To the Death

speed to eight knots and the navigator was studying the GPS intently, calling out the numbers. As they passed Quantico, Commander Bob Wallace made contact with the United States Marine Corps airbase at Turner Field.

They came slowly past Chicamuxen Creek on the starboard side and, almost drifting now, came alongside the low-lying peninsula of the Navy’s surface warfare center at Stump Neck. Right here, Commander Wallace ordered a course change, and USS Grabber came thirty-eight degrees left into the middle of the stream, onto a 360-degree bearing, due north.

Sonars active.

The navigation officer was calling the GPS numbers now, and he did so for three more miles. It was almost dark now, and in the failing light, with the sun disappearing behind the long, low shoreline of Charles County, Commander Wallace called for the helmsman to hold course, but for engines to reverse, and for the barges to do the same. The firm voice of the navigator could plainly be heard:

Thirty-eight spot thirty-eight north, seventy-seven spot zero-two west.

“Thank you, Tommy,” said Commander Wallace quietly. “All stop. Drop anchors fore and aft. Diving Team One prepare to go. Check marker buoys, load sea anchors, and lower the Zodiacs away. Ops area teams prepare to leave.”

Grabber was suddenly a fast-moving U.S. Navy warship. There was no enemy, of course, in the middle of the Potomac a few miles south of Washington, D.C. But there had been, and right now it was hard to tell the difference between battle stations and peacetime action stations. No one was standing still. Or sleeping. Or sipping coffee.

The shouts and commands of the petty officers, chiefs, and lieutenants crackled in the gloom of the early evening. Lines were made fast, anchor chains howled, heavy metal hit the riverbed sixty feet below, underwater lights were tested, scubas checked, ropes, lines, and marker buoys prepared. Away to starboard, four miles through the fast-encroaching darkness, the powerful night scopes of the watchmen at the U.S. Navy surface warfare center peered out from Indian Head. Tonight and until this mission was completed, they were watchdogs.

Two patrol craft, engines running, were moored on the jetty. The slightest suggestion of an intruder would have them racing at flank speed for the Grabber, armed to the gunwales. That small ops area in the middle of the Potomac River was no place to be. Not tonight.

Commander Wallace and his men were acting under orders direct from the Pentagon. And right now their mission was one-dimensional. Everything else was Phase Two. Before dawn, they must locate, and mark with floating buoys, the shattered wreckage of TBA 62.

They had the last known GPS numbers the airliner had shown on the screen before everything went fizzy. However, those numbers may have been her final position when the missiles hit, or they may have been her final position when the 737 hit the water.

The operators at Herndon were of the opinion the air control radars would have continued “painting” her until she plunged beneath the surface. The missiles were known to have severed her engines and blown off the wings, but the general opinion was that the fuselage had stayed intact until the moment of impact with the Potomac.

Thus, Commander Wallace had positioned his little flotilla exactly at Flight 62’s last known position. In his opinion, that wreck would be dead beneath the ships. If the divers failed to find anything, it meant the blasted aircraft had vanished from the screens maybe twenty seconds before she hit the water. Twenty seconds at 220 mph is equal to two thousand yards.

Essentially, Grabber was positioned at the near end of Flight 62’s range of descent. If the divers found nothing, the fuselage of the aircraft was lying on the riverbed up to two thousand yards closer to the city. Commander Wallace believed, from all his reports, that the fuselage had been in one piece when it hit the water, and the numbers 38.38N 77.02W signified the precise position of impact on the water, not the position 1,500 feet above the water where the missiles struck home.

The commander left the bridge and walked down to the lower deck, where SEAL Chief Coulson and LPO Flamini were preparing to go over the side. Seamen were making last-second checks on all the equipment. For the initial search, two more Navy divers were going with the SEALs.

The lights from the patrolling Zodiacs cast a brightness upon the water, but the depths looked black, and Commander Wallace wore a look of admiration as the four black-suited figures rolled backward, down into the water, kicking hard into the depths, their flashlights casting strong beams out in front of them.

The dive control operators began communications almost immediately as the SEAL leaders, using their regular attack boards, kicked along the bottom, the GPS figures stark before them, keeping them straight, warning them when they strayed too far from the direct line of flight of the Canadian bolter.

Twenty minutes went by. Then five more. And the SEAL leader had specified that since this work was likely to go on more or less indefinitely, it should be conducted in thirty-minute takes. Four more Navy divers were preparing to go overboard when one of the controllers called, “Sir, they got something.”

Every eye swiveled around toward the men with the headpieces, standing on the deck talking to the men below the surface.

Chief Coulson’s saying there’s something there, maybe a hundred yards off our bow.

Another three minutes passed, close to the limit of the SEALs’ time underwater. And then the controller called again.

He’s telling us to watch for the buoy, coming directly up from the smashed window of the cockpit.

The big light on the roof of the bridge suddenly blazed into life, ripping a beam through the dark and onto the surface of the river. Seconds passed, but they seemed like minutes. Then a scarlet Navy marker buoy bounced out of the water and settled.

Two minutes later, Chief Coulson surfaced next to the Grabber’s portside hull and called up, “We got her, sir. Those numbers were right on the money. Haven’t found the wings yet, and the fuselage is split almost in half. If we lift her, she’ll break. But if the cranes get two cables on her, she’ll come up one section at a time.”

“Will she take one around the tailplane and one through the cabin?” asked the commander.

“Not a chance,” said Chief Coulson, hauling himself up the ladder. “Tailplane broke off on impact. I never even saw it.”

“Can we get cables underneath the main fuselage?”

“I don’t think so, sir. She hit the riverbed pretty good and then skidded some. I’d say she’s embedded maybe three feet.”

“What’s the bottom like?”

“Kinda high-class mud. Doesn’t look dirty, more like silt, light-colored, and more holding than plain sand.”

Commander Wallace held out his hand and gave the chief a pull over the gunwale. “Great job, Mark. What next?”

“Get the diving engineers down there right away. Let’s get some decisions made. But one thing’s definite: she’ll come to the surface. No doubt in my mind.”

“How about the bodies?”

“Didn’t see too many of them, sir. I took a quick look, and everyone was still strapped in.”

“Do we move them now, or bring ’em up with the wreckage?”

“I’d bring the whole lot up together. Mostly because it’ll be a darn sight easier to get ’em in body bags up here than it will underwater.”

“Okay. Now you go and get some food and hot coffee. We’ll talk again in an hour. and Mark, thanks a million.”

Five hours later, the decisions were made jointly by the engineers, the SEALs, and the commanding officer. It was plainly too difficult to get cables right under the fuselage of Flight 62—at least, it was without very sophisticated equipment, the kind of hydraulic air pumping used for dock piles, driving out the seabed and hammering them in through soft disturbed sand. But that’s conducted from the surface. And it’s a whole lot more difficult to transfer this technology to operate sixty feet below the waterline. And a lot too slow.