“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.”