Rogue Element (5 page)

‘Agreed,’ echoed the captain. ‘Dump as much gas as we can. And get off a Mayday call.’

Rivers looked blank. Their radios were dead. ‘But captain, the –’

Flemming answered her expression. ‘You never know.’

The nose of the 747 fell towards the soft, silver lake of stratus cloud spread out below them. But was a mountain hidden somewhere within it? Or did the cloud extend all the way to the ground? In either case they would simply drill a large hole in the earth and never see it coming. All three pilots on the flight deck held their breath as the first wisps of silver slid over their windows. In an instant, the stars were obliterated.

Raptor couldn’t believe his eyes when the seven-four pulled out of its dive, seemingly in control, above the cloud. What do I have to do to score a kill? he asked himself.

His fuel pressure and contents were still okay so he decided to wait. There was plenty of smoke trailing from the 747. The drama was not over yet. He smiled with satisfaction when the 747 began to nose under the cloud. There was rugged country beneath. Lots of immovable things to fly into. No 747 pilot would dip below 10 000 around here. Unless there was no choice.

Raptor watched as the 747 slipped below the surface of the cloud like a torpedoed ship ploughing under a ghost sea. This was getting interesting. He beamed the jumbo with active radar and followed it down from a safe distance.

When the plane levelled out of the dive, Joe couldn’t believe he was still alive and that the plane hadn’t crashed. The stench of vomit filled his nostrils. Much of the vibration had stopped but there was still a fair amount of noise. His mind was starting to grapple successfully with reality. He tried to place the noise and decided it was both wind and engine roar. Most of the passengers were calm now, as if resigned to their fate, whatever it would be. That was certainly Joe’s outlook. He reflected on the fact that death by plane crash was an awful, protracted way to die. It had been going on now for, he checked his watch, more than ten minutes. At least it gave you some time to say goodbye. ‘Goodbye,’ he said aloud, testing the realisation. No one said anything back.

Abe Niko, a Japanese traffic controller on contract at Denpasar Airport, blinked with surprise. At this hour of the
morning the skies were pretty quiet. There were only four aircraft on his screen: a KLM 747 out of Melbourne, Australia, bound for Amsterdam via Singapore, a Garuda 767 en-route to Jakarta, a weather delayed Qantas 747 headed for London, and a private Beech Baron on an intra-island flight, inbound, sixteen miles from the Denpasar runway.

The Qantas plane was on the screen and then it wasn’t. It had gone, vanished! The suddenness of the disappearance made him blink, as if he wasn’t sure what he’d just seen. Qantas Flight 1. Abe’s brain worked hard to lift itself out of the torpor induced by a combination of boredom and the early morning hour. Shit, that could mean only one of two things. The first was that the aircraft’s transponders had become unserviceable. That was highly improbable. The second more likely possibility? Well, that was too ghastly to even contemplate. He noted the time – 4.36 am local time. Abe picked up the phone and hurriedly found a line out.

The radio clicks exchanged between the Indonesian pilot and his controller joined the traffic on Ruth Styles’ desktop at NSA Hawaii. There was a lot of activity going on there, she thought, given the time of day, or rather, night. She tagged it with an asterisk and sent it on.

QF-1 shot out of the cloud base, stratus swirling in a vortex behind it. The high country of central Sulawesi that filled the pilots’ windshields was the antithesis of the friendly winking threshold strobe lights of a commercial runway.

Flemming, Granger and Rivers gaped at the rugged ridge lines below them, and the occasional mountain face
that rose above them: they knew they only had a few minutes to live.

What was now uppermost in their minds was giving everyone as much chance as possible to survive the landing. Flemming and Granger trimmed the aircraft for a descent rate of 500 feet per minute. The aircraft shook and bucked in protest but obeyed the pilots’ commands.

Flemming flicked the intercom switch and addressed his passengers and flight crew. ‘This is Captain Flemming. Both the engines on the right-hand wing have failed. Without them, this aircraft cannot maintain level flight.’ This was not strictly true but it wasn’t the right time to give an aircraft systems lecture. ‘We will be making a forced landing shortly.

‘If you are not in the crash position with your head forward between your knees, adopt it now. Make sure your seatbelts are fastened tightly and that any children are also restrained in their seats.

‘There is enough oxygen at this altitude so you no longer need the masks. Your flight attendants will assist you if you have problems.

‘We have broadcast our difficulties and our position to the local authorities. Help is no doubt already on the way,’ he lied.

Who was it that said, ‘You don’t find atheists in foxholes’? Flemming couldn’t remember but at that moment, even though he never considered himself a religious man, he could see the truth in it. He concluded the announcement. ‘If any of you pray to God, now is the time to do it.’

There was no point doing the laconic pilot routine. He had just brought four hundred people through a gut-wrenching dive from 35 000 to 10 000 feet in a handful of
minutes. Perhaps a word about rescue – even if it wasn’t true – and the reassurance that they were in God’s hands, would do some good. He didn’t know and he had run out of time to think about it. The moonlit jungle was rising up to kill them. It was time to land.

The mist that had caked Joe’s window had melted. He wiped away the remaining droplets with the palm of his hand and looked outside. He was sickened by what he saw. The plane was flying in a large bowl ringed by mountains and lit by the moon. The peaks topped out above the aircraft’s altitude. There was only one possible outcome. He’d listened to the captain’s address and decided that the people at the front of the aircraft had reached the same conclusion about their fate. There were no lights below. There was no runway waiting for them. This was it. He peered out the window harder, trying to see exactly what they would be landing on. They were going to land weren’t they? The captain had just said so. They weren’t going to crash, surely? The window didn’t allow him a view downwards. He was frightened, but he realised he had no control over anything that happened in his near future. A part of Joe’s brain found that oddly comforting. It calmed him. There was absolutely nothing he could do to alter the situation. He just had to sit there and wait. He bent his head between his legs and breathed the warm sickly air rising from the vomit-soiled carpet under his feet – the kiss your arse goodbye position, he thought. A pain swelled in his chest as if an invisible hand was squeezing his heart. ‘For Christ’s sake, just get it over with,’ he said to the god he rarely spoke with.

‘I’m going to go for that ridge over in our ten o’clock,’ shouted Flemming. Granger and Rivers agreed. From their
angle, it appeared to present more of a plateau, although it was night and appearances could be deceptive. Putting the plane down on a ridge would be a better option than a valley. Rescuers would more easily spot the wreckage, for one thing. And for another, a valley would inevitably end with a mountain, and slamming into a solid rock wall would be utterly catastrophic.

There was no argument. ‘Luke, you’ve got the flaps and the undercarriage. Jenny, read off our airspeed. We’re only going to get one go at this so let’s do it by the numbers.’ Flemming wanted to say he thought they’d been a good crew, but the best he could manage was a crooked smile.

It was possibly the most forbidding landscape Luke Granger had ever seen. The fact that he was about to set down a fully loaded 747 on it didn’t improve his impression any.

The flight deck was hot and humid. It didn’t take much to figure out that they probably had a large hole blown in the side of the aircraft. The engine must have exploded and taken part of the fuselage with it. It was possible that shrapnel from that explosion had wrecked their E&E Bay, taking out their communications and hydraulics in the process. Then Granger remembered what he thought was a fighter’s deadly pass down the side of the 747. No, surely not . . . Was it possible? Part of Granger’s mind knew they’d been attacked and shot down. Another part refused to believe it. Knowing the answer wouldn’t help the situation any. He couldn’t even radio anyone with his suspicions. The disquiet evaporated almost the instant it formed. There was too much demanding his attention.

Despite the tropical heat, the sweat on Luke’s body was cold, and he realised grimly that he’d pissed himself.
Moonlight washed through a break in the clouds, revealing a lumpy tree canopy. Jungle. They were almost on top of the equator, so it wouldn’t be anything else. Not a single reassuring light winked through the expanse below them.

The ridge Captain Flemming had pointed out was now lined up in plain view. Granger scanned the instruments and tried to focus on anything other than his impending death. Their hydraulics pressure was virtually nonexistent. At least the flaps were fully extended and the undercarriage had locked. That was something. With luck, they’d slide along gently after the gear tore off, eating up much of the plane’s energy, coming to rest peacefully with no lives lost, held aloft by the waving arms of friendly palm trees.

Who was he kidding? thought Granger. Murderously steep gorges ran off from either side, beckoning. There was only one possible outcome.

Joe couldn’t help himself. He’d heard the familiar whirr and bump of the undercarriage coming down and locking in place, and he managed to convince himself, briefly, that they were about to settle on a smooth runway. Then there was the sickening screech of grinding metal as the flaps lowered and the hope evaporated. The big 747 was flying with its nose high in the air. Joe had tested all the top flight sims; he knew the pilots were trying to slow the aircraft down so that it would arrive at its point of impact with the ground just as the lift under its wings gave out. The desire to know what they were about to land on gripped him again. He realised it might be the last thing he ever saw. He looked out and down and saw the tops of trees flashing by at alarming speed. ‘Shiiiiiiit,’ he said, throwing himself forward again into the crash position.

QF-1 slammed onto the ridge. The force of the impact fractured the fuselage behind the wings’ trailing edge. The huge fin and tail section, split from the main body of the aircraft, was thrown high in the air. It began to spin like a child’s toy as it fell, flinging chairs, people and luggage into the trees. It whirled down into a steep gorge where it shredded itself against volcanic rock like cheese against a grater.

The main body of the aircraft, now engulfed in a fireball, continued to plough through the jungle. A rock outcrop caught the leading edge of the port wing. The violence of the impact carved off the centre section of the fuselage. The remaining fuel in one of the wing tanks exploded, turning the centre section of the aircraft into burning shards of aluminium that rained down over the jungle.

The forward section of the fuselage spun into a small depression. Its mass combined with its speed, telescoping the nose in on itself. Flemming, Granger and Rivers were turned into paste.

Burning fuel caused small fires for a thousand metres around.

The savagery of the crash silenced the jungle. Smoke from the burning fires hung like a mist of death in the moist, pre-dawn air.

Raptor watched the 747 hit the ground. It didn’t appear to be going very fast at all but it was difficult to make out any detail until the fireball lit the scene. The sight of the aircraft breaking up was gratifying and he congratulated himself on a job well done. He thumbed the Send button on his control column several times, broadcasting the
agreed code for a successful mission. Raptor noted the lat and long coordinates on his thigh-pad from the GPS. He lit his afterburners and set a course for Hasanuddin AFB.

The NSA is the world’s most sophisticated eavesdropper. It keeps the airwaves safe for Uncle Sam, gathering information any way that it can, mostly through an extensive battery of antennae dishes scattered around the world. The dishes harvest the low frequency signals, the frequency range generally preferred by the world’s military. If atmospheric conditions are right, these can bounce off the biggest dish of all, the earth’s ionosphere. The higher frequency transmissions are trickier, the line-of-sight comms. To patrol this frequency range, the NSA deploys all manner of assets, including a flotilla of spy ships masquerading as ocean survey vessels and, of course, spy planes.

The NSA monitors most frequencies in the radio and microwave spectra around the clock; phone and Internet lines are also filtered. Even general phone communications are regularly sampled. The bottom line is, very little communication escapes the NSA, especially when attempts are made to hide it. If you’re Milly chatting to Maude in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, there’s a good chance the NSA knows your gossip. If you’re a Russian tank commander positioning assets around a Chechen enclave, you can guarantee it.

Occasionally, the NSA picks up transmissions that are only meaningful in the context of hindsight, such as the radio clicks passed between an F-16 and a ground controller in Indonesian airspace in the early morning of Tuesday, 28 April.

Ruth Styles was aware that the Indonesian air force had been particularly active for some time, trying to regain its edge after the recession that gutted the Asian Tiger economies and the subsequent fiscal constraints imposed by the World Bank. Perhaps it was this knowledge that activated the IAE’s personal radar. She had already passed on some recent interceptions from Indonesia to HQ in Maryland. There was something irregular about them. Why? Had she been asked, Ruth wouldn’t have known, but she always listened to her inner voice, no matter how faint its call.

Ruth tried to remember who the analyst for South-East Asia was. Wasn’t it Gioco? Hadn’t she met him at one of the conferences held to foster interdepartmental cooperation within COMINT, the communications intelligence department of the NSA? She tapped the enquiry into the box. The answer was instantaneous. Yes, Bob Gioco: thoughtful, intelligent, hard-working. Unusual name for a black man though, she thought.