by Bill Clem
Damn you, jet.
Hammond turned for the ocean and dumped the remaining fuel. He would have to ditch.
No one had ever tried an ocean landing in a 747. Not successfully, anyway.
As the aircraft made an approach in the general direction of the Australian coast, Captain Hammond lowered the flaps, trying to slow the descent. It was too little, and much too late. And he knew it.
I’m sorry, Ellen.
Seconds later, the huge plane hit the water with unimaginable force. The last thing Hammond saw was a torrent of ocean entering the cockpit.
The hull of the jumbo-liner skipped across the waves like a child’s stone across a pond. With a thunderous roar, the cabin of the 747 ripped into three pieces as though it were made of tissue. More debris was created and scattered when it came to rest on a most-inhospitable rocky outcropping.
* * *
At 13:47 GMT, Buck Johnston of the Australian Search and Rescue Service received a terse phone call from Darwin Air Traffic Control.
“AusSAR, Buck Johnston,” he answered, using the acronym for his branch of the Australian Rescue Coordination Centre, itself a division of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. After all, this was a service that appreciated brevity. Behind his desk hung a sign that read:
SECONDS COUNT
He believed that, based on his years of experience.
“Buck, this is Tim Reid over at Darwin.”
“We just got a brief distress call from a seven-four-seven, just south of here.”
Johnston’s chest tightened. “And?”
“We only had the signal for a moment, then we lost contact. This one feels bad, Buck.”
“Do they ever feel good, Tim? Give me the details.”
“British Airways flight niner out of Heathrow. The distress call went out about five minutes ago at latitude 9°40 S, longitude 124°51 E.”
“Jesus, that’s a hell of a place to go down. I’ll scramble a C-24 over there.” Johnston tapped a few keys on his laptop and looked at the screen. “There’s a frigate in that general area now. I’ll alert them, too.”
Two
* * *
JACK BAKER MUST HAVE BLACKED out on impact because he couldn’t recall how long or how far it took the plane to stop upon hitting the water. He thought he could still hear the faint whine of a jet turbine somewhere in the distance. Or maybe it was just a ringing in his ears. He looked around. He could see water through the open end of the decimated rear fuselage, sloshing against the ragged metal edges and up onto the cabin floor. Half in, half out of the opening, a man floated face down, his body rising and falling with the tide. The passenger next to Jack, who he’d been talking to a few minutes earlier, was still strapped into his seat; head gone, just a splinter of spinal column protruded from the wet stump that was his neck. A moan sputtered from within the mangled fuselage. Across the aisle, a woman wailed away her final breaths. She tried to move, but the seat in front of her had catapulted against her on impact, crushing her legs like an accordion. She kept crying, “My legs... my legs.” Jack wanted to help her, but for the first time in his life, he was too paralyzed with fear.
* * *
Captain Eric Hammond lay motionless, taking stock of his internal signals. He was bruised and battered, but as far as he could tell, nothing was broken. Opening his eyes, his thoughts were slow to focus. Everything seemed softer here... quieter. For a split second, he thought he saw a dog running into a thicket of bamboo. Hammond found a small bottle of vodka in his uniform pocket, unscrewed the top and gulped the contents in one swallow, savoring the analgesic effect on his already numb senses. He had little doubt that he was a lucky man. The reinforced cockpit had saved him any substantial trauma.
Focusing, Hammond saw the area was beach and jungle. He looked around for signs of civilization, or a rescue party. The twisted pieces of debris scattered all around him was all he saw. No buildings, no rescue party.
Not yet. Soon, probably.
Now, raising his head, Hammond could hear the sounds of the ocean. Painfully, he tried to stand up, but his legs felt feeble. He grabbed a tree branch and heaved. After the earth steadied itself beneath his feet, the pilot staggered through the surf, slowly at first, then crashing through the waves, his mind coming alive with the realization of what had actually occurred.
I lost my plane.
And, to top it all off, he couldn’t remember them making radio contact with anyone before the crash. He wasn’t sure, but he doubted it.
They may have no idea that the jet crashed. Eventually, they would realize the plane was missing. But would they know where to look? He had no idea where he was. He could only hope that the transponder was still able to send a signal.
He turned back to the shoreline and surveyed the wreckage. The small hope he had for the transponder dissipated with the spray of the wave that crashed over him. As he was pulled under the surface, he felt the urge to just go with it. Just open my mouth and let the salty brine fill my lungs.
* * *
Jack unbuckled himself and managed to climb out of the twisted plane. The miracle of his survival became more apparent when he got out and surveyed the broken hull.
The pilots had managed to ditch the plane in the ocean, keeping the front fuselage more-or-less intact until they ran out of luck and water, hitting a rocky outcropping a hundred yards shy of the beach. The plane then cart-wheeled before breaking into three pieces. The middle section sank, the rear section landed in the surf, and the cockpit and first class section catapulted onto the island.
A deep gash at the water’s edge marked this point. Further up the beach, the twisted remains of the front landing gear were half-buried, torn off when the remainder of the front fuselage began its breakup.
Jack walked to the sheared-off right wing, laying a good twenty yards from the plane’s body. Circling the broken airfoil, he silently thanked the pilots for emptying the fuel tanks. The fact that the plane didn’t become a fireball was the only good thing about the crash.
Jack made his way to the nose of the aircraft, wedged between two giant teak trees that finally stopped them. He surmised the front fuselage snapped in two just before this piece began its slide into the jungle, leaving rear passengers’ half—his half—floating in the surf. Had this not been the case, Jack’s fate would have been as bad as the birds that were smeared across the cockpit.
Jack stood and listened carefully. Voices?
Yes! He heard voices.
Three
* * *
CAPTAIN HAMMOND WALKED OUT OF the sea and fell to his knees at the shoreline. He buried his face in his hands and sobbed. A few minutes later, with his breakdown over, he rose to his feet. Not being able to tell if the salt he tasted was from his tears or the seawater, the pilot wiped his hand across his face and walked slowly to the tree line. Smoldering pieces of the airliner littered the jungle floor. A row of seats dangled precariously from a huge rubber tree ten yards in front of him.
Hammond recalled the final seconds of their harrowing ride—the sound of the engines flaming out, the downward drag of the plane as the cockpit alarms went crazy, the bewildered look on his co-pilot’s face in the final seconds—the sea getting bigger in the windshield.
Despite his years of flight experience, he was shocked to see the pieces of the plane spread out so far from the water. After all, the plane didn’t explode and break up in mid-air. Still, there were fragments everywhere, and he found this odd based on his ditch approach. The last thing Hammond remembered before ditching was seeing the islands that hug the huge coastline of Australia. This island could be one of several hundred uncharted islands off the mainland.
Hammond heard voices ahead and ran in their direction. Huddled together near a pile of luggage were a half-dozen people who looked like they’d just survived a nuclear bomb blast. Some had clothes hanging in tatters, and several had makeshift bandages wrapped around their wounds. He was relieved to see Tracy Mills, one of the flight attend
ants.
“Tracy, are you all right?”
Tracy nodded. “Captain. Is there anyone else—”
He looked at the ground as he answered, “I just don’t know.”
The cockpit sat twenty feet away, turned upright as if it had been dropped from the top of a building. Hammond clambered over to the cockpit, pushing aside debris.
“Help me, Tracy. Help me push this window out.”
Hammond yanked on the windshield while Tracy used her foot to push on the window frame. It took every ounce of strength they had but finally, with a decisive crack, the windscreen gave way. The momentum caused Hammond to fall backwards onto the jungle floor.
Regrouping, Hammond went to the open cockpit window and forced himself to look inside. Oh no!
The scene inside the cockpit made his heart sink. The copilot, First Officer Towson, hung upside down from his twisted seat. Hammond could only identify him from his uniform. The impact had split Towson’s head down the middle and a grayish red jelly seeped from the gruesome wound. Hammond choked back bile.
Strengthening his resolve, Hammond reached across and grabbed the radio control. He started to say something into the microphone when he noticed it.
Below the maze of switches and dials and digital readouts, a huge tangle of wires hung to the floor. Following the tangle of wires to the radio transceiver, he saw now it was hopeless. The radio was totally destroyed. He climbed down from the window and looked at Tracy and the rest of the group. He shook his head.
“Where the hell are we?” someone asked.
Wherever they were, Hammond’s impression was this island was an alien, inhospitable place where time had stood still. He definitely didn’t want to be here for very long.
“I’m not sure, somewhere around the Java Sea, maybe the Banda Sea.” Hammond said, though he was just guessing.
“Where the hell is that?” another demanded.
“Around Indonesia and East Timor, north of Australia,” he answered, more confidently. Though he didn’t know where they were, at least he knew where those seas were.
* * *
With Captain Greg Beard at the helm, the frigate Kanglour was churning toward a small chunk of land off the coast of the Indonesia. Beard studied the boat’s GPS for a moment. This uncharted island was smack dab in the middle of the sector the AusSAR had given Beard hours earlier. This was also a sector that rattled Beard’s nerves. Several ships had disappeared in the area over the last year, and Beard had heard some of his colleagues refer to it as The Pacific Triangle, relating it to the western version of the infamous Bermuda Triangle. Beard’s superstitious musings were interrupted by his first mate, who hurried to the captain with his field glasses in hand.
“Skipper, there’s a piece of a plane fuselage off the east end of the island.”
“Can you make out any lettering?”
“Yeah. I’m afraid it’s the one.”
“Shit. Okay. Is there any sign of survivors?”
“Not so far.”
“Get us in closer.”
“Aye, Captain.”
When the frigate neared the beach, Beard could see the mangled tail end of the jumbo jet rising out of the surf.
Jesus, he thought, all those people.
He scanned the surrounding area. Debris floated all around, yet he saw no bodies. Not one.
* * *
By about two a.m., it had become clear to Buck Johnston and the rest of his team at AuSAR that the plane, if it had indeed ditched, must have done so further north of the mainland. They could do nothing more until sunrise.
Dawn was a somewhat nominal concept as it brought little more than a grey fog to the scattering of islands off the coast. Visibility was limited for the search planes. However, as the day progressed, boat patrols in a score of little islands off Tasmania reported no sightings of the 747. The islands that skirted the mainland were all remote inaccessible places, but too small to disguise an airliner. Even one in pieces.
It began to look as though the ocean had just swallowed the jumbo jet completely. Worse yet, the frigate Kanglour had failed to report back, which left Johnston even more rattled. Besides his concerns for the airliner, two other ships had disappeared in as many years in that same sector, known as The Pacific Triangle. Johnson wasn’t a gambling man but in this case, he’d stake his life that the plane, and maybe now another frigate, had become the latest victims of the triangle. Despair began to settle around Johnston like a descending mist.
Part Two
Extinct
Four
* * *
PETER CARLSON SAT IN THE study of his suburban Washington, D.C. home, considering the worn parchment text in his lap. His grandfather had passed the ancient book on to him just hours before succumbing to lung cancer some twenty years ago. Peter was close to his grandfather. After his own father had walked off and left them, the elder Carlson raised Peter himself. Peter’s mother had died when he was six. He barely remembered her, so his world revolved around his grandfather. He idolized him, and his life’s work.
As Carlson scanned the worn pages, he could see his grandfather was not the quack some of the old man’s former colleagues had accused him of being. In fact, the information was as clear as a bell to Peter Carlson.
In 1921, the Tasmanian tiger, a marsupial land cat native to the island of Tasmania, was hunted to extinction by mainland Australia. Though it was widely believed to be the result of over-hunting for sport, that wasn’t the real reason they’d hunted the elusive mammals out of existence.
The Chinese had discovered that the liver of the Tasmanian tiger, when ground into a fine paste, could cure everything from impotence to cancer, and more. The Aborigines had been privy to this information for years, having lived for centuries among the animals in the dense jungles of Tasmania. When word got out to the rest of the world, every hunter with a rifle and a week’s worth of supplies flocked to the dense jungles off the Australian coast, killing every Tasmanian tiger in sight. Medical companies paid big money to have a cache of Thylacine liver to experiment with and claim as the cure for this or that. It was something akin to the medicine sideshow of the eighteenth century where one elixir would cure all ills. But unlike the medicine shows, these substances from the tiger did indeed work, in the right hands. And therein lay the key; the right hands. Mucking up the works were the charlatans out to make a quick buck. Many had substances they claimed to be legitimate, but were usually acquired in the offal at the local butcher shop. Still others had the real thing but mishandled it, rendering it useless.
Enter Dr. Gregory Carlson, a biologist with an obsession about the Tasmanian tiger. In 1954, long after the remaining Thylacine supply dried up, Carlson led an expedition to island of Tasmania, a thousand kilometers south of Melbourne, Australia. Carlson was convinced there were still Thylacine tigers living on the dense, lush island. He planned to capture one, bring it back to the United States, and resurrect the supposedly extinct animal. However, after two months of giant mosquitoes, poisonous snakes and spiders, Carlson returned home, having never sighted the legendary beast. Disgraced and called a fool by his colleagues, Carlson never let go of his dream. In his later years, he reluctantly relented that there were no more Thylacines in Tasmania or anywhere else. However, with the advent of genetic engineering, his impossible dream was theoretically now possible. There was a fetal Tasmanian tiger specimen in the Australian Museum of Natural History. It would be a simple matter of capturing some DNA from the intact organs and cloning it using a close marsupial relative, the Tasmanian devil.
Peter could see, even if his peers couldn’t, that Grandpa Carlson was way ahead of his time; genetic engineering was in its infancy at the time of his brainstorm. When he knew his days were numbered, he called his young grandson to his bedside and confided in him: “If you do one thing in your whole life, Peter, do this. Take my records and study them. This holds the answer that can save thousands of lives. Finish what I cannot.”
Now, as Pe
ter Carlson pulled himself back from that long-forgotten time, he knew his grandfather was right. And so Peter had spent nearly his whole life researching mammal genetics with the hope of someday resurrecting a Thylacine, then extracting stem cells and synthesizing them to make a true cure-all formula.
Eventually, he’d read about another scientist in Australia pursuing the same quest. The article in National Geographic was about Michael Whiting’s work with the specimen at The Natural History Museum in Sydney. It didn’t surprise Peter that someone else had pursued it. Naturally intrigued, he delved deeper into the story and soon learned more than he’d ever expected about recovering DNA from extinct species. Finally, there was a chance.
Peter believed the key lie in his grandfather’s research. He had written to the museum in Sydney, but the law firm representing it had put him in touch with a curator, who told him there was no such project at the museum. A year later, Peter discovered the true fate of the project, in a science journal. Dr. Whiting had indeed attempted to resurrect the Thylacine from a pup preserved in alcohol. However, midway through the project, they simply ran out of money.
Peter was not surprised, for that had been his experience as well. Despite his faith in his grandfather’s conclusions, it was just too expensive. The equipment alone would run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. All his applications for grants had been turned down, and he got no further with private donors.
Throughout the ages, the debate has raged about whether there actually is such a thing as fate. Peter Carlson would argue strongly in favor. For just when Carlson was about scrap everything, someone stepped into the picture.
Someone with all the money in the world, and one dying son.
Five
* * *