The camera angle widened to show four streaking contrails around the A-10, then rotated down to include the empty, ridge-scarred desert below. Sound resumed: “—believe are US Air Force A-10 attack planes en route to intercept a terrorist attack aimed somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area, which is apparently being delivered via the hijacked Air Force Two—the plane carrying Vice President John Samuelson. For those of you who just joined us—”
“Television is the medium for people who just got here,” Jason said.
Zach nodded. “That’s why children love it.” The planes flew on, parallel white streaks in the blue sky, two of them big enough to show as glints of metal. The voice-over commentator began to go through it all again. Very softly, he added, “And why we need Daybreak.”
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. YUMA. ARIZONA. 5:42 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Ysabel plunged down the stairs just slow enough to be silent; above her, she could hear Neil’s high old voice, like an unhappy child, over and over, asking if anyone knew what that sound was, and didn’t they smell smoke?
She popped through the ground-floor fire exit and walked quickly across the street, making herself not look back.
Stunned, exhilarated, scared, she held her cell phone to her ear and walked along the busy street, saying “unh-hunh, unh-hunh, yeah you’re right.” At the corner pay phone, she let herself look up and see the people staring over her head and behind her. Just like acting class back at the community college, “acting is re-acting,” nothing hard here.
She turned and gawped like everyone else. The aerostat was sinking slowly, a tangle of junk hanging from it, but it didn’t look like the diesel fuel had caught fire; good, less chance that anyone would be hurt. The Stinger had torn some big holes in the lower, air-filled part (to judge by the flapping bits of fabric) and small holes in the upper, helium-filled part (to judge by the way it was sinking).
Aaron had explained about the upper and lower parts, and it had been one of the few things he said about the aerostat that she could follow. She liked the way he tried so hard to be non-condescending and non-technical for her. That and his Latin-poet eyes.
Ysabel pictured campesino families, desperate for work, over the border in San Luis Rio Colorado. They would see the big balloon that had always been like a Yankee fist in their face sinking like a bad dream. She imagined them packing their few treasures from the old village and heading north tonight. Her face was aching for a chance to grin, but she kept it slack as she slumped heavily against the pay phone’s metal hood and slid her phone onto the little metal shelf. Someone looking to make a pay-phone call would be happy to find a prepaid cell phone with no security on it.
The aerostat sank faster in the late-afternoon sun. More people stopped to stare, point, and yell. Time to go.
ABOUT TEN MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 8:50 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
“How the fuck did a local TV station plane get that close without permission?” Garren demanded.
I think a man can be allowed an f-bomb under the circumstances, Heather thought.
The radar balloon shot down in Yuma had pulled a whole flock of Air Force and ANG fighters too far west, and they were now out of the chase. Nonetheless, now we’ve got him. A Global Hawk had picked up the 787 as it flew northward, hopping over ridges in the empty desert east of San Diego and just north of the border—an area slashed by ridges and draws with no more apparent pattern than the folds in a crumpled sheet of newspaper, striped and blobbed in green and brown brush. Smart choice of approach, she thought, but we got you anyway. In the last few minutes they’d been able to pull Fullbacks, the A-10 Warthogs, off point defenses south of LA and send them on interception courses.
The A-10s wouldn’t have been as fast as the Dreamliner at high altitude in a straight-line chase, but the airliner was flying low and slow and zigzagging among the ridges, and they’d be able to dive on it. One of the Warthogs might well be first to the kill.
If Bad Dreamliner somehow dodged through the closing arc of A-10s, there were other chances. CVN 76 Ronald Reagan, just off North Island, had already catapulted two Super Hornets, which could overtake the 787 in a stern chase before it reached LA. Three Marine F-35s that had been returning to North Island had enough fuel to divert to intercept as well, and a flight of Utah ANG F-22s would be able to intercept just south of Long Beach, if Air Force Two somehow got that far.
Someone was going to shoot down that plane. She hoped Samuelson wasn’t still alive.
“They’ve got an interception vector for an A-10,” one of the DoD people announced. “First shot in about four minutes. Less than a minute after that we’ll have a window for an F-18 to put an AMRAAM on his tail. If he’s headed for somewhere around LA—and it looks like he is—we get at least five good tries to bring him down, plus three long shots.”
Kim Samuelson was talking with President Pendano, their arms around each other as if they were already at the funeral.
Cam spoke beside her. “Do you have Jim Browder on the line, Heather? Urgent question for him.”
“I’ve got him standing by on secure IM.” She typed, Phn me, encrypt #.
Her phone rang; she docked it in her terminal, set it for Record, Transcribe, and Speakerphone, and said, “Jim. Mr. Nguyen-Peters of Homeland Security has a question for you. Cam, Jim is fully briefed per your instructions.”
“Good. Dr. Browder, the vice president yelled ‘barrels on the plane’ three times. We’re about to shoot it down over uninhabited desert, almost nothing human downwind for hundreds of miles. Is there anything that they could have put on it that will cause massive problems if we just blow the plane up? Anything that will be made worse if it burns?”
“Probably not in uninhabited desert,” Browder said. “Planes burn hot. Fire should kill any weaponized germs or toxins we know about. Most nerve gases are destroyed by flame and heat, except maybe Novichok-5, which hasn’t been seen since the 1990s and it’s possible the formula is lost. Depending on which ex-Soviet scientist was telling you which self-serving mixture of lies and truth, that stuff might or might not have been heat resistant, but its chemical cousins are not. So I don’t think you have to worry about anything chemical or biological.”
“Nuclear? Radiological?”
“Nukes require very complex moving parts to work exactly right very, very fast. They’re the last thing in the world that you could set off by just whacking them or burning them. So if it was gas, germs, or nukes, they were planning to pull the trigger or open the nozzle before crashing the plane, and shooting it down in the desert should take care of it.”
“That leaves radiological.”
“Yeah. If the drums contained flammable radiological material, of course, that doesn’t stop being radioactive when it burns, and burning it might spread it around more. Either something like tritinated hydrocarbons or something like radiosodium might be kept in barrels. But I don’t think it’s likely; the physics is all wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
“The flight time is too long,” Browder explained. “The shorter the half-life, the stronger the radiation. If they used something with a short-enough half-life to be quickly, immediately deadly, that’s going to be a half-life of hours rather than weeks or years. They’ve been on that plane for close to fifteen hours with it, and short-half-life radioactives are too energetic for any shielding less than tons of lead to deal with. They’d all be dead of radiation poisoning.