John Nance - Lockout

The woman shook her head ever so slightly to indicate there was nothing new to report, and that irritated him all the more. To have a major potential intelligence challenge with Israel and Iran occur simultaneously with one of his agents appearing to go silent was upsetting. Whatever was happening, it also involved the NSA, and it was a sure bet his CIA counterparts knew something and were waiting with barely concealed glee to blindside him.

Penick took his seat, trying hard to maintain a smile but hating this aspect of the job. In the military, blindsiding a major general was a career-ending move. In the civilian intelligence community, it was known as sport.

The president had become fond of walking briskly ahead of his aides, advisors, and body man and breezing into meetings with little or no warning, which he did now, loosening the bow tie on his tux as he rounded the corner. There had been too many occupants of the Oval Office, Walter thought to himself, who had no military experience and had been too tentative and wildly out of step with reality, but the current chief executive was not one of them, and it was deeply comforting to know the man understood the parameters—and the limits—of both military force and intelligence.

“Okay, folks. What’s the status of the Pangia flight?”

One of the national security advisor’s deputies ran through the basics: Aircraft still not under crew control but a strange 360-degree turn, as well as a significant slowing.

“Okay. James? Walter? What about Moishe Lavi? Is he just along for the ride? Or is this something more nefarious?”

Walter Randolph wanted badly to get to his feet and command the room, but it would be seen as inappropriate and an upstaging of the president, so he remained in place and substituted a few silent moments of referring to his papers before looking up and locking eyes with POTUS, then beginning to speak.

“First, a few new discoveries. The Airbus A330 that’s causing the problems does not belong to Pangia.” Walter quickly outlined the switched aircraft and the airline’s utter shock at the news, the missing, bogus employee in Mojave, and the allegation that former Prime Minister Lavi may be dying of pancreatic cancer. “Mr. President, with all this, we increasingly suspect the possibility of a covert op being run on behalf of, or even directly by, Mr. Lavi, and one originating at least in part within our borders.”

“Good lord! How probable is that?”

“Well, sir, the facts are lining up a bit, and the motive is very clear, if Lavi is involved. First, the missing Mojave employee. We believe he is actually a well-known ex-pat operative who at one time or another has worked for a half dozen agencies, including the CIA. His real name is William Piper. His aliases are too many to mention, which is something for a man in his late forties. He looks like a GQ model, and we figure he has a very good plastic surgeon somewhere keeping him young. We think we’ve picked up his tracks in Tulsa where the airplane was prepared for commercial service the following week, and we also have reason to suspect he has a confederate, some sort of mole, in Pangia Airways. The owner of this mysterious, identical airplane that was pawned off on Pangia as theirs… an airplane which has to have been fitted clandestinely with some sort of electronics a regular Airbus would never have… is a secretive company in Colorado Springs, which is obviously a front for someone—and not CIA, I hasten to assure you. This outfit bought the subject A330 new off the line in Toulouse and had it sitting in storage long enough to modify it for precisely this mission.”

“A front organization in the Springs?” the President asked, looking startled.

“They’re incorporated as Air Lease Solutions, but we can’t find any evidence of a single lease they’ve done as yet, and they only own one other airplane, a Boeing 737, also new. Of course there hasn’t been enough time to track down any of their principals, but we’re working on it as fast as possible. Considering the fact that Piper once also worked for Mossad some fifteen years ago, and the fact that he was last supposed to be retired from being a spook and living in Haifa with his Israeli girlfriend, this fits most of the fingerprint requirements for a carefully planned operation: They acquire and extensively modify the electronics on the aircraft and wait for the right moment to substitute it for one of Pangia’s identical airplanes, knowing that the A330 would most likely end up on the long distance, round-the-world run… especially if a confederate was doing the ship routing in Chicago. Once the aircraft is on the way, Mr. Lavi buys a ticket… which he did, in fact, buy at the last minute… and once they’re airborne, either take control of the aircraft through an installed package of electronics triggered by an external, probably satellite-fed signal, or internally. It’s not impossible that Mr. Lavi himself is controlling the aircraft from his first class seat. Maybe with a special laptop the aircraft is programmed to obey. Mix in an unknown number of sympathizers and coconspirators in the IDF and the Israeli Air Force ready to overstate the case and push everyone into hair-trigger tension, make sure Iran is informed very early in the process of who’s aboard and what might be happening, perhaps call in a sleeper agent in Tehran to whip up paranoid hysteria at a critical moment among the top military leaders, and you have the makings of a manufactured disaster.”

The president’s hand was out in a stop gesture. “Whoa! All this just to provoke a response from Tehran? The mullahs could just order the plane shot down!”

“Very true, and if Flight 10 gets close to the border, Iran will undoubtedly launch their fighters to do exactly that, and it’s likely they will be flying toward an airliner escorted by Israeli fighters with hair-trigger rules of engagement. Also, as we all know, there are factions in Tehran who were so outraged by Lavi’s quest for a first strike, they want the same thing launched by their side and, of course, we must never forget that power in Tehran rests in the hands of people openly dedicated to wiping Israel off the map and evaporating all the inhabitants. Any way you cut it, you have at the very least a potentially escalating confrontation. This jet is a spark flying toward a pool of gasoline.”

“But we don’t know if Lavi is a passenger or a progenitor?”

“Yes sir. And, we don’t know what aces Lavi may have hidden up his operational sleeve, if this is all his doing.”

“What is Israel saying?”

“Precisely what you would expect, Mr. President. They are on alert; their command and control apparatus is on line in The Hole in Tel Aviv. We also know that the new prime minister was there a few hours ago and is fully engaged with the civilian decision-makers who would have to be in agreement for any nuclear usage, and even though we are not supposed to know this about our allies’ preparedness, they have pilots waiting now in their cockpits, with the fighters fully armed. We assume the missile crews are on hair-trigger alert as well.”

“I see,” the president said, leaning on both arms, his hands planted on the table. “Anything else? Not that that’s not enough.”

“Yes, sir.” Walter glanced at the DIA chief with a carefully forced, neutral expression. “There is one thing we haven’t had an opportunity to share with General Penick, since we picked it up just before you got here, but we have grave concerns that part of this clandestine operation, whoever is running it, may have involved our own NSA in some way, and we think DIA may have had someone looking into this already.”

James Bergen watched a homicidal look flicker across General Penick’s face before the DIA chief caught himself and nodded evenly.