Countdown to Mecca (43 page)

They all kept in constant touch even as the Gulfstream was taking off down the runway.

“How fast can we get to L.A.?” Jack asked.

“It's about three hundred and eighty miles,” Doc replied. “Our top speed is about six hundred miles an hour, so about forty minutes.”

“We got that much time to find out where this bastard might be taking off from,” Jack told Sammy.

“We'll find him,” said Sammy.

“Sol,” Jack called. “What's your twenty?” He used the adapted law enforcement phrase for his location and/or status. “Can you find Professor Peters quickly?”

From the low-angle position of the video camera in Sol's smartphone, Jack and Doc could see he was in one of his many cars—from the sleek looks, and the throbbing sound of it, his fastest and most powerful. From the glimpses of the foliage out the window, Jack could tell Sol was heading for Peters's wildlife preserve cabin.

“Yes,” Sol replied, adding, “between you and me, Jack, I've been monitoring him since your first meeting.”

Jack was surprised, and even a little impressed. “So the prof was right. He was being watched.”

“And not just by me,” Sol informed them. “But that's not all I've been doing. Speaking of that, got to go. I'll log back on when Professor Peters is secured.”

Jack and Doc shared a look as Sol's screen winked out.
What could he be doing?
they wondered. But they didn't have time to dwell on it, since Sol's screen came winking back on almost immediately—just in time to see Professor Peters's legs come bundling into the passenger seat of the car.

“Wow, that was fast,” Jack commented. “How did you get him into the car so quickly?”

“Told him Jack needs you,” Sol answered. Peters, for his part, was looking every which way to try to locate where Jack's voice was coming from.

“Down here, Professor,” Jack said. “Sol's smartphone.” He waited as Peters bent and all but stuck his face into the screen.

“Ah, there you are, Jack. Have you cracked the conspiracy?”

“Yes, Professor. They've brought the bomb back here. They're going to try destroying Los Angeles.”

“That's ridiculous!” Peters exclaimed. “Even if they secure the bomb in a van, sure, they'd kill many people, but they wouldn't even come close to destroying all of L.A.” Then he thought for a moment. “Unless … do they have a plane?”

“Yes, we think so. We're trying to trace any possible flight plans now.”

“Damn it. Altitude, Jack, altitude.”

“Altitude how, Professor?” Jack asked.

“When an aircraft bomb is armed, it is set to go off at a certain altitude. This occurs when it is dropped. If it is dropped from thirty thousand feet, as it passes through the proper altitude—let's say five thousand feet—the bomb is armed and explodes. This is a very simple type of fuse. But effective.”

“What does that mean for us?” interrupted Jack.

“For maximum effect,” Peters continued, “the explosion should be an air burst, so that the weapon explodes above the target at a carefully calculated altitude. Then the destruction of life will be…”

“Do you know what altitude?”

“One thousand, five hundred meters above sea level. But this is the interesting thing—the fuse will not set itself until the aircraft is above that altitude. If it then descends, it will explode.”

“So once they're over five thousand feet…”

“Four thousand, nine hundred, twenty-one point twenty-six to be precise,” said Peters.

“Once they're over that, they can't come down?”

“Well, of course they can, but only to blow up. That is the type of fuse they have chosen. At least on the basis of the materials they have smuggled in.”

“You're sure?”

Peters didn't even pay attention to the question. “The damage with an air burst at that altitude is well calculated and the most effective. If I were trying to destroy or contaminate the population of an entire city, that is what I'd do.”

Jack's jaw set. “Thanks, Professor. Let me know if you can think of anything else that might help us.”

“I have an immediate suggestion,” Professor Peters offered.

“Yes?”

“Don't let that plane take off.”

Jack turned to Dover. “Tell the air force that if there's a plane with a bomb, it can't go under five thousand feet or it'll explode.”

“Jack, under five thousand feet? How do you think planes land?”

“They should shut down the air space around L.A. Send everything out through the desert.”

“That's not going to happen, Jack.”

“It has to. At least until we get this figured out.”

Dover shook her head, but grabbed her phone to call Forsyth and tell him the latest. Jack leaned back in his seat, gazing at the landscape below.

“Jack,” Doc said quietly. “Say we find him in time. Do you have any idea what we're going to do when we get there?”

“I don't,” he admitted. “This jet doesn't have air-to-ground missiles, does it?”

Doc smiled grimly and shook his head regretfully. “Just in case it comes in handy, maybe you should take this. Jimmy would have wanted you to have it.” He handed Jack the other Glock, the one that had been in the possession of their late friend.

As he gratefully accepted the weapon, Dover tapped him on the arm.

“Forsyth's pushing all the buttons he can,” she said. “He's got a search warrant for everything in Morton's home. He has also managed to convince the Army's Criminal Investigation Division to begin an investigation of Morton and Brooks's work computers. They won't be able to seize the computers until morning.”

Jack bit his lower lip, sticking Jimmy's Glock in his pocket. Dover looked apologetic.

“Tell the CID liaison to get in touch with Kevin Dangerfield from the CIA,” Jack told Dover. “Tell him everything we know.”

“Already done, Jack. Dangerfield is hitting a brick wall, too. No one wants to believe that they were so asleep at the wheel. They are telling themselves the L.A. attack is impossible.”

Jack wanted to rail against the stupidity and injustice of it, but he was distracted by what was happening on Sammy's computer screen. Ana had leaned forward and was listening intently to what Sammy was saying as he pointed at something Jack couldn't see.

“There's a lot of information to untangle,” Sammy was telling Ana. “I'm looking at a dump of data that's left over from five different conversations, parts of which have been erased.”

“It's all numbers,” said Anastasia.

“Mostly, yeah, it's an encryption of some sort of picture. You can tell by this pattern here. It's a file header.”

“It has words in it,” she said, pointing to a line close to the very bottom. “Bayward Park.”

Jack looked at Doc and Dover, with hope in his expression.

“Really?” Sammy looked at the screen. Anastasia was right. He scrolled up. There were other words as well. “It's an image of a map,” he realized. “It's not encrypted—it's just what the bytes look like when they're not assembled by the program.”

“What does that mean?” asked Anastasia.

“It means that if I can find the right program to read this data, we can see what the picture says.” He hit the keys to scroll up, then back down. “It's not a typical image file. It comes from some sort of program that I've never seen.”

“Sammy!” Jack shouted. “We don't need to know where he plans to go. If he gets high enough into the air, we're done for. I just need to know where he plans to take off from.”

“Right,” Sammy agreed, his fingers already back at work.

“We're about ten minutes out of L.A.,” Doc told Jack. “Where do you want to go?”

“Can you take us over Hollywood?”

Doc nodded. Jack sighed, almost as if in defeat. “You might as well take some video, too,” he suggested. “One way or another, the world must know what happened here.”

Dover rested her hand encouragingly on Jack's shoulder and they all watched as the jet approached the city from the east, flying over Glendale toward the center of Hollywood. The city glowed gold in the distance, and the glitter only increased as they came near. Staring at the vast expanse of the city, Jack felt how small he was in comparison, how hopeless, how improbable this all seemed. But he refused to let his confidence melt. Not now.

“Jack, it's Sammy,” said Dover, pointing insistently at the computer screen.

“I'm looking at a flight simulator program,” Sammy said. “It's Russian. I think it's the pattern that the plane is going to fly. The FAA and the FBI hasn't found anyone else who has filed a similar profile. It's a Cessna that supposedly comes in from Baja every couple of days.”

“Baja, California?”

“Yes, except that the plane didn't take off from Baja today. It flew up yesterday, on a lease. It was due back today but didn't show. I talked to the manager. The flight was canceled. But get this—first of all, yesterday's flight? No flight plan was filed. And second of all, today's? There's a flight plan out of Baja. And there's a plane with that call sign who filed roughly that course, about twenty minutes out of L.A.”

“Amazing, Sammy. You're a lifesaver. What's the planned altitude?”

There was the briefest pause as Jack's words filled Sammy with warmth. But there was a bomb to stop so he said, almost instantly, “Eight thousand feet, and descending on a gradual slope.”

Jack was on his feet. “The location of takeoff!” he shouted. “Give us the exact location of takeoff!”

Doc relayed the information to the pilots. If the coordinates were correct, the private airplane was about fifty miles away. At their speed, they would arrive at the location in about five minutes. They all prayed it wasn't too late.

“What do we do if he's already in the air?” Doc asked.

“If the air force won't bring him down, we'll have to.”

Doc did not ask how. The word “kamikaze” was the only method that applied.

Dover went immediately to her phone. As she spoke urgently to Forsyth, Sammy stared at his screen, trying to figure out something, anything, to get his mind off the possible tragic outcomes.

“Why is he planning to come in from the west?”

“Less chance of being told to drop his altitude,” said Doc. “You don't have as much traffic and there's more room to maneuver. The Baja plane has flown this pattern for weeks. You said so. So he's much more likely to be ignored.”

“Exactly,” Jack agreed, hopping up and going to the cockpit door. “He wants to attract as little attention as possible. Most times it's not going to be a big deal, but if a few minutes of confusion are going to make a difference, that's the edge he wants.”

The door opened on his first knock and the pilots let him scan the horizon through the jet's windshield.

“Jack,” Sammy called.

“Yes?”

“We have a Google Map picture of the takeoff point. It's an abandoned airfield in the hills. According to social media, kids were using it for radio controlled planes and some sandlot sports until it was padlocked up about a year ago.”

Jack was momentarily distracted by the sound of Sol's car engine almost screaming into his smartphone. Doc almost chortled at the panicked look on Peters's face, but instantly remembered why they were all here.

Jack turned his head toward Sammy's screen for a moment. “That long?” he blurted. “Pyotr was planning this that far back?”

“Of course,” said Dover. “According to Morton's information, that's when he started working with Brooks directly.”

“Jesus,” Jack breathed. “Did Brooks create the international conspiracy just to get the money and power to collect the bomb parts? Was he planning to blow up L.A. all along?”

“No,” Dover said, echoing her boss. “Not an American general. No way.”

“Maybe that's why he was relying on Pyotr more and more,” Jack stressed. “Because he knew the others would never go along with it.”

“Jack!” came Sol's booming voice. “Since you passed on Morton's positive identification of Ansky, Boaz has tracked him. Yes, he's a Russian mercenary—but one who converted to Islam twenty years ago!”

The people inside the plane were thunderstruck. “How do you know that?” Jack blurted.

“It was before he went to work as a merc,” Sol said. “He was converted in prison, by an imam we have been watching for decades. An imam who's been preaching the evils of Hollywood for about that long.”

All the intrigue, all the death, all the tension, all the racing from one place to the next … they combined in Jack's mind like the pieces of a high yield-to-weight bomb, and just exploded. “Of course!” he exclaimed. “Had to be! I knew it all along … even Brooks somehow knew! He was infected by the same evil that wants to corrupt and destroy America. Islamic terrorism was behind this all along…!”

“Jack,” interrupted the urgent voice of the pilot.

Jack turned to see him pointing. In the distance, at the top of a hill, was the no-longer-abandoned airfield.

“It's still on the ground!” Jack all but bellowed. “The Cessna's still on the ground!”

“Not for long,” growled Doc, who was standing beside Jack in an instant. “It's warming its engines.”

“Get the FAA to make him change course,” Doc told the copilot.

“I'll try,” he said, already working the radio. “But I don't think that's going to work.”

Jack spun to Dover. “Air Force? National Guard?”

Dover looked up from her phone long enough to say. “Not enough time!”

Jack looked back to the Cessna despairingly. “The only way to stop him is to run right into him,” he realized.

“That would not be advisable,” the professor said. “If you can keep him from taking off, the bomb will not detonate. If you engulf him in a double ball of flame, that may not be so.”