The single option—the only option—was a water ditching. She stared at Taggart, unseeing, while she searched her memory bank for every scrap of data. The first 727 went into service in 1964. In all the years since, no one had ever attempted to take one down in the water. No one even knew if the hundred-ton jet would float. Even Boeing’s computer models were inconclusive. They couldn’t predict with any certainty what would happen, either.
But…
She only needed to keep the body of the aircraft afloat long enough for the passengers to egress. And if she brought it down in shallow water… Shallow, swampy water. Weeds would break the water’s surface tension, soften the landing. A water ditching would be a dicey proposition at best, given the problems with the right flaps, but if she compensated by working the left and—
Suzanne’s racing thoughts skidded to an abrupt stop. An experienced pilot might be able to pull it off. Ryder Hamilton would plow Flight 407 right into the swamp.
With a fierce effort of will, she dumped every thought, cleared her mind completely, took another tack. Moments later, she blinked and brought Taggart’s face into focus.
“Okay, here’s the deal. We’re going to bring Flight 407 down in the Everglades. No one’s ever ditched a 727 in the water before, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”
A frown carved a deep V in Taggart’s forehead. “Do you really think Hamilton’s up to something like that?”
“Not Hamilton. Me. I’m going to be at the controls.”
Taggart’s mouth dropped. Before he recovered his powers of speech, Suzanne was back on the mike.
“Flight 407, this is Chase One.”
“Go ahead, Chase One.”
“I’m going to direct Chase Two up and into position right here beside you. I’ll keep this net open and remain in constant contact if you need me, but—”
“Bailing out on me, Delachek?”
He’d buried the terror she knew he must be feeling under a thick layer of cynicism. Someone had done a real number on this guy, Suzanne thought. A woman, if she could believe his snide crack about how he ended up in leg irons.
“No, I’m not bailing out on you. I’m going to see if I can borrow a transport plane, arrange a midair transfer, and join you in the cockpit.”
“A midair transfer?” He sounded as incredulous as the FBI agent still looked. “You’re crazy, lady!”
Everyone Suzanne talked to in the next half hour echoed exactly the same sentiments. Taggart. The FAA. The Department of Defense Emergency Coordination Center. The tower at Sam Houston International Airport, still monitoring Flight 407’s every transmission. Even the commander of the Air Force Special Operations unit at Hurlburt Field in the Florida panhandle, where the Gulfstream swooped in for a landing. As Lieutenant Colonel “Howie” Howard acerbically pointed out, midair transfers only happened in the movies.
Despite his very vocal skepticism, however, Howie had a C-130 Hercules waiting for her with engines running. Suzanne jumped out of the Gulfstream jet the moment it rolled to a stop and raced across the runway to the squat, four-engined workhorse that performed such varied air force missions as hauling cargo, suppressing enemy fire, and combat rescue.
“We put a flight suit aboard for you,” the pilot shouted over the roar of the 130’s four turboprops. “Along with a helmet, an oxygen pack, and boots. The crew chief will show you how the harness and hoist work once we’re airborne.”
“Roger that.”
He cocked a look over his shoulder as she strapped herself in. “You gotta be nuts to even think about doing this.”
“So I’ve been told,” Suzanne drawled. “Let’s go.”
To everyone’s complete astonishment, Suzanne’s included, she pulled it off.
It took two nerve-wracking hours to bring Flight 407 down in ever-widening circles to a safe altitude to depressurize the aircraft and blow the left passenger door. At the same time, they edged the 727 closer and closer to Florida’s southwest coast.
It took another twenty minutes to position the C-130 above and to the left of the jet. That was followed by agonizing minutes of terror when the forward passenger door flew off and everyone in the watching aircraft prayed they wouldn’t see bodies being sucked out or the 727 going nose down into the sea.
Then Suzanne was swinging at the end of a steel cable, buffeted by the brutal wind and the 727’s jet stream, convinced that this insanity would shave five, maybe ten, years off her life…if she didn’t end it in the next few minutes.
The only thing that kept her from signaling the crew chief to winch her back up was the man at the big jet’s open hatch. He had anchored himself to the inside galley by a harness fashioned of stainless steel shackles. Wind tore at his hair and clothes. Desperate hope twisted his face.
Shuddering, Suzanne waved to the crew chief to drop her down another ten feet. Fifteen. Twenty. When she was eye level with the open door, she swung out, then in. She missed the hatch and slammed against the fuselage with bone-jarring force. Bouncing away, she twisted like a puppet on strings. Stars pinwheeled behind her eyes. Nausea from the wild spin threatened to choke her. The jet’s engines deafened her.
Gripping the cable with gloved hands, she waited for the nausea to pass, sucked in a breath and signaled for another try. This time she got close enough for the man at the open hatch to grab at her boot before the wind and centrifugal forces dragged her away.
Two tries later, she smashed right into the guy. They tumbled backward, clinging to each other while the C-130’s crew chief frantically slackened the cable to keep from pulling them both back out.
Wild cheers erupted throughout the cabin when she stumbled to her feet and tore off her helmet and oxygen pack. The man who’d hauled her in, a marshal, she guessed, since he wasn’t wearing the prison-issue tan pants and white T-shirt, wrapped her in a huge bear hug.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he shouted over the wind screaming through the cabin. “You and that bird up there. Is it going to take us all out?”
Suzanne shot a glance down the long passenger cabin, stripped to the bare essentials for prisoner transport. Faces stared back at her. Frantic. Joyful. The woman in a middle row caught her eyes.
The hijacker’s ex-wife. Kelly Jackson. She’d saved Flight 407 once by helping Spence Cantrell bring down the murderous bastard who shot the pilot. Suzanne would have to save it a second time. Whipping her glance back to the marshal still shackled to the galley, she shook her head.
“I’m sorry. Flight 407’s running out of fuel fast. At most, the C-130 could winch up one soul, maybe two. They’ve got a doc on board with a portable heart crash kit to help O’Connor if he’s still hanging in there. The rest of you…”
She speared a glance around the circle of marshals who’d crowded forward to listen to her words.
“Unshackle the prisoners and get them ready for an emergency landing.”
When she wrenched the cockpit door open, the injured Spence Cantrell scrambled out of the seat and squeezed past her with a shouted welcome. The door banged behind him a second later, shutting out the roaring wind. Suzanne climbed into the vacant seat and turned to the convict at the controls.
Before she could get out so much as a word, Hamilton wrapped a hand around her neck, hauled her halfway across the throttles, and laid a kiss on her that knocked the wind right out of her for the second time in as many minutes.
Chapter 2
In the few seconds it took Suzanne to gather her scattered senses, she registered several pertinent facts about Ryder Hamilton.
One, he kissed like no man she’d ever met, including her ex-husband, and Jack’s all-too-skilled lovemaking had kept Suzanne in her marriage far longer than either common sense or her ex’s lack of commitment dictated.
Two, Hamilton was the handsomest devil she’d come across in a long time. Gunmetal gray eyes glinted at her from a rugged, square-jawed face. His black hair had just enough of a curl in it to re
sist a comb, although his stubbled cheeks and chin indicated he hadn’t been anywhere near a comb or a razor in days.
Three, his white T-shirt stretched across shoulders the everyday, average male would kill for. And the muscled thighs under those tan prison pants…
The prison uniform brought her thoughts slamming back into focus. Ryder Hamilton was a convict. A jury had found him guilty of scamming hundreds of people like her folks out of money they couldn’t afford to lose. That was why he was aboard Flight 407 in the first place.
And Flight 407 was the reason—the only reason—Suzanne had just hurtled a hundred feet of open airspace. Wrenching her mind back to the urgent business at hand, she reached for the throttles. They felt smooth under her fingers, as familiar as a lover’s touch.
“All right, Mr. Hamilton. Here’s the drill. I’m going to put—”
“Ryder.” His grin kicked up another notch. “You’re in my head, sweetheart. You’ll probably be there for the rest of my life. I think that puts us on a first-name basis.”
She refused to let his combination of heady relief and reckless charm infect her.
“I’m going to put us down at approximately eighty-one degrees longitude, twenty-five and a half degrees latitude.”
Her cool tone stripped away his grin. Reality in the form of a crippled plane fast running out of fuel had him doing a quick calculation.
“Eighty-one degrees longitude.” His brow creased. “Are we going into Miami?”
“Close. The Everglades.”
“The Everglades! You’re putting us down in the water?”
From the way he choked out the question, Suzanne guessed he’d figured out their odds of survival if they went down in the Gulf and didn’t like them any better than she did.
“In the swamp, Mr. Hamil—Ryder. To be exact, smack in the middle of a saw grass prairie called Shark Valley.
As she talked, Suzanne visually swept the instruments, swiftly translating altitude, airspeed and remaining fuel into air time.
“I spent a summer camping in the Everglades with my folks. Shark Valley is a shallow, slow-moving sea of grass. The reeds will break the surface tension of the water and make it act like a cushion instead of concrete.”
That was the theory, anyway.
“Even if the aircraft breaks up when it hits, which is the most likely scenario, the scatter pattern of the wreckage should be contained within a few miles. Search and rescue assets are already en route to the estimated impact point.”
“Impact point,” he echoed, his jaw tight.
She didn’t have time to reassure him any further…or herself. “Hang on. I’m going to activate the flaps. I’ll compensate with thrust, but…”
“It’s going to get bumpy,” he finished grimly.
“A little.”
With that magnificent understatement, she brought the 727 out of its wide, low-level circle and applied the flaps. The jet shook and rattled like a tin can kicked down two flights of stairs. Every joint in its frame stressed. Metal shrieked against metal. The wings flexed like an eagle in flight.
But she slowed! Thank God, she slowed.
Suzanne took 407 down, sweating, straining, constantly checking airspeed, altitude, fuel consumption. Every few seconds she’d whip her gaze up, praying for a glimpse of the Florida shoreline in the twilight now purpling the eastern sky.
When the first lights appeared on the horizon, she slowed the jet almost to stall speed and brought her down to less than a hundred feet above the water. Suddenly, a flashing red light on the instrument panel put a kink in her stomach.
The fuel low-level light! Swallowing, she searched the horizon. They’d make it. Barely.
With the warning light emitting a continuous reminder of their precarious situation, Suzanne divided her attention between the instruments and the distant coastline. When the purplish smudge resolved into a more distinctive pattern of inlets and cays, she wanted to weep with relief, although she knew the worst was yet to come.
She keyed her intercom mike. “Five minutes to impact.”
Ryder nodded, his gray eyes narrowed on the flickering lights in the distance. There weren’t many. This stretch of Florida was inhabited primarily by alligators and egrets. In the midst of her own churning fear, Suzanne noticed that he’d clenched both fists so tight the knuckles showed white.
“Don’t wimp out on me now.”
“What?”
“I need you.” She glanced pointedly at his fists, and forced a confidence she was far from feeling. “We’re going to walk away from this.”
He stared at her for a moment. Then, unbelievably, the weathered skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled and his mouth kicked up. As grins went, it was pretty puny, but it was definitely a grin.
“Actually, I was just thinking that we’re putting down only a few hours drive from my ex-fiancée. If we walk away, I might just look her up.”
“You do that. But first get on the intercom. Tell the folks in back to put their heads down, wrap their arms around their legs, and brace for landing. Remind them their seat cushions are flotation devices.”
While Ryder did as she instructed, Suzanne brought the shaking, shuddering airframe down so low its belly almost skimmed the waves. Her heart bumped each time she checked the fuel gauge.
The coast rushed at them.
They were flying on fumes.
Water gave way to swamp.
When the swamp became a vast sea of grass dotted with scattered, islandlike stands of trees, Suzanne put the left flaps down full, compensated with a sharp right thrust, and throttled all the way back.
“Hold on!”
The big jet slammed into the watery weeds, glanced off, rose like a silver Venus from the grassy sea.
A second or two later, it hit again with a force that smashed Suzanne back against her seat. The last thing she heard was the agonized scream of metal ripping apart.
Ryder thought he’d been through hell in the past two years. The only woman he’d ever wanted to marry had played him like a cheap fiddle, first by working her way into a position as his secretary, then by worming her way into his heart. He still couldn’t quite believe he’d been so damned gullible. Only after the feds showed up at his office and hauled him off in handcuffs did he have any idea Sharon and the “cousin” she’d convinced Ryder to hire had used his stationery, his fax, and his name to milk investors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in phony oil leases.
But the searing shame of his trial and the long months at a minimum security prison didn’t begin to compare with the hell he went through when he shook his head to clear the buzzing and saw watery weeds lapping at the 727’s windshield.
Or when he turned his head and found Suzanne Delachek slumped lifelessly in the seat next to his.
“Dammit!”
His throat closing, he reached across the throttles, buried a hand in her hair and pulled her head back. The skin under her jaw felt warm and smooth, but his own pulse hammered so hard he couldn’t find hers.
It had to be there! She couldn’t be…!
The faint flutter under his fingertips spawned a whoop of relief. “Atta girl, Delachek! I knew you were too tough to let a little thing like a crash landing take you out. Come on, babe. Wake up.”
Groaning, she pulled away from his hand. A moment later, her lids fluttered up. Ryder’s stomach clenched at the dazed incomprehension in their blue depths.
He had no way of knowing if she’d suffered internal injuries, and right now she couldn’t tell him. But he knew he had to get her out of there. The jet’s nose appeared to have augured into mud. The whole plane tilted down at a thirty-degree angle, but the damned thing could flop back at any minute, sink into the water, and take everyone aboard with it.
He struggled free of his shoulder harness. The instrument panel now sat almost in his lap. Grunting, Ryder wiggled out from under the tangled wires and crawled over the throttles. He had to fight his way up the angled cockpit and put his s
houlder to the door to shove it open. Pushing through, he climbed over the debris in the galley.
“Hey, is anyone…?”
He caught himself a half step from pitching headfirst into the purple dusk. Stunned, he gaped at the empty hole where the fuselage used to be.
The whole body of the jet had broken off, right behind the forward galley. Only a couple of rows of seats remained. He stared at the darkening sky, trying to estimate how far the nose had traveled in the terrifying seconds after they hit. Trying to remember, too, what Suzanne had said about wreckage and scatter patterns.
The fuselage could be a mile behind them, he thought with a twist of his gut. Maybe more.
A groan spun Ryder toward the right row of seats. One of the convicts struggled up. Blood seeped from a cut on his forehead as he stared in stupefaction at the night sky.
“Wh…? What happened?”
Ryder didn’t bother to answer, figuring the empty hole spoke for itself.
A second convict poked his head up. A face decorated with tattoos contorted in disbelief.
“Damn!”
After a moment of frozen immobility, the prisoner ducked back down, wrestled the bottom cushion from a twisted seat frame, and staggered up. He was headed for the open passenger door when Ryder caught his arm and hauled him around.
“Wait a minute! The pilot’s hurt. I need you to help me get her out.”
“Get her out yourself.”
“She saved your ass, dammit.”
The tattooed swastikas at the corners of his mouth twisted. “Tell it to the judge, cowboy.”
The beefy prisoner had him by a good four inches and fifty pounds. Still, Ryder might have taken the gorilla on if the man hadn’t wrenched a dangling shard of metal from the overhead compartment and hefted it with unmistakable menace.
“I ain’t hanging around waitin’ for no marshals to show up and put me in chains again. I’m outta here, cowboy. If you had any sense, you would be, too.”
Special Report Page 17