Chapter 28
Langley
The mood at CIA headquarters was bouncing like an overinflated basketball. At first the mission to extract Dr. Chen from Hong Kong had seemed like a rousing success. Then the aircraft bringing him home had vanished in the Arctic.
In the hours since, only one new bit of information had arrived: Polar communications satellites, which had suspiciously gone offline for a time, suddenly came back to life and registered a solid emergency locator beacon. This was strong evidence that the airliner had indeed crashed.
Now the operations center was digesting a report from their only asset in the region, the USS Cheyenne, which had rushed to the presumptive crash zone. Unfortunately, that only muddied the picture further.
“ARCHEX-AP3,” said an analyst from the technology section.
He and the deputy director were hunched over a monitor studying the photos sent by the Cheyenne of the device they’d recovered.
“It’s built by a Chinese manufacturer, one of their bestselling models.
Portable emergency locator transmitters, or ELTs, are standard equipment on airliners and business jets. ”
“You say this is a portable device?” DDO Flynn asked.
“That’s right. The ELTs in the tail section of a jet activate automatically if it goes down. But in a ditching scenario, those beacons sink with the wreckage. With one of these on board, you can load the passengers into life rafts and take an ELT with you.”
“Okay, I guess that makes sense. Could this be from Hemisphere Flight 777?”
“No, I already looked that up in the jet’s maintenance records. The portable ELTs that Hemisphere Airlines uses are from a French manufacturer.”
“So how did this one end up in the middle of an Arctic ice field?”
“That’s the million-dollar question. But when you add in the fact that there’s no trace of any other wreckage… it seems pretty clear. Somebody put it there.”
“To get us chasing ghosts.”
“I think that about sums it up.”
“China,” concluded Flynn.
“That’s the most logical answer, but it’s not a slam dunk. These beacons are manufactured in Tianjin, but they’re sold all over the world. Anybody could get a hold of one.”
“I don’t understand how it got where we found it.”
“I suppose it could have been brought in by boat—a sub or an icebreaker. But given the time constraints as we know them, there’s a more likely answer.
” The analyst magnified the best available image and pointed to a large dent on the device’s housing.
“These transmitters are built to survive air crashes, and you can see where this one took a pretty good hit. If I were to guess, I’d say somebody dropped it out of an airplane or a helicopter from low altitude. ”
“Seriously?”
“Technically, it’s perfectly feasible. But it does imply a certain amount of desperation.”
The DDO thought about that. If China had realized that Chen and Sky Fire were on their way to New York, desperate is precisely what they would be.
But to down a commercial airliner with passengers on board?
That seemed incomprehensible, yet it was where all the evidence was pointing.
Before he could pepper the analyst with more questions, the operator at the comm station said, “Sir, I’ve got an incoming message. ”
“From who?”
“I’m not exactly sure. It came via an irregular routing. None of the usual agency protocols. The team downstairs decided to forward it due to the implied geolocation.”
“Geolocation?”
“The source of the transmission was triangulated through two polar satellites, and the coordinates correlate with a lat/long that’s embedded in the message itself. We’re working to verify all this, but it appears to have come from very high up in the Arctic Ocean.”
“Put the fix on the map!”
A blue circle flashed to the main screen at the head of the room. It was well over a hundred miles from the spot where they’d sent the Cheyenne after a decoy. The dot was also nearly on top of a second symbol—the Chinese icebreaker they had been tracking.
And just like that, the basketball bounced again.
After chasing their asses for hours trying to locate the crash site, they now knew where it was to within an accuracy of two meters.
More intriguingly, someone had just sent them a message from that very spot, but it hadn’t followed the appropriate secure communications protocol.
Either they didn’t know what they were doing, or they were taking one hell of a risk of their transmission being discovered.
“That ship we’ve been tracking is just south of this new fix?” Flynn queried, wanting to be sure about the picture before him. “The icebreaker the Cheyenne sent us a heads-up about?”
“Yes, sir. The Snow Dragon 2. The two are separated by fifteen miles.”
The DDO turned to the NRO liaison, and said, “Do we have an ice survey for this area?”
The woman began typing furiously. “We do,” she replied.
“How old is the data?”
“Six and a half hours.”
“Give me an overlay.”
The map changed again, and in a cool magenta hue the current topography of ice fields in the area was added to the display.
With the complete scene presented in high-def clarity, Flynn stood awestruck.
Roughly 200 meters from their new blue dot was a hole in the ice pack the size of a football field.
There were no similar breaches anywhere else on the screen.
It was exactly the kind of aberration they had been searching for 160 miles west. And most jarring of all: Just over the horizon from their new reference point, a Chinese icebreaker was loitering in the pack ice.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Flynn said.
The comm officer announced, “The rest of the new message is arriving on your console, sir. Alphanumeric security protocol verifies it as being from Orion.”
Flynn saw a text field blink onto the screen.
3WLE6BT. Hemisphere Flight 777 down this position.
9 survivors including Orion and Falcon. Package intact and operable.
One surviving crewmember, FO Sharpe. Need extraction ASAP for all.
Chinese involvement in downing likely. Will check for response this address at 2000Z and include secure challenge.
Silence froze the room as everyone processed the implications of the message.
Orion was Kasey Sheridan. Falcon was Dr. Chen Li.
The package could only be Sky Fire, and it was up and running.
The fact that Walter Ho, code name Nike, had not been mentioned could only mean that he wasn’t among the survivors.
Flynn was stilled by this realization, but not for long.
His voice erupted in a ragged tenor of urgency.
“The Chinese may have beat us to the scene. But we are not out of the fight yet, ladies and gentlemen. We have ninety minutes to come up with a plan.” He sprayed orders across the room like an overcaffeinated machine gunner.
Only after the workstations around him were humming in overdrive did Flynn reach for the blue phone. Taking a deep breath, he placed a call to the White House.