A crescendo of screams and crying filled the aircraft.
“One,” Bennett said, “two . . .”
Cory had a mischievous smile as he held out the gun, ready to fire.
“Stop!” Nick shouted. “I know where the device is.”
Bennett held up his hand to temporarily delay the execution.
“Let’s have it, Agent Bracco,” Bennett said. “Right now or you’ll be next.”
“It’s not in the cabin,” Nick told the CEO. “It’s in the cockpit.”
Bennett gave Nick a dubious glare. “That’s a very clever way of getting us to open the door, but it won’t work.” He nodded at Cory to continue his death sentence.
“No,” Nick said, reaching both of his arms into the air in a defenseless position. “I have the manifest which gives all the medical data for everyone on board. The copilot has a bad case of allergies which requires him to carry an inhaler with him. You were right . . . it is on board. It’s just inside there.” Nick pointed a finger at the cockpit door.
The concept rang a bell with Bennett and he gestured Cory to lower his weapon. The guy looked like he was told to drop his ice cream cone. The plane sank lower into the Atlantic without any appearance of land surfacing around them. Some of the passengers gasped as the flight appeared on the verge of landing in the ocean.
Bennett braced himself against the wall behind him with a menacing expression. He zoned in on Nick as if he could determine Nick’s motivations with the mere power of his stare.
Nick tried to offer Bennett a way out without casualties. Now it was a matter of saving lives. Possibly even his own.
“You said there would be no one injured if you found the device,” Nick reminded him.
Bennett braced himself for the landing but said nothing.
The passengers along the window seats squealed in horror as they descended above the choppy waters without a sign of land before them.
“I’ll call your bluff,” Bennett finally muttered. “But if you’re wrong, the executions will begin with you.”
Nick glanced over at Jess, who for the first time seemed to realize her story might never reach an audience above the ocean floor. Her face was pale and her expression bleak.
At that moment the back wheels finally touched down and everyone lurched forward as the plane hit the tarmac. There was a slender strip of land on both sides of the plane before the ocean spread out to the horizon. An occasional tree interrupted the ocean view, but it almost felt as if they were landing on an aircraft carrier.
The plane was stopping quicker than a normal landing, consistent with a short runway. So far everything Bennett said seemed true. They were on a tiny piece of land in the middle of nowhere.
When the plane finally stopped, Bennett stood tall and pulled his cuffs down from beneath his suit jacket. He glared at Nick while one of his minions twisted the door latch and opened the door.
Immediately a ladder clicked against the side of the plane and Bennett gave a signal to someone outside. Nick couldn’t see the entourage from his seat, but he was betting they were armed and ready for action. Five million dollars would do that to a person.
The plane remained idling and there was no indication the cockpit door would be opening. There were audible sobs coming from the rear of the plane. Nick’s pulse throbbed in his temple as he waited for the next move.
Bennett motioned for his team to bring the injured terrorist to the front and the guy hobbled on one leg while using the headrests as crutches. When he reached the ladder, Bennett personally helped the guy lumber down the top of the steps. He turned to see Jess back to scribbling notes and gave a satisfied smile, as if his effort would be documented for the world to see.
Bennett motioned Lisa to the front and she strutted down the aisle with a purpose. He nodded to the cockpit door and Lisa tapped a sequence of taps onto the door. Then she pressed a series of numbers into the keypad. A moment later, the door opened, and finally Nick could see Paul Greko. He was a fit-looking gentleman with graying sideburns and bushy eyebrows. He looked like an airline pilot.
As Greko exited with his carry bag, Lisa slid past him into the cockpit. Bennett gestured for him to step onto the ladder, then stopped him.
“Can I see what’s in the bag?”
Greko didn’t hesitate. He handed Bennett the black bag and waited while the CEO rummaged through his personal items. After a minute, Bennett seemed satisfied and pointed for him to continue. Greko allowed himself a guilt peek at his two pilot colleagues, who simply stared at him with disdain.
Bennett stuck his head into the cockpit and Nick’s longshot gamble was about to expose itself. He was completely unsure of his theory and just hoped that Bennett’s intel was solid.
Cory stood by the open doorway with his gun dangling in his hand and a serene look on his face. Nick would have to challenge him soon. To his left, Nick could see Kirk Weston in a window seat with a gash across his forehead. When Nick made eye contact with him, the air marshal seemed ready to make a suicidal plunge. Go out fighting.
After a few minutes, Bennett emerged from the cockpit wearing a giant grin across his face and holding up an inhaler for everyone to see.
“You are a very clever man, Agent Bracco.”
Nick let out a breath. There was the slightest drip of hope running through his veins, but he knew that could evaporate with a simple nod from Bennett.
From his office window in Washington, DC, the administrator of the FAA, Henry Schaffer, could see the National Mall and the Smithsonian, but all he wanted to see right now was a Flight 12 sighting. He was on his third cup of coffee and it wasn’t even six o’clock.
Sitting across his desk were a handful of his closest advisors, all staring at their tablets trying to communicate with varying control centers around the globe, attempting to locate the missing 767.
“We’re up to a five-hundred-mile circumference,” Deputy Administrator Lance Hawkins said. “Every hour that passes, that circumference increases by four hundred miles.”
“Keep that perimeter tight,” Schaffer said. “Anything outside five hundred miles and it turns into something completely different.”
“Hank, if we keep the search field too narrow, we might lose valuable—”
“Too bad,” Schaffer said, rising to his feet and circling around to the front of his desk. “We already have the USS
Kidd
and three naval carriers heading that direction. If we have them searching the entire Atlantic, we’ll never find them.”
On the eighty-four-inch monitor at the back of his office, an animated version of that night’s scheduled flight plans over the Atlantic lit up the screen. Including Flight 12.
“Shanwick is reporting headwind of over fifty miles per hour,” Hawkins said. “Otherwise, no other weather in the area.”
Schaffer pointed to another staff member. “You spoke with Rolls Royce?”
“Yes, they said it was impossible. Less than one-tenth of one percent.”
Schaffer’s greatest talent was his ability to delegate. He acquired his job almost exclusively on that basis alone. Previous regimes would have to run everything through the administrator, but not Schaffer. He encouraged free thinking.
“Hank,” Hawkins said. “Rescue flights are just arriving on the scene. They have nothing to report.”
“Remind me,” Schaffer said, “how long between waypoint check-ins?”
“Reykjavik lost him at 2:34,” Oscar Chang said. “There was a fifty-minute lag between check-in and zero contact. That’s our target range. If it’s mechanical, we’ll be over the site all day long.”
Schaffer walked over to his window where the sun was just beginning to brighten the streets below him. Business people were starting their day without ever understanding the responsibility he felt trying to keep them safe while they moved from one city to the next at thirty thousand feet.
“We’ll find them, Hank,” Chang said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“Sir,” Anne Johnson said, glued to her tablet, “secondary radar system show Flight 12 on its flight plan sixty minutes out of JFK.”
Schaffer shook his head. “That’s not helpful. Their HF signal came an hour after that.”
“Yes, but were they on their track when the pilot sent the signal?”
“Sir,” Chang said, “I just received confirmation that the transponder has been shut off.”
That brought a silence to the room.
“Do we know if it was turned off deliberately?”
Of course that was the question everyone was trying to determine. Was it a premeditated act of a rogue pilot? Or was the transponder destroyed in some catastrophic event?
“No sir.”
Schaffer leaned back against the front of his desk and clenched the oak structure with both hands as if it were trying to fly away. “No request for flight change,” Schaffer ruminated out loud. “No response to air traffic control in Reykjavik. No transponder.”
Just then Schaffer’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. When he saw the incoming number, he immediately pushed the “on” button. “What do you have for me, Walt?”
“We have satellite images just coming in right now,” Walt Jackson said. “So far we don’t see any anomalies.”
“And the coastline?”
“Homeland Security has it under control. Nothing unannounced can get within fifty miles of shore without a fighter pilot on scene.”
Schaffer walked over to the window again and tried to put it together. The Department of Justice would have access to the naval ships and Coast Guard, and as the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism program, Walt could use all of his assets on this search.
“Walt, are we getting assistance from Interpol?”
“Absolutely. They’ve given us full range of compliance from Iceland all the way to Italy.”
For some reason Schaffer decided to lower his voice for the next question. “And you’re handling everything yourself?”
“We’ve got the command center right here in my office.”
Schaffer turned to see his staff busy tracking information on their devices.
“All right,” Schaffer said. “Please keep me updated.”
“How long until the press conference?”
Schaffer looked at the digital clock on the wall. “Twelve minutes.”
“Good. Tell them everything you know.”
Schaffer blinked. “Walt, I don’t know anything.”
“Exactly. You tell them the model of the plane, when it was manufactured, how many flight hours it had. Anything you can conjure up that’ll keep the press talking through the next news cycle. We’ll have something within twenty-four hours.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I’m not, but it’s my job to be confident and to lead with conviction. Times like this someone has to be the lightning rod and take the hits.”
“Are you suggesting I be the lightning rod?”
“No, no,” Walt said with a soft tone. “Hank, I have good people on this. I have an entire team of agents who are specialists in predictive analytics. You give them your name, age, place of birth and they’ll tell you what type of coffee you drink.”
Schaffer looked down at his ice-cold cup sitting there on his desk. “I could use someone who can tell me where this damn plane is.”
“Just keep your composure. You need to look concerned, but not frantic. Make sure you have an ample supply of grief counselors available to any family members.”
“Walt, are you coaching me?”
“I’m trying to help. Right now you’re the face of the event. Once it heads in another direction, I’ll gladly take your place.”
“And you know we’re heading that way, don’t you?”
There was silence.
“Which means,” Schaffer deduced, “that I can’t deny what I haven’t been told.”
More silence.
Schaffer sighed. “All right, Walt. I’ll keep this investigation open and I’ll update you every hour.”
“Sounds good.”
When Schaffer hung up, he realized he’d agreed to keep the FBI updated during the conversation, but not once did Walt agree to update the FAA.
“Isn’t that about right?” Schaffer murmured to himself.
With the plane door open and the humidity seeping into the cabin, Nick had to pull the sticky shirt from his torso. They were somewhere tropical for sure. Even the soldiers Bennett employed to meet them at the island wore sombreros to keep the sun from their neck and face.
Bennett had everyone getting off the plane without explanation. It was the lack of explanation that concerned Nick. A guy like Bennett loved to document his every move and now there was a conspicuous silence to the deplaning process. The passengers were told to descend the ladder onto the tarmac and move into a fenced-in area off to the side of the runway.
As they were ushered single file down the aisle toward the door, Bennett monitored the proceedings with his arms folded across his chest. Part of Bennett’s plan seemed to involve splitting up Nick and Weston, who was already on the tarmac, while Nick sat next to Jess in the front row. Even Jess had a suspicious tenor to her note-taking, occasionally looking outside the window while jotting down her thoughts.