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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: High Flight
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“Morning Star?” McGarvey asked.
“Yes. The fool wants to somehow embroil Japan in a war with the U.S. Evidently for ultimate economic control of the western Pacific rim.”
“Is it possible without Tokyo's cooperation?”
“Sokichi Kamiya is a powerful man. A lot depends on how your government reacts.”
“To what?” McGarvey asked.
Teramura peered at him through rimless glasses. “I don't know. But whatever it is will happen very soon.”
“Sunday?”
“Possibly, Mr. McGarvey. But I think the issue with Guerin may be separate, and possibly just as troubling to Kamiya as it is to you. Are you aware that Mintori Assurance has a connection with one of Guerin's subcontractors here in the States?”
“What's the name of this company?”
“I haven't been able to find out. One of my people was assassinated, and now our lines of communication have been severed.”
Abunai
took a cigarette from Yemlin. “It may be impossible for you to do anything to avert his plans.”
“What if Kamiya were to be killed?” McGarvey asked.
Teramura considered the suggestion. “His death might be of some value. But if you are concerned that
some catastrophe will happen on Sunday, you are already too late. You do not have the time to get to him.”
“What about the network?”
Teramura shrugged. “My part was to pass intelligence to Moscow in order to help avoid conflict between our countries. That may be a moot point finally.” He smiled wanly. “We are at a difficult juncture. Nothing is the same, yet everything is the same.”
“As what?” McGarvey asked.
“The late twenties and early thirties, of course.”
 
John F. Kennedy Airport is located on Jamaica Bay at the southern edge of Queens, and La Guardia is on Flushing Bay at the northern edge of the borough. Traffic to and from both airports is almost always heavy. But security, or the lack of it, is no different from any other major airport in the country. No one seems to notice or care who comes and goes, as long as there are no snarls.
Apparently it was all the authorities could manage, Mueller thought, watching a Delta Airlines Guerin 522 come in for a landing at JFK. Why there hadn't been more terrorist attacks in the United States was an incredible mystery to him. From what he'd read in the magazines and newspapers, it was just as big a mystery to Americans. Yet no one was doing anything about it.
He turned in his rental car at the Budget counter and took the bus over to the American Airlines terminal. The last flight to Washington's National Airport left at 11:01 P.M. He checked in a half-hour early, got a cup of tea, and sat down with a
Newsweek
magazine in the boarding area.
Tomorrow he would do Dulles and on Sunday at 3:00—when Air Force One was scheduled to depart from Andrews and
America
from Portland—he would send the signal.
Something stirred in his gut, and he looked up for a moment. One of the gate agents, a pretty woman in an American Airlines uniform, was looking at him. He smiled, and she smiled back.
 
 
The afternoon was gray, the wind outside the bight of Tokuno Island still blew hard, kicking up big seas.
Fair Winds
rode easy at her protected anchorage. Nevertheless Liskey had gotten up several times to make sure they were holding. Standing now at the half-open hatch, drinking a cup of coffee he'd brewed, he studied the rockbound shoreline a hundred yards away. If the weather were better it would be interesting to take the dinghy ashore to look around. But for now he wanted to head farther north.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Carol said, emerging from the vee-berth forward.
“I was thinking about a Japanese fishing village where the food is good and the saki is cheap.”
She poured a cup of coffee. “How about warm weather?”
“If not that, how about warm saki?”
“Ugh. Tastes like snot to me.”
He shook his head and laughed. “You've definitely got a way with words, toots.”
“How about coming back to bed, in that case. I'm cold.”
Liskey ducked back inside and put his cup aside. “See what I mean,” he said.
D
ominique was gone. McGarvey stood in the middle of the kitchen, listening to the sounds of the house, her note in one hand, his gun in the other. She said that she was in town having lunch with Edward Reid. But that was impossible. He'd told her the situation. She understood that these people were desperate and that killing one more person would be totally
meaningless to them. So what was she trying to do? Christ; the stupidity, he thought.
A car pulled up in the driveway. McGarvey raced down the corridor to the stair hall in time to see Dominique getting out of her Corvette, and then he hurried upstairs to a front window from where he could see the street. He half expected to see a white Toyota van, but there was no traffic. He stepped back away from the window, lowering his gun, allowing a measure of relief to pass through him. She hadn't been kidnapped, nor had she been followed back here. The note was legitimate.
Dominique let herself in as McGarvey came down the stairs, and her eyes went from the note in his hand to the expression on his face. “Before you say anything, hear me out,” she said.
“There'll be nothing to say when you're dead,” he told her mildly. “They'll kill you if you get too close.”
“Reid's in this up to his ears. When I mentioned your name he practically fell down. But he knows you. I only used your last name, but he knew your first.”
“What'd you say to him?”
“I told him that Guerin hired you because it was worried about the Japanese, but now you're convinced someone else caused the Dulles accident.”
“If he knows me, it means somebody is feeding him information. He has help. But he has a lot of contacts.”
“When I told him that you'd convinced the FBI and the CIA to investigate I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”
“Did he say anything about Sunday?”
“That's the only part that didn't make any sense to me, Kirk. When I asked him for help convincing you that the Japanese were behind the Dulles crash, he said it'd have to wait until after the weekend. He's flying to Tokyo with the President.”
“I know.”
“Do you think he's involved?”
“Phil Carrara thought it was possible.”
An odd expression crossed her face. “Where is he?”
“I don't know.”
 
“The brakes are fried,” the Delta Airlines chief mechanic on duty at Dulles International Airport said.
“We really had to lean on them to slow down,” senior pilot Robert Rodwell replied. They were hunched over the main landing truck on the port side. A lot of black debris and metal shavings had collected from the brake rotors.
“Same on the other side, Captain. This bird'll have to go into the shop tonight.”
“She's not scheduled to fly until morning. Can you get it done by then?”
“We're down to a weekend crew. Company won't budge on that with the overtime pay and all.” The mechanic, Ted Neidlinger, shined his flashlight on the huge brake rotors. “Could be these are already turned to tolerance, which means we'll have to bring spares up from Atlanta. Something I know we don't have in shop.” He shrugged. “Your call, Captain.”
“Without calling in an extra crew, what are we looking at for time?”
“Twenty-four, maybe thirty-six hours.”
“They're not going to like it,” Rodwell said. He'd have to have Operations bring another aircraft up from Atlanta to make the morning La Guardia round-trip. It would probably be one of the older birds, like an L1011 or DC-10, and not the more modern and more comfortable Guerin 522. There'd be a lot of bitching.
“I don't break ‘em, Captain. I just fix 'em.”
It was a shitty remark, but it was late, and besides, he was right. “Are we going to have it for Sunday morning's La Guardia?”
“No. But I'm pretty sure we can have it for the seven-five-six.”
“That's when I fly next,” Rodwell said. “Fix it good.”
“I hear you.”
The pilot took the stairs up to the jetway and went
back into the airplane to get his brain bag. His co-pilot was already gone, but Mary White the chief stew was still aboard, finishing her flight log.
“How's it look?” she asked.
“This bird is down until Sunday. You flying tomorrow?”
She nodded tiredly. “Not until three. What'll they send up for us?”
“Nothing good. How about Sunday?”
“Yup, then too.”
“Busy weekend.”
“Not so bad,” she said. “I have a four-day layover in L.A., and I've got a ton of things to do in my apartment. How about you?”
“Not until Sunday. I've got seven-five-six, O'Hare direct, then L.A.” He glanced at the panel clock. It was a few minutes after midnight. “Still time to grab a couple of drinks and a bite to eat.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Drake.”
“They put us across town at the Tudor. It'd be too late by the time I got back. I've got to get some sleep.”
“My room has a king-size bed.”
Her eyes widened slightly.
“Ah, shit, sorry,” Rodwell apologized. “I didn't mean anything. It's late and I'm tired …”
She smiled. “You don't snore, do you, Captain?”
 
Project supervisor Scott Hale came up to
America'
s cockpit where Socrates and Kilbourne were watching the last of the diagnostic tests on the flight management system computers.
“We're ready to re-cowl the engines,” he told them. “Do you want to sign off?”
Socrates took the clipboard Hale brought up and ran through the checklist. “Do the thermocouple interfaces again,” he said tiredly. It was well after midnight. His throat hurt, and his eyes burned.
“That'll take at least three hours on each engine,” the
engineer replied. He was frustrated. They all were because of the long hours.
“I know. And before we move over to Portland Sunday morning we'll do them again from the forward electronic bay.”
“Well, you're going to have to settle the argument between Rolls and InterTech, Mr. Socrates. They're at it again.”
“What's their beef this time?” Kilbourne growled.
“They're still showing a phase delay on one of the sensor ready pulses. Sudursky came up from San Francisco yesterday to look it over. He says it's well within tolerances, but Danson can't find it on the schematics.”
“Have we seen anything like that from this end?” Socrates asked the technician.
“Are they talking about GO-One?”
“I think so.”
“We've seen it. The problem is with the schematics, not the subassembly. It was a minor redesign that hasn't shown up in the manuals.”
Something about that didn't quite set right with Socrates, but he couldn't put his finger on it. “Let's test from here.”
“The phase delay involves the thermocouple circuitry. Do you still want the main tests run?”
“Yes,” Socrates replied tiredly. “As soon as this question is settled. Then you can re-cowl.”
 
There was no security at Dulles other than a night watchman at the Airport Commission building. Mueller stood in the darkness of a basement corridor for several seconds, waiting for the uniformed but unarmed man to finish his rounds and return to his office upstairs.
In Europe after any crash, whether caused by accident or terrorist attack, airports were closed up as tight as prisons. In addition to the usual security people, the military or in some cases anti-terrorist police, heavily armed with automatic weapons, swarmed over every square meter. From food service to baggage handling,
and from ticketing to passport control, electronic sensing equipment and police sniffer dogs were on duty twenty-four hours per day.
A couple of weeks ago an airplane had crashed here, but the only security Mueller had encountered was one old man unarmed except for a walkie-talkie and a set of keys.
Incredible.
He went upstairs, hesitated at the end of the corridor to make sure the guard was gone, then walked across to the exit and let himself out. Keeping close to the building, out of camera range, he removed the Walkman and disappeared into the night.
 
“
America
is still at Gales Creek,” Kennedy said from his secure line in Portland.
“When are you moving it to Portland?” McGarvey asked.
“Not until Sunday morning, a few hours before the Honolulu flight. How is everything there in Washington? Are you with Dominique?”
“Yes. But listen to me, David. I don't know how much good I'm doing here. Have you found anything?”
“Nothing.”
“I'll be aboard that flight.”
“You'll never get through security.”
“Yes, I will,” McGarvey promised. “Have you heard from your wife?”
“No,” Kennedy said, his voice choked.
“Did you call the police?”
“Yes. But until I get a call or a note or something, there's nothing they can do. She doesn't have anything to do with this, Mac. What the hell do they want?”
“I don't know, David, but Yamagata is in the middle of it,” McGarvey answered. “I'll be there tonight. Hang on.”
 
Roland Murphy came to the White House first thing in the morning. President Lindsay and his NSA Harold Secor were waiting for him in the Oval Office. Except for
last-minute details, this would be the President's final regular intelligence briefing before he took off for Tokyo tomorrow.
“I've spoken with President Yeltsin and Prime Minister Enchi, who assure me that their military movements are nothing more than exercises,” the President said. “Does this square with your shop?”
“If you want my gut reaction, Mr. President, I'd say both of them were lying through their teeth.”
President Lindsay grinned. “Put a military man in charge of an agency, and you'll get straight answers. Not always the ones you want to hear, but straightforward. What do you have for us this morning, General?”
Murphy handed the President the leather-bound folder that contained the in-depth national intelligence estimates that ran to more than twenty thousand words this morning, twice as long as normal.
“Three main points, sir. The first involves the military standoff in the region. As of last night, every Japanese Self Defense Force base, installation, and ship was on alert. All leaves are canceled.”
“Prime Minister Enchi called it a ‘national exercise,' to test the entire system. He says their weapons are unarmed.”
“Yes, sir, under federal command. Their system is similar to our nuclear weapons release codes plan. But only in theory.”
President Lindsay was troubled. “You're saying that their local commanders have launch autonomy?”
“More than we've been led to believe, Mr. President.”
The President exchanged glances with his National Security Adviser. “I see. Go on, General.”
“Russian naval and air force bases all along their far eastern zones of defense—which extend for three hundred miles inland from the Seas of Okhotsk and Japan—have gone to a similar state of readiness. Some specialist troops have also been moved out from Moscow. We're not quite sure of the numbers, or all the units involved, but they seem to be commandoes and first-strike troops.”
“What is your confidence in these reports?” Secor asked.
“Very high, Harold. Except for the incident in the Tatar Strait, no shots have been fired. But both sides are ready.”
“And apparently lying about it,” the President said. “What else?”
“The submarine
Samisho
, which caused the trouble in the first place, has disappeared.”
“What do you mean?”
“One of our destroyers was tailing the sub south in the general direction of Okinawa, when it went to a silent-running mode and dove very deep—apparently well beyond the range of our sonar equipment. Seventh Fleet sent out two frigates to help in the search, and they're being continuously overflown by surveillance aircraft as well as all-weather fighter/interceptors.”
“What the hell is going on?” the President demanded.
“Routine exercises, Mr. President. Except in the case of the
Samisho
, which Escort Fleet Command at Yokosuka claims it is trying to contact for recall.”

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