Page 38 of Air Force One
Petty Officer Stanik didn’t hesitate. He squatted spreadeagled over the horizontally submerged access hatch and signaled her to perch on his shoulders. He was alternately underwater and in the air, but hadn’t complained once. Holly had worked as fast as she could in the sloshing chaos lit only by the headlamps they’d both donned. Two wing nuts to free each recorder—if only it had been so simple. Last one had been jammed tighter than a virgin’s…well, yeah, tighter than that.
But they did it.
They’d unmounted the damn things. Hadn’t dropped them where they’d probably fall through the access hatch and disappear to somewhere in the labyrinthine depths of the tortured plane. And hadn’t died in the process. Three for the win!
Except the plane was getting restive, and it wasn’t only the increasing wave heights battering against the two-and-a-half-story-tall vertical stabilizer. While they’d been battling the recorders, a fuel tanker had arrived and begun pumping out the wing tanks. The nitrogen gas they were pumping in, so that no explosive air-fuel mixture formed, was lightening the plane. Not enough to float it, but it might be enough to unstick it from the bottom. If it did, odds-on were Air Force One would finally complete its failed landing—horizontal on the seabed. If they were still inside, they’d be dragged down with it to a depth of sixty meters. Bad news in any diving manual she’d ever read. And that was assuming they and the others working aboard weren’t trapped in the fall.
They finally got out of the tail cone space—alive. She sent Stanik to the surface with the recorders. Once he surfaced, that would set his deepest dive point for the day. He knew it too. Unable to go deeper on his next dive to help his teammates clear the bodies was gonna rankle deep.
But she’d had an idea as they washed in and out of the stupid air bubble in the tail cone and wanted to check it out. Letting her hand-light lead the way, she swam down past the body-conveyor rope. Every minute or so, another body drifted by and mournfully looked at her mask so nicely full of air.
At first, she swam into the starboard rear cabin. The bodies had been cleared but the piles of equipment that remained—cameras, video gear, and a flurry of good-old notebooks—said it was the press area. She had to bat knapsacks and camera cases aside, but couldn’t find any hole big enough that a body could have slipped out. The body conveyor, once she was past the worst of the horror, had reminded her of Miranda’s comment in the PEOC that one body had surfaced, and Holly wanted to find where it had come from. She’d been very careful to not look at the screen once it was obvious there were no survivors.
She hit pay dirt in the port-side rear cabin. The failure point was the second window from the aft bulkhead. Everything else looked alarmingly intact, except for the various firearms that had collected against the forward, now lower bulkhead. Aboard Air Force One only the Secret Service would have been armed, making this their seating area. The weapons should have remained in the individuals’ holsters—though maybe not.
Miranda had said that the worst-case scenario was an eight-g impact force. The condition of the passing bodies’ necks proved that no matter how extreme the prediction, Miranda was rarely wrong. At eight-gs, a two-pound weapon would briefly weigh sixteen—twice the rating of even the most secure holsters, four times a normal one.
Again, a rolling nausea swam through her, but she managed to choke it down. These were, had been, her kind of people.
She swam down into the staff and guest passenger area but didn’t probe any deeper. She kept an eye on her gauges and was hitting her air-time-depth limit. Also, the corridor narrowed off to one side and bodies had started coming up from the deeper reaches of the plane.
A whole line of men and women in white shirts and military jackets. The upper deck watch crew. In their midst, a body bag that someone had taken the time to wrestle with at depth. General Drake Nason, it had to be. Because he would be nowhere else than on the command deck when the worst was coming.
Though his body bag was head up and she floated head down, Holly offered him her best salute until he disappeared up the rear stairs.
After the command deck crew, a pair of body bags came up farther apart. The way they floated and twisted, whoever was inside was no longer intact.
Yeah, she was done. She grabbed onto the rope in the gap after the second body bag and let herself follow them to the surface.
It was a mistake.
The rope ran close by the horizontal stabilizers. When a couple tons of water in a four-meter-high wave slammed a dead body against the aluminum skin, they didn’t care so much. When it did the same to Holly, it blew all the air out of her lungs, blasting her regulator out of her mouth. She was lucky to have hit flat and back first, but she was going to be black-and-blue from her heels to her shoulders. Her vision tunneled as she groped about blindly for her regulator in the next crashing wave.
The only thing that saved her was that her instincts hadn’t released the rope. She was hauled clear and dragged onto a Zodiac like a dying fish—with a lungful of burning seawater that she had to choke out. One of the seamen removed her tank and mask, then helped her vomit over the side. By the time she was done and could breathe again, the Zodiac was already headed back to the ship with a load of ten dead and one living—at least technically, though it sure didn’t feel that way.
Looking aft, she could see that another RHIB had slid into place to gather more bodies.
She’d waited until the bodies were transported aboard. How she’d managed to climb the swim ladder to stand among the dead on the Bear’s afterdeck would have to remain a mystery.
“You look like shit.”
Holly had never been so happy to see anyone in her life. She wrapped her arms around Mike.
“You’re all wet.” But his arms came around her.
She buried her face against his shoulder and breathed him in. The life and warmth in him wrapped around her as they stood on a deck of death.
Alone. Under that long-ago blown-up bridge, there had been only her and the dead.
Here? Not alone. Mike held her tighter and tighter. The pain across her back and shoulders didn’t diminish, but it was far less important.
She wanted to ask why he held her so tightly. Why he clung to such a royal mess of a person. The first sob wracked through her worse than being wave-slammed against that stupid stabilizer.
Not alone. She held onto Mike as hard as he held her—and wept.
31
Jeremy and the flight recorders were headed back to the NTSB aboard the Marine’s HMX-1 White-top helo. He had a black box reader with him, but that wasn’t strictly protocol and Mike had told Miranda to insist that this time everything must be done a hundred percent by the books.
