Joe Elderman’s face was bathed in the macabre green light from the radarscope. It magnified the mounting panic he was experiencing as he pointed his fingers to the spot on the electronic tube where the target had last been seen. "Right here. Twelve miles southwest of Huguenot, on a bearing of two-four-two. The last altitude I saw from the airliner was 3,600 feet." Elderman wiped the perspiration off his forehead, then looked at the radar screen several more seconds as if he expected Flight 255 to suddenly reappear. Finally, he looked back up at his supervisor.
"On a 242 bearing," the older man who stood beside him repeated. He leaned forward and unfolded a chart. He quickly found the proper coordinates and laid his index finger on the area that Elderman had described. "Somewhere around here, you say?"
"Yes."
"The New Jersey-Pennsylvania border," the supervisor announced as he read the names and symbols on the chart. "A few miles west of the Delaware River, around Dingman's Ferry."
"Or even farther west than that," Elderman volunteered.
"The airliner was still headed westbound when he disappeared from the scope. He could have gone another five miles. Maybe ten." Elderman couldn't believe that this had happened on his shift, on his scope. In his eight years as an air traffic controller, he had never witnessed an actual crash.
"Hand me your telephone. I need to give the coordinator an update."
"Sure." Elderman passed over the telephone. While the supervisor talked, Elderman glanced up and down the long rows of radarscopes in the dimly lit air traffic control center. The rest of the controllers were hunched over their screens, their attentions on their individual tasks. But Elderman caught a few of the quick glances in his direction as each of them tried to learn more of what had happened in sector five. Each controller said his own silent prayer of thanks that it was Joe Elderman and not them in his chair this particular September morning.
"Here." The supervisor gave the telephone back. "Anything else you can think of?"
"I wish I could. I do know that the country around there — the Poconos — is pretty desolate. Heavily wooded, lots of lakes, from what I remember."
"You're right." The supervisor studied the chart for a short while longer, then peeked at the radarscope. There were still no targets displayed anywhere near the area in question, although he really didn't expect any. The airliner had gone down, period.
"It's weird," Elderman said as he followed the supervisor's eyes to the blank radar screen. "Everything was normal until this unknown Learjet came toward them. The first time I noticed the conflicting target, it was five or six miles from Trans-American and heading straight toward it."
"And you gave the crew immediate notice of the conflicting traffic?"
Elderman could tell from the change in the supervisor's tone that this was an official question. "That's right," he said as he tried to remember exactly how far away he had first called the conflicting, unknown target. The taped radio conversations would have that information, but he didn't want to wait until they played the tapes back to know for sure. "The crew saw the traffic. They identified it as a Lear."
"Go on."
Elderman squirmed in his seat. Another man, also an FAA supervisor, walked up alongside the radarscope, but he stood a few feet away, in the shadows. He had taken out a pencil and pad and had begun to take notes. "I did everything by the book," Elderman continued, hesitantly. "Once the Trans-American crew confirmed that they had visual sighting with the Learjet, I turned my attention to other traffic I was working to the north." Elderman waved his hand toward the top edge of his radarscope to indicate where that other air traffic had been.
"Did you notice anything else about the Trans-American flight or the Learjet target?" the second supervisor asked as he stepped closer. He scribbled on his pad. "Anything from that point on?"
"Yes. Sort of." Elderman bit into his lower lip. He hoped to hell that he hadn't said too much already and that nothing he was about to say would reflect badly on him. You could never be too careful when it came to the legal types. They were nothing but Monday-morning quarterbacks. Still, his role in this accident seemed pretty clear-cut. Nothing he did had any bearing on it. At least he hoped not. "The unknown target — the Learjet — seemed to edge in slowly toward the airliner, as if it were flying an intentional formation."
"Intentional?"
"Maybe. That's what it seemed like. It took a minute or more to happen. When they finally got less than half a mile apart, the two radar targets merged together."
"Did the radar targets ever separate any time after that?"
"No. Never."
"Not even after the rapid descent had begun?"
"No."
"Were there any radio transmissions from the Lear? Any further transmissions from the airliner?"
"None from the Lear." Elderman thought about the background noise — a low-level humming — that had begun on the frequency about then, but he decided not to pointedly mention it. It probably meant nothing — general interference of some sort — and would only complicate his side of the story for no reason. But he did decide to say something about the chopped-off sentence that he had gotten from what he presumed was Flight 255.
"Something did come across, but it was very garbled because of static. You might be able to make more out of it on the tape."
"What was it?"
"Just a few words. Hard to tell. But one of the words sounded like murdered, another was killed."
"I see." The second supervisor closed his notebook. "We'll pull the tapes, but it's probably one of those irrational last transmissions from a flight that knows it's going down."
"That's what it sounded like to me." Elderman was pleased that no one had focused on anything he had done or had hinted that his actions were suspect. "This is one hell of a shame. A real tragedy."
"It sure is." The second supervisor shook his head in disgust, then turned and walked away.
The first supervisor began to fold up his chart. "We'll add this data to what we've already sent to search-and-rescue. Write all you can remember in your report. When you're done, you can go home." The supervisor motioned for another controller across the room who began to walk toward them. "Henderson will relieve you. Go home and have a drink. Relax." The supervisor smiled. He was happy that for now it appeared that this accident had nothing to do with any of his boys or any of his equipment. "By the way," he said as Elderman stood up and began to walk toward the administration area with him, "do you have any thoughts on what could have happened? Strictly off the record, of course."
Elderman nodded. "Off the record, sure. The Lear was playing games with the airliner. An intentional game of tag. He must have cut it too close. They must have collided. The two of them came down together."
"That's what I figure," the supervisor agreed. He opened the door that led into his office and gestured toward the desk that he wanted the controller to use to write his report. "It's a real crime. Some moron on a lark killed lots of innocent people." The supervisor looked at his wristwatch. It was 9:35. "At least the weather out there is good. They've got eleven hours of daylight to conduct a search. Unless someone living in that area saw that airliner go down, it might take every bit of those eleven hours for a search to cover all that territory. I used to camp up there and I know for a fact how right you were. The Poconos are one hell of a big, remote area to find a wrecked airplane in."
<>
Even through the raindrops that rolled rapidly down the windows of the bridge of the Yorktown, Paul Talbot had spotted the submarine's periscope a minute before the radio had begun to crackle with the first message. He reached for the microphone and replied with the authorized response that told the submarine that all was well on the carrier's end.
"Continue your southeast heading," the speaker blared again, the man's voice somewhat garbled by the very low level of power the portable transmitters put out. "We will maintain our relative position off your port bow. Slow to half speed so we can keep up."
"Roger. Ahead half." Talbot reached for the signal lever to the engine room. He pulled the handle back to the halfway mark. Within a few seconds the answering bells on the bridge rang and Talbot felt the vibrations of the huge ship's engines as they began to slow.
"Verify that the landing net has been erected." There was a few seconds' pause in the transmission from the submarine before the man spoke again. "The Captain wants to be certain that the net has been properly secured."
"Stand by." Talbot leaned over to the intercom and pressed the appropriate switch. "Engine room, I have the submarine in radio contact." Talbot peeked out the bridge window, but was now unable to visually pick out the trail created by the periscope against the choppy, whitecapped sea. "I had visual contact a moment ago, but not right now." Talbot knew that visual contact meant nothing, but his old Navy training caused him to report all the facts as he saw them, without interpretation. Deciding what details were important and what weren't was an exclusive domain of the officers — a responsibility he had never experienced before this trip.
"Hey, pop, get your bifocals checked." Yang's voice had a lilting, teasing laugh to it. "I've got a man leaning on the port side rail who just called me to say that the sub is plain as day. Directly off our midsection, a few hundred yards."
Talbot forced his eyes to scan the spot Yang mentioned. In a few seconds he again found the periscope, its black mast sticking up even higher out of the waves. "Negative sighting from the bridge. No visual contact with the submarine," Talbot lied. He had no intention of allowing Yang to correct him again, even though he had been right about the sub's location. "They want verification that the deck net has been secured properly," Talbot continued as he passed on the submarine's last message.
"Hell, yes. Tell that underwater skeptic that we guarantee our work." The background sound of laughing came across the intercom. "Tell him that we're officially off the clock, that our part of the job is finished — at least until McClure's Air Force arrives." More laughter came out of the wall speaker before the engine room switched off their end of the intercom.
Talbot passed on the message, word for word. To his surprise, the man on the receiving end acknowledged with no comment. Perhaps he, too, understood too well what a childish bastard Richard Yang was. Talbot dismissed the thought as he concentrated on relaying a few minor but necessary items to the sub. Satisfied that all was finally taken care of, he terminated his transmission. The portable radio lapsed into silence.
Paul Talbot stood with his hands against the old and cracked leather of the captain's chair. His body swayed back and forth in rhythm with the rolling sea that the giant warship wallowed through. Out of a sense of duty, Talbot glanced once more around the bridge. All was well. The ship's autopilot held the steering controls within a degree or two of the on-course heading and the engines continued to run smoothly.
Talbot glanced below at the flight deck. The net that Yang and his men had erected — a weave of steel cabling that stretched across the width of the flight deck — made the scene below appear as if a badminton game for giants was about to be played. The knitted cable stood tall enough to be nearly on eye level with the bridge. Talbot had never seen a steel net of this sort in actual use, although he had heard of it. If a landing aircraft broke its normal tail hook and time and fuel allowed, the men on the carrier would erect the net of steel webbing and the airplane would be snared by it during its runout on landing. Without it, there was no way to get an airplane with a broken tail hook stopped on the short and pitching deck of an aircraft carrier.
Talbot reached for his coffee cup and put it to his lips. The brown liquid in it was tepid at best, but he didn't want to leave the spot where he stood. A fresh pot of hot coffee sat on the hot plate in the captain's sea cabin, a dozen feet behind him. He didn't have the energy to get it. Even though there was nothing left to do, somehow there was still too much to do, too much ahead of them. Talbot stood physically inert, but his mind raced ahead to what was expected to happen on the Yorktown within the next few hours.
The man that McClure said he had hired — Talbot hadn't asked for a name, and McClure hadn't volunteered one — would have already stolen the aircraft with the gold on it. If plans were going according to schedule, that aircraft would be headed out to rendezvous with the carrier at that moment. Once landed, the gold would then be unloaded and everyone would head for the submarine. Talbot would be dropped off in Spain. He would work his way to Switzerland to deposit his share. Then he would get word to Charlotte and Amy that the money was theirs but that it should be withdrawn slowly so as not to alert the U.S. government. A half million dollars in a numbered Swiss account was not enough to pay for the deaths of Keith and Thomas, but it was the only thing Talbot could do for his wife and daughter. Once he had gotten word to Charlotte and Amy, Talbot would disappear. To Africa or South America, probably. Charlotte and Amy would be set for the rest of their lives — and Talbot would no longer have to look into their eyes, listen to their sobs late at night. There was no way to get his grandsons back, but at least this was something. It was the only thing he could do.
Talbot cleared his throat, then looked out the window. The sea was frothy white. The bow of the carrier bobbed up and down in the increasing swells. The surface wind had also picked up. That, at least, was a good sign. When the proper moment arrived, Talbot would turn the ship directly into the wind and that would allow the pilot to touch down on the Yorktown at an even slower speed. The more wind they had across the deck, the easier the landing would be for that unknown pilot.
Talbot wondered for a moment about that man, a person he had never met, never spoken with. Stealing the airplane was dangerous enough, but landing on this heaving deck in foul weather was unquestionably a great risk. What made a man do a thing like that? Was it the money alone, or could there be more to it? "Damn," Talbot said out loud, the sound of his voice echoing off the emptiness of the vast ship's bridge where he stood alone.
Just like me.. .No choice. There was more to every event than most people could ever imagine. Life was very involved, very complex. Too complex. Talbot said a silent prayer for that unknown pilot. For some reason he felt an empathy with him, felt that the pilot would be different from Yang and the hoodlums in the engine room. Talbot prayed that the pilot wouldn't get hurt, that no one would get hurt. Money was one thing, but life was another. McClure had assured him that this mission — barring an unforeseen accident — would be free of risk, that no one would get hurt. Without that assurance, Paul Talbot knew that he never would have gone along with this crazy idea, no matter what the financial reward. No amount of money was worth a life.
Talbot sighed heavily, then edged himself onto the captain's chair. He picked up a pair of binoculars and began to scan the horizon, port to starboard. Other than the submarine's periscope cutting through the waves abeam the Yorktown, there were no targets in sight. Everything was quiet. Too quiet. Talbot laid down the binoculars and reached across for the cassette player that Amy had given to him as a birthday present. Talbot slid in the new Willie Nelson tape that he had bought the day before but had yet to play. He pressed the machine's start button.
After a few seconds of silence, a melancholy piano began. The carefully fingered notes resonated with a haunting clarity off the flat metal walls of the bridge. The introduction to the song ran very slowly, as if the musicians themselves were reluctant to get on with it. Finally, the plaintive voice of Willie Nelson began, his words formed carefully, the tone of his phrases full yet as vulnerable and fragile as a thin piece of elegant crystal.
Oh, it's a long, long while
From May to December
But the days grow short
When you reach September
When the autumn weather
takes the leaves to flame
One doesn't have time
for the waiting game.
Paul Talbot reached for the cassette player to shut it off, but his fingers would not respond to instructions from his rational mind. Something else — nostalgia, pain, suffering, guilt — was in control. He did not want to hear any more, but he could not stop himself. The lyrics continued to assault him, the notes of the solo piano played so forlornly that Talbot felt himself slipping between them and falling toward the hollow end of a bottomless pit.
The days dwindle down
to a precious few
September
November
And these few precious days
I'II spend with you
These precious days
I'll spend with you.