Night Fall (13 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

Home.I live in a two-salary high-rise on East 72
^nd
Street, between Second and Third Avenues. My apartment is on the 34
^th
floor, and from my balcony where I was now standing, Scotch whiskey in hand at two in the morning, I looked south down the length of Manhattan Island.

Between the skyscrapers of Midtown, I could see the Bowery and a piece of the Lower East Side, where I grew up on Henry Street, near the housing projects.

Beyond Chinatown, I could make out the courthouses and jails and One Police Plaza, where I once worked, and Federal Plaza, where I now worked.

In fact, most of my history was spread out down there-John Corey as a kid playing on the mean streets of the Lower East Side, John Corey as a rookie cop on the Bowery, John Corey the homicide detective, and last, John Corey contract agent for the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force.

And now, John Corey, a year into his second marriage, living in the apartment of his first wife, Robin, who was living with her boss, a total schmuck, making too much money defending financially successful scum.

At the lower tip of Manhattan, the skyscrapers of Wall Street rose like stalagmites in a cave pool. And to the right, soaring a quarter mile into the sky, were the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

On February 26, 1993, at around noon, Mideast terrorists, with explosives packed in a Ryder rental van, drove into the underground garage of the North Tower, parked the van, and left. At 12:18P.M., the van exploded, killing six people and injuring another thousand. Had the tower actually collapsed, the dead would have numbered in the thousands. This was the first attack by foreign terrorists ever perpetrated on American soil. It was also a wake-up call, but no one was listening.

I went into the living room of my apartment.

The decor of this place is sort of Palm Beach hotel lobby, with too many pinks and greens and seashell motifs and scratchy rugs.

Kate says it’s all going, first chance she gets. What’s not going is the only thing I bought-my brown leather La-Z-Boy recliner. It’s a beautiful thing.

I poured another Scotch, and hit the Play button of my VCR.

I sat in my La-Z-Boy and stared at the TV screen.

A collage of images with inappropriate music filled the screen. This was a one-hour videotape made by a conspiracy theory group, according to Kate, which pushed the theory of a missile attack. It included, Kate said, the CIA animation.

In a film clip of a network news interview, a former head of the National Transportation Safety Board said that it was unprecedented for the FBI to conduct the investigation. Congress, he said, had given a clear mandate to the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate airline accidents.

The key word, which seemed to be missed by the dim-witted television news interviewer, was “accident.” Obviously, some people in the government thought it was a crime, which was precisely why the FBI and not the NTSB had taken over the investigation and the reconstruction of the aircraft.

Next, an expert of some sort said that the empty center fuel tank couldn’t have caused such a large explosion because it contained only a “thimbleful of fuel.”

But Mr. Siben had told me that there could be fifty gallons of fuel left that wasn’t sucked up by the scavenge pump. In any case, it was the volatile fumes, not the fuel itself, which had apparently caused the initial explosion.

So, right in the first few minutes of the tape, we had some mistakes, or perhaps skewed facts.

I paid closer attention as a number of people who were not well identified spoke darkly of the disappearance of aircraft parts from the Calverton hangar, missing seats that had been recovered from the ocean depths and never seen again, and structural aluminum pounded into place during the reconstruction, thereby altering the signature of the explosion.

There was talk of the El Al 747 right behind the TWA 747, and of lab reports about explosive warhead residue and rocket propellant residue, and of “mis-guided” naval missiles. Someone spoke about a vaguely worded threatening letter received from a Mideast terrorist group hours before the TWA flight went down, and there was a lot of speculation about other altered and/or ignored evidence.

The so-called documentary was making several points, but not all the points connected to make a straight line. There was just a lot of stuff being thrown out to see what stuck. Or, to be more open-minded, this presentation gave equal weight to all theories, except the official conclusion of mechanical malfunction.

The tape went into some detail about the war games that had been conducted on the night of July 17, 1996, in the area off the coast of Long Island, designated W-105. I thought that the makers of this tape would then conclude that it was an American “mis-guided” missile that had brought down TWA 800. But an ex-Navy guy, very much like Captain Spruck, said, “There’s no way that an accident of that magnitude could be covered up by hundreds, thousands, of military people,” and I was left wondering why these war games played so important a part in the conspiracy theories. I guess government cover-ups are always more interesting than government stupidity.

The tape did make a provocative point, however, which was that radar sources had identified all the ships in the area of the crash, and that subsequent investigations had found and cleared all those ships-except one. A high-speed boat had immediately left the area after the explosion, and no one-not the Navy, not the FBI, not the Coast Guard, and not the CIA-had ever identified or found that missing boat. If that were true, then, ostensibly, this was the boat from which the missile-if there had been a missile-had been fired.

The tape was now showing three color photographs, all taken by people who were photographing other people that night, but who had inadvertently captured in the background what appeared to be a short streak of light in the night sky. The narrator speculated that this could be the afterburn of a rising rocket or missile.

The problem with still photography as evidence, especially when it was taken by accident, is that it proved nothing.

Moving pictures, however-videotape and film-were another matter, and I thought again of the couple on the beach.

The most compelling part of this presentation was original footage of six eyewitnesses.

Some of these eyewitnesses were interviewed where they said they had been standing when they saw the streak of light rising into the sky, so they were able to point and make little flying motions with their hands. All of them seemed credible and insistent about what they saw. A few of them became upset, and one woman broke down and cried.

They all described pretty much the same thing with some slight variations: They happened to be looking out to sea when they saw a streak of fiery light rise off the ocean, climb into the air, gather speed, then culminate in a small explosion, followed by a huge fireball, followed by the fireball plunging into the sea.

And now came the CIA animation. I put down my Scotch and looked closely at the animated depiction, narrated by a guy whose tone of voice was as annoying as the pedantic script.

First was a representation of the interior of the empty center fuel tank, showing some fuel residue in between the baffles on the bottom of the tank. Then the narrator mentioned volatile fuel vapors, then a spark was seen coming from some source inside the tank. Then the explosion.

The fuel-air explosion ripped through the left side of the center tank and ignited the fuel in the left wing tank, causing a big explosion, shown as a cartoonish depiction of a big bang.

The narrator explained that the concussive forces of the explosion had caused the nose section of the aircraft to “unzipper” and fall off.

But then, under the category of not leaving well enough alone, the narrator and the animation attempted to explain what the eyewitnesses actually saw, though the narrator didn’t mention that there were over two hundred of those witnesses.

If I could follow this animation and narrative correctly, the CIA was saying that the two hundred eyewitnesses did not notice the aircraft at the moment of the explosion; what drew their attention to the aircraft was the
sound
of the explosions, which reached them thirty or forty seconds later. Then, when they looked up, they saw two things: the fiery aircraft rising before it plunged into the sea, and/or the burning fuel streams, which may have been mirrored in the calm water. In other words, everyone who saw this event got it backwards in their minds.

A few witnesses came back on the screen, and the first guy said, “How can a climbing aircraft going from fourteen to seventeen thousand feet look like a high-speed missile rising from the water?”

A former Air National Guard guy said, “The streak I saw took three, four, five seconds to rise fourteen thousand feet. It was going at supersonic speed.”

A guy, who I recognized from the FIRO TV news conference three nights before, was interviewed in front of his house on Long Island where he was standing when he saw the incident. He said, “That animation was nothing like what I saw. Not even close.”

A woman interviewed from a bridge where she had been standing that night said, “I did see burning fuel falling, but that was after I saw a streak of light going
up.”

I thought of Captain Spruck’s words again:
This way is up. Right?

I stopped the tape, sat back in my recliner, and thought.

The CIA animation raised more questions than it answered, it flew in the face of logic, and it contradicted by cartoon what people swore they saw. Sometimes the least said and the least shown, the better. I might have bought the mechanical failure conclusion-eyewitnesses notwithstanding-if it weren’t for this gratuitous CIA creation.

I hit the Play button, and the tape continued.

Kate came into the living room, wearing a little teddy. “Come to bed, John.”

“I’m not tired.”

She pulled up a footstool, sat beside me, and took my hand. We watched the last few minutes of the tape together.

The conclusion of the pseudo-documentary was not entirely clear, ending with questions and leaving open the possibility of a sequel.

I shut off the VCR, and we sat in the dark, silent room, high above the streets of New York.

Kate asked me, “What do you think?”

“I think this tape is about forty percent inaccurate and forty percent manipulative. Like an Oliver Stone movie.”

She asked, “And the rest of it?”

“Just enough truth to make you wonder.” I asked, “What’s with the missing high-speed boat?”

She replied, “That’s real. A few unimpeachable radar sightings describe a boat moving at high speed-thirty knots-away from the crash site right after the explosion.” She added, “Most private boats in the area went
toward
the crash to see if they could help. The military boats remained on station until ordered to move toward the crash site. The Coast Guard and FBI put out a public call for all boat skippers who were in the area that night to come forward and report their positions and describe what they’d seen. Everyone did, except this one boat, which became known as the Thirty-Knot Boat.”

I said, “So that’s the boat from which the missile was supposed to be fired.”

“That’s the theory.”

I remarked, “Maybe the people on this boat were up to what the couple on the beach was up to and that’s why that boat hightailed it out of there. I’m sure there were a lot of men and women out there on that summer night who weren’t supposed to be there together.”

“So what you’re saying is that the only heat-seeking missile on this missing boat was between some guy’s legs.”

“Sounds like something I’d say.”

She smiled and said, “Actually, you’re not the first person to come up with that thought. What did you think of the CIA animation?”

“There seems to be a disconnect here.”

She nodded, then informed me, “You know, not all the eyewitnesses described the same thing. Some saw
two
streaks of light. Many saw the streak of light ascend higher than the aircraft, then come down in an arc before it hit the aircraft from overhead. Others say the streak rose directly up from the water and hit the underside of the aircraft. Most people describe two explosions-the initial smaller explosion, followed by the huge fireball. But some people describe three explosions. Some people say they saw the nose section fall off, but most didn’t. Some people say the aircraft seemed to stop in midair after the first explosion, some don’t. Some saw the burning aircraft rise after the explosion, which radar sightings confirm, but most people describe a straight plunge into the ocean while others describe a wing-over-wing descent. In other words, not all of the eyewitnesses agree on all of the details.”

I replied, “That’s why I don’t understand how the CIA could make a speculative animation based on so much conflicting testimony. You’d need at least a dozen different animations to account for all the different testimonies.”

Kate replied, “I think the CIA started with one premise-the official conclusion, which didn’t include a missile. Then they depicted that conclusion the way some aviation experts say it should or could have happened. The eyewitness descriptions were irrelevant to the CIA. They simply said, ‘
This
is what you saw.’”

“Right. Somebody in this tape said that the eyewitnesses were never called to testify at any of the official and public hearings. Is that true?”

“It is. I’ll tell you something else. The FBI did not do many follow-up interviews with the witnesses. Dozens of witnesses kept calling us asking to be interviewed again. A lot of eyewitnesses got frustrated and went public, but found that the news media weren’t interested after the government began saying it was a mechanical failure.” She added, “I’ve never, in all my years of law enforcement, seen so many credible witnesses given so little credence.”

I thought about this and reminded her, “The more witnesses you have, the more variations you have. Eventually, they cancel each other out. I’d rather have one, maybe two good eyewitnesses than two hundred.”

“I gave you one.”

“Right. But people see what they’re mentally conditioned to see. I’ll tell you what was happening in the summer of 1996. Three weeks before TWA 800, the U.S. military residence in Saudi Arabia, the Khobar Towers, had been bombed. The FBI was on high alert for the summer Olympics in Atlanta, and the news was full of potential attacks from Iran, and from a dozen different terrorist groups. So, when TWA 800 went down, what was the first thing you thought of? Probably the first thing I thought of-terrorist attack-and we didn’t even know each other.”

She replied, “What we thought is what over two hundred people say they actually saw. This was not a mass hallucination.”

“Right. But it could have been an optical illusion.”

“John, I interviewed a dozen eyewitnesses, and my colleagues interviewed another two hundred. The same optical illusion can’t be seen by that many people.”

I yawned and said, “Thank you for an interesting day. It’s late and I’m tired.”

She stood and ran her fingers through my hair. She said, “Keep me up a while longer.”

I found a sudden burst of energy and I launched myself out of the La-Z-Boy recliner, straight into the bedroom.

We got into bed and made love with a lot of frenzy, the way people do who are overwrought and trying to release the energy from a tough and frustrating day. This, at least, was something we had some control over, something we could make have a happy ending.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In the morning-I in my ratty bathrobe, and Kate still in her sexy teddy-sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the papers. Bright sunlight came through the windows.

When Robin moved out, I canceled the
Times
and subscribed to the
Post
, which is all the news I need, but since Kate moved in, the
Times
is back.

I sipped my coffee and read a story in the
Times
about the memorial service we’d attended yesterday. The article began, “Five years after Trans World Airlines Flight 800 fell from the sky in fiery bits that landed in the ocean near here, the relatives of some of the 230 people who died in the crash made their annual pilgrimage to the East End of Long Island for prayer and remembrance.

“They came to be close to the last place where their friends and loved ones were alive. They came to hear the green waves heaving on the sand. They came to see the red and white Coast Guard house down the road in East Moriches where victims’ bodies were brought ashore.”

I continued to read the tortured purple prose: “The atmosphere of the first memorial here, days after the shocking crash and amid confusion over whether it had been caused by a malfunction or by a bomb, was one of numbing silence… Many could only wade into the water to drop a flower, no more.”

Further down the article, I read, “They even have to deal with kooks, said Frank Lombardi, who assists the families. In recent days, he said, the families have been called by a man who said that he knows the identity of the terrorist who shot the plane down. ‘And if they give him $300,000, in cash, that he would tell them who it was,’ Mr. Lombardi said. ‘Is that sick or what? It is unbelievable that somebody would play on people’s emotions like that.’ (The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that an explosion in a fuel tank, possibly triggered by a short circuit, caused the crash.)”

I finished the article and gave the paper to Kate, who read it silently. She looked up and said, “Sometimes I think I’m one of the better-intentioned kooks.”

I asked her, “By the way, what was the name of the hotel where that couple may have stayed?”

She replied, “Everything you saw and heard yesterday was either public record, or, in the case of Captain Spruck’s testimony, available under the Freedom of Information Act. The name of that hotel does not officially exist.”

“But if it did, what would it be called?”

She replied, “It would be called the Bayview Hotel in Westhampton Beach.”

“And what did you discover at this hotel?”

“As I said, I never actually got to the hotel. This wasn’t my case.”

“Then how did you learn the name of the hotel?”

“I took it on myself to call local hotels and motels to inquire about a missing blanket. A lot of the people who I called said the FBI had already been there, showing them a blanket. One guy at the Bayview Hotel said he told the FBI that he was missing a blanket, and that the one they showed him could possibly be that blanket, but he couldn’t be sure.”

I nodded and asked, “And that’s the extent of the lead?”

“This guy at the Bayview did say that the FBI had gone through his guest registration cards, credit card slips, and his computer, and had questioned his employees.” She added, “He assured me that he wouldn’t mention any of this to a single soul, as instructed. Then he asked me if we’d found the guys who fired the missile.”

“Not yet. What was this guy’s name?”

“Leslie Rosenthal. Manager of the Bayview Hotel.”

“Why didn’t you follow up?”

“Well, when you get a bite, sometimes it bites back. Mr. Rosenthal, or maybe some other hotel person that I phoned, called their FBI contacts, or maybe the FBI was doing a follow-up or something, but whatever happened, the next day I get called into an office I’ve never been to on the twenty-eighth floor of 26 Fed. Two guys from the OPR who I’d never seen before or since told me I’d overstepped the scope of my duties on this case.”