Nelson DeMille - Night Fall

Captain Spruck stopped speaking and had a thoughtful look in his eyes, then he said, “I glanced up at my sail, and something in the sky to the southwest caught my eye. It was a bright streak of light rising into the sky. The light was reddish orange and may have risen from a point beyond the horizon.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“I did not. The light streak was coming from out on the ocean, toward the land, and slightly toward my position. It was climbing at a steep angle, perhaps thirty-five or forty degrees, and seemed to be accelerating, although that’s a difficult call because of the angles and the lack of firm background references. But if I had to estimate the speed, I’d say about a hundred knots.”

I asked, “You figured all this out in… how many seconds?”

“About three seconds. You get about five seconds in the cockpit of a fighter-bomber.”

I counted to three in my head and realized that was more time than you get to dodge a bullet.

Captain Spruck added, “But as I told the FBI, there were too many variables and unknowns for me to be absolutely positive about any of my calculations. I didn’t know the point of origin of the object, or its exact size or distance from me, so its speed was a guess.”

“So you’re not really sure what you saw?”

“I know what I saw.” He looked through the window and said, “I’ve seen enough enemy surface-to-air missiles coming at me and coming at my squadron mates to get a sense of these things.” He smiled tightly and said, “When they’re coming at you, they look bigger, faster, and closer than they actually are.” He added, “You divide by two.”

I smiled and said, “I had a little Beretta pointed at me once that I thought was a.357 Magnum.”

He nodded.

I asked, “But it was definitely a streak of red light that you saw?”

“That I’m sure of. A reddish orange streak of bright light, and at the apex of this light was a white, incandescent spot, which suggested to me that I was seeing the ignition point of probably a solid fuel propellant trailed by the red-orange afterburn.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“But did you see the… projectile?”

“I did not.”

“Smoke?”

“A plume of white smoke.”

“Did you notice this aircraft-this 747 that subsequently crashed?”

“I noticed it briefly before I became fixed on the streak of light. I could see the glint-the last of the sunlight off its aluminum skin, and I saw the aircraft’s lights, and four white contrails.”

“Okay… back to the streak of light.”

Captain Spruck continued, “I watched this red-orange streak of light closely as it continued its climb into the sky-”

“Excuse me. What was your first impression?”

“My first, second, and lasting impression was that it was a surface-to-air missile.”

I had been trying to avoid the “M” word, but there it was. I asked, “Why? Why not a shooting star? Lightning? A skyrocket?”

“It was a surface-to-air missile.”

“Most people said their first impression was a leftover Fourth of July-”

“Not only was it a missile, it was a guided missile. It zigzagged slightly as it climbed, as though correcting its course, then it seemed to slow for a half second, and it made a distinct turn to the east-toward my position-then it seemed to disappear, perhaps behind a cloud, or perhaps it had expended its fuel and had become ballistic, or perhaps my view of it was now blocked by its target.”

Target . A TWA Boeing 747, designated as Flight 800 to Paris, with 230 people on board had become the target .

We both stayed silent, during which time I evaluated Captain Thomas Spruck’s statements. And as we’re taught to do, I considered his general demeanor, his appearance of truthfulness, and his intelligence. Captain Spruck got high marks in all categories of witness believability. Good witnesses, however, sometimes fall apart at the end-such as the time a very intelligent man who began as a good material witness in a disappearance case ended his statement with his theory that the missing person had been abducted by space aliens. I had dutifully noted that in my report with an asterisk explaining that I wasn’t fully convinced.

Witnesses also start to unravel under questioning, so I asked Captain Spruck, “Tell me again how far this object was from you.”

He answered patiently, “As I said, I believe, but I can’t be sure, that it originated over the horizon, which would be about six miles line of sight on the water with calm seas. But it could have been farther, of course.”

“So, you didn’t see an initial point of… let’s say, launch?”

“No.”

“What would that have looked like? I mean, how much light would that make?”

“A lot. I’d be able to see the glow lighting up the dark horizon, even if it was launched ten or twenty miles from my position.”

“But you didn’t?”

“To be honest, I don’t know what first caught my eye-the flash of a launch, or the red-orange streak of light rising off the horizon.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“No. A missile launch is not that loud, especially from a distance, with the wind blowing toward the launch.”

“I see. And how far up was this object when you first recognized it as an ascending streak of light?”

“I can’t say unless I know the distance. Height is a product of distance and angle off the horizon. Simple trigonometry.”

“Right.” I was a little out of my element here, but interrogation techniques remained the same. I said, “Give me a good guess.”

He thought a moment and said, “Maybe fifteen hundred to two thousand feet above the water when I first saw it. This initial impression was reinforced as I watched it climb, and I was then able to get a feel for its speed and flight path. It was rising in a straight line as opposed to an arc, with small zigzag corrections, then a distinct turn as it locked on.”

“Locked on to what?”

“Its target.”

“Okay…” I asked him, “Did you ever see that CIA animation of what they thought happened?”

“I did. I own a copy of it.”

“Yeah, I need to get one. Okay, so in this animation, what they’re saying is that the center fuel tank vapors accidentally exploded because of an electrical short circuit. Right? And what all the eyewitnesses saw was a stream of burning fuel from a ruptured wing tank coming down from the aircraft-not a streak of light coming up — toward the aircraft. In other words, people had it backwards in their minds. They heard the explosion before they saw it, then looked up, and mistook the burning stream of fuel for a rising rocket. What do you think?”

He looked at me, then pointed his thumb into the air and asked me, “This way is up. Right?”

“Last time I checked.” I said to him, “The other possibility, also shown in this animation, is that this aircraft actually continued to rise a few thousand feet, and what eyewitnesses saw was the burning aircraft ascending, which looked to people on the ground like a rising streak of light from a missile.” I asked him, “What do you think?”

“I think I know the difference between a streak of light, which is accelerating and ascending, trailing a white smoke plume, as opposed to a burning aircraft in its death throes. I’ve seen both.”

I had the disturbing thought that Special Agent Mayfield had done a better job of questioning Captain Spruck than I was doing. I asked him, “Is this basically the same testimony you gave Ms. Mayfield?”

“Yes.”

“Did she ask good questions?”

He looked at me as though I’d just asked a stupid question, but replied politely, “She did.” He added, “We went through the sequence of events for over an hour. She said she’d be back and could I please think about what I saw and call her if anything new came to mind.”