The missile left the tube with a WHOOOSH, the force of it rocking Hashan’s slender frame. He watched it go, the front and rear fins popping out instantly. It seemed to fly away in slow motion, and he almost imagined that he could see it spinning.
“God is great,” the boy said beside him.
Hashan nodded. “Yes.”
That much was true, no matter whether the missile found its target.
Congressman Jack Butterfield of Texas lounged in a first-class window seat, simultaneously sipping a vodka tonic, watching the mountains pass below them, and listening to white-haired English billionaire Marshall Dennis prattle on beside him about some hedonistic misadventures he’d enjoyed in Ibiza as a young man.
“That’s a riot, Marsh,” Jack said, and he meant it. The whole trip had been a riot so far. This was the party plane. They had all started drinking in an airport VIP lounge before they left Gatwick. Everyone had roamed about the cabin at will for the duration of the flight, as though they were at a flying cocktail party.
And the young redheaded stewardess had just served him another drink, even though they were landing. Jack’s eyes followed her as she moved up the aisle and stopped at the Egyptian Consul General’s row. Boy oh boy, Jack would love to have a few misadventures with that stewardess.
He needed to think of a reason to call her back here.
“If it’s okay with you,” Jack said, “I probably won’t share that story during the unveiling.”
“Oh, I doubt a single person would be surprised,” Marsh Dennis said. “I’ve been the sporting type my entire life.”
“I know you have. Believe me when I say I’ve followed your – ”
Just then, the plane banked hard and lurched violently to the left. A voice came over the airplane’s public address system. Jack recognized it as the Oklahoma drawl of the pilot, an old US Navy vet Jack had briefly met when coming aboard. But the voice was different now. The man spoke fast and loud.
“Flight attendants! Prepare for emergency landing.”
Someone two rows back gasped.
The pretty red-haired flight attendant had fallen across the Consul General’s lap. The plane was banking so steeply, she was nearly upside down, her legs in the air. She could not regain her feet.
Jack Butterfield turned to Marsh Dennis. Everything seemed to slow down and take on a surreal cast. Marsh’s bloodshot eyes had opened wide, nearly round with sudden fear. For the first time, Jack noticed the deep lines in Marsh’s face – long, narrow slot canyons that undulated down his cheeks.
Jack glanced down at his own hand, holding his vodka drink in a plastic airplane cup. He hadn’t spilled a drop of it, despite the commotion. He felt a moment of absurd pride about that – he’d been drinking a long time. Hell, he was a Texas man.
“Hard stick right!” someone shouted over the speakers. “Hard right, I said. Oh God, it’s tracking us!”
Jack looked around for his seatbelt. He found it, clipped it in, and cinched it tight.
A moment passed.
“Prepare for impact,” someone said.
Impact?
Beside him, Marsh Dennis placed his weathered hands on top of the seat in front of him.
Somewhere behind them, far back in the main cabin, a sound came. Congressman Jack didn’t understand the sound. It was so loud, it was beyond his understanding. It was like a thunderclap, multiplied by a thousand. An instant later, the flight trajectory changed drastically. The plane was falling – a sickening plunge. A rushing sound came… there was nothing to compare it to.
Things went flying by now, sucked backward. The pretty redhead was one of those things. Her drink cart was another. After that, another person went – a fat man in a suit.
“Crash positions!” a booming voice shouted.
Jack screamed, but he couldn’t hear himself. He dropped his drink and clapped his hands over his ears.
The cabin of the plane was like a narrow tunnel in front of him. When it flipped upside down, he closed his eyes tight. In the midst of his terror, no thought came to him, only a dim awareness that whatever happened next, he did not want to see it.
“Here it comes,” Liz Jones said.
She stood with her advance hospitality team in the international VIP passenger greeting area in Terminal 1 at Sharm El Sheikh Airport. Her team all wore black and gold Dennis Hotels Worldwide uniforms. She wore a tan business suit.
The windows here were four stories high, giving a commanding view of the surrounding mountains, and the desert approach to the airport itself.
She felt a trickle of nervousness run down her spine – this one was a major deal. A planeload of heavy hitters was coming in, including Sir Marshall Dennis himself, and most of them were going to be roaring drunk by now. But Liz could handle it. She knew that about herself. She had run with the big dogs, all over the globe, for years and years.
“Let’s look sharp, everybody,” she said.
Suddenly, a young man in her group, a guy from Ireland, gasped. Then a young woman screamed. Now more people all over the lounge were screaming.
Liz stared out the window, her pretty middle-aged face numb, her brain frozen in shock. For a long moment, she could not understand what was happening out there. It didn’t make sense. The unfamiliar data simply did not compute.
On the other hand, somewhere deep inside her mind, she knew she had stored footage of what had just transpired. If she replayed it, she knew what she would see – the plane approaching over the mountains, then a flash of light on the right side of the plane about halfway back, just behind the wing. She had seen it happen in real time, but had been unable to process it. She had been psyching herself up for the disembarking, and didn’t realize what she was looking at.
The plane had cracked apart in midair. There were two pieces at first, then three, then four. The rear of the fuselage spun away like a boomerang. The front section came forward and down. It turned upside down, moving very fast, crashing into the foothills and spraying into a thousand shards. The wings disintegrated as they fluttered to the Earth.
Liz stared and stared. Now there were fires all over the hillsides. All around her, her team stood silently, statues in Dennis black and gold. Behind them, in the terminal, people were still screaming, and now people were running.
Several people had collapsed to the floor.
“Was that really the plane?” Liz said to no one.
CHAPTER TWO
4:35 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
The White House Residence
Washington, DC
The phone rang.
It made a funny sound, not so much a ring as a buzz, or a hum. But it was loud. Also, on each ring it lit up the early morning darkness in blue, like the siren lights on a police car. Luke Stone hated that phone.
He lay somewhere between asleep and awake. Images flashed in his mind. The past few years: an explosion at the old White House, the stately colonnade blowing apart, chunks of it flying up into the air; a gun and rocket battle in a vast open-air stadium in North Korea; Ed Newsam’s fierce eyes, a container ship engulfed in flames behind him; Mark Swann, skinny and bearded in an orange jumpsuit, eyes vacant, chained to a group of other ISIS prisoners; Becca’s pained and angry eyes, her face thin, her skin like paper… Gunner’s big worried eyes, staring at him, looking to Luke for…
Luke opened his own eyes. Next to him on the bed table, in the dark of the Presidential bedroom, the infernal phone kept ringing. A digital clock sat on the table next to the phone. He glanced at its red numbers.
4:35. As he watched, it blinked