The well known black box really wasn’t much more than a tape recorder whose leads trailed off to the cockpit. There they collected data from engine and other flight controls, plus, in this case, the microphones for the flight crew. Japan Airlines was a government-run carrier, and its aircraft had the latest of everything. The flight-data recorder was fully digitized. That made for rapid and clear transcription of the data. First of all, a senior technician made a clean, high-speed copy of the original metallic tape, which was then removed to a vault while he worked on the copy. Someone had thought to have a Japanese speaker standing by.
“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
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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.
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“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 sun was up now. The sky was mainly clear, and it took a moment to realize that the skyline was wrong.
The 747 hadn’t even harmed the trees, Ryan saw. It hadn’t wasted its energy on anything but the target. Half a dozen cranes were working now, lifting stone blocks from the crater that had been the House chamber, de-
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positing them onto trucks that were taking them off somewhere. Only a few fire trucks remained. The dramatic part was over for now. The grim part remained.
The rest of the city seemed intact enough at 6:40 A.M. Ryan gave the Hill a final sideways look through the darkened windows as his vehicle headed downhill on Constitution Avenue. If cars were being turned away, the usual morning collection of joggers was not. Perhaps they’d run to the Mall as part of the normal morning ritual, but there they stopped. Ryan watched their faces, some of which turned to see his vehicle pass before returning their gaze eastward, talking in little knots, pointing and shaking their heads. Jack noticed that the Secret Service agents in the Suburban with him turned to watch them, perhaps expecting one to pull a bazooka from under his sweats.
It was novel to drive so fast in Washington. Partly it was because a rapidly moving target was harder to hit, and partly because Ryan’s time was far more valuable now, and not to be wasted. More than anything else it meant that he was speeding toward something he would just as soon have avoided. Only a few days before, he’d accepted Roger Curling’s invitation for the vice-presidency, but he’d done so mainly as a means of relieving himself from government service once and for all. That thought evoked a pained look behind closed eyes. Why was it that he’d never been able to run away from anything? Certainly it didn’t seem like courage. It actually seemed the reverse. He’d so often been afraid, afraid to say no and have people think him a coward. Afraid to do anything but what his conscience told him, and so often what it had told him had been something he hated to do or was afraid to do, but there wasn’t ever an honorable alternative that he could exercise.
“It’ll be okay,” van Damm told him, seeing the look, and knowing what the new President had to be thinking.
No, it won’t, Jack could not reply.
SCRUTINY
THE ROOSEVELT ROOM IS named for Teddy, and on the east wall was his Nobel Peace Prize for his “successful” mediation of the Russo-Japanese War. Historians could now say that the effort had only encouraged Japan’s imperial ambitions, and so wounded the Russian soul that Stalin–hardly a friend of the Romanov dynasty!–had felt the need to avenge his country’s humiliation, but that particular bequest of Alfred Nobel had always been more political than real. The room was used for medium-sized lunches and meetings, and was conveniently close to the Oval Office. Getting there proved to be harder than Jack had expected. The corridors of the White House are narrow for such an important building, and the Secret Service was out in force, though here their firearms were not in evidence. That was a welcome relief. Ryan walked past ten new agents over and above those who had formed his mobile guard force, which evoked a sigh of exasperation from SWORDSMAN. Everything was new and different now, and the protective Detail that in former times had seemed businesslike, sometimes even amusing, was just one more reminder that his life had been traumatically changed.
“Now what?” Jack asked.
“This way.” An agent opened a door, and Ryan found the presidential makeup artist. It was an informal arrangement, and the artist, a woman in her fifties, had everything in a large fake-leather case. As often as he’d done TV– rather a lot in his former capacity as National Security Advisor–it was something Jack had never come to love, and it required all of his self-control not to fidget as the liquid base was applied with a foam sponge, followed by powder and hair spray and fussing, all of which was done without a word by a woman who looked as though she might burst into tears at any moment.