High Flight (82 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: High Flight
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Sam Varelis was home in Chevy Chase when the first bulletins started coming over CNN. At least six civilian jetliners were down in addition to Air Force Two. But no one seemed to be making the connection that every one of those airplanes were Guerin 522s. McGarvey was right after all, but it didn't give him any satisfaction.
He didn't bother calling NTSB operations in the Department of Transportation building on Independence Avenue until he was in his car and heading downtown. He got John Horn, the duty officer.
“This is Varelis, I'm on the way in. Has the FAA issued the grounding order yet?”
“Nobody knows what's going on, Mr. Varelis, but all hell is breaking loose. The count is up to twelve with the latest three.”
“What aircraft? Where?”
“A United exploded on the ground, and a Northwest went down on takeoff at La Guardia. And another United over at JFK exploded on the ground.”
Varelis was having trouble keeping a grip on it. “What kind of equipment were those three?”
“Sir?”
“What kind of airplanes were they, goddammit?”
The line was silent a moment. When Hom came back he was subdued. “Sonofabitch. They were all Guerin 522s. Mr. Varelis, what's happening?”
“That's what we're going to find out.”
 
Most of the fire was out, but SARTECH team leader Technical Sergeant Roy Halvorson, covered in foam, was so hot inside his suit that he could barely think straight. He'd gone directly into the fire before it was
completely extinguished so that he could set up his cutting equipment to get inside the twisted wreckage. He knew it would take several minutes before the heat he'd absorbed would bleed off. He would just have to endure it. Eagle Two was inside.
His SawsAll cut through the aluminum pressure hull of the Guerin 522 like a hot knife through soft butter. His partner, Staff Sergeant Mike Salo, was beside him with the big pry bar, and together they wedged out a door-sized section of hull aft and above where the port wing had connected. Dense smoke billowed out of the opening. But the emergency lights were still on. The interior of the aircraft was a mess. About as bad as Halvorson had seen.
“Going in,” he said into his helmet mike.
 
Captain Don Moody, Jr., Chief 7th Fleet Navy Intelligence, was having a nightmare in which he was stumbling along a hot jungle road. All around him were American POWs, many of them half dead. It was World War Two on Luzon's Bataan Peninsula. In spite of the dream he wasn't surprised when he was awakened by his beside telephone.
“Captain, this is McCarty. We've been ordered to DEFCON THREE.” Lieutenant, j.g., Michael McCarty was Intelligence Staff OD.
Moody glanced at his nightstand clock. It was a few minutes after 5:00 A.M., Tokyo time. “I'll be over there in five minutes. Has Admiral Ryland been notified?”
“In the process, sir. We've sent the twixt out to the fleet.”
Moody was completely awake now, as if someone had stuck an electric probe up his ass.
 
FAA Administrator Jay Hansen refused to make the decision to ground all air traffic within the continental U.S. until he got to his office and could personally assess the situation. “Cool heads will prevail,” was his motto.
“The number stands at thirteen now, sir,” Byron Swanson, his associate administrator for operations said. “American Airlines Flight 228 exploded on the ground at O'Hare just two minutes ago.”
T
he storm continued to grow into the night and early morning hours. For the first time Stan Liskey feared for his and Carol's lives. Problems had started to pile up within hours after they'd rounded the southwestern tip of Tokuno Island. The weather, which had cleared Saturday morning, had closed in on them that afternoon, the wind shifting viciously out of the northeast. It made the rock-strewn west coast of the island a dangerous lee shore. Their Magellan satellite navigator had developed a problem and was no longer reliable. The LORAN chain, operated by the Japanese, had mysteriously stopped transmitting. The roller-furling gear on their headsail had jammed, forcing him to cut the sail away, leaving them with a double-reefed main and staysail. It was a good running rig, but having no way to accurately determine their position, they were sailing blind. Their only option was to stand farther out into the East China Sea, to windward, to gain as much sea room as possible. If they crashed into the island, or onto the off-lying rocks, they would not survive. Thank God the Aires windvane was still working. If they had to hand steer in these conditions he didn't think they would make it. They would wear down before the storm was over, and they would be driven back onto the island, or they would be broached and sink.
It was a few minutes after five in the morning. He'd sent Carol below a couple of hours ago to get some sleep,
and to get her out of the way so that she would not see his concern. The hatch slid open, and she scrambled up into the cockpit. Her eyes were wide, her face white, and she was panting. Liskey helped her attach her safety harness.
“What are you doing up here?” he shouted.
“I can't handle it, Stan. I want to be with you.”
“You need your rest. You might have to take over.”
“If we're going to die, I don't want to drown locked inside the boat!”
“We're not going to die. Don't be stupid.”
The
Fair Winds'
rail was buried again, the motion tremendous. They could not see the waves in the darkness, but from the way they were being tossed around, Liskey figured they had to be twenty footers or bigger. They were not breaking yet, he was thankful for that much. If one of those monsters dumped on top of them, they would go to the bottom without a chance of getting aboard the life raft lashed on deck. But if the storm continued another twelve hours or more, the seas would build to a point where they would have to break. Then they would be in trouble. Liskey's best guess was that the storm would last much longer than that. The barometer was down farther than he'd ever seen it, except in a hurricane. And the last he'd looked it was continuing to fall.
“Can we get behind one of the islands?” she shouted. “Can we go back?”
“It's too risky.”
“Why?”
“We'd pile up on the rocks.”
“How about launching the life raft? We could key the EPIRB. Somebody would find us in the morning. We'd be a lot better off.”
“No we wouldn't.”
“Goddammit, Stan, I'm scared out of my head!”
“So am I,” Liskey admitted. “But listen to me, Carol. This is a strong boat. As long as we don't do anything stupid we'll ride this out. We'll be okay. The life raft is
just a last-ditch stand. Remember Fastnet in the eighties? Most of the guys who got killed drowned trying to get into their rafts. The next day their boats were found, battered, the floorboards awash, but still floating. We'll launch the life raft only when this boat sinks out from under us. In the meantime we've got a lot of work to do.”
“All right, all right,” she said breathlessly. “We've got work to do. What can I do?”
“Get some sleep.”
“I'm done with that. What else?”
“Then hang on here. I'll go below and check the bilges.”
“I did it just before I came up. It only took ten strokes.”
“Then we're okay for now.”
Carol pulled a package of Marlboros and a Bic lighter out of her pocket. “I brought these along just in case. Want one?”
“Why not, if you can get it lit.”
 
“Lieutenant, we have a target,” the helmsman said.
The
DD Thorn
's senior officer on the bridge, Lieutenant, j.g., Roger Boberg, stepped across to the radar screen, bracing himself against the console. They were painting a small boat on the eighteen-hundred-yard ring, on what definitely was a collision course.
“I make our rate of closure about twenty knots, sir. Which means he's doing about five. The sub?”
“I don't know,” Boberg said. “Come left to one-six-zero.”
“Aye, coming left to one-six-zero.”
Boberg rang engineering to reduce speed to ten knots, which barely gave them steerage way in these winds and seas. He was about to pick up the growler phone to call the captain when the communications officer came onto the bridge with a message flimsy.
“This just came, Lieutenant. It's not a drill. We're at DEFCON THREE.”
“Holy shit.” Boberg read the brief message from Seventh, then snatched the growler phone and called the
captain. “This is Boberg on the bridge. You'd better get in here on the double, sir. We're tracking an unidentified object on the surface at eighteen hundred yards, and Seventh just took us to DEFCON THREE.”
“On my way,” Hanrahan said. “Sound general quarters, and pass it on to the
Cook
and
Barbey.”
“Aye, sir.” Boberg hit the ship's intercom. “Now hear this, now hear this. General quarters, general quarters, all hands man your battle stations.” He switched on the Klaxon, then radioed the two frigates.
The skipper was the first on the bridge. He took the message from Boberg, quickly scanned it, then checked the radar. They were no longer on a collision course with the surface target, but they were slowly closing.
“Good work, Rog,” he told his second officer. He called sonar. “This is the captain, what's the status on
Chrysanthemum?”
“Sir, we were picking up what might have been hull popping noises a couple of hours ago, but weren't sure. Still no contact. This surface noise is killing us.”
“Radar is showing what could be just the sail, sixteen hundred yards on a relative bearing of zero-two-five. Could it be our boy?”
“Captain, anything is possible in these conditions.”
“All right, listen up. I want to know if he floods his tubes and opens his doors.”
“We'll do the best we can.”
Lieutenant Commander Willis Ryder came on the bridge. “What's up?”
Hanrahan showed his XO the Seventh Fleet message.
“Authenticated?”
“Looks like it, but we haven't received a follow-up yet, so it's anybody's guess what's going on,” Hanrahan said. “We've got a surface contact to the south, under sixteen hundred yards now. Could be the sub.”
Ryder studied the radar screen. “Looks more like a small boat radar reflector than a steel hull.”
“Could be we're just catching the sail. Sonar had what they thought was hull popping noises.”
“But we don't have a hot contact?”
Hanrahan shrugged. “Conditions aren't good. We'll close for a visual. In the meantime contact Seventh and see what the hell is going on.”
“Aye, aye,” Ryder said.
“Bridge, CIC, we have a contact in the air.”
Hanrahan keyed the phone. “What is it?”
“Looks like an Orion, Skipper. I'd say Japanese … definitely Japanese. He's just lit his downward-looking radar.”
“Contact the
Cook
and
Barbey
again,” Hanrahan told Boberg. “Tell them we're going in for a look.”
 
“Could be four contacts up there now,
Kan-cho,”
the sonarman said.
Lieutenant Commander Kiyoda stood braced in the doorway to the sonar compartment. They'd slowly come up to thirty meters over the past few hours. The storm on the surface, which was ruining their passive sonar capabilities, was also moving the submarine around.
“Sierra-Zero-Four and Sierra-Zero-Five fade in and out. They're about twenty thousand meters at zero-six-zero and closing slowly, I think. But I'm losing Sierra-Zero-Nine. Sometimes it sounds like it has split apart. It's very hard to tell. No identifiable screw noises now. I just can't be sure.”
“They could have launched a life raft,” Lieutenant Minori suggested.
Kiyoda turned to his XO. “Do you think they are in trouble?”
“It's possible, sir.”
“Then why aren't the other two ships hurrying to the rescue?” Kiyoda asked thoughtfully. “Maybe it's a trick.”
“No way of knowing for certain until the conditions ease.”
“We'll go up for a look.” Kiyoda smiled. “Who knows what reaction we might provoke.”
“Kan-cho,
we're very close to Sierra-Zero-Nine,” the sonarman warned. “I cannot guarantee their exact position.”
“We'll take it slow,” Kiyoda said. He went back to the control room with Minori. “Come to periscope depth.”
“Recommend plus two meters to compensate for the waves.”
“Make it so.”
“Diving officer, make your depth one-eight meters,” Minori said. “Five degrees on the fairwater planes. We'll do this slowly.”
“Sound general quarters,” Kiyoda ordered, and he turned to his weapons control officer, Lieutenant Takasaki. “Look sharp. If we get a clear target I'll want a continuous firing solution. There's no telling what they're up to.”
“Hai, Kan-cho.”
Kiyoda watched the depth indicator on his CRT command display countdown toward eighteen meters. He started for the periscope when the sonar operator suddenly shouted.
“Contact closing! Contact closing!”
A tremendous crash slammed into the optical and electronic arrays on top of the sail, slewing the
Samisho
almost ninety degrees onto her starboard side. Lights in the control room flickered and died, and water rushed in on them from a dozen places on the overhead.
 
“That was a major event,” Ensign Masao Osanai radioed from ELINT in the back of the Lockheed/Kawasaki P-3C ASW aircraft.
“What happened?” the pilot, Lieutenant Fumiko Miyake, asked. He was fighting the aircraft's controls. The winds were boiling at this low altitude, making level flight difficult. His co-pilot flew the yoke and rudder pedals with him.
“A collision, I think. We were painting the
Samisho
on the MAD as it started to surface. It just merged with the American destroyer.”
“What are you seeing now?”
“The
Samisho
is going down. She's trailing bubbles.”
“Comms,” Miyake radioed.
“Hai, Kan-cho.”
“Get that off to base. Ask for instructions.”
 
Since the brutal murders of the young Japanese woman and the policemen two weeks ago, officials in Yokosuka had become timid. It was a few minutes after five in the morning before anyone challenged the crowd that had been growing along the waterfront all evening. Americans were a violent people from a violent land. The only lesson they understood was violence. If Tokyo could not see this then Prime Minister Enchi's government would fail. The people would be heeded. It was time to embrace the old values of respect and of
bu-shi,
Takushiro Hatoyama thought. Now the MSDF had to share the port with the American navy. Both sides of the harbor were busy this morning, lights and movement everywhere, as if both bases were on alert. It was disturbing because it was unexpected. The crowd stopped in front of a line of Japanese policemen in riot gear stretched two deep across the road a half-block from Seventh Fleet's main gate. Hatoyama went across to them.
“We are Rising Sun,” he shouted. The police line stiffened. “We are here in the name of the people to arrest Rear Admiral Albert Ryland for crimes against the state of Nippon.”
A police lieutenant near the middle of the line raised a bullhorn. “You are engaged in an illegal activity,” he shouted. “You are ordered to disperse at once or face arrest.”
“There are ten thousand of us here, Lieutenant. More are continuously arriving. You cannot arrest us all. Stand aside.”
“By order of the government, return to your homes immediately.”
“Do not be a traitor to your own homeland,” Hatoyama shouted. “Contrary to international agreement many ships of the Seventh Fleet are equipped with nuclear weapons. Admiral Ryland is a criminal.”

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