Crashers (37 page)

“Nervous?” Kiki asked.

Tommy nodded. “A little. We just crawled through a jet that looked an awful lot like this one, except . . .”

Kiki reached across the aisle, palm upward. Tommy took her hand.

She said, “I know.”

 

Two rows forward, Ray pretended he couldn't hear the couple—and hell, they were clearly a couple—behind him.

 

“November Tango Sierra Bravo One, you are cleared for takeoff. Don't suppose I got to tell you which runway. Over.”

Isaiah adjusted his voice wand. “Thank you, tower. Be advised, this is a test. We'll be returning shortly. Over.”

“Roger that, November Tango. See you soon. Valence tower out.”

Dennis skidded to a stop in the parking lot behind a Glidden Paint store. If he'd calculated right, he should be lined up with the runway.

He scrambled out of the car. The parking lot, and that entire end of Valence, sat on a little hill, maybe ten feet higher than the valley floor where the airfield lay. Dennis dashed to the end of the parking lot, stared through a chain-link fence and between two bedraggled yew bushes. He was looking down and almost directly into the mouth of the single runway, which was separated from the hillock by maybe a hundred yards of flat land and low brush. The Vermeer was just now turning onto the path.

One hundred feet away from Dennis, one of the ubiquitous rented Sentras idled. Two figures in NTSB windbreakers stood behind the car, their identities obscured by an umbrella.

Sitting on the trunk was a Gamelan infrared transceiver.

“You shits!” Dennis hissed to himself and scrambled back to his car.

 

Isaiah Grey toggled the switch for the intraship communications. “Can you folks hear me?”

John Roby's voice came back. “Oy! There's a baby crying. Can I get an upgrade?”

Isaiah said, “Tourist. We're about to leave the ground. Peter called in. They're ready.”

John said, “We're ready as well. Let's give it a go, mate.”

With a nod to his copilot, Isaiah throttled forward.

 

Next to the rented Sentra, and under one umbrella, stood Walter Mulroney and Peter Kim. Walter was leaning over Peter's shoulder, staring at the infrared transceiver. “You know what you're doing?”

“Yes, Walter,” the engineer replied with an irritated sigh. “I do know a little something about computer programming.”

“I'm just asking. Here comes Grey now. Let's hope he's as good a pilot as he brags.”

 

A hundred feet away, Dennis Silverman had his laptop and transceiver out. He'd set them up on the driver's seat of his Outback, the driver's door open, then perched himself sideways on the passenger's seat, thus protecting the equipment from the slanting rain. He had no idea what set of instructions the Go-Team was about to send to the Gamelan in the swap-out jetliner. It didn't matter. He knew what signal he'd send.

 

The plane rolled forward, rain drumming on its aluminum skin. Ray was on his cell phone in the back of first class. He hung up.

“L.A. says Irish delegates are in the air, flying from New York to Los Angeles, right now.”

Tommy and Kiki twisted in their seats. “Catholic?” Kiki asked.

“Catholic and Protestant both. Show of hands: who here likes big, fat, whopping coincidences, when we're right in the middle of this shit with the Red Fist of Ulster?”

Tommy said, “So who on Flight Eight One Eight had ties to Ireland?”

Ray said, “Not a damn soul. We've triple-checked them.”

Tommy rubbed his neck, still aching from hours at the autopsy tables. “This makes no sense. I like what you're saying about a delegation heading to Los Angeles. That's gotta fit in somehow. But downing the Vermeer on Monday? The telephone call from the Valence airfield? I got nothing, Brooklyn.”

Kiki stood to face Ray and put one knee up on her seat, her arm resting on Tommy's shoulder. “If the Gamelan is involved, I wish we could have reached Dennis Silverman. Doing this without our designated expert is a handicap.”

Tommy was not aware that he touched her arm. “Pete and Walter know what they're doing. My money's on them.”

Ray said, “For what it's worth, the brass at the L.A. field office agrees with you about the Irish delegates. We're promoting them to most-likely target.”

John Roby took five paces back to their little party. “Best take your seats. Isaiah is about to take off. This works, Peter should activate the screens, show us a movie.”

“Yeah?” Ray piped up. “What's playing?”

“Dunno. Something with Will Ferrell.”

“Jesus.” Tommy winced. “Couldn't Petey just crash the fuckin' plane instead?”

 

Dennis reached into the glove compartment of his Outback and pulled out his home-built radio rig. He slid it into the gaping hole in his dashboard, where the factory-original radio would have gone. Normally, when he drove, Dennis took advantage of his technical skills to entertain himself. He'd extensively modified it to scan the frequencies dedicated to cell phones. Over the years, he'd listened to hundreds of calls around the Portland area. The vast majority had been dull. A few had been hilarious. Occasionally, some were pornographic: his favorite.

The night before, while they'd been sharing a beer, Dennis had asked to see Tommy's comm unit. He'd noted the frequency and, now, adjusted his radio to match. He was immediately rewarded by a harsh squawk and then the voice of Susan Tanaka.

“Walter? They're rolling.”

Dennis quickly turned down the audio before the two men under the umbrella heard something.

“We have them visually, Susan.” It was the voice of Walter Mulroney. “Here they come.”

The Vermeer reached takeoff velocity and the front wheels lifted off the tarmac, marked with thick stretches of melted rubber. The aircraft rose smoothly, passing directly over the stretch of low brush, then over both parked cars and both Gamelan transceivers.

 

Peter tapped the Return key. “Message sent.”

 

A fifth of a second later, Dennis hit a knuckle-buster combination of keys. It was his own get-out-of-jail-free card, a program he'd plugged in to the Gamelan, just in case. His message traveled at the speed of light to the Vermeer roaring overhead.

The message: Abort all changes. Maintain status quo.

Whatever message the NTSB boys sent, Dennis just erased it.

 

In the cockpit, Isaiah peeked at the Gamelan monitor, sitting at two o'clock relative to him. A red warning light blinked twice on the monitor screen in less than half a second.

 

Tommy, Kiki, and Ray watched the movie screens in the front of first class. If this trick worked, the DVD player would blink on. John Roby was busy watching oscilloscopes attached to the Gamelan.

The trio behind him continued to watch the movie screens.

Tommy raised his voice. “Are we there yet?”

Isaiah Grey's voice came back over the PA system. “Yeah. We're there and well beyond there. Did anything happen?”

“Oh, poo,” Kiki said. “We missed the dinner show.”

 

Susan Tanaka was standing in the simple, unadorned box on stilts that served as the Valence tower. From the hasty cleaning job and the dust-free squares marking the walls, Susan suspected that the tower crew had quickly squirreled away any girlie pictures before she arrived. She appreciated the gesture.

Ricky Sanchez had tuned the ATC radio to the speaker mounted on the wall. Isaiah's voice piped up. “Ah, ATC, this is November Tango One. Negative, repeat, negative results on Gamelan test.”

As the tower controller responded, Susan hit the controls of her belt satellite-phone unit.

“Nothing, Walter. It didn't work.”

 

Dennis Silverman chanted, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” as softly as he could, not knowing how well sound traveled in the rain.

He'd done it. He'd beaten the NTSB's best. And there was still time to catch his flight out of McNary Field, in Salem. He'd be late getting to the rendezvous, but he'd make it.

He reached for his homemade radio, which was plugged into the cigarette lighter, and turned it up. Walter Mulroney's broad, Plains accent sounded. “Okay, Susan. Tell them we're a go for test number two.”

Dennis blinked. He stared at the radio as if daring it to retract that statement.

“I'll tell them,” Susan said. “Be advised, this storm is getting worse. They just closed Portland International. Isaiah's only got about another thirty minutes for these tests. That's, what? Ten passes, tops.”

Shit!
Dennis slammed a fist into the dashboard.

 

It was Dennis's worst nightmare. He'd driven like a bat out of hell and had gotten to the parking lot behind the Glidden Paint shop with seconds to spare. He'd managed to negate whatever signal the Go-Team had sent to the swap-out, thus making it look like a Gamelan flight data recorder couldn't be used to sabotage an aircraft. Everything was going his way.

Then the wide-body began wheeling around for another pass.

Only this time, the jet would fly over his position first, then the NTSB rental car. That meant the FDR would catch his signal first, then theirs. It was simple physics. There was no way he could order the Gamelan on board that jet to belay their orders if it hadn't received them yet.

The jetliner finished its arc. Even with the leaden sky and the rain, Dennis could see it out there, a faint blob amid the clouds. It was maybe ninety seconds away, headed right for him.

He hadn't wanted to do this. He'd set out just to discredit their theory about the Gamelan. But now he needed a stronger move. With the Vermeer
sixty seconds out, he slipped a flash drive into the port of his laptop, watched the programs pop up on the screen.

A prewritten set of instructions began scrolling across his screen.

 

John Roby turned around. “I know we didn't get our test right, but something happened. This monitor shows a double spike of energy to the Gamelan.”

Ray, Tommy, and Kiki digested that, not sure what it meant.

John gave them a shrug.

 

“Second pass. Gonna try the same test,” Walter relayed to Susan via their ear jacks.

“Excuse me.” Susan touched the air traffic controller on the shoulder. “Can you tell the pilot we'll try the same test on this pass?”

 

In the cabin, Tommy, Kiki, and Ray began concentrating on the blank movie screen.

The flicker of light blinked onto the screen. About a third of a second after the Vermeer began shaking itself to pieces.

ALBION AIR FLIGHT 326 passed through a minor bit of turbulence over Nebraska. Normally, Captain David Singh wouldn't have thought twice about it. But normally, he wasn't playing chauffeur to high-ranking officials—or so Captain Singh had been assured—of the Irish government and a sitting U.S. congressman.

Teddy McCoy, the jovial navigator, unlocked the flight-deck door and let himself in. He carried three cans of soda pop and his hands were so huge, all three fit in one. The Scotsman stood over six-two and was as thin as a hockey stick. He also had a constant smile plastered on his long features.

“Here you go, then.” He handed a Coke Zero to the captain and a Diet 7UP to the copilot, Eloise Pool, who nodded her thanks. Even on a long, dull cross-Atlantic flight, Eloise didn't say three words other than the count-off checklists. It wasn't that she was shy, it was that she was the world's worst conversationalist. It was the same in the pilots' lounge or taking a cab from the airport hotels. The woman seemed incapable of making small talk.

Daya Singh, fifty-five, had started calling himself David in his teens. He'd been born in London of Indian parents and he wanted to be as much a Londoner as every other kid at school. He'd excelled at cricket, which
had gotten him into King's College on a scholarship. From there, he'd joined the Royal Air Force with one goal in mind: to fly. It was David Singh's one true passion; or it had been until meeting his wife and the birth of their three now-grown girls.

But even today, after all these years, all those cockpits and flight decks, David Singh was never happier than riding the left-hand seat of
his
aircraft.

He removed his watch and adjusted it for Pacific Time: it was 3:30
P.M.
in California.

Teddy McCoy took his seat, which was behind Eloise's, and turned ninety degrees from the other two. He adjusted the four-point harness before opening his Coke. “Are we flying anywhere near that Vermeer that went down Monday?”

Captain Singh slid his soda pop into the holder to his left, which was fitted with a gimbal to be steady even in turbulence. “That was in Oregon, north of California. I've heard naught about a cause yet.”

“Aye, it's early days.” Teddy checked his state-of-the-art navigational equipment. He also had the assignment of handling internal and external communications for the mammoth aircraft. “These things take bloody months, don't they.”

“I'd met the pilot,” David said wistfully. “Black girl, 'bout your age. It was just about, I don't know, eight months ago. She spoke on a panel about wake vortices. Very keen, that one. Told her so, after the conference. That's why I remember her. Shame.”

“Damn shame,” Teddy agreed.

Eloise Pool, it seemed, had no opinion on the topic.

For every flight that Tommy Tomzak had ever been on—every single one of them, without fail—an attendant had instructed the passengers to wear their seat belts. The one time he'd boarded an airplane with no flight attendant, he'd forgotten.

The Vermeer quaked like an epileptic in a grand mal seizure. Tommy went flying, landed hard in the aisle, his head ricocheting off an armrest. He caught a half-formed glimpse of Ray Calabrese, also airborne.