“Again, this is approximately the crash site, sir, based on rescue data cross-referenced to emergency locator data, corrected for… I guess they call it the prevailing currents. It pretty well matches the projection of the Albatross’s flight path from the previous tape.”
“How close can we come to a time for the crash of that Albatross?” Mac asked.
Jacobs was shaking his head. “Unknown, sir, from the data I’ve got.”
Mac was on his feet, stretching as he pointed to the screen. “Sergeant, run that through on fast forward and see if you see anything we need to see. We’ll be pacing around the hallway.”
Mac and Anderson had barely reached the Coke machine down the corridor when the sergeant stuck his head out the door.
“General? You gentlemen need to see this.” They followed him back inside.
“Remember, this is a surface radar,” the sergeant said. “It’s not like our aviation radars that really can’t effectively track someone below a thousand feet.”
“Understood,” Mac said, more impatiently than he’d intended.
“Okay,” the sergeant said. “Watch this target appear from the south margins of the coverage area. See it moving north?”
Mac nodded.
“How fast?” Anderson asked.
“I estimate around a hundred twenty to a hundred forty. The Coast Guard system doesn’t put data blocks on air traffic. Here’s that huge tanker over to the northwest of the target, about eight miles at this point. And you can see several other sizable vessels down here in the same vicinity the Albatross is approaching.”
“Okay. So you believe that’s the… whoa!” Mac said as a new target rushed in from the left side of the screen at twice the speed, its radar return a crisp white blotch closing on the northbound track of what had to be the Albatross. “Slow that down,” Mac commanded.
The tape was slowed to quarter-speed, the respective radar tracks showing the Albatross and the Gulfstream closing on each other every four seconds with each sweep of the radar beam.
“Our guy is running without lights, of course,” Anderson muttered, and Mac nodded. “We weren’t supposed to be just fifty feet over the water, or out of our own control area.”
“There’s the oil tanker,” Jacobs added, using his laser pointer. “If you extend the Gulfstream’s track dead on another five miles, it intersects the tanker.”
“What’s that?” Mac asked, flashing his own pointer on the screen at a spot north-northeast of the Albatross, but barely a hair’s breadth south of the approaching Gulfstream’s west-to-east track.
“That’s another ship, I think,” Jacobs replied. “The Albatross will pass to the west of it. Looks like a large enough return to be a large freighter or cruise ship.”
“Good Lord,” Mac said, his eyes on the screen. “Our Gulfstream’s going to barely miss whatever it is.”
Jacobs was nodding. “Sir, look at this. Remember we couldn’t track the Albatross on the other tape inside ten miles? Look at him here at eight miles out on the Coast Guard tape. He’s changing course. Right here. See? He’s changing course to the east by… twenty degrees. That completely alters the equation. He’s now headed squarely for that freighter, and… the point at which the Albatross’s projected flight path will cross our Gulfstream’s flight path has moved east, and… I’m trying to figure out the time, but they’re going to arrive at that intersection about the same time.”
General MacAdams, Lieutenant Colonel Anderson, and the two sergeants watched transfixed as the targets converged on each other, the Albatross’s radar return disappearing for several sweeps of the radar beam as it approached the unidentified new ship, then reappearing brightly on the north side of the ship just as the Gulfstream’s target crossed the same point.
“Here the Gulfstream seems to be in a right turn,” the sergeant said.
“He was climbing. He’d unlocked the computer and pulled up.”
“Okay, the Albatross continues on for two sweeps of the radar and then appears to slow and get more faint… finally disappearing, probably when he sinks.”
“Again, please,” Mac asked as the tape was rewound slightly and the point of convergence played once more.
After the fourth repetition Mac sat back and shook his head, his mind accelerating into the problem. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Dammit, Jon, you said they weren’t that close.”
“I… told you, sir, the best I had at the time. That isn’t the same position the Coast Guard plotted as the crash site.”
Sergeant Jacobs was consulting the note sent with the tape. “They apparently noticed this too, sir. They’ve got the corrected coordinates on this note. And… remember I warned you that my projections were based on no turns.”
Mac waved them down. “Don’t worry, fellows, I’m not looking to blame anyone for anything. But now we’ve got a potential problem.”
“The tapes don’t have to leave here alive, General,” Jon Anderson said.
“Not the point, Jon. The FAA’s trying to string up that pilot and this shows he could have hit not one but two objects out there.”
“Well, what was he doing that low, y’know?” Anderson asked.
“He’s flying a bloody seaplane, Jon. You have to get low to find the sea. No, the question we’ve got to grapple with is whether or not there’s any chance the Albatross hit our Gulfstream.”
They looked at the sequence again, rolling it back and forth past the same spot until Mac shook his head. “Jon, was the Gulfstream inspected for any damage?”
“I… don’t know, General. I assume they’d find any damage when they got back here and did their normal post-flight inspection, and I assume the pilots would have heard any collision. Metal to metal in an airplane isn’t subtle.”
Mac glanced at him with a smile. “Tell me about it. I survived a glancing blow from pieces of an exploding surface-to-air missile in my F-105 just south of Hanoi in 1973. The memory of that noise still scares the… scatology out of me.” He pulled himself back out of the chair as he glanced down at Anderson. “We’re going over to the hangar immediately. I want inspection stands and lights.”
Jon Anderson stood as well. “Sir, we’d better warn Joe Davis what we’re looking for.”
Mac was shaking his head. “No. No explanations.” He turned to the sergeant. “And no leaks to Uniwave, understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. By the way, Sergeant Jacobs?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, it’s a real shame, Bill, about that accidental erasure on the Coast Guard tape,” Mac said with a set jaw, looking the man in the eye.
“Sir?”
“I say… it’s a real shame that when that particular tape was returned to the Coast Guard, it had accidentally been bulk erased. Right?”
Sergeant Jacobs’s eyes fluttered open in sudden comprehension. “Oh! Yes. Yes, sir, I’m… terribly sorry about that.”
“Just normal human error, I suppose,” Mac said, giving the man a tired smile, which was tentatively returned.
Lieutenant Colonel Anderson was already in the hallway as Mac paused in the doorway and turned back to the two men. “This isn’t dishonesty per se, gentlemen. Keep that in mind, please. This is a black project, and there are things we have to do that are for solid reasons of national security.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, and Jacobs, one other thing?”
“Sir?”
Mac motioned him over and issued a verbal order quietly in his ear, outside the hearing of the other man, before waving a quick farewell and joining Anderson, down the hall.
TWENTY
THURSDAY, DAY 4 SEQUIM VALLEY AIRPORT, WASHINGTON 11:20 A.M.