H.M.S. Unseen

do.”

Everyone saw the two military men leave the room, walking quickly, out toward the office where the Presidential communications were located, guarded by six Secret Servicemen. There were three telephones in there, and while John Mulcahy stood up and apologized for the technical interruption, the President’s chief security advisor was already on the secure line to the White House, instructing them to patch him through to Air Traffic Control, Shannon, southern Ireland.

That took less than thirty seconds because Kathy O’Brien had the numbers right in front of her. When the admiral made contact, announcing himself as the senior security representative of the President of the United States, the operator put him through at once to the ATC supervisor.

And he had no idea what the fuss was about. “Sir, Starstriker 001 made contact at 30 West, nine minutes ago…she’s not due in for another four minutes…how can I help?”

“GO TO SELCAL…BOMBARD THE COCKPIT WITH SIGNALS…GET ’EM ON THE LINE!”

“No problem, sir. I’m sitting right here with the operator now…we’re going through on her private call sign HF band…we just lit two warning lights in the cockpit and right now we have four warning bells ringing.”

“Are they coming in?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“HIT ’EM AGAIN FOR CHRIST’S SAKE.”

“No need sir, these systems operate nonstop…it’s happening over and over.”

“Are they coming in?”

“Nossir.”

“How long before they’re due?”

“Two minutes, sir”

“KEEP HITTING ’EM.”

“I’m doing it, sir. But they’re just not answering. It’s very unusual…very, very unusual.”

“GIMME THE TIME AGAIN.”

“Starstriker’s due in sixty seconds, sir.”

Arnold Morgan waited. He waited next to his trusted friend Joe Mulligan for a full minute, then another. Then the Irish ATC supervisor said, “We’re on the line. You can probably hear our operator right next to me.”

And in the distance the admiral could hear a disconnected voice, and the tones were somehow hollow. “Starstriker…Starstriker. This is Shanwick…this is Shanwick…go ahead with your position report. Starstriker 001, please go ahead with your position report…”

The two admirals, both of them in mild shock, stood in silence, still listening for the words of the Irish supervisor to confirm that it was all a mistake, that the Boeing supersonic was still racing through the skies.

But at 1001 (EST), the operator came back on the line and delivered his message with a softly spoken jackhammer. “I’m sorry to inform you, sir, that we are now certain Starstriker is down in the North Atlantic, somewhere east of 30 West, her last-known was 50.30 North at 60,000 feet. We are alerting all ships in the area plus the appropriate United States agencies.”

Admiral Morgan replaced the receiver, looked at the highest-ranking officer in the United States Navy, and said, “He got her.”

Admiral Mulligan found it hard to speak. Their conversation of just three days earlier would haunt both men for years to come. But still the question remained: Was Ben Adnam really out there in a stolen diesel-electric submarine silently slamming passenger jets out of the Western skies on behalf of Islam?

“Well,” rasped Admiral Morgan, “with two supersonic aircraft down, for no reason, in roughly the same patch of water, in three weeks, an accident looks pretty goddamned coincidental.”

They walked back to the main room, uncertain what to do or say. But pandemonium had already broken out. When Shannon put the announcement out to the international air-sea rescue services, it took just a few minutes for the news to reach the British Broadcasting Corporation, and subsequently to be released in a news flash on the television and radio networks. This meant, broadly, that the entire world news media knew that Starstriker was down within twenty minutes of the crash.

The television people could not believe their luck. One of the great stories of all time was breaking, and there they were, in a room with the Boeing president, his PR chief, and other executives. Even the President of the United States was there. Even the head of the United States Air Force. Even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. They even had the chairman of British Airways, which had lost the Concorde a mere twenty days earlier. These journalists were involved in the News Nirvana of the last hundred years.

In the opinion of Arnold Morgan nothing useful could possibly be achieved by any of the Presidential party, and he recommended that everyone leave immediately, an evacuation facilitated by the Secret Service. Admiral Mulligan made the same suggestion to Scott Dunsmore, and the military top brass were also out of there in record time, leaving Jay Herbert to protect John Mulcahy as best he could. The electronic satellite links to the great aircraft had been switched off, since it was plain there was nothing to which they could connect. Starstriker was history.

The Pentagon staff car dropped Admiral Mulligan at the White House. And there in the West Wing, behind the locked doors of the office of the NSA, sat the only two men in America who had even a partial, if outlandish, theory to explain what had happened. Each tried to assemble his thoughts, trying to decide what to do about the menace that might be lurking five hundred feet below the surface, somewhere in a million square miles of the North Atlantic.

“The trouble is,” said the Navy chief, “we still don’t have a shred of evidence, and I can’t just order a fleet to take off on some wild-goose chase. It would cost a fortune, which is not in our budget, and we’d hardly know where to start looking. Plus the operation would have to be ‘black,’ since we cannot alarm the populace. We’d need a dozen warships, which would alert the entire Armed Forces that something dead suspicious was going on right out there where the two jetliners went down.”

“I know, Joe. Don’t I just know. I think the best way forward is for us to analyze carefully the whole scenario…just to get it clear in our minds. That means we should assess the similarities between the two disasters, which is very simple.

“Both aircraft were maintained to the highest possible standards. Both of them just vanished off the airwaves around 30 West. Neither pilot, so far as we know, had time even to utter the word, SHIT. Which means they both blew up internally, or fell apart for unknown reasons. Or they were hit by a big guided missile, capable of perhaps a 50-mile range, at a speed somewhere between MACH-2 and MACH-3. Because of the obvious security surrounding Starstriker, there can be no question of a planted bomb. Neither does anyone think that was possible with Concorde. Which leaves us with the possibility of metal fatigue or structural weakness.

“But not on two aircraft built thirty years apart, one of which had been flying perfectly all its life, and the other judged to be the very last word in supersonic travel by every single one of the many, many world-class engineers at the Boeing plant.”

“I agree, Arnold, with all that. Which leaves only the missile.”

“Right. And the difficulty with that is simple; there is nowhere to fire it from. No land. No nearby ship, certainly not a warship. Unless the missile was delivered from space, which is not within present-day technology for us, it must have been fired from a submarine. A specially fitted submarine, one with a sizable surface-to-air system out there on its casing, probably in front of the fin like your man Harry’s Blowpipe, only a lot bigger.”

“Right, Arnold. And we have a missing submarine, nearly brand-new, whereabouts unknown, somehow taken beyond the very capable reach of the Royal Navy.”

“Correct. And we have the possibility of one of the most dangerous submariners who ever lived being at the helm. I’ve spoken to David Gavron in Tel Aviv, and he admits, very frankly, that when you get right down to it, they cannot be certain whether Commander Adnam is dead or alive. They never saw the body, which has now been cremated by the Egyptians. They only had his papers. Could have been anyone. They could even have been forged, probably by fucking Adnam himself.”

“Plus, Arnold, we have the irritating possibility that the plans for Harry Brazier’s Blowpipe system are very