Without Warning (28 page)

So I did. I told him about Dempsey and that he was planning to crash a plane filled with high-capacity explosives into tanks containing nuclear waste in Wiscasset. “It’s the walls of the tanks that are going to come tumbling down,” I said, relating it back to that last, ominous prediction in the capsule.

“So it’s a suicide mission?” Bennett asked.

“This guy thinks he died years ago. The only thing keeping him going was hatred for me.”

“You think we can get to him before he takes off?”

“I’m not even sure he’s going from the same airfield. But it’s the only one around here. If he is, he would have had to load the plane with the explosives, so we might get there in time.”

“There was a Cessna 152 there when we landed,” Mitch said.

“You know airplanes?”

Mitch nodded. “I do.”

“Well, let’s hope this one is still there.”

There was no plane at the airstrip when we arrived. The chopper was there, but the pilot was standing by the small office, on his cell phone. When he saw us pull up, he ran over to us, and we all quickly got out of the car.

“There’s a guy dead on the floor in there,” he said. “I went to see if he had any coffee, and…”

Bennett interrupted him. “There was a plane here. How long ago did it take off?”

“Maybe six, seven minutes ago.”

I asked Mitch, “How fast can a Cessna 152 travel?”

“Under normal conditions, a hundred, maybe a hundred and five knots.”

I turned to the pilot. “And this helicopter?”

“One thirty-five. One fifty if we push it.”

“Let’s push it,” Bennett said.

We got on the chopper, and I told the pilot to take a direct route toward Wiscasset. Katie asked the pertinent question immediately. “What do we do if we catch him?”

“We identify the location to the fighter jets,” I said.

Bennett asked, “Which fighter jets might they be?”

“The ones you call in.”

“Only the president of the United States can authorize military jets to shoot down a plane over our territory.”

“Then get on the phone and get the process going. Because if those tanks are destroyed, the waste gets in the water and travels in all directions. And New England will make Chernobyl look like Disneyland.”

Bennett understood the gravity of the situation, and patched through a call on an emergency line to the director of the FBI. I tried to listen for a while as he navigated the ponderous bureaucracy, but I was growing almost as frustrated as he was.

He was saying things like, “No one is unreachable,” and yelling, “It can’t wait, goddamnit!” When I couldn’t listen to it any more, I went forward to talk to the pilot. “Is it possible we’ll catch him, but won’t see him because he’ll be at a different altitude?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No chance. There’s a limit to how high they can fly, and this thing has state-of-the-art radar. If he’s in the area, we’ll find him. The question is whether we can catch him.”

We talked a little more about the process of tracking him down, and we went over a map showing where we were and the route to Wiscasset. The pilot seemed very competent, but he could only do what he could do. And judging by the look on Bennett’s face when he put down the phone, I had a hunch we weren’t going to be getting any outside help.

“Where does it stand?” I asked.

“Meeting a lot of resistance at each level. And there are a shitload of levels.”

“Why the hell would there be resistance? Don’t they realize what the downside is?”

“Shooting down an American plane over American airspace is not an easy call, and no one wants to be responsible for recommending it. Working in our favor is that no one wants to be the one blamed if the worst happens.”

“But the worst is going to happen,” Katie said.

Bennett shook his head. “Believe it or not, there are people that don’t want to shoot down a plane based on the word of a guy wanted for murder. Especially when that guy never even saw the explosives and claims that the person piloting the plane is known to have been dead for years.”

“Well, they’d better decide soon, because they have less time than they think,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

I took Bennett up front to show him the map. “This is the route we’re assuming he’s going. But after a certain point, he’s going to be over populated land. Not midtown Manhattan, but if the plane goes down there, or explodes there, we would have to be very lucky not to have fatalities on the ground. It becomes a crap shoot; it could come down on farmland, or a school.”

“So where would the best place be?”

I pointed to the map. “Right here. This lake, east of Winthrop.”

“How far are we from there?

The pilot answered the question. “We’re about forty-five minutes away. Hopefully he’s not much closer than that.”

I went toward the back to listen as Bennett tried to convince somebody, anybody, to come and shoot down the damn plane. He was pleading with them, and the whole thing was getting on my nerves, so I went over to Katie.

“I’m sorry, I never even asked how you were doing.”

“I’m okay,” she said. “I have to admit I was scared. This is not the kind of thing I’m used to.”

“No one is. I’m sorry you had to go through it.”

“If not for you, it would have been a hell of a lot worse.”

“If not for me, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place,” I said.

“Is this going to work? Are we going to stop that plane?”

“If we find it, it’s going down.”

Suddenly she leaned over and hugged me, and I hugged her back. Except for kicking Matt in the groin, it was the most enjoyable thing I had done all day.

“That might be him.” It was the pilot speaking, which made it a very significant sentence.

Bennett was off the phone by then, and all four of us moved toward the front. We looked off into the distance, but I couldn’t see anything.

“Where is he?” Bennett asked.

“Don’t look there,” the pilot said. “Look here.” He pointed to the radar screen, at a small blip near the top of it. “No way to tell if it’s him yet, but the course is right, and the altitude makes sense.”

“How far away is he?” Mitch asked.

“We should make visual contact in maybe thirty or forty seconds.”

So we waited, and sure enough in about that amount of time we could see the plane in the distance. It was remarkable, but I really didn’t have time to reflect much on the technology of it.

“We need to get close enough to make sure it’s him,” I said.

“I’m going as fast as I can.”

But we slowly closed the gap, until we had made up maybe half of the distance. Mitch was looking at the plane with binoculars, and he finally said, “It’s a Cessna 152. I’m sure of it.”

“Get right on his ass,” I said. Then, to Bennett, “Is the Air Force going to come to the rescue?”

He shrugged. “No way to know. It’s out of my hands; there’s nothing else I can tell them.”

I nodded. “Then we need to assume the worst, that they’re not coming, which leaves us with only a few options, the way I see it.”

“Let’s hear them,” Bennett said.

“One, we get up close and ram into him.”

If there can be such a thing as a four-person, collective gulp, that’s what the response was to my first option. “What do you think we’re doing, playing bumper cars?” Bennett asked. “We’d be committing suicide.”

I thought I might be outvoted on option one, so I moved on to number two. “We could shoot Dempsey,” I said, realizing the problem as I was saying it. “But then the plane would go down in an undetermined location, though not at the target.”

“I hope there’s a number three that’s better than the first two,” Bennett said.

“We try to bring it down by shooting out the propellers.” I pointed to the high-powered rifles in the case near the back. “Any of you a marksman?”

Mitch looked at Bennett, essentially giving it away, so Bennett had to admit it. “I am, but we are not authorized to bring down that plane.”

“And I am not authorized to have nuclear waste spread out over New England,” I said.

There was nothing else to be said, at least for the time being. It wasn’t going to wait until we got close enough to make a positive identification. Then we would make a decision one way or the other, because even doing nothing was making that decision.

By this time we all had binoculars, and as we got closer Katie was the first to say she was convinced. “That’s him; I’m sure of it.”

“You see any fighter jets on your radar?” I asked the pilot.

“No.”

I walked to the back and took a rifle out of the case. “You need to do this,” I said, handing the gun to Bennett. “I have no experience with these; I’ll miss.”

“You realize what you’re saying? If that’s not him, or if you’re wrong about the explosives, we’re talking about a murder charge, and a no-brainer conviction.”

“He’s wearing a parachute,” Katie said, still peering through the binoculars.

“Two things are always true,” I said. “Nobody washes a rental car, and nobody wears a parachute on a suicide mission.”

“Those planes have advanced automatic pilot systems,” Mitch said. “When he gets close enough, he could just set it on a trajectory to hit the disposal area.”

“Would that work?” I asked.

“Most likely, depending on how close he is when he leaves the plane. But even a small miss would bring it down in a very populated area.”

I looked at Bennett, who showed no indication that he was going to take the rifle. “Okay, I’ll do it,” I said.

“You don’t understand,” Bennett said. “We do not have authorization to shoot down that airplane.”

“You have authorization to shoot me?” I asked. “Because that’s the only way you’re going to stop me.”

“How long until we are over the lake?” I asked the pilot.

“Maybe four minutes.”

“Okay. Get me as close as you can.”

I took the rifle and went to the side. I opened the top panel on the window and laid the rifle half in and half out. It would give me the best stability and balance.

Through the site I could see Dempsey stand and leave the controls, probably planning to bail out. I was close enough to see him look over at us. I don’t know if he knew I was on the copter or not, but the son of a bitch smiled.

So I aimed for the propellers, and I fired.

And missed.

One of the problems with shooting at an airplane in midflight, from a helicopter in midflight, is that when you miss, you have no idea how you missed. I was not kicking a field goal; there was no way to tell whether I was wide right or wide left.

So I fired again.

And missed again.

So I fired again.

And missed again.

And there was the lake in the distance, and that distance was lessening with every second.

“Bennett, take the damn rifle!”

I could see his mind racing, figuring out the possibilities. There was a fairly wide range of possible outcomes for him, ranging from saving the world to spending the rest of his life in prison.

“Take it!”

Finally he did; he grabbed it out of my hand and went to the same window vent to shoot.

As I watched, Dempsey moved toward the side door of the airplane. The lake was coming up in front of us; we’d be over it in a few seconds.

And Bennett fired. And then again. And again. And one of the shots must have hit the propellers, or maybe the fuselage, because the plane started to spin slightly, and then more drastically, and then it started going down.

I didn’t see Dempsey anymore, but I know he didn’t make it off the plane. And just before the plane hit the water, it was engulfed by a massive explosion, unlike any I had ever seen—and we blew up a lot of stuff in Afghanistan.

The concussive wave was so great that it smashed into the helicopter, and I thought we were going to join Dempsey at the bottom of the lake. But the pilot kept us under control, and after a few seconds that seemed like a month, the shaking stopped.

Bennett handed me the rifle. “Good shot, Jake,” he said. “Yeah, way to go,” Mitch said. Katie came over to me and gave me a little hug. “Nice shot, honey. I knew you could do it.”

The vote was in. I was once again stuck being the hero.

Fifteen hours later, I was listening to Brian Williams say how great I was. I realize that a lot of people, the great majority of people, would relish the moment. They would lick up the praise with a spoon. And I don’t blame them; in fact, I wish it were them.

I’m sure it’s obvious by now that I never relished my hero status, because so many of my equally deserving colleagues were not so honored. But this was far worse; I was getting credit for shooting down a plane when I didn’t do it. I couldn’t even claim it was a lucky shot; it was a nonshot.

I was on camera briefly in the piece, saying that anybody would have done what I did. Which is literally true: there is not a single person that I know who would not have handed the rifle to Bennett and told him to shoot the damn plane down.

But I had talked to Bennett after it was over, and he still maintained he didn’t want to risk being identified as the shooter. Soon after it became obvious that we were right to chase and bring down the plane, I offered again to switch places with him, but he still declined. He had already denied it, and couldn’t go back on that.

So the bad news is I had to suffer through the publicity, like the NBC News piece I was watching. The good news is that I was watching it with Katie Sanford, and the even better news is that we were watching it in bed.

Between sleep and sex, not necessarily in that order, we had not had much time to talk about what had taken place. I didn’t bring it up, because I thought she might need to process it all on her own terms. She didn’t bring it up because, well, I have absolutely no idea why she didn’t bring it up.

Yet, somehow, they can always read my mind, and this time was no exception. Katie was watching me watch the news, and she said, “You’re uncomfortable with this. You don’t think you deserve it, and you wouldn’t like it even if you did think so.”

“You obviously have telepathic, as well as sexual, superpowers. I only hope you use them on behalf of truth and justice.”