Skyhook

NINETEEN THURSDAY, DAY 4 ELMENDORF AFB, ALASKA 8:40 A.M.

“There. What’s that?” General MacAdams orbited the shadowy radar return on the screen with the red dot from his tiny laser pen.

“Not sure, sir,” a sergeant replied. “This is from one of our air-defense sites.”

“Looks like a fast-moving target to me,” Mac added.

Sergeant Jacobs, an AWACS air-traffic control specialist normally charged with keeping fighters and tankers headed in the right direction, approached the screen, scratching his chin before turning back to the man operating the liquid crystal projector.

“Run it again, Jim.”

Once more the picture came to life, and once again the shadowy target appeared, disappeared, and reappeared on subsequent sweeps of the radar beam.

Jacobs turned to the general. “Well, sir, of seven tapes, that’s the only hint I see of an unidentified fast-mover where your guy descended below two thousand feet. All the tapes show the skin paint return of the jet until… here.” He used his own laser pointer to highlight a spot considerably west and on the left margin of the screen. “But this is the only tape I’ve seen that was getting hits on him while he was within a hundred feet of the water.”

“And we’re all in agreement that there’s no other conflicting traffic visible?”

Everyone in the room nodded except for Lieutenant Colonel Anderson. “Ah, General, there’s still the Coast Guard tape we haven’t seen.”

“Sir,” the sergeant interjected. “There is one other target on this tape that’s of interest. It’s intermittent and running north, where your jet is running east. We had him intermittently on the AWACS tapes, too. While our Gulfstream is coming in from the left side of the scope, this fellow’s coming in from the bottom… the south. He first appears down here, and the radar is picking up his transponder squawking twelve hundred, the visual flight code, and his altitude is coming through as two hundred feet. Now that’s, as I say, at the bottom of the screen — remember the top is oriented to north — and at this point it’s about twenty miles south of the estimated position of the Albatross crash site. I’m assuming this is the Albatross, right here where you see this smudge. That’s the faint radar return, and it’s northbound.”

“Could that be that ship we talked about?” Mac asked, then winced and corrected himself. “Of course not. Sorry. Dumb question. The tanker was southbound.”

“Yes, sir, and this northbound VFR hit is probably going at least a hundred knots, so it sure as heck isn’t a ship.”

“But, the two don’t intersect, do they?” Mac asked with some alarm. “The track of our Gulfstream coming in from the left crosses or will eventually cross the northbound track of the target you believe is the Albatross, but will they be there at the same time?” Mac was sitting forward now, his concern rising until the sergeant shook his head.

“No, sir. I projected their respective tracks, and with the time-line information we have on the Gulfstream from the flight data recorder, they come close, but miss by several miles.”

“Good.”

“Provided, sir, that the Albatross doesn’t change his heading.”

“But, you’d see a change, right?”

Jacobs was shaking his head no. “Well, he probably didn’t change course, but we only have a good track on him until about ten miles south of the estimated crash site, and then he apparently dropped too low, or something happened to his transponder, because we have no hits on him after that. That means we can only project his subsequent flight path, but when I do, it misses your Gulfstream by miles.”

“Do we have that Coast Guard radar tape?” Mac asked.

“Yes, sir. Racking it up now,” the sergeant answered.

Once again a series of computer-generated images filled the screen, this time of surface vessels in the form of large targets crawling along sea lanes into and out of Prince William Sound. Jacobs consulted a briefing sheet sent with the tape and studied the screen for a few seconds before highlighting an area south of Valdez.

“Again, this is approximately the crash site, sir, based on rescue data cross-referenced to emergency locator data, corrected for… I guess they call it the prevailing currents. It pretty well matches the projection of the Albatross’s flight path from the previous tape.”

“How close can we come to a time for the crash of that Albatross?” Mac asked.

Jacobs was shaking his head. “Unknown, sir, from the data I’ve got.”

Mac was on his feet, stretching as he pointed to the screen. “Sergeant, run that through on fast forward and see if you see anything we need to see. We’ll be pacing around the hallway.”

Mac and Anderson had barely reached the Coke machine down the corridor when the sergeant stuck his head out the door.

“General? You gentlemen need to see this.” They followed him back inside.

“Remember, this is a surface radar,” the sergeant said. “It’s not like our aviation radars that really can’t effectively track someone below a thousand feet.”

“Understood,” Mac said, more impatiently than he’d intended.

“Okay,” the sergeant said. “Watch this target appear from the south margins of the coverage area. See it moving north?”

Mac nodded.

“How fast?” Anderson asked.

“I estimate around a hundred twenty to a hundred forty. The Coast Guard system doesn’t put data blocks on air traffic. Here’s that huge tanker over to the northwest of the target, about eight miles at this point. And you can see several other sizable vessels down here in the same vicinity the Albatross is approaching.”

“Okay. So you believe that’s the… whoa!” Mac said as a new target rushed in from the left side of the screen at twice the speed, its radar return a crisp white blotch closing on the northbound track of what had to be the Albatross. “Slow that down,” Mac commanded.

The tape was slowed to quarter-speed, the respective radar tracks showing the Albatross and the Gulfstream closing on each other every four seconds with each sweep of the radar beam.

“Our guy is running without lights, of course,” Anderson muttered, and Mac nodded. “We weren’t supposed to be just fifty feet over the water, or out of our own control area.”

“There’s the oil tanker,” Jacobs added, using his laser pointer. “If you extend the Gulfstream’s track dead on another five miles, it intersects the tanker.”

“What’s that?” Mac asked, flashing his own pointer on the screen at a spot north-northeast of the Albatross, but barely a hair’s breadth south of the approaching Gulfstream’s west-to-east track.

“That’s another ship, I think,” Jacobs replied. “The Albatross will pass to the west of it. Looks like a large enough return to be a large freighter or cruise ship.”

“Good Lord,” Mac said, his eyes on the screen. “Our Gulfstream’s going to barely miss whatever it is.”

Jacobs was nodding. “Sir, look at this. Remember we couldn’t track the Albatross on the other tape inside ten miles? Look at him here at eight miles out on the Coast Guard tape. He’s changing course. Right here. See? He’s changing course to the east by… twenty degrees. That completely alters the equation. He’s now headed squarely for that freighter, and… the point at which the Albatross’s projected flight path will cross our Gulfstream’s flight path has moved east, and… I’m trying to figure out the time, but they’re going to arrive at that intersection about the same time.”

General MacAdams, Lieutenant Colonel Anderson, and the two sergeants watched transfixed as the targets converged on each other, the Albatross’s radar return disappearing for several sweeps of the radar beam as it approached the unidentified new ship, then reappearing brightly on the north side of the ship just as the Gulfstream’s target crossed the same point.

“Here the Gulfstream seems to be in a right turn,” the sergeant said.

“He was climbing. He’d unlocked the computer and pulled up.”

“Okay, the Albatross continues on for two sweeps of the radar and then appears to slow and get more faint… finally disappearing, probably when he sinks.”

“Again, please,” Mac asked as the tape was rewound slightly and the point of convergence played once more.

After the fourth repetition Mac sat back and shook his head, his mind accelerating into the problem. “Oh, shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Dammit, Jon, you said they weren’t that close.”

“I… told you, sir, the best I had at the time. That isn’t the same position the Coast Guard plotted as the crash site.”

Sergeant Jacobs was consulting the note sent with the tape. “They apparently noticed this too, sir. They’ve got the corrected coordinates on this note. And… remember I warned you that my projections were based on no turns.”

Mac waved them down. “Don’t worry, fellows, I’m not looking to blame anyone for anything. But now we’ve got a potential problem.”

“The tapes don’t have to leave here alive, General,” Jon Anderson said.

“Not the point, Jon. The FAA’s trying to string up that pilot and this shows he could have hit not one but two objects out there.”

“Well, what was he doing that low, y’know?” Anderson asked.

“He’s flying a bloody seaplane, Jon. You have to get low to find the sea. No, the question we’ve got to grapple with is whether or not there’s any chance the Albatross hit our Gulfstream.”

They looked at the sequence again, rolling it back and forth past the same spot until Mac shook his head. “Jon, was the Gulfstream inspected for any damage?”

“I… don’t know, General. I assume they’d find any damage when they got back here and did their normal post-flight inspection, and I assume the pilots would have heard any collision. Metal to metal in an airplane isn’t subtle.”

Mac glanced at him with a smile. “Tell me about it. I survived a glancing blow from pieces of an exploding surface-to-air missile in my F-105 just south of Hanoi in 1973. The memory of that noise still scares the… scatology out of me.” He pulled himself back out of the chair as he glanced down at Anderson. “We’re going over to the hangar immediately. I want inspection stands and lights.”

Jon Anderson stood as well. “Sir, we’d better warn Joe Davis what we’re looking for.”

Mac was shaking his head. “No. No explanations.” He turned to the sergeant. “And no leaks to Uniwave, understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay. By the way, Sergeant Jacobs?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, it’s a real shame, Bill, about that accidental erasure on the Coast Guard tape,” Mac said with a set jaw, looking the man in the eye.

“Sir?”

“I say… it’s a real shame that when that particular tape was returned to the Coast Guard, it had accidentally been bulk erased. Right?”

Sergeant Jacobs’s eyes fluttered open in sudden comprehension. “Oh! Yes. Yes, sir, I’m… terribly sorry about that.”

“Just normal human error, I suppose,” Mac said, giving the man a tired smile, which was tentatively returned.

Lieutenant Colonel Anderson was already in the hallway as Mac paused in the doorway and turned back to the two men. “This isn’t dishonesty per se, gentlemen. Keep that in mind, please. This is a black project, and there are things we have to do that are for solid reasons of national security.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, and Jacobs, one other thing?”

“Sir?”

Mac motioned him over and issued a verbal order quietly in his ear, outside the hearing of the other man, before waving a quick farewell and joining Anderson, down the hall.