“Sorry, sir. That’s an outright whopper. She flew dead cool and kissed the sweetest landing you ever saw. She saved a lot of lives with how she put us down, sir. All I did was take over some of the cleanup afterward.” He nodded toward the morgue flight where they were loading the unclaimed luggage of the dead.
“Oh, well done, mate. Really well done. That’s a hard track. Did some of that myself during Desert Storm back in ’91.” Eli was much more serious as he thumped his shoulder again. “So what’s going on here? Who are these fine folks?”
“Everyone, this is Eli Jackson, the CEO of our airline. Sir—”
“Eli.”
“Eli, these six people are the NTSB investigation team.” He turned to make the personal introductions, but Miranda interrupted him before he could start.
“To answer your first question first, what’s going on here is that we’ve found possible evidence of sabotage. Our next step will be a detailed reconstruction of the sequence of events.”
Eli’s face lost some of its color. He rested his hand lightly on Miranda’s arm. “Sabotage, you say?”
Miranda didn’t answer, instead staring fixedly at Eli’s hand.
Holly slapped his hand aside. “You can’t touch her lightly. You do and Miranda can’t think of anything else.”
“Really? Sorry.” Eli glanced at Quint, but he could only shrug. He had no idea what was up with that. Must be some part of her autism. Within moments, Miranda shook her head as if waking up, then spoke as if nothing had happened. Was she even conscious that she was rubbing her arm over and over where Eli had touched her?
“Possibly. We’re trying to determine if it was sabotage right now.”
“By who?” Eli stuffed his hands in his pockets.
“That comes later, Eli. What and how come before who.” Miranda said it like he was a bit of a simpleton, not the president of the second largest airline in the southern hemisphere.
Then she simply turned her back on him.
“Holly, please lead us through your observations in detail.”
Eli appeared taken aback, but he kept his silence and watched the others. It was damned decent of him to fly out so fast. Of course, he’d just lost a several-hundred-million-dollar plane and fifty-three passengers, so maybe it wasn’t about decency.
Holly, on the other hand, looked like she really needed to take a sickie.
So slowly that it was painful to listen to, she recounted the events.
29
It didn’t help that Jeremy seemed to have eight questions about every single observation Holly made. He was clearly the resident whiz-kid, but Quint wondered if he ever slowed down.
The less Holly spoke, the more questions Jeremy fired off, until—
“Jeremy, hush,” Mike just cut him off.
Mike had already interviewed him about the crash. And he was so damned smooth that Quint hadn’t figured out what was going on until they were mostly done. They’d each grabbed a roast beef sandwich and a warm soda from the shattered galley, then gone and sat on the edge of the runway with their feet in the sand.
For an hour, while the others were investigating things he couldn’t begin to understand despite a lifetime of flying planes, they’d just talked. Right through every single aspect of the flight from the moment he’d left his layover hotel, met Dani in the foyer, and headed for the airport.
By the end of the hour, he knew that Mike was the human factors investigator for Miranda’s team.
And the way he figured it, Mike knew more about him than his ex-wife had after two years together. And they’d been pretty good years.
Now he stepped to the fore again.
The first thing Mike did was lead them all to a group of seats that the dozer had shoved aside with the rest of the wreckage. While the dozer operator struggled with the big central section and the still-attached right wing and engine, they tipped the seats upright in the sand.
The late afternoon sunlight was easing its hammer blow and the breeze felt pleasantly cool.
And with no obvious transition, Mike was interviewing Holly from the moment she’d boarded the plane. Rather than asking her questions, he…guided her explanation. No detail was too small.
“Take me on a journey down the aisle, Holly. Anything about the crew?”
“Shit, Mike. I didn’t even notice I was sitting behind the air marshal until he threatened to shoot me. How’s that for situational non-awareness?” Holly had pulled out the Glock as if holding a deadly weapon gave her hands something to do. She explained the series of events.
“Really? You can break it down one-handed? I’ve never seen that.”
And nothing would do until she’d showed him how to do it. The weapon seemed to simply be an extension of her hand, which was a little creepy.
“Cool!” Mike gave an encouraging nod as she slotted it back together and rammed the magazine home with a hard slap. “So you missed noting the air marshal and dropped into your seat. Which one?”
And just that smoothly, he led Holly through each detail.
Leg cramps keeping her awake.
The initial vibration.
The increased shaking.
The visible shaking of the engine once she’d opened the window shade.
The clean breakaway, followed by the iron fist of the fan failure shredding the engine and punching the wing.
The amount of detail she unearthed under Mike’s guidance was astonishing. She’d observed far more than she’d told them in the cockpit. Of course, they’d been on the verge of losing a wing at thirty-nine thousand feet at the time.
“Pure luck the uncontained fan failure didn’t puncture the hull.” Quint had never been through a depressurization event at thirty-nine thousand feet, and he never wanted to try.
“No,” Miranda was shaking her head. “Pure luck does not apply in this case, Mr. Dermott.”
“You call the CEO of my airline by his first name, but you’ve called me Mr. Dermott throughout the day.”
“Yes.” She didn’t say anything else.
“Why?”
“You didn’t ask me to call you Quint, Mr. Dermott. Eli did.”
“Oh.”
She waited.
“It’s okay to call—”
“Shut your yap, Quint,” Holly rolled her eyes at him. “Miranda likes to focus on one question at a time. Miranda, you were saying why it wasn’t chance that saved the hull?”
“This failure constitutes a terribly unlikely chain of events,” she continued as if returning to the primary topic was physically painful.
She was a strange little woman, but there was a weird logic to her that he rather liked.
“The most likely source for vibrations severe enough to cause a breakaway would be an engine containment failure—though the shear pins in the engine mount can typically withstand that type of shaking. However, the events occurred in the reverse order. To cause the kind of vibration you’re implying, someone must have mounted a hydraulic pressure booster pump in the system somewhere.”
“Yes. I get it!” Jeremy was nodding excitedly. “The most likely place to mount a pump like that would be directly above the leading edge of the high-pressure fan. When the engine mount ultimately let go—BANG!—that would have severely weakened the engine containment housing at the top. The engine breaks away…” he punched a fist forward, “…then it inverts to clear the wing—per design…” he swung his arm up until he was looking straight up at his fist, “…and at the moment of fan failure, the punch would have been directed entirely at the wing below.” Then he actually smacked the back of his fist against his own forehead.
“But…why?” Quint couldn’t imagine someone doing that.
“That’s still as irrelevant as ‘By who?’ was seven minutes ago.” Miranda seemed to be studying his left ear.
Quint checked his watch but since he had no idea what time Holly had started speaking, he had no idea how long it had been. He did notice that Miranda hadn’t looked a
t her own watch. He rubbed at his left ear. Miranda’s focus shifted to his right shoulder.
“I do wish we could recover the Number One engine to verify that conjecture.”
Jeremy was back to studying his tablet computer. “There’s an over-pressure surge on the Blue Loop hydraulic loop at about the time Holly is referring to.”
“How big a surge?”
“Well, it doesn’t really make sense. Ten thousand psi? Four-point-four times normal operating pressure. A remarkably high frequency for an aircraft hydraulic system. Three-point-seven pulses per second.”
Holly started slowly, “The vibration was induced by the high-pressure pulsation of the hydraulic system. It would be enough to damage the engine. Once the vibrations hit that harmonic of three-point-seven pulses per second, they would tend to amplify rather than dampen. Until something broke.”
Holly’s voice radiated more anger than a ticked-off water buffalo ready to shred your truck.
Quint considered clearing a detonation zone around her in case she went off.
“Yes,” Miranda said perfectly matter-of-factly. “Though without recovering the engine itself, we’ll never know quite what gave way, which I find rather…” She pulled out a notebook and consulted it briefly. “…annoying.” Then she tucked the notebook away as if her feelings were somehow stored in there.
“There was no alarm in the cockpit,” Quint would remember that. “Wouldn’t what happened be enough to trigger an alarm?”
There was a grim silence that answered that question.
Holly looked at him. “You had no alarm because during your supposed ‘engine service’, your saboteur simply disconnected the alarm sensor. They must have missed that when they were initially jury-rigging the system to fail.”
“Which means…” Eli looked grim, “…that it really was sabotage.”
“Possibly,” Miranda spoke up. “These are all elements of the conjecture meta-sphere so far.”
She didn’t explain what that meant, but no one else was commenting on it, so Quint kept his mouth shut.
“There is also the nonconjectural evidence from a phone call Mike mentioned.”
Mike tapped a phone. Unlike the others who carried a myriad array of tools, it was about the only thing in his NTSB vest. “I spoke with your Seattle maintenance facility. They have no record of a call for engine service during your three-hour turnaround and crew changeover in Seattle. Someone unauthorized worked on your engines. And then again to unplug the Blue Loop hydraulic alarm. The fault that was noted in the plane’s log was not corroborated by the Seattle office.”
“Which also fits the known facts,” she conceded.
“Of one of my planes?”
“As you are the CEO of the airline, and I assume that you are referring to responsibility rather than direct ownership, then yes, this is the remains of one of your planes.” She waved a hand toward the wreckage.
Quint fought to hide his smile. He’d had all afternoon to get used to Miranda’s curious way of stating the obvious in a very particular fashion.
“And, while I wouldn’t state it with the same certainty Holly just displayed, I would say that sabotage was a remarkably high probability at this time. There is another factor missing, something isn’t quite correct with the math. I wouldn’t be comfortable reaching any conclusion until that discrepancy is resolved.”
“It isn’t?” Jeremy jolted as if he was suddenly told he was on a plane about to crash. He plunged back into his modeling software.
“But,” Miranda continued, “I hope to discover that either on the flight recorders or the section of wing we preserved for investigation.”
There was a stunned silence. Despite the tropical heat, Quint felt a cold shiver up his spine. They really had been that close to death.
“Whoever sabotaged the plane will be disappointed.” Miranda said it as if her simple words carried the entire emotional weight a sabotaged airliner called for.
“Aye,” Holly nodded. “Disappointed enough to send an SOG team to break up any remaining evidence.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Eli roared.
Quint figured Eli was feeling just as overwhelmed as he himself was. He did his best to explain. Three women, with one gun between them, taking down a six-man CIA death squad had been pretty amazing to watch—even if he’d been doing his best to cower out of sight at the time.
“Why was the CIA trying to kill my plane?”
Holly’s look went from sickly to almost barfing.
“Again you’re asking why, Eli. Such conclusions aren’t possible until I have completed my analysis,” Miranda said.
Holly just looked down without saying a word.
30
“Are you sure, Holly?”
She wasn’t sure of anything.
“Look, Mike…” She didn’t even know what to say anymore.
Too weary to stand, she sat and leaned back against one of the three-foot-tall tires of the US Coast Guard C-130J’s nose gear. The sun was now low enough to beat on her even here under the plane. Even though it was a desert island, it was the only place they could find some privacy.
The cleanup crew was nearly done. In minutes, Johnston Atoll would once again be left to the gulls.
Eli had offered her and Quint a lift to Australia in his Gulfstream, rather than them backtracking to Hawaii on the C-130J with the rest of the team and then catching a flight to double back.
“Seriously, I don’t mind going with you if you need some company. Or just want a friend along for the ride.”
It actually sounded good. Leave it to Mike to always say the right thing. And he did it so well that she couldn’t even get annoyed at him for it.
“If it was anywhere…” except where she had to go. She just shook her head.
“Christ, Holly. Now you’re scaring me a bit. Maybe more than,” he offered one of those consoling smiles of his.
“It’s nothing dangerous, Mike. It’s just something I have to do—alone.” And if she survived, it would be more of a miracle than surviving a sabotaged plane crash.
“Any chance of you at least telling me what it is?” He rested his hand lightly on her arm.
It was all she could focus on. Offering comfort and consolation. Reminding her of a connection that she didn’t want at the moment. And overloading her sensations as Mike so often did. Their bodies positively hummed together in bed.
Well, it gave her a little more insight into what it must be like for Miranda when someone touched her lightly. Yeah, right. Probably times a thousand for her.
Holly eased out from under his touch and stared out across the shimmering runway.
Home.
The place she’d left at sixteen.
The very last place in the world she’d ever expected to set foot again.
31
At least her legs were enjoying the ride in Eli’s Gulfstream G650, even if the rest of her wasn’t.
Even stressed out, her leather chair in the executive-class cabin was genuinely nice. The facing-four let her stretch her legs out and rest them on the opposite seat. Her body began to unkink, one vertebrae at a time.
The morgue flight had left Johnston as soon as they were loaded.
After the dozer and sweeper were finished—other than the pile of debris along one side of the runway and some staining of the tar where the excavator had burned—the runway was clear again, and the island was much as they’d found it.
The second Coast Guard C-130J had headed aloft and turned for Hawaii at the same time Eli’s plane turned for Australia. Holly could feel the connection with Miranda, Mike, and the others stretching thinner by another mile every four seconds.
How long until it snapped entirely?
Such a cheerful thought. She slouched lower in the seat.
After making sure they were settled in the front seats, Eli Jackson had become the pure businessman. He’d gone to the conference table, already set up in the second group of seats w
here his work was all spread out. In minutes, he’d been on the phone, deep in his computer, and worrying about whatever airline CEOs worried about after a crash. Still, he’d personally flown all the way to Johnston to see the crash for himself, which was saying a lot about his personal investment in the company.
When Quint handed her a cold Tooheys New and a foot-long Continental Roll of crusty bread, Italian meats, and roasted red peppers, she started feeling a little better about the flight. A Continental might be a Sydney treat, but it was still more the taste of home than even a New York submarine sandwich.
“I could kiss you for this.”
“More than welcome to,” he rumbled out cheerily as he dropped into the kitty-corner chair and rested his feet on the seat beside her.
Holly was tempted, but decided that Mike wouldn’t like it.
Mike wouldn’t…
Christ! Being in a relationship, even just a strictly physical one, was more trouble than it was worth. She and Mike had been shacking up for… Shit! Eight or nine months? Way too long!
And he kept acting like there was more there. Was that why he’d offered to come to Australia—as if she’d want him to see the hole she’d come from? Or maybe he was just trying to stay between her and Quint. Yeah, far more likely, even if there was nothing there.
“What’s changed in Tennant Creek?” she asked Quint to make conversation.
He barked out a laugh and almost choked on his sandwich. “You’re joking, right? TC hasn’t changed since they put in the McDonald’s.”
That had her jolting in surprise. “When the hell did that go in?”
“Never,” Quint grinned at his own joke. “That’s how much TC hasn’t changed. Though there’s a surprisingly good Chinese place now.”
“Well, that’s something.” She’d always liked Tennant Creek, except for the fact that her parents lived there. Three thousand people, half of them indigenous, all in a space of two miles from the airport in the north, to Kelly’s Ranch in the south.
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