In comparison, Jibril’s task was not so difficult. He was happy with a simple contact fuse, little more than a plunger at the forward edge of his projectile to register impact. As a backup, he included an accelerometer. Any sudden, extreme deceleration would bring detonation of the main package. Either fuse could work independently, and Jibril elected to add no delay as he was attacking a soft target, no bothersome walls or armor to penetrate. Deliver the unit to the right place at the right time, and obliteration, as brought by six hundred pounds of U.S.-manufactured Tritonal high explosive, was a fait accompli.
Jibril worked the contact fuse into place at the front of the aircraft, securing it in the machine-drilled hole he had completed earlier. The wiring was redundant, two sets, either independently capable of initiating the main charge. He would not make the final connections until the hour before launch. A stray current here would do more than fry a circuit board — it would level the hangar. When his work was done, Jibril studied everything with a critical eye. He saw no concerns. All was ready.
If he were an engineer in the West, now would be the time for celebration, perhaps a bottle of champagne cracked across the bow of his creation with his team. But there could be no libations with the team assembled here. Jibril sat alone on his work stool and again thought about his “soft target,” the prime minister of Israel. He wondered how the imam could be so sure of his targeting information. How could he know the man would be unprotected, out in the open? How would they receive the last minute update? The aircraft’s VHF radio? Doubts niggled again. Jibril had double-checked, and every news article he saw confirmed that the Israeli prime minister was indeed scheduled to be out of the country. But then, who believed anything the Zionist government put out? Such reports could well be a cloud of disinformation. And the rest? Imam Khoury must have some very good spies, he reasoned.
Jibril heard a noise, and turned to see Muhammed. At the top of a tall ladder, he was monkeying sideways along the scaffold-like framework of the hangar. He kept moving across the wall until he reached the large photograph of the Sudanese president. With both hands, Muhammed began working the picture free of its mounts. Jibril wanted to shout up and ask what on earth he was doing, but the urge was overridden by his baseline dislike of the man. He watched Muhammed toss the picture to the floor where it crashed onto the cement, the frame splintering into a dozen pieces. Even more incredible was what went in its place. Muhammed drove a series of tacks into a wooden support plank. He affixed one edge, then kicked left and right with a filthy boot to unfurl the rest. Fadi Jibril could only stare in disbelief.
Displayed in all its glory was a large American flag.
Jammer Davis had been in the Red Sea before, on a scuba diving jaunt after the first GulfWar. It looked a lot like he remembered, one of the most vibrant coral ecosystems on earth. Individually, the specimens of corals, fish, and invertebrates found here were unique. Collectively they were awe inspiring. At least they would have been had Davis been of the mind to notice. But he wasn’t here to tour the seascape. He was looking for a downed aircraft, either the wrecked hulk of a DC-3 or a state-of-the-art drone. Which, he didn’t even know.
Davis had a reasonable amount of faith in the coordinates provided by Darlene Graham and the United States Navy. He had a reasonable amount of faith in the old man and Mr. Gamun a hundred feet in front of him. But none of that matched his faith in Mother Nature’s unpredictability. He’d seen a lot of things happen to airplanes that hit the water. If the vector is straight down, the hull will hit hard and typically break into a thousand pieces, virtually all of which sink instantly. With a low-angle impact, the fuselage might stay in one piece and get carried for miles by currents before hitting the bottom. Or, being a pressure vessel to begin with, an airplane might stay afloat and drift for hours, even days. USAir 1549 had proved that in the Hudson River.
Once, Davis had watched an entire navy search two years for the wreckage of a three-hundred-ton wide-body airliner. They’d come up with nothing. Right now, Davis didn’t have a navy to work with. He didn’t have locator beacons from black boxes or state-of-the-art sonar equipment. What he had was a rough starting point, a hundred feet of rope, and an old man with a twenty foot canoe to pull him through the sea like some kind of massive trolling lure.
But there were factors in his favor. His biggest break involved the depth of the water. The average ocean depth is over twelve thousand feet, but Davis’ Mark-1 eyeball told him he was in no more than fifty feet of water. And he had visibility on his side. In the Baltic or Gulf of Mexico, you’d be lucky to see your hand if you held it at arm’s length. But here, in the crystalline Red Sea, Davis could see the bottom a hundred feet in any direction.
The towline cut hard into his hands, and Davis was seized with the unhappy realization that this might take time. All day or all week. They could go faster to cover more sea floor, but his arms would only give out that much sooner. Fifty feet below, the visible light washed out so that only greens and blues remained, which meant Davis had to concentrate on shape. Man-made things tended to stand out in a natural environment — straight lines, perfect circles, angular geometry. He could be looking for an entire aircraft, or he could be looking for something smaller, jagged metal and smashed hardware as a minimum. Davis wasn’t sure what type of aircraft he was looking for, but a DC-3 or a drone were his best bets, and both were low-speed designs. Even under the most extreme circumstances, neither would have struck the ocean at a pulverizing speed. So Davis was pretty confident he was looking for something at least the size of a small car.
But all he saw through the old mask was an endless expanse of coral shelves and outcroppings, white sand in the canyons between. The waves that had been tolerable when he was in the boat now acted with more fortitude. They slapped his face, alternately drawing the towline slack and then snapping it taut. Davis gave a thumbs-down. Slower. He felt the tension ease. Every ten minutes or so, he saw the marine world under him begin a slow rotation as the old man turned to a reciprocal heading. Back and forth. He kept count for the first ten passes. Then he stopped, not wanting to overanalyze or second-guess the skipper’s seamanship. Davis stopped calculating and just looked.
He saw nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
At noon he took a break, spent thirty minutes in the boat drinking fresh water and massaging his aching arms. His hands were blistered, so the old man wrapped a fish-scented rag around the handle, securing it with string as only a seaman could.
Davis got back in the water.
Two hours later he spotted something, but it turned out to be an old sunken boat, thirty feet of metal and wood that had probably hit bottom back in World War Two. What remained of the hull was encrusted in sea life, a sarcophagus of soft coral and gorgonians that muted its shape. Even so, Davis had spotted the symmetrical outline. Spotted it by shape alone, just as he’d hoped.