“Minor problem, thought you might want to mention it to Mike.” Mike Chaswick was the chief pilot at Universal Express. He and Gayze were friends and had visited each other’s places of business many times on orientation tours. “One of your birds coming up on final approach now. No violations, but he’s skating on thin ice.”
“Sure, Bill… ah, which flight are we talking about?” “One-oh-seven.”
There was a very long pause, then: “107, you said?” “Yeah,” Gayze replied. “A Shorts 330, landing in about two minutes.”
“Our flight 107 landed four hours ago,” Kline said. “107 is a daily from Shreveport to Memphis, but it usually arrives at eleven P.M., not two A.M. Our last inbound is usually down around one-thirty — we start launching outbounds at three. What kind of plane you say it was? A Shorts?” “Yep. Tail number November-564W.”
“I don’t recognize that tail number,” Kline said. “We got three Shorts on the flight line, Bill, but we don’t use them for the inbound dailies — they’re for the short-haul last- minute outbounds. Used very little. I’m flipping through the schedule… nope, I don’t see any Shorts on the schedule yesterday or today, but that don’t mean too much because they come and go on short notice. He might be from the maintenance facility at DFW, but I sure as hell didn’t know about him. I’ll have to park him on the back forty— all my other gates are full.”
This was getting weirder by the second, Gayze thought — and the weird feeling was quickly being replaced by a feeling of fear. “Stand by one.” Gayze made a few radio calls for inbound flights, asked one of the other controllers a question, then turned back to the phone line: “We got another inbound Universal flight coming in on two- seven, flight 203 from Cincinnati, a 727.”
“We have a daily 203 from Cincinnati, Bill, and it’s a 727 usually, but he landed okay at eleven-fifteen. Yep, here’s the crew’s manifest on 107. Sure he’s a Universal flight?”
“Yep, that’s what he says,” Gayze replied, frowning. “I didn’t get a strip on my guy.”
“You got a strip on the 727?”
“Stand by one.” Sure enough, they did not. Well, he didn’t have any more time to work on this screwup, and besides call-sign screwups were common and not that important. Both planes would be on the ground in a few minutes. “Listen, Rudy, I gotta run, but I’ll call you back when I get a chance and we’ll sort this out after he’s on the deck. I’ll have Security escort them in. Talk to you later.” Well, whatever call sign he had didn’t really matter, Gayze thought as he punched off the phone button and returned to the radios.
“Tower, — 107, seven miles out, request sidestep for ILS three-six right.”
“107, stand by.” Gayze canted the strip holder for Universal Express 107, which would remind him that he had something to check on with him, then checked the arrivals counter, which held all the strips for arrivals and departures on the three runways. All counters were absolutely full. The traffic from the east was starting to pile up, so a sidestep maneuver — in which a pilot flies an instrument approach to one runway, then must be prepared to immediately transition to another instrument approach, usually on a parallel runway such as Memphis — was probably not going to be an option. “Unable at this time, — 107. Continue on the GPS three-six left, you’re number seven, report the outer marker. And give the tower a call on a landline after you land.” So it would take the new guy ten extra minutes to taxi to his cargo gate — an extra fifty gallons of jet fuel, about a hundred bucks. Knowing the Scottish tightwad that owned Universal Express, he was probably going to make the poor pilot pay it back. “Break. United Express- 231, right on intersection golf-golf without delay, ground point seven when clear.” Gayze made a mental note to keep an eye on the Universal Express flight until they made it to their terminal — being new on the job, pissed off at the world, and with a not-so-dynamic captain, on a busy night, this had all the ingredients for trouble.
“You are going to be thirty seconds late, Roberts!” Cazaux shouted. Ken Roberts was one of Cazaux’s best pilots, and had been with Cazaux almost as long as Taddele Korhonen had been, but he was much younger and far less experienced. He had been with Cazaux for about a year, and was one of his most capable and experienced pilots, but all he had done prior to this had been cargo missions, hauling drugs or weapons or troops to some dirt strip somewhere and back out. He had never done an aerial assault like this before. Further, Roberts was an American, one of the few Americans on Cazaux’s payroll. There had never been any doubt about his loyalty or commitment to following orders — until now. “Push your power up and get back on force timing now! ”
“But Captain, I was told by the tower to—”
“The tower is not in command of this flight, / am!” Cazaux snapped. The kid was a nervous wreck — Cazaux had to take the plane back. He slid back into the pilot’s seat, strapped in, took the controls, and slid the throttles up to 85 percent power. “Get back there and stand by on the fucking release mechanism,” Cazaux told Roberts. “And be prepared to release the payloads manually if the automatic system fails. Go!” The kid did as he was told, leaping out of his seat.
The terrorist switched radio channels to a discrete, scrambled UHF frequency, and keyed the mike: “Number Two, say status?”
“In the green and ready, lead,” Gennady Mikheyev, one of Cazaux’s newest and most promising pilots, responded. Mikheyev, a former Russian bomber pilot, was in absolute hog heaven at the controls of a Boeing 727–100, a very old but still reliable airliner, one of several aircraft leased from Valsan Partners, a Norwalk, Connecticut, company that specialized in re-engining and refurbishing Boeing 727s. “I wish I could feel more positive about this release system, Captain. It is giving us a lot of problems.”
“I want results, not excuses, Mikheyev!” Cazaux shouted on the scrambled radio channel. “You wanted this mission — you begged me to let you fly the 727 on the primary strike — and your partners were paid to devise a release system.”
Mikheyev and several of his fellow Russian aviators devised a complex but clever system to drop their explosives on the primary target — Universal Express’s huge packagehandling facility at Memphis International. The release system was similar to the one designed by Cazaux for the Shorts 300, but ten tall, skinny C08 cargo containers, each carrying fifteen hundred pounds of explosives, would be rolled out of the rear airstair door of the 727.
But preceding the main explosives string, six Mk 80 five-hundred-pound bombs would be automatically dropped out of the baggage compartments on the starboard side of the 727—these would hit and explode a few seconds before the main explosive charges, ripping off most of the thirty-acre roof of the Universal Express terminal and creating a nice hole for the main explosives containers to pass through.
Over twelve thousand pounds of explosives would explode inside the building, ensuring maximum destruction.
The system used a handheld computer and GPS navigation unit to roughly compute ballistics for the drop. Mikheyev had guaranteed fifty-foot accuracy on the string of containers from any altitude and at any airspeed, even though the term “ballistics” that he had used with Cazaux for selling his plan was a real stretch because no actual computations had been done on the ballistic flight path of the cargo containers. Mikheyev had been paid handsomely for the ambitious plan, and now, just minutes from his drop, he was trying to back away from his promise. “I will accept no excuses for failure,” Cazaux warned.
“Captain, the target is too small,” Mikheyev complained. The intended target was not the super hub, or aircraft parking and package-handling facility — that was mostly open ramp space, conveyor belts, and packages being sorted for delivery, all easily replaceable in relatively short time. The intended target was the westernmost part of the super hub that housed Universal Express’s complex of communications and package-delivery control computers, as well as its main corporate headquarters. The computers cost a whopping three billion dollars to install and modernize over the years — replacing them would cost two to three times that much. Of the entire thirty-acre complex, the target area was about fifteen thousand square feet. With an airliner flying at four hundred feet per second, using a sophisticated but untested release system, there was very little room for error. “I will do my best, but I cannot guarantee—”