It was two hours before dawn when Patrick Fawkes paid the cabdriver and walked up to the floodlit gate of the Forbes Marine Scrap & Salvage Company. A uniformed guard turned from a portable TV set and yawned as Fawkes passed a small folder through the arched window of the gatehouse. The guard scrutinized the signatures and compared the photograph with the man before him. Then he passed it back.

“Welcome to America, Captain. My employers have been expecting you.”

“Is she here?” Fawkes asked impatiently.

“Tied up to the east dock,” replied the guard, shoving a Xerox copy of a map of the salvage area through the window. “Mind your step. Since

Operation Wild Rose I 101

the energy rationing, the yard’s night lights have been shut off. It’s darker than Hades out there.” As Fawkes passed under the giant derricks toward the dock, a wind swept in off the bay and carried a heavy odor to his nostrils: the pungent perfume of the waterfront. He inhaled the mingled aromas of diesel oil, tar,and salt water. It never failed to revive his spirits.

He came to the dock and glanced about for signs of human activity. The night crew had long since gone home. Only a seagull, perched on a wooden piling, returned Fawkes’s gaze out of one beady eye.

After another hundred yards, Fawkes stopped at a huge spectral shape that loomed in the darkness beside the pier. Then he took the gangplank, stepped onto the seemingly endless deck, and unerringly made his way through the steel labyrinth to the bridge.

Later, as the sun crept over the eastern side of the bay, the mutilated shabbiness of the ship became manifest. But the peeling paint, the acres of rust, and the jagged torch marks of the salvage crew stood unseen in Fawkes’s eyes. Like a father with a hideously disfigured daughter, he saw only her beauty.

“Aye, you’re a bonny ship,” he shouted across the silent decks. “You’re gonna do just fine.”

3

Salvage

26

Washington, D.C. -November 1988

Steiger’s superiors at the Pentagon sat on his report of the discovery of Vixen 03 for nearly two months before summoning him to Washington. To Steiger it was like sitting in the audience of a staged nightmare. He felt more like a hostile witness than a key investigator.

Even with the evidence before their eyes, in the form of videotape, General Ernest Burgdorf, chief of Air Force Safety, and General John O’Keefe, aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed doubts over the sunken aircraft’s importance, and argued that nothing was to be gained by bringing it to light except sensationalistic play from the news media. Steiger sat stunned.

“But their families,” he protested. “It would be criminal not to notify the crew’s families that the bodies have been found.”