He listened to the reply and nodded, his eyes on the door to make sure there were no other ears around.
“I want the jump on this, Joe. The way I see it, the President’s only option is to snatch Harris out of there, but he also heard the word ‘Navy’ on the list of possibilities a few minutes ago and we’ve got to make sure the swabbies don’t steal this one. They’d just love to chopper him out to some carrier and fly in the media to interview him all the way to Norfolk.”
The general listened for a bit, nodding at intervals.
“Just get the plan cocked and ready, okay? The second we find where Harris is, I want an Air Force bird turning on final to the same runway. I want to hand the President an easy solution already in place.”
TWELVE
The sight of contrails streaming behind a high-flying Airbus 340 fifty miles distant had begun to worry Alastair as he waited for Craig to return from the cabin. The plumes of crystallized water vapor – ephemeral epitaphs to the stratospheric passage of the giant machine – stood in stark relief against the clear azure sky to the southeast.
We’re probably leaving our own contrail, Alastair thought. Hardly the most effective manner of sneaking away.
The contrail would last for many minutes after their passage, and any eye, airborne or on the ground, could follow it back to its source. The Italian air traffic controllers knew precisely who and where they were, of course, but the incongruity of such a visually heralded getaway left him amused and concerned at the same moment.
He checked the radar again to make sure the cumulus buildups directly ahead over Sicily weren’t hiding thunderstorms. A few rain showers adorned the digital color radar screen as light green splotches located just beyond the city of Catania and Mount Etna, but otherwise the weather was cooperating. He checked the altitude again. Steady at flight level two eight zero, or twenty-eight thousand, the airspeed Mach.72, seventy-two percent of the speed of sound.
Just for a moment, Alastair let his stomach tighten at the thought of what lay ahead professionally, but he quickly squelched the process, returning his thoughts instead to the growing mental list he’d been making of why he should leave EuroAir anyway. It was hardly a matter of money. He had plenty saved, and access to his father’s estate as well, but he’d never been dismissed from a job, and that small indulgence of pride was now threatened.
The cockpit door yielded to a key and Alastair looked around as Craig reentered and swung expertly into the left seat, rolling his eyes. There was no smile.
“I take it the natives are restless?” Alastair said.
“What? Oh. That would be British understatement, right?” Craig replied, the shadow of a grin crossing his face.
“You tell me,” Alastair said.
Craig nodded. “We’ve got about a dozen or so back there who would probably come after me with the crash axe if they could get to it. Missed flights, missed appointments, a missed wedding, missed opportunities… I lost count.”
“And you’re surprised?”
“Not really. I’m just not much of a diplomat. Where are we?”
Alastair gave him a quick synopsis and voiced his concern over the contrail. “I don’t know why it seems important.”
“I do,” Craig said, looking back over his left shoulder as his right hand found the heading select button on the autoflight panel. He began cranking the heading around to the left until the 737 entered a thirty-five-degree left bank.
“What are you looking for?” Alastair asked. “ATC will surely see this turn and ask what we’re doing.”
“Say nothing just yet.”
The aircraft’s heading was now more than forty-five degrees to the left of the course, and as he strained to see behind them, their contrail swam into view streaming back for many miles until it passed under another jetliner on the same course.
“Aha!”
“What, Craig?”
“We’re being followed. I thought so.”
“By whom?”
“It’s probably that charter flight they cleared to Malta just after us.”
“Aren’t we being a bit paranoid? If he’s going to Malta, there is a reasonably good possibility he would be behind us.”
Craig shook his head. “If you’re going to snatch someone back to Peru, wouldn’t it be smart to have a plane waiting? I could be wrong, but I’ll bet he’s literally tailing us.”
Craig reengaged the navigation link between the autoflight system and the flight computer and the 737 obediently rolled out of the left bank and into a right turn to resume course.
“So what do we do, if anything?” Alastair asked. “I rather doubt he’s carrying missiles, but it’s a bit difficult to hide a 737 streaming a fifty-mile contrail.”
“Any cells in those buildups?” Craig asked, pointing to the towering cumulus looming less than ten miles ahead.
“No. A little rain is all I see.”
“And right over our destination,” Craig muttered to himself as he leaned over the radar display. “Good. Let’s pull out the tower frequency for Sigonella.”
“And what, pray tell, are you planning, oh captain, my captain?”
“Just a little F-15 maneuver.”
“I see. You will keep in mind won’t you, old boy,” Alastair said, “that this little bird from Seattle doesn’t maneuver quite as well as that overfed F-15 you used to fly?”
“Sure it does,” Craig replied, his eyes boring into the clouds they were about to penetrate.
The controller in charge of EuroAir 42 forced himself to stub out his cigarette and concentrate. With several supervisors hovering over his shoulder, the uncomfortable task of watching the hijacked aircraft as its data block crawled southbound across his scope had become an agony of trying not to forget any procedures. The sudden left turn had been worrisome, but he’d resisted the temptation to ask the pilots what was going on. Who knew what was happening up there, and how the wrong word at the wrong moment might infuriate a hijacker holding a gun or a bomb? Fortunately, he noted, the aircraft was still in the sky, so hopefully there was no struggle going on in the cockpit. He remembered the videos of a Boeing 767 crashing into the water off the Seychelles years before amidst a monstrous struggle for control on the flight deck. Hopefully nothing so dramatic would occur today.
The data block for the Boeing 727 cleared to Malta had closed on EuroAir 42 by a half mile because of the sudden unexplained turn, but the spacing between the two jets was still legal.
EuroAir 42 was just crossing the shoreline of Sicily when the data block began to coast, the computer displaying the last readout of position and altitude in the absence of any updated information. The controller came forward slightly in his seat, watching for the aircraft’s transponder to resume “talking” to the ATC computer. But nothing was happening, and the warning symbol that told him the data from the aircraft had been lost was now flashing.
“What’s happening?” one of the supervisors asked with a self-importance that disgusted the controller.
“I’ve lost his transponder,” the controller said simply.
“What does that mean?” a visiting ATC manager who had never been a controller asked.
“It means, sir, that we may have just temporarily lost the signal, he could have turned it off, or something catastrophic could have happened to stop its transmissions.”