Bolt Action (24 page)

USS
Dwight D. Eisenhower
. . . the
Ike

CVN-69

Mid-Atlantic

T
hirty-six thousand feet below and a pair of Navy FA-18E Super Hornets are sitting patiently, engines running. Cockpit hoods still high in the air. Two pilots, call-signed Cletus and Sneaker, go through final pre-flight checks.

Their 1,100-foot long aircraft carrier is racing to line up into the wind, going full bore to swivel almost 90,000 metric tonnes of ship as quickly as possible. The flash had come through from USNORTHCOM command, a military structure created after 9/11 with responsibility for securing the air, land and sea approaches to the continental United States and Alaska. NORTHCOM and the satellite and air sovereignty programme NORAD share the same commander, as well as operational headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. The signal had come through highest priority. Operation Noble Eagle. Get two jets up there. NOW.

In the dark of the ship’s Combat Direction Centre, on the blue-light radar screens, they had already located PK412 and listened in to the Shanwick controllers trying repeatedly to raise some kind of answer. Then, by scrolling back through a series of hard drives that download and store all the radio transmissions hereabouts, that one very distinct broadcast from the plane had been identified. ‘ . . .
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
. . .’

Picked out, and passed on, this scratchy High Frequency recording, to the admiral on the flag bridge, plus the carrier’s captain, and to the squadron leader in charge of the Jolly Rogers, the Fighting 103rd, the naval attack unit from which pilots Cletus and Sneaker are assigned.

Things were supposed to move quickly on the order to scramble, but with the ground crew doing their deck-walk, and the USS
Ike
still rolling around the seas, the 103’s squadron leader had time to escort the two pilots out to their side-by-side planes. Letting them know that after something like 45,000 regular sorties and 2,200 ‘scrambles’, this Operation Noble Eagle call-out is the one. For real. ‘I tell you this because I know it’s every pilot’s worst nightmare . . .’ and being a basically chummy guy, he’d taken his time with them, lots of sincere eye contact, letting them know he understood any nerves they might feel ‘. . . wouldn’t be surprised if it were your worst nightmare too.’

‘But . . .’ the squadron leader had reached out to squeeze the backs of their necks, a gesture he hoped conveyed understanding and compassion ‘. . . consider what a different place this world would be if we’d had two pilots like you guys behind each of those planes on 9/11 . . .’ He had pivoted from one to the other, searching for any hint of weakness.

Cletus and Sneaker had gone awfully quiet as they clutched their flight helmets on that windswept deck, pitching this way and that, as the
Ike
tried to turn on a penny. There was no joshing or backslapping about this mission. They hadn’t thought to ask, nor had it been volunteered, just how many people are on the flight they are to hunt down.

Perhaps they hadn’t enquired because in that final face-to-face conversation, while the world seemed at once complicated and layered, yet it was very simple. After fist-bumping the senior officer, both headed to their planes. Wearing looks that were both fierce and piercingly serious.

The Combat Direction Centre had plotted the plane about 350 miles to the north-east of
Ike
’s position and moving westwards at just under 600 miles an hour. At maximum speed of
Mach 1.8, these two birds should be on station, by the hostile, in under twenty-five minutes.

Once in their Super Hornets the two pilots look off to their right. This is the first flight of the day, so a line of colourcoordinated ground crew has been rushed on deck, to check for Foreign Object Debris. Maintenance men in their green roll-neck tops, the guys and girls who handle bombs and armaments wearing red, and the refuellers in purple. Around the two planes are green-shirted crew chiefs doing their final checks and a knot of ground handlers in yellow, waiting for the OK to start directing them by way of hand signals, on to the catapult ramp for the launch sequence.

From the top level of the
Ike
’s island, the above deck area, comes the call from the duty Air Boss, himself a former naval pilot. ‘Two minutes to launch . . .’

As the Shooters who run the catapult system prep their equipment, steam leaks out of the long slit-like track in front of the two Hornets. Just as it does for any other day of flying. In fact almost everything about today is the same as on any other day of practice, training and relentless self-improvement. The same, and yet definitely not the same.

The pilots, not men of faith, even in the terrifying circumstances of night landings on a moving deck, find themselves now scrambling to think of something spiritual and prayer-like. As the clock counts down, the tension squeezes the chest. A strange vice-like grip tightening the skull.

On board PK412

T
he only word to describe the woman standing in front of them is matronly. Big, heavy, in a baggy, light blue, velour tracksuit, bouncing back and forth across two seats in Row 33. Giant projectile breasts. The Pakistani woman is shouting, screaming, bellowing at the top of her considerable voice in a language unknown to Tristie Merritt. Something South Asian. The noise so shrill that the nearby passengers seem to be grinding their teeth against the pain. Their startled heads bob into sight from behind the backs of seats. Up and down the aisles, startled, alarmed looks.

Salahuddin and Tristie are standing in the aisle, a seat’s width away. Captain Salahuddin looking alarmed by this Everest of wailing womanhood. The portly steward looking lost. Whiffler is coming down the aisle, yawning and rubbing sleep from his eyes and wearing a What the Hell is Going On? look.

Tristie can’t help but notice more and more passengers are grasping whatever it is that the woman’s shouting, dominos beginning to fall . . .

It’s fairly obvious what has happened. The cord of her in-seat telephone is looped over the backrest. She must have been on the phone to someone, and that someone has given her the news. Whatever it is they know down there – the bolted cockpit door, the missing crewman Zaafir – the screams are suddenly in English, and in a different, menacing tone. ‘
You will never see your children again. NEVER, I TELL YOU . . . NEVER.
’ More chilling and infinitely contagious. Tristie puts her hand on
Salahuddin’s shoulder and when he turns she mouths, ‘Hijack,’ pantomiming a telephone.

Sharp questions and the first blooms of anger rise in the faces of passengers. An epidemic starting to build.

Salahuddin nods. Yes. Puts up his hands in despair. What are we supposed to do? He glances back at this mammoth female, hopelessness in his face. The realisation she’s some three times his weight, and ripped up with the adrenalin of fight or flight that would make her an impossible takedown. Those big untouchable sacks of breast.

Come on, Captain. Be the Man . . .

This creature of Beelzebub, her madness increasingly bewitching the cabin, burning everyone up. Then a shaft of bright light bringing clarity . . .

Before Mad Woman knows a thing, Tristie vaults on to the aisle seat next to her. With the whole cabin watching, she hits her in mid-screech, and makes the slap look like nothing. Easy. Like it’s a cinch to knock a 300-pound woman to her knees. She falls down to a final scream, the row of seats rocking as she collapses. Then silence. It hurts like hell, Tristie’s hand a giant bee sting, But she makes it look easy . . . and that is what the rest of the plane had needed to see.

Tristie climbs down off the seat. Looks at Salahuddin. ‘Talk to these people, your passengers, about what’s going on. Give them some confidence. Tell them you’re putting together a plan.’

‘We are?’ Salahuddin blinks, then gives an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Like he’s seeing things. ‘We are. You are right, of course.’ And, back in command, he finger-points this way and that, shouting to his crew how to deal with the Mad Woman in Row 33.

Thankfully Whiffler had read Tristie’s mind. He had sensed what was needed, scuttled back to first class and woken Button, who’d raided the in-flight medical supplies. Button, oozing tranquillity, tap-taps on Mad Woman’s arm with a syringe of calm-down juice. ‘That’s better.’

As they make their way back to the front of the plane, past
rows of shocked faces, Tristie draws the captain to one side. ‘Our biggest problem is panic. The emotion we respond to fastest. And it’s the most dangerous by far.

‘This is your plane and these are your passengers . . .’ She waves away Whiffler, who’s signalling from the galley, making the universal army call for a brew-up. ‘. . . we need to be getting them to do things, to distract them from what’s going on. I’ve seen it happen before and it’s already building. When people are under stress for long periods, if their minds are given the time and space to roam, there will be madness on our hands. A collective furore. Very few will be unaffected, believe you me. Some will just calcify, go silent, zombie-like. But most will ready to stampede.’

The captain plays this scenario in his mind, pulls a pained, anxious face while biting on his bottom lip. ‘Yes,’ he speaks slowly, deliberately, ‘all of your points are well made.’

‘Excuse me for not knowing enough about Pakistan, but how many major language groups in your country?’

‘I would say six or seven: Urdu is our lingua franca but it isn’t the mother tongue of many people, less than ten per cent. The big populations are Sindhi. Pashto. Balochi. Punjabi, that’s my mother tongue . . . Saraiki. Hindko. These are the main blocs.’

‘And how many Pakistanis are there on this flight?’

Salahuddin shrugs his shoulders. ‘At a guess, eighty per cent of the flight.’

Tristie always had a head for numbers. Three hundred and forty-five passengers and seventeen crew. ‘About two hundred and ninety people.’

‘About right.’

‘I think we should move people around, try to get them sitting in little groups with their kin, people they feel comfortable with. It’s a big task, there could be some anxiety and frustration at times, but it will keep everybody occupied for, hopefully, a couple of hours at least. First, get your people to explain what we are trying to do. Lots of smiles. No stress whatsoever. And bring forward the next meal service so people
have something else to focus on. I’ll get my big colleague over there, we call him Button, I’ll get him to handle the Caucasian passengers if that’s any help.’

‘Problem.’ Salahuddin points a finger heavenwards. ‘It feels like we’re doing that Hezbollah thing, separating the Israelis, the Jews, from the rest of the passengers. I foresee this causing its own tensions. Big tensions . . .’

‘Which we can explain away. With our best
Come Visit Pakistan
smiles. Look. We’ve got no guns or munitions to threaten people with. We’re hardly a bunch of terrorists ourselves.’

‘What if people don’t want to move?’

‘That’s fine. No coercion. Remember. There’s no real point to this, other than to keep people distracted, get their minds on something different.’

‘Like rearranging the deckchairs on the
Titanic
?’

Not helpful.

Tristie looks down and lets out a long sigh, so he knows how irritated she is at this foot-dragging. It’s at this precise moment that she gets distracted. Whiffler is singing in the galley. That tune by the Kaiser Chiefs. Ten feet away, brewing tea for himself and Button . . . he’s watching people getting lairy and thinking it’s not going to be very pretty. ‘I Predict A Riot’. It’s unhelpful timing, possibly unintentional, but part of her wants to snicker with laughter.

Eventually Whiffler runs out of lyrics and is left humming.

It helps Tristie focus and she puts her hands up to Salahuddin. Surrender. Self-admonishment. That female instinct: let him think it is his own clever idea. A game that had to be played if she is to get what she needs. A tremolo of anger in her voice. ‘You want to talk about deckchairs on the
Titanic
. . . remember, the
Titanic
wouldn’t have sunk if the officer in charge of the bridge that night had turned into the iceberg, rammed it, instead of trying to skim around the side. A most natural and intuitive reaction for him, avoiding that iceberg, but it doomed the ship and all her passengers. Let’s not try and slide our way around this problem. Let’s confront it. Head on. OK?’

Salahuddin examines her, hardly a trace of movement in his solid, drawn features. He’s a bastard to read, this pilot. He holds his steady gaze for what feels like a count of ten, then calls over a pair of stewards. No idea what he’s saying to them but he’s whispering to them, busy, busy, as though it’s all top secret.

The only distinct sound is Whiffler, still
tinging
and
twanging
on the aluminium galley insets, drumming, humming happily to himself. ‘I Predict A Riot’ . . . Waiting for his beloved cup of tea to brew.

Salahuddin swings around from the little knot of cabin crew, and moves towards Tristie. Purposeful at last. ‘We can work together, you and me, but whatever happens,’ and he flexes his jawbone, ‘I mean
whatever
happens, you do not tell my crew that you and those others are ex-army.’

‘Is it such a huge problem?’

‘Yes, a huge problem.’ And he looks her in the eye. ‘Your government has helped turn our country into a plaything for incompetent soldiers and corrupt politicians. That is unforgivable. Once . . .’ and with his eyes shining slightly, he jerks a thumb back towards his crew, his people ‘. . . once upon a time, I’d like you to remember, before all this madness came from the West, we actually had a pretty decent country. And the best airline in Asia to go with it.’

The Situation Room Complex

Ground Floor, West Wing

The White House

0822 Washington time, 1322 London time, 1822 Islamabad time

T
he staff officer folds up the tele-message print-out, moves hurriedly from the National Security Council’s watch station, twelve short paces up the narrow, carpeted corridor, and eases open the heavy door into the main conference room. The news is that the two Super Hornets are on station, tucked in, as per standing orders, slightly above and five miles behind the Boeing 777. One fighter on either side.

As a relatively junior GS-12, the NSC staffer can’t put names to every single face in the modest, hushed room that he has entered, but he’s aware it’s a pretty stellar crowd. The mood is electric this morning and things are threatening to run amok in the watch station. Foreign leaders, desperate to talk, are being left on hold like this was Papa John’s Pizza, not the White House . . . sure, please tell Mr Prime Minister, the president knows you’re waiting . . . Yes, please convey to the Madam President that I’m sure he’ll join the video conference when he’s free . . . Yes, of course, please let His Highness know . . . They’d flicked as many of the calls as possible to the Secretary of State and his people, who are working from a soundproofed cabin next to the situation room, with panels of glass that mist instantly at the touch of a button.

So. Committed to the situation room this frantic morning
are the president, Charles Hannah, the Secretary of State, who’s half in, half out of all the discussions, and the Attorney General. The Secretary for Homeland Security. The acting head of the CIA. Plus the Transport Secretary paired alongside the top official of the Federal Aviation Administration. All seated round a long, polished table, about the only wood feature left in the whole ultra-modern room. The vice-president and Defence Secretary are hooked in live from two separate air force planes, one heading off to Korea, the other halfway back from Alaska. Somebody is giving a briefing on another video link, the room has six of them, huge, flat screens that dominate their respective wall spaces. One is permanently slaved to a map of the north Atlantic showing a little red dot, PK412, inching from east to west with radial lines plotted outward from New York in increments of 250 miles. It’s hard not to see this plane as an intruder, minute by minute getting closer and closer, menacing the US heartland . . .

The staffer wants to be in and out of the room as fast as possible, too many things fizzing through his brain, so he doesn’t focus overmuch on the briefing. An East Coast, Massachusetts sort of voice explains from one of the screens the State Department’s early take on things: the Arab League in Cairo are denouncing Washington’s aggressive posture, getting their condemnations in quickly . . . the Organisation of the Islamic Conference warns that downing the plane will be seen as an act of war on all Muslim nations. Everybody has commented that things are moving so fast . . .

There’s buzz about an Iran or a Venezuela-type country calling an emergency special session of the United Nations . . . ‘Just loose talk at the moment,’ the guy from State notes confidently. ‘No chance of getting seven votes off the Security Council . . . and, er, it’s our assessment, at this time, that they’ll be hard pushed, we feel, to get a majority of the member states . . .’ A point on which he sounds less than totally assured.

A row of seats for the underlings is set back from the main table and everybody there is crouched, eyes concentrated with
serious intent as the situation reports continue. The staffer can’t help but notice there’s a White House staff photographer in the back, quietly clicking away. Consigning this moment to history.

The GS-12 needs to find the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who, confusingly, is out of uniform. A measure of how quickly things had had to come together this morning. The security detail hadn’t quite grabbed the admiral by his arms, legs and belt as they had Vice-President Cheney on 9/11, but it had been near enough. Get Here Now. The staffer quickly scans the room, craning his neck this way and that, sees his man obscured by the solid shape of Secretary Salazar of Homeland. He holds out a note for the admiral to take and it’s snatched greedily. As he waits for any verbal or written response, the staffer follows all the eyes in the room towards the briefing screen . . . he notices first the change in voice. Midwest accent. Kansas perhaps. A different presenter, talking to his audience behind a lectern with a Department of Energy backdrop. Round faced, choleric . . .

‘It’s a public holiday here and in London, so the really big US and UK investors are not in play . . . but there’s already been a significant jump in crude oil futures on the two exchanges in Dubai, the Oman and Fujairah contracts. The Internet oil traders are also spiking this thing through the roof. Up eighteen, nineteen dollars a barrel in one day and still rising sharply . . . Crazy stuff when you consider twenty-five dollars a barrel is the record one-day jump. Tomorrow there’s going to be an awful lot of upward pressure. For sure, this will roll through into prices for Brent and West Texas Intermediate . . .’ and the guy from Energy rolls his eyes, tugs at the collar of his too-tight shirt ‘. . . because the market clearly anticipates this is going to blow up ugly. Serious ugly. Both short and long term . . .’

The staffer feels a tug on his sleeve and looks down at the admiral, who leans forward to whisper. ‘Get the live video from the Super Hornets prepped, and the comms link to the senior pilot. I want it to be the next thing we look at. Let’s see what these goddamn people are up to.’