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.”
“Crap,” Jones said. “Crap crap crap.” He thought about it for a while. “Can we somehow divert around Russian airspace?”
“I can tell you right now that if we try to get to the U.S. from Islamabad without passing over Russia, we will have to go by an indirect route, and we will not have enough fuel,” Pavel said.
“Then we should fly from Islamabad to somewhere else,” Jones suggested, “such as Hong Kong, and refuel there, and then proceed along the usual corridor.”
“What is so important about Islamabad?” Pavel asked.
“That,” Jones said, “is none of your concern. You just need to fly the plane.”
Pavel corrected him: “You need
Jones sighed. “I had hoped that I could avoid being so blunt,” he said, “but the deal is that, if you don’t file the new flight plan and get us to Islamabad, we will kill you.”
“In Islamabad,” Pavel continued, perfectly unruffled by the threat, “you have protection from officials that you can bribe, and you have connection to your friends who live in Waziristan, Afghanistan, Yemen. Surely you can find one or two comrades who know how to fly a plane. You intend to kill us there and then use your own pilots afterward.”
