The hijacking of a Boeing 777 triggers an international crisis—and potential world war—in this pulse-pounding thriller from former brigadier general Anthony J. Tata . . .
The hijackers were among the last to board. Three men in their twenties—sporting close-cropped hair, tactical gear, and carrying small duffel bags—stood out immediately. Alongside them was a sharply dressed Chinese businessman in a $3,000 Zegna suit, also under suspicion. Minutes before takeoff, Zara Sheridan, a newly appointed air marshal and former military police NCO on her first assignment, is scrambling to find their true identities when she receives a disturbing alert from the regional office . . .
An experimental fighter jet, the Hyperion X, has crashed near Sheridan’s North Carolina home. One of the jet’s senior engineers is on board Sheridan’s flight, en route to Taiwan to close a multibillion-dollar deal for Blackwood Aviation. His presence is not a coincidence. But by the time Sheridan realizes who he is—and what’s going to happen—it’s too late . . .
The plane is in the air. The hijack team takes over.
The lives of 350 passengers and 14 crew members are at stake. As tensions rise and the violence escalates, Sheridan uncovers shocking information about the new weapons technology the hijackers are after—and how it could change the course of global events. In the wrong hands, it could trigger a third world war. And she’s the only one who can stop it . . .
Terrifying, tense, and all-too-possible, Brace for Impact delivers a masterfully crafted scenario ripped from tomorrow’s headlines.
Publisher:
Kensington Books
Print pages:
320
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THE SEARING HEAT FROM THE EXPLOSION IN THE SKY CAUSED fourteen-year-old Lucas Sheridan’s skin to prickle.
The military jet pinwheeled from the clouds and ripped through the woods and swamp to his front. It tumbled and screeched and burned until there was no noise at all, as if the marsh had swallowed it whole. Not even the gators and bears that populated this path through North Carolina’s Inner Banks stirred, perhaps stunned by the manmade contraption that plummeted into their habitat.
Lucas’s first instinct was to haul ass in the opposite direction, but his mom had always told him, “You may be a little man, but you can make a big difference.” In truth, a growth spurt sent Lucas to a rangy five foot nine already and he was no longer his mother’s “little man,” even if she still called him that. He lifted weights and ran sprints every day to become better at his beloved baseball and felt he was becoming a prime athlete.
Now, he wondered if someone was injured and might need help. Surely there was a pilot in the airplane, if not two. He didn’t know. He balanced his Louisville Slugger over his shoulder with the backstrap of his Rawlings infielder glove cinched tight on the fat end of the thirty-two-inch bat. Then he feverishly pedaled down the trail, managing the chattering handlebars of his Reaper mountain bike with one hand. The erupting fireball maybe two hundred yards away caused him to skid to a stop and open his mouth in a giant O.
“Oh, my God,” he whispered to himself. Flames licked at the sky and settled into a burning pile of black smoke. An aftershock of heat rushed past him like a sonic boom.
Urged on by his retired army sergeant mom’s altruism, Lucas doubled his effort to get to the crash site. On a normal day, with both his parents working and barely speaking, Lucas enjoyed riding his bike through the game reserve and exploring for snakes and shark teeth, both of which he found in abundance.
But today was different. There was no joy in watching the wreckage burn and wondering if someone might be inside the debris field.
The heat from the fire licked at his face as he bore through the wafting smoke. An acrid stink filled his nostrils when he laid his bike in the tall grass next to a large hunk of smoking metal. He took a few steps, stumbled, dropped his bat, hit his head, and rolled to the ground. He felt like he did that time he collided with that fat catcher from Swan Quarter when he was trying to leg out an inside-the-park home run.
A secondary explosion maybe a football field to his front made him crab walk back until he was pressed into something made of glass. He’d been to enough air shows at Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station across the Pamlico and Neuse Rivers to know he was staring at the mangled remains of a pilot’s cockpit in some kind of fighter jet. A seat belt and headrest were next to the split open metal of what he would call a dashboard. It was dotted with buttons and small globes that probably covered lights. Before taking the Swan Quarter Ferry maintenance chief job, his dad had been the head of maintenance at Fort Bragg and had taught him all about indicator lights that would switch on when the operator was supposed to take some kind of action.
Hanging from the cracked dashboard were some wires with a small orange rectangle on each end. Lucas studied these and saw “Classified” printed in black letters on the side of each rectangle. “Code Word” was displayed on the opposite side of the devices. He held the two pieces in each hand and saw that they fit together if properly mated. Beneath the “Code Word” markings was the word “TYRANT.”
Lucas knew a little bit about classified material. One day when in his mom’s military police office at Fort Bragg, he had asked, “What’s that, Moms?” as he pointed at a document folder that said “Secret.”
“Just an empty classified folder,” his mom said, holding up the manila folder. “If there was something in here,” she joked, “I’d have to turn you over to my MPs. They’d lock you up real tight.” After a moment, she smiled, rubbed her chin, and said, “Now that sounds like a good idea.” Even though Lucas knew his army master sergeant mom was kidding, the thought of the military police and classified documents scared him at the time.
Now he was staring at the classified equipment that was on a fighter jet, and he knew his parents, especially his mom, would want him to try and do the right thing. They had always told him about the importance of protecting government secrets, because “if the bad guys get them, bad things happen to soldiers like us in war.”
He looked up at the hazy, late afternoon sky, smoke floating like a lingering ghost, and wondered what happened to the pilot. He hadn’t seen any parachute when he had noticed the plane whistling to the ground. And thank God, he didn’t see a dead body in the mangled cockpit seat to his front. That would freak him out. He searched a small circle around the husk of the cockpit and couldn’t find any sign of life—or death—in his immediate vicinity. He figured it wouldn’t be long before scavengers came to loot the airplane and they might not have the same sense of nobility when it came to protecting secret government information.
He decided to secure the small rectangular housings marked “Classified/Code Word.” Each was the size of his thumb, like a flash drive. He detached the first one and then the next by pressing on the orange rubberized material covering the storage drives. Each detached easy enough, as they were seated in a coupling designed to allow for removal. At Fort Bragg, Lucas’s father had let him watch diagnostics tests on vehicle engines by plugging a similar-looking gadget into a receiver in the vehicle electrical system. He didn’t remember any of them being classified, but that would make sense because his father had a top secret clearance and of course he didn’t.
His baseball pants had a hole in the back pocket from too many butt slides. His coach was working with him on the headfirst technique, but his mom didn’t want him diving into another player’s legs for fear of Lucas breaking his neck. He held the two sections in the palm of his hand and wondered how best to protect them. Looking at his bat and glove, he had an idea. He loved baseball so much that he slept with his glove next to him and even took it to school. There was no separating Lucas and his glove.
He rammed one device into the slot for his index finger and one into the slot for his pinky, those two being the least used of the five finger holes in his glove and therefore the tightest fits.
As he was making sure the devices were snug, a buzzing noise caught his ear. From living at Fort Bragg, he knew the sound of a helicopter when he heard it. He scampered into the wood line as the helicopter passed over him and swooped around again, landing about two hundred yards away. He could name most of the army helicopters like the Blackhawk, Chinook, and Apache. He liked them mostly because of the Native American names and he enjoyed reading history, especially about the indigenous people of North Carolina like the Lumbee and Croatan Indians. His “Moms” was part Croatan, descending from the earliest known Native American tribes in what became North Carolina. This helicopter wasn’t anything he recognized, though. It was painted tan and had a circular ducted fan at the back. He had seen those in movies but not on any military base. On the side, he saw what looked like a giant painted snake’s mouth with the fangs prominently displayed. He recognized the logo as that of a local private military contractor called Copperhead, Incorporated.
Two men jumped out of the side cargo doors. They held rifles attached to tactical vests by three-point slings as they scouted the area, looking left and right, before giving a thumbs-up sign to another person, who jumped out. He was tall and thick, having to duck beneath the whipping blades of the chopper. The three men walked to what he guessed was the main wreckage of the jet and began poking around as if they were looking for something.
Maybe they were a team sent to retrieve any classified materials before scavengers could pick the site clean?
As Lucas was thinking this, he heard another helicopter buzz low and saw that it was the kind he recognized, a Blackhawk, but painted with US Coast Guard white-and-red paint, which meant it was probably out of nearby Elizabeth City’s coast guard base. As it began to hover, the men on the ground aimed their rifles at the chopper and began firing.
Why would they be doing this? Lucas wondered. And then he realized they were the scavengers, not the good guys.
The coast guard helicopter banked away, its right engine bursting into flames and leaving a smoking trail on its egress. Lucas decided then to run the other way. He carefully lifted his bike from the tall grass, crouching low as he pushed it back toward the trail he took home every day. The smoking helicopter flew directly over him, causing the men on the ground to look in his direction. He tried to blend into the tall grass and trees, but he thought one of them might have seen him as he pedaled away on the trail. While he knew he could outrace them on his bike, he also knew he couldn’t outrun a rifle bullet.
Still, he dodged and darted his way through the brush. Shots whistled overhead, snapping tree branches. He didn’t know if they were shooting at him or the distressed chopper. Returning to the main trail he had left before finding the jet wreckage, he pedaled as fast as he could, as if he were stealing second base a million times over.
A buzzing noise seemed to be following him, but sometimes the Inner Banks did that. It buzzed. Buzzed with insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals all sounding off in an electric symphony. Still, Lucas kept looking over his shoulder and couldn’t see anything. Maybe his ears were just ringing from the explosions and gunshots? Racing into his driveway after what seemed like a lifetime but was only twenty minutes max, he saw his mom standing outside her car next to a suitcase as she argued with his father.
Unaware that Lucas had approached from the trail in the backyard, they were shouting at each other. Lonnie Sheridan, his father, was a physically imposing man, over six and a half feet tall, broad-shouldered, and physically fit. He had played football at Morehead State, joined the army after 9/11, and met his mother, who was graduating from Fayetteville State University. They both rose through the ranks and retired as master sergeants at twenty years, vowing to slow down the pace and provide a more wholesome life for Lucas in Eastern North Carolina, where his mother was born and raised.
“I can’t do this anymore, Zara. I’m done!” his father said, who was halfway in his Ford F-150 pickup truck with one booted foot on the ground and the other in the well of the driver’s compartment. He was wearing his standard-issue NCDOT Ferry uniform of short sleeve khaki shirt and blue jeans. “We were supposed to retire, for Christ’s sake! And now you’re off traveling the world … without me! At least I’m local!”
“I have to go do this job!” his mother said. “I’m doing the best I can!”
“Well, I have to go do mine. There’s a ferry accident in the middle of the river.”
“Fine. Lucas can take care of himself until you get home,” she said.
His mom checked her watch with a worried glance. He typically would have already been home from baseball practice.
“I have no idea what time that will be. Why did you have to take this job that takes you away from home?”
“That’s not fair,” she said in a hoarse voice.
“It’s more than fair. We agreed on retirement. We agreed on putting family first. And now this … this air marshal gig? I thought you were just taking some admin job with Sharpstone or Copperhead!”
“You know I’m no admin, goddamn it! No more than you are!”
His parents had been fighting a lot lately, even sleeping in separate bedrooms frequently. He loved them both with all his heart. They had been through so much together. From the time he was three until he was seven years old, one of them had been constantly deployed to combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria. The stress had been high, but they had made it to the twenty-year military retirement mark. The problem was, he guessed, that neither was truly retired. With the economy in trouble, they both held steady jobs to make ends meet and provide a standard of living they thought Lucas deserved. He wished there was something he could do to help the situation and blamed himself. Maybe if it weren’t for him, they might have stayed in the army and made command sergeant major or general or whatever rank was best for them.
As it was, he mostly kept to himself, made sure he didn’t place too many demands on his parents, and tried to help where he could. He understood they loved him, but he hated watching them fight. His only two real requests were for some computer equipment and the chance to keep playing baseball. That seemed totally reasonable.
He watched his father storm off in his truck, the tires spitting gravel as he sped to Swan Quarter Ferry landing to manage whatever accident had occurred.
His mother stood there, watching him drive away, and put her face in her hands, sobbing. Her phone rang and she wiped at her eyes, took a deep breath, and stood up straight before answering.
His mom, retired Master Sergeant Zara Sheridan, was a tall, fit woman, having played volleyball at Fayetteville State University before meeting Lucas’s dad at Fort Bragg, where she joined the army, after which they were married. She was the daughter of the highly respected former 82nd Airborne Division Command Sergeant Major Lincoln White, who had conducted combat jumps into Grenada, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Lucas’s grandparents lived in Edenton, North Carolina, about an hour away from Swan Quarter.
“I’m leaving now,” Zara said into the phone, her voice finding its footing. She lifted her suitcase into the hatch of their Toyota 4Runner. “Taiwan? First flight? Yes. Okay, that’s what I understood from the first call. Got it.”
“Moms! Moms!” Lucas shouted.
Zara turned and saw her son and held up a finger, as if to say, “Just a second.” Her furrowed brow and rushed movements told Lucas he might not have much time.
“Moms! Moms!” Lucas shouted again, tugging at her blazer.
“Raleigh is three hours away, and if I leave right now, I’ll make the flight,” she said. After a pause: “Understand. They’ll hold it for me if necessary.”
Keeping the phone held to her ear, Zara shrugged off her blazer, tossed it into the passenger seat, and stepped into the driver’s seat of the Toyota.
“Roger, I’m on my way,” she said.
Lucas scrambled to the driver’s side of the truck. “Moms! I really need to talk to you! An airplane crashed and a helicopter was shot at and there’s bad guys with rifles!”
“No. No. It’s my son. He’s always excited about everything. Probably some video game he’s reached a new level on,” Zara said. She started the engine and began to close the door when she saw Lucas still standing there. She shook her head and formed “sorry” with her lips and then said to her boss, on the other end of the phone, “Can you send me any intel so I can study up on the plane? I’ve never been to Taipei.”
Frustrated, Lucas spotted his mom’s blazer in the passenger seat and had an idea. He ran around to the passenger side of the SUV, dropped his bat, snagged his glove, fished out one of the classified devices, and slipped it into the pocket of her blazer. That would make his mom talk to him, which usually wasn’t an issue. As he was digging for the second piece, it was stuck way too far down the index finger slot of his glove for him to retrieve in a timely fashion.
“Lucas, dear, my blazer, son. I’m late for the airport and I’ve got an intel briefing happening in two minutes about this flight. I’ll call your dad, and we can talk once I’m settled, but Mama’s gotta go to work. Love you,” she said. She ran around the vehicle and gave him a quick hug.
Lucas tossed his mom’s coat in the seat of the vehicle, hugged her back, and muttered, “Love you, too.”
As his mom’s SUV pulled away, the buzzing noise returned, and Lucas thought he saw a drone banking away behind the tree line.
But maybe not, because that would be weird.
ZARA SHERIDAN
DURING THE DRIVE, ZARA FELT THE CRUSHING WEIGHT OF HER MARITAL discord with Lonnie coupled with her failure at Abbey Gate, which continued to gnaw at her psyche.
Could she have done more? Acted more quickly? Taken a shot in the crowd? Even if she had wounded a few innocents, it would have been better than the resulting thirteen dead US military personnel and dozens of others with grievous wounds. Hundreds of Afghans attempting to reach the gate were brutally slaughtered, too.
Her wounds, minor compared to others, were a constant reminder of her failure. Two scars ran along her left jawline, offset like a single lightning bolt. She would absently run her hand along the slightly raised welts when deep in thought. As if the wounds had opened a portal to an inner sanctum of truth and understanding, helping her realize her priorities.
She’d suffered traumatic brain injury, as well, but seemed to have shaken that off, or so she had convinced her doctors. On a pragmatic level, she understood that the Abbey Gate bombing was not her fault, but the soldier in her felt the pain of every killed and wounded soldier and marine.
The fighting with Lonnie was related, for sure. She’d retired from the army shortly after the action in Afghanistan, forcing his hand to do the same. The resentment was palpable, and she wondered if they would stay together. Add to that the sorrow she felt about leaving Lucas or, for that matter, not even listening to what her son had wanted to tell her, and she had a hat trick of guilt consuming her.
But she convinced herself that she’d been so bewildered from the fight with Lonnie, and in a such a rush to get to Raleigh-Durham Airport, she could excuse her treatment of Lucas.
“What are you talking about?” she whispered to herself. “There’s no excuse for ignoring your son.” She pounded the steering wheel, caught between the triple vector of Lonnie’s anger, job pressure, and simply loving her kid.
She knew that loving your kid always came first. So, why didn’t it? Why did adult matters seem to pass like a dark cloud over even the smallest moments? Had she even kissed Lucas on the cheek before leaving? She didn’t think so. Not that at fourteen years old he wouldn’t have turned away, but still.
The jumble of confused thoughts and emotions translated into a choppy synchronization of her last-minute tasking to co-marshal the maiden voyage of TransPac Airlines from the Research Triangle region of North Carolina to the tech heavy city of Taipei, Taiwan. Family and work were always a challenge for any parent, but she had vowed to spend more time with Lucas when she retired from the army. Mostly, she had been successful, but this new gig as a US federal air marshal seemed both exciting and challenging. Truthfully, she had missed the rush of combat and mission focus from her army days.
But she had missed so many birthdays and baseball games from Lucas’s childhood, and her teenager would be in college before she knew it.
Nonetheless, during the three-hour drive, she had a long conversation with Lindy Van Horn, the operations chief of the Charlotte, North Carolina, Federal Air Marshal Service office. Lindy had walked her through the passenger list, the crew, and the fact that she was replacing long-serving Air Marshal Arnold Winston, who had been diagnosed with the flu an hour before she got the call. She would be the deputy in charge behind another tenured Federal Air Marshal, Lloyd Bucknell.
She didn’t know Bucknell, and Lindy had only said, “He’s steady. Punches the clock. No emotion. Gets the job done.”
Unremarkable, she thought, which was good.
Zara made it to Raleigh-Durham Airport in time to park in premium, hoping it would be reimbursed by the stingy government. She hooked a left in the main terminal and then snaked her way through the throngs of people to the private marshal’s security screening area, which was near the often-vacant offices at the far end of the terminal.
Her heart froze when the door was locked. Was she too late? She glanced over her shoulder at the lengthy line of passengers at the main security checkpoint nearly half a football field away. She could cut to the front of the line, but that would identify her as a marshal to any potential passengers on her flight, and novice TSA agents sometimes didn’t know what to make of her pistol and ammunition. She preferred to remain as anonymous as possible. As a mixed-race woman, the most frequent take she received were comments about her beauty, not the fact that she was six feet tall. But still, she stood out if someone caused a scene.
The door flew open and a large balding man in a Transportation Security Administration hat was smiling at her. Bold yellow letters that read “TSA” screamed from the blue hat.
“Was just about to close. You’re Sheridan, with the marshals?” he asked.
“That’s me,” she replied.
“Bucknell was looking for you, but he got tired of waiting and already boarded.”
She stepped into the room, which was outfitted with a millimeter wave scanner, the type where a passenger steps into and lifts her arms, and a computed tomography scanner for luggage and bags. The TSA agent closed and locked the door.
It wasn’t the scanner and X-ray that caught her attention, though. His eyes were more intrusive and assessing than any equipment could ever be.
“Like what you see?” she snapped.
He looked toward the back door that led to the air side terminal, his tongue running along his bottom lip as he did so.
“Let’s get you going,” he said. “Name’s Clark.”
Clark had broad shoulders, a shaved head, and tattoo sleeves up both arms. Though he wore a TSA hat, he had a black polo shirt on. On the upper left breast was the logo “Copperhead Security.” The stem of the two Ps were snake fangs protruding from a muted outline of a copperhead snake’s open mouth ready to strike. She knew Copperhead but had never seen this individual. Their headquarters was in northeastern North Carolina not far from Swan Quarter. They had a lingering notorious reputation from the wars of the last two and a half decades.
“Roger that,” she said.
She placed her bag, pistol, ammo, and blazer on the conveyor belt for the CT X-ray.
“What’s this?” Clark asked, lifting her blazer.
“A blazer,” she snapped. “I’m in a rush here.”
“Darling, I’m talking about the classified flash drive in your pocket.”
Zara wrinkled her brow and said, “No idea what you’re talking about.” After a pause, she added, “Clark.”
He held up an orange device the size of his thumb.
“Can’t be carrying classified material unsecured,” he said, holding it so she could see. “Says ‘Classified/Code Word’ right here.”
Thinking quickly, she said, “Yes, it’s secured in my coat pocket.”
“Has to be in a briefcase. This is loose. I can’t let it on,” he replied, tensing up.
“It’s mine,” she replied.
“You didn’t even know it was there,” he replied.
She couldn’t really argue with Clark’s point as her mind spun to how it got there. Her husband? Then it hit her. Lucas had grabbed her blazer. He was trying to tell her something. Had he put the classified device in her coat pocket?
“I did. I was going to stow it in my bag,” she said, reaching for it.
He pulled his hand away.
“Best I can do is lock this up for you and you can get it when you return,” he said. “It’s my call what gets on the plane. This is suspicious, and you didn’t know it was there. A terrorist could have put it in your pocket.”
She smiled lightly at the prospect of Lucas being a “terrorist.”
“Something funny, Marshal?”
“Nothing. I’m just in a rush. You’re going to let me take my Sig but not my flash drive?” Her Sig was her Sig Sauer P229 pistol, one of the four standard carry options for federal air marshals.
“Your Sig and ammo are authorized on the manifest. I’m going to secure this flash drive in that bank of lockers over there, give you the key, and you can get it when you return.”
No harm in that, she thought. In a sense, he was right. She had no idea what the device was or how it got into her pocket. Zara couldn’t argue with his logic. She watched him open a small locker that looked more like a safe deposit box and place the item inside. He closed the door, turned the key, and then handed it to her.
“Place it on a key ring. There’s a master, but I’ll have to charge you a hundred bucks to make a new one, darling.”
“Seriously, you’re a pain in the ass,” she said. “And I’m not your darling.”
He puffed up and smiled.
“You could be though,” he said, winking. “We’d have fun.”
She held up her wedding band on her left hand. He shrugged. “Never bothered me much.”
“Right,” she said. “I figured.”
She shook her head, then gathered her blazer, pi. . .
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