Then the snapped-off landing gear lined up like three fallen dominoes.
The four round sections of the fuselage were scattered across the runway like chopped-off chunks of a banger. Bangers and mash described the crash site all too well.
Theirs was by far the longest intact section and lay completely upside-down.
Another long chunk that must be the rear fuselage lay sideways about fifty meters back along the runway.
The tail section remained upright, though each fin had been folded over badly from doing at least one roll.
The midsection, still marginally attached to the second, right-side wing, had sunlight shining through a hundred ominous holes that shouldn’t be there. The wing hadn’t lost all of its fuel. It burned brightly enough to be easily seen even in full sunlight.
The first passengers from their own section were staggering out into the open. Some battered, some bloody, and some…blue.
Nobody was moving around outside the midsection.
At least there weren’t many bodies that had made a hard landing on the tarmac personally. But it was definitely time to see how many would never get out of their seats on their own.
In unison, the three of them slid down off the nose of the aircraft and went to help the injured.
8
“Why haven’t we heard from them yet?” Mike had slipped into a state that Miranda could only label comatose-without-the-coma for the Learjet’s climb to cruising altitude. All the life had drained from his face and he slumped in his seat like…some metaphor she’d never think of.
The five of them were sitting in the aft section of the passenger cabin. She, Andi, and Taz were all so slight that they fit comfortably across the three back seats. Jeremy and Mike rode backward facing them. Up ahead, Jon and an Air Force copilot flew the plane. The engine was a steady pitch now—she’d always found the Garrett turbofans an interesting counterpoint to the deeper tones of most jet engines.
Miranda recalled Andi’s admonishment to be gentle with Mike. Though she knew the scenario was unlikely, she began with the most positive possibility she could imagine.
“Perhaps she’s busy. Even if they landed successfully—there was a seventeen-point-five percent chance of that,” she felt it was only honest to add, “—panicked passengers can take time to deplane and settle.”
Mike checked his watch. “They would have landed half an hour ago.”
Miranda considered how best to discuss, in a positive manner, the next-most likely scenario: wing departure from the airframe upon landing without losing the associated landing gear. Before she could come up with anything, Andi pointed at her chest.
“Why don’t you try calling her?”
Miranda looked down. Her satellite phone was in her breast pocket where she’d tucked it prior to departing her island. “Oh.”
She pulled it out, synced it to the Learjet’s system, and placed the call. She held it up to her ear until Andi gestured for her to place it on speaker.
On the fourth ring, even Miranda could feel the tension in the silence that had enveloped the others.
There was a loud click that could be the switching to voice mail. Or—
“Hey, her.” Holly answered brightly. “Sorry, my hands were full.”
“What’s the condition of the plane?”
Holly just laughed. “First, tell Mike that I’m fine.”
Miranda turned to Mike, “She says she’s fine.”
“I heard.” Mike wiped at his face, several times, then spoke up. “Good to hear your voice, Holly. Real damn good.” His voice cracked badly.
“Aww! Now don’t go all mushy on me.”
“Not gonna happen,” he sounded more like his normal self. “Just glad you’re not dead.”
“Me, too. I’m fine but we’ve got a bit of a mess here. You called it, Miranda. Left wing failed on landing, from flight to dragging. It sheared fully, and we lost the left landing gear at a hundred knots. About two hundred and forty cast and crew on the manifest. But no big fire, so we’re down by only thirty-four so far, though there are still a few in their seats we haven’t accounted for yet.”
“Oh! I didn’t think about that. We’ll call Hickam Air Force Base on Oahu and—”
Taz was shaking her head.
“Just a moment, Holly. What is it, Taz?”
“I already got them moving for you. Hickam was busy in a major training exercise. Rather than breaking that up, I called the Coast Guard’s commandant. Once I convinced him that I was still alive, and he was nice enough to pretend that he was happy to hear that, the admiral was very quick to send a pair of C-130J Super Hercules.” Taz’s smile must indicate something more than simple pleasure at a job well done, but Miranda couldn’t think what that might be.
Perhaps something to do with her returning from the dead after being declared dead for six months?
Or maybe it was related to when she was nicknamed “The Taser” for being three-star General JJ Martinez’s right-hand hatchet person. For a woman not quite five feet tall, the former Air Force colonel was certainly effective working with the military.
Taz leaned in closer to the phone. “The Coast Guard should be on-site in under three hours, Holly. We’re about two hours behind them—lost a half hour courtesy of when Major Jon Swift changed his name to Major PIA—oh, hi, Major.”
Miranda looked up at where Jon stood hunched beneath the low ceiling between Jeremy’s and Mike’s seats. “Why did you change your name?”
Jon just glared at her.
“PIA, Pain-in-the-ass,” Andi whispered in her ear. “A joke.”
“Oh,” she wasn’t much better at jokes than at metaphors.
Jon still wore a down-frown—unhappy face—despite Andi’s claim that it was a joke.
Taz continued talking before he could comment. “We’ll be further delayed by a refueling stop in Hawaii because Jon requisitioned a lame-ass C-21A Learjet instead of something useful like a C-37B Gulfstream 550 that could actually get us there direct. The Coast Guard is bringing medical and temporary shelter supplies. It will take them at least two round trips to evacuate everyone. Their main concern is whether there’s enough runway?”
“I doubt if we used the first thousand feet. Leaves them most of two miles. Just tell those blighters to hurry. We’ve got some badly injured and the rest of the natives are getting antsy.”
“I’ll let them know.” Taz picked up one of the airplane’s built-in phones to call the Coast Guard.
“Um, Holly?” Miranda didn’t like to contradict her, but something wasn’t right. “There are no natives on Johnston Atoll. As far as I’m aware, there never have been.”
“I was talking about the crash survivors, Miranda. They live here, for the moment.”
“Oh, right. I suppose they do. Can you actually be said to live somewhere if you haven’t at least spent a night there?”
“Not a time to worry about such details, Miranda.”
“Okay.” She pulled out her personal notebook and made an entry to ask about that later.
“What does Johnston look like?” Jeremy called out.
“Like a tropical island that someone paved over.”
“Oh. Is that all?” He looked sad or disappointed. Miranda had still found no reliable way to delineate the two.
“Why? What’s it supposed to look like?”
Taz slapped a hand over Jeremy’s mouth before he could continue. “What do you know about Johnston Island?”
Jeremy did have a tendency to respond to succinct questions with long answers, which Miranda never minded, but also, based on Taz’s action, must not be appropriate at the moment.
“Other than it just saved our asses? Not much.”
Taz uncovered Jeremy’s mouth, “Short answer only. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jeremy nodded fiercely. “You don’t want to let people wander off. There were several failed nuclear rocket tests there in the early ’60s, so the soil is contaminated with plutonium. Also, at th
e end of Vietnam, they unloaded over two million gallons of Agent Orange there. The Army built a massive incinerator plant to torch it, but a lot leaked out of the barrels first, into the ground and the lagoon.”
“Just peachy. Any other good news?”
“Don’t go swimming. The way they dealt with most of the soil pollution from the failed nuke tests was to shove it into the lagoon. Then they dredged it back onto the island to extend the runway again, bringing it back onto the site.” He turned back to Taz. “Was that short enough?”
She kissed him on the cheek, which he seemed to think meant yes. There were far too many forms of unspoken communication occurring today.
“Crikey!” Holly groaned. “And I thought the Chinese were slobs down on the Spratly Islands. You Yanks really are not worth the trouble. Okay, I’ll keep these bludgers corralled.”
“Holly,” Miranda spoke up when it sounded as if Taz was done, “could you secure the QAR and the recorders?”
“Already done.”
“Thank you, Holly. Also, keep everyone away from the left wing. I want to inspect that myself. I have encountered both a breakaway engine loss and an uncontained fan failure, but never both together. I really wish we could recover the engine.”
“It went walkabout out in the middle of the deep blue. We’re never going to see that again. The flight recorder should be able to pin it down to a smallish area, but I can’t imagine anyone will go after that needle in a haystack.”
“I suppose not. And Holly…” Miranda wasn’t sure if it was appropriate or not, but she felt it was something she should say, “…I’m glad you’re alive.”
“Me, too. Miranda. Me, too.” Then she hung up.
9
“That all sounded mighty cozy,” Quint finished tucking a complimentary blanket over the corpse they’d just set down when the call came in.
With a big marker, he wrote the body’s seat number on a page torn out of an inflight magazine and tucked it into their pocket. They’d set up a temporary morgue out of sight of the rest of the passengers, behind the shattered midsection of the fuselage—which conveniently included the majority of the fatalities. It also had the advantage of being downwind of the best shade, which lay in the shadows of the fore and aft sections that had rolled farther down the runway.
“Just Miranda checking in.” And Holly had to rub a hand over her face for a moment to shake off how good Miranda’s last statement had felt. As good as belonging to her SASR team? Better.
“Checking in that her plane crash is all in one piece, so to speak? Or at least in one place.” Quint added a rough laugh that chopped off quickly as he looked down at the temporary morgue spread around their feet.
“Yeah, that’s definitely her.” It was so completely Miranda that it felt as if she was already here, which also felt better than anything should.
“And who’s Mike? You settle down?”
“Shit, no! Not this side of the end of the world, mate!”
“Easy, Holly. But first thing you did was make sure he knew you were still moving around on your own two pins.”
She had, hadn’t she.
And he’d sounded….maybe too damn happy?
“Just shaggin’ the boy on occasion is all.” She winced inside even as she waved a dismissive hand.
Quint muttered something that might have been, “Lucky tosser.”
“I haven’t lost my mind, Quint. You?” Because she needed an immediate subject change. She had never been tied down and never wanted to be. She wasn’t the kind of gal with a puppy dog, point-seven of a child, and a classy urban-core condo for two. Mike was the same. That’s why it worked between them. He was just her fuck-buddy…he had to be just that and no more. Even if he knew more about her than anyone ever had, even her brother. Even if he had offered to come with her on this trip to hell. Even— Please, someone tell her that she hadn’t lost her mind. She didn’t belong to anybody but herself.
“I tried the marriage gig,” Quint stared down at the rows of blanket-covered bodies. “Didn’t stick. No kids, so we were able to walk away friends…mostly.”
He looked sad about that, so she changed the subject again by leaving the morgue area. Even hauling the final few dead out of the midsection was better than dissecting the corpses of their past sex lives.
The tropical sun hammered down on her head the moment they were out of the shade. Only an hour or so after sunrise and the heat already had a palpable weight to it.
Most of the passengers, and the triage area for the wounded, were still hunkered down in the shade of the two longer sections.
The air marshal sat with the others doused by the waste tanks, in the narrow shade of the tail section—downwind and off to the side. They’d been cleaned and disinfected, but they were still rank.
The stewards had found a job to keep some of the antsier passengers busy. They were digging through the overhead bins and the lower hold, queuing up the luggage beside the plane.
Holly spotted her own pack and snagged it.
Yanking on the lightweight vest with NTSB emblazoned across the back made her feel almost half normal. A lone inspector among the shattered wreckage. When she pulled out a Matildas hat, Quint recognized it immediately and offered a friendly bark of laughter.
“Got me a Socceroos cap somewhere about,” Quint nodded toward the sprawl of luggage.
“My team could whip those little boys’ butts blindfolded.”
“Not a chance, girlie. We’re talking the men’s national team.”
“I’m talking the women’s national team. Go on. Find your Socceroos hat and I’ll take you down one-on-one just to prove my point.”
Quint’s grin went sideways. “Tempting me, Holly. Seriously tempting me.”
Given their circumstances, it did sound good. Forget about the mess here in a man’s arms. It never worked, but it always sounded good. Forget about Mike’s attachment while she was at it. She couldn’t ever again risk someone depending on her.
She hadn’t moved this many dead bodies since—
Shoving that thought away was the only way to deal with it.
It didn’t go away, of course.
Since crawling down into the canyon to retrieve the bodies of her SASR team was the single worst thing she’d ever done—other than the minor mistake of killing her big brother. Stevie was the last person she’d ever loved, or ever would.
10
His phone rang once.
He waited.
When it rang again, he answered because he was alone.
“The plane survived the crash,” his key analyst informed him with no wasted greeting.
“Where?”
“Nothing place in the middle of the Pacific, Johnston Atoll.”
“I’ll fix it,” he hung up.
Damn Guest Seven and her FSB renegades. The damned Russians had utterly screwed up. They hadn’t even managed to kill one goddamn airplane.
He stared out the window.
Johnston Atoll. A thousand miles from anywhere.
His father had served there, died from Agent Orange poisoning while cleaning up the massive stockpile stored on the island after Vietnam. No government acknowledgement of course.
That had been his father’s battle. Military service always had a high body count.
No one died sitting in their office chair. Or not often. He tried not to remember the day that an airliner had flown into the World Trade Center towers—and the side of the Pentagon. Far too close.
He had different battles to fight.
Quickly coding out a set of top-security orders, he sent them through a masked and misreported channel set up by another of Guest Seven’s contacts.
Then he turned his attention to the east where the next step would soon be aloft.
Not far east, just a few miles away—in the heart of Washington, DC.
11
“Well, that’s a huge freaking relief.” Quint watched the pair of white-and-orange C-130J Super Hercules as the
y lifted into the heat-shimmered sky above Johnston Atoll. The first load, which included all the surviving passengers and wounded, were heading for the nearest land—Hawaii.
Dani had insisted on the brutal task of tending the wounded. She was now aloft as well—sticking at their sides until the end. Only he and Holly remained with the dead and the shattered airplane.
“Your captain is slick.”
“Dani’s the best. Taught me a hell of a lot about what it means to be a pilot.”
“That bit with the alcohol was priceless. Wish I had pictures of the passengers’ faces.”
They shared a laugh. “They were fit to crack the shits.” Quint had helped her pour all of the tiny airplane bottles of alcohol into a big tub as disinfectant for the wounded and the sewage stained. When some of the passengers had wanted to drink from it anyway, Dani had “accidentally” dropped a stained cloth in the tub. The fact that it was stained with a bit of harmless grease rather than blood didn’t matter, everyone eased off.
“Never hooked up with her?”
“Happily married, two kids. Like goofy happy.”
“Hard to imagine Captain Dani Evers being goofy.”
“She’s got it in her, until she gets within a kilometer of her plane. She’s also an urban gal. Loves being in Sydney. I’m still out in Tennant Creek.”
“Shit, you are from the GAFA.”
“Yep! A proud son of the Great Australian Fuck All. Just like you.” Because if ever there was a woman who’d belonged in the Never of the Outback, it was Holly Harper.
Holly’s grimace said volumes that he couldn’t quite read but none of them looked good.
To give her some space, Quint watched the Coast Guard planes—injured, crew, and the surviving passengers (with their precious luggage)—until they became just white dots against a blue sky, then disappeared. The best news was that the injured were now the USCG doctors’ problems; they’d lost three more before the cavalry had arrived. One of the stews was an EMT, but it just hadn’t been enough for some of the worst cases. He’d seen each loss hit Dani like a hammer blow as she helped them move the victim to the morgue.
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