Линкольн Чайлд - Crooked River

“It’s a fast Komar-class missile boat,” said the XO, peering into the scope.

“How fast?”

“Top speed rated at forty-four knots, but this one’s moving at thirty.”

“Armaments?”

“Two twenty-five-millimeter guns, two Styx anti-ship missiles.”

At Baugh’s shoulder, Lieutenant Darby swallowed loudly and painfully upon hearing this.

The Chickering was weaving now, executing evasive maneuvers. Baugh gripped the console rails. The Cuban missile boat was a lot smaller than their cutter, but it had those damn Styx missiles. Christ, one of those would obliterate his ship and no amount of chaff could chase it away. But the Chickering couldn’t fire first, especially while in Cuban waters.

“Still painting us with fire control, sir.”

One minute. If they were going to launch a missile, it would be now. He hoped to God this was a bluff.

He heard a small explosion behind him and almost jumped out of his skin, then swung around. He spied a puff of smoke in the sky several miles to the rear. “What the hell was that?”

“Drone self-destructed, sir,” said the OS.

“We’re out,” said the XO. “In international waters. Still painting us.”

“Maintain evasive maneuvers.”

But the Cuban boat was not pursuing. It slowed and began to turn, resuming its heading toward Mariel Harbor.

“Radar illumination ceased, sir.”

The bastards had just been trying to scare him. It was a bluff after all. Maybe he should’ve fired on that little wise-ass and turned it into floating matchsticks. In any case, there was going to be a shitstorm over his incursion into Cuban territorial waters. But he’d let Darby handle that — the lieutenant, truth be told, was good at placing smoke screens where they’d do the most good. Besides, they had the drone footage. And the Cubans knew it. This was going to be big .

“Cease evasive maneuvers,” he said. “Make course zero one zero at thirty knots. Stand down general quarters.”

The alarm went silent and the bridge began to return to normal. Baugh realized he was sweating like a pig. He turned to the operation specialist. “Ms. Atcitty, did the drone footage come through?”

“Aye, sir.”

“What can you see? What were those bastards doing?”

There was a long silence. “It appears, sir, that the prisoners and guards were playing volleyball on the beach.”

The large screen showed a detailed map of the Indian Ocean between Australia and Réunion Island east of Madagascar, bounded on the north by Borneo and Sumatra and on the south by nothing. Stretching across the center of the map was a rat’s nest of pink, red, and burgundy threads, as dense and tangled as Day-Glo steel wool, surrounding a thicker black line that arced from the coast of Java to a spot in the southern Indian Ocean many thousands of miles from land.

Gladstone, standing behind Wallace Lam, stared at the image. “What makes you think this is going to help us?” she asked.

“Because this was the most expensive and sophisticated ocean drift analysis ever performed.”

“Yeah, and it failed.”

Lam sighed. “Lord spare me from fools and numbskulls.”

“Watch out, or I’ll cut your salary.”

“What salary?” He sniffed. “Look. It only failed because the searchers didn’t interpret it properly. But I was able to take their data and perform a different calculation.”

“You’re saying you know where Flight MH370 went down?”

“They spent a hundred and fifty million dollars searching this area here, and here, and over here — and were wrong every time.”

Gladstone stared at the map. “Okay, but we’re not looking for Flight 370. We’re looking for the place where a hundred feet were dumped into the ocean.”

“It’s the same problem, really.” Lam sighed again, this time with impatience. “Let me try to explain.”

“If it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition.”

“I’m a glutton for punishment. Anyway, you know the story of the missing plane. On March eighth, 2014, Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, headed for Beijing. Over the Gulf of Thailand it made a sudden turn and headed southwest, eventually flying far out over the Indian Ocean. About seven and a half hours after it took off, a satellite signal, the last contact with the plane, indicated it was somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean — and then whammo! It disappeared.”

Gladstone nodded. She knew the story well.

“Investigators calculated how far it could have flown, given the fuel it carried and the speed and altitude, and estimated it ran out of fuel and went down somewhere along this arc.” He gestured at the thick black line on the screen. “Which became the main search area.”

“Right.”

“But then !” Lam held up his finger. “On July twenty-ninth, a six-foot piece of the plane, a flaperon, washed up on Réunion Island. And that’s when this reverse-drift study was done, backtracking to March eighth to approximate where that flaperon might have originated.”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

“Patience, boss lady, is a virtue. Now, shut up and listen — please. You can’t just throw a virtual flaperon into the ocean off Réunion Island and then run the clock back to see where it was five months earlier. So what they did was throw five million virtual flaperons into the ocean and run them all back in time to see where they were on March eighth.”

“Using what data?”

“They made a model of the flaperon, put it into a tank, and ran tests on it. They took into account the sail effect — how much wind might affect the floating object. They calculated wave action. They allowed for surface currents, tidal currents, and deeper ocean currents. And finally, they took into account the flaperon’s permeability — how much it became waterlogged and degraded over the months it spent floating at sea. All that went into the model. As more debris washed up on various islands and the African mainland, they added that to the model, as well.”

“So each of those colorful little kinky threads on the screen is one possible backtrail?”

“Right the first time.”

Gladstone stared at countless squiggly lines. “Judging from this map, those virtual flaperons could have come from anywhere in a million square miles. This analysis didn’t work at all.”

“But at least it showed that some areas were more likely than others. They shifted their search after that.”

“But still didn’t find Flight 370.”

“No.”

“Like I said, their model was a failure. A total, balls-up failure.”

“But like I said—”

“And now you want us to replicate their failure?”

“Not the failure .” Lam rolled his eyes. “You see—”

“You want us to dump five million virtual feet into the sea off Turner Beach and backtrack them in time, to see where they started?”

This time, Lam waited until he was sure no more questions were forthcoming before he answered. “Yes, I do.”

“And why will that work for us when it didn’t for them?”

“We have more data on the gulf than they had about the Indian Ocean. And we only have to backtrack twenty-five or so days, not five months. But most important, I had a new idea about a way to analyze their data. I applied it to Flight 370 — and when I did, all the floating debris models from the flight converged in one approximate area on the date of the crash. Instead of a thousand.”

Gladstone stared at the map. “So what’s your new idea?”

“I figured if I applied Feynman sum-over-histories diagrams to the possibilities, I might be able to eliminate the least likely pathways. Not every one of these squiggly drift patterns is equally probable: some are more likely than others. So you eliminate the unlikely ones — using Feynman diagrams.”