited. From what I’m told, promethium degrades naturally, which causes impurities in the crystal. Too many impurities and the crystal becomes worthless. So our bad guy is going to be itching to use this thing.”

“I agree. How do we use this against him?”

“By giving him a target. A big fat one.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“How about Air Force One?” Storm said.

“Are you out of your—”

“Not with the president on board, of course. Hear me out. We have the White House make a big announcement: the United States is the mightiest nation in the world and does not bow to the will of terrorists. ‘By executive order, domestic air travel will resume in two days. But in the meantime, as a show of faith to the American people, the president, several cabinet members, and a handful of brave members of Congress and the Senate are all going to hop aboard Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base and fly in a big circle over the eastern United States before landing back at Andrews.’ We’ll show footage of them getting on board, waving and smiling and all that, and then have a dummy plane painted like Air Force One and being remotely piloted actually make the flight. There would be no one on board.”

“But how do we—”

“I’m not done,” Storm said. “We have to make our terrorists feel like they’re earning this. So we give a fake flight plan to the press. The one we really fly will supposedly be a secret. But, of course, we’ll stick it on the FAA’s server.”

“Which is secure, but is easy enough to hack into,” Jones said. “The techs do it all the time. And we can assume whoever is carrying out these attacks has a similar capacity.”

“Exactly. Then we make sure our circular flight plan has only one spot where it is both over land and seventy nautical miles away from Andrews. We monitor the area via satellite from the cubby, then make sure we hide enough boots on the ground to capture the weapon and whomever is operating it.”

Jones was nodding, even though Storm couldn’t see it.

“You think that’ll work?” Jones asked.

“I don’t know,” Storm said. “But I do know one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve yet to hear anyone else come up with a better idea.”

Загрузка...