“It’ll be taken care of, General Lowe,” Wilkes assured her.
“It’d better be,” Lowe said. “The President’s advance team deploys in less than two days from now, and once they’re on the road, every crazy and nut case will be out there hunting the President down.” She silently looked at the FBI Director for a moment, then added, “Frankly, Judge, you’ve been one step behind the Marshals and Hardcastle this entire crisis. In case you’ve forgotten, there’s an election coming up next year, and how the President reacts to this crisis is important. He wants to be seen in the sky and on the road again, and he doesn’t want to be seen hiding behind F-16 fighters or Patriot missiles — or too many government agents.”
Pease International Tradeport
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Two Nights Later
Pease International Tradeport was once Pease Air Force Base, a small but vital Strategic Air Command bomber base, closed in 1990 and converted to civilian use. The eight large hangars that once housed B-52 Stratofortress bombers and KC-135 Stratotanker aerial refueling tankers now housed a collection of small fixed-base operators servicing light civilian planes — one hangar now held two dozen light planes in the same space that once could house only one B-52. The base operations building had been converted into a Bar Harbor Airlines commuter terminal, flying passengers throughout New England.
The original company which gave Pease Tradeport its “international” designation was Lufthansa Airlines, who in 1992 built a modern office complex in nearby Kittery, Maine, and converted three of the large maintenance hangars at Pease to a jumbo aircraft refurbishment and inspection facility, one of the most modern facilities of its kind in the world. The location was perfect — within an hour’s flying time of six of the top ten busiest airports in North America, close to many European and Asian transpolar flight routes, good schools, generous tax incentives, no income tax, a rural atmosphere but close to Boston and the high-tech Route 128 Corridor of northeastern Massachusetts. Pease International Tradeport was on the verge of becoming a major American airport, a vital reliever to already crowded and expensive Boston-Logan International.
Its popularity and success soon became its number-one problem. There had been two major crashes per year since the facility was opened.
Seacoast-area residents, backwoods environmentalists, and perturbed rich Massachusetts vacationers with beach homes in the Vineyard and Narragansett kicked the golden goose and told Lufthansa to scale back; indignant Lufthansa did them one better and left for the open arms, tax breaks, and relative peace of Raleigh, North Carolina. Pease International Tradeport became a virtual ghost town practically overnight.
But there were still high-tech heavy jet maintenance facilities at Pease, so occasionally the three-thousand-pound Cessnas would get a visit from one of their three-hundred- thousand-pound cousins. The busiest destination was Portsmouth Air, which leased about a third of Lufthansa’s aircraft refurbishment facility at Pease but still struggled to stay in business.
The Boeing 747–200 jetliner with Nippon Air livery had been flown into Pease the day after its prepurchase inspection at Mojave, and since then was locked away inside one of the remodeled hangars, one big enough to house the entire plane instead of leaving a tail section sticking out through a hole in the hangar doors. The hangars were designed to allow environmentally safe aircraft painting, completely sealing toxic fumes in and allowing multiple painting crews to work at the same time. Tanker trucks filled with paint were brought in to repaint the airliner, and work continued on for several days.
Pease’s air traffic control tower closed at nine P.M., and by nightfall the airport was silent, but it was not unusual to get after-hours traffic. At several minutes past one A.M., a Piper Aerostar twin-engine plane self-announced on Pease’s tower frequency, entered right traffic for runway 30, and lined up to land. Since Pease was one of the pilot’s favorite and frequent destinations, he knew it was best to stay high and delay landing until after midfield, still with six thousand feet of runway remaining, in order to shorten the taxi time to the general aviation ramp on the northern half of the field. No problems with the landing, no problems taxiing clear of the runway and heading toward the dead-quiet transient parking ramp. The pilot noticed activity at the Portsmouth Air maintenance facility, but that was normal — those guys worked day and night on the few jumbo jets that came in these days.
Everything was going fine until the pilot, by himself in jthe Aerostar, decided to shut off the electric fuel-boost pumps after turning onto the parallel taxiway. Seconds later, both engines sputtered and quit, vapor-locked. He nearly drained his battery trying to restart an engine. Disgusted, he braked to a halt, shut his plane down except for the strobes to keep another plane from ramming his Aerostar, grabbed his briefcase, locked up, and headed toward the terminal to find someone to help him tow his six- thousand-pound plane to the ramp.
The general aviation FBO and the Bar Harbor Airlines terminals were long closed. The only other sign of life at the airport was Portsmouth Air, so he walked over to the huge hangar complex. The complex was surrounded by a twelve-foot fence topped with barbed wire, but a Cypher- Lock gate near the parking lot was not fully closed, so the pilot walked in. The front door to the main office was locked. He walked around the offices to the west side of the hangar itself and tried another door — locked too. But just as. he walked past it to find another door, the steel-sheathed l door banged open, someone loudly hawked and spit outside, then let the door go — whoever it was never saw the pilot behind it. The Aerostar pilot caught the door before it closed and stepped inside the hangar…
… and what he saw inside made his jaw drop in surprise — it was Air Force One, the President of the United States’ plane!
The huge Boeing 747 airliner completely filled the hangar. White on the top, light blue and black on the bottom, with a dark-blue accent running from the upper half of the nose section and sweeping along the mid-fuselage windows to the tail, it was an awesome sight to behold. The pilot, a professor at Dartmouth, knew that Air Force One used to come to Pease quite often when President Bush would fly here on his way to his family retreat in Kenneb- unkport years ago, but he never had the chance to see him or his entourage arrive — now he was getting a good firsthand look at one of the most distinctive planes in the world!
He could plainly see the words UNITED STATES OF AMERICA on the side of the fuselage, although the lettering looked… well, a bit sloppy, not even or symmetrical at all. He was near the tail section, and he could see the Air Force chevron at the base of the vertical stabilizer, and the. serial number 28000 and the American flag midway up the vertical stabilizer, painted as if the staff side were forward and the flag were stretched taut and blowing aft. The smell of paint fumes was very strong — it looked as if Air Force One was getting a touchup or a good cleaning. Funny — the pilot never would’ve guessed they’d do maintenance on Air Force Ones up here in little Portsmouth, New Hampshire, although they’d obviously keep that kind of information se- i cret.
The pilot began walking toward the front of the plane, under the right wingtip. He passed a few workers, but they didn’t pay too much attention to him. He stood along the wall of the hangar, watching a guy painting the Seal of the President of the United States near the nose, and, like the lettering on top, the paint job on the seal was passable but not very professional. It looked okay from a distance, but up close it—
“Excuse me, sir,” he heard. The pilot turned and was confronted by a tall, very mean-looking guy with short- cropped hair, wearing a dark-green flight suit. He looked like a Marine Corps aviator. He looked mean and nasty enough to kill with his bare hands, but fortunately he seemed in a good — or at least a forgiving — mood. “This is a restricted area.”