The open utility drove up to the windows and the two aircrew were driven the half-mile to the waiting fighter. They spent ten minutes on their pre-flight checks, even though the chances their ground crew had missed something were extremely slim.
Once on board they strapped themselves in, gave one last nod to the ground crew, who clambered down, headed back and left them in peace.
Larry Duval started the two powerful F-100 engines, the canopy hissed down into its seals and the Eagle began to roll. It turned into the light breeze down the runway, paused, received clearance and crouched for one last testing of the brakes. Then thirty-foot flames leapt back from its twin afterburners and Major Duval unleashed its full power.
A mile down the runway, at 185 knots, the wheels left the tarmac and the Eagle was airborne. Wheels up, flaps up, throttles back to pull the engines out of gas-drinking afterburn mode and into military power setting. Duval set a climb rate of five thousand feet per minute and from behind him his wizzo gave him a compass heading for their destination. At thirty thousand feet in a pure blue sky the Eagle levelled out and pointed her nose north-west towards Seattle. Below, the Rockies were clothed in snow and would stay with them all the way.
In the British Foreign Office the final details for the transfer of the British government and its advisers to the April G8 were almost complete. The entire delegation would fly in a chartered airliner from Heathrow to JFK, New York, there to be formally met by the US Secretary of State.
The other six non-American delegations would fly in from six different capitals to the same Kennedy International.
All the delegations would remain ‘airside’ within the airport, a mile away from the nearest demonstrators and protesters outside the perimeter. The President was simply not going to allow those whom he called ‘loony-toons’ to scream insults at his guests or harass them in any way. Repeats of Seattle and Genoa were not to be entertained.
Transfer out of JFK would be by an air bridge of helicopters which would deposit their cargoes into a second totally sealed environment. From there they would simply stroll into the venue of the five-day conference and be enclosed in luxury and privacy. It was simple and flawless.
‘No one had ever thought of it before, but when you think about it, it’s brilliant,’ said one of the British diplomats. ‘Perhaps we should do it ourselves one day.’
‘The even better news,’ muttered an older and more experienced colleague, ‘is that after Gleneagles it won’t be our turn for ages. Let the others cope with the security headaches for a few years.’
Marek Gumienny was not long getting back to Steve Hill. He had been escorted by the Director of his own Agency to the White House, and had explained to the six principals the deductions that had followed the receipt of a bizarre message from the unheard-of island of Labuan.
‘They said much the same as before,’ Gumienny reported. ‘Whatever it is, wherever it is, find it and destroy it.’
‘The same with my government,’ said Steve Hill. ‘No holds barred, destroy on sight. And they want us to work together on this.’
‘No problem. But, Steve, my people are convinced the USA is likely to be the target, so our coastal protection takes precedence over everything else – Mideast, Asia, Europe. We have total priority on all our assets – satellites, warships, the lot. If we locate the ghost ship anywhere away from our shores, OK, we’ll divert assets to destroy it.’
The American Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, authorized the CIA to inform their British counterparts on an ‘eyes-only’ basis of the measures the States intended to take.
The defence strategy would be based on three stages: aerial surveillance, identification of vessel and ‘check-it-out’. Any unsatisfactory explanation, any unexplained diversion from course and track, would generate a physical intercept. Any resistance would entail destruction at sea.
To establish a sea territory, a line was drawn to create a complete circle of three hundred miles’ radius round the island of Labuan. From the northern curve of this circle a line was drawn right across the Pacific to Anchorage on the south coast of Alaska. A second was drawn from the southern arc of the Indonesian circle heading south-east across the Pacific to the coast of Ecuador.
The enclosed area was most of the Pacific Ocean. It included the entire western seaboard of Canada and the USA and Mexico down to Ecuador, including the Panama Canal.
There was no need to announce it yet, the White House had decided, but it was intended to monitor every ship in that triangle steaming east to the American coast. Anything leaving the triangle or heading to Asia would be left alone. The rest would be identified and checked out.
Thanks to years of pressure by a few bodies often dubbed cranky, there was one procedural ally. Major merchant-marine shipping lines had agreed to file destination plans, as airliners file flight plans, as a matter of routine. Seventy per cent of the vessels in the check-it-out zone would be on file and their owning companies could contact their captains. Under the new rules there was also an agreement that sea captains would always use a certain word, known only to their owners, if they were secure. Failure to use the agreed word could mean the captain was under duress.
It was seventy-two hours after the White House conference when the first KH-11 Keyhole satellite rolled on to its track in space and began to photograph the Indonesian circle. Its computers had been instructed to photograph, regardless of steaming direction, any merchant-marine vessel within a three-hundred-mile radius of Labuan Island. Computers obey instructions, so it did. As they began to photograph, the Countess of Richmond, heading due south through the Strait of Makassar, was 310 miles south of Labuan. It was not photographed.
From London the White House obsession with an attack from the Pacific was only half the picture. The warnings from the Edzell conference had been submitted in the UK and the USA to further scrutiny but the findings were broadly endorsed.
It took a long personal call on the hotline between Downing Street and the White House to conclude a concordat on the two most vital narrows east of Malta. The agreement provided that the Royal Navy, in partnership with the Egyptians, would monitor the southern end of the Suez Canal to intercept all ships save the very smallest coming up from Asia.
The US Navy’s warships in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean would patrol the Strait of Hormuz. Here the threat would only be from a huge vessel capable of sinking itself in the deep-water channel running down the centre of the Strait. The principal traffic here was supertankers, entering empty from the south, coming back low in the water and full of crude after loading at any of the score of sea islands scattered off Iran, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
The good news for the Americans was that the owning companies of such vessels are relatively few altogether, and ready to cooperate to prevent a disaster for all of them. Landing a party of US Marines by Sea Stallion helicopter on the deck of a supertanker heading for the Strait but still three hundred miles short, and having a quick tour of the bridge, took very little time and did not slow the vessel at all.
As for threats two and three, every government in Europe with a major sea port was warned of the possible existence of a ghost ship under the command of terrorists. It was up to Denmark to protect Copenhagen; Sweden to look after Stockholm and Göteborg; Germany to watch out for anything entering Hamburg or Kiel; France was warned to defend Brest and Marseille. British navy aeroplanes out of Gibraltar started to patrol the narrows between the Pillars of Hercules, between the Rock and Morocco, to identify anything coming in from the Atlantic.
All the way over the Rockies Major Duval had put the Eagle through its paces and it had performed perfectly. Below him the weather had changed.
The cloudless blue skies of Arizona betrayed first a few wisps of mares’ tail cloud lines, which thickened as he left Nevada for Oregon. When he crossed the Columbia River into Washington the cloud below him was solid from treetop height to twenty thousand feet and moving down from the Canadian border to the north. At thirty thousand feet he was still in clear blue sky, but the descent would involve a long haul through dense vapour. Two hundred miles out he called McChord AFB and asked for a ground-controlled descent to landing.
McChord asked him to stay out to the east, turn inbound over Spokane and descend on instructions. The Eagle was in the left-hand turn towards McChord when what was about to become the USAF’s most expensive spanner slipped out of where it had lain jammed between two hydraulic lines in the starboard engine. When the Eagle levelled out, it fell into the blade of the turbofan.
The first result was a massive bang from somewhere deep in the guts of the starboard F-100 as the compressor blades, sharp as cleavers and spinning close to the speed of sound, began to shear off. Each sheared blade jammed among the rest. In both cockpits a blazing red light answered the yell from Nicky Johns of ‘What the fuck was that?’