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volume control is down.”
    “Right. Hey ... do you think they’re all asleep?”
    Walters hesitated, then replied, “Well ... it happens, but, you know, a flight attendant would have come into the cockpit by now.”
    “Yeah. This is too long for a NO-RAD, isn’t it?”
    “It’s getting to be a little long ... but like I said, when he has to start down ... you know, even if he had total radio failure, he could use the data link to type a message to his company operations, and they’d have called us by now.”
    Esching had thought about that and replied, “That’s why I’m starting to think it’s antenna failure, like you said.” He thought a moment and asked Walters, “How many antennas does this plane have?”
    “I’m not sure. Lots.”
    “Could they all fail?”
    “Maybe.”
    Esching considered, then said, “Okay, say he’s aware of a total radio failure ... he could actually use one of the air-to-land phones in the dome cabin and call someone who would have called us by now. I mean, it’s been done in the past—you could use an airphone.”
    Walters nodded.
    Both men watched the white radar blip with its white alpha-numeric identification tag trailing beneath it as the blip continued to crawl slowly from right to left.
    Finally, Bob Esching said what he didn’t want to say. “It could be a hijacking.”
    Sam Walters didn’t reply.
    “Sam?”
    “Well ... look, the airliner is following the flight plan, the course and altitude are right, and they’re still using the transponder code for the transatlantic crossing. If they were being hijacked, he’s supposed to send a hijacking transponder code to tip us off.”
    “Yeah ...” Esching realized that this situation didn’t fit any of the profiles for a hijacking. All they had was an eerie silence from an aircraft that otherwise behaved normally. Yet, it was possible that a sophisticated hijacker would know about the transponder code and tell the pilots not to touch the transponder selector.
    Esching knew he was the man on the spot. He cursed himself for volunteering for this Saturday shift. His wife was in Florida visiting her parents, his kids were in college, and he’d thought that going to work would be better than sitting around the house alone. Wrong. He needed a hobby.
    Walters said, “What else can we do?”
    “You just keep doing what you’re doing. I’m going to call the Kennedy Tower supervisor, then I’ll call the Trans-Continental Operations Center.”
    “Good idea.”
    Esching stood and said, for the record, “Sam, I don’t believe we have a serious problem here, but we would be lax if we didn’t make some notifications.”
    “Right,” Walters replied as he mentally translated Esching’s words to,
We don’t want to sound inexperienced, panicky, or too incompetent to handle the situation, but we do want to cover our asses
.
    Esching said, “Go ahead and call Sector Nineteen for the handoff.”
    “Right.”
    “And call me if anything changes.”
    “Will do.”
    Esching turned and walked toward his glassed-in cubicle at the rear of the big room.
    He sat at his desk and let a few minutes pass, hoping that Sam Walters would call him to announce they’d established contact. He thought about the problem, then thought about what he was going to say to the Kennedy Tower supervisor. His call to Kennedy, he decided, would be strictly FYI, with no hint of annoyance or concern, no opinions, no speculation—nothing but the facts. His call to Trans-Continental Operations, he knew, had to be just the right balance of annoyance and concern.
    He picked up the phone and speed-dialed Kennedy Tower first. As the phone rang, he wondered if he shouldn’t just tell them what he really felt in the deepest part of his guts—
something is very wrong here
.

CHAPTER 3
    I was sitting now with my colleagues: Ted Nash, CIA Super Spook; George Foster, FBI Boy Scout; Nick Monti, NYPD good guy; and Kate Mayfield, Golden Girl of the Federal Bureau