Gerry continued. “The flight was supposed to have taken just eight hours and fifteen minutes, meaning they should have landed at Marco Polo at 9:05 a.m.”
“That’s right,” Sam confirmed. “Its ADSB transponder was picked up by the Oceanic Tracking station in Portugal at 07:45, following it up until it disappeared — presumably into the Mediterranean Sea at 08:01.”
“Where was that, specifically?” Tom asked.
“It went down in the Ionian Sea.” Gerry looked up from his notes and met Sam’s eye. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
“Phoenix flight 318 disappeared into the Calypso Deep?”
“Exactly. Most of the Mediterranean Sea has an average depth of 4,900 feet, and the deepest point on record is the Calypso Deep at 17,280 feet. Whoever we’re dealing with here, knew that and so they placed the counterfeit A380 wreck there, where they knew it was going to be difficult to retrieve the bodies.”
“That explains the delay and difficulty retrieving the black box from the wreckage. Impossible to dive at that depth. It would have taken a month to locate an available deep-water submarine capable of making the dive, and setting up a team of ROVs to enter the wreckage.”
“Nearly two months by the time we had a full team ready to make the dive.”
Sam licked his dry lips. “What did your crew find inside?”
“Everything we expected to find. Dead bodies still in their seats, flight attendants, personal effects and luggage. But it was all a show. Everyone who was down there had been dead a long time.”
Sam nodded. “What about the black box?”
“They found it.”
“And?”
“At first we thought we’d found everything. It depicted a pilot intentionally alternating from his set course, and then setting the aircraft into an intentional water landing.”
“You mean, it was the right aircraft?”
“That’s what we thought, but we were wrong. Everything was faked.”
“How did you pick that up?”
“First the clouds in the cockpit’s video recording didn’t match the aircraft at all. They were high forming, cumulus clouds.”
“And on the day of the crash?”
“A thick thunderstorm pummeled the entire region, while at cruising altitude there was nothing but dense cloud cover.”
“Could it have crashed on another day?” Sam asked.
“No way. If it had, where had it been for the past three days?”
“Right.” Sam asked, “What about the passports?”
Gerry made a half-shrug. “The passports were real. So were the bodies. But they didn’t match. Our best bet is the deceased stopped breathing years before the aircraft went down.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “Someone went to the trouble of exhuming an entire aircraft worth of corpses and dumping a new aircraft just to send you down the wrong path? What about the passports?”
“The passports were real though, which means someone on board must know where the old aircraft disappeared.”
Sam picked up a piece of paper which displayed the predicted flight path. “You said the Phoenix flight 318 — the real one — was identified by local air traffic control towers and radar as having entered the Mediterranean airspace?”
“That’s right. Its onboard transponder showed it cruising in past Madrid at 07.15. It was then picked up by radar stations throughout the Mediterranean Sea, including radar towers at Roma, Barcelona, and Malta.”
That caught Sam’s attention. “Radar towers got a good image of the aircraft as it flew through the area, crashing into the sea?”
“Yeah… sort of.” Gerry’s voice faded, like someone who knew his answers wouldn’t hold up against public or scientific scrutiny.
“What exactly do you have?”
“Multiple air traffic control towers noted the presence of Phoenix flight 318’s transponder as they tracked it through their region.”
“Any visuals of the aircraft?”
Gerry shook his head. “No. It was severely overcast on the day, with violent thunder storms raging throughout the region.”
“What about the primary radar?”
“It tracked an aircraft flying through the route. It was a deviated course, but nothing that threatened harm or conflicted with any of the authorized flight plans, so no one took any notice until it was too late.”
“Deviated… why?”
“Well, Sam. In retrospect, and if I had to guess, I’d say the pilots appear to have taken a very specific route that was most difficult to track with radar.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “What can you say, unequivocally, was tracked by radar?”
“An aircraft displaying the same unique transponder code as Phoenix 318, relaying the same information one would expect from the A380, and traveling a similar course, was picked up roughly a hundred miles out from Portugal — and then tracked as it flew on a course that overshot Madrid, commenced its descent, and eventually crashed into the Ionian Sea at 08:01.” Gerry’s mouth squirmed as though he’d tasted something bitter. “Why? What are you thinking?”
Sam expelled a deep breath. “I don’t think you lost the real Phoenix 318 anywhere near the Ionian Sea. In fact, I doubt the Phoenix even crossed the Atlantic.”
Gerry crossed his arms. “You don’t? Then what plane did we track?”
“I have no idea, but I intend to find out.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was late at night and cold by the time Sam and Tom, accompanied by Gerry Emple, got off the NTSB jet and made their way to the field office.
The NTSB field office was set up in a large aircraft hangar they had hired from the Catania airport. Sam took in the hangar at a glance. Despite being nearly 11 p.m. a not so small hive of men and women dedicated to getting to the bottom of the strange mystery swarmed the building. At the southern end of the hangar the wreckage of the fake Phoenix Airlines A380 which had been meticulously brought up from the Ionian Sea, now rested on a series of purpose-built frames in three separate pieces. A small army of engineers, forensic scientists, and FBI agents surrounded the wreckage searching for clues as to where it had come from, how it got to the crash site, and who had constructed it.
The problem was, few things survived very well at a depth of 17,280 feet.
There was no longer any doubt about the aircraft being counterfeit. The hull itself was made out of a thin layer of steel, the interior a clever work of art, but the engines had been taken from a disused 747 engine cowling, repainted with the markings of a Rolls Royce Trent 900. By the time investigators stripped the internal panels, they discovered that the entire aircraft was devoid of any wiring. It at least explained how someone managed to steal an A380 to dump in the sea — they didn’t.
To the north were walls upon walls of computer charts, digital and real maps, live satellite feeds from the day of the event, and small military attaché from the Sicilian, Italian, Maltese, Nigerian, Spanish, and Portuguese Navies, who were providing additional information about the tracked flight path, weather, and conditions of the Mediterranean Sea during the day of the disappearance.
Gerry introduced them to the lead investigator, Mykel Densley who began bringing them up to speed on the investigation. Sam shook the man’s hand. He was tall and wiry, with an expressionless face that exuded high intelligence, with either low social skills, or more likely an indifference to them. The man was an MIT graduate and had a mind like a computer.