At four, it wouldn’t.
The world’s deadliest math problem. Those beautiful deadly streaks would either reach him or not, and the worst part was he’d already played his only card. He couldn’t outmaneuver the missiles, or hide from them. He could only try to outrun them.
In 45A, Vik had felt the surge of the engines. Then the plane leveled off, more than leveled off, started to drop. They know. They’ll do whatever they do to beat these things and we’ll be fine. But the missiles kept coming, closing the gap shockingly fast, homing in on the jet, arrows from the bow of the devil himself.
He grabbed Jessica’s hand.
“Whoever you pray to, pray. Pray.”
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee—” The words tumbled out of her. Vik just had time to be surprised. He’d expected a yogic chant. One of the streaks flared out, fell away.
But the other didn’t.
The Russians referred to the missile as the Igla-S—igla being the Russian word for “needle.” NATO called it the SA-24 Grinch. The Russian military had put it into service in 2004, updating the original Igla. They’d invested heavily in the redesign, knowing that man-portable surface-to-air missiles had a wide export market. Armies all over the world depended on them to neutralize close air support. A single SAM could take out a twenty-million-dollar fighter. The Russians more than doubled the size of the Igla’s warhead. They improved its propellant to allow it to catch even the fastest supersonic fighter. They added a secondary guidance system.
And they lengthened its range. To six kilometers.
Twelve seconds after its launch, the Igla crashed into the Boeing’s left engine. The warhead didn’t explode right away. Its delayed fuse gave it time to burrow inside the casing of the turbine. A tenth of a second later, five and a half pounds of high explosive detonated.
In movies, missile strikes inevitably produced giant midair fireballs. But military jets had Kevlar-lined fuel tanks. In the real world, missiles destroyed fighters by shearing off their engines and wings, sending them crashing to earth.
This time, though, the Hollywood myth was accurate. The 777’s fuel tanks weren’t designed to survive a missile strike, and the plane carried far more fuel than a fighter jet. It was a flying bomb, fifty times as big as the one that had blown up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
The explosion started in the fuel tanks under the left wing and created a superheated cloud of burning kerosene that tore apart the cabin less than two seconds later. From Nick Cuse, in the cockpit, to Vikosh Jain, in the last row, all two hundred seventy-eight people on board were incinerated. The ones nearest the fuel tanks in the wings didn’t die as much as evaporate, their physical existence denied.
Despite his immediate action, Cuse couldn’t save his jet. Even so, he was a hero. By getting the Boeing offshore — barely — before the missile struck, he saved the city from the worst of the fireball. If the explosion had happened over the slums, hundreds of people would have burned to death. Instead, Mumbai’s residents lifted their heads and watched as night turned to day. The tallest buildings were the worst damaged, so for once the rich suffered more than the poor.
The fireball lasted a full thirty seconds before fading, replaced with an unnatural blackness, a cloud of smoke that didn’t dissipate until the morning. By then, the toll of the attack would be clear. Besides the two hundred seventy-eight people on the plane, two people on the ground died. One hundred sixty-five more suffered severe burns. Planes all over the world were grounded.
And the United States and Iran were much closer to war.
PART ONE
1
The images were horrific. A man’s legs, brown skin sloughed off, exposing the yellow-red meat underneath. A layer of jet fuel burning on top of the ocean, charring a chunk of bone. Worst of all, bits of a stuffed toy, blood smearing its white fur.
The first reports of an explosion in Mumbai showed up on Twitter ninety seconds after the jet was hit. A half hour later, 12:30 a.m. in India, 2 p.m. in Washington, the Associated Press and Reuters confirmed a plane crash. The Indian navy had sent ships to search the waters west of the city, Reuters said. Two hours later, a bleary-eyed spokesman for the Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation identified the jet as a United Airlines flight bound for Newark. “The situation is difficult. At this point, we cannot expect survivors.”
Almost immediately, Reuters broke the news that the jet’s captain had reported missiles in the air seconds before the plane exploded. Then an Indian news agency reported that airport authorities had surveillance video that showed a missile striking the jet. By 8 p.m. Eastern, CNN and Fox and everyone else had the video. The anchors murmured somberly, Disturbing, we want to warn you so you can have your children leave the room…
The video was silent, not even a minute long. The camera was fixed and faced west from the airport’s control tower. It didn’t capture the actual launch. The missiles were already airborne when they entered the frame. From left to right, twin red streaks rose toward an invisible target. After five or six seconds, they faded, too far away for the camera to catch. But they hadn’t stopped their chase. The proof came with the explosion, a white flash tearing open the night, resolving into a mushroom cloud. The shock wave hit seconds later, rattling the camera as the cloud in the distance grew.
HORROR IN THE SKIES, the crawl under the video said, and this time CNN wasn’t exaggerating. India’s navy would call off its search by morning. No one could have survived.
The inevitable next act would be assigning blame.
The video ended. CNN cut to a serious-looking man in a gray suit with a white shirt. Fred Yount, Terrorism Analyst at RAND Institute—
John Wells flicked off the screen before he had to hear Yount. A man squeezed a trigger in the dark. A few seconds later, almost three hundred people were dead. Whatever Yount had to say wouldn’t change those bare facts.
Wells had quit the Central Intelligence Agency years before. But he’d never escaped the secret world. He knew now he never would. He felt like a swimmer fighting a whirlpool. He was strong enough to avoid being sucked down, but not to reach land. He could only tread water, knowing that one day his body would fail.
He was in his early forties, but his chin was still sturdy, his shoulders thick with muscle. Only the patches of gray hair at his temples and the permanent wariness in his brown eyes betrayed his age and his too-close acquaintance with the world’s sins.
Now he lay back on his bed, stared at the ceiling. He was in room 319 in the Courtyard by Marriott at the Washington Navy Yard, a hotel favored by randy congressmen for its nearness to their offices. More than anything, Wells wanted to close his eyes. Sleep. But he had a plane to catch in less than four hours. He had arrived in the United States only the night before. Now he was going back the way he’d come, over the Atlantic, bound for London and Zurich. To meet with a man who didn’t much want to see him. Then, maybe, to Mumbai.
Wells understood. He didn’t want to see himself either. Not at the moment. He was carrying himself around like a rain-soaked cardboard box about to burst. Too many miles. And too much death. Wells blamed himself for the downing of the jet. A few days before, he’d discovered the truth about a plot to maneuver the United States into war with Iran. He’d nearly found a way to stop it. But his enemies had outplayed him.