H.M.S. Unseen (19 page)

The picture showed up, in color, over four columns, at the top of page five. And it showed two Army trucks, full of heavily armed Iraqi soldiers, driving through the streets of the little marshland town of Qal At Salih, east of the Tigris, some 30 miles from the Iranian border. Behind one of the trucks was a trailer on which was some kind of a rounded cargo, covered with a tarpaulin.

The caption beneath it said:

IRAQI ARMY PERSONNEL ON THE MOVE NEAR
OUR FRONTIER. FEARS OF MAJOR GARRISON
BUILDING AT QAL AT SALIH.

Beneath the picture, the italicized credit line read:

AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE.

Now, none of this was particularly interesting. It was deep in the background of the photograph, slightly hidden beyond the trucks, where the writing was apparently on the wall. In daubed Arabic lettering was the slogan, DEATH TO THE OIL THIEVES. Beneath it was the unmistakable pterodactyl outline of Concorde coming in to land, nose angled down.

The photograph would have been perfectly complete without it, and indeed it really required a magnifying glass to make out the exact message of the lettering. But in Paris that morning there was someone with a magnifying glass, Ross Andrews, the CIA’s chief field officer in France. And he was staring at the picture on page five of
Kayham
with profound interest.

He called the veteran picture editor at
Agence France,
and wondered if he could purchase a copy that might be clearer. Such requests from American Embassy staff officers were not unusual, and Franc Gardu said he would call back when he located the negative.

Unhappily he could find no trace of the picture, not in the printing rooms, not in the wire room. Uneasy about calling back the U.S. Embassy and admitting he had no idea where the picture was, he placed a call to the offices of the
Tehran Times.

Franc had spoken to the picture editor there many times, especially during the various Middle Eastern conflicts of the past thirty years, and now he queried: “Are you certain you got that picture from us?”

“Of course I’m sure. It came in by wire yesterday morning. I just signed the credit to your account. It’s a nice shot.”

“Does it have our stamp on it, top left?”

“Wait please…I’ll check…absolutely. It’s right there.”

“You wouldn’t be good enough to wire us back a copy would you? I can’t find the negs.”

“Sure…be happy to.”

And with that, Karim Meta wired a copy of a perfectly exquisite forgery to Paris, a forgery so beautifully worked that no one except a military scientist would ever be able to tell that the trucks, and the soldiers, and the trailer, had been superimposed onto a photograph of a painted wall in a back street of south Tehran.

That morning Franc Gardu received several other requests for the photograph, one from the
Kuwait Times.
By the evening, midday in Washington, there were two wired copies of the picture on the desk of the CIA’s Middle East Chief Jeff Austin. One from Paris, one from the field officer in Kuwait.

Each one was accompanied by a similar memorandum, remarking how odd it was that a few remote people, from deep in the land of the Marsh Arabs in southeastern Iraq, had reason to be cheered by the loss of the U.S. oil-negotiating team that had died on Concorde. “No secret about the deaths, every paper in the Middle East carried the story. Here in Kuwait City there was even an interview with Mohammed Al-Sabah about his friend Bob Trueman…just seemed a bit strange that there should have been people who were pleased the Americans had died, right down there in the marshes.”

Jeff Austin’s mind buzzed. It was the second time he had seen that name Qal At Salih in the last six months. The first time had been back in the summer, when there had been two mild alerts about Iraqi missile testing in the marshes, though nothing had come of it.

And now this. Cheers from the Marsh Arabs about Concorde’s crash and the Americans who died in it. Jeff Austin called Admiral Morgan in the White House on the secure line and recounted his thoughts. The national security advisor was very reflective.

“How’d we get the picture?” he asked.

“Apparently with some difficulty. Two of our guys spotted it in the Tehran paper, and then had to negotiate with the French picture agency to buy it. I’m sending a copy over to you right away…you’ll see…it’s not that easy to read the graffiti right away. It’s in Arabic. It’s the picture that grabs you…the one of the aircraft. I thought both of our guys were pretty sharp to notice it. Ross Andrews in the Paris embassy was first.”

“Uh-huh…yup, Jeff. I’d like to see it. By the way…did we get any more confirmation on that missile-testing business we discussed before?”

“Not a word, sir. Not another word.”

“Qal At Salih…that’s a goddamned funny place to be associated with world atrocities. Fucking Marsh Arabs splashing around with guided missiles hidden up their goddamned djellabas.”

February 2006.

T
HE LOSS OF THE THIRTY-YEAR-OLD CONCORDE, THE
sixth of the production models that had arrived onstream between 1976 and 1980, occurred at a poignantly significant moment for the aircraft industry. Because, at that very time, Concorde’s natural successor was undergoing its final trials out on the West Coast of America. It was the Boeing Starstriker
,
the last word in supersonic flight in the opinion of its designers…twice the size of Concorde, with three times the passenger capacity, and 350 mph faster across the ocean. But, more than that, it heralded the reclaiming of the high aviation ground by the U.S.A., after thirty-five years of European domination.

Those thirty-five years had never been easy for the American plane makers to accept. Way back in the early sixties, when President Kennedy had been determined the U.S.A. would lead the way in the production of SSTs, Boeing had been at the very forefront of the design developments. The great swing-wing Boeing 2707-100, built to fly at MACH-2.5 with 300 passengers, had seemed set to blow the Anglo-French Concorde right out of the game, just as the Boeing 707 had outcommercialized Vickers’s beautiful, quiet VC10.

But then had come the fashionable clamor for a cleaner, quieter, less polluted world. And America’s East Coast liberals waged a six-year campaign to have the supersonic transports killed off, as “too costly, too noisy, too threatening to the environment, totally unacceptable to anyone living anywhere near the airports of New York and Washington.”

With JFK gone, men like Senator William Proxmire rallied support for the cause that the U.S. government ought not to be funding it. There were Harvard scientists founding outfits like Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom. All over the country a rising hysteria grew ever stronger. The East Coast press printed every outlandish claim, that the great sound-barrier boom of the SSTs would obliterate houses, destroy the American wilderness, wipe out entire species of life on this planet: birds, insects, domestic pets, possibly even liberals.

By the mid-sixties, it was clear that Concorde was in front of the Boeing 2707-100 in its development, but most experts believed the great SST from Seattle would come in late, with a more realistic economic base, and take over the world’s most expensive passenger flights without much trouble. Poor little Concorde would be stampeded aside in the rush.

However the more pressing stampede was that of the abolitionists, and by the late sixties the tide had turned. Pan American and TWA, the two U.S. airlines that had been vociferous supporters of supersonic transport, canceled their orders for Concorde, and a shiver of apprehension was felt in Seattle.

And there was no help from the military, which had traditionally stood behind major aircraft development. In the old days, of the early fifties, any new American SST program would have been for the development of some huge Air Force-manned bomber, and money would have been made available from the defense budget. However, that game, too, was changing drastically, and big manned bombers were becoming obsolete in the new age of guided missiles.

Which left the Boeing Corporation in Seattle to fight a lone battle for its supersonic passenger jet, an aircraft totally impractical without government funding, an aerial wagon around which the Indians were already circling.

On the night of May 17, 1971, Congress finally finished it, voting 49–47 to discontinue funding the project. The men from Seattle were devastated. And three years later, they could only watch helplessly when a cheering crowd estimated at 250,000 surrounded Los Angeles Airport to witness the spectacular landing of Concorde prototype 02, as it came howling out of the skies on its triumphant American Pacific Coast tour to sell the concept of supersonic flight.

There were many designers, engineers, and test pilots at Boeing who never quite got over the political killing of the 2707-100, an aircraft equally as dramatic as Concorde, and probably many times more financially efficient. One of them was a twenty-eight-year-old design engineer named John Mulcahy, an ex–Boston College football star, with an engineering doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

On February 2, in the deep winter of the year 2006, the sixty-three-year-old John Mulcahy was president of the Boeing Corporation, and he sat at the head of the long table in the rarefied corporate conference room listening with unashamed satisfaction to the latest reports of the tests on Starstriker
.
This was indeed the aircraft to dominate the world in the field of high-speed business travel, transatlantic, transpacific, global. Concorde had proved conclusively there was a market for executives who need to move across the world in a big hurry, the hell with the expense. And the giant Boeing SST was ready to place the corporation right back in the driving seat of world aviation. Where, John Mulcahy fervently believed, it had always belonged.

Certainly, in the intervening years since Concorde had first taken flight, the Boeing Corporation had dominated the world of commercial aviation, the Boeing 707s, 727s, 737s, 747s and the rest had been unrivaled in their volume, their safety and efficiency. But Concorde, nothing like so commercially successful, and a financial failure on so many routes, remained the glittering flagship of air travel.

She was the capricious high-speed record holder of the airways, the passenger jet everyone loved to watch. She had always been to aviation what the Cowboys were to football, what the Yankees were to baseball, what Arnold Palmer was to golf, what the Princess of Wales was to fashion. Concorde was the supersonic jet everyone wanted to meet, preferably from a window seat, sipping champagne, transatlantic.

Which made many Boeing execs consider the world a cruel and unfair place. Because they had designed an SST just as glamorous, even more spectacular-looking, and considerably faster. And government officials, more than three thousand miles away—
American
government officials—had destroyed her.

But now things were going to be very different. Based on those long-shelved plans and designs, they had re-created it all thirty-five years later. They had advanced the systems, refined the engines, working in conjunction with Pratt and Whitney. From the old stillborn 2707-100 had sprung the twenty-first-century 2707-500, the Boeing Starstriker
.
Now the world’s hotshot travelers would see what American excellence really stood for. And in a sense the men from Boeing would stand vindicated for all the millions of millions of dollars they had spent back in the sixties, and all the thousands of man-hours they had expended.

Starstriker represented living, growling proof, that where politicians might be quite happy to squander colossal amounts of money, which was not theirs anyway, America’s heavy industry was not so inclined. Their knowledge, their research and development had been meticulously stored over the years, then distilled, cultivated, and improved. And the East Coast journalists who had gleefully added up the costs of the old 2707-100 and pronounced Boeing money managers “guilty of extravagance beyond words” throughout the first SST program…well…they could now go chew on their own long-dead, ill-thought-out feature articles. In the unlikely event they would ever be able to comprehend the depth of their misjudgments.

John Mulcahy beamed with good humor. He sat next to his chief engineer, longtime vice president Sam Boland, whom he had first met at MIT and subsequently lured from another major U.S. plane maker. To his left was the top test pilot in the United States, Bob “Scanner” Richards, Boeing’s near-mythical project manager whose instinct for the smooth running of a revolutionary design venture was fabled throughout the industry. Scanner had just declared the titanium-bodied Starstriker
, “
about as close to perfection as anyone’s gonna get an SST in this lifetime.”

John Mulcahy had also listened to a report by his public relations chief, Jay Herbert, who had described, in barely controlled excitement, the events that would unfold in Washington, right there at Dulles International Airport on February 9, when Scanner Richards would take Starstriker on her maiden transatlantic test flight in the company of all of the top Boeing technicians who had worked on her for so long. There would be no passengers, just the high-tech air crew and staff. The guest list at the celebrity breakfast and reception was as glamorous as anything seen in the nation’s capital since the Reagan years.

Ten minutes previously Jay had revealed that the President of the United States would arrive at Dulles, together with his wife and National Security Advisor Admiral Arnold Morgan, plus Secretary of Defense Bob MacPherson. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Scott Dunsmore had accepted, plus the heads of all the Armed Services. Leading senators, congressmen, governors, the titans of corporate America, media tycoons, Wall Street giants, and a smattering of show-business lightweights, actresses and singers, who would probably claim most of the headlines.

The maiden transatlantic flight of Starstriker had captured the attention of the press and television as few technological subjects ever do. Orders and inquiries from at least eight different airlines, four of them American, were being dealt with on an hourly basis by the marketing department. John Mulcahy had known some great days as the man at the helm of the world’s greatest aircraft production corporation. But February 9 promised to be his finest hour.

He was a tall, craggy man in appearance, inclined to look a bit disheveled even in a brand-new expensive suit. His much younger wife, Betsy, fought a losing battle to make him look like the president of the Boeing Corporation, but she could never persuade him to get his shoes shined. And no matter how many times she bought him a tie from Hermès he always managed to knot it badly, somehow too thin, and it rarely hid the top button of his shirt.

Nonetheless there was an aura of power about the man. He stood six feet three inches, and his hair was thick, iron grey in color. He laughed a lot, but he also frowned a lot, and he ruled the corporation in a stern, hands-on manner. Only his true friends understood that behind this forbidding, somewhat severe exterior there lurked a wild Irishman, dying to break cover. No one ever forgot John’s sixtieth birthday party in a private room at the most expensive hotel in Seattle…when he stood on a table at one in the morning and insisted on singing a succession of traditional Irish revolutionary battle hymns. Upset a few local matrons, but Senator Kennedy seemed wryly amused.

John Mulcahy’s grandparents were from County Kildare in Ireland, and he treasured his roots in the old country. Each year he and Betsy flew to Shannon and drove up to the family village of Kilcullen, where he stayed at the home of one of Ireland’s major industrialists, Brendan Sheehan. On the way, they stopped and played golf for two or three days at Mount Juliet in County Kilkenny. In Kildare they played Michael Smurfit’s magnificent golf course at the K-Club. One day John Mulcahy intended to bring Starstriker to Shannon, which housed, after all, a section of the oceanic control center that would soon be guiding the new supersonic aircraft safely across the eastern half of the Atlantic.

He found it enthralling: the very prospect of his great aircraft descending through the mists of the Shannon Estuary, its landing wheels reaching out for Irish soil, 150 years after the penniless Seamus and Maeve Mulcahy had fled the famine, survived the voyage to America, and set up home in Boston, where, two generations later, John had been born.

He was a true romantic, an Irishman of the blood, and his contract with Boeing stipulated, in italicized letters, that he was
never
required to be at the office on March 17 of any year, save for an outbreak of war, fire, or mutiny. He did not miss many of the other working days, however, and he held the daily operations of the corporation in what some people believed was an iron grip. Boeing had never had a better president.

And the meeting today found him in an expansive mood. Concorde’s disaster had, of course, played into their hands, and while no one, genuinely, wanted to gloat at any airline’s catastrophe, particularly that of an important customer like British Airways, it was impossible to turn back the thought that Concorde’s calamity was, inevitably, Starstriker’s benefit.

The specter of that splendid airliner, coming apart at the seams, way up in the stratosphere, hung heavily over the table.

“What do you think happened to it, Scanner?” asked the president.

“I’m completely bewildered, to tell you the truth, John.” said the ex–Air Force fighter pilot. “I mean, what could have happened to it? There’s nothing up there to hit, and nothing known to man that could have hit it. Except maybe a meteorite, or a hunk that fell off a satellite. But the odds against that have gotta be millions and millions to one.”

“Then what?” persisted the president.

“Well, we do have that other pilot’s assertion, the guy from Northwestern, that he saw fire in the sky right where Concorde must have been. But I don’t know about that…I guess we must be left with internal failure of some kind. ”

“Yeah, but what kind of failure?”

“I can’t imagine. Both British Aerospace and Rolls Royce say a fuel leak fire is absolutely out of the question, so we have to forget that. And no one thinks it remotely possible that a bomb could have been planted. Which really leaves not much, except an engine fire that somehow got to the fuel. But to me that doesn’t really ring true. Without the fire observation from the other pilot, I’d be inclined to think in terms of metal fatigue, or a structural failure at MACH-2. But I don’t think either of those things would set the sonofabitch on fire. Beats the hell out of me, John.”

“And me. Just doesn’t add up, does it?”

“Not in this life.”

“Anyway, gentlemen, we better go on. Now, when are we moving to Washington?”

“On schedule, John. The aircraft departs on the afternoon of February 7, subsonic from Seattle to Dulles, leaves at 1600, arrives in secret and in darkness 2220 local. She’s being towed straight to a hangar, kept under wraps for the night, serviced thoroughly the next day ready for the 0830 departure for London on the ninth.”