“Mister President, I have met Romanov on several occasions over the years. With your blessing I will start exploratory talks immediately,” said Grant to the president.
“I don’t want this to get out into the media that we are looking at replacing President Ivankov,” said the President firmly. “Dave, treat this as a social call and nothing else right now. Ivankov still represents the horse I’d like to back in this race, but we need to be prepared to act should he continue to falter.”
There was a knock at the door. An aide entered the room and without saying a word, he walked over to Dan Leonard and handed him a note. As the Chairman of the NSA read the note, the color drained from his face. “Oh God, no,” blurted out Leonard.
“What the hell is it?” asked the vice-president.
Everyone in the room leaned forward in their seats as they waited on Leonard’s next words.
Leonard hesitated; he seemed to be searching for the right words to say. “Mister President, the South African Ambassador is asking to see you immediately. It would appear that they were not 100 % honest with the world about their nuclear disarmament program. It would appear that they retained two nuclear bombs as a means of deterrence, but they have been reported as stolen,” said Leonard as he sat back and blankly stared out of the window.
“Do you mean to tell me that there are two nuclear bombs loose out there?” shouted the Vice-president.
“It would appear so,” replied Leonard.
No one in the room noticed as President Kempt sank deeper into his couch and seemed to age several years in an instant.
18
It took Mitchell and Jackson the better part of four days to make it back home to New York. Between getting checked out at the hospital to make sure he could fly, the interviews with the local police about Reid’s murder, and a snowstorm closing the airport, Mitchell was a tense bundle of nerves ready to explode by the time he arrived at the complex.
Mitchell headed straight for the conference room. General O’Reilly and Fahimah were already there waiting to debrief him on what he had learned in Alaska, then in turn fill him in on what they had been able to uncover on the Goliath.
Before boarding his plane, Mitchell had taken the opportunity to email Fahimah a series of questions and ideas he had come up with after thinking about what Reid had told him about the disappearance of the airship. The news that Jen’s mother had been taken from a safe house and that three police officers had been killed further infuriated Mitchell. Someone was seriously pissing him off, and he intended to make that person pay.
As Mitchell entered the room, O’Reilly looked genuinely happy to see his protégé back and relatively unhurt. Fahimah gave Mitchell a quick smile and then handed him a briefing package that she had prepared about the Goliath for him to read over later.
It took over an hour for Mitchell to go over his run-in with the Russian thugs in Alaska. Both Fahimah and O’Reilly took copious notes, digging into the story to make sure Mitchell did not leave out any detail, no matter how insignificant it may have appeared.
Once Mitchell finished his debriefing, Fahimah picked up a remote and turned on a screen on the far wall. The first picture was a grainy black and white image of the airship Goliath flying over the shores of Dover on her way to Paris.
“The Royal airship Goliath, at over 250 meters in length, was the greatest airship of her time and the largest ever built in England,” said Fahimah as she changed the image on the screen.
A picture of the planned route of the Goliath came up.
“From England, the Goliath headed first to Paris and then on to Rome. From there it was scheduled to arrive at a French military airstrip on the outskirts of Nouakchott, the capitol of Mauritania, to refuel, but as history records, it never made it.”
Fahimah made eye contact with Mitchell and then continued. “Ryan, I looked into Mister Reid’s hypothesis that the Goliath went down in the region known as the Eye of the Sahara and compared that with its original flight plan, and the difference is quite substantial,” explained Fahimah, as she brought up a picture comparing the scheduled flight plan over Africa and the suspected location of the wreck. Mitchell took a deep breath as he studied the screen and saw that the navigational error, if it occurred, would have been well over 100 kilometers.
“Winds could account for some of that,” pondered O’Reilly, “but I find it hard to believe that a seasoned captain would have allowed his airship to run that far off course.”
“Unless he wasn’t aware that someone was tampering with the navigational instruments,” said Jackson as he walked into the room, holding a box of his favorite donuts.
Mitchell stood and shook his friend’s hand before helping himself to a less than nutritious breakfast.
Jackson took a seat and looked over at Ryan. “Before I took a trip up north to visit Santa and bring your sorry ass back home, Fahimah, on a hunch, asked me to do some research on the navigational means available to the Goliath,” said Jackson. “I can assure you that there was no GPS in 1931. The poor long-suffering navigator had to use a sextant to measure the angle between the sun, stars, or planets, and the horizon, and then plot that location on his map. While you were on vacation in the great white north, I paid a visit to the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum and had one of the old hands there show me how a sextant works. I have to tell you it takes an experienced hand to work these finicky pieces of kit,” said Jackson before swallowing a donut whole.
“So you don’t think a navigational error could have sent them that far off course?” asked Mitchell.
“I doubt they hired any person off the street to navigate a multimillion dollar piece of hardware around the world. So no, I don’t think so,” replied Jackson.
“There’s another possibility,” said O’Reilly. “Ryan, your email said that Reid believed that the airship’s builder, Lord Seaford, was up to his eyeballs in debt.”
“Yes sir, that is what Reid believed,” said Mitchell.
“What if Lord Seaford tinkered with the sextant to ensure that they ever so slowly, over a couple of days flying, went inexorably off course?”
Mitchell looked over at Jackson.
“Don’t look at me, I needed my daughter to set up my new iPhone. I suppose anything is possible,” said Jackson, not committing himself either way. “Look, if there’s a will, there’s always a way.”
“Ok, so, if we go with the theory that the Goliath went incrementally off course and crashed in the desert, where could she be?” asked O’Reilly, looking intently up at the map on the screen.
Fahimah brought up a satellite image of the Eye of the Sahara.
Mitchell studied the image as he took a sip of his coffee. The Eye of the Sahara looked like a series of massive concentric circles extending out from a large central dome. It appeared to Mitchell to be the result of an ancient meteorite strike.
Fahimah looked up at the image. “The Eye of the Sahara, located near the town of Ouadane, has a circumference of over forty kilometers and is made up mainly of rock and sandstone. It may appear to look like an impact crater, but it is, in fact, the remnant of a collapsed geologic dome that has eroded away over millions of years to give the uniform shape that you see on the screen,” explained Fahimah.
“I’ll have to take your word for that,” said Jackson with a wink at Fahimah as he reached for another donut.
Fahimah ignored Jackson and continued. “Captain Mitchell, I looked into the sandstorms that were described in Mister Reid’s notes and found several references to them in the diary of a Foreign Legion Officer, and in the notes made by a French merchant living in Ouadane at the time of the Goliath’s disappearance. I found credible evidence that there was indeed a massive sandstorm during that time that lasted for about a week. Roads, several villages, and many ravines that had been there before were all swallowed up by the storm.”