An hour later the newspapers were in the back of the White House car, displaying practically nothing else on the first ten pages. The headlines were varied, from the staid
Inside the papers were columns and columns of news and speculation, the disaster having taken place so early in the day there was ample time to interview all manner of “experts,” especially those who were captive at the VIP breakfast banquet.
Every one of the publications on Arnold Morgan’s lap connected Concorde and Starstriker, speculating on the proximity of the crashes, both in position and time frame, three weeks. Somewhat to Morgan’s relief, no one digressed on the possibility of a missile, because the Federal Aviation Administration had stamped on that from a great height. “You would need a certain type of high-accuracy missile to achieve such an objective,” their spokesman had said. “The best of them have a range of only around 50 miles, and at that point in the Atlantic Ocean there is simply nowhere to fire from…no land, and, the satellites confirm, no ship. We regard a missile as impossible.”
Every newspaper carried that quotation. And none of them carried the theory any further. Instead they concentrated on the risks of flying that high and that fast in anything except a spaceship.
Two of them, the
The
The general drift was that somewhere up there in the final layers of the earth’s atmosphere, there was just such a hole, and the two supersonic airliners traveling on almost identical flight paths, one heading east, one west, had just charged straight into it, spun, and powered into the ocean, with no time for anyone to correct anything. “It takes,” the expert wrote ominously, “only twenty-seven seconds for Concorde to travel 10 miles, probably faster going straight down…Starstriker could have hit the ocean from that height in fifteen seconds.”
Spokesmen from the Green Party had a field day, citing the hole in the ozone layer, caused by carbon-gas emissions, as the likely culprit for the crashes. “With the atmosphere noticeably thinner in certain areas, it seems probable that the air density may be reduced sufficiently to make the flight of a high, delta-winged aircraft impossible. It is therefore our view that all such flights should be suspended pending a scientific investigation of the atmospheric phenomena 10 miles above the earth.”
“Do you believe any of this stuff, darling?” asked Kathy. “I mean the hole in the stratosphere, like the hole in the ocean near Bermuda.”
“No,” said the admiral brusquely.
“Why not? It makes sense to me.”
“Because it’s aerodynamic bullshit,” he replied unexpansively.
“How do you know?”
“Because Concordes have been flying through it eight times a day for thirty years and none of them ever fell out of the sky. Now we have two in three weeks.”
“Maybe the situation is worsening. Maybe it’s been worsening for several years, and suddenly reached a critical point.”
“Maybe. But Concorde flights have not been suspended. In the twenty-three days since Captain Lambert’s aircraft hit the ocean, there’ve been 184 supersonic flights, from Paris and London to New York and Washington, right through, or damn close to, that flight path, a lot of ’em half-empty.
You know why they didn’t flip and plunge into the sea? Because Ben fucking Adnam did not fire a guided missile at ’em, that’s why.”
“Oh,” said Kathy, with an air of finality. “You mean he’s kinda on his break?”
“No. He’s just pretty selective. And I have no idea where he will strike next. But he will. Mark my words. He will, if he can. I know him.”
“Oh, do you? I didn’t realize. Perhaps we should have him over for dinner. How about next Wednesday with the Dunsmores?”
Admiral Morgan, despite himself, caved in and laughed, really laughed, for the first time that evening. “It is my unhappy lot to be contemplating marriage to a complete dingbat,” he said; then he softened even more, while he added, “Without whom the sun will never rise for me again.”
Kathy O’Brien had, however, learned from her man the joy of pressing on with a winning line. And now she had a small gold pen in her hand, and she was writing in a small leather-bound notebook, “That’ll be seven now, won’t it…? I do hope he likes swordfish…some people are funny about it…oh my God, he’s not a vegetarian, is he?”
“Thank you, Katherine,” said the admiral, still chuckling. “I think I’d prefer we gave him a nice little serving of grilled cyanide since we’re on menus.”
By now it was almost midnight, and the car was turning into Kathy’s wide tree-lined drive; the car with the Secret Servicemen and the communications system came in right behind them. Another Secret Serviceman drove the admiral’s car in the rear. Both Arnold and Kathy were used to traveling in convoy by now, and Charlie the chauffeur never worked nights.
The three men on duty spent the night watching television in Kathy’s basement study, taking turns to walk around the grounds in pairs, sidearms drawn, connected to their colleague by radiophone.
Arnold Morgan’s was the best-known relationship in the White House, but no one had ever tipped off the press. Not a word about it had ever appeared in any tabloid publication, possibly because both Kathy and Arnold were unmarried, but perhaps because of the reason offered by Charlie himself, “Ain’t no one never gonna gossip about that admiral, because of one good reason. Terror, man, sheer fucking terror. Trust me.”
HMS
Twenty thousand miles above her the satellites scanned the Atlantic Ocean, still searching for the surface ship that could have fired the missile that had downed Starstriker. Below them the search aircraft laid and relaid their buoy patterns. But there was nothing. And Commander Adnam was heading for shallow water, where he would be even more difficult to locate. Shallow water where his snorkel mast could more easily be lost in false echoes on searching radars.
He stood quietly in the control center with Lt. Commander Arash Rajavi, who was looking at a screen showing a North Atlantic chart.
“Right there, Arash. I want to stay right above the Ridge in the shallowest possible water. We’re much easier hidden that way. So let’s make our course three-one-five for another 500 miles, then switch to zero-four-five, all the way up to the Icelandic coast, for the refuel. How far does the Rekjanes stretch? ’Bout 1,200 miles?”
“Bit more, sir. More like 1,350. We ought to be off the southern coast of Iceland by February 15, that’s five days from now.”
“What’s our position for the course change, Arash?”
“We’ll be at 54 North, 37 West…that’s when we swing northeast at last. As you can see, the ridge is like a big V facing west. It would save a lot of trouble to go straight.”
“Not if someone picked us up in deep water. Stay right over the ridge all the way.”
“Aye, sir.”
“You have our destination plotted…see it right here…this big fjord way east of Reykjavik. We’ll still be 175 miles south of the Arctic Circle, and the Atlantic does not freeze up there. Also, the bay I have chosen is very quiet and shallow. It’s deep enough to hide in, but almost landlocked, hell for a searching radar or sonar…I once went up there with the Royal Navy. It’s where one of the big Icelandic rivers flows in…see it on the map…right here. The
