To the Death am-10

by Patrick Robinson

  Most of them were sleeping now, and would do so throughout the fourteen-hour, 160-mile run out into the Chesapeake and then onward up the dark and silent Potomac River toward Washington, D.C. There would not be much sleep after that. This was an urgent mission, and it needed to be accomplished fast and secretly. No mistakes.

  Slowly they chugged across the west-facing naval station, coming eighteen degrees to starboard as they approached the gateway to Chesapeake Bay. The stark outline of Fort Monroe was dark in the moonlight to port as they began their left turn northward. The water was rougher here, and there was a slap-and-swish to the freighter’s bow wave as she cut through the incoming tide.

  The big heavy barges directly astern rose up laboriously before wallowing back into the troughs as their helmsmen swung the wheels left, expertly allowing these cumbersome floating freight platforms to find their shallow lines.

  Grabber led them out to the north-running channel, and within two hours they had crossed the bay and run past Cape Charles on Virginia’s eastern shore. A little over four hours later, they crossed the unseen frontier where all north-going ships steam into the waters of the state of Maryland. Eight bells chimed on the salvage ship’s bridge, signaling the start of the forenoon watch: 0800 on this bright midwinter morning. But the sun was still low off her starboard quarter as they swung forty-five degrees left, up through the wide tidal waters of the Potomac estuary.

  Point Lookout was silhouetted clear in the morning light, lancing out from the long Maryland peninsula like a black snake on a silver carpet. The estuary was calmer here, and all along the portside of the three ships, the long, shallow, bay-strewn shore of Virginia stretched to the north, for forty miles, up toward the big S-bend where the river narrows and in places becomes deeper.

  This is a mighty waterway. From its icy, gushing source way up in the Allegheny Mountains beyond the Shenandoah Valley, the Potomac runs 160 miles along the South Fork alone before reaching Harper’s Ferry and turning east toward Washington, on its final 160-mile journey to the sea.

  Grabber and her consorts still had a hundred miles to run in broad daylight, and all along the route she kept strict radio silence. Occasionally they passed a freighter running south but made no signal of greeting, friendship, or recognition. The watch changed at noon. Lunch was served to all personnel on board the salvage ship, but the men on the barges settled for beef sandwiches and chocolate with mugs of hot coffee.

  The afternoon wore on, and a deep chill set in long before the sun began to set. By 1500, they had cut their speed to eight knots and the navigator was studying the GPS intently, calling out the numbers. As they passed Quantico, Commander Bob Wallace made contact with the United States Marine Corps airbase at Turner Field.

  They came slowly past Chicamuxen Creek on the starboard side and, almost drifting now, came alongside the low-lying peninsula of the Navy’s surface warfare center at Stump Neck. Right here, Commander Wallace ordered a course change, and USS Grabber came thirty-eight degrees left into the middle of the stream, onto a 360-degree bearing, due north.

  Sonars active.

  The navigation officer was calling the GPS numbers now, and he did so for three more miles. It was almost dark now, and in the failing light, with the sun disappearing behind the long, low shoreline of Charles County, Commander Wallace called for the helmsman to hold course, but for engines to reverse, and for the barges to do the same. The firm voice of the navigator could plainly be heard:

  Thirty-eight spot thirty-eight north, seventy-seven spot zero-two west.

  “Thank you, Tommy,” said Commander Wallace quietly. “All stop. Drop anchors fore and aft. Diving Team One prepare to go. Check marker buoys, load sea anchors, and lower the Zodiacs away. Ops area teams prepare to leave.”

  Grabber was suddenly a fast-moving U.S. Navy warship. There was no enemy, of course, in the middle of the Potomac a few miles south of Washington, D.C. But there had been, and right now it was hard to tell the difference between battle stations and peacetime action stations. No one was standing still. Or sleeping. Or sipping coffee.

  The shouts and commands of the petty officers, chiefs, and lieutenants crackled in the gloom of the early evening. Lines were made fast, anchor chains howled, heavy metal hit the riverbed sixty feet below, underwater lights were tested, scubas checked, ropes, lines, and marker buoys prepared. Away to starboard, four miles through the fast-encroaching darkness, the powerful night scopes of the watchmen at the U.S. Navy surface warfare center peered out from Indian Head. Tonight and until this mission was completed, they were watchdogs.

  Two patrol craft, engines running, were moored on the jetty. The slightest suggestion of an intruder would have them racing at flank speed for the Grabber, armed to the gunwales. That small ops area in the middle of the Potomac River was no place to be. Not tonight.

  Commander Wallace and his men were acting under orders direct from the Pentagon. And right now their mission was one-dimensional. Everything else was Phase Two. Before dawn, they must locate, and mark with floating buoys, the shattered wreckage of TBA 62.

  They had the last known GPS numbers the airliner had shown on the screen before everything went fizzy. However, those numbers may have been her final position when the missiles hit, or they may have been her final position when the 737 hit the water.

  The operators at Herndon were of the opinion the air control radars would have continued “painting” her until she plunged beneath the surface. The missiles were known to have severed her engines and blown off the wings, but the general opinion was that the fuselage had stayed intact until the moment of impact with the Potomac.

  Thus, Commander Wallace had positioned his little flotilla exactly at Flight 62’s last known position. In his opinion, that wreck would be dead beneath the ships. If the divers failed to find anything, it meant the blasted aircraft had vanished from the screens maybe twenty seconds before she hit the water. Twenty seconds at 220 mph is equal to two thousand yards.

  Essentially, Grabber was positioned at the near end of Flight 62’s range of descent. If the divers found nothing, the fuselage of the aircraft was lying on the riverbed up to two thousand yards closer to the city. Commander Wallace believed, from all his reports, that the fuselage had been in one piece when it hit the water, and the numbers 38.38N 77.02W signified the precise position of impact on the water, not the position 1,500 feet above the water where the missiles struck home.

  The commander left the bridge and walked down to the lower deck, where SEAL Chief Coulson and LPO Flamini were preparing to go over the side. Seamen were making last-second checks on all the equipment. For the initial search, two more Navy divers were going with the SEALs.

  The lights from the patrolling Zodiacs cast a brightness upon the water, but the depths looked black, and Commander Wallace wore a look of admiration as the four black-suited figures rolled backward, down into the water, kicking hard into the depths, their flashlights casting strong beams out in front of them.

  The dive control operators began communications almost immediately as the SEAL leaders, using their regular attack boards, kicked along the bottom, the GPS figures stark before them, keeping them straight, warning them when they strayed too far from the direct line of flight of the Canadian bolter.

  Twenty minutes went by. Then five more. And the SEAL leader had specified that since this work was likely to go on more or less indefinitely, it should be conducted in thirty-minute takes. Four more Navy divers were preparing to go overboard when one of the controllers called, “Sir, they got something.”

  Every eye swiveled around toward the men with the headpieces, standing on the deck talking to the men below the surface.

  Chief Coulson’s saying there’s something there, maybe a hundred yards off our bow.

  Another three minutes passed, close to the limit of the SEALs’ time underwater. And then the controller called again.

  He’s telling us to watch for the buoy, coming directly up from the smashed window of the
cockpit.

  The big light on the roof of the bridge suddenly blazed into life, ripping a beam through the dark and onto the surface of the river. Seconds passed, but they seemed like minutes. Then a scarlet Navy marker buoy bounced out of the water and settled.

  Two minutes later, Chief Coulson surfaced next to the Grabber’s portside hull and called up, “We got her, sir. Those numbers were right on the money. Haven’t found the wings yet, and the fuselage is split almost in half. If we lift her, she’ll break. But if the cranes get two cables on her, she’ll come up one section at a time.”

  “Will she take one around the tailplane and one through the cabin?” asked the commander.

  “Not a chance,” said Chief Coulson, hauling himself up the ladder. “Tailplane broke off on impact. I never even saw it.”

  “Can we get cables underneath the main fuselage?”

  “I don’t think so, sir. She hit the riverbed pretty good and then skidded some. I’d say she’s embedded maybe three feet.”

  “What’s the bottom like?”

  “Kinda high-class mud. Doesn’t look dirty, more like silt, light-colored, and more holding than plain sand.”

  Commander Wallace held out his hand and gave the chief a pull over the gunwale. “Great job, Mark. What next?”

  “Get the diving engineers down there right away. Let’s get some decisions made. But one thing’s definite: she’ll come to the surface. No doubt in my mind.”

  “How about the bodies?”

  “Didn’t see too many of them, sir. I took a quick look, and everyone was still strapped in.”

  “Do we move them now, or bring ’em up with the wreckage?”

  “I’d bring the whole lot up together. Mostly because it’ll be a darn sight easier to get ’em in body bags up here than it will underwater.”

  “Okay. Now you go and get some food and hot coffee. We’ll talk again in an hour. and Mark, thanks a million.”

  Five hours later, the decisions were made jointly by the engineers, the SEALs, and the commanding officer. It was plainly too difficult to get cables right under the fuselage of Flight 62—at least, it was without very sophisticated equipment, the kind of hydraulic air pumping used for dock piles, driving out the seabed and hammering them in through soft disturbed sand. But that’s conducted from the surface. And it’s a whole lot more difficult to transfer this technology to operate sixty feet below the waterline. And a lot too slow.

  Far better to thrust the lifting cables straight through the cabin, heave her out of the silt, and haul her in. As Chief Coulson had observed, the hull of the aircraft was split. She’d break as soon as the cranes moved her, and she’d come up cleanly in two parts. Meanwhile, a separate team of divers would begin the search for the tailplane and whatever fragments of the obliterated wings were still recognizable.

  The Big Man had apparently stressed that no part of that aircraft must be left on the riverbed, since he didn’t want some smart-ass television monkeys groping around down there and coming up with Mystery Air Crash Baffles Government.

  There was not, of course, an imminent danger of that, since the only information available about TBA Flight 62 was she had disappeared fifty miles offshore, out over the Atlantic Ocean, east of North Carolina, 180 miles away.

  It was almost midnight now, and the temperature had plummeted to twenty-one degrees Fahrenheit. An icy wind whipped across the surface of the water, and there was no moon. Commander Wallace decided to have the cables attached to the hull of the airliner through the night, but not to attempt to lift the wreckage aboard the barges until after dark the following day.

  It was slow going working underwater, and the engineers estimated it would take up to ten hours to fix cables to both ends of the fuselage. Meanwhile, the Navy divers would work in shifts through the night, using underwater metal detectors, trying to locate the smaller sections of wreckage that had broken off during the downing of Flight 62. Especially hardware from the engines.

  To the northern end of the ops area, a four-foot-high floating notice board, anchored to the bottom, read: PROHIBITED AREA — U.S. NAVY EXERCISE IN PROGRESS. STAY RIGHT OF THE BUOYS.

  To the south, an identical sign ordered northbound shipping also to keep right of the area. A line of flashing buoys now provided guidance, forcing any vessel to give the Grabber an extremely wide berth. The proximity of the Navy’s Surface Warfare Center on nearby Indian Head fortuitously gave the operation complete credence.

  This was plainly a legitimate naval operation. It was very public; at least it was to passing captains and seamen. It most certainly did not give the appearance of a clandestine mission, designed to carry out one of the biggest, most diabolically deceptive tasks ever undertaken by the United States military.

  In peacetime it was almost unprecedented. Politicians were shy of indulging in such adventures because most people still did not recognize the War on Terror as a true war. Still, it had taken the Flat Earth Society more than a century to disband.

  Right now, it was hell on earth out on the freezing decks of the Grabber, colder than it was sixty feet below on the riverbed. The blue-twisted steel cables had to be hooked onto the lifting cranes and then lowered away over the side, down to the divers, who were anxiously awaiting the engineers’ clearance to begin running them through the cabin. Everything was heavy, everything was freezing. Commander Wallace changed shifts all the time, allowing no one to work out there for longer than one hour at a stretch.

  By the time dawn broke over the Potomac, there were eight scarlet marker buoys in place, bobbing brightly on the surface, identifying accurately the positions of various hunks of wreckage. The SEAL leading petty officer, Ray Flamini, had personally found the tailplane, lying forlornly on its side half-buried, snapped off on impact, around a hundred yards short of the main hull, directly under Grabber’s bow.

  And all through the morning, the underwater men worked at securing the cables, in order to avoid breakage and facilitate a neat, clean lift from the riverbed. In the opinion of Chief Coulson, the critical moment would come when the aft section of the fuselage was lifted and, hopefully, snapped off from the for’ard part.

  If the metallic outer skin did not break, they would probably have to blow it apart with explosive, and that was never easy underwater. It was easily achievable but inclined to make one hell of a mess. However, Grabber’s cranes would not lift the whole fuselage, and time was not on their side.

  By 1530, they were ready for the lift. But there was traffic on the river, and Commander Wallace was not about to begin lifting what he called “darned great hunks of civilian jetliner” out of the river, in broad daylight, in full view of anyone who might be looking.

  Their journey from the shipyard had been conducted in the utmost secrecy, with nothing to announce they were Navy ships. And once on station, even with periodic visits from the patrol vessels out of Indian Head, they appeared just like a regular Navy exercise from the Surface Warfare Center. Strictly routine.

  Every twenty minutes, two divers returned to the riverbed to check that all was well, and the rest of the salvage crew just hung around, glad to be warm, hoping to hell the fuselage of Flight 62 would not fall off the goddamned crane or some other unforeseen bullshit.

  Winter darkness descended over the river before 1700. The flashing lights of the buoys went active; the big deck lights, fore and aft, illuminated the lifting tackle. Chief Coulson and LPO Flamini were over the side in company with six other divers, tending the huge cables. Signals were given, the controllers snapped out commands, and at 1724 Grabber’s foredeck crane began to lift.

  Swimming slowly through the water, thirty yards off the starboard beam of the aircraft wreckage, Chief Coulson watched the cable take the strain. Slowly the rear section lifted out of the silt, dragging with it the still-attached front section.

  For a split second, the chief thought the whole fuselage was going up together. But then there was a crunching thud, like a POP! played in slow motion. And the
for’ard cabin vibrated, then snapped off, dropping back into its hole and sending a massive cloud of silt and sand billowing into the calm water. It would take two hours to clear. But, fortunately, the second set of cables was already attached.

  Chief Coulson moved slowly upward, through the water, with the smashed hull in front of him. He could see a barge being moved into position for the crane to deposit its load onto the deck. By the time the chief had surfaced and once more climbed aboard Grabber, the aircraft hull was on board, with a team of twenty seamen swarming all over it, covering the huge cargo with tarpaulin and lashing it down in preparation for the journey back to Norfolk.

  During the next three hours, many of the other remnants were brought up and loaded, until all the pieces of Flight 62, save for the tailplane and the front section of the cabin, were on board and covered. At 2300, the barge pulled out between the buoys and turned south for Norfolk.

  To both port and starboard were escort patrol boats from Indian Head. Leading the way was a Navy frigate, which had materialized from nowhere. Just like the Big Man had specified. No chances. Take no chances whatsoever. The Navy escorts would stay close to the barge for the first hundred miles until dawn, and would then peel away, permitting the big unmarked vessel to continue her journey alone in broad daylight. The barge, however, with her highly classified load, would never be out of sight of the escorts.

  On board Grabber, the teams took a break for an hour; shortly after midnight, the divers returned to the riverbed and hooked up the cables on the final, smaller section of the main fuselage, the part that contained the cockpit and first-class kitchen.