Bolt Action (22 page)

Major Operations Room

MI5 Headquarters

Thames House

V
HF radio doesn’t work out there, in the wild reaches of the mid-Atlantic. So the live audio feed is spotted with crackles and hisses typical of any long-distance high-frequency transmission. Like an old wireless set. Even though the words are burning up and bouncing about in the ionosphere, the intent is very clear. You could hear a pin drop . . .

‘. . .
You want to know why? Because in the Muslim lands there is killing and raping and mutilation. So I am only avenging the actions of the Americans and their fellow traitors such as the British and the Jews. Non-believers should not be in the land of the believers. If you do not leave our lands your lives will forever be filled with pain. There are so many more like us, thirsting to strike until the law of Allah rules this earth . . .
’

Davane’s assistant, Pyjama-girl, in her striped pink top, feels her stomach drop to the floor as the angry words snarl at her through the ether. She bustles out quickly to get her boss. Noppy’s going to go bloody ape-shit, she thinks to herself, as she brushes past her gawping, statue-like colleagues. And starts to jogtrot, then run down the corridor.

In Davane’s office, the Ulsterwoman is midway through reciting this morning’s events into a speakerphone. Trying to impress upon her polished and urbane colleague Bill Grainger, deputy director-general of the service, that too many random pieces were coming together for this to be sheer chance. Bill Lamayette.
General Ali Mahmood Khan. Qissa Khawani. Macchar. The GCHQ monitoring reports . . . She has nothing yet by way of a smoking gun, but a lot in the way of gut instinct.

It had taken a dozen calls and a lot of badgering before someone had gleaned the mobile number of the golf caddy Grainger is using. He is playing the Ganton course, near Pickering in North Yorkshire. He must have had his pager switched off, and Davane knew he didn’t like carrying a phone while on the course. ‘Finest inland course in the whole country,’ Grainger had groused, as if he were a surgeon being interrupted during a life-saving operation, instead of on the tee-box on the par-five thirteenth.

Pyjama-girl pushes through the heavy door. Her breathing ragged. Her face set in stone. Interrupted, Davane looks up, frowning. How forward . . .

. . . but the young woman makes straight for the handset, pecks at it furiously to give a live audio link with the operations room, and within seconds that same angry voice can be heard both on speakerphone and at Grainger’s end. Garbled a little but deadly clear all the same.

‘. . .
learn to like the taste of hellfire because it is what I will bring to you, while in Heaven, in Paradise will live the Muslims who died due to your attacks. Like waves crashing on the beach, one martyrdom operation will follow upon another. Crashing on your heads like rain, on these
Kuffar
until there are no more nonbelievers in our lands . . .
’

‘Are you getting this, Bill?’ It doesn’t matter now whether they talk over it or not. Davane’s point has been proved . . . Martyrdom broadcasts always have an awful lot of what Davane calls ‘self-serving bog-shite’ in them. Rarely anything useful operationally. But just in case, intelligence analysts would be poring over it already . . .

‘. . .
Don’t try to put me in one of your boxes, your psychiatric trick boxes. You may call me a terrorist; but we are more like avengers. And we will keep on avenging until there is no more need to teach you a lesson . . .
’

With his dreams of golfing greatness postponed, Grainger’s response is hushed, resigned. ‘’Fraid so, Sheila. ’Fraid so.’

‘We need Downing Street up to speed. And this thing’s headed to New York. The modelling I’ve seen shows – what with the winds and weight on board – about seven hours runway to runway. The flight took off two and a half hours ago . . .’

‘Can you follow it on a screen?’

‘Not the actual track. But the Shanwick controllers use computer models to calculate speed and reported winds . . .’ On a pad of paper, when she had first watched the flight’s position being plotted, she had sketched a basic schematic of the Oceanic Flight Region to help her get a grip on the geography of what was going on. Small blob for Iceland. Bigger one for Greenland. Then the Canadian coast. And the curving lines of latitude and longitude that marked out the vast space of ocean. The drawing is very basic, year five standard, but it allows her to speak with confidence. ‘. . . according to those projections the flight should be about to pass through longitude Twenty West. They’re supposed to call in when that happens. And perhaps they will.’ But don’t bet on it, Davane mouths to herself in silence before continuing.

‘Fifty-plus minutes from now and they’ll cross Thirty West. That’s halfway. And then they’re on the other side of the Atlantic, under the jurisdiction of the Canadians.’

‘I’ll get to the car. Make the calls.’ An acknowledgement of sorts that they’re in a handing-over process. From MI5, with their intelligence gatherers toiling in the background, this has to be passed on now to the higher echelons of Whitehall. The political superstructure needs to take over, and command the whole of the British security apparatus. From here on, it would be government to government, one set of politicians at the highest level dealing with another; even the airline itself would have to take a back seat.

‘Just make sure you tell the Americans about Lamayette. He knows more than he was able to tell me. Of that I’m positive . . .’

Grainger sounds drained already. Defeated. ‘I’ll pass that on.’ For him this would count as a failure . . . a successful hijacking originating from a British airport.

There’s a moment of silence, and through the speakerphone the two women in the office can hear the wind whistling off the moorlands of Yorkshire. To Davane’s ear it sounds like Grainger’s got himself stuck in bloody
Wuthering Heights
. She hears him take a deep breath. ‘How many on board?’

Davane runs a crooked arthritic finger over the numbers. She knows what he wants. ‘Including crew, three hundred and sixty-two.’ She repeats for clarity’s sake. ‘Three. Six. Two. Sixty-one British. Twenty-nine of those Brits are female and fourteen children.’

‘Not that it matters . . .’

‘No, of course.’ Davane glances up at Pyjama-girl, who looks like she’s about to be sick. Sixty-one. More than were killed in the 7/7 bombing or any single IRA atrocity. ‘Not that it matters . . .’

Tenth floor

Headquarters of the Federal Aviation Administration

Independence Avenue

Washington, DC

0711 Washington time, 1211 UK time, 1711 Islamabad time

T
here’d been a heap of cock-ups on September 11th 2001. Some big and some small. But one of the worst, one of the few yet to be satisfactorily explained, had been the apparent communication failure, which meant that the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center didn’t know what the FAA knew in real time. Forty minutes was the delay, between the FAA finding out about the four hijackings, and that same news passing to the all-important NMCC. In particularly unhelpful testimony to the subsequent presidential commission, somebody from the Pentagon had said they’d actually war-gamed the 9/11 scenarios assuming no delay, and were certain that they could have shot down all four planes before they got to their targets.

It was angu ishing on so many different levels for anybody who worked in the rather drab seventies-style, glass-fronted FAA building because most of them were driven by a passion for aviation safety. And it didn’t help that it was this cock-up more than any of the others, involving as it did two arms of government, which gave most credence to all those wacky conspiracy theories.

Today’s FAA duty hijack coordinator is Todd Packway, a lean, intense man with rimless eyeglasses, and a love of long,
involved policy reviews. Every inch of his desk is stacked with thick, bound documents, which, up until a couple of moments ago, he had fully intended using his morning shift to dissect with his precise lawyerly skills.

He’s been informed of the hijack by the duty officer at the Civil Aviation Authority offices in London, who is curt and to the point, and forwards all the relevant information and a compressed audio data file of the rambling radio transmission about Allah and
Kuffars
. The CAA man seems quite glad to be shot of the whole thing.

In his office, fiddling with files, check-listing all of the post-9/11 protocols, Todd Packway is seriously delighted to access the now permanent communication web with the NMCC and hear that they’ve already been alerted. The Pentagon is on the case. Moments earlier, Shanwick control had contacted their opposite number in Gander, and Gander had red-flagged PK412 within the vast US–Canadian surveillance programme, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as NORAD.

For Packway it’s a surreal feeling: an actual hijacking, actually in progress. There’d been so many drills. So much training, role-playing and make-believe had been done in the name of Operation Noble Eagle. Now. At last. It’s happening. A real hijacking. Let’s do it . . . AND THIS TIME, LET’S GET IT RIGHT.

Down below his windows traffic is light on Independence Avenue. Joggers pounding their knees to death. Wind kicking up a bit. People’s newspapers turning inside out. Everybody blissfully unaware of what’s about to break.

A TV studio

Lahore, Pakistan

1714 Islamabad time, 1214 UK time, 0714 Washington time

T
ext messages driven by Hamza Khan’s hothouse operation continue to fizz around the country, outraging all those who are ever quick to outrage. PK412 in trouble. Three hundred Muslims to be killed.

Then, once the story crosses over into the mainstream media, everything changes again. National anger.

Chef Bindar is a TV chef with a difference. The cheeks of his continually sweating face, as wide as his head is long, are permanently creased in a leery grin. His particular talent is not cooking, but sharing bawdy and indiscreet gossip about politics, cricket and film stars, while he prods his various guests into showing him how to prepare
adrak
or use
amchoor.
His sixty minutes on air are never short of drama or spice. A vaudeville experience delivered in a machine-gun mix of Urdu and English, always ready with a wink-wink to camera. His audience loves him. And his audience share of a regular twenty-five per cent means his homely studio set is festooned with advertiser products, oversized mobile phones and giant cartons of laundry powder.

Live on air, Chef Bindar is heading to his second commercial break of the show. ‘We’ll be back in a couple of minutes . . .’ His hands are sticky with ground black pepper and, with a comedian’s sure touch, he wipes his face with them, squinting at the Urdu text of his autocue. ‘. . . when I’ll be trying to work
out why this whole country is going mad about a Pakistan Airlines flight. My producer . . . he has a girlfriend who is a stewardess, one of our country’s flying angels . . . lucky man, lucky man . . . our producer is saying . . . people are sending text messages . . .’

And he starts building towards a sneeze. ‘“It’s . . . it’s going to be shot down. Our flight to New York!”’ Chef Bindar shakes his sweat-drenched head. ‘Crazy stuff. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Can you shoot down a plane in this day and age? Are you worried? Do you know anybody flying to New York today? . . .’ and the punchline to his pepper-on-the-hands gag that the studio audience has been watching for comes at last. Chef Bindar finally expels a sneeze so hard that a sponsor’s display of teabags flies off his work surface. He smirks at the camera, caught like a naughty boy. ‘So is this thing true? Is our flight in danger . . . this PK412?’ He wipes his nose on the leaves of a sweetcorn that a studio guest had just husked. ‘Find out after the break . . .’

Fifteen minutes later, the first local news agency report is filed. An enterprising journalist watching the
Chef Bindar Show
snags a ‘non-denial denial’, as it’s known, the report quoting an unnamed and lowly official in the PIA Karachi head office as saying, ‘We don’t know anything about this.’

Not saying for sure that the flight is safe costs the spokesman dearly. His words are duly mangled into the searing headline ‘PIA Official Uncertain Whether New York Flight Is Safe’. This is duly picked up and typed into the rolling news-bars that scroll busily at the bottom of the screens of the twenty or so local TV channels – and their eight regional services.

Collectively a nation of almost 180 million people begins to sit up. Pays some serious attention. What the hell is going on?

Suddenly, these damned text messages and tweets are, like a virus, all over everyone’s mobiles, people sitting in their cars, buses, trains, trying to get home. Suddenly these messages appear to be right on the money.

America is going to shoot down a civilian airliner . . . a PIA flight?
Our national airline?

The country starts to hyperventilate . . . rushing to the edge, teetering on the brink of a red-misted madness. This is middleclass Pakistan being turned over now. Sober, reliable men and women getting angry. The electricity grid and telecom system begin to creak and pop along the seams. Heading into peak time everybody is powering up their computers and TVs, fiddling with their radios, churning through broadband. And just for good measure getting on the phone. Two or three phones simultaneously, if they can manage it.

Next step: one of Wikipedia’s contributors reports the hijacking of PK412 under sections on ‘PIA’ and ‘List of Notable Aircraft Hijackers’. One of the extremist websites is credited as a source for the information. After an explosion of additional edits, adding more and more inflammatory comments, Wikipedia’s editors decide to lock down both sections in protective status.

So high are the emotions, so hungry are people for news, that
#PakistanHijackCrisis
appears for the first time in ninth position on Twitter Trends, an overview of the most popular tweets. Tens of millions of people around the world see the story for the first time.

In such a feverish atmosphere it takes only a short while, outrage feeding on itself, before the first spontaneous events occur: protests outside the US embassy in Islamabad. Throw in the British as well. If none of these is in reach, go for the usual suspects. McDonald’s. Pizza Hut. Nike and Levi jeans. Ford. Coca-Cola bottlers. Anything with a Visa or Mastercard sign, anything that reeks of Western imperialism, is going to get burnt or smashed tonight. Or smashed and then burnt . . .