The First Casualty (2 page)

4

Hill 3234

Khost Province, Afghanistan

February 23, 1988

Charlie Sherman had been with the mujahideen too long. He was beginning to hallucinate. Maybe it was the food.
Qabili palau
, a sort of rice pilaf with caramelized vegetables, at every meal was enough to get to men far saner than Charlie. It had been so long since he had tasted meat, he had begun to fantasize about the scrawny goats that bleated in every village. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe he had been insane to begin with, volunteering to liaison between the CIA and the natives resisting Russian invasion.

Whatever. He knew the facts: A month ago, a Russian force had been defeated trying to open up the road winding through the valley below. There were still a number of what he guessed were Russian bodies. Natural decomposition despite the near frigid weather made it hard to tell. Decomposition, plus the quaint local custom of stripping the dead of anything useful, including uniforms.

But that wasn't what had Charlie questioning his own sanity.

Charlie's Afghan guide and translator, Aarif, whose name meant “understanding,” wasn't understandable at all. He had kept pointing to the rusting hulk of a T-72. Like most Russian tanks he saw these days, it had a couple of large holes in it, the result of multiple RPG hits. This one, though, didn't mount the usual turret gun. Instead, it had a blunt-nozzle sort of apparatus. Charlie had heard the Ruskies were experimenting with various gases, but there wasn't enough left of the seared interior to tell what sort of weapons it had carried.

Strange but not weird.

Then Aarif had led him into a cave cut into the rock of the hillside. The walls were easily one or two meters thick, far too thick to be penetrated by the 85-millimeter shells fired by Russian tanks. Charlie switched on his flashlight. The cave was full of dead people, mujahideen fighters. Not only did they look as though they had simply gone to sleep—no decomposition, no stench of rotting flesh—the bodies were barely over a meter in length. Unless the Afghans had enlisted a brigade of midgets, there was something really strange there.

Aarif's English left a lot to be desired, but if Charlie had understood him correctly, he said the tank had fired something that had come through the walls of the cave. But there was no damage Charlie could see.

“Gas,” he said, “the tank fired gas into the entrance?”

The Afghan shook his head adamantly, no. “Came through!”

Weapons that break through solid rock leaving no hole, fighters the size of small children that don't deteriorate . . .

Yep, Charlie had been in Afghanistan too long. On the upside, once he reported all this, he wouldn't be there much longer.

5

Air France Flight 447

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil–Paris, France

29º N, 30.6º W

June 1, 2009

The giant Airbus A330's 216 passengers remained strapped tightly into their seats. The storms indigenous to this area had tossed the plane about as though it were a child's ball. Last night's native Brazilian dinner, perhaps too rich, had caused Captain Marc Duboise to temporarily turn the ship over to the first and second officers while he made a brief visit to the first-class head. On long international flights, it was not uncommon to share the duties even though the captain had far more hours of experience than the two younger men combined.

Within minutes, the plane would reach TASIL, a point existing only on aeronautical charts and defined by the aircraft's global-­positioning system as 780 statute miles west of Dakar, Senegal. Its only real significance was that it marked the end of the “dead zone,” the point at which there was no VHF radio communication. Though no one voiced the thought, the sound of another human voice would make the turbulence more bearable.

“Me
rde!”
the first officer swore as a particularly violent down draft buffeted the plane, pushing the nose down. He was thrown painfully against his seat harness. The aircraft was bucking like one of those wild horses he had seen in films of American rodeos. Broncos, yes, that was what they were called, broncos. He kept his line of vision on the instrument panel below the windscreen, taking no chance of being temporarily blinded by the lightning outside, flashing with the frequency of a celestial disco. He could only hope the repeated strikes had not damaged the electronics.

The second officer pointed to the altimeter and shouted to be heard above the crash of thunder. “You're off your assigned altitude of thirty-five thousand feet.” He put a finger on the weather radar, indicating a narrow streak of green between red and yellow blobs. “Try flying zero-seven-zero. That might get us around the worst of it.”

For an instant, the first officer contemplated switching off the autopilot. Its immediate reactions to extreme turbulence could, possibly, damage the air frame. He discarded the idea. Even with hydraulically assisted controls, he would be unable to make all the corrections required by this line of storms. Instead, he thumbed the electric trim tab on the control yoke, elevating the aircraft's nose.

“That should help,” he shouted above the clatter of hail against the plane's hull, the sound of a coven of demons demanding admittance.

Neither man noticed the air speed indicator remained steady, an inconsistent reading since airspeed should have decreased in direct proportion to the elevated angle of the aircraft's nose—one reason planes land in a nose-up configuration.

“The altimeter!” the second officer exclaimed. “It is not moving. Neither is the vertical speed indicator!”

That was the least of the immediate problems. The yoke in the first officer's hands was not only twisting with the aircraft's gyrations, but now it was pulsating, a phenomenon neither first nor second officer had ever experienced.

“What the . . .”

There was a tearing sound, the cry of distressed metal, followed by a crash from the left side of the plane. The second officer looked up as a bolt of lightning illuminated the left wing. The number-one engine was gone, a gaping hole in its place.

“Mon Dieu!”

The stricken aircraft rolled violently to its left, shuddering in its death throws just as the strange expansions and contractions increased in violence. Over the terrified shrieks of passengers and the bedlam of the storm, there was the sound of ripping metal. From its location, the first officer guessed the vertical stabilizer had torn free.

6

Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyse (BEA)

Aéroport du Bourget

7 Kilometers North of Paris, France

May 6, 2011

It was, perhaps, fitting that the French BEA, the agency charged with examining and investigating crashes of French-operated aircraft, should be located on the site of the first successful solo transatlantic flight, a feat easily eclipsing an earlier duo flight by a pair of World War I pilots. It was there on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh's
Spirit of St. Louis
touched down 3,500 miles and 33½ hours from Roosevelt Field, Long Island. It was an exploit of individual courage not to be equaled until man walked on the moon.

Almost 100 years later, the field's 8,000-foot runway, multiple terminals, and status as Europe's busiest general aviation airport in no way resembled the open pasture that greeted the young American. Among the buildings clustered around the aviation center was a three-quarter acre, two-story structure that housed France's equivalent of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

Inside, two men stared at a computer monitor in a combination of disbelief and incomprehension. The orange boxes recovered from the ocean floor more than 3,000 meters below the surface must have been affected by the great pressure of such depths. But the flight and voice recorders had been specifically designed to exist in such a hostile environment indefinitely, long after the batteries no longer sent out signals as to their location.

“Impossible!”
Patrick Guyot, PhD in physics, exclaimed with the buzz of lips peculiar to the French pronunciation of the word. He was scrolling down the computer screen for the third time.

Charles Patin, aeronautical engineer, stepped over to a counter where a beaker sat on a single-ring burner, noted it was empty of the coffee usually brewed in it, and said, “Unusual, I agree. But impossible? We have checked and rechecked the readings, and they are consistent: The pressure driven instruments failed, the pressure altimeter, the static pressure vertical speed indicator. And the airspeed indicator, which would indicate the pitot tube, the . . .”

“And what is the likelihood of redundant instruments failing simultaneously? Even so, instrument failure was not the cause of this crash.” Guyot looked around and lowered his voice before continuing though he and Patin were the only two in the room. “The aircraft literally disintegrated in the air. I mean, parts of the tail assembly were found nearly twenty kilometers from the fuselage's pieces. The wings weren't even found in the search area at all. What are the odds of a storm causing that?”

Patin was looking for the small bag of ground coffee kept in a drawer. “Worse than you would get in the casino at Monte Carlo, I agree. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. There is no known limit to the severity of weather in those latitudes.”

Guyot held up a multipage document. “And this series of tests: There is no explanation as to how parts of the aircraft's aluminum seem to have simply melted. There is also evidence of high heat on surfaces.”

“Odd, I agree. I wonder if somehow lightning . . .”

Guyot shook his head. “To burn like that, lightning would need to be grounded. There is no ground between an airplane at thirty thousand plus feet and the earth.”

Patin eased into a wooden chair that was every bit as uncomfortable as it looked. “If not lightning, what?”

Guyot pulled over the mate to his companion's chair and plopped down into it so close that the two men's knees were nearly touching. He fished a blue box of cigarettes from a shirt pocket, Gitanes, with a picture of a wisp of smoke forming a dancer. “Surely, you don't think what I'm thinking.”

He offered the box.

Patin shook his head. He was almost a year past his last cigarette. He gave a wan smile. “Unless I can read your mind . . .” He studied the other man's face. “No! You cannot be serious!” He ground a finger into his temple, the French gesture to show one was mentally unbalanced. “This is crazy! Without absolute proof, I would not sign any report that even hints at . . .”

Guyot leaned forward so that his face was closer to Patin's, his cigarette temporarily forgotten. “We are obligated to report what we find, not what we think. Our report will simply relate that certain instruments aboard the flight failed at or about the same time. Panic would be the likely result of publicly stating the aircraft literally shattered in flight. We will pass that information along in confidence. There is also the strange matter of the few bodies recovered, the ones no one wants to admit exist. Desiccated and shrunken like prunes. How does one explain that? The politicians are the ones paid to decide what to do with it. Then, I intend to report what we suspect to the appropriate persons, say the DGSE, informally. If we are right, national, if not international, security is at stake.”

7

Oval Office

The White House

Washington, DC

January of the Present Year

1:25 p.m. EST

The president of the United States shifted the unlit cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, a good sign he was still indecisive on the issue. The damned doctors had sufficiently frightened him away from lighting up the things after a brief encounter with lip cancer ending in an operation his staff had somehow kept secret from the media. Denied his favorite vice, he was reduced to simply chewing them into stubs.

Oblivious to the seriousness of the occasion, his six-year-old twins, Ches and Wes, were noisily testing their balancing skills with a Wobble Deck in front of the Resolute desk. Ordinarily, the two would have been with their mother in the upstairs private apartments, but the First Lady was hosting a luncheon for some female poet whose verse was angry, rhymeless, and unintelligible. It was an argument even the president dared not renew: If a person couldn't sell their (choose one) poetry, play, sculpture, or painting on the open market, why should the taxpayers pick up the slack for the poet, artist, or playwright whose talents would be better utilized in, say, a car wash? The First Lady, however, felt strongly about public support for the arts.

She felt equally strongly about the “self-expression” of her sons, whose unfettered exuberance with crayons, fingerpaint, and watercolor had necessitated serious restoration of the decor of both the Blue Room and the Lincoln Bedroom. Had the Secret Service not intercepted an anonymous gift of a twenty-five-piece Black & Decker Junior Tool Kit, it was quite possible the damage done to the building in 1814 by the British General Ross would have seemed minor in comparison. The Service volunteered to provide a babysitter, but the president was unwilling to subject some unfortunate agent to the twins' unpredictable behavior, conduct that had earned them the service's code names Rape and Pillage.

“One of these days, someone in the Press Corps is going to catch you with one of those things in your face,” warned the only other occupant in the room.

The president shifted the cigar again. Aware that today's smokers had replaced yesterday's lepers as pariahs, he had been careful to restrain his limited use when anywhere near a camera.

He replied to Hodges, his chief of staff, principal adviser, former campaign manager, and general dog robber. “So what? We've got two years before I'm up for reelection, and the average voter wouldn't remember if I had dropped trou and mooned the TV cameras yesterday.”

There was no point in debating the electorate's notoriously brief memory span. Hodges cleared his throat and raised his voice to be heard over the twins. “Back to the problem: The Froggie's DGSE says, confidentially, that the Air France crash was no accident. The CIA and MI6 don't dispute it.”

The president put elbows on the desk, leaning forward. “They don't concur, either. I mean, let's face it: Death rays and the like play out great in sci-fi, but this is real life. If I cancel out because of some Darth Vader–type threats . . . That, the voters
will
recall. If not, my next opponent will remind them.”

Hodges shrugged, he was a man who knew when he was beaten. “It's your ass, Mr. President. At least reconsider in a couple of days.”

The president sat back in his chair. “Agreed. Think where we go if we even think of canceling a state visit because some camel-fucking sum'bitches make threats.”

“Not just any camel-fucking sum'bitches. We're talking Al Qaeda here.”

“Al Qaeda or the Boy Fucking Scouts of America, I'm going to look like a coward if I don't go.”