in the document. He’d written it. But there was no need to give Johnny more information than he required. Both Adare and Khalid had been informed that they were to intercept a British passenger plane en route from Singapore to Los Angeles. Precisely what would happen to that airplane, the two pilots had been informed at Suva Island, was contained in the sealed document. They’d both been promised a huge amount of money not to ask any questions.
“It is complete information on the rendezvous target. British Airways flight from Singapore. Flight #77. Waypoint intercepts marked on the charts. Biographical information on the pilot and copilot that we will need if we are challenged. Good stuff! Very thorough!”
Challenged? What the hell did that mean, Adare wondered but knew enough not to ask. Adare descended through the broken cloud layer and leveled off at the target’s designated altitude, 35,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean. Empty sky, empty sea. He was now five minutes from the target’s next known waypoint. He should acquire the target on his radar screen any minute. He studied the TAR, looking for a tiny blip. Nothing.
He reduced his airspeed and flew on, imagining everything that could have possibly gone wrong. The list was disturbingly long. Ten minutes later, he was starting to sweat. Twenty minutes later, at 0930 hours, he was beginning to think something was seriously wrong. He flew what hurricane hunters called an Alpha pattern, a flight path that looks like a giant X when drawn on a chart. The fact that he was possibly late and not early began to creep into his mind. Then, the TAR began to beep.
“Well, hello there!” Johnny said, easing his throttle back to fifty percent and descending a thousand feet to make room for the new arrival fast approaching from the rear.
“Yes!” Soong echoed, pointing to the glowing blip on the screen, “Our twin brother! Identical twin! Good, good!”
The doctor had removed a small digital video camera from his case. It was wired to a bizarre contraption with a small dish antenna. He now put the camera viewfinder to his eye and began filming the empty sky outside the cockpit window.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” Adare asked him.
“Bin Wazir likes to watch,” Soong said.
Was there no bleeding end to this little sod’s madness?
Flight 77
Captain Simon Breckenridge, a ruddy-faced man with thirty years experience, stared out his cockpit window in utter amazement. He was sitting in the left-hand pilot’s seat of British Airways Flight 77 heavy, en route to Los Angeles from Singapore. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Another company plane? Flying his precise course heading and altitude? What the bloody hell was going on here?
He looked at his copilot, John Swann, and both of them shook their heads. Mystified. This surrealist apparition did not make the least bit of sense to either man.
“Dee-dee-dee-dee…dee-dee-dee-dee…” Swann said, mimicking the old Twilight Zone theme.
“Company plane?” Breckenridge barked into his radio transmitter. “Identify yourself, over.”
No response.
“Speedbird on track Delta crossing one-four-zero degrees west longitude, say your call sign.”
Nothing.
“What the hell is this, Swannie?” Breckenridge eased his throttles forward. The big plane lumbered ahead, gaining on the other company plane now reducing speed and descending. When he was directly aft of the bizarrely positioned aircraft, he thumbed his mike.
“Company plane, this is British Speedbird 77 heavy, Whiskey Zulu Bravo Echo…identify yourself immediately.”
“Christ, Simon, I cannot believe what I’m seeing here,” Swann said. He was leaning forward, peering out his windscreen at the mysterious BA airplane. “He’s got—holy Jesus—he’s got our bloody tail number!” Tail numbers were deliberately small on commercial craft, to make life tougher on terrorists. But Swann was close enough now to read it.
The two giant aircraft were now flying parallel at roughly the same airspeeds. Breckenridge and Swann watched in amazement as a plane absolutely identical to their own in even the smallest detail now climbed a thousand feet and matched his altitude. The two planes were flying wing-to-wing about a thousand yards apart.
“You lost out here, Captain?” Breckenridge said into his mike and waited for a reply.
“Come back?” he finally said, when none was forthcoming.
Flight 00
“What the hell is that?” Adare asked the doctor. Soong had now pulled another small electronic device, brick-shaped with a flexible antenna, from inside his jacket and was punching in a sequence of numbers on a keypad.
“Radio transmitter,” the doctor said, his eyes alight. “In case our young friend over there loses his nerve.”
“Young friend?”
“Hmm. Yes. Seat 76-F.”
Soong was scanning the long row of windows on the British plane’s flank, wondering just which one the good-looking youth was sitting beside. Months earlier, he’d met the boy in a Damascus safe house and spent a week teaching him how to combine two apparently innocent and inert liquids into a powerful explosive apparatus, one triggered by a cheap, simple musical recording device called an MP3 player. If he failed to trigger it himself, Soong would use his radio transmitter and do it for him.
“Nerve? What are you talking about?”
“His name is Rafi,” Soong said, putting the camera to his eye once more and filming the British jetliner. “He is the young nephew of our beloved bin Wazir. Incredibly rich, handsome. Girls, girls, girls! Yet, he wishes to martyr himself and—Look! You are getting too close, Johnny! Get away, get away! Now, I tell you!”
Adare banked the plane sharply and rolled away. Oblivious to the cries and shouts of the four-hundred- some-odd terrified souls in his care, he climbed three thousand feet in a matter of seconds. It was barely enough to avoid the jagged chunks of metal flying in all directions.
Flight 77
The sudden and unspeakably violent explosion in row 76 on the starboard side of BA 77 broke the back of the airplane. People seated very close to the blast simply came apart, shards of the bomb and nearby objects fragmenting them. A fire raced through the airplane in the few seconds before it began to break up. The four Pratt & Whitney engines were still providing thrust, but the aircraft was no longer stable. It was experiencing horrific gyrations. Within five or six more seconds, the plane was in chunks. Seatbacks were collapsing and severely traumatized human beings were slipping out of their seat belts, thrown into the sky from what little remained of Flight 77.
Their fall from the sky lasted four minutes.
The passengers, and a few of them were still technically alive, fell seven miles, having attained the terminal velocity of any falling body, 120 miles per hour, during the first five hundred feet. Brutal impact against the ocean’s surface is what killed anyone aboard Flight 77 who had miraculously survived the explosion, the frigid air, and the horrific velocity. On impact with the water, the ribs break and become sharp jagged knives, eviscerating the heart, lungs, and aorta. The aorta also ruptures because part of it is fixed to the body cavity, and the internal organs keep moving for a fraction of a second even though the body that contains them has stopped dead.
The water stopped the falling bodies short, but not the aircraft’s two black boxes. They tumbled slowly
