IT WAS A SHIT JOB and Jerry knew it. Especially out here on the cold, damp tarmac on this foggy night. The only good news was that this was his last plane. A 767 with 300-plus-passenger capacity. Six bathrooms. Jerry watched as the four-inch flexible pipe started to constrict, telling him what the gauge on his lav-cart’s pump confirmed. The waste holding tanks on the big Boeing jet were sucked dry of the 1,200 pounds of human waste deposited during its last flight. Judging from the amount he just pumped, Jerry figured the plane had just completed a seven-hour flight.
What’s seven hours from SFO
, he thought as he mentally drew a compass circle from San Francisco International Airport out 4,000 or so miles. Jerry climbed to the platform at the front of the lav-cart, which put his head directly under the fuselage of the giant bird.
Maybe Hawaii or Argentina
. He disengaged the internal release valve first. That closed the petcock within the outlet housing, making it safe to disconnect the hose’s main fitting without having the formaldehyde-laced blue liquid and residue pour out over him.
Does this airline even go to South America?
Having topped off the fuel tanks of the 767, the fuel truck operator proceeded to disconnect his single-point refueling hose. The flight line, turn-around ground operation was smoothly and routinely nearing completion.
On board, the passengers were settling in and surely fighting for what little overhead compartment space was left. Jodi, a female baggage handler, pulled her motorized luggage ramp back from the closing cargo door; otherwise, Jerry would have seen him. A man in a long coat, both hands in his pockets, had just blown by the inner door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” The man had not responded when a security guard called out, “Sir, that’s a restricted area!”
Instead, he wheeled around pulling a 9mm automatic from the right pocket of his coat and fired two shots into the guard, whose bulletproof vest temporarily saved his life. The kick of getting hit, even wearing a Kevlar vest, caused the guard to fall back stunned as he fumbled for his fallen gun. The gunman continued through the glass doors that led to the flight line. Walking behind Jodi as she backed up her luggage conveyor belt, he passed most of the ground crew. The roar of the turning engines from an MD-80 pushing back from the next gate drowned out all sound on the ramp. That, however, was not the reason the man disregarded another security guard blasting through the door wielding his gun and commanding, “Freeze. Drop your weapon!”
The workers scrambled and hit the deck. The man pulled something from his left pocket while simultaneously drawing the gun again from his right and firing. The second guard’s shot slammed into the man’s shoulder, spinning him around and sending him down. The guard ran toward the downed man with his gun fully extended, his eyes wide and heart pounding in his chest, as this was the first man he ever shot. He was less than a yard from him when he realized what was in the wounded man’s other hand.
“Oh, my God!”
It was too late. The man released his grip on a grenade and flipped it with his last ounce of strength. It rolled ten feet, under the fuel truck. Just as the guard registered what the dying man had done, his face was flashed by the blast as his entire body was lifted and blown back, along with flaming debris and an expanding ball of flame engulfing the area. The female baggage handler’s body, perforated by grenade fragments, was also thrown back like a rag doll from the force of the explosion. Her ton-and-a-half conveyor belt truck was cart wheeling end-over-end, eventually ripping open the bottom of the plane’s huge wing, which contained a completely filled and topped off fuel tank. The machine landed on top of Jodi, wedging her body into the corner of the terminal building. The breached wing tank exploded and the plane split in two, each 200,000-pound section lifting fifty feet into the air and crashing back down. The rising orange ball of flame was visible for fifty miles, and falling debris shattered the twenty-six-foot-high glass windows and crashed through the roof of the terminal building. The aluminum halves of fuselage that were once the giant plane melted away instantly in the intense heat, dropping the 324 already-dead passengers and crew into the pyre of flaming Jet-A fuel.
They would find Jerry’s mangled body 400 feet east on a taxiway.
There was fog coming through the air-conditioning vents. It was so hot in this part of the desert that condensation was forming in the car. Winding through the barren landscape, Hiccock drove a rented four-door sedan. The car’s radio was tuned to the news.
“… engulfing the plane and the terminal. There are at least 320 dead on the plane and as many as 50 others in the terminal and on the tarmac. It is known that the plane was being refueled at the time and speculation is rising that possibly a spark of some …”
His cell phone started to ring and he lowered the radio. “Hello, Ray.”
“Where are you now?” the chief said.
“I think I’m about five minutes away.”
“Call when you get there; I have a fax for you to read.”
“If the Admiral has a fax machine.”
“Do you even know if the Admiral still lives there?”
“No, I don’t know if anyone will even be there…”
“Did you check with local utilities or police?”
“I tried that, but the Admiral’s deed, mortgage, phone, and electric bill must be in another name, as far as I can tell.”
“Wonderful, and this is your last great high-tech hope?” Reynolds added, not trying to hide his lack of confidence in the whole idea.
“I’ve got a hunch about this. What’s in the fax?”
“Basically it’s a get out of jail free card for you. The head of the Presidential Detail of the Secret Service has determined that you were not materially connected in the plot to assassinate the boss. Although a congressional oversight committee might censure you and Naomi wants to spank you in Macy’s window for all the world to see, I think you’ve heard the end of this.
“What about Carly? How did she backtrack my location?”
“The FBI has found she has a family relative who works for the phone company. The FCC is applying pressure now, but she hasn’t given her cousin up yet.”
“Why do I feel responsible for her?”
“Were you fucking her?”
Hiccock was taken aback by that question. “No. What makes you think…?”
“Bill, I’ve seen the girl; she’s a looker. If I were your age and single, I’d have been tempted.”
“No, nothing like that happened.”
“Well, Tate at the FBI was trying to make a meal out of your dinner with her the other night.”
“How did they find out about that?”
“She expensed you out. It was on her T and E report.”
“Wow, everybody gets receipts for things. I gotta learn that lesson soon.” Hiccock shot glance towards the rental contract on the seat next to him.
“Hear the news out of S.F.?”
“It must have been a horrific way to die. I don’t think I can remember when a plane exploded refueling.”
“It’s happened a few times in the military. Static. It builds up on the truck frame, then discharges. Unless the FBI discovers evidence of terrorist activity, I bet when the wreckage cools they’ll find the fuel truck had no static strap dangling to the floor.”
“Gee, I almost forgot about that, it’s such a low-tech thing.”
“Yeah, easy to miss. Poor bastards never knew what hit ’em.”
“I can’t imagine the horror …”
“Boss is calling, don’t waste too much time with your high-tech hermit, okay, Bill?”
Navajo Gully 1 mile.
There actually were places with names like that
, Hiccock thought as he passed the highway sign.
A million miles from civilization, with a backdrop of purple mountains off in the hazy distance, Hiccock noticed a rare patch of green and color in the dusty, dry New Mexican desert. He stopped his car and walked up the hillside toward the humble house. The plantings provided a welcome mat of sorts. He noticed someone in the thick of them and approached respectfully, as he realized this was an older woman. Trying not to startle her as she bent over tending the yuccas and some other plants, he said, “Excuse me.” She continued working with a trowel. He upped his volume. “Excuse me …” She stood, her left hand pushing against her lower back, the hand tool in her right. He smiled. “I’m looking for Admiral Parks?” he said, making a question out of the statement.
Squinting in the noonday sun, she regarded him and started to pull off her work gloves. “No one has called me ‘Admiral’ in thirty years.” A half-smile momentarily flashed from under her Katharine Hepburn-ish hat. In that moment, Hiccock saw in her mature, sunburned face the traces of the younger woman he’d only seen in her black-and-white file photo.
It was tea for two as the pot sat on a wood-burning stove in the center of the two-room house. A cup was passed between Hiccock and Admiral Henrietta Parks, USN retired. She was a serious-looking woman with rugged skin, her blue eyes set off by the long gray ponytail hanging down one shoulder. She could have been a pioneer a hundred years earlier.
“People are blowing up things?” she asked.
“It’s been all over the media …”
“I don’t get any TV, radio, or newspapers.”
“How can you manage to unplug like that?”
“After I was invited to leave the Navy, I just stayed away from anything technical or mechanical.”
“I’m amazed. A lot of people fantasize about disconnecting from our crazy world, but you are the first person I have ever heard of who has actually done it.”
“What do you want from me, Mr. Hiccock?”
“Call me Bill, please.” Her directness reminded Bill that she was an Admiral. “I’m here because you wrote about this thirty years ago. You practically predicted what’s happening now.”
“How did you know about that?”
“I used your paper—your premise actually—as the principal source in my thesis.”
“You wrote a thesis on naval computational warfare?”
“No, it was on predicted validity and baseline sampling. I quoted from your work extensively … with footnotes.” Bill felt like he was suddenly defending himself.
“Because of that little manifesto they forced me to take my pension,” she said, looking off at the setting sun.
“Like Kaczynski …”
“Who?”
“Ted Kaczynski … the Unabomber.”
“Can’t say I know the gentleman.”
A slight shadow of concern darkened Hiccock’s face. Something had nagged at him since he entered the house, but now he knew what it was. He pushed his chair back, got up, and, walking off the porch, proceeded to scan the outside of the house. After inspecting all four corners, he returned. “There’s probably not a chance in hell that your power, telephone, and cable are shot under the ground, right?”
“No electricity, no phone, no telegrams.”
“Telegrams?”
“Cables.”
He tried to squeeze the unbelievability of the situation from his eyes. He walked down to the car past a load of firewood. Retrieving his satellite phone from the front seat, he hit autodial.
“Yes, Bill?” Reynolds said impatiently.
“I need a few things.”
One Corps Slice Signal Support Package was delivered. It consisted of three army trucks and a communications van with camouflage, netting, and a satellite dish array out of Fort Hood, Texas, and was parked in front of Henrietta’s cabin. A generator truck whined in the background as a few military technicians milled about. The shoulder patch on one of the shirts read “3rd Signal Brigade.” A mass of camouflage-wrapped wires and fiber-optic cable packs connected to the trucks was snaked into the cabin. They were connected to two four-foot-high shock-mounted mobile rack units containing routers and codecs. From there, two lines ran to a twin-screen Sun Microsystems minicomputer that sat in front of Admiral Parks. And sat … and sat.
“What’s the matter?” Hiccock said, concerned.
“How do you turn it on?” she asked, looking at the racks, not realizing the power switch was hidden in the design of the twin monitors nowadays.
Hiccock breathed deeply.
“Listen, Mr. Hiccock, you came after me. I didn’t ask you to come here. Now I am sorry if I don’t know how to get this contraption going. In fact, I don’t know why the hell you think I can help you at all. So maybe you just better pack up all this equipment and make sure not to scratch my floors when you haul it out of here.”
Hiccock studied her, trying to figure out if this was her way of signing off or just negotiating. “Admiral, I believe in you and your theories. I want you on my team because I believe you have a contribution to make. The nation is suffering right now. No one has a clue what’s going on. Thirty years ago, you did the basic analysis of what I think might be happening today. I want you to be familiar with what’s gone on since then.”
“Bilgewater!”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s a load of backwash. You happened to pull my report to the Joint Chiefs out of some dusty old pile and now you have elevated it to the status of ‘scripture.’ I think it’s got more to do with your pride than my writings.”
“Fair enough. Maybe I am a little biased toward your paper, but the president has given me the job of finding an alternate causality. My intuition tells me computers somehow play a role here.”
“So why do you think I can help?”
“Maybe you can give this a fresh new look from an old perspective.”
“Old? Try ancient! I can’t even recognize this apparatus here as a computer. In my day they were enormous.”
Hiccock pondered this for a moment. “I got a better idea.” He removed his laptop from its case. “Let’s start small.” He opened the PowerBook and pointed to the “on” button. “You press this circle here; it’s actually a momentary contact push button, they like the design to be sleek and smooth so they hide it.”
Later that evening, as Hiccock was leaving, he said, “I’ll be back from Washington in two days. Just fool around with the laptop before you tackle the big one. These men will camp outside and won’t bother you unless you have questions.”
“I haven’t touched a computer in three decades. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”