Page 48 of Air Force One
The investigating officer was never able to identify who hit the ball that had left a round hole in the window and a messy one in Jeffrey’s head. He figured that no serious player would want to admit to hitting such a bad slice. The golf ball itself was never found and the case was closed as an accidental death.
No one had hit the golf ball; it had been fired from a custom-built slingshot rifle. After passing through Tech Sergeant Jeffrey Wilson and the truck window, the ball had bounced once on the pavement and landed in the back of a passing pickup where the incoming rain would wash it clean long before it was discovered.
Jeffrey Wilson wouldn’t be telling anyone about anything he’d done. He’d just been executed by a Titleist golf ball.
39
Air Force One had not gone quietly to her grave. Nor did she resurrect gently either.
The storm had stabilized at Sea State 6. With the deep swell triggered by the storm continuing to travel north, the waves around the crash site were forming up in great, long rollers up to two stories high. Most of them were whitecapped and some were blowing spray.
Initial delays in raising the plane occurred when two fresh dive teams were sent down to the very nose of the 747 to attempt recovery of the last two bodies. Neither team was successful.
Colonel Vic Franklin had spent innumerable hours over the last year waiting outside of various Presidential locations, both on land and in the air. Whenever the President left the White House, a rotating staff of colonels from each of the services made their best effort to keep the briefcase known as the nuclear football (properly the Presidential Emergency Satchel) within fifty meters of the President.
During those hours, he’d developed quite the crush on Tabitha Ray, one of President Cole’s secretaries—the one who typically traveled with him. Rumor said she’d gotten a divorce six months ago, and he hoped this trip would give him the chance to ask her out.
He was mid-forties and knew he'd topped out; he wasn’t general material and wasn’t going to let himself become a useless lump of ROAD—retired on active duty—colonel for another twenty years. He’d be out as soon as he figured out what came next.
And there was Tabitha, the walking, breathing proof that fifty was the new fantastic. Besides, she was one of those genuinely nice people; it just radiated off her. They were both part of a truly rare breed, born-and-raised DC natives. That too had given them a connection to rest his hopes upon. As always, their seats were side by side on Air Force One along the left side of the plane facing the President’s office.
It had been going well…until the engines had started winding down. After General Drake Nason had come out, shutting the President’s door so firmly that the Do Not Disturb signal was clear, Tabitha had reached out and taken his hand. They hadn’t let go even during the final impact.
Vic had struggled and failed to keep ahold of both Tabitha’s hand and the nuclear football when the initial surge of the water struck. It had rushed aboard, ripping their seats free from the fifty-year-old floor supports. The three of them—Vic and Tabitha still belted into the business class seats, and the forty-five pound briefcase—tumbled together. The pressure wave had driven them down into the President’s personal apartment at the very nose of the aircraft—landing them in the President’s bed at the very front of the cabin.
The nose of the plane had survived generally intact, except for the massive radar assembly that had driven the forward bulkhead of the cabin into the compartment like the engine into a car’s passenger compartment during a head-on collision. They were dead when they landed, then crushed by the radar assembly, but they’d finally gotten into bed together.
After the failure of the two dive teams to recover Vic and Tabitha’s bodies, though they had recovered the nuclear football, it was decided to proceed with the attempt to refloat the plane. Once the storm broke off the tail, the recovery would become far more difficult. It would also drastically delay the analysis of what had caused the crash.
The final dive team had entered every space as they slowly ascended, to make sure that no one other than Vic and Tabitha had been left behind—there wasn’t. But the diver also noted that the blown-out copilot’s window was packed solid with mud.
On surfacing he asked to see the commander. The two small women wearing NTSB vests were with him.
“I understand that the concept is to blow air into the plane, using its pressure to drive the water out the missing window in the bottom. But that window is below the level of the mud. The water will be hard to drive out.”
This had caused the next delay as another team mounted a jet pump deep in the fuselage. Somewhat counterintuitively, a jet pump removes water by pumping more in. A small amount of water is driven down a high-pressure line. At the bottom, the stream is turned upward and fired into an uptake pipe with a narrowed throat. Just before the narrowing, a pickup pipe is open to the ocean. When the high-pressure stream enters the narrow tube, the resulting Venturi effect accelerates the stream further, creating a very low-pressure zone in the pipe. This sucks the water in from the pickup pipe.
They would need to create a balance between air pressure pumped into the airplane and the jet pump ejecting water from inside the plane to out on the surface. Getting them out of balance could explode or crush the fuselage.
To monitor that, successive pressure gauges, both water and air, were placed at intervals down the length of the fuselage. By the time everything was ready, the RHIBs had to be pulled from the water because they could either handle the waves or be useful, but they couldn’t do both.
The five motor life boats had become ten, and those could ride out a hurricane. Commander Davidson ordered those to pull back as well.
The sun had set hours before and the searchlights of the three cutters made the sea look even worse than he knew it was.
Commander Davidson inspected the situation carefully from his command bridge. Air, water, and power lines ran from the USCG Bear out to Air Force One.
The Northland and Harriet Lane had upped anchor to ease the brutal ride rather than constantly jerking against their anchor chains.
“Station keeping,” he ordered the helmsman to keep them exactly where they were, then raised the Bear’s anchor. When everything was squared away, he gave the command.
“Let’s do it. Start the pumps.”
He’d thought that the crisis of his command would be the rescue and body recovery. Now he glanced aloft at the blinking lights of the few news helos braving the storm and wondered what they’d say if he got Air Force One to the surface and then lost her to the depths.
40
Already lightened by the removal of the fuel, Air Force One was shifting several degrees each way as the waves washed by her tail.
