The sight of contrails streaming behind a high-flying Airbus 340 fifty miles distant had begun to worry Alastair as he waited for Craig to return from the cabin. The plumes of crystallized water vapor – ephemeral epitaphs to the stratospheric passage of the giant machine – stood in stark relief against the clear azure sky to the southeast.
We’re probably leaving our own contrail, Alastair thought. Hardly the most effective manner of sneaking away.
The contrail would last for many minutes after their passage, and any eye, airborne or on the ground, could follow it back to its source. The Italian air traffic controllers knew precisely who and where they were, of course, but the incongruity of such a visually heralded getaway left him amused and concerned at the same moment.
He checked the radar again to make sure the cumulus buildups directly ahead over Sicily weren’t hiding thunderstorms. A few rain showers adorned the digital color radar screen as light green splotches located just beyond the city of Catania and Mount Etna, but otherwise the weather was cooperating. He checked the altitude again. Steady at flight level two eight zero, or twenty-eight thousand, the airspeed Mach.72, seventy-two percent of the speed of sound.
Just for a moment, Alastair let his stomach tighten at the thought of what lay ahead professionally, but he quickly squelched the process, returning his thoughts instead to the growing mental list he’d been making of why he should leave EuroAir anyway. It was hardly a matter of money. He had plenty saved, and access to his father’s estate as well, but he’d never been dismissed from a job, and that small indulgence of pride was now threatened.
The cockpit door yielded to a key and Alastair looked around as Craig reentered and swung expertly into the left seat, rolling his eyes. There was no smile.
“I take it the natives are restless?” Alastair said.
“What? Oh. That would be British understatement, right?” Craig replied, the shadow of a grin crossing his face.
“You tell me,” Alastair said.
Craig nodded. “We’ve got about a dozen or so back there who would probably come after me with the crash axe if they could get to it. Missed flights, missed appointments, a missed wedding, missed opportunities… I lost count.”
“And you’re surprised?”
“Not really. I’m just not much of a diplomat. Where are we?”
Alastair gave him a quick synopsis and voiced his concern over the contrail. “I don’t know why it seems important.”
“I do,” Craig said, looking back over his left shoulder as his right hand found the heading select button on the autoflight panel. He began cranking the heading around to the left until the 737 entered a thirty-five-degree left bank.
“What are you looking for?” Alastair asked. “ATC will surely see this turn and ask what we’re doing.”
“Say nothing just yet.”
The aircraft’s heading was now more than forty-five degrees to the left of the course, and as he strained to see behind them, their contrail swam into view streaming back for many miles until it passed under another jetliner on the same course.
“Aha!”
“What, Craig?”
“We’re being followed. I thought so.”
“By whom?”
“It’s probably that charter flight they cleared to Malta just after us.”
“Aren’t we being a bit paranoid? If he’s going to Malta, there is a reasonably good possibility he would be behind us.”
Craig shook his head. “If you’re going to snatch someone back to Peru, wouldn’t it be smart to have a plane waiting? I could be wrong, but I’ll bet he’s literally tailing us.”
Craig reengaged the navigation link between the autoflight system and the flight computer and the 737 obediently rolled out of the left bank and into a right turn to resume course.
“So what do we do, if anything?” Alastair asked. “I rather doubt he’s carrying missiles, but it’s a bit difficult to hide a 737 streaming a fifty-mile contrail.”
“Any cells in those buildups?” Craig asked, pointing to the towering cumulus looming less than ten miles ahead.
“No. A little rain is all I see.”
“And right over our destination,” Craig muttered to himself as he leaned over the radar display. “Good. Let’s pull out the tower frequency for Sigonella.”
“And what, pray tell, are you planning, oh captain, my captain?”
“Just a little F-15 maneuver.”
“I see. You will keep in mind won’t you, old boy,” Alastair said, “that this little bird from Seattle doesn’t maneuver quite as well as that overfed F-15 you used to fly?”
“Sure it does,” Craig replied, his eyes boring into the clouds they were about to penetrate.
The controller in charge of EuroAir 42 forced himself to stub out his cigarette and concentrate. With several supervisors hovering over his shoulder, the uncomfortable task of watching the hijacked aircraft as its data block crawled southbound across his scope had become an agony of trying not to forget any procedures. The sudden left turn had been worrisome, but he’d resisted the temptation to ask the pilots what was going on. Who knew what was happening up there, and how the wrong word at the wrong moment might infuriate a hijacker holding a gun or a bomb? Fortunately, he noted, the aircraft was still in the sky, so hopefully there was no struggle going on in the cockpit. He remembered the videos of a Boeing 767 crashing into the water off the Seychelles years before amidst a monstrous struggle for control on the flight deck. Hopefully nothing so dramatic would occur today.
The data block for the Boeing 727 cleared to Malta had closed on EuroAir 42 by a half mile because of the sudden unexplained turn, but the spacing between the two jets was still legal.
EuroAir 42 was just crossing the shoreline of Sicily when the data block began to coast, the computer displaying the last readout of position and altitude in the absence of any updated information. The controller came forward slightly in his seat, watching for the aircraft’s transponder to resume “talking” to the ATC computer. But nothing was happening, and the warning symbol that told him the data from the aircraft had been lost was now flashing.
“What’s happening?” one of the supervisors asked with a self-importance that disgusted the controller.
“I’ve lost his transponder,” the controller said simply.
“What does that mean?” a visiting ATC manager who had never been a controller asked.
“It means, sir, that we may have just temporarily lost the signal, he could have turned it off, or something catastrophic could have happened to stop its transmissions.”
He toggled his transmitter. “EuroAir Forty-Two, Rome Control. We’ve lost your transponder, sir.”
No reply.
He tried again.
“There! You’ve got a skin paint!” his supervisor said, the man’s breath fetid and heavy over the controller’s shoulder.
There was in fact a faint return, but it wasn’t traveling in a straight line. It was off to the right of the original course, now disappearing, then returning as the controller changed the display’s polarization control. Suddenly the area was blanked by the appearance of rain echos, and he switched back. The “skin paint” echo, if that’s what it was, had all but reversed course now and seemed to be spiraling.
The controller realized he was holding his breath. Jetliners didn’t just spiral out of altitude without a word, their data block suddenly going blank. But airliners that suddenly broke up in flight would look exactly like what he was seeing.
Oh my God, he thought to himself, imagining an explosion in the cockpit. We’ve lost them.
A sudden rain squall had approached from the southwest and blanketed the field for the past ten minutes, obscuring the usually magnificent vista of Mt. Etna to the north, and most of the east-west runway. The two U.S. Navy controllers manning the control tower had watched with amusement as some of their fellows went dashing across the ramp below to reach the military passenger terminal, their khakis completely soaked. A four-engine Navy P-3 Orion submarine hunter, the military version of the Lockheed Electra, sat on the ramp below the tower, its crew off somewhere enjoying local pleasures. Next to it a twin-engine E-2 Hawkeye had just arrived from the Kennedy, one of the carriers currently on patrol in the Mediterranean. The pilots had shut down just as the squall hit and were waiting it out. The controller working the tower frequency saw the door opening now that the rain was ending, then raised his field glasses for a routine sweep of the airport at the same moment a blaze of landing lights appeared over the eastern end of the runway.
“Who the hell is that?” the controller asked his partner as the radio speaker came alive.
“Sigonella Tower, EuroAir Forty-Two on short final to runway two seven for an emergency landing.”
The controller yanked the microphone to his mouth, his mind embracing the regulations the approaching aircrew might have violated by not contacting him sooner, and discarding the thoughts just as quickly. The word “emergency” overrode all other considerations.
“Ah, EuroAir Forty-Two, you’re cleared to land runway Two Seven, wind two four zero at seven, gusts to fifteen, altimeter two nine eight eight, rainstorm over the field and in progress. Runway is wet.”
“Roger,” was the only response. A British accent, the controller noted, wondering what on earth could have happened that would have sent them a commercial flight with no advance warning from Rome.
The controller turned to his partner again. “Did you have anything on him?”
“Hell, no. Nothing!”
“Call Rome Control and at least let them know he made it in.”
The landing lights had coalesced to a Boeing 737, a late-model design, he could tell, with the larger CFM-56 engines with the oval openings in the front. Whoever was flying made a smooth touchdown and deployed his thrust reversers quickly, slowing the aircraft at midfield, where he made a sharp right turn off the runway, following the taxiway toward the tower.
“Ah, do you need any assistance, Forty-Two?” the tower controller asked.
“No,” was the monosyllabic reply.
“Contact ground… no, stay with me. Where do you want to park?”
“Which ramp is under U.S. Navy control?”
The tower controller hesitated, wondering why anyone would ask that question. The pilot of the 737 was making a beeline toward the parked P-3.
“Ah, sir, the whole base is U.S. Navy, and you’re heading to the passenger ramp now. Do you have authorization?”
“We do now” was the response, this one a different voice, and one that sounded American.
The controller reached over to the crash phone and hesitated, then pulled up the handset and punched the button to alert the security police. The 737 taxied rapidly behind the P-3 and turned to pass between the Orion and the Navy terminal, coming to a stop with its right wingtip practically touching the building.
“Sigonella Tower, EuroAir Forty-Two. Please listen closely. No one is to approach this aircraft except the commander of this Navy installation. Do you understand?”
“Forty-Two, I will relay that request, but what is your circumstance, sir? If there’s a problem, please… ah… tell me what. Do you need assistance of some sort?”
The other controller had been on hold on another line. Suddenly he lowered his receiver, his eyes wide. “Rome says this bird’s hijacked, and they thought she’d exploded a few minutes ago in midair.”
“Jesus!” the first controller said, his hand mashing the crash alarm button at the same moment to summon the entire base to alert.