But now things were going to be very different. Based on those long-shelved plans and designs, they had re-created it all thirty-five years later. They had advanced the systems, refined the engines, working in conjunction with Pratt and Whitney. From the old stillborn 2707-100 had sprung the twenty-first-century 2707-500, the Boeing Starstriker. Now the world’s hotshot travelers would see what American excellence really stood for. And in a sense the men from Boeing would stand vindicated for all the millions of millions of dollars they had spent back in the sixties, and all the thousands of man-hours they had expended.
Starstriker represented living, growling proof, that where politicians might be quite happy to squander colossal amounts of money, which was not theirs anyway, America’s heavy industry was not so inclined. Their knowledge, their research and development had been meticulously stored over the years, then distilled, cultivated, and improved. And the East Coast journalists who had gleefully added up the costs of the old 2707-100 and pronounced Boeing money managers “guilty of extravagance beyond words” throughout the first SST program…well…they could now go chew on their own long-dead, ill-thought-out feature articles. In the unlikely event they would ever be able to comprehend the depth of their misjudgments.
John Mulcahy beamed with good humor. He sat next to his chief engineer, longtime vice president Sam Boland, whom he had first met at MIT and subsequently lured from another major U.S. plane maker. To his left was the top test pilot in the United States, Bob “Scanner” Richards, Boeing’s near-mythical project manager whose instinct for the smooth running of a revolutionary design venture was fabled throughout the industry. Scanner had just declared the titanium-bodied Starstriker, “about as close to perfection as anyone’s gonna get an SST in this lifetime.”
John Mulcahy had also listened to a report by his public relations chief, Jay Herbert, who had described, in barely controlled excitement, the events that would unfold in Washington, right there at Dulles International Airport on February 9, when Scanner Richards would take Starstriker on her maiden transatlantic test flight in the company of all of the top Boeing technicians who had worked on her for so long. There would be no passengers, just the high-tech air crew and staff. The guest list at the celebrity breakfast and reception was as glamorous as anything seen in the nation’s capital since the Reagan years.
Ten minutes previously Jay had revealed that the President of the United States would arrive at Dulles, together with his wife and National Security Advisor Admiral Arnold Morgan, plus Secretary of Defense Bob MacPherson. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Scott Dunsmore had accepted, plus the heads of all the Armed Services. Leading senators, congressmen, governors, the titans of corporate America, media tycoons, Wall Street giants, and a smattering of show-business lightweights, actresses and singers, who would probably claim most of the headlines.
The maiden transatlantic flight of Starstriker had captured the attention of the press and television as few technological subjects ever do. Orders and inquiries from at least eight different airlines, four of them American, were being dealt with on an hourly basis by the marketing department. John Mulcahy had known some great days as the man at the helm of the world’s greatest aircraft production corporation. But February 9 promised to be his finest hour.
He was a tall, craggy man in appearance, inclined to look a bit disheveled even in a brand-new expensive suit. His much younger wife, Betsy, fought a losing battle to make him look like the president of the Boeing Corporation, but she could never persuade him to get his shoes shined. And no matter how many times she bought him a tie from Hermès he always managed to knot it badly, somehow too thin, and it rarely hid the top button of his shirt.
Nonetheless there was an aura of power about the man. He stood six feet three inches, and his hair was thick, iron grey in color. He laughed a lot, but he also frowned a lot, and he ruled the corporation in a stern, hands-on manner. Only his true friends understood that behind this forbidding, somewhat severe exterior there lurked a wild Irishman, dying to break cover. No one ever forgot John’s sixtieth birthday party in a private room at the most expensive hotel in Seattle…when he stood on a table at one in the morning and insisted on singing a succession of traditional Irish revolutionary battle hymns. Upset a few local matrons, but Senator Kennedy seemed wryly amused.
John Mulcahy’s grandparents were from County Kildare in Ireland, and he treasured his roots in the old country. Each year he and Betsy flew to Shannon and drove up to the family village of Kilcullen, where he stayed at the home of one of Ireland’s major industrialists, Brendan Sheehan. On the way, they stopped and played golf for two or three days at Mount Juliet in County Kilkenny. In Kildare they played Michael Smurfit’s magnificent golf course at the K-Club. One day John Mulcahy intended to bring Starstriker to Shannon, which housed, after all, a section of the oceanic control center that would soon be guiding the new supersonic aircraft safely across the eastern half of the Atlantic.
He found it enthralling: the very prospect of his great aircraft descending through the mists of the Shannon Estuary, its landing wheels reaching out for Irish soil, 150 years after the penniless Seamus and Maeve Mulcahy had fled the famine, survived the voyage to America, and set up home in Boston, where, two generations later, John had been born.
He was a true romantic, an Irishman of the blood, and his contract with Boeing stipulated, in italicized letters, that he was never required to be at the office on March 17 of any year, save for an outbreak of war, fire, or mutiny. He did not miss many of the other working days, however, and he held the daily operations of the corporation in what some people believed was an iron grip. Boeing had never had a better president.
And the meeting today found him in an expansive mood. Concorde’s disaster had, of course, played into their hands, and while no one, genuinely, wanted to gloat at any airline’s catastrophe, particularly that of an important customer like British Airways, it was impossible to turn back the thought that Concorde’s calamity was, inevitably, Starstriker’s benefit.
The specter of that splendid airliner, coming apart at the seams, way up in the stratosphere, hung heavily over the table.
“What do you think happened to it, Scanner?” asked the president.
“I’m completely bewildered, to tell you the truth, John.” said the ex — Air Force fighter pilot. “I mean, what could have happened to it? There’s nothing up there to hit, and nothing known to man that could have hit it. Except maybe a meteorite, or a hunk that fell off a satellite. But the odds against that have gotta be millions and millions to one.”
“Then what?” persisted the president.
“Well, we do have that other pilot’s assertion, the guy from Northwestern, that he saw fire in the sky right where Concorde must have been. But I don’t know about that…I guess we must be left with internal failure of some kind. ”
“Yeah, but what kind of failure?”
“I can’t imagine. Both British Aerospace and Rolls Royce say a fuel leak fire is absolutely out of the question, so we have to forget that. And no one thinks it remotely possible that a bomb could have been planted. Which really leaves not much, except an engine fire that somehow got to the fuel. But to me that doesn’t really ring true. Without the fire observation from the other pilot, I’d be inclined to think in terms of metal fatigue, or a structural failure at MACH-2. But I don’t think either of those things would set the sonofabitch on fire. Beats the hell out of me, John.”
“And me. Just doesn’t add up, does it?”
“Not in this life.”
“Anyway, gentlemen, we better go on. Now, when are we moving to Washington?”
“On schedule, John. The aircraft departs on the afternoon of February 7, subsonic from Seattle to Dulles, leaves at 1600, arrives in secret and in darkness 2220 local. She’s being towed straight to a hangar, kept under wraps for the night, serviced thoroughly the next day ready for the 0830 departure for London on the ninth.”
“Okay. The rest
of us leave here at 0800 on the eighth arriving Washington 1630. Reception and dinner beginning 1900 at the Carlton. That’s industry only, plus three senior U.S. Senators.”
“Good. Kennedy coming?”
“Yup.”
“That’s better yet. He’s still the best we have. Knows more. Thinks more. Does more. Even though he’s a Democrat. Plus he’s as funny as hell. Put him near me, willya.”
“How about John Kerry?”
“Yup. He’s coming as well.”
“Excellent. Am I speaking?
“Yes. First draft’s ready tomorrow. I believe you’re working on the departure speech yourself.”
“Yup. Don’t want any help with that one.”
Friday, February 3, 2006. London.
Great Britain’s Minister of Transport, Howard Eden, was under pressure. Every day he faced a barrage of criticism over the Concorde air disaster. The media were demanding answers, the opposition benches in the House were demanding answers, and now the Prime Minister was demanding answers.
“Jesus Christ,” he told his secretary, in their besieged private offices in Westminster. “You’d have thought I was driving the bloody thing.”
He had just returned from a bruising session of questions in the House, during which there had been calls for his resignation. He had been publicly described as the Minister Without A Clue — a crib from a recent tabloid headline — and variously as “incompetent,” “uncaring,” “witless,” and “Ti,”—the latter, the Tory shadow minister explained, was short for “Titanic,” which everyone knew was a total bloody disaster.
Howard Eden was the latest in a long line of British government ministers who seemed fine while the winds were fair, but came unbuckled at the first sign of trouble. This was undoubtedly because the ruling Parliamentary party too often appointed ministers to areas where their degree of knowledge and competence was near zero. In recent years they had made bankers and lawyers into defense ministers — and appointed all kinds of political misfits into the great offices of state.
Howard Eden, in office for only eighteen months, still knew very little about modern air transportation. And he was not much better on road and rail. His job was regarded as a stepping-stone to higher office. Which was why he was all at sea, like Concorde, in his current predicament. And now he had to report to the Prime Minister who had made him transport minister in the first place, to explain precisely why his department was being made to look absurd on a daily basis, right out there in front of the entire world.
He had no answers. Everyone knew that. For the search for wreckage was going especially badly in mountainous North Atlantic seas almost 3 miles deep. The only glimmer of hope was that on the tenth day of the operation out on 30 West, a Royal Navy sonar operator thought he had heard the locator beam of Concorde’s black box. Whether or not they could ever get down there to retrieve it was highly debatable. But arrangements were being made for an unmanned diving submarine to go down and try.
The Prime Minister’s concern was a sharp lessening in public confidence in air travel. And, being an instinctive politician, he understood the reason for this was lack of explanation as to the cause of the disaster. What he needed was someone who could step forward, and say, Prime Minister, we are dealing here with almost certain metal fatigue, and we are examining every aircraft in the fleet for any further signs of it. Concorde was lost due to a structural failure and we are making absolutely certain such a failure could never, ever happen again.
The public could forgive an identifiable problem that was being fixed. They had proved that years ago when there were a succession of accidents with the Comet airliners. But the public could not cope with uncertainty, especially when the government’s own experts were plainly without clues. The British Airways board was beside itself with worry. Three of their members would be in Washington five days hence to see the fanfare of departure for the big Boeing superstar that would, expensively, put their beloved Concorde out of the business of supersonic flight forever.
It would, of course, be churlish for the Prime Minister to sack Howard Eden for his current role in one of Britain’s worst ever crashes — one which had killed four United States congressmen. But it might look a whole lot better if he resigned. There’s nothing quite so good as a scapegoat to take the heat off everyone else.
However, in this instance, the public outrage, fanned by the press, was so intense, it seemed nothing could diminish the clamor for heads to roll. As if 115 on board Speedbird 001 were not sufficient.
Howard Eden had no intention of going to Washington to attend the triumphant ceremony of the American plane makers. With a weary step, he headed downstairs toward the ministerial limousine, to take him to 10 Downing Street for possibly the last time.
Not far away, there was equal depression in the offices of the Air Accident Investigation Branch of the ministry. With every day that had passed since zero plus two, the number of clues had diminished. There had been pieces of wreckage on the surface, but only from the cabin. All of Concorde’s heavy-duty components, like the four engines, the tail plane and undercarriage, were on the bottom of the Atlantic. The wings seemed to have been blown into shards by exploding fuel, and they did not float. The Navy searchers found no sizable pieces whatsoever. The other problem was the height. “Normal” air disasters, which take place at the regular cruising altitude of above 30,000 feet can scatter debris over a 4-mile area.
In this case, given the 10-mile height and the terrific speed, the wreckage seemed scattered across a square of 10 miles by 10 miles, or, from the searchers’ point of view, 100 square miles, made infinitely more difficult because no one actually knew, with any accuracy, precisely where Concorde had been when she came apart.
Each day the department tried to assemble a report, demonstrating that some progress was being made. But it was almost impossible. Assisted by the senior brains of British Airways, and by the British Aircraft Corporation, even by French experts from Aerospatiale, there was nothing to piece together. Not unless they could find a way to reclaim the critical parts from the bottom of the Atlantic. And no one seemed very optimistic about that, particularly since it would cost a king’s ransom even to attempt it. No one had ever been anywhere near that depth in a search for wreckage. Not even the Titanic rested in water that deep.
Friday, February 3.
Office of the National Security Advisor.
The White House.
Admiral Arnold Morgan was on his “break.” This was a twenty-minute hiatus he tried to take each morning at around 1100 when he checked through newspapers and magazines, “just to check no one’s done anything absolutely fucking ridiculous.”
He was sitting at his big desk, perusing the national weeklies, chatting with Kathy O’Brien and sipping black coffee. “This Concorde thing’s like a time warp,” he was saying. “Remember last spring when the Brits were searching for the submarine? Well, they’re still doing the same thing now — groping around the bottom of the goddamned ocean, and both times they are finding nothing significant.”
“I could remind you,” said Kathy, “that despite your fears, the submarine has never been seen, and neither has it blown up another aircraft carrier. Most reasonable people believe it must be on the bottom, wherever that may be, a tomb for all the crew, whoever they may be.”
“You could remind me of that,” replied the admiral. “And you could remind me that in your view I suffer from incurable paranoia, which I do.”
They both laughed. But Arnold Morgan was serious. “When I was in the National Security Agency, I tried to connect apparently disconnected facts. And a lot of the time I was very wide of the mark. But not always. And I got it right more often than anyone else, which is, I guess, why I’m sitting in this chair. And I’m now pondering three totally disconnected facts.
“One, that British submarine is still missing, and I, in company with a very few like-minded paranoids, think it might be out there plotting and planning a strike against the We
st. I think it is possible that Commander Adnam may be alive, and that if he is, he is driving HMS Unseen… somewhere.
“Two, a brilliantly maintained aircraft, flying high, completely out of harm’s way, suddenly falls clean out of the sky, for no discernible reason.
“Three, there are, in the intelligence community, deep suspicions that Iraq, possibly assisted by the Russians, is testing SAMs, surface-to air-missiles, down in the southern marshes — a strange place, where we know there was some elation over the Concorde disaster.”
“Hold on one moment, Arnold, are you trying to tell me we have this homicidal maniac, who’s stolen a Royal Navy submarine, somewhere on the loose in a submarine which can shoot down supersonic airliners at will. Isn’t that a bit far-fetched?”
“Probably. At least it would be if his name wasn’t Benjamin Adnam…but the most far-fetched part is where Concorde vanished.”
“How do you mean?”
“Kathy, more than 94 percent of all air crashes take place on landing or takeoff. Just go over the ones you remember…the one in the Florida swamp, the one in the Potomac, the one at the end of the runway in Boston, the one up the mountain near Tokyo, even the TWA off Long Island, the one near Paris, the one that fell short of Birmingham airport in England. All near airports. Passenger aircraft hit mountains coming into land, they misjudge runways in bad weather, and they take off when something’s not quite right. But they hardly ever blow up of their own accord, or fall apart when they are cruising through empty skies…because there’s nothing up there.”
“No…I suppose they don’t.”
“Just think about it for a minute. Here we have this beautiful aircraft, powered by four Rolls Royce engines that the Brits check thoroughly about every two days. Its safety record is immaculate, its pilots and flight engineers carry out five times more safety checks than any other aircraft requires. When that baby takes off, every working part is as close to flawless as the Brits can get it. The safety procedures are sensational…they even ensure sufficient fuel to land on one engine anywhere during their journey….
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