Easy, tiger, she thought as she felt the aircraft’s landing gear hum beneath her toes.
You’ll have more work than you bargained for in about five seconds flat.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” said the pilot in her earphones.
She turned away from the window and came forward in the jump seat. The pilot was leaning out of the cockpit, smiling back at her. There were two other crew members sitting behind her, but they both seemed to be sleeping.
Ruby listened to the roar of the engines behind her in the big cavernous cargo plane as she looked forward at the pilot and the smile on his face. There was something creepy about the guy that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. He seemed normal enough. Plain looking. Midthirties. Very neat.
But maybe that was precisely it. He was too neat, too plain. He looked like one of those blend-into-the-woodwork, plain-looking neat guys from one of those Discovery Channel shows where women ended up floating in the Everglades after the first date.
“What was that?” she said as she pulled her blue camo utility cap down tighter over her dark brown pulled-back hair.
“What division are you in?” he said.
“Office of Naval Safety,” she said, tugging at her matching blue camo blouse to make it as baggy as possible.
As usual, she’d changed immediately into her navy blue utility working uniform and boots when she’d gotten the call. She actually had to gun it back to her apartment up in Ensley to change and to grab her gear. She’d only just gotten back in time to hitch this cargo flight out of Pensacola Naval Air Station, where she was based.
“Naval Safety?” the pilot said, glancing at his instruments then back at her.
“I know. It makes us sound like hall monitors,” she said. “We’re basically the NTSB but for the military. We investigate aviation mishaps.”
“Ah, a toe tagger,” he said with a nod. “That’s wild. You must have seen some real freaky stuff.”
Ruby smiled back politely.
She’d been backup for plenty of accidents in the four years she’d worked at Safety but had only been on-site to two real ones. The biggest was an air force cargo plane that had gone down in upstate New York the year before.
It was a NATO base resupply plane coming back from an overseas deployment somewhere. It needed to refuel in Canada, and there had been some screwup with the liters-to-gallons ratio. They’d also eventually surmised that the gas tank low-level alarm never went off due to a burnt-out transducer.
She remembered finding the black box herself on the bank of a frozen creek in Chittenango State Park near Syracuse. She most definitely remembered the pilots’ screams from it. Both pilots and the 140-million-dollar aircraft had been completely obliterated on impact.
“You like it?” the pilot said.
She glanced out at the lights of Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport coming at them hard and fast in the aircraft’s windshield.
“It’s a job,” she said.
That wasn’t true. Ruby loved it. The engineering, the math, the detective work, the excitement. Not being chained to a desk.
Well, at least usually, she thought, squinting down at the floor.
For the first time in her professional life, she had been actually disappointed when her boss had called her in for a job.
It was because of her sister. Her little sister, Lori, was due any minute to give birth to her second child. When Ruby’s phone rang two hours before, she’d actually been hanging out at Lori’s place in Lake Charlene waiting for her water to break so she could drive her to the hospital.
It had been Ruby’s hope to ride out her last night of being on call into her upcoming leave. She’d been pretty much banking on it actually. With Lori’s husband, Mitch, in the marine corps on active deployment in the Middle East, there was no way Ruby wanted Lori, her only sibling, to have to give birth alone.
Ruby winced as she thought about her sister, big as a house, on the sofa with her little three-year-old son, Sean, running around like a monkey.
Hopefully, she could get the preliminaries started on whatever the hell this was and then pass it off to the other members of her team and skedaddle.
“What kind of plane crash you going to?” the pilot said, absently flicking off the autopilot on the console as he sat forward again. “A navy plane? Some arrogant navy Tomcat pilot seen too many Tom Cruise movies and became tarmac pizza?”
“I don’t know yet. We do all branches. They didn’t tell me much. They just said they needed me in Miami ASAP.”
“One other question,” the pilot said, looking back at her with his creepily plain grin.
Oh, boy, here we go, Ruby thought.
“Shoot,” she said.
“You married?”
“Engaged,” she lied.
She saw the spinning chopper right away as they landed. To the left of the big coast guard hangars was one of their famous rescue helicopters seen in the recruiting commercials, red with the white stripe. There was a crewman in a helmet and a dark blue flight suit sitting in its open side door.
What was it called again? she thought as she unbuckled her seat belt. A Dolphin, she remembered as she stood and shouldered her gear bag. An MH-65 Dolphin.
“Lieutenant, your chariot awaits,” said a chief petty officer with a ruddy face and a beer gut on the other side of the Hercules’s dropped ramp.
“What’s going on, Chief?” she said.
“No rest for the weary, Lieutenant,” he said over the wind rush and rotor whine as he led her through the humid night air toward the Dolphin.
“We have a cutter on scene, the Surmount, out of Miami Beach. The bird will take you straight out.”
“Are there any other members of my team here?” she said.
“No. There’s no one. Are you supposed to wait for them?”
“I’m not sure. I keep texting my boss, but he hasn’t gotten back. Did you send anybody else out?”
“No, but my orders are to get you out there right away. I recommend you just head out now, and I’ll send out your friends later if they show. This one’s a four-alarmer, from the sound of my boss.”
Ruby looked at the old salty coastie, at the bright blinking lights of the churning chopper waiting for her.
“Let’s do this,” she said, tucking down her cap as she plunged into the rotor wash.
8
A thousand miles due north of Miami, snowflakes fell steadily against the upstairs window of Robert Reyland’s house in Falls Church, Virginia. There was a pretty good wind going as well. Downstairs in the brick chimneys of Reyland’s big new house, the whistling gusts of it sounded almost musical.
But Reyland didn’t see the flakes, didn’t hear the wind.
He was too busy watching it become midnight on his encrypted secure cell phone.
He raised his large bald head and looked around the small silent room. There wasn’t much in it. The eyebrow window above the gun safe, the cardboard boxes in the corner they still hadn’t unpacked.
The Realtor had told them that the tiny space off the master bedroom suite originally was supposed to have been a nursery for the people who had built the place, but the wife had miscarried, so they’d just left it empty.
Unforeseen botched circumstances, Reyland thought, passing a hand back and forth soothingly over the shaved-smooth skin of his head.
He placed his BlackBerry back down on the top of the gun safe he’d just taken it out of.
My, oh, my, can I empathize.
He shifted his weight on his wife’s tiny vanity chair he’d brought in from the bathroom. He was still in the suit and overcoat he was wearing when he’d gotten out of the car from the airport two hours before.
He’d been in London waiting to hear word from his boss when he’d gotten the report about his plane falling completely out of contac
t. The eight-and-a-half sleepless hours he’d just spent on the British Airways flight back to DC had felt like the most useless of his entire life.
He refused to even consider all the worst-case scenarios. At least not yet. Even for him, some things were just too terrible to contemplate.
He had gone immediately from Reagan International downtown to his office and called everyone he could. Twice. They had done some projections, but there were too many factors. The wind, the orientation of the instruments. It was a needle in a haystack even with the satellites.
Reyland palmed at his head like LeBron on a mid-dunk basketball.
Now he was home to get some sleep.
Yeah, right, he thought as the phone suddenly rang.
He felt his heart thump like a kick drum as he looked at the screen.
It was his right-hand man, Emerson.
Here we go, Reyland thought, closing his eyes as it rang again. In his mind, he pictured a coin flipping.
Heads, you live. Tails, you die.
He forced himself to take a very deliberate breath before he thumbed down the accept button.
“Where?” Reyland said.
“The ocean. Atlantic Ocean, northwest of the Bahamas.”
“The Bahamas! What?” Reyland said as he let out a breath. “How the hell did it get there?”
“It must have happened before the second turn in the flight plan,” Emerson said. “They never made the turn, and it just kept going till the gas ran out.”
“What a damn disaster! Is he alive?”
“No. It got ripped up on impact. Tore in two. Dunning is dead. All of them are dead. No survivors, just like they said.”
Reyland pondered that for a long silent beat. His mentor, the great Dunning, was gone. Just like that. It was hard to wrap his mind around. He put it aside.
“How far out from land?” he said.
“Ten, fifteen miles offshore of... Let’s see... Little Abaco. It landed underwater on a coral shelf.”
“Who called it in? Civilian?”
“No. The coast guard found it. A drug-interdiction cutter out of Miami Beach. They spotted the wreckage with their radar. Thought it was a drug boat.”
“Are we lucky it wasn’t a civilian. But coast guard, huh? I don’t like it. Did they see inside the cabin?”
“No, not really. The bodies are still in the part of the plane that’s underwater. We lucked out there.”
“Wait, wait, wait. What do you mean by ‘not really’?” Reyland said, squinting.
“Well, the coast guard went through standard rescue procedures when they spotted it. One of the rescue divers went down to check for survivors. Don’t worry. I’m already getting any and all tape and making plans to isolate the crew.”
“We on the way?”
“Yes, Ruiz should be wheels up with our team by now. Luckily, there was a salvage vessel out of Norfolk out training. It’s six hours away. Ruiz has some ex-SEALs with him. They’ll go under and get everything that needs getting off. All in all, it’s looking about as good as we could have hoped.”
“I don’t like it,” Reyland said. “The coast guard is out of our purview. I don’t have to tell you the lid we need on this.”
“Don’t worry. It won’t be a problem,” Emerson said. “I’ll send word again that the coast guard is to completely stand down and babysit until Ruiz and the navy vessel show up, and we get it all the hell out of there.
“By the way, London called again. Twice. But I stalled them like you said. Also, have you figured out how you’re going to tell Cathy?”
“Who?”
“Cathy. You know, Dunning’s wife.”
“Oh. No. I haven’t. Not yet. Shit. She thinks he’s at a conference in Italy. I mean, imagine? Add telling her the great Dunning is dead to the list of my magic tricks.”
“I could do it, boss, if you want,” Emerson said quickly.
Reyland’s gray eyes squinted as he sat up, suddenly noticing the eager-beaver tone in Emerson’s voice.
He was really all over everything, wasn’t he? Reyland thought. London. Their military contacts. You bet he was. Trying to use the crisis to climb a rung or two.
What’s the expression? Never let one go to waste?
There was a long beat of silence in the cold of the small room. Down in the living room, Reyland heard the wind in the chimney suddenly chime like a bell.
“You’re right, boss,” Emerson finally said. “I’ll leave it to you.”
9
After over an hour of monotonous black ocean, the sudden deck lights of the USCGC Surmount were as bright as a rock concert.
Ruby’s stomach churned in time to the change in pitch of the chopper’s turboshaft engines as they came to a hover. She loved flying in airplanes and was actually a licensed pilot herself, but like so many others in the military, helicopters always made her nervous.
As they swung in above the rear flight deck helipad, outside the window she could see several sailors in life jackets and hard hats along the 270-foot cutter’s aft rail.
“Okay, Lieutenant, if you’re ready, we’re going to lower you down in the bucket,” the Dolphin crew chief said with his Southern accent in her intercom headphones.
She turned and looked at him in horror as he showed her some kind of harness.
“What?” she shrieked.
“Gotcha,” the helmeted crew chief said with a grin. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. Roy will land it. Maybe even on the boat, if we’re lucky.”
The officer who met her on the chopper pad’s edge was fair-haired and clean-shaven and, like almost everyone else in the coast guard, looked young enough to still be in college.
“Welcome to the Surmount, Lieutenant Everett. I’m Lieutenant Martin,” he said, shaking her hand as he led her up a short set of steps through a doorway.
Inside, there were three blue-uniformed seamen on the bridge. She dropped her bag in an unobtrusive corner, the air-conditioning delicious after the humid heat in the chopper.
“So you’re the investigative team,” Martin said as they watched out the pilothouse glass where a team of coasties with a hose was already refueling the Dolphin.
“The first,” she said. “There are four of us altogether. The others are on the way. So what do you have? A downed aircraft?”
“It’s a plane,” Martin said, nodding. “One of our guys on watch spotted it on our radar about five hours ago. We do long-range drug-interdiction patrols out of Miami Beach, so we thought it was a boat in distress on the water at first.
“But as we approached, we saw its tail fin barely sticking up out of the water. That was only from its rear section. It’s actually broken in two. The front part is under a hundred feet of water. I was about to call the local airport on Little Abaco for any missing aircraft, but then I saw the bulletin. My father’s buddy Al Litvak works at the naval safety office, so I called him first directly. You know Al?”
“Yes,” Ruby said. “He’s one of my boss’s bosses. You said there was a bulletin?”
“Yep. It was on our OPREP board. I saw it when I came on watch. It said something about a missing air force jet to be on the lookout for.”
She thought about that. No one had told her about a missing jet.
“So it’s a jet? What kind? Do you know?”
Martin took out an iPhone and brought up a picture.
“Not a military one, as far as I can tell. It’s some kind of corporate jet. Our diver took a photograph of a dataplate on a piece of debris near the tail section. Gulfstream, it says. See?”
She looked at the image. Gulfstream was all it said. There was nothing stamped in the boxes for model and serial number and FAA certification.
Maybe it was an EC-37B, she thought. The EC-37B was the new military version of the Gulfstream 550 that had electronic warfare capabi
lity. It could jam radar and other electronic systems.
Perhaps it was on a test flight? Which was maybe why it hadn’t been picked up by local airports’ radar?
Ruby peered at the photograph again. She had never seen a blank dataplate before. It was like staring at a car license plate with no number on it.
“After we spotted it, we immediately did our rapid emergency rescue response to check for survivors. There was no one in the tail part. Then we saw that the sunken front portion was within diving range, so I had one of our rescue divers go down for a peek. Six aboard it, including the two pilots. All dead.”
“That’s terrible. Where are they now? Below deck?” she said.
“Who?” Martin said.
“The deceased,” she said, blinking at him.
“No,” Martin said, looking at her. “We didn’t do the recovery yet. I got a call from my base commander to stand down and let you guys take care of it.”
She gave him a funny look.
“Is that right?” she said.
“What’s the problem? Is that not protocol? With the bodies, I mean?”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “I’ve never heard of the deceased being left in place before. We usually get brought in after all remains are recovered from the wreckage.”
Martin squinted, puzzled.
“He was pretty insistent about us not going near the aircraft again until you guys showed,” he said. “He said a navy salvage vessel is en route.”
“My boss didn’t tell me that. I thought he was waiting to hear from me first,” she said.
“Well, looks like somebody’s getting their wires crossed, I guess. What else is new,” Martin said.
A burly older man in a bosun’s mate uniform came out of a door on the other side of the ship’s glowing control boards.
“Hey, Lieutenant, you got a call,” he said.
Martin looked at him then back at Ruby.
“Give me a sec,” he said.
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