Several of the nerds’ monitors contained satellite images of the crash sites of what were once airplanes, their broken pieces now spread over whatever field or forest where they had come to rest. One of the nerds was zooming in on a piece of what might have once been an engine. Another nerd was comparing a piece of shredded landing equipment to a picture of what it looked like when it came out of the box.
Storm, who had yet to see the repeated loops of television footage that were transfixing the rest of America, stopped to gawk at them. While he didn’t doubt Captain Estes, who had called it another 9/11, seeing the detritus that littered the screens made the disaster more real.
“So it’s that bad,” he said.
“No, bro,” Rodriguez said. “It’s worse.”
THE BRIEFING ROOM WAS JUST OFF the main corridor. It had a wall-sized, flat-screen monitor on one end, but its central feature was a polished conference table surrounded by high-backed leather executive chairs.
Seated in one of the chairs was Agent Kevin Bryan, a small-statured man who appeared to be every bit as Irish as his name. He was also one of Jones’s top lieutenants. He and Rodriguez were often teamed together. If Jones was the bread, Bryan and Rodriguez were the peanut butter and the jelly.
“All right, talk to me like I don’t know anything,” Storm said. “Because right now I don’t know anything other than the fact that I owe my life to the versatility of speed tape.”
“Told you that story was true,” Rodriguez spat at Bryan. “That’s what you get for doubting my boy. Twenty bucks.”
Bryan extracted a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to Rodriguez as he began talking. “Okay, we’re looking at four planes, all of which were heading toward Dulles airport and came into difficulty when they were at approximately twenty thousand feet in altitude. The National Transportation Safety Board has yet to recover any of the black boxes, so we don’t have detailed information for any of these yet. But we were able to, ahh, appropriate some initial information from the Federal Aviation Administration.”
“Go,” Storm said.
“I won’t tell you about Flight 937, because you already know about that one firsthand. So I’ll start with the initial plane to go down. It was Flight 312, coming in from Amsterdam Schiphol.”
An image of an Airbus A300 appeared in hologram as if it were floating above the table.
“It was coming in on the same approach path as 937. As a matter of fact, all four planes were coming in on a northeast approach toward Dulles runway twelve-thirty,” Bryan said. “Four-fourteen was using an Airbus A300 that had reported no recent maintenance problems. It was a perfectly routine flight. Then, at 1:55 P.M., its pilot was reporting he had lost his left engine. Pilots spend hours in simulators training for such things, so he began putting engine failure procedures into place, except they didn’t work. The plane began rapidly losing altitude and the pilot said it was responding as if it hadn’t just lost its left engine, but its entire left wing. That was his last communication before he crashed at a steep angle into a wooded area near Interstate 83.”
Bryan clicked a button and the hologram changed to a McDonnell Douglas MD-11.
He continued: “Next we have Flight 76, coming in from Stockholm Arlanda. It was a cargo plane registered to a company called Karlsson Logistics. Again, it had been a routine flight. Again, it was a plane with a spotless maintenance record. Three minutes after 312 distress call, at 1:58 P.M., Flight 76 had its last communications with the tower. Then nothing. It was like it simply ceased to exist. It was found in a farm field near Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, a few miles away from the other ones. The theory is that the pilot had no control when the plane hit the ground, because it hit hard and fast. Residents in the area reported thinking it was everything from a bomb to an earthquake.”
Storm only shook his head. Whatever had happened to Flight 76 had obviously been too catastrophic to be fixed with speed tape. He was thankful there were no passengers, but that would be little comfort to the families of the crew members.
Agent Bryan had changed the plane floating above the table to a Boeing 747.
“Finally, we have Flight 494, inbound from Paris Charles de Gaulle,” he said. “Again, there was nothing about this aircraft that would have indicated trouble. At 2:07 P.M. — nine minutes later — it reported a loss of hydraulic pressure in its rear rudder. As I said earlier, pilots are trained for such things, though by this point, flight control was apparently freaking out. They knew what had happened to the first two planes. They were determined to get this one down safely and really thought they could. Then the pilot came back on and said it was far more catastrophic. A pilot can’t see behind himself, of course. But as near as the man could figure, the entire tail section of the airplane was just gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone. What was left of the plane crashed into a forested area of Spring Valley Park. Your flight was the final one to report difficulty, about five minutes later, and the only one to survive.”
“Have any groups claimed responsibility?”
“Several are trying to, but none that we think have the capability to pull off something like this,” Bryan said. “Whoever is really behind it isn’t bragging about it yet. We don’t know what they want or why they did this.”
Storm concentrated on the desk in front of him for a moment before speaking. “So we have four different aircraft that seemed to suddenly lose valuable parts at approximately 2 P.M.”
“That’s right,” Bryan said.
“And we can be pretty sure it wasn’t some kind of nine-eleven-style hijacking,” Storm said. “There were no hijackers aboard my flight, and none of the other three reported anything. As far as we know, their pilots were still at the controls when the planes went down.”
“That’s right,” Bryan said again.
There was more staring at the desk.
“You think maybe it was sabotage?” Rodriguez asked.
“Talk it out for me.”
“Somebody on the ground was able to plant a small explosive at different points on each plane — the wing, the tail, whatever,” Rodriguez said. “The passengers on your flight said they heard a sound when the aileron came apart. Maybe the explosives were all set to go off within a few minutes of each other.”
Storm shook his head. “I don’t like it. These planes were coming from four different airports in four different countries — four sophisticated countries that have long experience taking terrorism and airport security pretty seriously. It’s hard to imagine what kind of organization could breach all four. And if you did go through all that trouble, why stop at one plane in each place? And why would they fixate on four airplanes that were not only traveling to the same airport but heading there via the exact same location? That’s far too big a coincidence.”
Rodriguez was nodding as Storm continued: “We need to think about that location. The geography has to be the common link here. Bryan, can you compare the four flight plans and find the places where they overlap within a mile or two?”
Bryan began typing furiously. On the flat screen on the far wall, Storm watched as Bryan manipulated the four flight plans on top of each other and began searching for points of intersection. Closer to Dulles, there were many of them — all four planes were on the same approach. Farther from Dulles, they were scattered.
The point of first convergence was slightly south of York, Pennsylvania.
“What’s there?” Storm asked, pointing.
Bryan zoomed in on the spot where Storm had gestured. When he got in close enough, they saw a chunk of green that was labeled, “Richard M. Nixon County Park.”