H.M.S. Unseen

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.

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.”

6

February 2006.

The 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.”