Each record showed the trace and the name of a metadata text file. These files showed the date and time of the seismogram, epicenter, and a comments section, among other data. Two were from this year; the other three were from 2011. Same exact spot, 35.177 degrees north latitude and 52.204 degrees west longitude. Identical traces. He checked the dates of the earlier activity and the dates of the other two recent events. Eight days to the minute between first and second, second and third.
There were three events in both cases, and eight years to the day between the series of events. The comment on the event of June 20, 2011, was that a recommendation was sent up the chain to examine the sea floor at that location, but there was no further annotation indicating if this had yielded any data. However, the metadata for the June 28, 2011, trace had the following comment: “Audio file 20110628A201 declassified upon decommissioning of submarine USS Houston, SSN-713, 26 August 2016.”
Following the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004, the National Tsunami Warning Center expanded its scope to the North Atlantic from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Since there were no recordings matching this trace prior to that, who knows how long these events may have been occurring?
Jacob guessed that if the USS Houston had detected the results of a disturbance in the ocean floor, NOAA would have already known about it. He downloaded the traces, the metadata, and the audio file.
He put in a call to the tsunami warning center, located in Palmer, Alaska. His friend Naquita Phillips answered the phone. “My, you’re up early!” Jacob said.
“Actually, I get off in about a half hour. Are you still at Pearl?”
“No, I left Hawaii about eight weeks ago, did the NOAA training, and now I’m at K103 in the Gulf.” They caught up briefly, then Jacob asked her about the seismograph readings.
“Over a hundred monitoring stations reported the disturbance, including yours. Since there was no reason to suspect a tsunami, we didn’t pursue any more details. But I can give you the triangulated location if you’re interested.”
“Yes, that’s all I really need.” She gave it to him and they said their good-byes.
Wow, he thought, another match!
After listening to the audio file, he decided he needed a second opinion.
Jacob stuck his head into the office next door. All Jacob knew about his friend’s job was that he was monitoring various activities which he never talked about, for a government agency located somewhere in Virginia. However, in the short time Jacob had been on K103, they discovered common interests of trout fishing, elk hunting, motocross, and redheads. Both had served in the military. One lived in northern Minnesota and the other in northern Wisconsin. “Hey, Jimmy!”
“Hey, Jake, what’s up? Are you out of beer already?” They both laughed; beer, along with all other alcoholic beverages, was not authorized on the platform.
“Not yet. I want you to listen to an audio and tell me what you think it is.”
They traipsed back to the Seismology Lab and Jacob cued up the audio. Jimmy put on the headphones and Jacob pressed Play. The audio lasted less than five seconds.
Jimmy knew exactly what it was. “It’s the crack-boom of ice breaking on a frozen lake. There’s no other sound like it! I remember the first time I heard it. I was ice fishing with my dad. I was scared out of my wits! I thought the ice was going to split apart right where we were. Where was this, and when?”
“That’s exactly what I thought too. The cracking of lake ice. It happened in the middle of the North Atlantic, about 35 degrees north and 52 degrees west, about two this morning. I watched the seismograph long enough to realize it wasn’t an earthquake, so I looked into it when I got up this morning.”
Jimmy was always on the lookout for more information-gathering techniques. “How did you get this audio so quickly?”
“The audio is eight years old. In fact, it is exactly eight years old, being dated June 28, 2011.” Jacob went on to tell Jimmy of his research that morning. “I’ve been here only a week, so I missed the events of the twelfth and twentieth.”
Jimmy was coming up with a theory. “How deep is the ocean at that location?” They checked the ocean charts together. “What were the coordinates they gave you?”
“Within one hundred miles of 35.177 degrees north latitude and 52.204 degrees west longitude.”
“Wow! The ocean is over five thousand meters deep there. Over three miles!”
“It’s interesting, Jimmy, that the audio was so clear. The USS Houston couldn’t go down more than two thousand feet, and I assume this audio was generated on the seafloor, well over fifteen thousand feet below the surface.”
I wonder, Jimmy thought, if the sound wasn’t the seafloor cracking like the ice. It sounded outlandish, so he kept it to himself. “Maybe that’s the difference between the travel of sound in water versus in air.”
“It seems like it’s been cracking for years. And on a regular schedule.”
In less than four hours, Jimmy would see those exact coordinates again.
4
At seat 21E, flight preparations were ongoing. He stood up, removed the sport jacket he had brought in case he got cold on the plane, and deposited it in the overhead bin. He emptied his pockets into the briefcase at his feet, and sat down in 21D. His long-sleeved white polo shirt with the terrier embroidered on the front should be sufficient for warmth. Although it was the end of June, the Chicago Airport had been cold, like he remembered it from his years of flying for an international food company.
He relaxed, rubbed the graying hair of his temples, and closed his eyes. Immediately the young woman in seat 4A came into his mind, and he remembered exactly where he had seen her. It was in last night’s dream! It was a good thing the rear jet bridge had malfunctioned, he reasoned, causing him and all the other economy passengers to enter through the front of the plane; otherwise he wouldn’t have seen her. So he would see her again, he concluded.
His thoughts returned as they did almost continually for the last two weeks to the words, “I have a job for you.” Then to the past year, and the grief threatened to swallow him up again, as it had for nine months following the first tragedy.
Rachel, his thirty-two-year-old daughter, her husband Mike, five-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter Amy, and two-year-old grandson Jack, had been on a mission trip to Costa Rica. They had gone with a group from their church to a poor area outside one of the larger cities on the Pacific side. The idea had been to live among some poorer families, help them to improve their dwellings, and share the gospel, with translators of course.
It had worked well until the Wednesday of their stay, when unusually heavy rains inland caused major flash flooding in the area where they were staying, wiping out dozens of homes and killing fifty-seven people. Three of the mission families had been among the deaths. Nine of the ten bodies were recovered, including Mike, Rachel, and their kids, but one little boy was never found. He blamed himself for not warning them of the danger, and was inconsolable for exactly four weeks, when the next tragedy struck. Then about a month after the second tragedy, Helene, his wife of forty years, died of a burst brain aneurysm.
His whole family gone, he had become listless. Purposeless. Merely going through the motions, barely managing. Trying to write haiku for therapy. Grieving. Hanging on to God for dear life, knowing that God hadn’t abandoned him. He needed to change the subject, so he pulled the airline flight magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him. He read the pictorial article about Rio de Janeiro, the mini-bio success story of the Britannia Airlines Systems Analyst, the article about food preparation for international flights, and the information for the best wine-tasting tours. Nothing seemed to help much.
5
In the cockpit, Chuck revisited the conversation about Joel’s Air Force Intelligence friend. “I flew Air Force too,” he said. “Bombers. Mostly F-18s.”
“No, that would be a cargo plane.”
“Don’t be a jerk! That joke is so old,
I’ve forgotten it twice already.” Every military pilot knows Air Force Two is the Vice President’s plane, a Boeing C-32 cargo plane.
“Sorry, I couldn’t resist!”
“Yes, well, I set myself up for that,” Chuck said. “My dad was also a bomber pilot. Vietnam in the late sixties. I flew in Afghanistan after 9/11. My dad and I have this in common, that we were both shot at by MiGs. Neither of us were hit, but he got a lot closer to it than I did. We both lived to tell about it. My brother was a pilot for the Marine Corps. Flew helicopters. He’s retired now, too.”
“I started off in fighters, then switched to recon. Never got shot at. I met JC, my friend in Chicago, early in my career, shortly after I started flying reconnaissance. I carried him and his team all over the world. They were the ones actually doing the recon, I just flew the plane.”
“That’s one nice thing about flying commercial for Air World,” Chuck said.
“What’s that?”
“Ever since I started flying for Air World, and their partners like today’s Britannia Airlines, I’ve never been shot at.”
Yet.
6
Julius Caesar Smalley had just finished breakfast when his phone alerted him to a new email. He got hundreds daily, it seemed, but the alert ringtone identified the sender as one of those in his contact list. He opened the phone and tapped the Mail icon. It was from his friend Joel Barth, but the body of the email was just gibberish. Why did Joel send him an encrypted email?
He opened his laptop, downloaded the message, and sent it through the decoder. The decoder asked for the key code. What would Joel have used as a key code? He thought back to their days flying to various parts of the world on intelligence-gathering missions. Joel had been his favorite pilot and they logged many hours together. Air Force pilots all had nicknames; Joel’s was “Dolphin” but he had never told him why.
He tried Dolphin and the decryption algorithm converted the message to more gibberish. Nope. He didn’t call Joel, Dolphin; they had grown close enough they had their own private nicknames for each other. Joel was Ace and he was Spook. He tried Ace. Nope. If Spook didn’t work then he’d have to send a plain-text reply asking for help.
Spook rewarded him with words in plain English. He chuckled at the first three, “Third try, right?”
Then he read, “Need help. In air on AW flight 94 to LHR. Eight passengers AWOL, all Russians. Double-booked, but all made earlier flight. No problem with that. Their baggage is all on board, but change not reported by system. Four arrived from MSP; four from LAX. Identical glitches? Seems strange, don’t have a good feeling about this. Let me know what you find out. Joel. PS. Use the same PW.”
Using the same password would eliminate the guesswork for Joel, who would have enough on his mind already.
He reread the message, felt the adrenaline rush, grabbed his phone and started dialing. “Please be there,” he muttered to himself.
“FAA Regional Field Office, Smith here. How may I help you?”
“Jack, JC Smalley here. Your office has a new name?”
“We have caller ID so I knew it was you. No, we’re still the External Security folks. What’s up?”
JC briefly outlined what he knew and asked for an administrative password to Air World’s data system.
“Are you freelancing, or is this official business? Can someone vouch for you? Do you have a time constraint?”
“The first officer on that flight sent me an urgent message. Joel Barth. They’re already in the air.”
“Okay, I’ll check on that. Are you still at the same email address as last time?”
“Yes.”
“We have new rules now. I can’t give you a password lasting more than two hours. If you need more time you’ll have to call me back.”
“Roger.”
Jack Smith checked a spreadsheet he had pulled up while they were talking. “It’ll be encrypted. Use the last four of your social.”
“Thanks.”
Since the flight was already in progress, Jack was able to pull up the flight data and confirm the first officer’s name. That was good enough. He called the security office at Air World Airlines.
Two minutes later, JC received the email he was hoping for. Thirty seconds after that, he had logged into Air World’s Flight Information System. He pulled up the flight data for flight AW94 and quickly confirmed the Russian passengers. It wasn’t hard; their names gave them away: Egorkin (Vaughn and Misha), Lebedev (Sasha and Anichka), Nikolevski (Nikola and Sasha), Petrov (Mikhail and Katrina). The status column for each of the names confirmed the reservations were made, then cancelled with a “PP” in the remarks column. JC right-clicked the column heading and found out that “PP” indicated that their baggage was still loaded on this flight.
“How do I get to the baggage?” He didn’t mean to say that out loud, and at that moment, Nicki appeared in the doorway with a cup of coffee for each of them.
“What, honey?” She saw the look of pure concentration on his face, and fifteen years of marriage told her his question was quite irrelevant. Both “It’s work, isn’t it?” and “How soon do you leave?” occurred to her at the same time. She asked neither.
By this time, he had found the Flight Information button, and the submenu presented him with a Baggage Info selection. He clicked it and was rewarded with another database consisting of information on about six hundred pieces of baggage. Already sorted by last name.
Odd, he thought. Normally, it would not be sorted, but would be listed in the order the data was entered. Someone’s already been in this list, he concluded.
“Oh, nothing. And thanks for the coffee.”
JC wasn’t fooling his wife. “Not nothing, Julius. I know that look!”
“My old Air Force friend Joel needs some help. You remember Joel Barth?”
“Yes, he was at your retirement.”
“He retired at the same time. Now he’s flying for Air World, and he’s in the air with suspicions of something he can’t quite put a finger on. We spent enough time together that I trust his suspicions a lot. But so far, I’m not seeing anything.”
He scrolled down the list to the first entry for Egorkin and clicked on it. The whole row lit up. Good, he thought, I’ll just copy the entries into my own spreadsheet. Holding down the control key, he clicked on the rest of the Egorkin entries, and found the other three couples and highlighted them the same way.
He right-clicked to prepare for the copying, and was astonished to see the message pop up, “Selected baggage on hold. Delete at this time? Yes/No.” He quickly clicked No and found a different way to copy.
JC Smalley, USAF Retired, with thirteen citations for his intelligence work while on active duty, was now a freelancer. A thin, wiry man with a bushy moustache on a boyish face, he had moved back to the north side of Chicago after his retirement to be near his aging parents. He mostly did research and analysis work for an old colleague who was fairly high up in a three-letter organization in the DC area. Occasionally, JC would be deputized for actual field duty where his personal risks would be rather low, but those were few and far between. However, there was enough office work for JC to keep his intelligence skills sharp.
Which is why, when he saw the popup “Selected baggage on hold. Delete at this time?”, he immediately realized why the glitch occurred with the baggage as flight AW94 was being loaded. Someone else had put the selected baggage on hold.
On a hunch, he clicked the System button at the top of the screen. Mining through the different selections, he found one allowing him to see what other computers had recently logged into this particular data sheet. It merely showed the computer’s IP address and time stamp. There was only one entry. IP address 191.6.118.145 at 8:45 that morning.
There’s a rat in the woodpile, he thought, I can see its tail.
He was able to trace where else that IP address had accessed the airline’s info. The previous flight, where the passengers actually flew. Baggage Info on both flig
hts, and flight routes, including a change due to some laser activity in Newfoundland. A double whammy, he wondered, for flight 94? Could the lasing be related to this baggage issue? He finished his search, wrote down the pertinent information, and logged out.
Next, he googled the IP address. Brazil? Macapá, Brazil? Really? This has suddenly gotten too much for just me. Time to call the big guns!
JC quickly encrypted an email back to Joel, and picked up the phone.
7
In seat 4A, it was time to feed the infant, who was starting to fuss. Just a little, her little girl was such an angel! Rummaging through the carry-on sprinkled with brightly-colored jungle birds, she found the empty bottle, all the paraphernalia that allowed the liquid to actually exit the bottle, the can of formula, no water. Not allowed through security. She would have kicked herself if she had had her foot free, for not bringing along an empty water bottle to refill at one of the many hydration kiosks.
She found the call-the-flight-attendant button and soon had enough warm water for this feeding and spares for the next one or two. A burp and a half later, a smiling face rewarded her with a gurgle. She held the baby close and closed her eyes.
Immediately, she felt in her belly the same feeling she had when the man had smiled at her and Jenny, while he was waiting for the passengers in front of him to move. It was a tingling that went up and down her spine, coupled with a heightened sense of anticipation, similar to the anticipation one would feel as Door Number Three was about to be opened.
But there was no Door Number Three, just a stranger who had an unknown draw on her. Who was he? She drew his image back out of her memory, but couldn’t make any connection. She took some comfort in his not recognizing her either. The image seemed to be calling to her, however, beckoning her. She did not feel annoyed or threatened, only puzzled.
The Wreck Emerged Page 2