Free Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders by Tom Clancy Page A

little while, reversed course, and headed southeast toward D.C. After that he bluffed his way through air-traffic control.”
    “How?”
    Murray
    
    
     nodded to someone Ryan didn't know. “Mr. President, I'm Ed Hutchins, NTSB. It's not hard. He claimed to be a KLM charter inbound to
    
    
     Orlando
    
    
    . Then he declared an emergency. When there's an in-flight emergency, our people are trained to get the airplane on the ground ASAP. We were up against a guy who knew all the right buttons to push. There's no way anyone could have prevented this,” he concluded defensively.
    “Only one voice on the tapes,”
    
    
     Murray
    
    
     noted.
    “Anyway,” Hutchins continued, “we have tapes of the radar tracks. He simulated an aircraft with control difficulties, asked for an emergency vector to Andrews, and got what he wanted. From Andrews to the Hill is barely a minute's flying time.”
    “One of our people got a Stinger off,” Price said, with somewhat forlorn pride.
    Hutchins just shook his head. It was the gesture for this morning in
    
    
     Washington
    
    
    . “Against something that big, might as well have been a spitball.”
    “Anything from
    
    
     Japan
    
    
    ?”
    “They're in a national state of shock.” This came from Scott Adler, the senior career official in the State Department, and one of Ryan's friends. “Right after you turned in, we got a call from the Prime Minister. It's not as though he hasn't had a bad week himself, though he sounds happy to be back in charge. He wants to come over to apologize personally to us. I told him we'd get back—”
    “Tell him yes.”
    “You sure, Jack?” Arnie van Damm asked.
    “Does anybody think this was a deliberate act?” Ryan countered.
    “We don't know,” Price responded first.
    “No explosives aboard the aircraft,” Dan Murray pointed out. “If there had been—”
    “I wouldn't be here.” Ryan finished his coffee. The corporal refilled it at once. “This is going to come down to one or two nuts, just like they all do.”
    Hutchins nodded tentative agreement. “Explosives are fairly light. Even a few tons, given the carrying capacity of the 747-400, would not have compromised the mission at all, and the payoff would have been enormous. What we have here is a fairly straightforward crash. The residual damage was done by about half a load of jet fuel—upwards of eighty tons. That was plenty,” he concluded. Hutchins had been investigating airplane accidents for almost thirty years.
    “It's much too early to draw conclusions,” Price warned.
    “Scott?”
    “If this was—hell,” Adler shook his head. “This was not an act by their government. They're frantic over there. The newspapers are calling for the heads of the people who suborned the government in the first place, and Prime Minister Koga was nearly in tears over the phone. Put it this way, if somebody over there planned this, they'll find out for us.”
    “Their idea of due process isn't quite as stringent as ours,”
    
    
     Murray
    
    
     added. “Andrea is right. It is too early to draw conclusions, but all of the indications so far point to a random act, not a planned one.”
    
    
     Murray
    
    
     paused for a moment. “For that matter, we know the other side developed nuclear weapons, remember?” Even the coffee turned cold with that remark.
     
     
    T
    HIS ONE HE
     found under a bush while moving a ladder from one part of the west face to another. The firefighter had been on duty for seven straight hours. He was numb by now. You can take only so much horror before the mind starts regarding the bodies and pieces as mere things. The remains of a child might have shaken him, or even a particularly pretty female, since this fireman was still young and single, but the body he'd accidentally stepped on wasn't one of those. The torso was headless, and parts of both legs were missing, but it was clearly the body of a man, wearing the shredded remains of a white shirt, with epaulets