Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (45 page)

*   *   *

Davy had been crying for the best part of two hours. It was out of the ordinary, and when he began running a low temperature and sneezing Christine guessed he was coming down with a cold. Mercifully, he fell asleep in his crib just after dinner. She too was exhausted, having not had a good night’s sleep in days.

She found Stein downstairs, standing with a sandwich in one hand and the television remote in the other. He was surfing through channels. “I’m going to try and get some sleep. I think Davy is coming down sick, and he probably won’t sleep through the night.”

“Okay. Anything I can do to help?”

“I suppose a run to the pharmacy for an antihistamine is out of the question?”

Stein shot her a disapproving look.

“Right.” She hesitated, and he seemed to read her mind.

“No—I haven’t heard from David.”

Christine nodded and went upstairs, and spent a full five minutes watching Davy sleep. His breathing was steady, punctuated by the occasional sob after his earlier meltdown
. Has to be that,
she thought.
The nightmares don’t come until later.

She went to her room, and instead of undressing changed into a pair of comfortable jeans and a loose sweatshirt. Her running shoes went to the foot of the bed, which would please her not-so-dead husband.
Always be ready on a moment’s notice
. Of course, that sage advice presumed one was on the run. Her situation was quite the opposite, bunkered up with a bodyguard in her home. Her eyes fell closed, and she easily ignored the sound of the television down the hall and a rattle of wind at the window.

Minutes later she was fast asleep.

At that same moment, across the street, the front door of the house on a right-hand diagonal swung slowly open. A large man dressed in layered clothing emerged. He moved with palpable caution, and from the travertine-wrapped porch, he looked left and right up the street before closing the door. He moved with an unnatural gait, this due to the heavy metal bar hidden in the recesses of his jacket, which partially immobilized his right side. So encumbered, the man set out at determined pace toward the snow-encrusted sidewalk, and on reaching it he veered slightly to his right. He crossed the street heading directly for Christine Palmer’s house.

SIXTY-SEVEN

The Middle East is a region unlike any other. In a geographic footprint that would fit within the state of Nevada lies a combustible merger of eight troubled nations: Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey. Starting from the center, in Lebanon, a typical jet aircraft might reach any of those borders within twenty minutes. Not by chance, each of these surrounding nations is capable of launching fighters to intercept intruding aircraft, or if a more direct approach is desired, to shoot them down using surface-to-air missiles. If this brew of weapons, mistrust, and cross-purposes is not perplexing enough, most of these eight countries are home to warring tribes and religious factions that keep some degree of autonomous military capability. Finally, as a coup de grâce to any hope for regional stability, the majority of shrines holy to the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religions reside in this same unsettled outline. The birthplace of so many of the world’s religions, in a somber paradox, is no better off for it.

Director Thomas Coltrane had a monumental problem on his hands.

Their efforts at containment had failed miserably, which meant he and his Ops Center team were now little more than witnesses to a radiological bomb gliding through the world’s most unfriendly skies. They knew precisely where the aircraft was, the U.S. Air Force having excellent radar coverage in the area, but without some idea of where it was going there was little hope of setting countermeasures in place. As far as they knew, the plot unfolding before them involved seven individuals, five of whom had already been dispatched by an assassin, a man not under Langley’s control, yet who had proven brutally effective. Unfortunately, not
quite
effective enough.

“Our target is fifteen nautical miles from the Syrian border,” said a front-row voice. “Heading is steady to the southeast.” The specialists, on their own initiative, had already taken to calling it a target.

Sorensen said, “We need to get fighters in the air for an intercept.”

The Ops Center’s DOD liaison, already thinking along those lines, said, “We have the carrier
Reagan
in the eastern Med, roughly three hundred miles west. I’ll find out how soon they can have Hornets in the air. CENTCOM is checking what else is available—the Air Force always has fighters deployed somewhere on the Saudi peninsula.”

Everyone nodded agreement, and someone suggested that the neighboring U.S. consulates should be put on alert. Another voice observed that because the MD-10 was traveling southeast, it would soon be within range of Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries in both Israel and Saudi Arabia. Coltrane had already made notifications up the chain of command, a chart in which there were few boxes above his own. The director of national intelligence would soon brief the president on the impending disaster. Sidebar agencies had also been notified, but these were largely a distraction. In proof of this point, facing Coltrane’s big leather chair was a communications suite whose blinking lights represented no fewer than six government entities waiting to speak to him.

“All right,” he said, “I’m going to bring everyone in on a conference call and ask for help on this. Foggy Bottom can handle embassy notifications and dust off their response plan for a radiological attack. I want CENTCOM and the Joint Chiefs to coordinate—”

“You don’t need any of that crap!”
a voice boomed from the back. A room full of busy chatter went silent and everyone looked at Jammer Davis. “You need a pilot, a meteorologist, and a chaplain.”

Davis was situated at the back of the room, planted in a chair far too small for his massive frame. He was chewing on a vending machine burrito.

Coltrane said, “Let me guess—you’re the pilot?”

“I’ll go out on a limb here and say I’m the only person in this room who’s ever shot down an airplane.”

“Mr. Davis, you’ve proven yourself useful, but I think the situation has progressed outside your area of expertise.”

“I think it’s outside
your
area of expertise. You’ve got a large airliner flying over foreign soil that’s loaded with a radiological agent. There’s a strong chance this material will be dispersed before it lands. The list of potential targets in this part of the world is overwhelming. You’ve got population centers, economic targets, military facilities, religious shrines. We need to get ahead of the curve and figure out where this jet is headed.”

“Which is exactly why I need to bring others in.”

Coltrane turned away, picked up his handset, and initialized the first of his calls. He’d been talking for less than five seconds when a big hand swept in and cut off the call. A furious Coltrane looked up and saw Davis at his shoulder. “Do you realize you just hung up on the Secretary of State?
You are out of line, mister!
”

In a calm, low voice Davis said, “If you spend the next ten minutes on interagency coordination, your chance to stop this will be gone. You are facing a crisis, sir. But you’ve also got twenty good, capable people right here in this room. Use them!”

Coltrane’s eyes swept out, and a sea of eager, competent faces stared back.

“Would you like to know where this jet is headed?” Davis asked.

“You can tell me?”

“No, I’d just be guessing. But there’s no need for that. The pilots flying it have already told us where they’re going—we just haven’t been listening.”

Coltrane’s eyes narrowed severely, but his anger gave way to curiosity. He set down the handset. “What do you mean?”

Davis pointed to the white dot on the map. “Those pilots know perfectly well where they’re operating. If they try to cross any border without a flight clearance, it’s an invitation to be intercepted. So unless the captain is planning on staying in Lebanese airspace, which makes no sense, you’ll find a flight plan on file with Lebanese air traffic control. The crew might have called it in by phone, or maybe filed it by computer. They might even have coordinated a clearance by radio after they got airborne. Of course, the paperwork isn’t going to say they’re flying an MD-10—they know we’ll be looking for that. It’ll say the aircraft is an Airbus or a business jet. That’s what I would do. To the air traffic controllers there’s no difference—they see nothing but a blip on a screen. But there
is
a flight plan in the system. Has to be.”

After a brief pause, Coltrane pointed to a woman at the communications desk. Her fingers began racing over her keypad.

Coltrane said, “I’m not sure I buy into your theory. These people have gone to incredible lengths to hide what they’re doing. They managed to chop up a derelict airliner in the middle of the night, remove the pieces, and park another jet in its place without anyone noticing. You think they’ll just publish a route to their target for the world to see?”

“No—it won’t be that simple. It won’t be a straight line. If this is truly the strike mission, they’ll plan a feint, an ordinary flight path that takes them
near
their target but not directly to it. When the time is right, they make a hard turn and push up the throttles. Three minutes, maybe five, and they’ll be right where they want to be before anyone can react.”

Coltrane sat rail-still in his seat. “What else?”

“We’re talking about the aerial dispersal of a contaminant. Your typical firebomber will drop its load all at once, from maybe five hundred feet. That covers a linear mile, more or less. If they fly lower, down in the dirt like a crop duster, the footprint becomes smaller and the radiation more dense. In that case, we could be talking about an area the size of a football field. However, either of those cases present one problem. Flying a wide-body airliner at five hundred feet is tricky at night—it would require special equipment and some training.”

“Which leaves us where?”

“The nightmare scenario.” Davis waited, but no one asked. “Drop five kilos of cesium from thirty thousand feet, and you can rain gamma emissions over a whole city, maybe even a country. Not as dangerous, obviously, from the standpoint of radiation density or the threat to a population. But as a terror weapon?”

Coltrane nodded. “It would be devastating.”

“It would be Chernobyl with wings.” Davis took another bite of his burrito. “The flight plan will include a cruise altitude. Put the two together, and it might help you predict the target. Once you know
that,
you can decide how to handle it. Next, any response is going to require accurate information on the winds aloft at every altitude. Like I said, you need a meteorologist.”

Coltrane set a woman to that task.

Davis picked up. “Miss Sorensen is correct—you need fighters in the air as soon as possible to shadow this jet. You
could
use the Air Force of one of the neighboring countries. Israel and Jordan are reliable, and probably Saudi Arabia. Their pilots are well-trained, and disciplined enough to not screw this up by getting trigger-happy. Personally, I’d prefer relying on our own assets. In any event, whoever you use has to be capable of shooting this airplane down, which is a very messy last resort.”

“No,” Coltrane said, “we have to avoid that.”

Davis pointed again to the white dot on the monitor that represented CB68H. “That’s your call. But you should pray to God that this blip doesn’t turn north. There’s no telling how the Syrians or the Turks would react to a threat like this.”

“And that,” Coltrane ventured, “is where the chaplain comes in?”

Davis smiled.

SIXTY-EIGHT

The odyssey of Charlie Bravo Six Eight Hotel continued to unfold on the main monitor in the Langley Ops Center. The flight plan was discovered within minutes. It had been filed electronically—when and from what source was put aside for the time being—and activated with Lebanese air traffic control as soon as the jet was airborne.

The most relevant sections were transparent: a proposed cruising altitude of fifteen thousand feet, and a route shaped by a more or less direct path through central Saudi Arabia, with a final destination of Abu Dhabi International Airport in the United Arab Emirates. The subterfuge Davis had predicted was also there—the aircraft type on the flight plan was not listed as an MD-10, but instead a Hawker 1000, a business jet with suitably comparable performance characteristics.

“They’re into Syrian airspace,” Sorensen said.

The jet was so far behaving normally, holding true to its filed track and level at the requested altitude of fifteen thousand feet. A conscientious crew undertaking an ordinary flight.

“So what are they after?” Coltrane said, voicing the question on everyone’s mind. “Dubai could be a target. Banking and tourism, the tallest building in the world. We have the forged identity operation, so maybe this was sourced in Iran—there are a lot of Shiites who don’t like the Emirati.”

“No,” said Sorensen. “I don’t think we should fall into the trap that this is state-sponsored. Half the characters involved are not even from the region.”

“She’s right,” Davis agreed. “This is terrorism, but I don’t see religious or political aims. We’re watching something else.” He looked at a projected flight path that spanned hundreds of miles of empty desert, sand and hills and widely dispersed villages.

“Sir,” said a comm tech near the front of the room. “I have CENTCOM requesting a secure link.”

“What do they want?” Coltrane asked.

“They have a patch to the C-17 on the ground in Lebanon. Apparently the man we were watching earlier wants to talk.”

Looks were exchanged all around the room.

“The Israeli wants to talk to us?” Coltrane asked rhetorically. “All right, maybe he can shed some light on this.”

Coltrane chose a speaker option so that everyone could listen in.

“This is Thomas Coltrane, director of the CIA. Am I speaking with the former Edmund Deadmarsh?”