Flight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales (12 page)

John motioned around. “What is this?”

In mid-sip, Gallagher’s eyebrows lifted. When he lowered the glass his tongue agilely shaved off his froth mustache. “A place for discerning gentlemen. Don’t worry. It’s nothing you don’t want it to be.”

With that the dancing woman came and sat next to John. She was violently pretty and wearing a black dress that could have fit inside a coin purse. Her dancing had left her sweaty and luminous, an ecosystem in miniature.

John looked plaintively at his host. “Gallagher, please.”

Gallagher laughed again. “One drink, Counsel. It’s a nice place to relax if you let yourself.” To the dancing woman he said, “Sweetheart, davei. Come sit next to me.” She did. The next woman who came over Gallagher tried to wave off; she sat next to John anyway.

John shook her hand. Her legs were ruinously thin, her stretch pants tight around her thighs but barely holding shape against her calves. Her neck was a veiny stalk. She sniffled in an affected way and pulled two silver clips from her black hair. They were purely for show: not one displaced strand fell into her face. She scrutinized the clips as though she had panned them from a riverbed. She was waiting for John to speak. She replaced the clips and studied her foot as she tapped it against the red carpeting, which looked as though it had been the recipient of many gastric sorrows. Her toenails were the color of aluminum foil. John still said nothing to her. Gallagher, meanwhile, was getting along well with the dancing girl. Honestly. It appeared they were having a fairly serious conversation. The woman next to John lit a cigarette and took one of those long, crackling drags that actually made cigarettes seem appealing. Smoke leaked from the corners of her mouth. After another minute of this, she left, and John was alone with his beer.

What they did not ask after his speech was whether he had suffered any reservations at the time he had written his memos. John did have occasional reservations. They all did. John worried first that interrogators might not feel restrained by the same moral qualms that he, John, would. He also worried about what was called “force drift,” where force applied unsuccessfully had no choice but to become force applied again, but more intently. After all, enhanced interrogation was excusable only if the person being interrogated was assumed to know something. This was why he never imagined it being applied to anyone but al-Qaeda members.

John understood his arguments were controversial and sometimes even repellent, but they were legal rather than moral judgments. John did not craft policy or devise what form “enhanced interrogation” actually took. He simply measured legality against relevant statutes. His memos had been concerned with eighteen methods, and they came in three categories. The first category was limited to two techniques: yelling and deception. The second category comprised twelve: stress positions, isolation, forced standing for up to four hours, phobia exploitation, false documents, removal from standard interrogation sites, twenty-four-hour-long interrogations, food variation, removal of clothing, forced grooming, deprivation of light, and loud music. The third category, intended for use only against the hardest cases, broke down into four techniques: mild physical contact, scenarios that threatened the death of the detainee or his family, extreme element exposure, and simulated drowning. There was also a fourth category, which, thankfully, he had never been asked to rule on. The fourth category was also the loneliest. Its one technique: extraordinary rendition.

John had told himself, while contemplating leaving Justice, that it would be better outside. Walks across an autumn quad, adoring students waiting outside his office, all the intramural atmosphere Washington could never provide except in venal approximation. Justice was a museum, and its cold marble hallways led to a kind of intellectual progeria: even the young there quickly became old. Addington was the saddest to see John go. Do you really, Addington asked, want to teach spoiled rich kids who give murdering proletarian mobs a good name?

Within months after John’s departure, many of his judgments were withdrawn and then suspended. John later learned that Addington protested this by saying the President had been relying on John’s views. In that case, the answer came back, the President may have been breaking the law. Five months later, Abu Ghraib. Seven months later, John’s memos were declassified. Gonzales, at the press conference, claimed to want to show the media that due diligence and proper legal vetting had occurred at every step in the enhanced interrogation process. That was what he actually believed was at issue.

John would never forget the rattlesnake energy coiled in those War Council meetings. They were all as confident as Maoists. Feith, Haynes, Addington, Gonzales, Flanigan—men one step away from the President. The lawyer’s lawyers. The nation had suffered a heart attack and they were holding the paddles of defibrillation, working together to improvise legal strategies for something no law as yet existed to contain. They met in Gonzales’s office in the White House, sometimes at Defense. Simple, uncatered, unrecorded meetings in which the most luxurious staples were a few Diet Cokes. John often looked at himself and Gonzales during these meetings. John was a first-generation American, Gonzales the son of immigrants so impoverished they did not even have a telephone. And yet here he was, drafting policy during the most serious national-security crisis in half a century, serving as personal counsel to the world’s most powerful man. This was the America John had been willing to do anything legal to protect.

Then you had Feith and Addington, androids who regarded other human beings as little more than collections of interesting mental malfunctions. The dimples within Feith’s rumpled Muppet face were venom repositories. He circulated memos without buckslips so no one could be sure to whom they were routed or cc’d them to people who never actually received them. He made speeches on the sanctity of Geneva only to heighten the incongruity of its sacred shroud being filthied by terrorists. His was such manifestly confusing lawyering that those who heard Feith talk about Geneva came away believing Article III would apply to everyone the United States captured. By the end of one of Feith’s monologues he had one of the Joint Chiefs mistakenly believing that all eighteen enhanced interrogation techniques were sanctioned by the Army’s Field Manual. Not one of them actually was. The idea to launch a new intelligence agency called Total Information Awareness, the logo of which was a crazy Masonic eye overlooking the world? Only Feith.

As for Addington: the eyes of a Russian icon, the bearing of Lincoln, the disposition of a hand grenade. After the attacks, Addington began carrying a copy of the Constitution in his pocket so worn and flimsy it looked like it served as a hankie or coaster or both. Whenever anyone disagreed with him, he pulled it out and started reading from it. It was Addington’s special genius to frame every legal and moral argument in warlike terms, whereas any argument about actual warfare came draped in diaphanous euphemism. Maybe that was why, out of all of them, only Addington escaped. Only he had managed to keep his name off every relevant document.

They had attempted to legislate within an atmosphere in which the ticking time bomb was the operational assumption rather than the outlying statistical Pluto it was. Now John could see that, but that was only one way of thinking about it. Another was this: intelligence was the ability to discern the applicability of incoming outside information. The better part of knowledge was knowing what you were allowed to forget.

Three people had been subjected to waterboarding. Three people. And for that he had to answer questions about war crimes. John had heard that his successor allowed himself to be waterboarded before supplying a decision about whether it was over the line. The answer: it was. But for all that, for all the debate and decapitated careers, the CIA was still allowed to use simulated drowning (John actually preferred this more honest term), just as John had originally argued. His core arguments were still in place. Of course, no one in Justice wanted to sign off on CIA use of the technique, but the President found his man. He always did. But that was bitterness. John was not bitter. He would have liked to see Feith or Gonzales or Ashcroft, or any of them, alone in a European city, answering questions on policies they had endorsed and were now ashamed of.

John looked into his pint glass, now an empty crystal well. Somehow he had drunk his beer. He could brood here, he knew, all night, and let the dark wave carry him.

“I’m ready to leave,” he told Gallagher, who was still having his edifying conversation with the dancer.

He looked at John. “I hope you’ve made time to see the Museum of Occupation tomorrow.”

“I can’t, actually. I’m leaving in the morning.” John looked at his watch. It was already past midnight.

Gallagher sat back. “A shame. Tallinn’s a nice place to spend a day in.”

“Thank you for the drink,” John said, standing. “Feel free to stay. I can find my way back.”

Gallagher remained seated but extended his hand. “I hope someday we might meet again. Have a good flight tomorrow.”

At the door, John turned for one last glimpse of Gallagher. He was already on his cell, bent over in his chair, the dancer getting up to leave. Gallagher noticed John lingering in the doorway and shot him a not-very-sharp salute. Hard to believe that guy was a Marine. John wondered, though only for a moment, to whom Gallagher might be speaking.

****

Janika’s interrogation film had been over for twenty minutes or two hours. It was impossible to keep track of time in the darkness. Light gave time’s passage handholds and markers. Time passed in the dark was like driving through cornfields—an endless similarity, full of the unseen.

What the exercise was intended to provoke in him he did not know. He was no more or less sympathetic to those he had helped doom to torture than he was before it began. They misunderstood him. They did not comprehend what he had actually argued for. Those in command of this plane and, now, his life, had nothing to gain from him, other than invigorating their sadism. He, in return, had nothing he could give them, other than the gift of his torment. Torture, he had written, was a matter of intent. He now knew that torture was many more things than that. The exchange of dark knowledge, a revelation of hidden capacities, the annihilation of connection.

Suddenly John was staring at the plane’s ceiling, its vaguely surgical nozzles gushing air. The lights were back on. He wrenched around in his adopted coach seat and was not quite prepared to see Janika’s broken body, still tangled in luggage. When he stood, gusts of sickness-spiced air pushed through the cloth chimneys of his clothing.

After Janika’s tormentor had moved through Category I and the more visually operatic techniques of Categories II and III, several other men entered the room. What happened next was as dreadful as anything John had seen. He refused to watch most of it and opened his eyes only after the sounds of her struggle had ceased. While the men were verifying the extinguishment of Janika’s vital signs, the film stopped.

John returned to his designated seat. Upon it sat his iPhone, white as a wafer. A dumb flood of thought branched off toward what few remaining lowlands it could. One of them was Gallagher, the only person who knew that John had changed his flight. Gallagher’s card was still in his breast pocket. He took it out and looked at it, his thumb playing over the raised embassy seal. He wondered how Gallagher knew he would not throw the card away. He wondered how it could be that Janika was wearing the same clothes in the interrogation video as she had been on this plane. He wondered how long he had actually been unconscious and whether this was the plane he had boarded. He wondered where on this plane those who were doing this to him were hiding. He wondered, too, how his iPhone was receiving any service, but there it was: two bars of reception. An answer came to one of his questions: Gallagher had not anticipated John keeping his card. John was four digits into Gallagher’s number when the recognition application tripped. It had been added to his phone.

Gallagher answered after the third ring. “Tallinn is a nice place to spend a day. You should have listened to me.”

What could John say? They had what they wanted.

“Nothing to ask? I don’t blame you. You have bigger problems, Counsel. Right now you should probably turn around.”

He did. A man in a black ski mask, and a YOU SUCK tee shirt, hit John in the face with an instrument of formidably metal bluntness. When his knees met the carpet he saw the item clearly: the same air compressor he had used to beat the cockpit door. John’s head turned mutant with pain. He did not remember the second blow but it must have come, because he woke, once again suddenly, in a plywood room, tied to a chair. One of his eyes no longer worked. Some of his teeth were gone and his tongue felt as swollen and bloody as a leech. He looked down at his shirt: a butcher’s apron. The plane’s engine was still in his ears. Turbulence shook the room. He could hear weeping somewhere close by. Sitting across from John was Gallagher, whose hands were folded atop yet another sign. He did not show it to John, but John could read it. Gallagher told John he could promise questions but not answers. He also told him this was new territory for all involved. Not even he was sure where this would go. “Are you ready?” Gallagher asked him. “I need to know if you’re ready.” John nodded, feeling somehow covetous of his mouthful of blood. The door behind him opened. Footsteps. Hands like toothless muzzles took hold of him. Category V had begun.

Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds

Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons has written award-winning science fiction novels (
Hyperion
), award-winning fantasy/horror novels (
Carrion Comfort
), and stories which contain elements of both. Here is one of his very best stories, remarkable for its clarity and its brevity. Simmons suggests that two minutes and forty-five seconds can be the length of a pop song…a rollercoaster ride…or just enough time to contemplate one’s onrushing death.

Roger Colvin closed his eyes and the steel bar clamped down across his lap and they began the steep climb. He could hear the rattle of the heavy chain and the creak of steel wheels on steel rails as they clanked up the first hill of the rollercoaster. Someone behind him laughed nervously. Terrified of heights, heart pounding painfully against his ribs, Colvin peeked out from between spread fingers.

The metal rails and white wooden frame rose steeply ahead of him. Colvin was in the first car. He lowered both hands and tightly gripped the metal restraining bar, feeling the dried sweat of past palms there. Someone giggled in the car behind him. He turned his head only far enough to peer over the side of the rails.

They were very high and still rising. The midway and parking lots grew smaller, individuals growing too tiny to be seen and the crowds becoming mere carpets of color, fading into a larger mosaic of geometries of streets and lights as the entire city became visible, then the entire county. They clanked higher. The sky darkened to a deeper blue. Colvin could see the curve of the earth in the haze-blued distance. He realized that they were far out over the edge of a lake now as he caught the glimmer of light on wavetops miles below through the wooden ties. Colvin closed his eyes as they briefly passed through the cold breath of a cloud, then snapped them open again as the pitch of chain rumble changed, as the steep gradient lessened, as they reached the top.

And went over.

There was nothing beyond. The two rails curved out and down and ended in air.

Colvin gripped the restraining bar as the car pitched forward and over. He opened his mouth to scream. The fall began.

“Hey, the worst part’s over.” Colvin opened his eyes to see Bill Montgomery handing him a drink. The sound of the Gulfstream’s jet engines was a dull rumble under the gentle hissing of air from the overhead ventilator nozzle. Colvin took the drink, turned down the flow of air, and glanced out the window. Logan International was already out of sight behind them and Colvin could make out Nantasket Beach below, a score of small white triangles of sail in the expanse of bay and ocean beyond. They were still climbing.

“Damn, we’re glad you decided to come with us this time, Roger,” Montgomery said to Colvin. “It’s good having the whole team together again. Like the old days.” Montgomery smiled. The three other men in the cabin raised their glasses.

Colvin played with the calculator in his lap and sipped his vodka. He took a breath and closed his eyes.

Afraid of heights.
Always
afraid. Six years old and in the barn, tumbling from the loft, the fall seemingly endless, time stretching out, the sharp tines of the pitchfork rising toward him. Landing, wind knocked out of him, cheek and right eye against the straw, three inches from the steel points of the pitchfork.

“The company’s ready to see better days,” said Larry Miller. “Two and a half years of bad press is enough. Be good to see the launch tomorrow. Get things started again.”

“Here, here,” said Tom Weiscott. It was not yet noon but Tom had already had too much to drink.

Colvin opened his eyes and smiled. Counting himself, there were four corporate vice presidents in the plane. Weiscott was still a Project Manager. Colvin put his cheek to the window and watched Cape Cod Bay pass below. He guessed their altitude to be eleven or twelve thousand feet and climbing.

Colvin imagined a building nine miles high. From the carpeted hall of the top floor he would step into the elevator. The floor of the elevator would be made of glass. The elevator shaft drops away 4,600 floors beneath him, each floor marked with halogen lights, the parallel lights drawing closer in the nine miles of black air beneath him until they merged in a blur below.

He looks up in time to see the cable snap, separate. He falls, clutching futilely at the inside walls of the elevator, walls which have grown as slippery as the clear glass floor. Lights rush by, but already the concrete floor of the shaft is visible miles below—a tiny blue concrete square, growing as the elevator car plummets. He knows that he has almost three minutes to watch that blue square come closer, rise up to smash him. Colvin screams and the spittle floats in the air in front of him, falling at the same velocity, hanging there. The lights rush past. The blue square grows.

Colvin took a drink, placed the glass in the circle set in the wide arm of his chair, and tapped away at his calculator.

Falling objects in a gravity field follow precise mathematical rules, as precise as the force vectors and burn rates in the shaped charges and solid fuels Colvin had designed for twenty years, but just as oxygen affects combustion rates, so air controls the speed of a falling body. Terminal velocity depends upon atmospheric pressure, mass distribution, and surface area as much as upon gravity.

Colvin lowered his eyelids as if to doze and saw what he saw every night when he pretended to sleep; the billowing white cloud, expanding outward like a time-lapse film of a slanting, tilting stratocumulus blossoming against a dark blue sky, the reddish brown interior of nitrogen tetroxide flame, and—just visible below the two emerging, mindless contrails of the SRBs—the tumbling, fuzzy square of the forward fuselage, flight deck included. Even the most amplified images had not shown him the closer details—the intact pressure vessel that was the crew compartment, scorched on the right side where the runaway SRB had played its flame upon it, tumbling, falling free, trailing wires and cables and shreds of fuselage behind it like an umbilical and afterbirth. The earlier images had not shown these details, but Colvin had seen them, touched them, after the fracturing impact with the merciless blue sea. There were layers of tiny barnacles growing on the ruptured skin. Colvin imagined the darkness and cold waiting at the end of that fall; small fish feeding.

“Roger,” said Steve Cahill, “where’d you get your fear of flying?”

Colvin shrugged, finished his vodka. “I don’t know.” In Viet Nam—not “Nam” or “in-country”—a place Colvin still wanted to think of as a place rather than a condition, he had flown. Already an expert on shaped charges and propellants, Colvin was being flown out to Bong Son Valley near the coast to see why a shipment of standard C-4 plastic explosive was not detonating for an ARVN unit when the Jesus nut came off their Huey and the helicopter fell, rotorless, 280 feet into the jungle, tore through almost a hundred feet of thick vegetation, and came to a stop, upside down, in vines ten feet above the ground. The pilot had been neatly impaled by a limb that smashed up through the floor of the Huey. The co-pilot’s skull had smashed through the windshield. The gunner was thrown out, breaking his neck and back, and died the next day. Colvin walked away with a sprained ankle.

Colvin looked down as they crossed Nantucket. He estimated their altitude at eighteen thousand feet and climbing steadily. Their cruising altitude, he knew, was to be thirty-two thousand feet. Much lower than forty-six thousand, especially lacking the vertical thrust vector, but so much depended upon surface area.

When Colvin was a boy in the 1950s, he saw a photograph in the “old”
National Enquirer
of a woman who had jumped off the Empire State Building and landed on the roof of a car. Her legs were crossed almost casually at the ankles; there was a hole in the toe of one of her nylon stockings. The roof of the car was flattened, folded inward, almost like a large goosedown mattress, molding itself to the weight of a sleeping person. The woman’s head looked as if it were sunk deep in a soft pillow.

Colvin tapped at his calculator. A woman stepping off the Empire State Building would fall for almost fourteen seconds before hitting the street. Someone falling in a metal box from 46,000 feet would fall for two minutes and forty-five seconds before hitting the water.

What did she think about? What did
they
think about?

Most popular songs and rock videos are about three minutes long
, thought Colvin. It is a good length of time; not so long one gets bored, long enough to tell a complete story.

“We’re damned glad you’re with us,” Bill Montgomery said again.

“Goddammit,” Bill Montgomery had whispered to Colvin outside the company teleconference room twenty-seven months earlier, “are you with us or against us on this?”

A teleconference was much like a séance. The group sat in semi-darkened rooms hundreds or thousands of miles apart and communed with voices which came from nowhere.

“Well, that’s the weather situation here,” came the voice from KSC. “What’s it to be?”

“We’ve seen your telefaxed stuff,” said the voice from Marshall, “but still don’t understand why we should consider scrubbing based on an anomaly that small. You assured us that this stuff was so fail-safe that you could kick it around the block if you wanted to.”

Phil McGuire, the chief engineer on Colvin’s project team, squirmed in his seat and spoke too loudly. The four-wire teleconference phones had speakers near each chair and could pick up the softest tones. “You
don’t
understand, do you?” McGuire almost shouted. “It’s the
combination
of these cold temperatures and the likelihood of electrical activity in that cloud layer that causes the problems. In the past five flights there’ve been three transient events in the leads that run from SRB linear shaped charges to the Range Safety command antennas...”

“Transient events,” said the voice from KSC, “but within flight certification parameters?”

“Well…yes,” said McGuire. He sounded close to tears. “But it’s within parameters because we keep signing papers and rewriting the goddamn parameters. We just don’t
know
why the C-12B shaped range safety charges on the SRBs and ET record a transient current flow when no enable functions have been transmitted. Roger thinks maybe the LSC enable leads or the C-12 compound itself can accidentally allow the static discharge to simulate a command signal…Oh, hell,
tell
them, Roger.”

“Mr. Colvin?” came the voice from Marshall.

Colvin cleared his throat. “That’s what we’ve been watching for some time. Preliminary data suggests that temperatures below 28 degrees Fahrenheit allow the zinc oxide residue in the C-12B stacks to conduct a false signal…if there’s enough static discharge…theoretically…”

“But no solid database on this yet?” said the voice from Marshall.

“No,” said Colvin.

“And you did sign the Critically One waiver certifying flight readiness on the last three flights?”

“Yes,” said Colvin.

“Well,” said the voice from KSC, “we’ve heard from the engineers at Beaunet-HCS, what do you say we have recommendations from management there?”

Bill Montgomery had called a five-minute break and the management team met in the hall. “Goddammit, Roger, are you with us or against us on this one?”

Colvin had looked away.

“I’m serious,” snapped Montgomery. “The LCS division has brought this company 215 million dollars
in profit
this year, and your work has been an important part of that success, Roger. Now you seem ready to flush that away on some goddamn transient telemetry readings that don’t mean
anything
when compared to the work we’ve done as a team. There’s a vice-presidency opening in a few months, Roger. Don’t screw your chances by losing your head like that hysteric McGuire.”

“Ready?” said the voice from KSC when five minutes had passed.

“Go,” said Vice-President Bill Montgomery.

“Go,” said Vice-President Larry Miller.

“Go,” said Vice-President Steve Cahill.

“Go,” said Project Manager Tom Weiscott.

“Go,” said Project Manager Roger Colvin.

“Fine,” said KSC. “I’ll pass along the recommendation. Sorry you gentlemen won’t be here to watch the liftoff tomorrow.”

Colvin turned his head as Bill Montgomery called from his side of the cabin, “Hey, I think I see Long Island.”

“Bill,” said Colvin, “how much did the company make this year on the C-12B redesign?”

Montgomery took a drink and stretched his legs in the roomy interior of the Gulfstream. “About four hundred million, I think, Rog. Why?”

“And did the Agency ever seriously consider going to someone else after…after?”

“Shit,” said Tom Weiscott, “where else could they go? We got them by the short hairs. They thought about it for a few months and then came crawling back. You’re the best designer of shaped range safety devices and solid hypergolics in the country, Rog.”

Colvin nodded, worked with his calculator a minute and closed his eyes.

The steel bar clamped down across his lap and the car he rode in clanked higher and higher. The air grew thin and cold, the screech of wheel on rail dwindling into a thin scream as the rollercoaster lumbered above the six mile mark.

In case of loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will descend from the ceiling. Please fasten them securely over your mouth and nose and breath normally.

Colvin peeked ahead, up the terrible incline of the rollercoaster, sensing the summit of the climb and the emptiness beyond.

The tiny air tank-and-mask combinations were called PEAPs—Personal Egress Air Packs. PEAPs from four of the five crew-members were recovered from the ocean bottom. All had been activated. Two minutes and forty-five seconds of each five-minute air supply had been used up.

Colvin watched the summit of the rollercoaster’s first hill arrive.

There was a raw metallic noise and a lurch as the rollercoaster went over the top and off the rails. People in the cars behind Colvin screamed and kept on screaming. Colvin lurched forward and grabbed the restraining bar as the rollercoaster plummeted into nine miles of nothingness. He opened his eyes. A single glimpse out the Gulfstream window told him that the thin lines of shaped charges he had placed there had removed all of the port wing cleanly, surgically. The tumble rate suggested that enough of a stub of the starboard wing was left to provide the surface area needed to keep the terminal velocity a little lower than maximum. Two minutes and forty-five seconds, plus or minus four seconds.