Solstice

Levine cleared his throat and said, 'I think this falls to me, sir. And I wish it didn't. At 0449 our time we lost contact with Air Force One on the way back from Tokyo. She was routed for Geneva. The last confirmed position was one hundred eighty miles east of Irkutsk. We keep constant radar surveillance on Air Force One whenever she's in range as a standard security measure. The indications are that she was in some kind of collision with a British passenger jet around one hundred twenty miles east of the city, but that's only half the story. Somehow both planes were downed by a single phenomenon. We have the same report confirmed from local radar too. They're sending out the Army to look for debris, and they've agreed we can airlift in our own team too. Some pieces of the planes are turning up already, according to the Russians. It's a mess, nothing much bigger than a passenger door, and that burned so bad they don't know whether it's ours or from the British plane. We have a mission on the way, people from the FAA along to take a look. This is Russian sovereign territory but we already have a commitment from the Kremlin that we can take in pretty much who we like so long as we don't take advantage of the situation.'

Clarke shook his head. He was a handsome man, thought Helen. He wore close-cropped, military-style hair, gold-rimmed glasses, and a sober, dark suit, and he was big in the flesh, at least six feet tall and muscular. But there was a genuine spark of emotion in his eyes, more than you found in most politicians. She'd seen that on TV. Here, six feet away, it was even more obvious.

'Any hope?'

Levine shook his head. 'All the indications are that both airplanes were totally destroyed in some kind of explosion on impact at around six thousand feet. We'll look, but it's impractical to think anyone survived.'

'Jesus,' Clarke groaned.

Helen watched him. You could forgive someone for losing it a little at a time like this. Who knew what LBJ was really like when they told him Kennedy was dead? And this was somehow much worse. So distant, so huge.

'Run me down the names, Graeme.'

Burnley looked at a sheet of paper on his knee, but it was obvious he knew these all by heart.

'The President and First Lady. The Chief of Staff and Mrs Sawyer. The Secretary of State for Trade and Mrs Olsen. Congressmen Simons and Bernhard, Congresswoman Lilley. Plus fifteen White House staff members and a crew of seven on the plane.'

'And?'

Burnley looked lost. 'Sir?'

"The other plane?'

He was lost for words. Levine interjected. 'There were three hundred thirty-two passengers and eight crew, sir. We have nationals, most are European.'

Clarke shook his head. 'Almost four hundred people dead. Someone want to tell me why?'

'Sir,' Graeme Burnley interrupted. 'There are formalities we have to deal with first.'

'They're done, Graeme. I spoke to the Attorney General. I get sworn in right after this meeting. They're working on a TV broadcast right now. Formalities can wait. I want to know what the hell happened, and most of all why we just got robbed of one hell of a President.'

'They go beyond that, sir. We need to be thinking about the funeral. The arrangements… this will be, effectively, a world summit and you will be leading it. We need to set agendas now.'

'No, we don't,' Clarke said immediately. 'Dammit, Graeme, Bill Rollinson was a man. We have to bury him and his family, for sure. And this nation is going to have to grieve for him too, all of us. But we can leave the politics out of it, for now anyway.'

They nodded, in a way, she thought, that said: You have to make these noises, sure, we know. But everyone understood how cool relations between Rollinson and Clarke had been recently, most of it revolving around how Clarke had been sidelined in government. Rollinson would push the black ticket so far, it seemed, and then no further. And as it turned out, in doing so he'd given America probably the last thing he'd ever expected: the first black president in its history.

'And I still want to know what happened.'

'Sir,' Helen said, and she tried not to blush when they all stared at her, 'I did some work on the Mauritius crash last year. When you get down to it there are really only three possibilities in these situations. Either there was some malfunction in the air — mechanical or navigational; or there was a device that destroyed one or both airplanes, or possibly damaged one so much that it crashed into the other; or the planes were destroyed by an outside agency. A missile, ground-to-air fire, enemy action.'

'The rest of you I know,' Clarke said gruffly, peering at her. 'No one introduced you, lady.'

Levine leaned forward. 'My apologies, sir. Helen Wagner here is acting head of Science and Technology at the Agency. Just started today.'

Clarke smiled thinly. 'Wagner. I know the name, I guess you get sick of hearing people say that.'

'The first time is okay,' Helen replied, unsmiling, feeling the eyes in the room upon her.

'First day on the job. Baptism of fire,' Levine added.

'Yeah, for all of us,' Clarke replied, looking at her. 'I can get to that stage myself, Miss Wagner. But where's the evidence?'

'There is no evidence,' Levine said, a touch sourly. 'First, it's clear that both planes suffered some kind of incident at altitude. Neither should have been at six thousand feet. Both lost contact at around thirty-three thousand feet, so we have to assume some dual incident affected them.'

'How far apart were they when they first reported trouble?' Helen asked.

'Ten miles,' Dave Barnside said, his eyes on Clarke. 'We have an Ops team going through the tapes now.'

'Could an explosion cover that kind of area?' Helen asked.

'Nothing you could get on board an airplane,' Barnside replied.

'It's inconceivable that both aircraft could have identical system failures at altitude,' said Helen. 'It must be an attack from the air or ground.'

Levine toyed with the papers in front of him. 'If it was from the air we would have picked it up on radar.'

'A stealth aircraft?' Clarke asked. 'We don't have a monopoly on that technology.'

Levine shrugged. 'No. The Chinese have stealth. And the Russians too. But if this was an attack in the air, the planes would have been destroyed when they were hit. They wouldn't have descended thirty thousand feet intact, as far as we can make out, before disintegrating. It doesn't make sense. And the same goes for some kind of ground-to-air attack.'

'Is anyone claiming responsibility?' Clarke asked.

Dan Fogerty pulled himself up in his chair. He looked just like he did on TV: a crumpled academic out of Georgetown, which was exactly what he once was. And the languid attitude and expressionless face hid, she guessed, a formidable intelligence.

'Someone always claims responsibility, Mr President. I hope you don't mind me calling you that. I don't see why any of us need wait on the formalities. You really have to bear in mind there will always be someone putting their hand up. Thanks to the Internet, they can do it for free just by E-mailing me these days. The news is only just starting to get out on the wires, of course, so the real lunatics are a little way off. Right now, we have three definitive claims. One is from some Libyan-based organization we've never heard of. One is from a Middle Eastern crew linked to Iraq. And the third is some bunch of ecoterrorists, not that we know much about them.'

'Anything there?' Clarke asked, impatience in his face.

'Nothing you can put your finger on, sir. The Libyans and the Iraqis make this kind of claim all the time. Partly to keep us on our toes, partly so that every time something big does happen they can put their hands in the air and say: We did it. The eco-group — I'm getting some data on them. I'm dubious, frankly.'