“The thing in Bangkok?”
Briggs nodded. “We’ve got a Delta team still en route to Bangkok now.”
“We should have sent a Delta team to guard Jon and Erin.”
“I guess so, Mr. President. So much has been happening. It’s been happening so fast, I guess…”
Briggs never finished the sentence, but Oaks wouldn’t have wanted him to.
Bobby Caulfield popped his head in the door. “Mr. President?”
“Not now, Bobby,” Oaks replied, waving him off.
“I think you need to see this, sir.”
The president turned and glared at him. Caulfield stepped into the conference room, set a note down in front of Oaks, and left the room as quickly as he had entered. The president picked up the note, read it, and felt his heart sink.
“Orlando PD called,” it read. “Found Ruth Bennett’s body. Kitchen floor. Double-tapped to the head. No break-in. No apparent robbery. Seems like a professional hit. FBI now on scene. How would POTUS like to proceed?”
Oaks felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. A wave of guilt washed over him. He couldn’t believe what was happening. It didn’t make any sense. He’d just talked to Jon, asked him to come back and help him, advise him, walk him through the prophecies of the last days. Had the Bennetts been targeted because of that? All of them? His guilt quickly turned to anger, and finally to thoughts of vengeance.
The president looked up and turned to Briggs.
“Somebody needs to pay for this,” he said finally. “Find out who.”
52
Move fast; be invisible.
Those were their orders, and they had come directly from the president. The pilots powered up, ran through their checklist as quickly as possible, then used hand signals to alert the ground crew they were ready. They were at war and radio silence was critical. Moments later, the hog-nosed Boeing RC-135 “Cobra Ball” spy plane — a high-tech military version of the commercial 707—was being pushed out of the hangar. Captain Victor “Vic” Harris, twenty-six, said a prayer for his wife of only two years and their new baby girl, barely three months old. He, his copilot, and his entire flight crew of thirty-two were fully briefed on what had happened back in the U.S. They had also been briefed on the latest developments with China and North Korea. They knew scores of F-15 Eagles had already been scrambled to protect the base and patrol the Sea of Japan. The 961st Airborne Air Control Squadron had been launched, and now they were being sent into action as well.
Harris proceeded to taxi to runway 23L. Morning traffic was heavy outside Kadena Air Base, he noticed. Highways 58 and 74 were bumper-to-bumper, but that wasn’t surprising. Not today. Nearly twenty thousand American servicemen and — women and some four thousand Japanese employees worked on the base, located just outside of Okinawa, Japan, and now all leaves had been canceled. Everyone had been ordered in. They were at Threat Condition Delta. Security was as tight as he’d ever seen.
As his second-in-command instructed their crew to do a final check on all systems and prepare for takeoff, Harris checked his onboard computer monitor and got a text message from the tower giving him the winds, which doubled as their green light to go when ready. This was it, Harris thought. They were heading into enemy territory. No escort. No cover. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. He took a deep breath, got the nod from his copilot, and throttled up.
Ten minutes later, they were at forty-nine thousand feet, cruising at 520 miles an hour.
“Everyone stay sharp,” Harris said. “We really need to deliver on this one. As you know, our orders are straight from the top. Move fast; be invisible. The Boss needs our best today. Let’s give it to him.”
The mood on board was somber. The flight crew from the 45th Reconnaissance Squadron — both pilots and two navigators — knew they had one task today: get their team of a dozen “Ravens” (electronic warfare officers), fourteen intelligence operators and linguists, and four airborne systems engineers from the 97th Intelligence Squadron close enough to get what the president and the SecDef needed, and then get them home without ever being detected.
What they needed was real-time, on-scene intelligence and reconnaissance data on the rapidly intensifying North Korean military buildup near the DMZ and unconfirmed reports of heightened activity at long-range missile silos surrounding the capital of Pyongyang. To help them was some of the best spyware ever developed. Their communication equipment included high frequency, very high frequency, and ultra high frequency radios. Their navigation equipment incorporated ground navigation radar, a solid state Doppler system, and an inertial navigation system that merged celestial observations and Global Positioning System data.
At least that’s what the public was told, but that only scratched the surface. On board were the latest high-speed digital cameras, with such remarkable clarity that from five miles up they could look over the shoulder of a man reading a newspaper and actually read the headlines and much of the text. They carried infrared telescopes capable of tracking ballistic-missile tests at long range. They could relay all this and more to intel operators stationed at Kadena, and then back to NORAD, Site R, and any other military or intelligence facility it needed to go to, where it could be analyzed in real time and cross-linked to American bombers and fighter jets, if need be.
“How’s Janie?” Harris asked his copilot, trying to lighten the mood.
“She took quite a spill.”
“Stitches?”
“Nine, in her arm.”
“Ouch,” Harris said. “That was quite a spill. How’s the arm?”
“Not as bad as the bike.”
“Poor kid.”
“Aw, she’ll be fine. Tomboy through and through.”
“Quite the firecracker.”
“I’ll say. Did I tell you she—?”
An alarm suddenly went off, followed almost immediately by their chief navigator saying, “Captain, we have a bogey at two o’clock. Mach 2 and coming in red-hot. No, make that two bogeys.”
“How far out?” Harris asked.
“A hundred and fifty miles.”
“Where’d they come from?”
“Not sure, sir. A second ago, I had nothing; now I’ve got two — no — make that four bogeys. I repeat, four bogeys.”
“What kind?” Harris asked, scanning his instruments and plotting a possible course change.
“MiG-29s, sir.”
“Four of them? You’re sure.”
“Positive, sir.”
“You sure they’ve seen us?” Harris asked, though he already knew the answer.
“They’re coming straight for us, sir.”
This wasn’t good. They weren’t ready. They certainly weren’t done. They had barely begun to gather what they needed. They were a full 240 kilometers, or 150 miles, off the coast of the Korean Peninsula. Below them was the Sea of Japan. They were still in international airspace. But Pyongyang was clearly sending a message. What was it they didn’t want U.S. intelligence to see? What exactly were they hiding?
Harris alerted the AWACS operators four hundred miles to the north, as well as the air operations center back at Kadena. Sixty seconds later, four F-15s were scrambled and ordered to give the Cobra Ball the cover they needed. But how should they handle things before that help arrived?
There was no place to run, no place to hide. And suddenly the first two MiG-29s roared into view. The first came in above them from the north and made an incredibly dangerous pass, slicing past their window at Mach 2 and coming within fifty feet of their windshield.
No sooner was it gone than Harris spotted the second MiG several miles in front of them, climbing at a rate of sixty-five thousand feet per minute. And then its pilot decided to play a game of chicken. Harris could see the MiG coming straight at them. Like the first, it was going supersonic. Harris’s heart was pounding in his chest. Should he break right, left, or keep heading straight? He knew he had only a moment to react, but by the time he made his decision it was already too late. At the last second, the North Korean pilot pulled up. The MiG screamed over their heads. And then one alarm after another began buzzing in the cockpit.