H.M.S. Unseen (20 page)

“Okay. The rest of us leave here at 0800 on the eighth arriving Washington 1630. Reception and dinner beginning 1900 at the Carlton. That’s industry only, plus three senior U.S. Senators.”

“Good. Kennedy coming?”

“Yup.”

“That’s better yet. He’s still the best we have. Knows more. Thinks more. Does more. Even though he’s a Democrat. Plus he’s as funny as hell. Put him near me, willya.”

“How about John Kerry?”

“Yup. He’s coming as well.”

“Excellent. Am I speaking?

“Yes. First draft’s ready tomorrow. I believe you’re working on the departure speech yourself.”

“Yup. Don’t want any help with that one.”

Friday, February 3, 2006. London.

Great Britain’s Minister of Transport, Howard Eden, was under pressure. Every day he faced a barrage of criticism over the Concorde air disaster. The media were demanding answers, the opposition benches in the House were demanding answers, and now the Prime Minister was demanding answers.

“Jesus Christ,” he told his secretary, in their besieged private offices in Westminster. “You’d have thought I was driving the bloody thing.”

He had just returned from a bruising session of questions in the House, during which there had been calls for his resignation. He had been publicly described as the Minister Without A Clue—a crib from a recent tabloid headline—and variously as “incompetent,” “uncaring,” “witless,” and “Ti,”—the latter, the Tory shadow minister explained, was short for “
Titanic
,
”
which everyone knew was a total bloody disaster.

Howard Eden was the latest in a long line of British government ministers who seemed fine while the winds were fair, but came unbuckled at the first sign of trouble. This was undoubtedly because the ruling Parliamentary party too often appointed ministers to areas where their degree of knowledge and competence was near zero. In recent years they had made bankers and lawyers into defense ministers—and appointed all kinds of political misfits into the great offices of state.

Howard Eden, in office for only eighteen months, still knew very little about modern air transportation. And he was not much better on road and rail. His job was regarded as a stepping-stone to higher office. Which was why he was all at sea, like Concorde, in his current predicament. And now he had to report to the Prime Minister who had made him transport minister in the first place, to explain precisely why his department was being made to look absurd on a daily basis, right out there in front of the entire world.

He had no answers. Everyone knew that. For the search for wreckage was going especially badly in mountainous North Atlantic seas almost 3 miles deep. The only glimmer of hope was that on the tenth day of the operation out on 30 West, a Royal Navy sonar operator thought he had heard the locator beam of Concorde’s black box. Whether or not they could ever get down there to retrieve it was highly debatable. But arrangements were being made for an unmanned diving submarine to go down and try.

The Prime Minister’s concern was a sharp lessening in public confidence in air travel. And, being an instinctive politician, he understood the reason for this was lack of explanation as to the cause of the disaster. What he needed was someone who could step forward, and say,
Prime Minister, we are dealing here with almost certain metal fatigue, and we are examining every aircraft in the fleet for any further signs of it. Concorde was lost due to a structural failure and we are making absolutely certain such a failure could never, ever happen again.

The public could forgive an identifiable problem that was being fixed. They had proved that years ago when there were a succession of accidents with the Comet airliners. But the public could not cope with uncertainty, especially when the government’s own experts were plainly without clues. The British Airways board was beside itself with worry. Three of their members would be in Washington five days hence to see the fanfare of departure for the big Boeing superstar that would, expensively, put their beloved Concorde out of the business of supersonic flight forever.

It would, of course, be churlish for the Prime Minister to sack Howard Eden for his current role in one of Britain’s worst ever crashes—one which had killed four United States congressmen. But it might look a whole lot better if he resigned. There’s nothing quite so good as a scapegoat to take the heat off everyone else.

However, in this instance, the public outrage, fanned by the press, was so intense, it seemed nothing could diminish the clamor for heads to roll. As if 115 on board
Speedbird
001 were not sufficient.

Howard Eden had no intention of going to Washington to attend the triumphant ceremony of the American plane makers. With a weary step, he headed downstairs toward the ministerial limousine, to take him to 10 Downing Street for possibly the last time.

Not far away, there was equal depression in the offices of the Air Accident Investigation Branch of the ministry. With every day that had passed since zero plus two, the number of clues had diminished. There had been pieces of wreckage on the surface, but only from the cabin. All of Concorde’s heavy-duty components, like the four engines, the tail plane and undercarriage, were on the bottom of the Atlantic. The wings seemed to have been blown into shards by exploding fuel, and they did not float. The Navy searchers found no sizable pieces whatsoever. The other problem was the height. “Normal” air disasters, which take place at the regular cruising altitude of above 30,000 feet can scatter debris over a 4-mile area.

In this case, given the 10-mile height and the terrific speed, the wreckage seemed scattered across a square of 10 miles by 10 miles, or, from the searchers’ point of view, 100 square miles, made infinitely more difficult because no one actually knew, with any accuracy, precisely where Concorde had been when she came apart.

Each day the department tried to assemble a report, demonstrating that some progress was being made. But it was almost impossible. Assisted by the senior brains of British Airways, and by the British Aircraft Corporation, even by French experts from Aerospatiale, there was nothing to piece together. Not unless they could find a way to reclaim the critical parts from the bottom of the Atlantic. And no one seemed very optimistic about that, particularly since it would cost a king’s ransom even to attempt it. No one had ever been anywhere near that depth in a search for wreckage. Not even the
Titanic
rested in water
that
deep.

Friday, February 3.
Office of the National Security Advisor.
The White House.

Admiral Arnold Morgan was on his “break.” This was a twenty-minute hiatus he tried to take each morning at around 1100 when he checked through newspapers and magazines, “just to check no one’s done anything absolutely fucking ridiculous.”

He was sitting at his big desk, perusing the national weeklies, chatting with Kathy O’Brien and sipping black coffee. “This Concorde thing’s like a time warp,” he was saying. “Remember last spring when the Brits were searching for the submarine? Well, they’re still doing the same thing now—groping around the bottom of the goddamned ocean, and both times they are finding nothing significant.”

“I could remind you,” said Kathy, “that despite your fears, the submarine has never been seen, and neither has it blown up another aircraft carrier. Most reasonable people believe it must be on the bottom, wherever that may be, a tomb for all the crew, whoever they may be.”

“You could remind me of that,” replied the admiral. “And you could remind me that in your view I suffer from incurable paranoia, which I do.”

They both laughed. But Arnold Morgan was serious. “When I was in the National Security Agency, I tried to connect apparently disconnected facts. And a lot of the time I was very wide of the mark. But not always. And I got it right more often than anyone else, which is, I guess, why I’m sitting in this chair. And I’m now pondering three totally disconnected facts.

“One, that British submarine is still missing, and I, in company with a very few like-minded paranoids, think it might be out there plotting and planning a strike against the West. I think it is possible that Commander Adnam may be alive, and that if he is, he is driving HMS
Unseen…
somewhere.

“Two, a brilliantly maintained aircraft, flying high, completely out of harm’s way, suddenly falls clean out of the sky, for no discernible reason.

“Three, there are, in the intelligence community, deep suspicions that Iraq, possibly assisted by the Russians, is testing SAMs, surface-to air-missiles, down in the southern marshes—a strange place, where we know there was some elation over the Concorde disaster.”

“Hold on one moment, Arnold, are you trying to tell me we have this homicidal maniac, who’s
stolen
a Royal Navy submarine, somewhere on the loose in a submarine which can shoot down supersonic airliners at will. Isn’t that a bit far-fetched?”

“Probably. At least it would be if his name wasn’t Benjamin Adnam…but the most far-fetched part is
where
Concorde vanished.”

“How do you mean?”

“Kathy, more than 94 percent of all air crashes take place on landing or takeoff. Just go over the ones you remember…the one in the Florida swamp, the one in the Potomac, the one at the end of the runway in Boston, the one up the mountain near Tokyo, even the TWA off Long Island, the one near Paris, the one that fell short of Birmingham airport in England. All near airports. Passenger aircraft hit mountains coming into land, they misjudge runways in bad weather, and they take off when something’s not quite right. But they hardly ever blow up of their own accord, or fall apart when they are cruising through empty skies…because there’s nothing up there.”

“No…I suppose they don’t.”

“Just think about it for a minute. Here we have this beautiful aircraft, powered by four Rolls Royce engines that the Brits check thoroughly about every two days. Its safety record is immaculate, its pilots and flight engineers carry out five times more safety checks than any other aircraft requires. When that baby takes off, every working part is as close to flawless as the Brits can get it. The safety procedures are sensational…they even ensure sufficient fuel to land on
one
engine anywhere during their journey….

“And yet, halfway across the ocean, in light winds, flying clear at 54,000 feet, not a semblance of a problem, something happens that is so sudden, so utterly drastic, the sonofabitch just self-destructs, all on its own. Neither pilot apparently had time to yell to Gander Control on the radio, ‘We’re in trouble.’ Not even ‘Holy shit!’ Nothing. Kathy, that aircraft was taken out at the speed of light, and even the terrorist community would have to admit it would be impossible to get through the BA security to plant a bomb. The Concorde team security-check
every passenger’s goddamned baggage in detail…
no, Kathy, in the absence of the black box, I’m saying something’s going on.”

“Do you think someone fired a missile at it…like they say happened to the TWA flight?”

“Kathy, I can’t say that…because there’s nowhere in that part of the Atlantic
from which to fire a missile
.”

“How about if there had been…a nearby island, say. Or a cruising foreign warship? What would you have said then?”

“I would have been pretty goddamned suspicious, that’s what, Kathy. I’d have been drawn to the conclusion that someone had knocked Concorde right out of the sky.”

“Which leaves us where.”

“Nowhere, basically.”

“How about Ben?”

“Well, no submarine in anyone’s navy has ever possessed the capacity to fire a surface-to-air guided missile that high, that fast, and that accurately. Not even us. And Ben Adnam is a known Iraqi, working for that barbarous but kinda primitive regime.

“I suppose they might have bought and tested a Russian missile that would have done the job. But it would have needed refining. And their submarine would have required major surgery. They don’t even have a submarine that we know of. They don’t even have any water deep enough to float it in. Hell, the Iraqis don’t even know how to
service
a submarine, never mind turn it into the most advanced underwater weapons system in the world. So I guess I just don’t know. Maybe the facts are incompatible.

“The trouble is, Kathy, if we accept there is even a possibility that Concorde was hit by a missile, we have to accept that it must have come from a vanishing submarine. Because there was nowhere else it could have come from. Barring outer space.”

Monday, February 6.
Office of the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral
Joseph Mulligan. The Pentagon, Washington.

“
Arnold, as I live and breathe! To what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected visit? Good to see you.”

“I just wanted to have a chat with one of the very few entirely sane minds operating in this neck of the woods.”

“You might have the wrong office. Bear that in mind…three years in here can really test your powers of logical thought.”

“Not yours, Joe. How ’bout some coffee. You might need it when you hear my latest theory.”

“Good call, lemme order some…then we’ll talk.”

Five minutes later the two men settled into more comfortable chairs and began a discussion that might have sounded eccentric among other Naval officers. But not between these two.

Admiral Morgan cited the two entirely separate circumstances that had seen “the Brits groping around on the bottom of the ocean.” He outlined his view that the apparently deceased Commander Adnam might not be quite so dead as all that. And that, in his opinion, shared by some very influential others, it was possible that the Iraqi commanding officer might right now be at the helm of the lost HMS
Unseen.

He then cited two other circumstances he considered to be absolute impossibilities. The first was that
Unseen
had somehow been missed by the Royal Navy after an exhaustive ten-month search, and had in fact sunk. ”Not possible, not even likely; she’s out there somewhere. Stolen.”