“Mayday, Mayday, Laredo tower we have an electrical emergency and request immediate clearance to land.”
Adam spat the French fry from his mouth as the radio burst to life. The word Mayday was even more shocking to him than the scene that had just played out on the TV that was keeping him awake for the graveyard shift at Laredo International Airport.
He grabbed the microphone and hit the communicate button.
“This is Laredo Tower, you are cleared for immediate landing on runway one seven lima. I repeat one seven lima. Please identify yourself.”
“Thank you. This is Aeroflot 321 heavy, in bound towards LAX.”
The Russian designation surprised Adam as he would have sworn the captain’s accent was American.
Adam turned to his radar. There was no sign of the inbound aircraft on the screen; the only sign of a plane was one small unidentified blip with no data. Had it not been for the emergency, he would have written the small blip off as a flock of birds due to how small it registered on his screen.
“Aeroflot 321, did you say you were heavy?”
“Correct. We are an Ilyushin 96.”
Adam stared at his screen. He knew an Ilyushin 96 was pretty much the same size as a Jumbo Jet and there was no way on this earth it was anywhere near Laredo. Its blip would have been screaming at him, not blipping dully.
“On final approach!” announced the captain.
Adam couldn’t help himself. There was nothing on his screen “To Laredo International?”
He didn’t need an answer as the powerful landing lights lit up the sky and the massive Russian airliner screamed overhead and landed on the runway ahead of him.
Adam looked up from under the desk and watched as the colossal airliner, far larger than any normal plane at Laredo, taxied towards the terminal building. Adam looked around wildly for the procedure manual. He was on his own and a large international flight had just arrived, claiming to be suffering from a malfunction of some kind. On finding the manual, he quickly realized the incident wasn’t covered, certainly not when the airport was effectively closed in the middle of the night and one member of staff was on duty.
Adam donned a high-vis safety vest, grabbed a torch, his cell and headed down to the chaos he expected below.
As he walked, he called the airport’s operations chief, his boss. He quickly explained what had happened to the somewhat sleepy executive and was informed he would be arriving there within the half hour.
As he approached the aircraft, the four main doors opened and an internal stairway began to appear from the hold of the aircraft and within five minutes, Adam was surrounded by over 300 bewildered passengers. None of them spoke English and from what he could tell, they had as much difficulty understanding the Russian stewardesses.
A few minutes later, as the chaos was beginning to reach fever pitch, the captain appeared at the top of the stairs and announced everything was OK, they had identified the problem and were good to go.
“Err, sorry,” coughed Adam as it appeared the captain was simply going to reload his passengers and leave.
“It was just a faulty fuse, all fixed,” he explained as Adam rushed up the stairs to stop them.
“You can’t just take off. We need to file an incident report, contact the FAA…”
The captain gave Adam his best poster smile. “Son, I’m the Captain with a staff of fourteen and three hundred passengers keen to get to their destination. You’re one little guy, now get the fuck off my steps before I throw you off!”
Adam looked at the smile on the captain’s face and suddenly realized there was a complete lack of any warmth behind it. As good as it looked, it was only skin deep. The menace in his voice had Adam retracing his steps and praying his boss arrived before the plane had a chance to leave. It seemed unlikely. An order was barked at the passengers that were milling around the aircraft and almost as one, they disappeared back on board. The stairway began to retract back into the hold and as the final door closed, the plane began to taxi to the runway. Without so much as a request for clearance, the plane powered up its four massive engines and shot into the sky. The final act of the bizarre scene being its somewhat magical disappearance as the lights extinguished almost the second it left the ground.
Adam was left looking into the blackness of an empty sky and wondering if he had just dreamed the last twenty minutes when the screech of his boss’ tires brought him back to reality.
“Adam, what the hell are you doing down here?” asked his confused boss, pointing to the control tower. “Get up there and help the plane down.”
“They’ve been down,” he said meekly and then launched into what had happened, from the first mayday to the captain threatening to throw him off the plane.
Unfortunately for Adam, there would be no evidence of any plane having landed. While he was distracted by the multitude of passengers, two technicians had made their way to the tower and successfully doctored any record of their landing at Laredo. Every detail was wiped, even down to the customer service webcam that broadcast the exciting movements on Laredo’s runway. If anybody checked the flight number, they would find it had landed hours earlier at LAX, without incident and was in fact an Airbus A330. No Ilyushin had been used on the LA route for many years.
To add to Adam’s woes, a small stash of extremely potent Marijuana had been left near his workstation.
What Adam would never know was that the Ilyushin was no ordinary Ilyushin and was in fact one of a few experimental and highly secret ghost planes developed by the Russian military. Only flown at night, the plane had a slightly more angular look to its fuselage and borrowed technology stolen from the US many years earlier. Both allowed the massive jet to have the ability to appear on radar, just as Adam had thought, as a flock of birds. The other most startling ability, which Adam had managed to miss, was how quiet the engines were, barely audible over a revving car engine, allowing the plane to land and take off without alerting the local residents. All in all, Adam was going to have a very hard job convincing anyone of the plane’s existence.
As for the plane itself, within ten minutes, it was back cruising at 40,000 feet and taking three hundred rather bewildered Venezuelan tourists back to Venezuela, after a somewhat shorter than anticipated and promised trip to America. It had also deposited ten of General Yuri Borodin’s most experienced Spetsnaz troops deep in the heart of Laredo. Fresh from jungle training in Venezuela, the soldiers were ready to serve their General and kill Sean Fox.