M
ueller took the red-eye flight from Baltimore, arriving in Oakland at midnight. An hour later he retrieved his bag, rented a Chevy Lumina from Budget, and drove across the airport to the industrial park. He left the car behind the Mirimax Distributing Company's warehouse, took one of the Roach Motels, the Walkman, and a small set of tools from his bag, and made his way in the darkness to the rear of the Oakland Airport Commission building. The closed-circuit television camera was stationary, focused on a spot in front of the door, so Mueller was able to approach it from the side without being seen. He activated the Walkman, set it down beneath the camera, and
went to work on the security-card door lock. Within a minute and a half he had the cover off and the code reader shunted. The door lock clicked, and he let himself in.
He went directly to the equipment room in the basement, defeated the security-card door lock, and placed the Roach Motel behind one of the electronic bays, pushing it as far back as he could reach.
Retracing his steps, he relocked the equipment-room door, and outside relocked the back door, switched off the Walkman, and hurried back to his car.
By 2:00 A.M. he was on the San Jose Freeway heading south.
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Louis Zerkel presented himself to the Andrews Air Force Base public-affairs office a couple of minutes before eight in the morning. He had telephoned a few days ago about base tours. Nine other people were there, one of them a reporter for a small Midwestern newspaper who kept flashing his press card around and asking if it would be okay to take pictures for his readers. Their young WAF sergeant tour guide gave them packets containing brochures on the base's history, maps, charts, an Air Force recruiting poster, and a visitor badge. This was the base that protected Washington, and from this base presidents flew to and from the world's capitals on the “business of democracy.” By 9:30 they had toured the operations center, meteorology, a fighter/interceptor hangar, and then headed to the top of the control tower for a view of the base. Louis held back so that he was the last one up the stairs into the glass-enclosed observation center. There was a moment when the reporter was posing the operators for a picture when no one was looking toward the door. Louis slipped the Roach Motel out of his coat pocket and slipped it behind one of the consoles, pushing it way out of sight with his foot. He didn't think it was likely that the repeater would be found anytime soon. He'd had a brief look behind the console and had seen at least an inch of dust.
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Mueller got a few hours of sleep at a Holiday Inn outside of Oxnard, then drove into Los Angeles to the public library a few blocks from Pershing Square. He went up to the information desk on the second floor in the nonfiction collection and asked one of the librarians about a history of Los Angeles International Airport.
“LAX,” the pleasant young black woman said. “Quite a colorful past, what with movie stars and all.”
“So I'm told,” Mueller replied diffidently, slipping into a thicker German accent. “I'm doing a freelance piece for
Die Stern
.”
“I get it.” The woman grinned. “We see a lot of German tourists here. Is there a specific era or subject you might be interested in?”
“The present-day facility. The terminal, the traffic, the electronic controls, all the safety aspects, you know.”
“They're just about done with the renovation. We have some material, but you really should talk to someone at the airport commission. I'm sure they'd be happy to help.”
“I wanted to stop here first for the preliminary background. I don't know so much about the airport yet. I'm just beginning.”
“I'm with you. You don't wanna look like a fool asking the wrong questions.”
“Something like that,” Mueller said.
“Well, you just come along with me, and we'll see what we can find.” The woman jumped up and hurried off.
Mueller thought she was shaped like a pear, small on top and large on the bottom. Her skin was very black. Most Germans were just as prejudiced against
Schwartzers
as was the average rural Mississippian. But this one seemed reasonable.
She found several files of brochures, pamphlets, maps, photographs, and magazine and newspaper clippings, which she laid out for Mueller on a table. Then she came up with a thick sheaf of blueprints and a bundle of aerial photos.
“Before and after,” she said. “I brought you both sets, in case you wanted to compare.”
She stood, smiling shyly, as if she were a waitress waiting for a tip.
Mueller returned her smile. “You have been very helpful. I can't tell you how much.”
She beamed. “You need anything else, you come see me.”
“I'll do that,” Mueller said. When the woman was gone he started working his way through the mound of material she had brought to him. It was incredible. No matter how long he was in this country, he never ceased to be amazed at its openness. The material he'd been so freely given would have been highly classified in any Eastern European country less than ten years ago, and still on a restricted list in almost every other country in the world. Now the problem wasn't so much one of access but one of volume. There was so much information available that espionage had become an endeavor for the computer expert.
Within the hour, Mueller had what he needed, and he checked into a Hyatt near the airport, after booking a ticket on United to Portland leaving LAX at 11:30 P.M. Los Angeles, tonight, would be a near carbon copy of Oakland, and he was getting the feeling that the others would be just as easy.
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George Socrates felt his sixty-seven years. Working around the clock on two projects at the same time was taking its toll not only on him, but on both of his crews. Tired engineers made mistakes. And in this business mistakes sometimes cost lives, a fact he was reminded of every time he looked at a 522. But it was the safest airplane in the history of aviation. He had designed it that way, and it had been built that way. The learning curve had been very shallow. Before the assembly plant had gotten up to full speed, eighty of the jetliners had gone out the door. At every stage of the manufacture and assembly, Socrates had demanded and gotten perfection.
Now Sir Malcolm was telling him there could be flaws in the engine and in the way the engine was installed.
“Only two possibilities,” McGarvey cautioned. “Sir Malcolm said nothing about probabilities.” Engineering had told him that Socrates was in the research hangar where a 522 was being disassembled one nut and bolt at a time.
Socrates said nothing as the port engine was lowered out of the wing onto a maintenance stand. It was a little smaller than a military fighter/interceptor engine. About fourteen feet long and four feet in diameter at the widest, it weighed nearly forty-five hundred pounds dry. But it was a hot engine, producing seventy-five percent more thrust than the old-style jet engines. There were only two stages, instead of the normal four, in the turbine section: a high-pressure blisk and a low-pressure blisk that counter-rotated against each other. It had been a major breakthrough for Rolls in design efficiency.
When the engine was secured the technicians removed the exhaust nozzle and then the inspection plates around the turbines and, just forward of them, the ceramic combustor. Next they removed some of the plumbing and sensors blocking a cowling that covered a section of bypass ducting.
“The NTSB should be doing this,” Socrates grumbled.
“If you find something we'll pass it on to them,” McGarvey said.
The engineer looked at him. “We shouldn't be doing any of this. There should have been no crash.”
“But there was. Quit now and they win.”
I don't care
, Socrates wanted to say, but he bit it off. He did care. In 1990 when the American Airlines 522 had gone down, it was as if his child had been killed. And when their own equipment went down at Dulles someone had ripped his beating heart out of his chest. The bastards!
The first of Sir Malcolm's suggestions was that someone had tampered with the bypass duct air-flow channels. High-pressure air and fuel were mixed in the
combustor to create a controlled explosion, the mixture burning as high as thirty-eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit. This was too high a temperature for the ceramic turbine blisks, so more air was ducted to the combustion gas to reduce its temperature. If this airflow were to be interrupted the engine would overheat, swallow its blisks, and disintegrate. Literally blow itself to pieces.
The technicians blocked the duct intake forward of the low-pressure compressors, placed a pressure gauge just aft of the combustor, and powered up the test rig that Sir Malcolm had outlined. It took a few seconds for the system to fully pressurize.
“It's normal,” one of the technicians reported, looking up. “Air flow is well within specs.”
“Double the pressure,” Socrates ordered.
“It'll pop our seals.”
“Or something else.”
The technicians did as they were told, slowly adding more pressure to the system until at one hundred eighty-five percent the pressure seal they'd used to block the forward intake ruptured with a bang.
“Followed us all the way up, Mr. Socrates,” the technician said. “Nothing wrong with the airflow on this engine.”
“Could it be the material that the walls of the bypass duct are made of?” McGarvey asked. He'd taken a crash course on engine design, manufacture, and operation before he'd gone to Tokyo, and then to England to see Sir Malcolm, so he knew something about what he was watching.
“We tested this particular engine on a static stand at full thrust and didn't find a thing,” Socrates said patiently.
“But that's different than in actual operation. No vibrations from the wheels against the pavement. No landing shocks. No air turbulence.”
“There's better than seven hundred 522s flying. That's fourteen hundred engines. We've only had trouble with two.”
“Were there enough pieces found of both of those
engines that sections of the bypass duct could be identified?”
“I imagine there were.”
“What if something was wrong with the metal? If the bypass duct were to fail the engine would blow.”
“Sensors would shut it down first.”
“Not if the failure were catastrophic. Not if the entire bypass duct disintegrated because it was designed and built that way. Was the bypass duct wall on either engine magnafluxed to see if it was good?”
Socrates looked startled. “I don't know,” he said, thoughtfully. “But I'm going to find out.”
“It could be nothing.”
“We'll check everything.” Socrates stepped away from the noise of the compressor and made a call on his cellular telephone.
McGarvey walked over to one of the technicians. “Are you going to run the same test on the other engine?”
“Probably. We'll tear this one down first. Rolls wants us to check the thermocouples. If they're bad it could send faulty readings to the on-board monitor.”
“Any of them critical?”
The technician looked at him. “A few.”
“What about the bypass duct on this engine? Any way of magnafluxing the walls?”
“Not without pulling the engine completely down. Which we'll probably end up doing.”
“These are different engines from those on the 2622?”
“Totally,” the technician said.
“I see,” McGarvey said. He walked around to the boarding ladder and climbed up to the open hatch just aft of the cockpit. All the seats had been removed from the main cabin and the floor pulled up so they could inspect the hydraulics and wiring. Even the two seats on the flight deck had been pulled out and the deck removed. Much of the control panel had been dismantled as well, many of the electronic instruments removed and hanging free, connected only by their cables.
McGarvey peered down into the electronics bay beneath the cockpit. A trouble light was on, casting harsh
shadows. He climbed down the ladder. The cramped space smelled of electronics, hydraulic fluid, and kerojet.
Something was here, he thought. Something had been done to the American Airlines flight in 1990 and the Dulles flight last week to bring them down. Someone knew, and someone was still stalking them. Someone besides the Japanese.
There had to be a connection between those incidents, this airplane, and the 2622 that would fly to Honolulu next week. He could feel it just as thick on the air as the strange smells down here.
Something was coming. Some malevolent beast was raising its ugly head, threatening to devour them all.
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President James Lindsay met with Edward Reid in the Oval Office. It was an impressive room, and everyone who came here was moved. But Reid did not delude himself into believing that the President had agreed to see him because he was a former State Department official, or because he was any friend of the administration. Steve Nichols, the President's Appointments Secretary, had been very specific about it. “He'll give you fifteen minutes if you're prepared to leave your newsletter histrionics at home and give him some straight talk. Japan is very important to him at this point.”