Murray consulted his notes. 'The aircraft flew out of Vancouver International, B.C. They filed a false flight- plan for London Heathrow, headed east, departed Canadian airspace at 7:51 local time. All very routine stuff. We assume that he headed out a little while, reversed course, and headed southeast toward D.C. After that he bluffed his way through air-traffic control.'
'How?'
Murray nodded to someone Ryan didn't know. 'Mr. President, I'm Ed Hutchins, NTSB. It's not hard. He claimed to be a KLM charter inbound to Orlando. Then he declared an emergency. When there's an in-flight emergency, our people are trained to get the airplane on the ground ASAP. We were up against a guy who knew all the right buttons to push. There's no way anyone could have prevented this,' he concluded defensively.
'Only one voice on the tapes,' Murray noted.
'Anyway,' Hutchins continued, 'we have tapes of the radar tracks. He simulated an aircraft with control difficulties, asked for an emergency vector to Andrews, and got what he wanted. From Andrews to the Hill is barely a minute's flying time.'
'One of our people got a Stinger off,' Price said, with somewhat forlorn pride.
Hutchins just shook his head. It was the gesture for this morning in Washington. 'Against something that big, might as well have been a spitball.'
'Anything from Japan?'
'They're in a national state of shock.' This came from Scott Adler, the senior career official in the State Department, and one of Ryan's friends. 'Right after you turned in, we got a call from the Prime Minister. It's not as though he hasn't had a bad week himself, though he sounds happy to be back in charge. He wants to come over to apologize personally to us. I told him we'd get back—'
'Tell him yes.'
'You sure, Jack?' Arnie van Damm asked.
'Does anybody think this was a deliberate act?' Ryan countered.
'We don't know,' Price responded first.
'No explosives aboard the aircraft,' Dan Murray pointed out. 'If there had been—'
'I wouldn't be here.' Ryan finished his coffee. The corporal refilled it at once. 'This is going to come down to one or two nuts, just like they all do.'
Hutchins nodded tentative agreement. 'Explosives are fairly light. Even a few tons, given the carrying capacity of the 747–400, would not have compromised the mission at all, and the payoff would have been enormous. What we have here is a fairly straightforward crash. The residual damage was done by about half a load of jet fuel— upwards of eighty tons. That was plenty,' he concluded. Hutchins had been investigating airplane accidents for almost thirty years.
'It's much too early to draw conclusions,' Price warned.
'Scott?'
'If this was—hell,' Adler shook his head. 'This was not an act by their government. They're frantic over there. The newspapers are calling for the heads of the people who suborned the government in the first place, and Prime Minister Koga was nearly in tears over the phone. Put it this way, if somebody over there planned this, they'll find out for us.'
'Their idea of due process isn't quite as stringent as ours,' Murray added. 'Andrea is right. It is too early to draw conclusions, but all of the indications so far point to a random act, not a planned one.' Murray paused for a moment. 'For that matter, we know the other side developed nuclear weapons, remember?' Even the coffee turned cold with that remark.
THIS ONE HE found under a bush while moving a ladder from one part of the west face to another. The firefighter had been on duty for seven straight hours. He was numb by now. You can take only so much horror before the mind starts regarding the bodies and pieces as mere things. The remains of a child might have shaken him, or even a particularly pretty female, since this fireman was still young and single, but the body he'd accidentally stepped on wasn't one of those. The torso was headless, and parts of both legs were missing, but it was clearly the body of a man, wearing the shredded remains of a white shirt, with epaulets at the shoulders. Three stripes on each of them, he saw. He wondered what that meant, too tired to do much in the way of thinking. The fireman turned and waved to his lieutenant, who in turn tapped the arm of a woman wearing a vinyl FBI windbreaker.
This agent walked over, sipping at a plastic cup and wishing she could light a cigarette—still too many lingering fumes for that, she grumbled.
'Just found this one. Funny place, but—'
'Yeah, funny.' The agent lifted her camera and snapped a couple of pictures which would have the exact time electronically preserved on the frame. Next she took a pad from her pocket and noted the placement for body number four on her personal list. She hadn't seen many for her particular area of responsibility. Some plastic stakes and yellow tape would further mark the site; she started writing the tag for it. 'You can turn him over.'
Under the body, they saw, was an irregularly shaped piece of flat glass—or glass-like plastic. The agent snapped another photo, and through the viewfinder things somehow looked more interesting than with the naked eye. A glance up showed a gap in the marble balustrade. Another look around revealed a lot of small metallic objects, which an hour earlier she'd decided were aircraft parts, and which had attracted the attention of an NTSB investigator, who was now conferring with the same fire-department officer with whom she'd been conferring a minute earlier. The agent had to wave three times to get his attention.
'What is it?' The NTSB investigator was cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief.
The agent pointed. 'Check the shirt out.'
'Crew,' the man said, after putting them back on. 'Maybe a driver. What's this?' It was his turn to point.
There was a strange delicacy to it. The white uniform shirt had a hole in it just to the right of the pocket. The hole was surrounded by a red-rust stain. The FBI agent held her flashlight close, and that showed that the stain was dried. The current temperature was just under twenty degrees. The body had been thrown into this harsh environment virtually at the moment of impact, and the blood about the severed neck was frozen, the purple-red color of some horrid plum sherbet. The blood on the shirt, she saw, had dried before having the chance to freeze.
'Don't move the body anymore,' she told the fireman. Like most FBI agents, she'd been a local police officer before applying to the federal agency. It was the cold that made her face pale.
'First crash investigation?' the NTSB man asked, seeing her face, and mistaking her pallor.
She nodded. 'Yes, it is, but it's not my first murder.' With that she switched on her portable radio to call her supervisor. For this body she wanted a crime-scene team and full forensics.
THE TELEGRAMS CAME from every government in the world. Most were long, and all had to be read—well, at least the ones from important countries. Togo could wait.
'Interior and Commerce are in town and standing by for a Cabinet meeting along with all the deputies,' van Damm said while Ryan flipped through the messages, trying to read and listen at the same time. 'The Joint Chiefs, all the vices, are assembled, along with all the command CINCs to go over national security—'
'Threat Board?' Jack asked without looking up. Until the previous day he'd been President Durling's National Security Advisor, and it didn't seem likely that the world had changed too much in twenty-four hours.
Scott Adler handled the answer: 'Clear.'
'Washington is pretty much shut down,' Murray said. 'Radio and TV announcements for people to stay home, except for essential services. The D.C. National Guard is out. We need the warm bodies for the Hill, and the D.C. Guard is a military-police brigade. They might actually be useful. Besides, the firemen must be about worn out by now.'
'How long before the investigation gives us hard information?' the President asked.
'There's no telling that, Ja—Mister—'
Ryan looked up from the official Belgian telegram. 'How long since we've known each other, Dan? I'm not God, okay? If you use my name once in a while, nobody's going to shoot you for it.'
It was Murray's turn to smile. 'Okay. You can't predict with any major investigation. The breaks just come, sooner or later, but they do come,' Dan promised. 'We have a good team of investigators out there.'
'What do I tell the media?' Jack rubbed his eyes, already tired from reading. Maybe Cathy was right. Maybe he did need glasses, finally. Before him was a printed sheet for his morning TV appearances, which had been
