The Lion's Game Read Online Free Page A

then back to Federal Plaza, with our alleged defector, then we’ll see.”
    “See what?”
    “Are you in a rush to get somewhere?”
    “Sort of.”
    “I feel badly that national security is interfering with your social life.”
    I didn’t have a good reply to that, so I said, “I’m a big fan of national security. I’m yours until six P.M.”
    “You can leave whenever you want.” She took her tea and rejoined our colleagues.
    So, I stood there with my coffee, and considered the offer to take a hike. In retrospect, I was like the guy standing in quicksand, watching it cover my shoes, curious to see how long it would take to reach my socks, knowing I could leave anytime soon. Unfortunately, the next time I glanced down, it was up to my knees.

CHAPTER 2
    Sam Walters leaned forward in his chair, adjusted his headset-microphone, and stared at the green three-foot radar screen in front of him. It was a nice April afternoon outside, but you’d never know that here in the dimly lit, windowless room of the New York Air Traffic Control Center in Islip, Long Island, fifty miles east of Kennedy Airport.
    Bob Esching, Walters’ shift supervisor, stood beside him and asked, “Problem?”
    Walters replied, “We’ve got a NO-RAD here, Bob. Trans-Continental Flight One-Seven-Five from Paris.”
    Bob Esching nodded. “How long has he been NO-RAD?”
    “No one’s been able to raise him since he came off the North Atlantic track near Gander.” Walters glanced at his clock. “About two hours.”
    Esching asked, “Any other indication of a problem?”
    “Nope. In fact ...” He regarded the radar screen and said, “He turned southwest at the Sardi intersection, then down Jet Thirty-Seven, as per flight plan.”
    Esching replied, “He’ll call in a few minutes, wondering why we haven’t been talking to him.”
    Walters nodded. A No-Radio status was not that unusual—it often happened between air traffic control and the aircraft they worked with. Walters had had days when it happened two or three times. Invariably, after a couple of minutes of repeated transmissions, some pilot would respond, “Oops, sorry ...” then explain that they had the volume down or the wrong frequency dialed in—or something less innocuous, like the whole flight crew was asleep, though they wouldn’t tell you that.
    Esching said, “Maybe the pilot and co-pilot have stewardesses on their laps.”
    Walters smiled. He said, “The best explanation I ever got in a NO-RAD situation was from a pilot who admitted that when he laid his lunch tray down on the pedestal between the pilots’ seats, the tray had pressed into a selector switch and taken them off-frequency.”
    Esching laughed. “Low-tech explanation for a high-tech problem.”
    “Right.” Walters looked at the screen again. “Tracking fine.”
    “Yeah.”
    It was when the blip disappeared, Walters thought, that you had a major problem. He was on duty the night in March 1998 when
Air Force One,
carrying the President, disappeared from the radar screen for twenty-four long seconds, and the entire room full of controllers sat frozen. The aircraft reappeared from computer-glitch limbo and everyone started to breathe again. But then there was the night of July 17, 1996, when TWA Flight 800 disappeared from the screen forever ... Walters would never forget that night as long as he lived.
But here
, he thought,
we have a simple NO-RAD
... and yet something bothered him. For one thing, this was a very long time to be in a NO-RAD status.
    Sam Walters punched a few buttons, then spoke into his headset microphone on the intercom channel. “Sector Nineteen, this is Twenty-three. That NO-RAD, TC One-Seven-Five, is coming your way, and you’ll get the handoff from me in about four minutes. I just wanted to give you a heads-up on this in case you need to do some adjusting.”
    Walters listened to the reply on his headset, then said, “Yeah ... the guy’s a real screwup. Everyone up and down