Thunder of Heaven: A Joshua Jordan Novel

  “Any talk about this being connected to the Chicago plane?”

  “What?”

  Joshua realized his daughter knew nothing about the Chicago crash. He decided to drop it. “Never mind, honey. Just let us know how soon we can see you.”

  “While jets are being grounded they’re giving us priority on the new westbound Flashtrain. I’ll board today and be in Denver tomorrow and with you guys by tomorrow afternoon.”

  Joshua, a decorated colonel in the Air Force and former spy-plane pilot, had cut his teeth on military flying, not commercial, but he knew something about flight-incident investigations. His most recent stint as the premier antimissile defense contractor with the Pentagon had also brought him into contact with many federal agencies: the NTSB, the FAA, Homeland Security, and the National Security Agency among them. By now he’d already guessed that his daughter’s flight was somehow connected to the Chicago disaster.

  “Oh, there’s something I have to tell you,” Deborah said. She didn’t give either parent a chance to process before she continued, “I’d like to bring someone to Hawk’s Nest … so you can meet him.”

  Abigail threw a look across the log-beamed living room to Joshua, who was sitting by their five-foot-tall fieldstone fireplace.

  “Explain, dear,” Abigail said in a tone freighted with a parent’s expectation, “exactly who you’re talking about?”

  “Mom, this guy is former Air Force. And Dad, guess what? He worked in defense contracting with Raytheon.”

  Abigail pushed a little. “How long have you known him?”

  “Well, just a few hours …”

  Across the room Abigail was shaking her head. It wasn’t adding up.

  Joshua said, “Sweetheart, this isn’t making sense. You’re probably shaken up.”

  “Dad,” she began, and her parents could hear the depth of emotion in her voice, “he saved me during the flight, kept me from getting a broken neck or cracking my skull.”

  “Deborah, what on earth?” Abigail had had enough. Now she was going to launch into one of her skillful, impassioned cross-examinations. Seeing that, Joshua waved his hand toward Abigail, as if to say, Not now. This is too sensitive for a phone conversation.

  Abigail decided to pull back. “Darling,” she said, “just come home quickly. We love you so much, and we’re glad you’re safe. Your brother’s coming in a few days. Hopefully flights will be back to normal by then. Cal’s in Boston. We’ll all be together. I can’t wait to hug you.”

  After they clicked off, Abigail strode over to the sofa where Joshua was sitting and dropped down next to him. She grabbed his powerful hand and ran her other hand through her hair. Joshua, as usual, was doing the stoic thing, but she could see he was carrying a two-hundred-pound weight on his chest. They sat silently, absorbing what their daughter had told them, scant as it was. It sounded like something terrifying had happened. Abigail said she wanted her daughter home “ten minutes ago.” How frustrating it was that that their private jet was down with repairs. Could they charter another private jet to pick Deborah up?

  Joshua shook his head. “Abby, I know what you’re thinking. I’m there too. But by the time we lined up a charter, she could be heading home. Let’s stick with the plan. Besides, I don’t want to flag Deborah to the federal folks.”

  “You think something’s going on, don’t you? This was not just a random plane crash …”

  “With all we’ve learned and seen, we have to expect anything.”

  They disappeared into their own thoughts.

  Abigail broke the silence. “Josh, what she said …” The words caught in her throat. “She said someone saved her on that flight …”

  Joshua was rocked by the fact that his daughter’s life had been at risk, but he was also thinking about the Chicago flight and the fact that the FBI had interrogated Deborah and the other passengers from her flight — four states away. He couldn’t shake the feeling of catastrophe. And responsibility. Both jets were 797s, and he knew something about them. He had designed the RTS antimissile system installed on those planes, and he had a vested interest in commercial air safety. His own daughter had been on a National Airlines flight with his RTS device on board. He had to find out why the Chicago flight ended in disaster. And right away. Was this just a tragic air accident? And if so, then maybe it was pilot error. Or equipment failure. Major wind shear at takeoff?

  One thing he did know: there was a possible explanation for the crash that he was dreading. He wasn’t a person who prayed, a religious type, like his wife. But what he said silently in his head sounded awfully similar.

  Please, don’t let it be that …

  EIGHT

  Washington, D.C.

  At 5:45 a.m., William Patch, retired Navy admiral and now national-security advisor to the president, was hunched in the back of a government limo as it motored along the Washington Parkway. He had no idea which route his driver was taking because it changed every day for security reasons. Patch wouldn’t have gawked at the scenery anyway. Most days, like today, he was absorbed in the contents of the leather-bound folder on his lap. It contained the latest national-security data that he was to present in his briefing to President Virgil Corland, scheduled for 6:30 a.m. There were the standard State Department memos, diplomatic cables, a Homeland Security report … the usual.

  Recently the Department of Agriculture had begun filing its own reports. They wrote about the growing dust bowl in the Midwest; and their concern was that the unending drought, coupled with the bizarre pest infestations, had decimated American agriculture, putting a lot of farmers and food industry workers out of work. The DOA’s latest speculation was that those conditions might create “increased domestic unrest and possibly create homegrown, right-wing terrorists.” Patch thought it was bunk, that it would take the national-security focus off the real threat. And he said so. The intelligence guys, the Defense Intelligence Agency — the DIA — and the CIA had agreed with his assessment. But the mood in the situation room had been different lately. Politics was trumping everything — not that political realities weren’t factored into every decision made in Washington when it came to war and peace: Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Kosovo, Persian Gulf 1 and 2.

  But now there had been a seismic sea change. It wasn’t just about politics either. Geopolitics was running everything. Now there was talk from the president, and even more from Vice President Jessica Tulrude, about a “global security coalition” and less talk about American interests.

  Patch’s file also contained a short summary of his briefing from the CIA. As usual, when it came to the agency’s written outline for Patch — and for everyone else, for that matter — the CIA kept it concise and cryptic. The spy guys wanted to keep things up their sleeve until the last minute, until it was their turn to brief President Corland.

  This morning Patch’s file had memos from the FAA and the NTSB concerning the Chicago air catastrophe of the day before as well as the near misses at JFK and LAX.

  He looked over the photos of the crash scene and spat out several of his favorite sailor’s cuss words as he looked at the carnage. He came to a one-page statement from the office of Vice President Tulrude. He read it carefully. Then a second time.

  He swore again, this time even louder, trying to vent all of the steam out of his system before the meeting.

  On the other hand, he thought, maybe I should just tell the vice president where to go and be done with it.

  In Patch’s mind, there was a cancer in the White House, and it wasn’t coming from the Oval Office. It was coming from a little farther down, from the VP’s office in the West Wing.

  Forty-five minutes later, in the situation room in the basement of the White House, the president’s national-security advisors were seated in the black-leather executive chairs around the long walnut conference table. On the walls, digital screens flickered with intelligence data, charts of international hot spots, and, today, a cascade of images from the crash of Chicago Flight 199.
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  President Corland was flipping through a report. His face was pale and haggard; his skin, an unhealthy pallor. In the harsh glare of the ceiling lights, he looked even worse. The president brushed his hand over his partially balding head as he read. He looked up and started the meeting.

  “Let’s begin with you, Admiral. This air crash and the other two flights … no question about who was behind this?”

  “No question. Al Aqsa Jihad, a splinter group of Al-Qaeda.”

  “What’s their beef with the United States? … as if I have to ask.”

  “Our support of Israel.”

  “Right. Okay. What are we doing to round up these murderers?”

  The deputy director of the FBI chimed in, “We have a dragnet around the greater Chicago area. Same with Los Angeles. We have solid leads. We’ll find them. We have positive IDs on several of them already. As for the Long Island group, we believe they were all killed in the attempt.”

  “How’d they get their hands on heat-seeking missiles?”

  There was an awkward pause. Admiral Patch filled in the blanks. “There’s evidence that Arab sympathizers within the military transferred Stinger missiles to enemy hands.”

  Helen Brokested, the director of Homeland Security, a tall, bland-looking woman with close-cropped hair, was shaking her head vehemently. “Mr. President, the facts are very much in dispute on that. We have to be careful not to make hasty accusations based on racial profiling.”

  Vice President Tulrude, sitting at the president’s right, nodded, her pageboy hairdo waving. She held her finger out, like a place marker for her turn to talk.

  “Yes, I agree with Helen,” she said. “Mr. President, let’s get this train back on track. The real question is where we go from here.”

  Admiral Patch pulled out the note in his file from Tulrude. He said, “Madam Vice President, it appears that your suggestion is that we tell the American people very little about the incident.”

  “Just what they need to know, Admiral.”

  “So,” Patch continued, “you really think that we should tell them only one missile was fired — the one that downed the Chicago flight — and nothing about the JFK and LAX near misses?”

  “Admiral, that’s what my note said,” Tulrude snapped, pointing to her memo, which was now on the conference table. “Mr. President, we could deep-six the entire airlines industry if this gets out of control. I’ve already given all of you my advice, that we lift the lockdown on commercial flights we imposed when this happened. This nation is tottering on financial catastrophe. Before the missile strikes all but one of the airlines had already gone into bankruptcy, failed to reorganize, and are now under federal control. Our foreign credit is precarious. What we say publicly about these incidents is going to be crucial. And even more importantly, there’s our international partnerships, our new global coalition. There are worldwide values at stake here. The new global society we are trying to build. Peace, gentlemen. Peace.”

  “You know, they used to call this the National Security Council,” Patch growled. “Now it’s sounding like the United Nations glee club.”

  “That’s all, Admiral,” the president responded. “I understand your devotion to national security. Everyone does. But we have to work as a team here.”

  The CIA liaison from the Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis raised his hand. “Mr. President, we have some data.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “About the FBI report, the wording, I mean. You heard it in the briefing just now. The statement was that there was an ‘attempt’ to launch a missile at Flight 433. That report implies that the suspects were blown up when the missile, which they tried to launch, somehow detonated in the warehouse before being fired. But we have a visual from the NSA. It picked up what looks like a missile heading toward the 797 jet, but then it does a U-turn in the last third of the flight pattern and heads back to the warehouse where it exploded. Also, in the first interview with the folks in the cockpit, the pilots said that the alarms and the deck screen indicated they were under attack — ”

  “Wait just minute.” Tulrude was waving her hands.

  But the CIA guy plowed ahead. “So it looks as if the RTS, the Return-to-Sender system on Flight 433, successfully turned around the incoming — ”

  “Now you just wait right there,” Tulrude sputtered. “The final report, the very last one, says just the opposite. That the cockpit crew renounced their previous statement about the missile alert warnings going off and about some incoming missile. They admit they were mistaken.”

  “Looks like that missile wasn’t the only thing that did a U-turn,” Admiral Patch muttered, loud enough to evoke a few chuckles. Then, with a heavy dose of cynicism, he added, “Of course, there’s no chance that those pilots were pressured to say that …”

  President Corland threw him a wearied look but said nothing.

  “I want this on the record,” Jessica Tulrude shot back, slightly red in the face as she threw a pointed look toward the CIA liaison. “I want to know how and why the CIA is getting domestic surveillance data from satellites tasked by the National Security Agency. That is a major breach of privacy of American citizens — and is probably illegal. You people have no business using satellites to spy on American citizens or on American soil. Was permission obtained from the FISA court for this?”

  The CIA guy was nonplused. “This data regarded foreign actors inside the United States trying to shoot down our planes — ”

  Tulrude dug in. “I repeat, domestic spying that is probably illegal — ”

  Brokested jumped into the fray. “There’s enough dispute here, Mr. President, that I think we should be careful about what we say publicly. I suggest that we go along with the recommendations of Madam Vice President, and limit our statement to the following — that a missile was fired at the Chicago flight, and the onboard RTS system failed to stop it, resulting in the tragic destruction of the Chicago flight. Period. Nothing about the LAX or the JFK flights being at risk. At least for now.”

  To the left of the president, Hank Strand, his chief of staff, had a suggestion. “Mr. President, a thought. We could simply say that the LAX and JFK flights were rerouted back to their airports based on preliminary security information. Out of an abundance of caution. The pilots on both flights would back us up on that.”

  President Corland sighed and asked his chief of staff a simple question: “Would that be the truth?”

  Hank Strand grimaced, tried to smile, and then said, “Well, in a manner of speaking.”

  “All right,” Corland said. “I’ll think on it, Hank, and get back to you in a few hours. Now, good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all.”

  When everyone had cleared out of the room, Vice President Tulrude and the president’s chief of staff stayed behind. The situation room was impenetrable in terms of security, acoustics, and privacy. And they knew it.

  Tulrude started. “Well, I bet this changes Corland’s decision about who’s going to be on his list for the Medal of Freedom.”

  Hank Strand looked worried. “Don’t be so sure.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I wouldn’t joke about something like that.”

  “He’s got to be nuts if he doesn’t change his mind …”

  “Madam Vice President, I’m telling you, things are different with him lately. I’m not saying we are losing control …”

  “Let’s hope not …” Then she thought about something. “Are the White House physicians still talking about the same diagnosis for Corland?”

  “Yeah. TIA. Transient Ischemic Attack.”

  “Next time he has one of his blackouts I could demand an immediate transfer of power to myself. Constitutionally I could do it and Corland knows it. So what are you noticing?”

  “He’s less compliant. More unpredictable. And he’s changing course on some policy issues. I’m worried about whether he’ll keep his promise to you …”

  Tulrude tapped
a painted fingernail against Strand’s chest. “Just make sure he does. He’s got to know he can’t run for a second term. I’ve kept my part of the bargain. I haven’t told the press about his medical condition. Now he has to keep his by putting his seal of approval on me publicly and then declaring he won’t run again.”

  She couldn’t resist another jab at the president. “Did you hear him today? His question … ‘Would it be the truth?’ he asks. Since when did he become such a Boy Scout?”

  Hank Strand was about to say something, but Tulrude cut him off. “You’re sure Corland’s not keyed into the fact that I’ve been meeting with you behind his back?”

  “No chance.”

  “So when’s he announcing the recipients of the Medal of Freedom?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “And the ceremony?”

  “I think he wants it quick. In a few days. In the Rose Garden.”

  Jessica Tulrude gave a disgusted shake of her head and turned to leave. She tossed out one last comment as she left. “I’m glad I won’t be there. Especially if he still insists on hanging a medal around Joshua Jordan’s neck. That would be political suicide for him if he’s still holding onto to the crazy notion of a run for a second term.”

  With that, she stopped in her tracks. A thought broke through like sunlight. Her face relaxed. It was no longer the hard, bitter look the vice president would occasionally flash when things didn’t go her way; instead, it was the look that she had been working on for her public appearances and the photo ops. Now she was smiling and nodding with her own personal revelation.

  Virgil Corland aligns himself with the controversial weapons dealer Joshua Jordan. Corland’s ratings crash, making it even more difficult for him to change his mind and seek reelection and forcing him to stick with our plan. I distance myself and push forward to the primaries. People start thinking, why was she ever vice president anyway? She should have been president. Yes, this could be a good thing.

  NINE