H.M.S. Unseen (24 page)

By the time the President had made his decision, the admiral had quickened his stride, marching back to his own office, head thrust forward, his mind locked on to one unnerving fact.
I have to get this whole fucking scenario right out of the hands of civilians and under the control of the military on both sides of the Atlantic. I just can’t have some fat, dumb, and happy asshole in a Savile Row suit making some loosey-goosey remark on the BBC that is gonna send half the world into a fucking tailspin. And that is highly likely to happen. Specially if they find one of the black boxes.”

He walked into his office, closed the door, kissed Kathy, told her he loved her, then ordered her to get her ass firmly into gear and to get Admiral Sir Richard Birley on the line in London immediately, if not sooner. “He’s probably at his residence. It’s 2100 over there…he lives right near the base at Northwood…the number’s on file…comes under FOSM.”

Before he had finished yelling instructions, Admiral Birley was on the line from his office.

“Arnold. Hello, I was half expecting you to call…if our last conversation had a basis in truth, we are, shall we say, in the deepest possible trouble.”

“Dick, we have more or less accepted here the truth of our last talk. I am presuming there has never been a squeak from
Unseen
?”

“
You presume correctly. And we both know why. But we have to ask ourselves, what now?”

“Well, I had a purpose in this call…I think circumstances have thrown the Royal Navy and the United States Navy together. What may appear at first sight to be a civilian problem is now no such thing.”

“Correct. I had absolutely the same thought myself.”

“Are the search ships for Concorde all Royal Navy?”

“Yes. Two frigates and a destroyer. We’re running a deep unmanned submarine from a civilian mother ship as well, but I can keep the lid on them.”

“Great. Because we’re sending three Navy ships out there to search for the wreckage of Starstriker
.
Also I wanna get a CVBG into the area as soon as possible. And, even quicker, some MPA. The thing is we have to keep any news of any black box we find under very tight control.”

“We realize that over here. If the recording has the pilot shouting out that he was about to get hit up the arse by a guided missile…well, we won’t want the media getting hold of that too soon. Because they would go instantly berserk. God knows what would happen then. I suppose all transatlantic flights would be in chaos, but also Adnam would know we were onto him…and that way he might make a bolt for it and disappear for good…knocking down a sodding aircraft whenever he felt so inclined.”

“That’s it, Dick. We have to keep this very, very tight. What I need to know is this, how can our two organizations keep a handle on it? The black boxes must be kept out of careless hands. I’m assuming your investigators won’t just unpick the box and issue a press release?”

“Good God no. We’re probably as tight with this information as you are. The box will be dealt with in secret at the laboratories of our Air Accident Investigation people. Nothing will be released to anyone until they are sure of their ground. But in this case I think there should be a formal military representative on the team.”

“Right. I was going to suggest our CNO talk to your First Sea Lord…just to ensure that if either you, or we, get ahold of any one of the four boxes, we share whatever information we have. The idea is to catch this bastard, not sell fucking newspapers.”

“Absolutely. I’ll tell you what. I’ll speak to someone in the ministry right away, and brief them as to our thoughts. Basically I think the way forward is for our Air Accident Investigation people to lock in with your Federal Aviation Administration. I’ll call you back.”

“Okay, I’ll be waiting.”

All through the small hours of the night, the Navy chiefs conferred. The First Sea Lord arranged for both the Navy and the Air Force to listen to the black-box recordings at the headquarters of the Air Accident Investigation people. Admiral Joe Mulligan, through Admiral Dunsmore, received similar clearance from the Oval Office, and by 0400 London time, the deal was done. The Royal Navy and the United States Navy would work in tandem, expense no object, in order to bring up the black boxes.

It was as well they had all worked so quickly. At 1340 (GMT) the following day, the Royal Navy’s deep-submerged submarine
,
found one. It was still transmitting its locator signal, and
Exeter
had detected it on passive sonar. The box itself was 3 miles down, and they grabbed it with the aid of a television monitor, two floodlights, and a special small bathyscaphe lowered from the minisubmarine.

Back on board
Exeter,
they identified the black box, which was in fact orange, as the CVR, the cockpit voice recorder, that had belonged to the Concorde. In accordance with the latest orders a satellite signal was sent to both Northwood and the Pentagon. Then the box was sealed, and
Exeter
made all speed due east to the English Channel, where she would come within the range of a Royal Navy Sea King helicopter.

The box was ultimately flown straight to the Royal Navy Air Base at Culdrose, Cornwall, and on from there by fixed-wing military aircraft. It was a long costly mission for one single word. The only sound to be heard from the cockpit beyond the reams of regular flight recordings was just one short shout from Captain Lambert. It sounded like “MISS,” but there was a lot of interference. It could just as easily have been “KISS,” or “BLISS.”

That part of the recording was relayed to the White House immediately, where Admiral Morgan and Admiral Mulligan were waiting. Arnold Morgan suggested, “the guy either wanted to take a leak, or he was requiring, or getting, a blow job from the stewardess!”

He caught Admiral Mulligan in mid-swig, and the CNO did his unavailing best not to laugh or blow coffee down his nose, but he failed on both counts. And while the towering ex–Trident commander mopped his mouth with a big white handkerchief, the national security advisor moved into serious mode without missing a beat.

“Joe,” he said, “Captain Brian Lambert saw it, didn’t he? Not once in the whole recording, all the way from Heathrow, did we hear him even raise his voice for emphasis. That loud shout of ‘MISS,’ was entirely out of character. The captain meant to say ‘MISSILE!’ in my opinion. Poor guy never got the chance. The bastard was coming straight at him, closing at MACH-4, nearly 2,700 mph If he’d spotted it in clear skies even as much as 4 miles away, it would have hit him in five seconds. And that’d be my rough assessment of a totally lousy equation.”

“Sounds right to me, Arnold. There is no other word that fits the pattern, especially the ones in your sexually explicit theory. He was trying to shout ‘MISSILE’ all right. This recording has been very useful…it’s just about confirmed our original thoughts. And it emphasizes that if the Brits can find a small box in the middle of the Atlantic with modern equipment, they sure as hell could have found a fucking great submarine in the shallow English Channel.”

Just then the telephone rang on Admiral Morgan’s desk. It was a call that had been intercepted by Kathy, so it was plainly important. The national security advisor picked it up and was put through to Admiral George Morris, calling from Fort Meade.

“Arnold, hi. One of my guys just got something that might interest you. We’ve been running routine date checks on the computers, seeing if anything interesting correlates. And he’s come up with this. January 17, the day Concorde, and our oil men, were blown out of the sky. It was the fifteenth anniversary to the day since the opening shots of the Gulf War. January 17 was the day we unleashed the first barrages of Tomahawk cruise missiles at Baghdad…it’s not that much of a coincidence, but it’s a bit of one.”

“Yes, George. Yes it is. The odds against it are 364–1, and it might be a pointer. I thank you and your team.” Click. As ever, Morgan had no time to say good-bye, as the problems that were ostensibly civilian crowded in, unproven, on his military mind.

That evening he and Kathy O’Brien were dining together in Georgetown, and despite all of his efforts to make it cheerful and pleasant, the silences were too long and the admiral’s preoccupation was almost total.

“You always take these matters so personally,” she said, holding his hand, looking into his eyes, confirming unknowingly that she was easily the most beautiful woman in the room. But he kept repeating over and over, “Darling, he’s going to do it again. I know this bastard.”

“Would you like to go home?”

“No. We better hang around for a bit, then get the driver to swing back through the city and pick up the first editions, see if the Fourth Estate has stumbled on something I’ve missed.”

“Would that be a first in your long career?” she asked sweetly, fluttering her eyelashes.

“Maybe a second,” he growled. “But I don’t remember the other occasion.”

They sat companionably, sipping amaretto on the rocks, while the admiral tried to cast from his mind the all-too-real vision of a missile, closing at MACH-4, as the one that probably hit Starstriker most certainly was. “Imagine that,” he said. “You could see it 4 miles out, perhaps a glint in the sunlight, thin contrail behind…now count to five…that’s it. One. Two. Three. Four. BAM. And it’s gotcha. Wouldn’t that be a bitch?”

“Oh yes, I think it would,” she replied. “A real bitch.”

Even Admiral Morgan smiled, just once.

An hour later the newspapers were in the back of the White House car, displaying practically nothing else on the first ten pages. The headlines were varied, from the staid
New York Times
’s
U.S.
SUPERSONIC CRASHES IN NORTH ATLANTIC
to a local tabloid’s
STARSTRIKER STRIKES OUT
.

Inside the papers were columns and columns of news and speculation, the disaster having taken place so early in the day there was ample time to interview all manner of “experts,” especially those who were captive at the VIP breakfast banquet.

Every one of the publications on Arnold Morgan’s lap connected Concorde and Starstriker, speculating on the proximity of the crashes, both in position and time frame, three weeks. Somewhat to Morgan’s relief, no one digressed on the possibility of a missile, because the Federal Aviation Administration had stamped on that from a great height. “You would need a certain type of high-accuracy missile to achieve such an objective,” their spokesman had said. “The best of them have a range of only around 50 miles, and at that point in the Atlantic Ocean there is simply nowhere to fire from…no land, and, the satellites confirm, no ship. We regard a missile as impossible.”

Every newspaper carried that quotation. And none of them carried the theory any further. Instead they concentrated on the risks of flying that high and that fast in anything except a spaceship.

Two of them, the
Washington Post
and the
Philadelphia Inquirer
went into the possibility of a stratospheric Bermuda Triangle—trying to compare the fickle atmospherics ten miles above the earth to the strange volcanic eruptions under the sea near Bermuda, which scientists believe release gases into the ocean water, reducing its density and causing ships simply to sink.

The
Post
hired an expert from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to explain how this reduction in water density wreaks havoc with the theory of Archimedes, that a ship displaces an amount of water to equal its own submerged volume…“therefore if the ship is 50 percent underwater, but the water here is 50 percent less dense because of the gases, then the ship will just go straight down…”

The general drift was that somewhere up there in the final layers of the earth’s atmosphere, there was just such a hole, and the two supersonic airliners traveling on almost identical flight paths, one heading east, one west, had just charged straight into it, spun, and powered into the ocean, with no time for anyone to correct anything. “It takes,” the expert wrote ominously, “only twenty-seven seconds for Concorde to travel 10 miles, probably faster going straight down…Starstriker could have hit the ocean from that height in fifteen seconds.”

Spokesmen from the Green Party had a field day, citing the hole in the ozone layer, caused by carbon-gas emissions, as the likely culprit for the crashes. “With the atmosphere noticeably thinner in certain areas, it seems probable that the air density may be reduced sufficiently to make the flight of a high, delta-winged aircraft impossible. It is therefore our view that all such flights should be suspended pending a scientific investigation of the atmospheric phenomena 10 miles above the earth.”

“Do you believe any of this stuff, darling?” asked Kathy. “I mean the hole in the stratosphere, like the hole in the ocean near Bermuda.”

“No,” said the admiral brusquely.

“Why not? It makes sense to me.”

“Because it’s aerodynamic bullshit,” he replied unexpansively.

“How do you know?”

“Because Concordes have been flying through it eight times a day for thirty years and none of them ever fell out of the sky. Now we have two in three weeks.”

“Maybe the situation is worsening. Maybe it’s been worsening for several years, and suddenly reached a critical point.”

“Maybe. But Concorde flights have not been suspended. In the twenty-three days since Captain Lambert’s aircraft hit the ocean, there’ve been 184 supersonic flights, from Paris and London to New York and Washington, right through, or damn close to, that flight path, a lot of ’em half-empty.

You know why they didn’t flip and plunge into the sea? Because Ben fucking Adnam did not fire a guided missile at ’em, that’s why.”

“Oh,” said Kathy, with an air of finality. “You mean he’s kinda on his break?”

“No. He’s just pretty selective. And I have no idea where he will strike next. But he will. Mark my words. He will, if he can. I know him.”

“Oh, do you? I didn’t realize. Perhaps we should have him over for dinner. How about next Wednesday with the Dunsmores?”

Admiral Morgan, despite himself, caved in and laughed, really laughed, for the first time that evening. “It is my unhappy lot to be contemplating marriage to a complete dingbat,” he said; then he softened even more, while he added, “Without whom the sun will never rise for me again.”