Let the Music Play - 37. Fire in the Sky

Less than a second after detonation, part of the double wave of photons reached an altitude of 10,900 miles, where a tiny fraction found itself captured by a wide-angle lens and directed to the heart of a very special orbiting camera called a Bhangmeter, one of which is on each of the constellation of over twenty-four orbiting NAVSTAR GPS satellites.

The camera’s operating system analyzed the optical signature, matching it against pre-defined parameters. Half a second later, the satellite transmitted an alert to its ground station, followed by the data itself. Within three seconds, the seven other GPS satellites within line-of-sight of the blast transmitted their own data.

In the North American Space Command headquarters (SPACECOM) operations room at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado, a bored watch officer flipped through his novel for the fifth time, waiting for the end of another monotonous shift. Everything changed as one of his monitors beeped. The first thing he noticed was the glaring red ‘NUDET’ blinking at the top of that screen. Pressing an alarm button of his own to notify other members of the command staff, he began studying the data dump. His blood pounded in his ears as he realized that he wasn’t looking at a false alarm, but at a real nuclear event.

In Toowoomba, the fireball was spreading out, reaching half a mile across before lifting into the sky, carrying countless tons of dirt and ash, along with copious amounts of cobalt-60 and a myriad of other radioactive debris. The damage on the ground was total; nothing remained standing within two miles of the blast’s epicenter. What had once been The Scar’s assembly facility was obliterated entirely, nothing but a memory at the center of a glowing crater hundreds of feet across. Most of the city had been reduced to burning rubble, and what little that was far enough away from ground zero to be left standing would be uninhabitable for a time span measured in decades. Sixty thousand people had died almost instantly from the bomb’s initial effects, but the reaper’s bill was far from paid. Twenty thousand more would die within the week from injuries and radiation, and fifty thousand more within a year, as the intense fallout, several hundred times that of a conventional nuclear weapon, drifted with the winds. The city of Brisbane was spared only by providence; the winds that day were from the southwest, which took the fallout cloud to the city’s north. The fallout pattern took the form of a cone, beginning in Toowoomba and extending in an ever-widening swath northeast to the sea. Along the coast, the fallout zone stretched from Caloundra in the south to Torquay in the north. All told, an area of Queensland exceeding ten thousand square miles had been rendered uninhabitable for decades.

On their hilltop twenty miles to the south, Dimitri and The Scar, facing away from Toowoomba, had seen the brilliant flash. They turned around to behold their handiwork, watching as the seething fireball climbed into the heavens, and The Scar saw the realization of his dreams to be within his grasp at last.

The Scar was the first to speak. “At least our issues with Vladimir are finalized,” he said with a smirk.

“I told him he had a bright future,” Dimitri replied as the rising fireball dimmed, allowing them to see the distinctive stem of the mushroom cloud. “Vohzd, we must hurry. There is a chance that the Australians will issue a grounding order for all aircraft. The sooner we are on our way, the better.”

Nodding, and taking one last proud glance towards what had once been Toowoomba, the Scar climbed into the Land Rover as Dimitri jumped in and fired up the engine.

One minute and forty seconds later, the remnant of the shockwave arrived on the now-vacant hilltop, diminished by distance to a rumble reminiscent of angry thunder, followed a few minutes later by a warm gust of wind.

Seconds after the detonation, the SPACECOM watch officer shouted over his headset, “Double-flash signature, detected by multiple platforms, optical spectrum profile consistent with a nuclear event, eastern Australia.”

Using a different set of controls, he tapped into the feed from a DSP (Defense Support Program) infra-red monitoring satellite in geosynchronous orbit. The DSP satellites are the U.S. Military’s primary early-warning system for missile launches and other high-energy events. Immediately, the false-color image appeared on his screen and he stared in horror at the growing blob over Australia. “DSP data confirms, fireball over eastern Australia, localizing now.” The GPS downlink and the DSP data correlated and moments later he called out, “Event localized, at or near the city of Toowoomba, in the state of Queensland,” he barked, his voice far calmer than he felt, though his voice was far from calm.

The Nuclear Detonation Report, confirmed again by the DSP ground station at Barkley Air Force Base and by the National Reconnaissance Agency, would in and of itself have raised havoc in the U.S. chain of command. However, SPACECOM is part of North American Aerospace Defense Command – NORAD – and the four-star Commander in Chief of NORAD (CINCNORAD), who had his office just yards away, dashed into the control center.

Looking up at the main displays, one of which held the infrared image from Australia, General James Mead, who had been given his fourth star and command of NORAD just weeks before, squinted through his one good eye – he’d lost the other in an accident the year before. As he realized what he was seeing, he felt his stomach clench and goose bumps rise on his arms. His first order required no thought at all. Lifting a white phone, he ordered, “Take us to DEFCON 4.”

The sergeant, studying his screen, said, “Sir, based on the thermal signature, I evaluate the yield as between fifty and one-fifty kilotons.”

Why the hell, the general wondered, has someone nuked Australia?

At that moment, over thirty fax machines, located throughout the Pentagon and at various command centers in the U.S., began to hum and buzz in response to calls from Dimitri’s automated program. One of those fax machines was located in the NORAD signals office.

Taking a seat in his darkened command room, General Mead had only a few moments to begin glancing at the various screens and status displays, before an ashen-faced captain from his signals office thrust a fax into his hands.

The shock value was exactly what The Scar had intended, though the results were beyond what he had anticipated. Glancing down at the sheet in his hand, General Mead then looked at the screen where the remains of the nuclear fireball were still fading, and than again down at the paper in his hand. The lines that seared their way into the general’s mind were the ones about nuclear devices being in the United States, coupled with the one promising further proof within the U.S. at a time and place of the attacker’s choosing. The general, for a moment, considered contacting the Joint Chiefs or the Secretary of Defense, but given the threat and the confirmed nuclear event with delivery method unknown, he knew he had to act. What he wanted was a full defensive alert for conventional forces, but there was no time to do it selectively, unit by unit.

The U.S. Military is structured so that it can react quickly to threats. There are two Emergency Condition (EMERCON) warnings. The first, Defense Emergency, denoted a major hostile attack on United States or allied forces overseas, or an overt action made against the United States. The fax in the general’s sweaty hand, combined with the nuclear event in Australia, met those criteria precisely. Such a warning, due to its effects, can only be given by the president, the Secretary of Defense, or the commander of a major unified command such as STRATCOM (U.S. Strategic Forces Command) or, the commander of NORAD.

The most immediate result of the EMERCON alert, which had never before been given, was an alteration in the global DEFCON (Defense readiness Condition) state. The DEFCON level is a measure of the activation and readiness state of the U.S. Military. It can apply to individual units all the way up to the entire military, worldwide. U.S. DEFCON states are matched to situations of military severity and threat. The standard peacetime protocol is DEFCON 5 (though strategic and forward-deployed units are most often at effectively higher readiness) and the lower the number, the greater the perceived threat. On September 11^th, 2001, the U.S. had gone to DEFCON 3. Twice before, during the latter half of the 20^th Century, the U.S. had reached DEFCON 2. DEFCON 1 indicates the expectation of or confirmation of actual imminent strategic attack and prior to that day had never been declared globally.

His decision took only a moment, though nonetheless left him as pale as a ghost. He ordered, “This is CINCNORAD, I am declaring EMERCON, Defense Emergency. This is no drill.” Slamming the phone down, he turned to look at the main board in his command center, specifically at the DEFCON status, and he began counting off the seconds. It should take less than four, he knew.

The first and most significant result of an EMERCON alert was to change the global DEFCON state. It was automatic. The general watched as the numeric display beside the ‘DEFCON’ sign changed from a pale yellow ‘4’ to a glowing red ‘1’. Turning to face his gathering command staff, he barked, “People, we’re at DEFCON 1; make sure signals gets the word out to all commands, get me CINCSTRATCOM on the line, and alert Secret Service to get the president to a NEACP.” He was referring to one of several Boeing E-4’s, essentially a converted 747 designed to be a survivable airborne command post, which he pronounced ‘kneecap’.

With those orders given, a flash alert went out to all U.S. commands worldwide as the U.S. military shifted to a war footing. They had no way of knowing it, but they were following the ancient maxim of locking the barn door after the horse had gone.

As yet unaware of the nuclear explosion in Australia that had occurred just two minutes before, Helen listened on her phone as Günter explained the situation. The call was dropped due to the massive amount of cell traffic resulting from people finding out about the nuclear explosion in Australia. Not since 9-11 had the US cell phone grid endured such a traffic load. On this day, as on that one, it proved sporadically unequal to the task.

Helen tried twice to reconnect, but Günter had filled her in enough before the call ended. She was not displeased with his news; the interview with the customs agent was taking longer than they had expected and might require a trip downtown so that Joe could look at some mug shots. Günter felt it might take all afternoon and evening but he wanted to be there, so he would, he’d said, just catch a commercial flight to Colorado that night.

Helen hoped that the investigation would be productive and the fact the interview had gone into overtime was, she felt, a good sign.

Leaving the building for the drive to Van Nuys airport, she flicked on the radio. Minutes later, all thoughts of counterfeit T-shirts were chased from her mind by a news bulletin.

Plodding up the stairs into their waiting jet even before its pilot had arrived, the members of Instinct took seats in the passenger compartment as they waited for Helen to join them. Brandon glanced forward, looking at the plane’s empty right-seat, and shrugged off any thoughts of flying; he knew they had far more pressing concerns to deal with first.

The news from Australia had arrived almost an hour before, just as they were leaving their hotel. Their first reaction had been disbelief, flipping channels in the limo’s TV, only to find that the news from Australia filled every station. As the reality sunk in, it had shaken them all; an entire city obliterated, wiped out in the blink of an eye. The video footage of the roiling mushroom cloud that marked the city of Toowoomba’s grave was an image of destruction that would haunt a generation. Worse still, the more recent reports indicated high levels of radiation, proving that the fireball was nuclear and not a meteor or comet as some of the talking heads in the news media had originally speculated.

Only Jon was old enough to have vivid memories of 9-11 and those recollections came flooding back: sitting in front of a TV set, seeing what he thought was a strange movie, one that soon confused his ten-year-old mind. He had flipped the channel, only to do so again a moment later, soon discovering that the ‘movie’ was on every station. At last, he’d understood that it was real. The memory of the shock, and the feeling that the world had changed forever, were foremost on his mind.

Toowoomba. That name had a special meaning to the four members of Instinct; one indelibly linked with Jerry ever since they’d recovered the planted GPS and examined its contents.

Jon dug his laptop out of his cabin bag, setting it up on the plane’s single table. Hoping that it would work, he tried the cellular wireless connection and moments later was rewarded by a news site loading with agonizing slowness.

“The servers must be overloaded; everyone must be checking in for news,” Eric said flatly, his voice lacking its normal upbeat cadence. They were alone in the plane; only a single maintenance man was in evidence and he was working outside.

Jon launched a search hoping that someone would have coordinates for the blast. He found nothing, other than one brief mention that the epicenter appeared to be a mile south of the city’s center. “Look, that’s the same place we tracked Jerry to, right on the damn nose.”

Like a nightmare, unwanted yet all consuming, a thought entered Brandon’s mind and he gave voice to his fears. “Could Jerry have had something to do with this? I know we were suspicious of the guy, but we figured him for some kind of scammer.”

Staring at the screen, Jon nodded solemnly, “This is one hell of a coincidence. The location looks like a perfect match and Joe did say he believed his father was some kind of arms dealer. We need to tell Helen right away, about everything that we’ve done, and why.” A failed attempt to use his cell phone prompted Jon to add, “Looks like the phone network is overloaded. Helen should be here soon anyway.”

Günter strolled out onto the airport tarmac, relieved he’d made it in time for the charter flight and wouldn’t have to fly commercial. The customs agent had abruptly terminated the interview, saying he’d been called away for some kind of emergency meeting. Günter had not been pleased about the remainder of Joe’s interview being postponed for at least three days, but Günter loved the mountains and was looking forward to a few days in Telluride. Loathing radio commercials, Günter tended to play CDs in his car and today had been no exception; he hadn’t heard the news from Australia.

As he rounded the end of a metal hanger, the chartered jet, a Beechcraft Premier 1A, came into view, as did the man working on it.

It wasn’t the man in coveralls that first caught Günter’s attention. The object that caught his eye was the truck-mounted cherry picker on which he stood. Due to the angle, it looked to Günter as if the edge of the basket was touching the plane’s nose. With growing concern, he advanced his gait to a hurried jog.

Arriving at the jet’s nose, he glanced up, noting with relief that a gap of several inches showed between the plane’s sleek nose and the metal basket. The man in it, Günter saw, was watching him out of the corner of his eye while he applied something to the windshield’s central pylon with a sponge.

Mario bit back a curse as the man below showed no signs of leaving. With as much haste as he dared, Mario applied a last sponge-full of raw, pureed goose fat to the central pylon and the area just below the windshield, making sure he concealed the goose blood he’d applied just moments before. The pencil-thin line of white detonator cord he’d adhered to the pylon was nearly unnoticeable, but the small control unit attached with epoxy at its lower end just below it was another matter. It wouldn’t be visible to the pilot, but the small control unit, nothing more than the innards of a digital watch along with a small lithium battery, was easily visible from the outside of the plane. Painted white, it would pass a casual observer’s notice, but a trained eye, as Mario well knew, would pick out the incongruous object in seconds.

Taking care to keep his body between his handiwork and Günter, Mario pressed a tiny activation stud on the timer casing to arm the device and begin its countdown. With that task done in the blink of an eye, he plastered a friendly smile on his face and lowered the basket to the tarmac. To hold Günter’s attention, he asked as he jumped out, “How can I help you, sir?”

Günter eyed the man, taking in the aviation maintenance company’s logo on the coveralls. Glancing up at the nose of the plane and seeing what appeared to be a layer of grayish white grease, Günter nodded in its direction and asked with no apparent emotion, “What were you doing?”

Mario could tell professional interest when he saw it and he knew there was little chance of talking his way out of the situation. Holding out his blue plastic bucket with his left hand, Mario smiled, angling his body slightly to the right.

Günter, distracted for a moment as Mario had intended by the blue bucket, didn’t notice in time to react as Mario’s right hand emerged from his jacket. All of Günter’s instincts lit off at once as his subconscious mind recognized the dull black shape that came into view. ‘Gun,’ was the only thought in his mind as he reacted, jumping to his right in an attempt to dodge.

Mario’s own training kicked in as he tracked the man who was now his target. Turning with his body, he led his target, applying steady pressure on the trigger. His aim had never failed him before and this day proved to be no exception as the gun kicked in his steady grip.

Günter recovered from his sideways dodge, spinning on the ball of his left foot to face his opponent, as he felt a mild blow land on his chest. Time seemed to slow down for him. As he staggered from the impact of the silenced nine-millimeter slug, he was surprised that he’d taken what he thought was a punch from a man whose arms were at his sides. Confused, unable to focus his thoughts, Günter looked into Mario’s eyes, seeing steely resolve and nothing more. Glancing down at his chest, which, he was now aware, did not feel right at all, Günter saw a small circle of blood growing on his white shirt, the red surrounding a very small hole in the cloth. For an instant, he wondered if that could be why he was feeling so very strange, but that thought faded, pushed away by a growing sensation of pressure and nausea caused by the bullet that had stilled his heart forever.

Sinking to his knees as his vision grayed out, Günter’s last thought was to shout a warning, but the final blackness engulfed him before the cry had even formed in his throat.

Cursing his luck, Mario struggled to twist the now-useless single-use silencer off his pistol, damaging a few of the improvised threads in the process. Dropping the silencer in his pocket, he brought the pistol back to bear on Günter’s unmoving corpse. Taking a fast glance around, hoping that no one had yet noticed, Mario, with pistol at the ready, grabbed the body by the arm and heaved it into the cherry-picker’s basket. Sparing one brief moment to check for a pulse, he closed the platform’s door. He dashed to the back of the truck and used the set of hydraulic controls located there to raise the basket into driving position, which he hoped was also high enough to obscure the body from any prying eyes.

Dashing into the truck’s cab, he started the engine and slipped the truck smoothly into gear. With one concerned glance in the mirror he pulled away, wishing that he’d had the few seconds he’d needed to complete one last check of his work. With resignation, he decided that the bomb would either work or it wouldn’t; there was no use in further exposing himself now. The timer was set and it was out of his hands. Instead, he focused his mind on his immediate need; finding a way to dispose of the body which currently occupied the cherry-picker’s basket, just as soon as the band’s jet had taken off.

Helen, accompanied by the chartered plane’s pilot, stepped out onto the tarmac, her mind paying no heed to the small white cherry-picker maintenance truck roaring by. The news from Australia weighed heavily on her mind; she too had seen the video clips of the doomsday cloud rising into the Australian sky. Shuddering at the thought, she climbed the steps into the plane, wondering if the world would ever be the same.

She flipped open her cell phone and speed-dialed Günter’s number, but the fast pulse of a busy signal informed her that the cell network was still overloaded by a frantic public. She considered returning to the terminal to use a land line but dismissed the thought immediately; Günter’s cell phone still wouldn’t work and he’d told her to go without him.

Walking to the table where her four downcast charges sat, Helen took a seat and buckled in as the pilot raised the stairs and closed the door.

As the twin turbofans spooled up, Helen noticed that Brandon wasn’t up front, but assumed that he was in no mood for flying. The plane began to taxi as Jon fixed her in a serious gaze and said, “We’ve got something we need to tell you. It’s about Jerry...”

Parked just across the street from the airport’s perimeter fence, Mario watched as Instinct’s jet taxied to the end of the runway and began its takeoff roll. As soon as the plane was airborne, he reminded himself to check the body’s pockets for any identification. Mario put the truck in gear, planning to drive a few miles and then find a likely looking dumpster. That, he felt, would be good enough.

She’d never seen her four boys look so serious, so for the first and possibly last time in her life, Helen didn’t say a word and let Jon, with some occasional additions from his band mates, tell her of their suspicions. She’d opened her eyes wide in surprise when they got to the part about planting the GPS and opened them wider still when she’d heard that the nuclear ground zero appeared to be exactly where they’d tracked Jerry.

It took twenty minutes of listening, interspersed with questions, for her to take it all in. Her first gut reaction was that they were paranoid, or crazy. Under other circumstances, she’d have suspected some kind of joke, but the events of the day, coupled with the four sets of deadly-serious eyes facing her, put any such thought to rest.

Almost as an afterthought, Jon added, “I know this is a stretch but think it through. Joe told us that Jerry isn’t what we think; that he’s not gay and is a fucking arms dealer, and then the place we tracked him to gets nuked. Eric has hated Jerry from the start and that intuition, or whatever the hell it is that Eric has, is almost never wrong. You know that, Helen, you’ve seen him do it too many times. We’ve got to let the FBI, or somebody, know to take a look at Jerry, because if we don’t and he had some part in all this, using our gear...” Jon let his words trail off as Helen’s expression let him know that he’d made his case.

The plane, climbing through twenty thousand feet, rolled out on course for Telluride, leaving the Los Angles area behind as it soared over the Mojave Desert. The pilot monitored the autopilot, settling in for what he assumed would be an uneventful flight.

Any chance of normalcy would prove a forlorn hope, due to the tiny electronic control glued just below the windshield’s center pylon. The device, roughly the shape of a hockey puck but only an inch and a half across and half an inch thick, had but one task; when the digital countdown timer reached zero, the watch was set to beep. However, that alarm would be redirected to a tiny relay, sending a pulse of current from the device’s internal battery to the micro-detonator in the high-explosive primer-cord.

Dimitri’s instructions to Mario had been explicit; use primer-cord as a linear charge to cave in the windshield of the aircraft, killing the pilot and destroying the plane’s controls. The goose blood and fat had been applied, again at Dimitri’s orders, to ensure that the resulting crash would be ruled an accident; every few years, a bird strike downed a small jet, most often military. Dimitri, in formulating his plan, had recalled an accident he’d read about years before; an F-4 Phantom had hit a Canada goose. The shock of slamming into nearly twenty pounds of bird at five-hundred miles an hour had shattered the plane’s canopy, causing it to crash. The goose’s remains should show up in a cursory inspection and he had good reason to assume that the American authorities would be too preoccupied to do more than that. For that reason, the operation had been delayed until after the successful detonation of the bomb in Toowoomba. The fatal crash, he’d hoped, would be ruled an accident, and that would be that.

Primer-cord, also called detonator cord, is often used in building demolition; wrapped tightly around steel or concrete columns, it cuts like a hot knife through butter upon detonation. However, unless tightly attached, the force of the explosion would be largely lost.

The primer-cord glued to the windshield pylon had not fully adhered at the top, something Mario had not had time to notice, nor correct, due to Günter’s interruption. As a result, one-third of the primer cord – the part nearest the top of the pylon – had come loose in the four-hundred mile per hour slipstream. It was no longer in full contact with the metal. However, the remaining two-thirds were still solidly attached as the timer’s digital display, unseen inside its housing, ran down to zero.

A fraction of a second later, the detonator performed its singular task, triggering the high-explosive immolation of the primer-cord. The resulting shockwave performed as expected, shattering the adhesive which held the timer assembly in place, sending the timer housing spinning away into the empty sky. The remaining effects were far less benign.

The shockwave slammed into the windshield pylon, snapping it from its upper and lower mounts and driving it several inches towards the rear of the plane. The resulting near-instant distortion of the windshield caused it to shatter, and the shock against the pylon caused fragments near it to accelerate, becoming a hail of small shrapnel which slammed into the jet’s delicate electronics and its even more fragile pilot.

Due to the diminished effect of the loose section of primer-cord, the windshield assembly did not collapse completely, but the damage was lethal nonetheless; the business jet shuddered from the force of the explosion, warning lights snapping on for an instant as vital circuits in the control panels were riddled with shrapnel. The loosened right-hand pane, shattered but still held largely together by the layer of clear plastic between the layers of glass, trembled between the opposing pressures of the onrushing air outside and the pressurized cabin atmosphere inside. The greater pressure won; the remains of the right-hand windshield bowed out, driven by air pressure, parting company with the center pylon. The glass, freed of restraint in the center and upper and lower edges, swung around its one remaining contact point like a hinge, slapping against the side of the plane before the slipstream tore it completely free. It slid aft, accelerating rapidly, as the slipstream sent it careening into the open maw of the jet’s starboard engine, where the impact shattered the spinning turbofans, and they in turn disintegrated, sending their own wave of shrapnel through the jet’s tail empennage. The elapsed time since detonation: less than two seconds.

The jet shuddered, followed by a roaring howl from the cockpit as the cabin air surged out of the gaping hole where the starboard windshield had once been. A sudden grey mist of condensation filled the cabin as the air pressure dropped by more than half in under a second and the temperature decreased by forty degrees as a result of the catastrophic depressurization.

The pilot, ignoring his stinging neck, cut the fuel to the now-dead starboard engine as the plane, reacting to the massively increased drag over the upper section of the nose, responded to the increased aerodynamic pressure by slowly nosing over into a dive. He glanced at his emergency oxygen mask, only to find its air-hose shredded and useless. The pilot pulled back on the yoke and throttled back on the remaining engine, maintaining a forty degree rate of decent, knowing instinctively that he had to reach thicker air before hypoxia robbed him and his passengers of consciousness.

Checking his instruments, he discovered that most of his electronic readouts were blank, including the autopilot. A quick glance confirmed that only a few electronic items showed any signs of life.

Addressing the greatest threat first, he glanced at the analog altimeter and pulled back on the yoke when he saw it spiral down through fifteen thousand feet. The plane staggered out of its dive and only then did the pilot notice the sensation of warm liquid. He glanced down, only to be numbed by the sight of his upper arm covered in bright red blood. His left hand darted upwards, slapping down against his neck, pressing against the spurting cut below his right ear.

He didn’t have time to think, because the blood loss, combined with the shock, confused his thoughts, and he barely noticed as his vision began to darken. He slumped forward, unconscious, as the blood spurting from his partially severed carotid artery at last began to slow, as his heart fought its losing battle for life.

The weight of unconscious pilot’s hand on the yoke pulled down on the right, sending the plane into a slight but increasing right-hand bank.

Gasping for breath in the thin air, ignoring the pain in his ears, Brandon looked forward and saw the gaping hole in the windshield. That sight chilled him, but not nearly as much as seeing the pilot’s head sag forward. His eyes opening wide in horror, Brandon unbuckled his seatbelt and staggered towards the cockpit, fighting the increasing tilt of the deck as the plane’s roll took it past forty-five degrees of bank angle. Brandon slipped against a seat, struggling to keep moving forward, towards the howling hole and the control yoke just below it.

Chase watched Brandon go, not yet understanding why. Desperately trying to comprehend what was happening, he glanced first at Helen, seeing nothing but confusion and a touch of fear. Turning to look back at his brothers, he locked eyes first with Jon, and then Eric, but before he could shout a question the plane’s increasing bank and the rising howl of the slipstream caused him to turn and face forward, hanging on to the armrests as he gasped for breath.

Struggling to climb over the right-hand seat as the plane rolled past eighty degrees, Brandon fell against it, clawing his way forward, his attention riveted on the control yoke. The plane, with its wings nearly vertical, began an accelerated sideslip towards the ground. The tail, offering the most resistance to the sideways airflow, forced the nose of the plane further and further down. Reaching for the right-hand yoke, now just inches from his grasp, Brandon looked through the gaping hole as the approaching ground filled the plummeting aircraft’s window.

Now aided by gravity, Brandon fell forward, landing hard against the control panel before forcing himself into the right seat, his hand grabbing hold of the yoke as the nose of the plane angled down past forty-five degrees and the wings approached vertical. For a moment he hesitated, not knowing what to do, but he knew he had to level the wings and pull the nose up. He had no clue how to raise the nose with the wings vertical, so by default, he made the right choice and turned the yoke to the left as the aircraft shuddered.

For a long moment, one that seemed like an eternity to Brandon, the plane hesitated, until finally, a few degrees at a time, it rolled to the left, as the airspeed indicator passed redline, the maximum speed the airframe could safely endure. As the wings neared horizontal Brandon began to center the yoke as he continued to pull back, and the nose of the plane began to inch up towards the horizon.

The wind from the gaping hole blasted past his head, roaring in his ears, and he concentrated on leveling the plane out, breathing a sigh of relief as the nose slowly rose to level off, coming out of the dive barely two thousand feet above the jagged rocks and spires of the arid mountains below. His relief was short lived; as soon as he had the plane level he found that he had to maintain some backpressure on the yoke to keep the nose up, along with several degrees of left bank to counter a slow turn to the right. As his airspeed reduced, Brandon glanced at the throttles. Seeing that they were all the way back, he advanced them both until his airspeed ceased its drop. He had no way of knowing that one engine was dead. He slipped his feet onto the rudder pedals, but after a few hesitant tries found that they had no effect at all. What he couldn’t know was that the shrapnel from the disintegrating turbine blades had severed the rudder control cables.

Confused, but with the plane stable for the moment, Brandon glanced over at the pilot, noticing the tremendous amount of blood for the first time. He didn’t have time to think on what that meant, as Jon struggled forward, stopping between the seats as he turned his attention to the pilot.

Feeling a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold, Jon looked at the fading flow of blood from the gash in the man’s neck. Pressing his hand against the wound to try and stop the bleeding, he glanced down at the pools of blood on the plane’s carpeted deck. Helen stumbled up behind him, her own eyes widening with a look of horror as she surveyed the carnage.

“I don’t think he’s breathing,” Helen yelled above the roar of the wind, “Can you feel a pulse?”

All Jon could feel was the sticky, rapidly cooling blood on the pilot’s neck. He didn’t know how to feel for a pulse, but the sheer amount of blood, combined with the lack of blood flow from the wound, made him fear the worst.

Helen reached in, feeling for a pulse on the man’s wrist and then on his neck, trying one side and then the other, but finding nothing. Not knowing if she was doing it wrong, or there was nothing to be found, she yelled, “I can’t find a pulse and I don’t see him breathing. Unbuckle him and help me get him out of there, but keep your hand on his neck; try and stop as much of the bleeding as you can.”

Jon reached down with his free right hand and tugged the pilot’s seatbelt open. Shifting position, he moved his left hand to better stanch the flow of blood, but as he did so he noticed to his horror that the blood flow had ceased almost entirely. Taking his hand away a few inches at a time, Jon turned his head to look at Helen with fear in his eyes, emphasized by a slow shake of his head. He twisted around, hooking his arms under the pilot’s armpits, and pulled the limp body from the seat. With Helen’s help, he dragged the man back to the first passenger seat.

Chase and Eric joined Helen in attempting to tend to the pilot and Jon spun around to head forward to check on Brandon.

Still struggling with the controls, concentrating on keeping level, Brandon squinted against the wind that blasted him in the face and had already forced him to scrunch down and sideways to escape the worst of its impact.

Glancing over at the empty left seat and the distorted and shattered windshield in front of it, Brandon yelled to Jon, “Lean over my shoulder and hold the yoke right where it is; I need to change sides.”

Ignoring the pool of congealing blood that he had to sit in, Brandon slipped into the left seat and thanks to the remaining windshield, he was able to sit upright. He looked at the window in front of him; it was spider-webbed with cracks, to the point of being nearly opaque in places, especially near the center pylon where some pieces were missing, but at least he could see and had some shelter from the wind.

Crouching between the seats, Jon put his head next to Brandon’s to minimize the need to yell and said, “Can you fly this thing?”

Brandon shook his head. “I can probably keep it straight and level, but that’s it. The controls feel weird and there’s no way I could land us even if everything worked. Help me with the radio, maybe we can get some medical advice for the pilot. He’s our only chance.”

Looking at the baffling array of instruments, Jon asked, “Which one is the radio?”

Brandon looked for a few moments before spotting a familiar faceplate and pointing. Jon noticed a power switch and pressed it. He then tried turning a few knobs before blindly stabbing at buttons. A few moments later he said, “The readouts are blank. I don’t think it’s on.”

Brandon looked at the controls. The radio did appear dead, but so did most everything else on the center console except for the altimeter, airspeed indicator, and a few lights near the center. Jon followed Brandon’s look and asked, “What is it? It’s got power, it must have, otherwise the numbers on the display wouldn’t be lit up.”

Pointing at a keypad on the faceplate, Brandon said, “That’s the transponder. It sends out a code so air traffic control knows who we are. On the way to Phoenix, the pilot told me that you can change the code to indicate an emergency. If we can do that, maybe we can let the ground know we’re in trouble.

Jon studied the transponder for a few seconds before replying, “Yeah, I think you just type it in and hit ‘Ident’. What code do we need?”

Brandon tried to remember. He knew it was seven thousand and something, ending with two zeros, but he knew there was one code for emergency and a different one for radio failure. He figured he had both problems, but he wasn’t sure he remembered the code. Taking his best guess based on a partial memory, he said, “Enter seven, five, zero, zero.” He had it almost right; the code for an emergency is 7700 and lost communications is 7600. The third emergency code, the one Brandon had just given, denoted ‘unlawful interference’: a hijacking.

Tapping the ‘Ident’ button, Jon set the transponder.

A few seconds later, an air traffic controller, who had with grave concern noticed the aircraft’s wild heading changes, watched in horror as the aircraft ID on his screen changed and the computer displayed it in bright bold letters, signifying a hijack code. It took him less then a second to figure out what to do; he bellowed for his supervisor.

The supervisor jogged over, reading the screen in a moment. The rules were clear on what to do in the event of a suspected hijacking. Snatching up a red phone, a dedicated line to the North American Air Defense Command’s Western Sector Headquarters at Washington State’s McChord Air Force Base, he waited for the other end of the line to pick up before saying crisply, “This is SoCal Departure Control. We’re reading a transponder squawking seventy-five-hundred. The aircraft is a business jet, outbound on a flight plan from Los Angles to Telluride and currently over the Mojave. The aircraft began maneuvering erratically and descending about seven minutes ago. We were trying to raise him when the transponder change occurred. The aircraft is now proceeding at four thousand feet at three hundred knots. We’re having trouble holding a track on him at that low an altitude due to the terrain.”

The watch officer on the other end of the line, a full colonel called in due to the alert, adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses and glanced up at the glaring red lettering that read, ‘DEFCON 1’ which was as high as alerts went. They hadn’t told him, yet, why the alert was on.

One of his console operators, a sergeant, pointed at her screen. “Colonel Atkins, I’m cross-decking the Nellis radar feed to your console. We have him, sir. Target is on a heading of forty degrees, speed two-eight-zero, which puts him over Las Vegas in about twenty minutes.”

Brandon stared at the dead instruments on his panel. He then found their cause; a few holes above the instruments, near the windshield. He pointed at them and said, “We’ve got major electrical damage.”

With butterflies in his stomach, Jon asked in desperate hope, “You’re good with electronic stuff; can you fix it?”

Shaking his head, Brandon replied, “Yeah, maybe, if I had the right tools, parts, manuals, and about two weeks.” Suddenly remembering another way to communicate with the ground, he said, “Try your cell phone, maybe we can get help that way.”

“No signal,” was Jon’s reply after trying.

Brandon remembered that they were over empty desert. Pulling Chase’s GPS from his pocket, he thumbed it on. After zooming out, he was relieved to see that they were heading in the general direction of Las Vegas, about a hundred miles out. “We’ll be over Vegas soon; you should get a signal there. I’ll keep us low so we’ll be closer to the cell towers. I think one of the engines is dead so I doubt I could climb anyway. Get everyone to try their cells. Try an operator, try 9-1-1, try everything. Check on the pilot too, he’s our only hope.”

Jon got up to walk aft, finding his brothers and Helen hovering around the pilot. The first thing that Jon noticed was the Pilot’s open, sightless eyes; only the whites showing. Helen confirmed his fears by saying, “I think he’s dead. He’s not breathing, I can’t find a pulse at all, and he stopped bleeding.” No one on board knew how to do CPR, but it wouldn’t have made any difference.

The pilot certainly looked dead to Jon, and he hoped that Brandon was wrong about not being able to land. Chase made a beeline for the cockpit while everyone else tried their phones at Jon’s request. The results were the same: no signal.

Taking the right seat, Chase put a reassuring hand on his boyfriend’s shoulder. “Brand,” he yelled above the noise, “The pilot is dead. You’re going to have to land us.”

Brandon’s blood turned to ice as he remembered the Australian flight instructor’s warning that an untrained person couldn’t land a jet. Brandon could take off and fly, but he knew he couldn’t land, even if they got help from the ground.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl for Brandon. He looked to his side, at Chase, who had clicked on his seatbelt; a clear sign of his intent to stay by his side. In that moment, Brandon knew what he had to do, and whom he needed to ask. “Go check and see if they are having any luck with the phones. I need to talk to someone on the ground. Then get some blankets and pillows, anything you can find, and put them in the seats at the rear of the plane. Send Eric up here for a minute, too.” With a final pat on Brandon’s shoulder, Chase headed aft to do as he’d been asked. Brandon was thankful that Chase hadn’t asked why. He felt bad about the deception, but he knew it had to be done. Watching his boyfriend go, Brandon felt his heart break, knowing that he would probably never see him again.

Moments later, Eric climbed into the right seat. He got right to the point by asking, “We aren’t going to make it, are we?”

Brandon checked over his shoulder to ensure that only Eric could hear before replying, and shook his head before saying, “I don’t think I can land us. We’re probably going to cartwheel when I set us down because I can’t keep it lined up and level. I don’t think I could do it even if the controls were working right and they aren’t. I need you to do something for me; keep everyone in the back of the plane. I think that’s about the only place anyone will have any chance at all of surviving the crash. I need you to keep Chase back there, no matter what it takes.”

Eric felt a chill unrelated to the temperature and asked, already fearing the answer, “What about you up here?”

With a calmness that surprised him, Brandon replied, “Basically zero chance. That’s why I don’t want anybody up here and I know Chase won’t leave willingly.”

Making his own decision, Eric said, “I flew one of these for an hour once. I can stay with you and work the switches for the flaps and gear; that might help.”

Vetoing that idea, Brandon said, “Thanks bro, but no. I can do that myself; I need you in back, keeping an eye on Chase. If you two both survive, just tell him I love him, okay? Now, go check on the cell phones, make sure everyone stays on ‘em. If we don’t get in contact with anyone, I’m going to try and set us down at McCarran International in Vegas in about twenty minutes, before anything else goes wrong with this crate.” Brandon was still assuming that some kind of mechanical or structural failure had been the cause of their trouble.

Getting up to do as he’d been asked and already knowing that he’d probably need Jon’s help, Eric paused, unashamed of the tears forming in his eyes, to say to Brandon, “You better be wrong about your chances, because I don’t want to bury a brother.” Eric’s pat on Brandon’s shoulder left no doubts who he meant.

A status of Defense Condition One had many effects, including some sweeping changes to the rules of engagement. Another change was to the fighters kept on runway alert at major air bases. The normal alert level of DEFCON 5 would have them on plus fifteen, which meant that the fighters were just off the runway, the pilots in the alert building, and could be airborne within fifteen minutes. Anything past DEFCON 3 changed the rules drastically; the alert birds were at plus five, with the pilots sitting in the cockpit, ready for immediate takeoff.

“Assets?” the NORAD colonel demanded, wanting to know what he had to work with.

“Nellis has a CAP up over Vegas, four F-16’s, and has a ready force on strip alert,” came a reply from the duty officer.

Glancing at the tactical display, which showed the main runway at Nellis to be less than eight miles from the city center, the colonel asked, “Fuel State?”

The CAP – Combat Air Patrol – over Las Vegas had been up since the alert had begun, orbiting the city. The duty officer replied, “There’s a tanker lifting out of Nellis now. They’re down to thirty minutes loiter time, less if they have to maneuver.”

That made the choice a simple one. The colonel barked, “Scramble the alert birds, repeat, scramble the alert birds, this is no drill. We have a possible hostile inbound on Las Vegas, altitude three thousand. Vector on two-one-zero degrees at five thousand on climb-out. Have those F-16’s hold in position. Acknowledge.”

Sitting on a blistering runway was not what he’d signed up for, thought Major Pierce as he sat in the cockpit of his Oregon Air National Guard F-15/A. He and his wingman, part of the 142^nd fighter wing, had been on a training mission to Nellis when the alert was called, and thus they found themselves sitting runway alert, their canopies open, with a small umbrella their only protections against the burning sun. Gazing out across the runways, staring at the shimmering heat mirages, he wondered if life could get any more boring. The Weekend Warrior, normally a civilian airline pilot, didn’t have time to ponder his situation further as the order to scramble crackled in his headset.

Five seconds later, the duty officer on the other end of the line told the colonel, “They’re scrambling sir. Their call sign is Sierra Flight; they’ll contact you as soon as they clear the runway.”

“Confirm type?”

“F-15/A Eagles, sir, Oregon Air National Guard,” the Nellis officer replied, using the official designation for that model of fighter.

“Kick ‘em to Buster as soon as they’re airborne,” the colonel ordered, using the term for maximum sustainable airspeed and wishing that the aircraft were the newer F-22 Raptors. Unique amongst the world’s fighters, the F-22 has the ability to fly supersonically without using a fuel-guzzling afterburner which gave it the capability of cruising at nearly twice the speed of a conventional fighter. The F-15 couldn’t use afterburner for more than a couple of minutes but given the range and the target’s current speed, he knew the Eagles should be able to intercept the target at least fifty miles from Las Vegas. If not, the F-16’s of the CAP would engage twenty miles south of the city.

Sixty seconds later, the two haze-grey F-15’s of Sierra Flight rolled down the runway, punching on their afterburners which added eighteen thousand pounds of thrust to the thirty thousand pounds already being produced by each of the fighter’s twin Pratt & Whitney F100 engines. With their augmented thrust far exceeding their loaded weight, the two F-15’s rotated off the runway, roaring into the stark desert sky on twin columns of thundering blue fire. Rolling southbound, already nearing Mach 1, they cut their afterburners before clearing the perimeter fence.

The rumbling echoes of the F-15’s takeoff were still resounding off the dry crags and canyons of the desert mountains when the sergeant told the colonel, “Sierra Flight is asking for instructions, sir.”

Snatching up a hand-held microphone, the colonel adjusted his headset as he barked, “Sierra Flight, how are you loaded?”

“Full air-to-air loadout, sir. White ones on the rails; Sidewinders, Sparrows, and guns. We’re locked and cocked,” came the reply, crackling over the colonel’s headset. ‘White ones’ meant warshots; live warheads and no range-safety package, as opposed to ‘blue ones’ which would have denoted exercise missiles of some kind.

Turning to his sergeant, the colonel ordered, “Check with SoCal ATC, see what you can find out about that bogie.”

A hurried conversation later, the sergeant replied, “ATC checked with Van Nuys tower sir; they confirm it’s a bizjet, private charter.”

Small and fast, capable of carrying a bomb like the one that had gone off in Australia... That one word sent a chill down the colonel’s spine. He glanced up at the DEFCON 1 sign glaring overhead, and then at the clipboard in his hand which held the most recent flash traffic, which gave the reasons for the unprecedented alert.

NUDET in eastern Australia confirmed. Unconventional nuclear threat against CONUS confirmed. Hostile nuclear devices believed to be in CONUS. Further nuclear attacks deemed probable, method unknown. Take all necessary defensive measures.

NUDET: a confirmed nuclear detonation, coupled with a nuclear threat against Continental United States. The colonel shivered involuntarily at the thought.

Nuclear devices, DEFCON 1, Australia... and now a hijacked jet, radio-silent and inbound, down in the weeds, for Las Vegas – a city of two million people. He didn’t believe that could be a coincidence and the only reason he could think of for that type of plane to be flying so low was to evade radar coverage; he’d seen that on another day in another command center, during the 9-11 attacks. The colonel’s mind whirled as he drew the obvious, but incorrect, conclusion.

Checking his scope, he saw that the target was seventy miles out. He didn’t need to think; there was no time to bounce the decision up the line, but under DEFCON 1 rules of engagement he had the authority and he knew what he believed he had to do. With two million innocent lives on the line, he felt he had no choice. Keying the mike, he gave the order. “Sierra Flight, WARNING RED, WARNING RED, WEAPONS FREE! Bandit is hostile, repeat, target inbound on Las Vegas is hostile and may be carrying a nuclear warhead. Splash the bandit, repeat, splash the bandit. Confirm.”

Acknowledging the order with a simple, “Roger, engaging,” Major Pierce felt himself shiver; nuclear terrorism. He’d heard about the destruction of Toowoomba, which had explained the alert. He pushed those thoughts aside; he had a job to do and a bandit to kill. He glanced at his HUD (Heads Up Display) and planned the attack. They were closing on the target head-on, three thousand feet above it, range ten miles. Checking his navigational display and the target’s speed and heading, he knew they had some time, time they could use to increase their own chances of survival. Keying his mike, he told his wingman, “We’re going to extend right to twenty miles, then go vertical and engage with Sparrows on pullout, ripple two. That should put us well outside the lethal radius if that nuke cooks off. Execute.” ‘Ripple two’ meant that each plane would fire two missiles. With millions of lives at stake, they couldn’t take any chances. ‘Execute’ is the order to begin a maneuver, and both F-15’s snapped into a ninety-degree right bank.

Watching his display as the range began to open again, the major spun up his missiles. The range and angle would be optimum for the Sparrow AIM 7M, a semi-active radar-guided air-to-air missile, so he selected them from his weapons store, instructing his wingman to do the same. As the range-to-target indicator clicked over to twenty miles, he rolled inverted, pulling back on the stick and sending his fighter hurtling towards the ground in a split-S turn, reversing course and pulling out of the maneuver with his nose on the target, slightly below its altitude in order to avoid any radar interference from ground clutter.

Aiming his nose directly at the bizjet’s left quadrant – a perfect firing position – he confirmed that his fighter’s AN/APG-70 X-band pulsed-Doppler radar had lock, confirmed the range, and pressed the trigger on his stick. The fighter shuddered as the first missile roared off its rail, hurtling towards the bandit. He triggered the second missile half a second later. “Fox One, Fox One,” he called over the radio, using the call sign for a radar-guided missile launch. The missiles, already punching through Mach 1, bored in on Instinct’s jet.

Moments later, two flashes to Sierra Lead’s right, followed by an identical call from his wingman, announced that two more of the twelve-foot long Sparrow missiles were on their way. “Bandit engaged, missiles are tracking,” he informed NORAD as the missiles accelerated through two thousand miles per hour. Taking heed of the closing range, he thumbed his weapons selector down to ‘Sidewinder’, an infrared-seeking missile used for closer engagements, just on the off chance that the target somehow survived the Sparrows. He heard the distinctive growl in his headphones; the signal that the Sidewinder’s infrared seeker head had positive lock on the target. His range indicator had dropped to fifteen miles, still outside the Sidewinder’s maximum range at such a low altitude: just a thousand feet above the desert floor. Shielding his eyes against a possible nuclear blast and instructing his wingman to do the same, Major Pierce watched on his radar scope as the supersonic Sparrow missiles closed inexorably on their target.

The four missiles, arrayed across the sky, death incarnate riding on columns of fire, streaked towards Instinct's jet at over three times the speed of sound. Designed to destroy a fast and maneuverable fighter, the damaged, slow, and lumbering jet was no challenge at all for their guidance computers.

On board the missiles’ target, only Brandon was looking out a window, his windswept hair laced with sweat, his eyes on the horizon ahead, concentrating on keeping the wounded aircraft stable. No one on board noticed the missile launches; they had occurred twenty miles to their left. Even had they known, it would have made no difference at all... .

© 2008 C James

Please let me know what you think; good, bad, or indifferent.

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Many thanks to my editor EMoe for editing and for his support, encouragement, beta reading, and suggestions.

Thanks also to Shadowgod, for beta reading, support and advice, and for putting up with me.

A big "thank you" to to Bondwriter for final Zeta-reading and advice, and to Captain Rick for Beta-reading and advice.

Special thanks to Graeme, for beta-reading and advice.

Any remaining errors are mine alone.