“Was the Coast Guard helicopter still on station? Were they still searching, I mean?”
She shook her head. “No. They hadn’t been out there for a couple of hours. I found out later that the Coast Guard suspended the air search between 2 A.M. and sunrise, and the cutter they sent wasn’t even close yet. Which means it was just me out there. And the others-me on the tower, them in the water, and that boat. Which is why the Coast Guard didn’t see it. Never knew it was there.”
So far, I didn’t doubt the woman’s story. By law, between dusk and dawn, all vessels are mandated to show running lights, but it’s common for skippers to ignore the law and run dark. On black nights, white anchor lights, even red and green bow lights, interfere with night vision. It’s easier to see random waves without them. As to other boat traffic, there’s usually not much at night, particularly in stretches of seldom-traveled wilderness water, and the water space off the Ten Thousand Islands is about as wilderness as it gets.
Even so, something was missing from the story. Had to be. By my judgment, Amelia was a rational, logical person, and thus far, her story contained a major omission. I said, “Okay, you saw a boat. The boat wasn’t showing lights. Trust me, it’s not unusual. It slipped through a little hole in the Coast Guard search schedule. I don’t doubt that, either. So the question is obvious: What makes you think that boat may have found Janet, Michael, and Grace? It was dark. There was no way for people aboard to see three people floating in the water.”
Amelia took a sip of her water, turned her head, and looked at me. She had eyes the color of spring grass, a lucent green, and they seemed to be set slightly deeper into her face, as if having retreated from the emotional beating she’d taken over the last several weeks. “The boat stopped, that’s why. About twenty minutes later, the sky had changed from charcoal to a kind of pearly gray. It was way to the northeast, but it was out there. I could see it. Out there, floating, but not moving forward.”
“Could you hear its engines?”
“No. It was too far away by then. I’m sure you’ve seen the tower I was on. It has two platforms. One just over the waves, and the other about twenty feet above that. I climbed up to the highest platform to get a better look. It was cold up there, windy. Doc, I’m telling you now exactly what I told the Coast Guard. There was a boat out there. I’ll swear to it. And it stopped. For the first time, it showed lights. I saw it flashing a spotlight around. Then it started moving again toward shore and was gone. It’d stopped for five minutes, maybe ten.”
She paused for a moment, building her case, letting me think about it before she added, “All three of them were wearing inflated vests. If all those search boats and helicopters didn’t find Janet, Grace, and Michael in six solid days and nights of searching, doesn’t it make sense that someone else did? Someone picked them up. My God, someone had to. That’s the only reasonable explanation. We didn’t find them because they weren’t there!”
I said, “I’d like to believe that-and so would you. So would we all. But it’s a big ocean, Amelia. You know that better than most people will ever know it. Drop the average adult diver into the Gulf of Mexico, and he or she is proportionally reduced to the size of about one molecule in the atomic structure of a very large animal. Easy to miss, and sometimes almost impossible to find.”
She was nodding, anticipating my response, way ahead of me. “I agree. But it should be easy enough to prove there was another boat out there. At least that there is a possibility they were picked up. It’s like I told your friend at St. Pete Coast Guard, Commander Dorsey.
“I told him that everyone knows the government has all kinds of satellites flying around the sky, up there to monitor weather and drug trafficking and who knows what else. Maybe a satellite flew over that night and there’s a photo of the boat somewhere, a way to identify it.”
“What did Dalton think about that idea?”
“He thought it was great, but he said the Coast Guard couldn’t help me. No access to that kind of classified information. Not officially anyway. It had something to do with them not being a branch of the military, which was news to me.” She seemed to make it a point not to look in my direction when she added, “Commander Dorsey suggested that I mention the satellite idea to you. When I asked why, he didn’t say. Just sort of ignored the question. Like there was something he knew but wasn’t going to tell me. Does that make any sense to you, Doc?”
I was thinking: Satellite images. Good idea. But I said, “Nope. I have no idea why Dalton would say such a thing. But look… well, what we should decide here, as far as me helping you, Amelia-of course I will. Count on it. What I’m not clear on is what you want me to do.”
Now she turned to look at me. “I want you to question every detail of my story. This is the lawyer in me talking. Trying to prove me wrong is the only way I can be proven right. Come to some conclusions, write them out, and Commander Dalton said he would attach it to the Coast Guard file, which will make it public record. What I really want? I told you before. I want you to help all four of us get our reputations back.”
11
I listened to my old friend, colleague, and confidant, Bernard Yeager, Ph. D., say to me over long-distance telephone, “Satellites? So why should I know a satellite from a submarine? Tell me that if you don’t mind very much.”
Patiently, I replied, “Bernie, this is me at the other end. If you can’t talk, just say so. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Surveillance satellites: I need some general information, and maybe a little piece or two of specific information-if it’s available.”
“Trust me, it’s not available. Even if I had access to that kind of data, it’s not available. Which I don’t.”
I sighed and stared at the shelf of aquaria along the wall of my lab. It was feeding time, and eight football-sized octopi stared back at me from their individual tanks, while aerators in each created the sweet molecular odor of ozone and a soothing chorus of bubbles. I said, “Won’t you at least listen?”
“I’ll listen, I’ll listen, already! But first things first. You say you are Marion Ford. I know your voice well. You are my old friend. But these are dangerous times. Did you know that there are certain computer magicians who can record another person’s voice, download it, and then use microphone active software to make their own voice sound very similar to the one they’ve recorded?”
“Nope,” I said. “Never heard of such a thing.”
“It’s true! So maybe it’s you, maybe it’s not. What it could be is some nebbish playing a trick on poor old Bernie, showing I’ve gotten so old I trust my ears, not my brain. Which is why I want you to speak a few more words, and let me make certain you are who you say you are.”
I pictured how it would probably be on his end of the line. He would be in the office of his desert adobe outside Scottsdale, Arizona, talking on the newest generation of high-security scrambler phones. The telephone would somehow be hooked into the bank of computers on his desk and around the room that he’d assembled lovingly by hand and interconnected. On one of the monitors would be a series of voiceprint images, old and new, but all of them seismic renderings of my voice.
All voices are distinctive, the uniqueness of each determined by the size of throat, nasal, and oral cavities, and the shape, length, and tension of the vocal cords. The manner in which speech muscles are manipulated is distinctive as well. Bernie would be using some esoteric program to confirm that my voiceprints matched. Presumably, he was using the same sophisticated computer system that made it possible for me to dial a Virginia area code yet end up speaking with the rotund and brilliant retired National Security Agency department head. How? I have no idea. My guess is, the same way you can dial a special seven-digit phone number and reach the security station at Kwajalein in the middle of the South Pacific. More of Yeager’s electronic wizardry.
Bernie is still a legend among the elite intelligence community familiar with the man’s work. It was Bernie Yeager who single-handedly unscr
ambled the Soviet nuclear subcode progression. It was Yeager who invaded and compromised computer communications between Managua and Havana during the Sandinista wars in Nicaragua. It was Yeager who discovered that, for years, the Mossad had the key to many code transmissions between the United States and Panama, compliments of a Mossad agent named Michael Herrera who Manuel Noriega had, amazingly, put in charge of his Panamanian air force. Next time you see a photograph of the former dictator in uniform, note the inverted paratrooper wings of the Israeli army-an honor bestowed on Noriega by a grateful Herrera.
All true.
And it was Yeager who consistently interrupted and intercepted radio and Internet communications between the Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamic terrorists in the United States. I’d heard through mutual friends that he had become obsessed with unmasking and destroying them individually and as groups. I knew that Bernie had lost both parents in Nazi concentration camps, so it made sense when our mutual friend said that Bernie considered the Islamic fanatics to be the Nazis of the new century. Nor was it surprising that he would become obsessive about destroying them.
Many of my friends in the intelligence community share the same obsession.
Bernie’s is not a name that is found in newspapers; he has never been invited to appear on national television and, hopefully, will never be asked. Yet he has done as much as any one person to safeguard the security of his adopted nation.
Several years back, I did a favor for the man because I like, admire, and trust him. His sister, Eve, the young mother of a three-year-old son, had a evening of silly, injudicious behavior. On a lark, at a party with a couple of former college room-mates, she tried a street drug that they were told was “coca candy.”
It was crack cocaine.
As a upper-class professional woman, she’d never experienced anything like it. A few days later, Eve rationalized a reason to contact the friend of a friend who had the stuff, and she bought a little more.
Slightly more than a year later, at Bernie’s request, I tracked his sister across four states to a suburban crackhouse outside Boulder, Colorado. It took me a couple of days to size up the hierarchy of males who exploited the women there and provided them with drugs. It took another couple days of research to find just the right way to leverage the crackhouse chieftain. I got her out without much trouble, and we got her into a superb rehab program. We gave it a month before we told her the bad news: Her distraught husband had divorced her in absentia and had secured custody of their son.
I stayed in close touch. I liked Eve very much; Bernie and I gradually became close friends. I joined the two of them, by telephone, for a small celebration the night Eve’s ex-husband said, yes, he was willing to try again. It should have been the storybook ending to an American tragedy. Unfortunately, storybook endings are seldom associated with the white rock. After more than a year of apparent domestic tranquility, Eve vanished. Bernie asked me to go a-searching once more. I found her in Colorado again, the same suburb, the same crackhouse. This time, she refused help. She was found dead a few months later.
I rarely impose on Bernie for favors. Friendship is based on loyalty, not on behavioral bookkeeping, quid pro quo. But when I do ask a favor, he never refuses.
After I told him the story of Janet Mueller and her two lost companions, Bernie said to me, “Awful! Tragic! In such a terrible mishmash, who wouldn’t want to help? Unfortunately, and as I keep telling you over and over, I don’t have access to the kind of data you need. But just out of curiosity, do you have the lat and long of the wreck they were diving? Or GPS numbers, perhaps?”
I was taught to think in terms of latitude and longitude and still prefer it over the more modern Global Positional System numbers. For some reason, it’s simpler for me to picture our planet covered with imaginary lines called parallels and meridians, or lines of longitude and latitude. It’s easier for me to calculate distances in my head, too. It takes the earth twenty-four hours for a full rotation of 360 degrees. Thus, every hour we rotate 15 degrees longitude, or one time zone. For the sake of precision, the imaginary lines are broken down into degrees, minutes, and seconds. There is exactly one nautical mile per minute, and there are sixty minutes (and sixty nautical miles) between degrees.
I told Bernie that the wreck of the Baja California lies at 25 degrees 21 minutes 60 seconds north latitude and 82 degrees 31.97 minutes west longitude.
“And you said the Coast Guard had found debris from the wreck, but not a trace of the divers themselves?”
I told him that, besides Amelia Gardner, all the Coasties had found were a length of manila line tied to a life jacket, as described by Amelia, a camera bag, a water jug, and two empty tanks, all scattered to the southwest.
I found it very reassuring when Bernie asked, “I don’t suppose you have the lat and long for the most distant item found?”
I told him an empty tank was found floating at 25 degrees 19.60 minutes north latitude and 82 degrees 46.50 minutes west longitude. The rough math was easy-twenty nautical miles or so southwest of the site of the wreck.
I heard him say, “ Humph, ” as if preoccupied, his keyboard clattering in the background, working on something else as we talked. Then he said, “So tell me what you know about satellite surveillance systems. Wait, I withdraw the question. Me, the computer nerd asking you, Mr. Live-in-a-Hut-Hermit. So let me tell you what is public information, which is why there’s no harm in me giving you a little crash course in what it is you’re asking. I tell you certain things, you judge for yourself if the satellite data you need are maybe available. Not that I can provide them.”
I said, “Understood and agreed.”
Bernie said, “Okay, so stand outside, look up at the night sky, and what you’re seeing is the makings of a junkyard. You laugh. The man thinks I’m joking. About satellites, I never joke. There are nearly ten thousand man-made objects up there orbiting this little planet of ours. More than three thousand of those objects are satellites, operative and inoperative, plus garbage you wouldn’t believe. Up there, we got nose-cone shrouds, lens covers, hatch covers, rocket bodies, pay-loads that have exploded, junk the astronauts or cosmonauts threw out or forgot. All sorts of stuff.
“But the U.S. intelligence agencies also have some very amazing birds up there. I’ve read about this, understand, I got no firsthand knowledge. Not that anything is such a great big secret anymore. Our military shoots off a rocket, the world’s watching. The Chinese, the Saudis, everyone, they know that if the rocket goes east or west, it’s probably an electronic eavesdropping satellite. If it goes north or south, it’s most likely a photoreconnaissance satellite, doing what they call a polar orbit or figure-eight orbit. The photorecon satellites, that’s what might interest you.”
No longer gazing at the octopi, concentrating on what Bernie was telling me-telling me with words, and without words-I said, “Exactly. Satellite photographs. How good are they?”
“Even back in the 1960s, when the CIA first starting launching them, even then, they were pretty good. CORONA Satellite Photography, that was the name of the operation. Keyhole photography we…” Bernie paused, catching himself. “Every satellite had a KH, keyhole, designation. Carried large spools of seventy-millimeter film into space, great big panoramic cameras. After photographs were taken, the satellites jettisoned the exposed film, which was then snared in midfall by military planes. Amazingly complicated, but it worked pretty good.”
I said, “But it’s better now.”
“Better? Remember the old rumor that NSA could read the number on a license plate from outer space. That was ten, fifteen years ago. Bunk! Three-meter resolution, that was about as good as it got. So the rumor was complete nonsense up until a few years back when we launched a couple of ultra-high-tech birds, KH-12s and now KH-13s. Absolutely fabulous resolution… which is what I’ve read, anyway. Pictures are so sharp, they can count the rivets on equipment coming out of Iraqi factories. They can pick out a human face in a sea of people. And the
KH-13s, what they can do is still classified so, of course, how is someone like me supposed to know a thing or two about something like that? Spectacular reconnaissance, that would be my guess. With all the improvements in sensor development, maybe they can see through clouds. At night. In a heavy fog. I’m not saying it’s true, but in such a world, name one little thing that’s not possible.”
Yep, Bernie definitely had access to the satellites, and the satellites had the capability. That’s what he was telling me. I found his line, a human face in a sea of people, at once subtly evocative and also haunting. Was it really possible that he could pull up photos that might isolate Janet, Michael, and Grace after they were adrift?
I said, “Just for argument’s sake, let’s say I wormed my way into the right department, filled out all the forms, jumped through all the hoops, and managed to get official authorization to check the satellite data banks-”
“Marion, Marion! Forget it. Don’t waste your time. It could never happen. If this country allowed intelligence satellites to be used in even one missing person’s case, the floodgates would be opened. You know how many people go missing every year? Not to mention the breach of security. The whole system would be compromised. It would be disastrous. Even if you were a U.S. Senator, the governor of a state, it wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t release that information to you, or even admit they had it.”
“But let’s say I did manage to get access. What are the chances that one or more satellites flew over the area the night my friends were set adrift? That photographs were taken?”
Yeager’s voice changed slightly, had some emotion in there-additional reassurance. “The chances? A man so naturally lucky as you, what do you care about odds? I’ll put it this way. There is now in place a keyhole system called ‘Lacrosse’ that is part of the old Star Wars initiative. With the satellites they have, U.S. intelligence people are able to see all parts of Russia at the same time, twenty-four hours a day, no problem. We’ve got newer birds on station now. Could be, our people want to keep a close eye on Cuba. Or Panama, maybe. I wouldn’t be the tiniest bit surprised if that included the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Keys, the whole kit ’n’ kaboodle. Isn’t that where you live, down there in the tropics? Coconuts and alligators, tourists wearing those horrible shirts. All that rain and humidity. Every summer we used to have to visit my aunt on Miami Beach. Whew! It’s yours, you can have it.” He was laughing now.
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