THREE MINUTES

a novel

by Robb Magley

--

On September 11th, 2001, terrorists hijacked four airliners in the skies above the United States. Three crashed into targets in New York and Washington, D.C. The fourth crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania.

At the Hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, retired Colonel Alan Scott testified on behalf of the Air Force that the fourth airliner, United Airlines Flight 93, impacted the earth killing all aboard at 10:03 AM local time. This time was also corroborated by the FBI, for whom the crash is an ongoing criminal investigation.

Analysis of seismic records, conducted at the request of the United States Army by scientists from Columbia University and the Maryland Geological Survey, identified seismic signals associated with the crash and determined it took place at 10:06 AM.

Neither the Air Force nor the FBI have offered any explanation for the time difference.

---

Chapter 1

09:30, 24 August 2000

400 miles west of the Azores, Atlantic Ocean

Flood lights from the remotely operated submarine filled the television viewscreens with twin shafts of blue light, as "Tweety" made its slow descent to 10,000 feet below the surface.

There were no fish; as the crew of the Lady Tramp sat huddled around instruments monitoring its descent, only tiny flecks of plankton rising on the viewer indicated the ROV's downward motion. Ann Wright kept her hands away from the keyboard and grudgingly let the computer guide her little robot to the ocean floor.

"Tweety" was nearly twenty feet long, almost as tall, and weighed more than a Winnebago. Its yellow paint job was all that tied it visually to its cartoon namesake, that and her designer's adamant declaration that the original Tweety bird was in fact female; nothing was worse luck than failing to name a sea-going vessel after a woman.

Lady Tramp held its position with a system of directional thrusters, linked to a computer which took its position from satellites. She was a mission-built vessel, one hundred feet long and designed to support underwater exploration and recovery for six weeks or longer. Lady Tramp represented a turning point for Ann's company, Wright Recovery; after nearly a decade of working from leased boats designed for fishing, or hauling cargo, Ann and her team were delighted with this recent state-of-the-art purchase.

Aside from ship's crew and technical support personnel for "Tweety", today she carried two "observers", representing close to a million U.S. dollars in current and future capital for Ann's team. Ann assumed they were , like their clients -- quiet men both, it was only after three days of steaming out to the dive site that one of them had struck up even the feeblest of conversations. His name, Ann discovered, was Korshin. She hadn't been able to figure out if that was his first name, or his last.

Korshin's job, and that of his assistant, was merely to be the eyes of their clients; this had meant so far that the pair had kept to their own cabin, coming out for meals and the occasional smoke on Lady Tramp's aft deck. They hadn't gotten in the way. Ann had spoken to each of her people in private, warning them not to refer to the men as "carp," an old Navy term for useless passengers, unless they were well out of earshot.

Now that Tweety was swimming, no one could keep them out of the control room.

"Passing four thousand," came the voice of Gabe Rushing, Ann's navigation specialist. Gabe had his face pressed into a light shielding box around his monitor, his arms hanging above his head, giving the impression of a submarine captain staring through his periscope. Although the windows in the control room were painted black, today the lights were on to keep the "observers" from tripping over the tangle of wiring crisscrossing the deck.

Lady Tramp and Ann's team were treasure hunting machines. Unlike their more famous brethren (Florida's Mel Fisher, for example), they eschewed publicity. Ann and her crew specialized in more discrete recoveries; their principal client list included insurance companies, large corporations, and the occasional head of state. When the Spanish government, in what Ann considered a marvelous bit of historical irony, lost a cargo aircraft and its shipment of gold bullion from dubious sources in Central America, Ann and the crew of the Lady Tramp were quietly dispatched to the Norwegian coastline. In three days they raised the bulk of the gold, to the tune of roughly 400 million dollars returned to Spain.

They kept their fees to less than one percent.

"Eight thousand," said Gabe. "We're going to slow down a bit to keep the thud factor down."

"Clear signal to the satellite buoy," said Ann. She tapped her keyboard. "We're looking really good on target, even for us."

That got a smile out of Korshin, she noticed. He was a handsome man, but his face seemed distant. Sharp eyes, for sure, and solemn. Ann suspected no small part of that was due to the somber nature of this project. Somber, and thus far expensive; their clients had spent massive amounts of money already, and so far there was virtually nothing to show for it.

That was about to change.

Tweety was trailing behind her a long, thin tether; an unfathomably expensive carbon fiber composite cable, strong enough for the job, yet thin enough to allow a single, two-mile long length to be spooled onto a ship. The link to the navigation buoy kept the ROV in touch with orbital satellites, letting its guidance computer know exactly where on earth it was. The update was fast enough to ensure an accuracy to within a couple of inches, even ten thousand feet below sea level.

"That's bottom," said Gabe quietly. The picture from Tweety's camera showed a quick flurry of sand in front of the lens before it settled.

"Let's spin it around."

At Ann's command, Bill Flowers' hands reached for Tweety's thruster controls. Flowers had been a construction crane operator in his former life, swinging hundreds of tons of structural metal and concrete around the skies of Atlanta. Today, he "flew" Tweety like he had been doing it his whole life. His right hand danced nimbly over a keypad, while the left gently nudged an assignable joystick, at one moment turning the entire ROV, at another extending Tweety's manipulator arm.

Gabe turned to Korshin. "We're going to pop the cork on that locator pulse here," he explained, "to make sure we're dead on."

"This will locate the escape pod?" said Korshin.

"Hopefully," said Gabe. "And your boss' son will finally come home."

Korshin nodded, and smiled thinly. When they had first met, Gabe hadn't figured out what was so disturbing about the man's smile right away. Then it struck him; Korshin's smile didn't telegraph up to his eyes. Gabe had made a few attempts during the trip out to make the man more comfortable, cracking the occasional joke, or just asking Korshin about his life.

It had gone nowhere, and Gabe had given up.

A loud and harmonic double thud echoed through the control room, from thousands of feet below the hull. Like a sonar echo from the submarine movies, thought Gabe, only deeper.

"There it is," interrupted Ann. "Flowers, I think you can grab this one with your eyes closed."

On Ann's monitor, superimposed over the image of an endless ocean floor of sand, was a computer-generated rectangular blue box twenty feet long and half as wide. The image seemed no more than an inch or two beneath the sandy bottom, and as Flowers flipped his left hand back to reverse the throttle, a cloud of murk briefly obscured the view.

Ann was always impressed with Flowers' adept handling of ROVs. Actually, Flowers was a man adept at most everything he put his hands to; at her first meeting with him, he had driven her back to the Wright Recovery offices, after a pleasant interview over lunch. Pulling up to the door, in the middle of a busy downtown street, Flowers had grinned at her, taken a quick look around, and closed his eyes.

She had watched in amazement as he swung the car backwards into a tiny parking space, very quickly, leaving mere inches between his bumpers and those of the cars on either end. He put the car in "park", and opened his eyes, beaming at her.

Ann had hired him immediately.

Right now Flowers had Tweety running half of its thrusters forward, and the other half in reverse; the effect on the bottom was to slowly blow away layer after layer of sand. Tweety was effectively digging a hole, and Flowers ran her like this for a good five minutes before shutting the motors down. They waited for the sediment to settle back down.

As the sand began to fall back down to the ocean floor on either side of the hole, the image from the camera cleared enough to make out the shape of a dull metal box, still lightly outlined by the computer-generated blue glow. Ann flipped the pulser's image off, and sat back to let Flowers bring Tweety's arm into play.

A second image appeared on the monitor in the upper right corner, a closer view of the target object as seen from another camera mounted on the end of the manipulator arm. As it drew closer, markings on the top of the box became quite clear.

"My God," said Korshin, breaking the silence.

There, reflected in the ROV's bright lights, was an engraved stainless steel panel:

SSN 589 SCORPION

EBD - GDC - 58

Gabe whistled quietly. "Time to come in from the cold, son."

---

The pod had been extremely heavy, visibly (and audibly) straining the massive winch as it brought it on its long, slow journey to the surface. It had taken hours, and the crew kept dousing sea water on the spooling mechanism, fearful of overheating. Ann knew this was probably going to mean an expensive overhaul once Lady Tramp reached port. Something else, along with that specially-fabricated boron-kevlar winch line, for the final bill.

The "observers" had both become quite active once the pod was aboard, taking authority over the recovery platform once it had been swung on deck. They produced an elaborate rolling dolly from their compartment, and worked together to slide the entire metal box into the forward hold.

"Let me help you with that," offered Gabe, as the suited men struggled with the pod.

"No, thank you," said Korshin. "You will understand, this is really a private matter."

"Of course," answered Gabe. "Just let us know if you need anything."

"Thank you, thank you," said Korshin hurriedly, as the men wheeled the pod into the hold, and slid the roll-up door down behind them. Gabe heard the locking bar slide into place.

Ann, for her part, was unconcerned. Let them have their privacy, she thought to herself. They're certainly paying enough for it. Further, she mused, she truly had no desire to see what sailors looked like after thirty years on the bottom of the Atlantic.

---

In the hold, the "observers" were working fast. They unlatched metal suitcases and moved with an air of purpose.

Using a pneumatic tool, one of the men began to spin bolts off the outer hull. Korshin wheeled over a large varnished-wood funeral casket. He opened the top half, revealing a padded internal casing with various electronic monitoring devices, and no less than three inches of thick metal lining.

The large access door fell off the pod with a wet metallic crash, and was kicked across the hold floor. Both men reached into the pod and gently lifted out first one, then a second metal cylinder, each about the size of a small propane tank. One was gently cradled into the funeral casket, and Korshin leaned over and connected wires and sensors to the other.

"Dityatko moyo," he whispered. My baby.

The second cylinder remained on the ship's deck, the object of attention by the first man, who attached a small device and wrapped the excess wire on brackets underneath the pod. Switching it on, the small readout on its side began blinking. Korshin looked at his partner questioningly.

"Vsyo pad kontrolem," said the man. "Dover`sya mne." Trust me.

The men quickly repacked their tools and began wheeling the casket towards the entrance. Korshin reached down and slid the locking bar free, and raised the door. The instant they were through, they brought the door back down. The other man reached his hand through and pushed the locking bar until it was almost all the way in, then pulled the door all the way to the ground. They both heard the lock slide home.

Out on the deck, Ann was watching the sea. It was calm, which always made her feel comfortable, and she began to wonder how long they would wait for their clients to finish before getting underway. There were several long days and nights ahead of them, and she admitted (if only to herself) she was ready to be back in port. The recovery business paid well, but she recognized that there was little point in earning a good living if you couldn't spend it on a few vacations every year. Maybe this was the year she'd try the Caribbean.

Her reverie was broken by the sight of a surprising dot on the horizon. It grew quickly, and the whup-whup-whup was unmistakable. A giant Sikorsky helicopter was storming its way towards her boat.

Ann walked over to a locker, opened it, and took out a pair of binoculars. To her surprise, the helicopter had writing on the side that looked like Russian characters. What was it doing out here, far off the Spanish coastline?

"Gabe," she turned to her navigator. "Get on the radio, see if you can hail these guys." She began to feel a little uneasy, in no small part because the helo, wherever it was from, was unmistakably military.

Gabe nodded, and went into the radio room. The giant helicopter had moved itself into position right over the Lady Tramp's forward deck, hovering menacingly. The noise was deafening.

"It's okay!"

Ann spun at the sound of Korshin's voice, as the men emerged from the hold with the casket. The other one was speaking earnestly into a small radio headset.

"Korshin!" She called out, yelling over the helicopter's incredible noise. "What the hell is this?"

"It's okay!" Korshin held his mouth close to her head, speaking loudly into her ear. "This helicopter, we have hired it. We have the son, and are to get him off quickly. My employer wanted it done immediately."

Ann twisted her face, holding her baseball cap under the prop wash. "What about the other body?"

"No problem." Korshin smiled broadly. "In about ten minutes the second helicopter will arrive for him."

Ann was baffled. Two helicopters?

"I thought we were bringing them back to port!"

"It's okay!" Korshin yelled again, putting a large, strong hand on Ann's shoulder. "This is faster, better, ah?" He beamed at her, patting her again on the back, and rushed over to help his companion secure wide nylon straps to the casket.

The heavy lift line from the helo had found its way to the men's position, and the wide open door of the Sikorsky revealed two men working the winch. One of them, noticed Ann, was keeping a large-caliber automatic weapon trained on the deck, and her crew. Ann felt like she was being put upon by pirates.

She and her crew watched as the hook from the lift line was slipped under the strapping, and Korshin gave a thumbs-up to the helicopter. The casket left the deck of the Lady Tramp, rising up towards the open door. It swung inside, and a second line was quickly lowered back down to the deck.

Korshin and his assistant clipped themselves onto loops twenty feet apart on the line. Ann realized they were now wearing harnesses over their suits.

The giant helo lifted the pair of men off the deck of the Lady Tramp and took off ascending to the south, with no apparent urgent effort to bring either of them inside as they picked up speed. Gabe stepped from behind Ann and shielded his eyes to watch the strange transport shrink in the distance.

"Where are they going in such a hurry?" said Gabe.

Ann shook her head silently.

---

On the Sikorsky, Korshin had already found a seat as the door slid shut behind the second man. Buckling himself in, Korshin pulled a headset from a hook, fitted it to his head, and adjusted the microphone to reach his lips.

"Pilot," he barked in English. "What's our distance?"

"400 kilometers, sir," answered the pilot. The rotor blades whined in a high fever pitch, as the helicopter was hurtling full speed across the clear sky.

As Korshin turned back towards the passenger compartment, one of his men put a device into his hand. He nodded and flipped it open, wiping sweat and grime from his eyes. The Soviet-era transmitter resembled a miniature notebook computer, with a very small keyboard and a large rotary switch. Korshin tapped a short message carefully, looked up, and turned the switch to peredaitye.

He looked around at his companions briefly, then closed his eyes. For a moment, nothing happened. Then light - the cabin of the Sikorsky filled with incredibly bright, white light, streaming in the windows, even through the tiny gap around the main side door. A second later, the helicopter shook as an aftward wind boosted it along. As the initial wave of light diminished, a fireball as bright as the setting sun boiled from just over the horizon to the north. Korshin opened his eyes to watch, as did everyone else on board, as a familiar mushroom-shaped cloud begin to form behind them.

---

back to Chapter Index

back home

email Robb