Flight into Darkness (Flight Trilogy, Book 2) (17 page)

After replacing the albums, all spines perfectly aligned, he went downstairs. Finding Usman in his place staring at the computer screens, the children resting quietly, and Keri, no longer struggling against her straps, he flipped open Keri’s cell. “Keri, I’m calling your husband. He will want to know that you and the children are alive and well. I will remove the tape to let you speak with him. You will need to tell him everything is fine and for him to do as he is instructed. Do you understand?”

She nodded.

Samael warned, “If you do anything crazy, your daughter will die. Is that perfectly clear?”

Again, she nodded.

Samael pressed the number on the keypad designated to speed dial Ryan.

Ryan picked up after one ring. “Yes.”

“Captain Mitchell, I assume you’ve had time to review my instructions.”

“You’re insane!”

“From your perspective it might appear so, but I have my reasons.”

“I want to talk to my wife!”

“First, let me confirm that you understand. I am watching your every move. Remember? I am your god, I see all. I know when your plane leaves the gate, when it takes off, and will be watching it every mile of the way until it reaches the target. I remind you,
if
the plane does not reach the target, or for some reason it does not take out the target, your family will
all
die. Do you understand?”

“Yes. I understand. Now let me talk to my wife.”

Samael peeled the tape away from Keri’s mouth, and then held the cell phone to her lips.

“Ryan, it’s me,” Keri said, her voice low and subdued.

“Are you and the children okay?” he said.

“Yes, but the children—”

Samael pulled the cell away. “Everything is fine. Keri wanted you to know that the children are asleep.”

Ryan pleaded, “I’m going to do what you want, just don’t hurt my family. You can trust me. I promise.”

“Wonderful. We finally trust each other. Now, go fly your final mission and your family will live—a picture-perfect ending. Perhaps your Keri might want to add and album to her collection after this is over. As the story says—“And they all lived happily ever after.” Well, not everyone, but the important ones. Isn’t that right, Captain Mitchell?” Samael closed the flip on the cell. He peered down at Keri, “My dear, it’s time. Once we get you and the children all hooked up, I’ll let you go to sleep—hopefully it won’t be forever.”

Keri’s rage returned. “You’re going to pay for this! You may kill us all, but you’ll pay!”

Samael reached down and stretched the silver tape back across Keri’s mouth, pulling it tight, pressing it against her face. She struggled wildly. “Keri, I was in hopes we could visit; share some of my views on this life and the next, maybe have a cup of tea, but I guess not.”

David moaned. Keri turned and saw his head move. She fought hopelessly against her bindings and grunted.

The sound drew the albino’s attention. He reached into his satchel and pulled out the hypodermic and ampoule of sodium thiopental. He walked to David’s bed and administered another injection. He then leaned down and checked Martha. “She should be okay for a few minutes,” he said, “but it looks like we need to go ahead and get everyone hooked up.”

Keri pulled and strained.

CHAPTER 23

9:28 p.m.

Ryan exited the employee bus, hurried into the terminal building through a secure checkpoint, and up the stairs to the main concourse. His heart raced faster and faster with each step.

After navigating around and through a stream of passengers, he slipped into an obscure corridor that led to a single-door elevator reserved only for flight crews. He inserted a key into the key access switch located beside the steel door. As he turned the key, he pondered how the lunatic might have obtained access to the secure area. Secured areas throughout the terminal building were limited to those employees that worked in that specific area—with one exception: cleaners. The cleaners had full access for cleaning, emptying trash cans, and vacuuming carpets, duties conducted mostly at night. Perhaps the lunatic had paid a cleaner a few hundred bucks—maybe less—to drop the package in Ryan’s mail slot.

After an agonizingly slow ride to the second floor, the door opened to a cold room as quiet as a morgue. Ten computer terminals, evenly positioned on waist-high counters, lined the far wall. A ceiling to floor map of the world spread across the adjacent wall.

Ryan headed for the mailroom, a labyrinth of slotted shelves alphabetized with the names of pilots and coded by their crew position and aircraft type. He quickly located MITCHELL, R. and pulled the contents from the narrow slot. He moved to a table in the adjacent room where he could review the contents of the package in private. He hesitated, as another pilot moved listlessly through the dimly lit room, but he paid Ryan no attention.

Ryan flipped through his mail—chart updates; company memos warning of discipline for extended sick absences; fuel saving suggestions. There it was, as promised. He pushed everything else aside, tore open the envelope, and pulled out a folded piece of paper with typed instruction:

THE PROFILE MUST BE FLOWN EXACTLY AS SHOWN.

YOUR PROGRESS WILL BE TRACKED.

DEVIATIONS WILL RESULT IN UNWANTED CONSEQUENCES: YOUNGEST TO OLDEST.

Load the following latitude and longitude points into your flight computer. Speeds and altitudes will be flown as indicated.

POINT A: N340 W1200 – Speed: 250 knots; altitude: 10,000 feet.

POINT B: N370 42’ W1230 – Cross at 500 feet. Then increase speed to 325 knots to the target.

TARGET: N37048.5’ W122028.4’ – Arrive at the target at an altitude of exactly 500 feet above the water, and a speed of 325 knots.

FLY THE PROFILE EXACTLY! ARRIVE AT THE TARGET AT EXACTLY 12:00 (MIDNIGHT).

At first glance, Ryan had no idea of the exact location of the latitude and longitude coordinates, however, the increasing latitude for each point—N340 to N370—told him the locations were somewhere north of LAX.

Using the jet’s global positioning and inertial reference systems, the on-board flight management computer could easily be programmed to navigate to the exact points, including the altitude, airspeed, and time constraints the lunatic had listed. Ryan’s concern was how to convince air traffic controllers to allow it. Arbitrary deviations from the flight plan, unless small and quickly corrected, would create panic for the controllers, and in extreme cases—such as with the lunatic’s proposed flight profile—could result in the launch of nearby escort fighters sitting on alert.

Taking the lunatic’s instructions, he rushed over to the flight-planning table. Underneath a clear, Plexiglas top was a navigational chart stretching from Dallas to as far west as the Hawaiian Islands, and from the border of Mexico to a point 100 miles north of San Francisco. The chart included a grid of latitude and longitude lines evenly divided into increments of two-degree blocks.

Ryan quickly located LAX airport (N33 56.0 W118 25.9). A thin green longitude line crossed from right to left just above the airport. Following the green line, his eyes darted to the edge of the chart at the left, reading N340. He then zeroed in on the markings for the lines of latitude along the bottom of the chart, moving from east to west, right to left: “N1180…N1200.”

He followed the thin green line back up until it intersected with the N340 line of longitude. Holding the spot with his right finger, he checked the paper in his left hand: POINT A: N340 W1200.

The point beneath his finger was located above a small group of islands approximately 130 miles west of LAX—The Channel Islands.

Holding his spot, he checked the paper. POINT B: N370 42’ W1230.

His eyes jumped to the edge of the chart, moving up…N360…N380…and then to the right…W1240…W1220…. toward the coast.

The lines were marked in even numbers. He split the small block in half, estimating the midpoint: W1230. The navigational fix named FARRA, conveniently marked with Lat/Long: N37 41.8 W123 00.9, was practically the exact location of the lunatic’s POINT B.

FARRA
.

Ryan knew FARRA to be short for the Farallon Islands; a nearby collection of ten islands—211 acres of inhospitable, craggy rocks towering to 350 feet—located west of San Francisco. Though only thirty miles from Macy’s in Union Square, the islands remain unknown by many of the seven million Bay-area residents. The mysterious landscape, filled with myth and nightmare, juts from the Pacific like the fangs of a sea monster, aptly dubbed by sailors in the 1850s as the
Devil’s
Teeth
.

Ryan first learned of the Farallon Islands while watching the Discovery Channel series,
Shark
Week
. The cold Pacific waters, along with the island’s blubbery carpet of seals, attract the largest great white sharks in the world. The Farallones lie within a particular 100 mile stretch of coastline—from San Francisco to Monterey—named the Red Triangle. It has been estimated that of all documented great white shark attacks on humans, more than half have occurred within the infamous Red Triangle. The Farallon Islands form the corner of this triangle. He wondered if the lunatic had chosen the forbidding place as some sort of eerie message of death.

It wasn’t the sharks that concerned Ryan. Something worse—birds, lots of birds. As a wildlife and wilderness refuge, he knew that the airspace above the islands, up to 1,000 feet, was a protected no fly zone. The lunatic’s instructions called for the jet to descend to 500 feet over POINT B: the exact coordinates of FARRA.

Home to hundreds of thousands of seabirds, the inky-black sky above the Farallones was guaranteed to be filled with nocturnal seabirds—a jet engine’s worst nightmare. At 300 miles per hour, a surprise attack by a flock of gull-size birds could equate to a shotgun blast with bowling ball-sized pellets. The jet’s engines, unable to digest multiple hits from the feathery, foreign objects, would burst into flames, rocketing turbine blades in every direction, easily slicing through the thin walls of the fuselage. Depending on the size of the bird, cockpit windshields could shatter possibly decapitating the pilots.

With his finger now resting on FARRA, a point approximately twenty nautical miles west of San Francisco, he checked the paper for the final point. TARGET: N37048.5’ W122028.4’.

Seeing W1220, his heart leaped in his chest. The longitude for the final point decreased from W1230 to W1220, meaning the target was to the east, toward the coast.

Ryan slid his finger slowly across the top of the glass to the east toward San Francisco. He double-checked the paper, and then looked closely at the chart beneath his finger. He noticed the navigational aid for Sausalito, the small harbor town across the bay to the north of San Francisco. The lat/long coordinates for the navigation aid were printed on the chart: N37 51.3 W122 31.4. He checked the paper again. TARGET: N37048.5’ W122028.4’.

The
degrees
for the two sites matched exactly: N370 and W1220, but the
minutes
were slightly different.

Knowing that nautical miles are based on the size of the Earth, by dividing the circle of the Earth at the equator into 360 degrees, traveling one degree around the Earth was equal to traveling 60 nautical miles. Then, by dividing each degree into 60 minutes, one minute of the Earth’s arc is equal to one nautical mile.

Ryan quickly did the math, calculating the distance from the Sausalito coordinates to the target: 51.3 minus 48.5, and 31.4 minus 28.4. That put the location of the target at a point 2.8 miles south and 3 miles east of the Sausalito navigational aid.

He examined the chart closer. He remembered a romantic weekend he and Keri had spent in Sausalito while touring the wine country to the north. He knew the navigational facility would not be located in the valley near the town, but to the west, toward the coast, possibly on a hilltop. The higher elevation allowed for enhanced reception of the radio beams, as they rely on line of sight.

He suddenly realized the target.

“Oh my God, the bridge!”

Ryan quickly turned and scanned the room to see if his outburst had been noticed.

He remembered the shock he felt that morning, hearing the reporter attempt to justify why Rex Dean’s flight had been shot down by U.S. fighters: “Officials believed the plane was headed for a target in northern California”.

The
lunatic
did
it
!
The
lunatic
killed
Rex
!
He’s
already
tried
this
once
,
and
failed
.
Then
he
murdered
Emily
.
He’s
not
joking
.
If
I
don’t
do
this
,
he
will
kill
my
family
.

Now certain that the lunatic’s target was the Golden Gate Bridge, certain that the lunatic had murdered Emily, and certain that Keri and the kids were in grave danger, he began to sweat. His throat tightened, holding back a wave of nausea. His legs felt like they might give way. He gripped the counter to steady himself.

The wall clock read 9:42. He steadied himself, then moved to a computer and pulled up the crew list. His copilot, Charles Smith, had already signed in. He should be somewhere in operations, or possibly on his way to the plane. Ryan needed time to explain the plan to Smith. Without Smith’s help, Ryan was certain that Keri, David, and Martha would die.

CHAPTER 24

9:30 p.m.

Chuck Smith’s watch alarm began chirping repeatedly at 9:30 interrupting dreams of palm trees, crashing surf, and Hawaiian dancing girls waiting on his every need. He wiped the drool from the corner of his lip and retracted the extended foot of the recliner where he’d spent the last two hours.

After rubbing his face, his eyes still unable to make out shapes in the dark room, he stabbed around on the floor until locating his Rockports, slipped them on, and eased out of the recliner, being careful not to wake the other pilot stretched out on the sofa in the corner of the room. The guy was snoring loud enough to buffer any noise Chuck might make opening the door and exiting the small, closet-like room.