“I appreciate that.”
“On a personal note, Charles”—Ghami used his Christian name deliberately—“if this is Allah’s will, I certainly don’t understand it.”
Moon recognized that only the most heartfelt sentiment would cause Ghami to even suggest that he was questioning the will of his God. “Thank you.”
The United States Ambassador led the Libyan Foreign Minister to the bank of elevators. Almost as an afterthought, Moon asked Ghami, “I wonder, if there is wreckage, how we should proceed.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If the plane crashed, my government would most likely request that a team of American examiners inspect the remains in situ. People from the National Transportation Safety Board are experts at determining exactly what forces were in play to cause an airplane to crash.”
“I see, yes.” Ghami rubbed his jaw. “We have specialists who perform a similar function here. I can’t see it as a problem. However, I’ll need to consult with the President.”
“Very well. Thank you.”
A minute after Moon returned to his office, there was a knock on the door. “Come in.”
“What do you think?” asked Jim Kublicki, the CIA station chief at the American Embassy. A former college football star, Kublicki had been with the agency for fifteen years. He was nearly as tall as the doorframe, which meant he would never be a covert operative because he stood out in any crowd, but he was a competent administrator, and the four agents assigned to the embassy liked and respected him.
“If they’re involved in some way, Ali Ghami’s out of the loop,” Moon replied.
“From what I’ve heard, Ghami is Qaddafi’s fair-haired boy. If they intentionally shot down that plane, he’d know.”
“Then my gut tells me the Libyans didn’t do anything and whatever has happened was an accident.”
“We won’t know for certain until they find the wreckage and get a team to examine it.”
“Obviously.”
“Did you ask him if we can bring over folks from the NTSB?”
“I did. Ghami agreed, but he wants to talk it over with Qaddafi. I think Ghami wasn’t prepared for the question and wants a little time to figure out how to accept without admitting our people are better than his. They can’t afford a diplomatic flap by refusing.”
“If they do, that would surely tell us something,” Kublicki said with a spook’s inherent paranoia. “So, what’s he like in person—Ghami, I mean?”
“I’d met him before, of course, but this time I got a better sense of the man behind the diplomatic niceties. He’s charming and gracious, even in these circumstances. I could tell he was truly disturbed by what’s happened. He’s poured a lot of his own reputation into this conference, only to see it marred before it starts. He’s really upset. It’s hard to believe a regime like this could produce someone like that.”
“Qaddafi saw the writing on the wall when we took down Saddam Hussein. How long after we pulled him out of the spider hole did Libya agree to abandon its nuke program and disavow terrorism?”
“A matter of days, I believe.”
“There you go. A leopard can change his spots once he sees the consequences of jerking around the good old U.S. of A.”
The corners of Moon’s mouth turned downward. He wasn’t much for jingoism, and had been dead set against the Iraq invasion, though he acknowledged that without it the upcoming peace summit might never have been proposed. He shrugged. Who really knew? Events had unfolded the way they had and there was no use revisiting past actions. “Have you heard anything?” he asked Kublicki.
“NRO has shifted one of their spy birds from the Gulf to cover Libya’s western desert. The imaging specialists have the first pictures now. If that plane’s out there, they’ll find it.”
“We’re talking thousands and thousands of square miles,” Moon reminded. “And some of that is pretty mountainous.”
Kublicki was undeterred. “Those satellites can read a license plate from a thousand miles up.”
Moon was too upset about the situation to point out that being able to see details of a specific target had no relation to searching an area the size of New England. “Do you have anything else for me?”
Realizing he was being dismissed, Kublicki got to his feet. “No, sir. It’s pretty much a wait-and-see kind of thing now.”
“Okay, thanks. Could you ask my secretary to get me some aspirin?”
“Sure thing.” The agent lumbered out of the office.
Charles Moon pressed his thumbs against his temples. Since hearing about the plane’s disappearance, he had managed to keep his emotions in check, but exhaustion was cracking his professional façade. He knew without a doubt that if Fiona Katamora was dead, the Tripoli Accords didn’t stand a chance in hell. He had lied to Ali Ghami during their meeting. He and the President had discussed who would represent the United States. The President had told him that he would send the VP because an Undersecretary simply didn’t carry enough clout. The problem was, the Vice President was a young, good-looking congressman who’d been put on the ticket to balance it out. He had no diplomatic experience and, everyone agreed, no brain either.
The VP had once met with Kurdish representatives at a White House function and wouldn’t stop joking about bean curds. At a state dinner for the Chinese President, he’d held out his plate to the man and asked, “What do you call china in China?” Then there was the video clip, an Internet favorite for months, of him staring at an actress’s cleavage and actually licking his lips.
Not one for praying, Charles Moon had the sudden urge to get on his knees and beg God for Fiona’s life. And he wanted to pray for the untold hundreds and thousands who would keep dying in the seemingly unending cycle of violence if she was gone.
“Your aspirin, Mr. Ambassador,” his secretary said.
He looked up at her. “Leave the bottle, Karen. I’m going to need it.”
TEN
As soon as the polished-brass elevator doors opened on the Oregon’s lowest deck, Juan Cabrillo felt the pulsing beat against his chest. It wasn’t the ship’s revolutionary engines producing the throbbing presence in the carpeted corridor but rather what had to be the most expensive stereo system afloat. To him, the music blaring from the only cabin in this section of the freighter sounded like a continuous explosion with a voice-over track that seemed to mimic a dozen cats fighting in a burlap bag. The wailing rose and fell in no relation to the beat, and every few seconds feedback from the musicians’ amplifiers would shriek.
Mark Murphy’s taste in music, if this could be called music, was the reason there were no other cabins in this part of the Oregon.
Cabrillo paused at the open door. Members of the Corporation had been given generous stipends to decorate their cabins any way they saw fit. His own was done in various types of exotic woods and resembled an English manor house more than a nautical suite. Franklin Lincoln, who had had nothing growing up on the streets of Detroit, and who had spent twenty years in the Navy sleeping wherever they told him to, furnished his cabin with a cot, a footlocker, and a pressed-metal wardrobe. The rest of his money went into a customized Harley. Max’s cabin was a mishmash of unmatched furniture that looked like it had come from Goodwill.
And then there was Mark and his partner in crime, Eric Stone. Eric’s room was a geek’s fantasy, with every conceivable video-game console and controller. The walls were adorned with pinup girls and gaming posters. The floor was a static-dampening rubber that was crisscrossed with a couple thousand feet of cables. His bed was an unmade pile of sheets and blankets tucked into one corner.
Mark had gone for a minimalist vibe. The walls of his cabin were painted a matte gray, with a matching carpet. One wall was a video display system nearly eighteen feet across and composed of dozens of individual flat screens. There were two overstuffed leather chairs, a queen-sized bed, and a stark chest of drawers. The room’s dominant feature was the speakers. The four of them stood seven f
eet tall and resembled Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Murph claimed that sharp angles in a speaker system affected the sound. Considering the garbage he listened to, Juan wasn’t sure how his young weapons specialist could tell.
Murph and Stone were standing in front of the video display, looking at satellite imagery provided by Langston Overholt. With the Oregon driving hard for Libya, Cabrillo had finalized a contract with Lang to act as a covert search-and-rescue group and had gotten his people thinking about what they would find once they reached their destination. He had also asked for the raw satellite imagery that he was certain the National Reconnaissance Office had obtained within a few hours of Secretary Katamora’s disappearance.
Mark and Eric had altered some basic pattern-recognition software to help them search the imagery for a downed aircraft. The NRO had a dedicated staff of dozens doing the same thing, with hardware and software more sophisticated than what was at his people’s disposal, but Juan was confident they would find the downed 737 first.
Juan flipped the light switch to get their attention.
Murph pointed a remote at the stereo rack and muted the system.
“Thank you,” Juan said. “Just so I don’t buy the CD by mistake, who was that?”
“The Puking Muses,” Mark replied as though Cabrillo should have known.
“Yeah, no way I’d make that mistake.”
Mark was wearing ripped jeans, and a shirt that said PEDRO FOR PRESIDENT. His hair was a tangled dark mane, and to Juan’s surprise he had shaved off the scraggly whiskers he called a beard. Eric was in his customary button-down shirt and chinos.
Cabrillo touched his chin and said, “About time you got rid of the dead bird on your face.”
“This girl I’m chatting up on the net said I’d look better without it.” Mark’s cockiness had returned following the Chairman’s rebuke over his mistake in Somalia. Sam Pryor, the wounded engineer, said he harbored no ill feelings but was going to make Murph his personal valet once he got out of Medical.
“Smart woman. Marry her. So what have you got so far? Wait. Before you answer, what is that?”
He pointed to the map on the screen where the Sahara desert met the Mediterranean, about fifty miles west of the recognizable urban sprawl of Tripoli and its suburbs. Where the coastline usually ran in a fairly even stroke, there was an area where the sea pushed inland in a perfectly shaped rectangle. It was obviously a man-made feature, and, from the scale on the monitors, enormous.
“A new kind of tidal power station,” Eric said. “Just came online a month ago.”
“I didn’t think the Med has high enough tides,” Juan mused.
“It doesn’t, but this power station doesn’t rely on the ebb and flow of the tides. The place they built the plant had been a narrow-mouthed bay that was much deeper than normal for the region. They built a seawall across its mouth and pumped it dry. They then expanded the dried-out bay so it was wider and deeper than it was originally. There is a series of sluice gates running along the seawall near its summit and sloping downward. During high tide, water pours through the gates, down pipes, and turns turbines to produce electricity.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Eventually, the old bay will fill with water. I don’t care how big they made it.”
“You’re forgetting the location.” Eric had a little smirk on his face. When he’d first read about the project, he had intuitively grasped the facility’s secret. When Juan stared back blankly, he added, “The desert.”
The Chairman suddenly understood. “Evaporation. Brilliant.”
“The reservoir had to be wide and broad but not necessarily deep. They calculated typical evaporation rates to get the right size for the amount of electricity they wanted to produce. By the time the sun goes down in the evening, the artificial lake is virtually empty. Then the tide rises, water pours in through the powerhouse, and the cycle is repeated.”
“What about the . . .”
“Excess salt? It’s trucked away at night, and sold to European municipalities as a deicing agent for roads. Completely renewable, clean energy, with the bonus of a few million dollars a year in road salt.”
“There is a potential problem,” Mark said, “Over time, the excess evaporation could change weather patterns downwind from the site.”
“The report I read said it would be negligible,” Eric said, defending the project from Mark’s natural paranoia.
“That report was written by the Italian company that developed the plant in the first place. Of course, they’re going to say it’s negligible, but they don’t really know.”
“Not our problem,” Cabrillo said before Mark could ramp up one of his conspiracy theories. “Finding the Secretary’s plane is. What have you got so far?”
Murph chugged half a can of Red Bull before answering. “Okay, we’ve got a couple of scenarios. Number one is the plane exploded in midair, either the result of a catastrophic failure, like TWA 800 over Long Island south shore, or a missile strike, also like TWA 800, depending on who you believe. If that’s the case, then we would have wreckage strewn over a hundred square miles when we factor in the plane’s speed and altitude.”
“It would be nearly impossible to spot any of it without knowing approximately where the event occurred,” Eric said, wiping his glasses on the tail of his shirt.
“We know when their transponder and communications died,” Mark pointed out. “A quick extrapolation of their course, speed, and estimated time of arrival at Tripoli International would have put the event just on Tunisia’s side of the border with the wreckage landing on Libya’s.”
“Is that what you have there?” Juan asked, pointing to the desert imagery on the multipanel display.
Murph shook his shaggy head. “No, we already checked it out, and nada. We saw an abandoned truck and a lot of tire tracks left by what we assume are border patrols, but no plane.”
“That’s good news, then,” Juan said. “Her aircraft didn’t suffer a midair explosion.”
“Good and bad,” Eric replied. “Since we don’t know the nature of the event, it becomes much more difficult to figure out. Did the oxygen system fail and kill the crew, so the plane just kept flying until it ran out of fuel? If that’s the case, it could have struck five hundred miles or more to the east of Tripoli, possibly even in the Med. Or there could have been an engine failure. If that happened, the plane would have glided for miles before impact.”
“But that wouldn’t explain the radio silence,” the Chairman pointed out. “The crew would have radioed an emergency.”
“We know that,” Mark said a little defensively. “Still, we have to investigate every possible theory to winnow—good word, eh?—to winnow down our target area. It’s unlikely the radios would die the same moment as the engines, but stranger things have happened. Hey, that reminds me, have the feds talked to the ground people who serviced that plane last? You know, it could have been sabotaged.”
“Lang said the FBI is conducting interviews as we speak.”
“They should check out the flight crew, too. One of them could be Al-Qaeda or something.”
“The crew’s all Air Force personnel,” Juan replied. “I doubt they are a security threat.”
“The CIA said the same thing about Aldridge Ames, and I’m sure the FBI had vetted Robert Hanssen.” Despite his genius intellect, or maybe because of it, Murph delighted in pointing out the mistakes of others. “There’s no reason some Air Force guy couldn’t be bought. He could have flown the plane to some remote Libyan base, where they’re torturing the Secretary of State right at this moment.” He looked to Eric, his eyes a little glassy with inspiration. “What do you bet they’re waterboarding her? Good enough for the guys we have at Gitmo, right? Or they’ve attached electrodes to her—”
“Gentlemen, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Juan interrupted before they started coming up with more lurid torture techniques.
“Oh sure, sorry,” Eric muttered, even
though he had remained silent during Mark’s excited outburst. “Um, well, if both engines failed, we factored speed, altitude, and estimated a fifteen-hundred-foot-per-minute descent rate. That gives us a target area of roughly eighty nautical miles.”
“So that’s what you have on the screen?” Cabrillo asked.
“Not exactly,” Eric said.
Mark overrode his friend’s next words, “Yes, we had to consider the engine failure-radio dying scenario, but we discounted it pretty quickly and came up with something better.”
Juan was losing patience with his brain trust, but he kept it to himself. He knew Murph and Eric delighted at showing off their intellect, and he wouldn’t rob them of their fun.
“So what’s the answer?”
“The plane’s tail came off.”
“Or at least part of it,” Eric amended.
“A structural failure in the tail could very likely damage the radio antennas, which would explain the blackout.” Mark said. “It could also knock out the plane’s transponder at the same time.”
“Depending on the extent of the damage,” Eric went on, “the aircraft could still fly for some distance. It would be highly unstable, and the pilot would have minimal control. He could only steer the plane by alternating thrust to each of its engines.”
“The danger comes from the fact the 737 doesn’t have fuel-dump capabilities. He would have had to fly in circles to burn off avgas or risk coming in too heavy.” Juan made to ask a question, but Mark anticipated him. “They refueled in London when they stopped for a quick meeting with England’s Foreign Secretary. By my calculations, they had enough to keep going for at least an hour after the plane went dark.”
Cabrillo nodded. “Even throttled back, she could have cruised for a couple hundred miles.”
“But they didn’t,” Eric said, “or they would have tried an emergency landing in Tripoli.”
“Good point. So where the hell are they?”