If there was one thing Professor had learned during his time in uniform, it was that, no matter the location, branch of service or flag they flew, military bases were all pretty much the same. It wasn’t a physical similarity, though block construction and grim utilitarian uniformity were a constant, but rather something less tangible. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but Royal Australian Air Force Base Richmond on the outskirts of Sydney was no exception.
Even before getting past the main gate, as he waited beside his rental car for his bona fides to be checked and his visitor’s pass to be issued, Professor felt like he had been transported back in time twenty years to when he was a freshly scrubbed swabbie arriving at Coronado to begin Basic Underwater Demolitions/SEAL training. He found himself automatically checking the rank of every Aussie airmen that passed by, separating officers from enlisted like he used to do in the old days, just in case a salute was required. He had to fight the urge to stand at parade rest.
The airmen manning the gate handed him a clip-on pass and supplied instructions on how to find the ad hoc command center where the ongoing search for Flight 815 was being coordinated. Although the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau was the lead agency, there were more than a dozen different organizations — military, civilian, and private — and hundreds of aircraft looking for the plane, which made the RAAF base the ideal hub from which to oversee the effort.
Professor was posing as an FBI counter-terrorism consultant, on loan to the Australian government. The cover was vaguely defined, just official enough to allow him to hang out at the fringes of the search, ask a lot of questions, and get a feel for what had really happened. He did not expect to do any actual consulting, but if there was information being withheld from the public, something that provided a more concrete link to Roche’s murder, he had to find it. He had opted for casual attire — chinos and a navy blue polo shirt — but thought his Explorer fedora might set the wrong tone. It stayed in the rental car.
He decided to begin his search by introducing himself to ATSB operations manager Steven Sousa, the man in charge, notionally at least, but despite the fact that he had both emailed ahead to make an appointment and called to confirm, Sousa was nowhere to be found. The ATSB office was all but deserted. The lone agent manning the phones answered Professor’s inquiries about Sousa’s whereabouts with a shrug, which left him little choice but to park himself in a chair outside the office and wait.
Sousa arrived two hours later, a stout balding man with a haggard expression but a determined carriage. He brushed past Professor and went straight into the office where he immediately began making a phone call. Professor slipped in behind him and took a seat in front of the desk. Sousa acknowledged his presence with an irritated frown, but continued with his phone call — which mostly consisted of “No, sir. Not yet, sir” delivered with an almost stereotypically thick Aussie accent — as if Professor were not even there.
Finally, after a promise of “right away, sir,” Sousa hung up and leaned across his desk. “Let’s hear it.”
Professor offered a cordial smile and proffered his bogus credential pack. “I’m Chapman. FBI counter-terrorism.”
“Great. Another seppo.”
It did not sound like a question so Professor let it go. “I’ve got some questions I need answered and then I’ll be out of your ha… errr, your way.”
Sousa let out a noncommittal grunt. “Fine. Ask your questions. Hope you don’t mind if I keep working.” He reached for a stack of papers and began leafing through them.
The man’s recalcitrant attitude was the main reason Professor had not simply conducted this interview by phone. Getting anything useful out Sousa was going to be like pulling teeth. He decided to push back a little. “We’re on the same team, Sousa. I’m not here to piss on your hubcaps. As soon as I get what I came for, I’m gone. How long that will take is up to you.”
Sousa glared at him for a moment then tossed the papers down and folded his arms across his chest. “Go on.”
Professor took out a notepad and pen. “For starters, why don’t you tell me exactly what happened. I’ve heard what the news media are saying, and just about every crazy conspiracy theory imaginable. Now I want to hear it from you. What really happened to that plane?”
“What happened is that the plane bloody vanished.”
Professor’s pen remained poised above the page, but he said nothing.
Sousa sighed. “The aircraft took off from SYD at 0958. It’s a daily flight, originating here, not a turnaround, so the plane received a thorough maintenance evaluation before departure. Not so much as a loose nut anywhere on that bird. The flight left on time, and everything was fine until it wasn’t.”
Professor had just started writing, but stopped at the cryptic comment. “What does that mean?”
Sousa gave him a hard look. “You know anything about how airplanes work?”
“I understand principles of lift and aerodynamics, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’s not.” Another sigh. “I’m talking about the air traffic control system. People watch movies and they get this idea that ATC is like some kind of computer game, with a great big screen and little lights that show the exact location of every aircraft in the sky.”
“It’s not?”
“At any given moment, there are close to seven thousand commercial flights in the sky worldwide. There are more than a thousand different air carriers, and a lot of them are flying old birds that haven’t been fully upgraded with the latest bells and whistles. Air traffic control has to manage all of them, and the only way to do that is with radar and radio navigation. Both of those rely on line of sight, which isn’t terribly useful a thousand miles out over the Pacific Ocean. There are a lot of gaps in radar coverage. Planes aren’t tracked in real time. Sometimes, we don’t know there’s a problem until a plane fails to show up, or misses a scheduled check-in. What we know about this plane is that they reported in right on schedule for the first three hours or so, and then…nothing.”
“So the crew did not report any problems.”
“Not a peep. The odds are that this was a mechanical failure, not a deliberate act, but we won’t know what happened on that aircraft until we find it. So while I understand that you have a job to do, Agent Chapman, you’re just pissing into the wind.”
Professor didn’t back down. “And why haven’t you found it?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? We don’t track these planes in real time so we don’t know where it went down.”
“But that particular plane was equipped with both a radio transponder and a GPS locator, right? I heard those systems were shut down by someone on the plane.”
Sousa sighed again as if weary of answering these particular questions. “If the aircraft experienced a major failure, like a fire in the electrical bay, those systems would have been disabled along with the radio. That doesn’t mean someone aboard intentionally shut them off.”
“Okay what about the black box? That’s supposed to be indestructible, right?”
“The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder are designed to survive a crash, and yes, they do broadcast a 37.5 kilohertz locator ping, at least until the batteries die. Right now, search vessels are deployed in the projected crash area listening for that signal, but in case you haven’t looked at a map lately, it’s a big bloody ocean.”
“If the plane’s disappearance was a deliberate act,” Professor said, “say, an act of terrorism, it might have deviated from its course. A difference of even a few degrees would put it thousands of miles from where you’re looking. That would explain why you haven’t found it, right? I’d say that’s a pretty compelling reason to at least investigate the possibility that this was an act of terrorism.”