“Doesn’t Los Angeles have a nuclear sensor system in place?” Honi asked.
“It does,” Stafford replied. “All main highways in and out of LA have radiation sensors. The problem is that this airport is inside the sensor ring.”
“So we would know if it left. But not if it stayed.”
“That’s the working theory. Until we can prove it’s not here, we have to assume it is.”
“Are there sensors downtown?”
“Yes. But only on the main streets where heavy truck traffic would run. The guts to the B83 could be moved in the bed of a heavy pickup truck. If you knew where the sensors were, you could simply drive around them.”
“Do you think General Teague would know where the sensors were placed?” Jake asked.
“Every damned one.”
“How much time do you think we have to find the bomb?”
“No clue. It’s a matter of people and technology. By tonight, we will have three thousand people with radiation sensors sweeping through the city, starting at the center and working their way out. The sensor has to be within one hundred feet of the device in order to pick up the radiation. Given enough time, if it’s here, we will find it. Teague must know that. If he’s going to use the weapon, it’s going to be sooner rather than later.”
“So we could all be vaporized at any time?” Honi asked.
“Not here. The mountain will protect us from the blast, but on the other side? Nothing will remain.”
“Who does the search and who stays here?”
“My orders and your orders are to run the operation from here. Only volunteers will man the sensors and do the search in the blast radius.”
“And how many volunteers do we have?”
Stafford looked at her. “Between the military and all the federal, state and local agencies and law enforcement involved, we have thirty thousand volunteers nationwide. We’ve got enough people. I just don’t know if we have enough time.”
“What about the media. They have to be all over this.”
“They are, but at least they’re cooperating with us. This is being portrayed as another massive inter-agency exercise, an extension of what we did in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.”
Stafford took his hat off and wiped the sweat off his bald head with the palm of his right hand. The expression on his face was barely restrained fury. “Nobody does this in our own back yard and gets away with it. Nobody!”
An army officer approached. “Sensor teams have cleared the city center offices. All clean, sir.”
“Thank you.”
Jake looked over at the plane. “Do we know where it came from?”
“No,” Stafford said. “I ran the tail number — it’s fake. So is the FedEx paint job. All FedEx planes are accounted for and verified.”
“What about the onboard navigation system?”
“Not working. Someone put a bullet through it.”
“Is it okay if I take a look inside?”
“Sure. Both CID and FBI crime scene technicians have finished with it.”
Jake walked toward the plane and looked it over. He wandered around the outside, stopping to examine all of the details of the plane. There were spots of dirt, or dust, stuck in places that didn’t get as much airflow during flight, like in the recesses for the door handles and latching mechanisms. He wiped his finger through the dust and rubbed them together. Gritty, he thought. Not fine dust like you’d get with farmland. There’s a sand component, but not as coarse as beach sand. Interesting.
The side door was open. He climbed inside the cargo compartment. There was more space in there than he would have imagined. He couldn’t stand up straight because of the low ceiling. The cargo area and the flight deck were separated by a U-shaped panel and thick nylon straps. He hopped back out and opened the left front door. He pulled himself up and sat in the pilot’s seat. There were three 10-inch displays across the front, plus dials, gauges, buttons, switches and controls. He wondered what might have been going through the mind of the person who flew the plane with a hydrogen bomb in the back. He couldn’t imagine.
The opposite door opened and Honi scrambled in and sat in the co-pilot seat.
“Figure anything out?”
“Yeah, the pilot didn’t have a lot of civil air experience — probably military; which would make sense. He disabled the onboard navigation system by shooting it. But the onboard system is only part of a larger operation. You can’t fly anywhere in the country without showing up on somebody’s control board.”
Jake used his phone to locate the number and called LAX.
“This is FBI Special Agent Hunter. I need to talk with your Air Traffic Control Supervisor.” He waited. “Yes, I’m at the Corona Municipal Airport. I’m sitting in a Cessna, like the kind used by FedEx. It arrived sometime between midnight and six this morning. It is relatively new, so it’s probably Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast equipped. Can you give me the identifying information on that plane?”
“But this is Corona, not LAX,” Honi said.
“It’s still inside the LA Area Control Center. They’ll know.”
Jake pulled out his notebook and a pen. “Yes, repeat that again, please. It’s a Cessna 208 Caravan. Okay, and the tail number? Thank you.”
He finished writing down the information.
“Now we have the correct tail number. We know the bomb left Dallas/Fort Worth and ended up here in LA. The next place to check is the Area Control Center in Albuquerque. They had to cross through that area on their way here.”
He completed the second call and turned toward Honi.
“Albuquerque issued an MSAW night before last to this plane, which was ignored.”
“A what?”
“Minimum Safe Altitude Warning. The pilot of this plane landed it where there is no airport.”
“Where?”
“Northwest New Mexico.”
They both jumped out of the plane and ran over to Stafford.
Honi called Ellington at the NSA. “It’s Honi. I need the NRO to focus on this GPS coordinate in New Mexico, twenty-five mile radius. Scour every square yard. See if anything unusual is going on there.” She listened. “Yes,” she replied. “Probable connection to the BENT SPEAR operation. Thank you.” She disconnected.
Jake nervously paced around the command area for twenty minutes, a deep frown on his features. He occasionally looked up into the dark sky. He suddenly stopped and returned to Honi and Stafford. “I think the plane in LA is a diversion. I think they dropped the B83 off in New Mexico and flew the empty plane here. They disabled the avionics package thinking we wouldn’t know where they had been, and left us to panic.”
“We still have to check everything out,” Stafford said. “We have to make sure that the bomb isn’t here.”
“Of course you do. But Agent Badger and I have to get to New Mexico. Tonight.”
Jake and Honi were transported by Black Hawk helicopter back to the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base in Long Beach, and from there the FBI jet took them to Kirtland Air Force Base near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Briggs had arranged to have the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) join them at Kirtland, along with a NEST unit. At 3:00 a.m. Jake held the briefing.
“As you may be aware, this is a BENT SPEAR level operation. We are missing a 1.2 megaton thermonuclear bomb. We believe it was put on a truck in Fort Worth, driven to Wichita Falls, put on a Cessna 208 Caravan and then transferred to another vehicle somewhere in this northwest corridor of New Mexico. The NRO has analyzed the entire area from satellite images and IR scans. They have identified this area as having an unusual amount of tire marks compared to the surrounding terrain. They have also identified what looks like a landing strip. The area is remote and not secured. We are looking for any and all radioactive trace material and any signs of unusual activity. Any questions?”