Executive orders - Tom Clancy [30]
This flight data looks like pure vanilla on first inspection. Nothing was broken on the aircraft, an analyst reported, scanning the data on a computer screen. Nice easy turns, steady on the engines. Textbook flight profile until here-he tapped the screen-here he made a radical turn from zero-six-seven to one-niner-six and settles right back down again until his penetration.
No chatter in the cockpit at all. Another tech ran the voice segment of the tape back and forth, finding only routine traffic between the aircraft and various ground-control stations. I'm going to back it up to the beginning. The tape didn't really have a beginning. Rather it ran on a continuous loop, on this machine, because the 747 routinely engaged in long, over-water flights, forty hours long. It took several minutes for him to locate the end of the immediately preceding flight, and here he found the normal exchange of information and commands between two crewmen, and also between the aircraft and the ground, the former in Japanese and the latter in English, the language of international aviation.
That stopped soon after the aircraft had halted at its assigned jetway. There was a full two minutes of blank tape, and then the recording cycle began again when the flight-deck instruments were powered up during the preflight procedures. The Japanese speaker-an Army officer in civilian clothes-was from the National Security Agency.
The sound pickup was excellent. They could hear the clicks of switches being thrown, and the background whirs of various instruments, but the loudest sound was the breathing of the co-pilot, whose identity was specified by the track on the recording tape.
Stop, the Army officer said. Back it up a little. There's another voice, can't quite Oh, okay. 'All ready, question mark.' Must be the pilot. Yeah, that was a door closing, pilot just came in. 'Preflight checklist complete standing by for before-start checklist ' Oh oh, God. He killed him. Back it up again. The officer, a major, didn't see the FBI agent don a second pair of headphones.
It was a first for both of them. The FBI agent had seen a murder on a bank video system, but neither he nor the intelligence officer had ever heard one, a grunt from an impact, a gasp of breath that conveyed surprise and pain, a gurgle, maybe an attempt at speech, followed by another voice.
What's that? the agent asked.
Run it again. The officer's face stared at the wall. 'I am very sorry to do this.' That was followed by a few more labored breaths, then a long sigh. Jesus. The second voice came on a different vox channel less than a minute later, to notify the tower that the 747 was starting its engines.
That's the pilot, Sato, the NTSB analyst said. The other voice must be the co-pilot.
Not anymore. The only remaining noise over the copilot's channel was spill-over and background sounds.
Killed him, the FBI agent agreed. They'd have to run the tape a hundred more times, for themselves and for others, but the conclusion would be the same. Even though the formal investigation would last for several months, the case was effectively closed less than nine hours after it had begun.
THE STREETS OF Washington were eerily empty. Normally at this time of day, Ryan knew all too well from his own experience, the nation's capital was gridlocked with the automobiles of federal employees, lobbyists, members of Congress and their staffers, fifty thousand lawyers and their secretaries, and all the private-industry service workers who supported them all. Not today. With every intersection manned by a radio car of the Metropolitan Police or a camouflage-painted National Guard vehicle, it was more like a holiday weekend, and there was actually more traffic heading away from the Hill than toward it, the curious turned away from their place of interest ten blocks from their intended destination.
The presidential procession headed up Pennsylvania. Jack was back in the Chevy Suburban, and there were still Marines leading and following the collection of Secret Service vehicles. The