“I hope not. That guy was the biggest, baddest motherfucker I ever came across.”
“You think? How about Osama bin Laden?”
I’m bad with Arab names, but I knew that one. In fact, there was a Wanted Poster of him hanging at the coffee bar in the ATTF. I replied, “Yeah, the guy behind the attack on the USS Cole.”
“He is also responsible for the bombing of a U.S. Army barracks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in November 1995, which killed five U.S. soldiers. Then, in June 1996, he was behind the bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which housed U.S. military personnel. Nineteen dead. He masterminded the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, which killed 224 people and injured another five thousand. And the last we heard from him was nine months ago—the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, which killed seventeen sailors. Osama bin Laden.”
“Some rap sheet. What’s he been doing since then?”
“Living in Afghanistan.”
“Retired?”
Kate replied, “Don’t bet on it.”
CHAPTER SIX
We began walking back toward the Jeep. I asked Kate, “Where to now?”
“We’re not done here.”
I had thought this was just a memory-lane stop for Kate and a place for me to get inspired. Apparently there was more.
She said to me, “You wanted to interview a witness.”
“I would want to interview many witnesses.”
“You have to be satisfied with only one witness tonight.” She motioned toward a rear door of the shingled Coast Guard building. “That will take you up into the lookout tower. Top floor.”
Apparently she wasn’t coming with me, so I went through the screen door into the base of the tower and found the staircase.
Up I went. Four floors, which reminded me of the five-story walk-up where I grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I hate stairs.
The last flight of stairs rose into the middle of the glass-enclosed lookout room. The room was not lit, but I could make out a few tables and chairs, a desk with telephones, and a military-type radio that was glowing and humming in the quiet room. There was no one in the room.
Through the plate glass picture windows I could see a railed catwalk, which ran around the square tower.
I opened a screen door and went out onto the catwalk.
I walked around the square tower, and I stopped at the southwest corner. Across Moriches Bay, I could see the outer barrier islands and the Moriches Inlet that separates Fire Island from the Westhampton dunes and Cupsogue Beach County Park, where, in vulgar police parlance, someone banged his bimbo on the beach and maybe videotaped a piece of evidence that could blow this case wide open.
Beyond the barrier islands was the Atlantic Ocean, where I could see the lights of small boats and large ships. In the sky were twinkling stars and the lights of aircraft heading east and west along the shoreline.
I focused on an eastbound aircraft and watched as it came opposite Smith Point County Park on Fire Island. It was climbing slowly at about ten or twelve thousand feet, about six or eight miles offshore. It was about there that TWA Flight 800, following the normal flight path out of Kennedy Airport toward Europe, had suddenly exploded in midair.
I tried to imagine what it was that more than two hundred people saw rising off the water and streaking toward the aircraft.
Maybe I was about to meet one of those people—or someone else.
I walked back into the watchtower and sat in a swivel chair at a desk facing the staircase. After a few minutes, I heard footsteps on the creaky stairs. Out of habit, and because I was alone, I drew my off-duty .38 Smith & Wesson from my ankle holster and stuck it in the back of my waistband under my knit shirt. I saw the head and shoulders of a man coming up the stairs, his back to me. He walked into the room, looked around, and saw me.
Even in the dim light I could see he was about sixty, tall, good-looking, short gray hair, and dressed in tan slacks and a blue blazer. I had the impression of a military guy.
He walked toward me and I stood. As he got closer, he said, “Mr. Corey, I’m Tom Spruck.” He put out his hand and we shook.
He said, “I’ve been asked to speak to you.”
“By who?”
“Miss Mayfield.”
It was actually Ms. Mayfield, or Special Agent Mayfield, or sometimes Mrs. Corey, but that wasn’t his problem. In any case, the guy was definitely military. Probably an officer. Special Agent Mayfield knew how to cherry-pick a good witness.
I wasn’t talking, so he said, “I was a witness to the events of July 17, 1996. But you know that.”
I nodded.
He asked me, “Would you like to stay here or go outside?”
“Here. Have a seat.”
He rolled a swivel chair toward the desk and sat. He asked, “Where would you like me to begin?”
I sat behind the desk and replied, “Tell me a little about yourself, Mr. Spruck.”
“All right. I am a former naval officer, Annapolis grad, retired with the rank of captain. I once flew F-4 Phantoms off aircraft carriers. I flew a hundred and fifteen missions in three separate deployments over North Vietnam between 1969 and 1972.”
I remarked, “So, you know what pyrotechnics look like at dusk over the water.”
“I sure do.”
“Good. What did they look like on July 17, 1996?”
He stared out through the plate glass window toward the ocean and said, “I was in my Sunfish—that’s a small, one-man sailboat—and every Wednesday night, we’d have informal races in the bay.”
“Who are we?”
“I belong to the Westhampton Yacht Squadron on Moriches Bay—and we finished sailing about eight P.M. Everyone started back to the club for a barbeque, but I decided to sail through the Moriches Inlet into the ocean.”
“Why?”
“The sea was unusually calm, and there was a six-knot wind. You don’t often get conditions like that for a Sunfish to venture out onto the ocean.” He continued, “At about eight-twenty, I had navigated the inlet and was out to sea. I took a westerly heading, along the Fire Island shoreline opposite Smith Point County Park.”
“Let me interrupt you here. Is what you’re telling me public record?”
“It’s what I told the FBI. I don’t know if it’s public or not.”
“Did you ever make any public statements after you spoke to the FBI?”
“I did not.” He added, “I was told not to.”
“By who?”
“By the agent who first interviewed me, then by other FBI agents in subsequent interviews.”
“I see. And who first interviewed you?”
“Your wife.”
She wasn’t my wife at the time, but I nodded and said, “Please continue.”
He glanced out at the ocean again and continued, “I was sitting in the Sunfish, looking up at the luff of the sail, which is how you spend most of your time in a sailboat. It was very quiet and calm, and I was enjoying the sail. Sunset was officially eight-twenty-one P.M., but EENT—end-of-evening nautical twilight—would be about eight-forty-five P.M. I glanced at my watch, which is digital, illuminated, and accurate, and saw that it was eight-thirty and fifteen seconds. I decided to come about and enter the inlet before dark.”
Captain Spruck stopped speaking and had a thoughtful look in his eyes, then he said, “I glanced up at my sail, and something in the sky to the southwest caught my eye. It was a bright streak of light rising into the sky. The light was reddish orange and may have risen from a point beyond the horizon.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“I did not. The light streak was coming from out on the ocean, toward the land, and slightly toward my position. It was climbing at a steep angle, perhaps thirty-five or forty degrees, and seemed to be accelerating, although that’s a difficult call because of the angles and the lack of firm background references. But if I had to estimate the speed, I’d say
about a hundred knots.”
I asked, “You figured all this out in . . . how many seconds?”
“About three seconds. You get about five seconds in the cockpit of a fighter-bomber.”
I counted to three in my head and realized that was more time than you get to dodge a bullet.
Captain Spruck added, “But as I told the FBI, there were too many variables and unknowns for me to be absolutely positive about any of my calculations. I didn’t know the point of origin of the object, or its exact size or distance from me, so its speed was a guess.”
“So you’re not really sure what you saw?”
“I know what I saw.” He looked through the window and said, “I’ve seen enough enemy surface-to-air missiles coming at me and coming at my squadron mates to get a sense of these things.” He smiled tightly and said, “When they’re coming at you, they look bigger, faster, and closer than they actually are.” He added, “You divide by two.”
I smiled and said, “I had a little Beretta pointed at me once that I thought was a .357 Magnum.”
He nodded.
I asked, “But it was definitely a streak of red light that you saw?”
“That I’m sure of. A reddish orange streak of bright light, and at the apex of this light was a white, incandescent spot, which suggested to me that I was seeing the ignition point of probably a solid fuel propellant trailed by the red-orange afterburn.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“But did you see the . . . projectile?”
“I did not.”
“Smoke?”
“A plume of white smoke.”
“Did you notice this aircraft—this 747 that subsequently crashed?”
“I noticed it briefly before I became fixed on the streak of light. I could see the glint—the last of the sunlight off its aluminum skin, and I saw the aircraft’s lights, and four white contrails.”
“Okay . . . back to the streak of light.”
Captain Spruck continued, “I watched this red-orange streak of light closely as it continued its climb into the sky—”
“Excuse me. What was your first impression?”
“My first, second, and lasting impression was that it was a surface-to-air missile.”
I had been trying to avoid the “M” word, but there it was. I asked, “Why? Why not a shooting star? Lightning? A skyrocket?”
“It was a surface-to-air missile.”
“Most people said their first impression was a leftover Fourth of July—”
“Not only was it a missile, it was a guided missile. It zigzagged slightly as it climbed, as though correcting its course, then it seemed to slow for a half second, and it made a distinct turn to the east—toward my position—then it seemed to disappear, perhaps behind a cloud, or perhaps it had expended its fuel and had become ballistic, or perhaps my view of it was now blocked by its target.”
Target. A TWA Boeing 747, designated as Flight 800 to Paris, with 230 people on board had become the target.
We both stayed silent, during which time I evaluated Captain Thomas Spruck’s statements. And as we’re taught to do, I considered his general demeanor, his appearance of truthfulness, and his intelligence. Captain Spruck got high marks in all categories of witness believability. Good witnesses, however, sometimes fall apart at the end—such as the time a very intelligent man who began as a good material witness in a disappearance case ended his statement with his theory that the missing person had been abducted by space aliens. I had dutifully noted that in my report with an asterisk explaining that I wasn’t fully convinced.
Witnesses also start to unravel under questioning, so I asked Captain Spruck, “Tell me again how far this object was from you.”
He answered patiently, “As I said, I believe, but I can’t be sure, that it originated over the horizon, which would be about six miles line of sight on the water with calm seas. But it could have been farther, of course.”
“So, you didn’t see an initial point of . . . let’s say, launch?”
“No.”
“What would that have looked like? I mean, how much light would that make?”
“A lot. I’d be able to see the glow lighting up the dark horizon, even if it was launched ten or twenty miles from my position.”
“But you didn’t?”
“To be honest, I don’t know what first caught my eye—the flash of a launch, or the red-orange streak of light rising off the horizon.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“No. A missile launch is not that loud, especially from a distance, with the wind blowing toward the launch.”
“I see. And how far up was this object when you first recognized it as an ascending streak of light?”
“I can’t say unless I know the distance. Height is a product of distance and angle off the horizon. Simple trigonometry.”
“Right.” I was a little out of my element here, but interrogation techniques remained the same. I said, “Give me a good guess.”
He thought a moment and said, “Maybe fifteen hundred to two thousand feet above the water when I first saw it. This initial impression was reinforced as I watched it climb, and I was then able to get a feel for its speed and flight path. It was rising in a straight line as opposed to an arc, with small zigzag corrections, then a distinct turn as it locked on.”
“Locked on to what?”
“Its target.”
“Okay . . .” I asked him, “Did you ever see that CIA animation of what they thought happened?”
“I did. I own a copy of it.”
“Yeah, I need to get one. Okay, so in this animation, what they’re saying is that the center fuel tank vapors accidentally exploded because of an electrical short circuit. Right? And what all the eyewitnesses saw was a stream of burning fuel from a ruptured wing tank coming down from the aircraft—not a streak of light coming up—toward the aircraft. In other words, people had it backwards in their minds. They heard the explosion before they saw it, then looked up, and mistook the burning stream of fuel for a rising rocket. What do you think?”
He looked at me, then pointed his thumb into the air and asked me, “This way is up. Right?”
“Last time I checked.” I said to him, “The other possibility, also shown in this animation, is that this aircraft actually continued to rise a few thousand feet, and what eyewitnesses saw was the burning aircraft ascending, which looked to people on the ground like a rising streak of light from a missile.” I asked him, “What do you think?”
“I think I know the difference between a streak of light, which is accelerating and ascending, trailing a white smoke plume, as opposed to a burning aircraft in its death throes. I’ve seen both.”
I had the disturbing thought that Special Agent Mayfield had done a better job of questioning Captain Spruck than I was doing. I asked him, “Is this basically the same testimony you gave Ms. Mayfield?”
“Yes.”
“Did she ask good questions?”
He looked at me as though I’d just asked a stupid question, but replied politely, “She did.” He added, “We went through the sequence of events for over an hour. She said she’d be back and could I please think about what I saw and call her if anything new came to mind.”
“And did you?”
“No. Two gentlemen—FBI agents—visited me the next day and told me they were going to do a follow-up interview and that Agent Mayfield had moved on to other witnesses. Apparently she did initial interviews . . . there were six to eight hundred witnesses according to a news report, and about two hundred of those saw the streak of light. The others saw only the explosion.”
“I read that, too. So these two guys—did you get their names?”
“Yes. And their cards.” He took two business cards from his pocket and gave them to me. I turned on the desk lamp and read the first card. Liam Griffith. That sort of surprised me, but not that much. The second card really surprised me. It was an FBI card, but the name on
it was of a CIA guy—Mr. Ted Nash, to be more precise. This was the gentleman who I’d first met on the Plum Island case, then actually worked with on the Asad Khalil case. Ted had many annoying habits, but two stood out—the first was his pocketful of business cards and credentials that identified him as an employee of whatever government agency fit his purpose or his mood of the moment; his second annoying habit was his thinly veiled threats to terminate yours truly whenever I pissed him off, which was often. In any case, Ted and I had put all that behind us, mostly because he was dead.
I said to Captain Spruck, “Can I keep these cards?”
“Yes. Miss Mayfield said I could give them to you.”
“Good. And do you have Ms. Mayfield’s card?”
“No. Mr. Nash took her card.”
“Really? Okay, so what did these two guys talk to you about?”
“They had listened to the taped statements I’d given to Miss Mayfield and said they wanted to go over them again.”
“And did you ever get a transcribed statement of your taped interview to sign?”
“I did not.”
Very unusual. I said, “Okay, so these guys had a tape recorder, too?”
“Yes. Basically they wanted me to repeat what I’d said the day before.”
“And did you?”
“I did. They tried to find inconsistencies in what I was saying to them and what I’d said to Miss Mayfield.”
“And did they?”
“No.”
“Did they ask you about your eyesight?”
“Several times. I had perfect distance vision, then and still do.”
“Did they ask if you’d been drinking or on drugs?”
“They did. I told them I found the question insulting. I don’t take drugs, and I don’t sail when I’ve been drinking.”
To lighten the moment, I said, “I only drink with other people, or when I’m alone.”
It took him three seconds to get the joke, and he sort of laughed.
I said to him, “In other words—and I don’t mean this in a pejorative way—they tried to shake your testimony.”
“I suppose so. They explained that it was their job to do that in case I was ever called as a witness in a court of law.”