And business, of course, was exactly what this plane was designed for. The main cabin could be configured as a meeting room; a data projector had been concealed in the aft bulkhead and could throw an image up the length of the cabin to a retractable screen at the forward end. So they pulled down all of the window shades and got Pavel’s laptop connected to the projector.
The two jihadists who had been driving the taxis drove them away from the plane and apparently parked them in the parking lot of the FBO and then walked back to come aboard. So there were now nine people aboard the jet: the pilots Pavel and Sergei, Abdallah Jones, Zula, Khalid, and four whom Zula thought of as soldiers: the one who had spent the entire day driving the stolen taxi around Xiamen, the second bomb vest wearer from the Hyatt, and two more who had only recently been collected from the boat. The latter two seemed younger, more junior. Certainly more obsequious. In any case, these four soldiers all crammed themselves into the private sleeping cabin at the back of the plane, leaving the main cabin available for this meeting. Zula was not invited to it, but neither was she told to move, and indeed, short of locking her into the lavatory, they could not really have put her anywhere else.
And so, shortly before midnight, they resumed the earlier conversation about flight plans and great circle routes, this time with visual aids. For Pavel had a piece of software that could calculate and plot such routes on a map of the world, and he now used it to shape possible courses from Islamabad to various cities in the United States.
The jet’s maximum range was 10,700 kilometers. The pilots wanted Jones to understand that some distance had to be subtracted from that figure to allow for unexpected headwinds and for maneuvering in the vicinity of the airports at either end of the flight plan.
The picture that emerged was that Islamabad was basically located on the opposite side of the world from Denver, and so a great circle route plotted directly over the North Pole would take the jet to the Mile High City, if it had that much range, which it didn’t. In fact, if they were to fly the jet on that heading, it would be lucky to reach as far south as Regina, Saskatchewan. More likely, they’d have to set down in Saskatoon for refueling.
This kind of talk seemed to put Abdallah Jones into a foul mood. After some angry pacing up and down the aisle, he appeared to calm himself down and then divulged something to the pilots. Or at least he acted as if he were divulging something. Zula had seen enough of the man and his wiles, by this point, to doubt that he ever sincerely divulged anything.
All he wanted, he claimed, was to get the jet across the forty-ninth parallel and land it on U.S. soil. It didn’t have to be a big airport. As a matter of fact, he much preferred a smaller, more rural destination. The ideal landing site would be an unmanned dirt strip out in the middle of nowhere. His only goal was to smuggle a few of his brethren into the United States where they could disappear into the general population and then await future orders. But if the jet could only make it as far as Saskatoon, this wouldn’t work.
There followed a lot more screwing around with maps and detailed calculations. The gist of it was that the middle of the United States was actually the worst part to aim for. Because of the mathematics of the great circle calculations, it turned out that the northeastern and northwestern corners of the Lower Forty-Eight were significantly closer to Islamabad—close enough that the jet might be able to reach them without the need to refuel.
They then began to plot and examine great circle routes from Islamabad to various New England and Northwest destinations. Jones was fascinated by the differences between these. The route from Islamabad to Boston, for example, passed over the western Russian heartland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, threaded between Iceland and Greenland, then passed over the Canadian maritime provinces and Maine. Each of these places seemed to give rise to its own set of misgivings in Jones’s mind. The route to Seattle, on the other hand, cut across the least populated swath of Siberia, traversed the Arctic Ocean, made landfall again in Canada’s extreme northwest, and followed the mountainous wilderness of the Yukon and western British Columbia before crossing the U.S. border only a few miles from its destination. The trajectory was an unbroken swath of the most desolate and unpopulated places on the globe. A small diversion to one side or the other would bring the jet down in the wilderness of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, or the mountains or deserts of eastern Washington State.
Once this was understood, there was no question in Jones’s mind as to how they would proceed.
“When we get to Islamabad,” he said, “we’ll file a flight plan from there to Boeing Field in Seattle. We can reach it without the need to refuel. I like this idea because it’s not going to arouse any suspicion in the minds of the authorities; Boeing Field is where you departed from the last time you left the United States.”
“But if you land there—” Pavel began.
“—we’ll be arrested, obviously, by Homeland Security,” Jones said. “But we’re not actually going to land there. We’re going to divert at the last minute and land out in the middle of nowhere and scatter. So you’ll need to reserve enough fuel for that.”
“You want to get from Islamabad to Seattle without refueling?” Pavel asked.
“Is that not the entire point of this exercise?”
“We have been plotting great circle routes,” Pavel told him. “This is not the same thing as a flight plan.”
“I understand that,” Jones said.
“You cannot simply fly on a great circle trajectory across Russia,” Pavel said, astonished that Jones would not already know this. He directed their attention at the red arc that his software had plotted northward from Islamabad, bisecting Siberia on its way to the high Arctic. “There is no such air traffic corridor. The Russian Air Force would shoot us down as soon as we crossed the border. This cannot be done.”