H.M.S. Unseen (18 page)

Admiral Durrell’s aircraft would be quicker. And by 0830, two Lockheed CP-140 Auroras were up and out of Greenwood, Nova Scotia, making 400 knots toward Concorde’s crash area. They were scheduled to arrive by 1230.

In London, news of the lost supersonic jet broke before the end of the 1:00
P.M.
bulletin on BBC. And it was delivered in tones of pure disbelief by the newscaster. The broadcasting corporation then announced that the BBC 2 channel would follow the story day and night for the next twenty-four hours, all other programming being canceled. Not since the death of the Princess of Wales more than eight years previously had the BBC moved into such extensive coverage.

The trouble was, of course, there was almost nothing to report. The great airliner had simply vanished. It was there one moment, gone the next. And in the aftermath of its demise there was not one shred of wreckage, not one suggestion as to the whereabouts of the black-box flight recorder, not a word from anyone, save from Bart Hamm in Gander, who was quite prepared to confirm he had heard precisely nothing.

Television, radio, and newspaper reporters had about three facts—one, Concorde had reported its height, speed, and position at 30 West; two, it had failed to report in at its next way point at 40 West; three, they had the passenger list. And Ray Duffield had been right. His man Shane had almost drawn a blank. Phil got the ink.

The London tabloids unanimously led their front pages with variations on the same headline:

PHIL CHARLES DEAD IN CONCORDE
MYSTERY CRASH

or:

CONCORDE CRASH KILLS PHIL CHARLES.

British Airways announced late in the afternoon that Flight 001 had been commanded by Captain Brian Lambert, “one of the most senior and respected pilots on the North Atlantic route.” His copilot had been First Officer Joe Brody, “an ex–Royal Air Force fighter pilot who had been with BA for twelve years.” Flight Engineer Henry Pryor, was, according to the BA press release, “shortly to have been promoted to the most senior engineering position in the entire Concorde fleet.”

Jane Lambert, who heard of the catastrophe to her husband’s aircraft at halftime in Billy’s match against Elstree, was taken to the headmaster’s study, where she reacted with immense bravery. “I have been Brian’s wife for eighteen years,” she said. “I have always been prepared for something like this…every time he leaves the house.” They didn’t tell the little boy until the game was over.

In Washington, the loss of the government’s oil-negotiating team, including four congressmen, was a major story. The evening television newscasts, which had much more time to prepare than their British counterparts, were concentrating on a report from a Northwestern Airlines pilot whose plane had crossed 30 West around the same time as Concorde, some 80 miles to the north. “I thought I saw,” said Captain Mike Harvold, “a small fire-flash in the sky south of my aircraft. I’d say just about on my ten o’clock. I was heading two-six-zero at the time for the coast of Newfoundland.”

Questioned further, he confirmed he could not make out the shape of any aircraft so far away, “I guessed it might be Concorde, but I couldn’t be sure, and I just made my report of the possible explosion in an unknown aircraft. But there’s nothing else up that high. I guess it had to be Concorde. Looked to me like it just blew right out of the sky. I suppose you couldn’t discount the possibility of a bomb…but the security surrounding that thing is unbelievable. In the trade, a bomb in Concorde is regarded as just about impossible.”

By the late evening, the experts were in, extolling their opinions to a shocked U.S. audience. The possibility of a bomb was chewed over in much detail, but not in the same way as with other airline disasters. Concorde was too well managed, too small, with too few passengers, and the legendary security was as near to watertight as any security ever can be.

“Experts” who had never traveled on Flight 001 announced they thought it was possible to plant an explosive device on board. “Experts” who had actually traveled supersonic, thought the opposite. Some thought Concorde might have blown up because of a fuel leak. One source even mentioned the possibility of a missile strike, assuming at that stage it could have come from a surface ship.

But checks were made over the next forty-eight hours, and it became clear that 10 miles below Concorde’s flight path, in the vast wastes of the North Atlantic, in waters so lonely the nearest land is over 1,600 miles away in any direction, there was simply no platform for such an attack to be launched. No land. No warship. Not even a decent-sized merchant ship. No one could have loosed off an accurate radar-guided missile at the supersonic passenger jet, because no one had a place for the launcher. In any event, hitting an aircraft traveling that fast, that high, was way beyond the capacities of 90 percent of the world’s guided missiles, even if there had been a launching pad. The possibility seemed so utterly unlikely it was not discussed at the highest levels, even in the Pentagon.

Not even in the White House, by the zealously suspicious Admiral Arnold Morgan…although he was heard to mutter cynically to Kathy O’Brien that evening, “Goddamned Brits are getting a little careless, hmmm? First a three-hundred-million-dollar submarine which is never seen again…now a supersonic aircraft, also vanished…That’s not like them. Not like them at all.”

By midday on the morning of January 18, it was decided that since the accident had been to a British Airways aircraft, built in Great Britain and flown by British pilots, the entire thing had little to do with the United States, not in formal terms. Certainly the Federal Aviation Administration was more than interested in the world’s most famous aircraft hitting the Atlantic en route to New York. But the actual investigation into the causes of the destruction of Concorde would be undertaken by the Air Accident Investigation Branch of the Department of Transport in London. The crash had, in any event, occurred slightly nearer to the UK than to the shores of either America or Canada.

And now there were two Royal Navy warships on their way out to the seas which roll over 30 West around the fiftieth parallel, where at first light that morning the Canadian Navy surveillance planes had spotted wreckage in the water. The big icebreaker was still twelve hours away from the spot, and the frigates were even farther. So the searchers would just have to hope the lighter material would keep floating. There was no sign of any bodies.

The loss of Concorde very quickly began to emerge as one of the great mysteries. British Aerospace and Rolls Royce engineers dismissed out of hand the possibility of the fuel leaking and igniting. The security dragnet that surrounds all Concorde flights dismissed as absurd any possibility of anyone planting a bomb on board.

Indeed there have been only two comparable air disasters in recent years. The first was USAIR’s Flight 427 from Chicago to Pittsburgh in 1994—when the Boeing 737 plunged 6,000 feet and nose-dived into a ravine at 300 mph killing all 132 passengers and crew.

The black box explained nothing, and no one has ever offered a satisfactory reason for the crash.

The second, of course, was TWA’s Flight 800, an aging Boeing 747 that burst into flames and plunged into the Atlantic off Long Island in July of 1996. There are still those who swear the aircraft was hit by a guided missile. Particularly three commercial airline pilots who reported seeing at least one missile in the air while flying over the same New York airspace where Flight 800 exploded.

The pilots, from Northwest, Delta, and US Airways, were all headed westward over the city toward Philadelphia, and they reported their missile sightings separately.

The U.S. Navy replied that they might have sighted two D5 Trident missiles being fired at the time from a submarine, USS
West Virginia,
off Florida, the night being very clear. However, those missiles were being launched toward the Azores, and the launch platform was close to 2,000 miles away. It was not terribly likely that all three of the commercial pilots would have made such a colossal error of distance judgment, especially since they were all flying the wrong way to see the Trident missiles anyway.

Pierre Salinger, JFK’s former press secretary, was convinced the U.S. Navy shot down Flight 800 by accident, with a missile which somehow got away. He went so far as to call a press conference in Paris to present his findings four months after the crash. But none of it ever came to anything.

The only truth was that no one had ever explained conclusively what happened to USAIR’s 437 at the bottom of the ravine, nor what had befallen TWA’s 800 off Long Island.

By the afternoon of January 19, Concorde 001 had joined that select pair of great modern aviation mysteries. No one was able to offer one single clue as to what had brought down the MACH-2 thunderbolt that flies alone on the frontiers of space.

What everyone required was Concorde’s two black boxes, one of which was the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) the other the Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR). But the aircraft had gone down in such diabolically deep water, possibly almost 3 miles, right on the far northwestern edge of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, it might prove impossible to retrieve anything off the bottom.

The British would no doubt bring to bear the most modern sonar systems and diving machines, and the Americans would no doubt find a way to assist. But it should be remembered that the finest feat of recovery ever, for black boxes, took place in February 1996, when a Turkish-based Boeing 757 from the Dominican Republic plunged into the Caribbean killing all 189 people on board.

On that occasion, four or five nations jointly financed a contract for the U.S. Navy to dive to more than 7,000 feet. On the first day they discovered that the black boxes were still emitting signals from their underwater locator beacons, which led the divers immediately to them. To this day, airline investigators still discuss that operation with awe.

But it had been carried out in warm water, in bright conditions—a far, far cry from the black depths of the rough, storm-tossed North Atlantic in January, where Concorde’s black boxes might also still be emitting signals, but from an ocean floor more than
twice
as deep as the one in the Caribbean that claimed the757.

The media’s problem in covering the news story was that there appeared to be no one to blame. Certainly not the pilot, nor his crew, who were dead, and had been flying Concorde for years. Certainly not the Shannon Air Traffic Control operators, who had already said good-bye to Flight 001. And certainly not Air Traffic Control, Gander, who were 1,600 miles away, and reported no unusual weather conditions for any flight, all day, particularly for one flying 4 miles above the weather, where the wind rarely rises above 40 knots.

The tough, hard-eyed security chief on duty in Concorde’s area at Heathrow made a bomb inquiry from a female reporter from London’s Channel Four look ridiculous. He gruffly informed her that if she cared to put an unauthorized suitcase anywhere near
Speedbird
001’s loading bay, she would probably be torn to pieces by guard dogs, and if not, then shot on sight. He was only half joking.

201100JAN06. 43N, 38.25W. Depth 100 meters.
Course 120. Speed 5.

HMS
Unseen
was running silently, and deep, the commanding officer sipping Turkish coffee in the control center, in conference with his navigation officer, Lt. Commander Arash Rajavi.

“I think we were correct, Arash. It was wise to clear the datum and make nine knots away from the firing area for a day. Now I think we are also correct to continue at five knots. At this depth and speed we are completely safe from detection. But tonight we shall have to snorkel for a few hours…batteries getting low. I just don’t want to come up before dark.”

“Nossir. I think not. The Americans are very vigilant around here. They have big a surveillance station at Halifax, as you know. That SOSUS very dangerous to us. If we stay dead slow, they hear nothing, right?”

“That is correct, Arash…but we’ll have to snorkel by 1800.”

“Then where, sir? Where do we go afterward? Can I know our next mission?”

“We will stay on the westerly edge of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge for the next twelve days. Detection is nearly impossible there. That way we can be back in our old position on 30 West, at the fiftieth parallel in perfect time.”

“We fire again, sir?”

“Yes, Arash. We fire again.”

Day after day they cruised quietly, snorkeling for very short periods by night, but always keeping the batteries well charged, just in case
Unseen
should need to get away from a pursuing U.S. or British warship. It was impossible for Commander Adnam to know whether or not the military had yet been called in to assist with the investigation into the crash of Concorde, but he knew they would come in the end.

He sensed that inside the U.S. military he had a very determined opponent. Someone who, he had no doubt, would one day piece together that one maestro had sunk a carrier and downed a supersonic jet. Both times using a submarine. Ben Adnam had no illusions about his own cleverness, but he was equally certain there was at least one person, just as cunning and just as brilliant, operating on the Great Satan’s side of the fence. It was that sort of assumption that kept him alive, he reckoned.

They stayed silent in the deep water, occasionally monitoring the satellite for news or orders from Bandar Abbas. And the Iranian crew awaited patiently the next instruction from their Iraqi captain.

For eight days he revealed nothing. They all knew that the next mission would be essentially the same as the first, but on January 26,
Unseen
received a terse signal:
“PR campaign launched.”
And Adnam briefed his crew on what this meant.

Then, two mornings later on January 28, a highly exclusive photograph appeared in the international Iranian daily newspaper
Kayhan,
which is the much more hard-line English-language edition of the
Tehran Times…
designed for an overseas readership.