Free Night Fall by Nelson DeMille

one of the full wing tanks-the left one according to the accident investigators-which was the cause of the catastrophic explosion.”
    I asked him, “Did you come to those conclusions immediately?”
    “No. I was focused for a time on the aircraft itself, as it came apart…” He seemed momentarily at a loss for words to describe this, then said, “The… nose section separated and dropped almost straight down into the sea. Then, without the weight of the nose section, and with the engines still running on fuel in the fuel lines, the main section of the fuselage actually rose for a few seconds and continued along in an ascent… then, it rolled, wing over wing, and began a rapid descent…”
    I let a few seconds pass, then said, “I guess you’ve seen planes shot down by surface-to-air missiles.”
    “I have. Seven of them. But nothing that big.”
    “Did it shake you up a bit?”
    He nodded, then said, “I hope you never see a plane falling out of the sky, but if you do, it will stay with you forever.”
    I nodded.
    Captain Spruck glanced out at the sky and said, “From the time I saw the explosion to the time when I heard it was about thirty or forty seconds.” He looked at me and said, “Sound travels at about one mile every five seconds, so I figured I was about seven miles from the explosion-altitude and distance. Nearly everyone who saw the streak of light saw it
before
they heard the explosion, not the other way around as the official conclusion would have you believe.”
    I leaned my butt against the rail, facing away from the ocean. Captain Spruck remained standing, looking out to sea like a ship’s captain, I thought, standing watch, alert, but at the same time hypnotized by the dark sea and sky. He said, as if to himself, “The fuel was burning on the water now and the sky was lit by the fires… black and white smoke billowed… I thought about setting sail toward the crash, but… that’s a long haul for a Sunfish on the ocean… and if I got that far, I wouldn’t be able to control the Sunfish around all that burning fuel.” He looked at me and said, “I knew there would be no survivors.”
    I stayed quiet awhile, then I asked him, “Could you guess what
kind
of missile this could have been? I mean, if it was a missile. You know, like heat-seeking? What’s the other kind?”
    “Radar-guided or infrared-guided.” He asked me, “Do you want a quick lesson in surface-to-air missiles?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, I can tell you what this missile was not. It was not a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile.”
    “How do you know?”
    “For one thing, their range is too short to engage a target at thirteen thousand feet. Also, any heat-seeking missile would seek out the biggest heat source-the engine-and all four engines of the 747 were recovered with no significant damage. So that leaves either radar-guided or infrared. We can rule out radar-guided because a radar-guided missile sends out a strong radar signal that would be picked up by other radar-especially all that military radar out there that night-and there were no ground or air radar sightings of an object tracking toward the 747. There
was
one anomalous blip recorded from a single sweep of an air traffic control radar in Boston, but that was thought to be a glitch. It could, however, have been an actual sighting of an infrared missile whose radar signature would be nearly invisible given its small size and high speed. In other words, what we might be seeing is a third-generation infrared-guided surface-to-air missile, launched from a boat or aircraft-though a boat is more likely.”
    I thought about all this, then asked, “Who has this kind of missile, and how do you get one?”
    “Only the U.S., Russia, England, and France make such a sophisticated surface-to-air missile. Whereas there are probably hundreds of shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles on the black market, these long-range infrared-guided missiles are strictly accounted for