by Jeff Rovin
The item was an audio file, the recording of a 911 call from Joseph Lewein in Manhattan. The message had a time stamp of 9:16 A.M.—just minutes after the crash and too soon for him to have seen, heard, or read about it anywhere.
Williams listened with headphones that kept any external noise out and internal sound in.
Dispatch: Nine-one-one, what’s your—
Lewein: My name is Joseph Lewein and I think … I’m sure something is wrong, badly wrong. I was—
Dispatch: Mr. Lewein, where are you calling from?
Lewein: Huh? 330 West Forty-fifth Street, apartment 5K, but that doesn’t matter! I was video sharing a movie with my uncle Bernard on South African flight—Christ, what’s the number? It’s two eighty, I think. He was traveling from Johannesburg to Perth and we were watching—Doesn’t matter. He suddenly started convulsing!
Dispatch: Sir, is this an emergency at your loca—
Lewein: No! I’m reporting some kind of emergency on the plane. I don’t have the FAA on frickin’ speed dial! I saw my uncle coughing blood and then his tablet must’ve fallen because then I saw a woman throwing up—blood, guts. I heard everyone choking and screaming!
Dispatch: All right, sir? I need you to calm down and tell me—
Lewein: I can’t calm down and I am telling you! I saw an oxygen mask hanging down! There was a ton of blood on the seat!
Dispatch: Sir, I need you to tell me if you are reporting a terror incident. If so, I will send officers of the Strategic Response—
Lewein: Goddammit, I don’t need help! It’s not me! It’s a plane that went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean! Christ! Idiot! Connect me with the FBI or Homeland Security. Get me someone, anyone who can do something! To hell with this—
The caller hung up. That was the entire recording.
Less than a minute after Williams finished listening to it, Matt Berry called on the secure landline. Williams closed the door before answering. He had rarely done that at the old Op-Center office.
“Good morning, Chase,” Berry said. “What do you make of it?”
“Same as you, I imagine. Terror attack—usual MO, early in the flight and out of an airport that’s been quiet for years, maybe a little lax with security.”
“Cause of deaths?”
“From the apparent speed, I would say a biological agent—ricin, maybe Clostridium botulinum.”
“Not a gas?”
“Not likely,” Williams said. “It would require too much to conceal in a carry-on, and if you want to ventilate it through the aircraft—it takes access and time to set up before takeoff. Acoustic analysis will probably find nothing underlying the normal sound of the vents.”
“But the fast-acting biotoxins aren’t airborne, and they don’t act uniformly.”
“No.”
“Then it’s got to be something else,” Berry said.
“What about the baggage handlers?”
“Airports Company South Africa is looking at that,” Berry said, adding, “though we’d like to get the FBI over there, establish better relations.”
“Not doing more to end apartheid is a big cross to bear,” Williams said.
“So was wiping out Indians and ignoring the Holocaust and—let’s not go down that road.”
“Sorry,” Williams said in earnest. “Just some context. I asked about the handlers because a radiological agent in someone’s luggage might have caused something like the caller described.”
“They’ve got radiation scanners at Oliver Tambo International. But—good point. I’ll make sure they were operational.”
“It needn’t have been onboard,” Williams added. “It could have been a cloud from an aboveground test or nuclear leak.”
“Uh-uh,” Berry said. “There was nothing like that anywhere in the flight path.”
“Then maybe a Russian or Chinese satellite with a plutonium power source failed to reach orbit, penetrated the cabin.”
“Imaginative, Chase, but what’s that—a billion-to-one chance?” Berry said. “Besides, the NRO, the air force, even NASA would have detected something like that.”
“National Reconnaissance Office shift-changes at eight A.M.,” Williams said. “Maybe someone was getting coffee. Or checking the classifieds.”
Williams was only half joking. More and more, computers were being programmed to watch—and catch—the large volume of data streaming in from satellites, listening stations, computer hacks, and human intelligence. A rocket abort, particularly a domestic satellite—and not necessarily Russian or Chinese, but Indian or Japanese—might not attract careful scrutiny.
“I’ll make sure that didn’t happen,” Berry said. “Meantime, I’ll be kicking over whatever we learn about the flight. Midkiff is phoning President Omotoso to offer condolences and resources—I may learn something then.”
“I’m sure you’ll have the passenger list and security footage under a microscope,” Williams said. “I’d like to look into external factors.”
“Seems unlikely—other planes use the route.”
“All the more reason to rule it out,” Williams said.
Berry considered that. “I need your instincts more than your skills. Have at it.”
“Do we have eyes on the region?” Williams asked.
“SoPo7 is being turned in that direction,” Berry said, referring to the polar-orbit climate satellite. “First image it took was dead barn swallows on a mountain—should be able to tell us something.”
“You are a font of bizarre information.”
“It impresses the ladies,” Berry said. “I’ll let you know when there’s something new,” he added, then hung up.
Williams thumbed off his phone. As always between the two, a moment of tension could be forgiven by a moment of levity. Still, Williams felt a little guilty for having goaded him. He had been responding to an impatience in Berry’s voice—stronger than usual—and it had nothing to do with the plane crash. The minds of every functionary in Washington—including Berry, and including the NRO—were focused on finding employment. Midkiff had been president for two terms and his party was voted out of office less than a week before. Like every president-elect, Pennsylvania Governor John Wright would be bringing in his own people.
Berry himself would be unemployed in less than seven weeks and Williams couldn’t help but wonder if the new Op-Center had been set up partly so Williams could hire the soon-to-be-ex–deputy chief of staff.
Not that I would mind giving him this desk and going back out with Black Wasp, he thought. As dangerous as that mission had been, it had the qualities of challenge and purpose that had first drawn him to a military career.
Pouring black coffee from his thermos, Williams opened the door and went back to work. He did not go to the linked databases of the organizations that had already reported in. Instead, he went to the daily reports filed by U.S. Geological Survey. Despite Berry’s assurances, he looked for seismic activity that might indicate nuclear tests anywhere along the air currents near the plane.
There was nothing.
Williams next went to the weekly updates from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Winds crossing the airliner’s path at 35,000 feet would have been the Cape Horn Current, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, and the Falkland Current—westerlies just after takeoff, easterlies when they went down. There were nuclear power plants along all three, from South Africa to the Falklands.
“The path is right, and there’s enough distance for radioactivity to rise,” he thought aloud.
Assuming, of course, there had been a leak.
He went to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission alerts. There were notes beside every power plant on the planet. There were no reports of difficulty at any plant along those southerly currents.
That was it for the nuclear option.
He went back to the USGS file. His geology training consisted of a single semester as an undergrad at Tufts, but he remembered that the region was volcanic and that volca
noes released a variety of gases into the atmosphere.
“Maybe a quick, freak incident jetted—what, methane?—into the air? It got sucked in by the engines?”
There was no volcanic activity anywhere that fit with the atmospheric patterns. He accessed NASA’s Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment, which circles the Earth taking tens of thousands of images. After each orbit, the artificial intelligence program on Earth analyzed those images, compared them to the previous pass, and created streams of data concerning observational changes.
This morning, the ASE had spotted an “anomaly” on Prince Edward Island—about three hours before the jetliner would have been taking off from Johannesburg.
He clicked the link to a satellite image. It showed a white dot on the northern side of the island, no explanation. It clearly was not an eruption of some kind.
“What the hell is a white dot?”
Williams went through an up-to-the-minute file from the space agency’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera, which failed to show a similar anomaly. He then went to the databases of other land-scanning satellites and found no corroborating or explanatory information. He went back one day, two days—there were no obvious “traumatic events,” as they were classified, such as a rock fall, a chunk of space debris striking land or water in the region, or Chinese artillery tests—though he did see a handful of boats near the coast in DNI surveillance, none of them anchored at the nearest natural harbor. He grabbed and saved those images, sent them to Berry for analysis. If the Chinese or Russians were using fishing boats or science vessels as fronts down there it was something worth noting.
But it did not help the current investigation.
This process reminded him of the poker games he used to play with Op-Center’s senior staff. Whenever intelligence director Roger McCord had the deal, he would offer a running commentary.
“No help there … busted … denied.…”
The imaginary McCord was right. This wasn’t solving the problem of the crash. That was when he came up with a better idea.
Looking at the time on his phone, Williams searched for a contact and then punched the phone icon.
CHAPTER THREE
Marion Island, South Africa
November 11, 2:46 P.M., South Africa Standard Time
Van Tonder and Mabuza were nearly above the wreckage. The pilot took them higher to avoid a choking stall from the smoke. Van Tonder reached for the binoculars in the side storage compartment.
“Michael, check any updates from the GSSA,” the commander said. “We’ll look at it when we get back.”
“Will do, sir,” Sisula replied.
The Geological Society of South Africa provided daily satellite reports of all seismic activity in the region. Both islands were of volcanic origin, and Marion was one of the peaks of an underwater shield volcano. That was one reason van Tonder hadn’t given the fisherman’s report much attention. Thermal venting in the region was not uncommon.
But not reaching 35,000 feet, van Tonder thought as Mabuza hovered above the blowing smoke and van Tonder raised the binoculars to study the parts of the wreckage that weren’t obscured by the churning black clouds.
The aircraft’s disjointed, shattered remains were an abstract caricature of something functional. The commander saw at once that nothing moved—except to collapse or pop, like a seat he saw burst and spew melted foam droplets into the air.
There was a brittle, blackened corpse still belted to the chair. It startled both men by jerking when the cushion exploded. Another lay on the ground nearby, curled tightly in a fetal position—either due to rigor mortis or some effort to protect itself, he imagined.
“I don’t know if you can see,” van Tonder said to the pilot. “The remains I’m looking at are burned but otherwise proportional and intact. Does that tell you anything?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Decompression at that height would likely have burst a lung. Also, do you see anything stuck in the bodies? You know—cutlery, personal devices, any flying debris?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“That also would have happened if there were a hole in the aircraft, sudden decompression—either from a bomb or a collision.”
“I have my doubts, but you mentioned that report from the fisherman—”
“I know, but volcanic gas at that height and intensity that the big boy geologists missed?” Mabuza shook his head. “Unless it was a major eruption—and we surely would have heard and seen that—effective contamination would have disbursed well below the jet’s cruising altitude. If it were a heat plume, the air would have cooled it sufficiently to prevent damage.”
“That’s all I can think of,” van Tonder said. “Do you have any theories? Any at all?”
“Not a one,” the pilot admitted.
The men continued to scan the site, looking for some detail they might have missed—even a hole punched by a meteor.
“Do you want to go down?” Mabuza asked.
“No. We’ll wait for the fires to die a little so we can go lower. What I want to do is head over to Prince Edward. Let’s have a look at that vent, see if there’s anything to it. Mike?”
“Still here,” he said.
“Are you getting the video feed?”
“I am.”
“Jump in if you notice anything or if Simon needs another flyover.”
“Yes, sir.”
Steering the helicopter to the northeast, toward the Southern Indian Ocean and into a black wall of night, Mabuza programed the GPS for the thirty-mile trip.
* * *
The sailors who first braved these waters in the middle seventeenth century had a name for the wind that blew here. They called it “Hell’s Bellows.” Whether the air was cold or colder it blew like something infernal. Along with the sound of the rotors, the wind pushed a steady howl as well as tangible pressure against the cushioned headset.
Mabuza was a fine helicopter pilot. The Cape Town native had joined the navy instead of the air force because there was less of a waiting line to fly the hot, new helicopters, of which the Rooivalk was one. He had quickly adapted to the unforgiving conditions of the southern polar region. But even he was having trouble keeping the aircraft steady in the eastward-buffeting fifty-mile-an-hour winds of the Subantarctic Front.
Fortunately, the journey to Prince Edward was a short quarter hour. The night was clear, and well before they arrived the men picked out their target: a faint, eerie glow rising from the northern coastline, visible only because it rippled the air behind it. They could not see the point of penetration, only a gossamer ribbon suspended above.
“Never seen anything like that,” Mabuza remarked. “Like a sliver of the aurora stuck in the sky. In daytime.”
It was an apt description. The light was a pale, yellowish strand with a similar translucence.
“You’ve still got the spotlight on,” van Tonder said suddenly. “Kill it.”
The pilot switched it off. The glow vanished.
“Incredible!” Mabuza remarked. “Whatever we saw was not burning on its own.”
“That rules out magma, hot gas, or vapor hot enough to self-illuminate,” the commander said.
“What we saw also doesn’t tell us how high it goes, because it was beyond the light,” Mabuza said.
“Invisible gas—methane? Carbon monoxide? I’m at a loss.”
“Sir, even if it reached all the way to the plane—that doesn’t make sense,” the pilot said. “We’re just twenty-seven miles from where the jet went down. It would have had to drop straight down over the iridescence to hit where it did. That didn’t happen.”
The pilot switched the spotlight back on. The faint column returned, like a ghost. The men approached in silence until Mabuza coughed.
“You all right?” van Tonder asked absently.
“Throat tickles suddenly.”
“Commander!” It was Sisula, urgently on the radio.
“Yes, Mike?”
“Turn back!” he sai
d firmly. “Turn back now!”
Van Tonder had learned to trust these men completely. “Do it, Tito,” the officer said.
The pilot swung the helicopter south as he tried to clear his throat.
“What’s going on, Mike?” the commander asked.
“Simon says the plane passengers apparently came down with some kind of coughing or reflux condition that killed them in minutes,” Sisula said.
“Jesus,” van Tonder said.
As he spoke, the commander reached around to the medical locker. He threw open the lid, drew out a mask, and put it on. There was a portable oxygen container inside the locker. He took that out for the pilot.
“Commander—” Mabuza rasped. “I’m sorry. I … I have to set down.”
“Understood,” van Tonder said. “Mike? Inform Simon we’re landing on Edward. Tell them why.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Also inform them that I’m putting the lieutenant on oxygen to see if that helps.” As he spoke, van Tonder pulled the mask over the pilot’s head and turned on the flow of air.
The helicopter wobbled as Mabuza inhaled deeply then coughed into the plastic mask. There were faint spots of blood.
Rallying, the pilot did not bother searching for a landing spot. The bulging mask created a blind spot. Using the altimeter, he simply descended to whatever ground was some fifty feet below.
The helicopter landed hard but evenly and Mabuza immediately throttled down.
“Don’t shut down,” van Tonder said. The glow of the cockpit illuminated tall grasses around them. The wind was blowing northeast—away from the door.
“How does your throat feel?” van Tonder asked.
“Not … worse…” he gasped.
Van Tonder patted the man on the arm. “Mike? Tell Simon that there’s some kind of—an infection, an abrasive mineral, something that is apparently coming from the pit. It hasn’t hit me. I’m using the—what is it, N99 high-filtration breathing mask. It may be enough to keep out whatever this is. I suggest they put all resources into finding out whether this is a natural event or a drilling. If someone was here, they better find whatever they may have taken with them.”
