“That’s true.” I thought back to the couple on the beach and asked Kate, “Why couldn’t you find Romeo and Juliet?”
“I wasn’t asked to find them.”
“You said you knew the name of the hotel where they may have stayed.”
“I do.” She stayed silent a moment, then said, “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t directly involved in that part of the investigation. I just happened to see that report from the local cop, and I did some phone follow-up on my own initiative. Then, I got shut down very quickly.”
“I see . . . so, you don’t know how this lead panned out?”
“No.”
I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, especially among government employees or the military, who are not capable of agreeing on anything, let alone capable of keeping secrets, or doing anything that would jeopardize their jobs or their pensions.
The one exception to this was the CIA, who lived and breathed deception, conspiracies, and borderline illegal activities. That’s what they got paid for.
For all my problems with the FBI, I had to admit that they were straight shooters, good citizens, and letter-of-the-law people—like my loving wife, who was about to have a minor breakdown because she took a step over the line.
Kate said, as if to herself, “If we pursue this, we don’t have a lot of time before they get on to us.”
I didn’t respond to that. “Home?”
“Home.”
I got on the westbound ramp of the Long Island Expressway and headed back to Manhattan. Traffic was light and moving well at this late hour. I moved into the outside lane and accelerated past the speed limit.
I’m the one who used to follow people, but my world had changed, so I looked in my rearview and side-view mirrors, then suddenly cut hard right across two lanes and got off at the next exit.
No one followed.
I ran along the service road for a while, then got back on the Expressway.
Kate did not comment directly about my evasive maneuvers, but said, “Maybe we should drop this.”
I didn’t reply.
She asked me, “What do you think?”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Nothing but trouble.”
“That’s a very persuasive argument.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We drove in silence awhile, then Kate said to me, “Regarding Sidney Siben, I thought you should hear the official version from the horse’s mouth.”
“I appreciate your sense of fair play. What do you want me to do now?”
“Sleep on it.”
“Now?”
“No. You drive. I’ll sleep.” She tilted the seat back, kicked off her shoes, and closed her eyes. Women can fall asleep in less than ten seconds, and she did.
A few minutes later, I passed the exit for Brookhaven National Laboratory and said loudly, “Hey, what are the seven theories?”
“Huh . . . ?”
“Wake up. Keep me company. What are the seven theories?”
She yawned and said, “First theory . . . friendly fire . . . military sea and air training exercises that night . . . There was supposedly a target drone launched . . . missile missed the drone and accidentally locked on the 747 . . . or the drone itself hit the plane . . . not likely. Too many witnesses on board the ships.”
“Okay. Theory Two.”
“Theory Two. Electromagnetic pulse scenario . . . military exercises create powerful electromagnetic fields, which can theoretically envelop an aircraft . . . doesn’t explain the streak of light.”
“Three.”
“Three. Foreign submarine theory, sea-to-air missile launched from underwater.”
“What’s wrong with that theory?”
“Go back to Theory One. The military exercises in the area, including anti-sub training . . . so, a foreign sub couldn’t have escaped detection.”
“How about one of our subs?”
“That’s part of Theory One. Theory Four. The meteorite or space junk theory. Possible, but not probable. What are we up to?”
“Five.”
“Five. That’s the methane gas bubble. Naturally occurring and invisible gas from the ocean floor rose up and was ignited by the 747’s engines. Far out. Not consistent with the evidence. And then there’s Theory Six, which is the plasma death ray. Brookhaven National Laboratory. So silly that there could be something to it. But Brookhaven says no.”
“Seven.”
“Seven. The cargo door of the 747 . . . some evidence indicates that it blew before the explosion and could have caused a rapid decompression, which started the chain of events that led to the explosion. But most likely the explosion came first. Good night.”
“Hold on. How about the terrorist missile?”
“That’s in a category by itself.”
“Okay. But I keep thinking about what your friend Sidney said. Why shoot down an aircraft so far from the airport? And why would the government want to cover up a terrorist attack? A terrorist attack from the high seas lets everyone off the hook, saves millions in insurance claims, not to mention millions in retro-engineering of the center fuel tank. Hell, if there was a government conspiracy, it should have to do with manufacturing a terrorist attack, not making believe it was a mechanical failure. Unless, of course, the government didn’t want to cause panic, and admit to a massive intelligence failure, which is where the CIA comes in, and . . .” I glanced at Kate. “Hello?”
She snored.
And so, I was left alone with my thoughts, which were starting to go into overdrive.
I pushed Brain Pause, then Rewind, and went back to the memorial service, and to my colleague, Liam Griffith. I would not put it past Kate to set me up with Griffith, who pissed me off enough to get me interested in the case. On the other hand, maybe it was what it was: an FBI guy telling me not to get nosy, and meaning it.
I glanced at Kate, who looked very angelic sleeping. My sweetheart wouldn’t manipulate her loving husband. Would she?
Scene Two. Cupsogue Beach County Park, dusk. A couple on the beach.
Did they actually see and videotape that streak of light and the explosion? I wondered, too, why they had never been located.
Or maybe they had.
Scene Three. Center Moriches Coast Guard Station. Captain Tom Spruck, reliable and cocksure witness.
This was the thing I couldn’t get out of my mind. This guy was one of about two hundred men, women, and children who had all, individually, or in groups, from different locations, seen the same thing. This way is up. Right?
And finally, Scene Four. Calverton, aircraft hangar. Mr. Sidney R. Siben, safety engineer for the National Transportation Safety Board. The honest and immovable expert witness. Or was he? Mr. Sidney Siben, during his stage exit, had expressed some doubts. Optical illusion. That’s it. No, that’s not it. Damn it.
What was that all about?
An unbidden image of the reconstructed Boeing 747 took shape in my mind. I mentally moved inside the broken fuselage, and walked again down the aisles, over the patchwork carpet, and between the empty seats. As the medical examiners like to say, “The dead speak to us.”
Indeed they do, and in a way, they can even give evidence at a hearing or a trial.
The 747 had given up most of its secrets. The recovered bodies had done the same. The eyewitnesses had given statements. The experts had spoken. The problem was, not everyone was saying the same thing.
I recalled that a few careers and reputations had been ruined, damaged, or compromised by this case, and I didn’t want to add my or Kate’s career to that list.
I looked at Kate. We’d been married a year, and this case had never come up before, though I recalled now that she’d gone to the memorial service last July without me. I wondered why she’d waited until this anniversary to let me in on this. Maybe I’d been on probation, or maybe something new had come up. In any event, I’d been given a peek into some sort of group that wasn’t giving up on this case.
This case had always been dangerous to anyone who came near it. It was a plasma death ray, an explosive gas bubble, a phantom missile, friendly fire, electromagnetic pulse, a volatile mixture of fuel and air, and an optical illusion.
All my instincts told me that for my own good, and for Kate’s as well, I needed to forget everything I had seen and heard tonight. But it wasn’t about Kate or me, or anyone else, in or out of the government.
It was about them. Two hundred and thirty of them. And their families and loved ones, the people who had placed roses on the seats of the aircraft, and who had lit the candles and waded into the ocean, and thrown the flowers into the sea. And the people who hadn’t been at the service, who sat at home tonight and cried.
CHAPTER TWELVE
H ome. I live in a two-salary high-rise on East 72nd Street, between Second and Third Avenues. My apartment is on the 34th floor, and from my balcony where I was now standing, Scotch whiskey in hand at two in the morning, I looked south down the length of Manhattan Island.
Between the skyscrapers of Midtown, I could see the Bowery and a piece of the Lower East Side, where I grew up on Henry Street, near the housing projects.
Beyond Chinatown, I could make out the courthouses and jails and One Police Plaza, where I once worked, and Federal Plaza, where I now worked.
In fact, most of my history was spread out down there—John Corey as a kid playing on the mean streets of the Lower East Side, John Corey as a rookie cop on the Bowery, John Corey the homicide detective, and last, John Corey contract agent for the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force.
And now, John Corey, a year into his second marriage, living in the apartment of his first wife, Robin, who was living with her boss, a total schmuck, making too much money defending financially successful scum.
At the lower tip of Manhattan, the skyscrapers of Wall Street rose like stalagmites in a cave pool. And to the right, soaring a quarter mile into the sky, were the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
On February 26, 1993, at around noon, Mideast terrorists, with explosives packed in a Ryder rental van, drove into the underground garage of the North Tower, parked the van, and left. At 12:18 P.M., the van exploded, killing six people and injuring another thousand. Had the tower actually collapsed, the dead would have numbered in the thousands. This was the first attack by foreign terrorists ever perpetrated on American soil. It was also a wake-up call, but no one was listening.
I went into the living room of my apartment.
The decor of this place is sort of Palm Beach hotel lobby, with too many pinks and greens and seashell motifs and scratchy rugs.
Kate says it’s all going, first chance she gets. What’s not going is the only thing I bought—my brown leather La-Z-Boy recliner. It’s a beautiful thing.
I poured another Scotch, and hit the Play button of my VCR.
I sat in my La-Z-Boy and stared at the TV screen.
A collage of images with inappropriate music filled the screen. This was a one-hour videotape made by a conspiracy theory group, according to Kate, which pushed the theory of a missile attack. It included, Kate said, the CIA animation.
In a film clip of a network news interview, a former head of the National Transportation Safety Board said that it was unprecedented for the FBI to conduct the investigation. Congress, he said, had given a clear mandate to the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate airline accidents.
The key word, which seemed to be missed by the dim-witted television news interviewer, was “accident.” Obviously, some people in the government thought it was a crime, which was precisely why the FBI and not the NTSB had taken over the investigation and the reconstruction of the aircraft.
Next, an expert of some sort said that the empty center fuel tank couldn’t have caused such a large explosion because it contained only a “thimbleful of fuel.”
But Mr. Siben had told me that there could be fifty gallons of fuel left that wasn’t sucked up by the scavenge pump. In any case, it was the volatile fumes, not the fuel itself, which had apparently caused the initial explosion.
So, right in the first few minutes of the tape, we had some mistakes, or perhaps skewed facts.
I paid closer attention as a number of people who were not well identified spoke darkly of the disappearance of aircraft parts from the Calverton hangar, missing seats that had been recovered from the ocean depths and never seen again, and structural aluminum pounded into place during the reconstruction, thereby altering the signature of the explosion.
There was talk of the El Al 747 right behind the TWA 747, and of lab reports about explosive warhead residue and rocket propellant residue, and of “mis-guided” naval missiles. Someone spoke about a vaguely worded threatening letter received from a Mideast terrorist group hours before the TWA flight went down, and there was a lot of speculation about other altered and/or ignored evidence.
The so-called documentary was making several points, but not all the points connected to make a straight line. There was just a lot of stuff being thrown out to see what stuck. Or, to be more open-minded, this presentation gave equal weight to all theories, except the official conclusion of mechanical malfunction.
The tape went into some detail about the war games that had been conducted on the night of July 17, 1996, in the area off the coast of Long Island, designated W-105. I thought that the makers of this tape would then conclude that it was an American “mis-guided” missile that had brought down TWA 800. But an ex-Navy guy, very much like Captain Spruck, said, “There’s no way that an accident of that magnitude could be covered up by hundreds, thousands, of military people,” and I was left wondering why these war games played so important a part in the conspiracy theories. I guess government cover-ups are always more interesting than government stupidity.
The tape did make a provocative point, however, which was that radar sources had identified all the ships in the area of the crash, and that subsequent investigations had found and cleared all those ships—except one. A high-speed boat had immediately left the area after the explosion, and no one—not the Navy, not the FBI, not the Coast Guard, and not the CIA—had ever identified or found that missing boat. If that were true, then, ostensibly, this was the boat from which the missile—if there had been a missile—had been fired.
The tape was now showing three color photographs, all taken by people who were photographing other people that night, but who had inadvertently captured in the background what appeared to be a short streak of light in the night sky. The narrator speculated that this could be the afterburn of a rising rocket or missile.
The problem with still photography as evidence, especially when it was taken by accident, is that it proved nothing.
Moving pictures, however—videotape and film—were another matter, and I thought again of the couple on the beach.
The most compelling part of this presentation was original footage of six eyewitnesses.
Some of these eyewitnesses were interviewed where they said they had been standing when they saw the streak of light rising into the sky, so they were able to point and make little flying motions with their hands. All of them seemed credible and insistent about what they saw. A few of them became upset, and one woman broke down and cried.
They all described pretty much the same thing with some slight variations: They happened to be looking out to sea when they saw a streak of fiery light rise off the ocean, climb into the air, gather speed, then culminate in a small explosion, followed by a huge fireball, followed by the fireball plunging into the sea.
And now came the CIA animation. I put down my Scotch and looked closely at the animated depiction, narrated by a guy whose tone of voice was as annoying as the pedantic script.
First was a representation of the interior of the empty center fuel tank, showing some fuel residue in between the baffles on the bottom of the tank. Then the narrator mentioned volatile fuel vapors, then a spark was seen coming from some source inside the tank. Then the explosi
on.
The fuel-air explosion ripped through the left side of the center tank and ignited the fuel in the left wing tank, causing a big explosion, shown as a cartoonish depiction of a big bang.
The narrator explained that the concussive forces of the explosion had caused the nose section of the aircraft to “unzipper” and fall off.
But then, under the category of not leaving well enough alone, the narrator and the animation attempted to explain what the eyewitnesses actually saw, though the narrator didn’t mention that there were over two hundred of those witnesses.
If I could follow this animation and narrative correctly, the CIA was saying that the two hundred eyewitnesses did not notice the aircraft at the moment of the explosion; what drew their attention to the aircraft was the sound of the explosions, which reached them thirty or forty seconds later. Then, when they looked up, they saw two things: the fiery aircraft rising before it plunged into the sea, and/or the burning fuel streams, which may have been mirrored in the calm water. In other words, everyone who saw this event got it backwards in their minds.
A few witnesses came back on the screen, and the first guy said, “How can a climbing aircraft going from fourteen to seventeen thousand feet look like a high-speed missile rising from the water?”
A former Air National Guard guy said, “The streak I saw took three, four, five seconds to rise fourteen thousand feet. It was going at supersonic speed.”
A guy, who I recognized from the FIRO TV news conference three nights before, was interviewed in front of his house on Long Island where he was standing when he saw the incident. He said, “That animation was nothing like what I saw. Not even close.”
A woman interviewed from a bridge where she had been standing that night said, “I did see burning fuel falling, but that was after I saw a streak of light going up.”