Page 52 of Air Force One
Mui rolled her eyes, but Mei-Li ignored her and took another bite of her sandwich.
“It is forbidden. It must be without their knowledge.” That, at least, was interesting. “This information can not ever be traced back to me.”
Before Mei-Li could jab at Daiyu again, Mui spoke softly. “Which means it must not be traceable back to Grandfather Zuocheng. I don’t understand how we can help. Our best connection was to their general who died aboard Air Force One yesterday.”
“I met his wife, the one to be the new Chairman of their Joint Chiefs of Staff.” Mei-Li shrugged. “But it was very brief; we were at an airshow. I doubt if she’d remember me. We never actually spoke.”
“She is not the only one you met at that airshow. Zhang Ru told me.”
She could never trust a woman who had been with that…that…monster! Especially not by choice.
Daiyu obviously read her expression but her own remained unchanged. “A small fact that may interest you: I had the pleasure of ending his existence. Then we left his body for the wolves to feed on so that his spirit would never know rest.”
Mei-Li was slow to recover. She’d assumed his death or imprisonment but not dared to truly hope—the death of Central Military Commission members wasn’t exactly public news. Slow, deep breaths didn’t help make it any more real; but there was no doubting Daiyu’s statement. Mei-Li managed a nod for her to continue, the best she could manage at the moment.
“You met others.” Daiyu picked up her pizza and took a bite to signal it was Mei-Li’s turn to provide some useful information.
“There were the two women who swore in the US President yesterday. I can?—”
“Not Miranda. I had the opportunity to work with them a few years ago. I would trust her discretion only if hard pressed. She has certain…”
“…challenges.” Mei-Li recalled hearing about those. Hearing about those from Taz and Jeremy. Taz. Colonel Vicki Taz The Taser Cortez. Maybe she would know how to make such a meeting happen.
She pulled out her phone and found the number. They hadn’t spoken in four years, but just maybe…
45
“Now what?” Commander Davidson had come to terms with Mike Munroe’s assessment—maybe Miranda Chase was the best there was at what she did. Against all probability, they had raised the President’s 747 within twelve hours of the crash. A task he’d have declared impossible a dozen times today. The commander of the entire US Coast Guard had already called in his congratulations for a job well done.
Once he’d convinced Miranda to stop apologizing for the sole error in her calculations and planning that had led to damaging his boat—and that had taken some serious doing—she’d turned into a whirlwind that even her companion said was unusual. She’d identified best towing points without any use of a calculator. It had been her advice to steam to harbor in reverse. Coast Guard cutters weren’t designed to reverse gracefully, especially not for long distances in rough seas. She’d arranged for a pair of the motor life boats to tie up just aft of the ruined bow. From there, they acted like bow thrusters to keep him on course. Even Zeb—his XO was generally the most creative guy on ship operations—had been impressed as hell by that move.
They were finally out of the heavy seas. The Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnels and Rip Raps Island lay behind them. The big waves were dissipating as they spread out over the broad inner bay of the Entrance Reach.
Command was kicking out plan after plan of what was supposed to happen next, and none of them agreed. He’d finally made his own command decision and called Miranda and Andi to the bridge.
“We need to stop here.” Miranda, typically he now understood, hadn’t explained. To her it was simply so obvious.
Not a single message sent by the various tiers of commanders trying to horn in on the glory had suggested such a thing—he called for an All Stop. This was much easier said than done. The two big tugs had to slow, but not too fast. Stopping the Bear wasn’t enough, they had to stop the MLBs that were acting as his bow thrusters. The massive small-boat entourage that had gathered around them surged ahead, then doubled back, causing a wide variety of collisions—mostly curses and scratched paint. There were more boats than water in the six kilometers from the Naval Yard’s Vista Point out to all the craft run aground on the Hampton Flats Hard Clam Harvest Area. Thankfully, that was now more the local police’s problem than the Coast Guard’s.
Once he had them stopped, she called for a floating crane.
“Not a rig in these yards can lift her.”
“They won’t need to.”
An hour later, he could only watch in amazement. She had the crane sling a cradle around each engine. Then, despite the passage of the storm dropping the air temperature back to a more typical five degrees above freezing, she personally went out to walk on the inverted wing with the Boeing technicians and studied each engine before she’d let them be unmounted. Somehow, for reasons he didn’t quite understand, he’d ended up as the dogsitter while she did this. Neither he nor Meg were particularly happy with the arrangement, but they managed.
Next came the unmounting of the wings. It was a much bigger operation; another task she watched closely. Then she rode over on the crane’s hook and meticulously cataloged each item snagged on the Bear’s bow before they were lifted clear and set on the barges with the engines and wings. She paid the same attention to the two bodies and the large radar array as she did to a pillow that must have graced the President’s bed.
While she’d been doing that, she’d left him with a long list of instructions.
First, Petty Officer Stanik led a crew out to seal up the passage between the ruined Presidential Suite and the rest of the plane. He also fully secured the quick patch they’d managed to slap over the copilot’s missing window while fighting the rough seas. Then they finished pumping the interior dry—or at least relatively dry.
Stanik reported that the interior was now a gloomy cavern lit by hundreds of windows, with water dripping from every surface to splash and pool on the ceiling of the inverted aircraft.
Next on his list had been to secure a long loop of line around the base of one wing stub—as she’d already removed that wing—and over the top of the fuselage. Once she had the other wing cleared, Stanik swam under the plane to tie another hawser over the other wing stub.
Back aboard, she arrived on his bridge still wearing the wet suit and tools that she’d been working with. “Now have the two tugs pull the two lines tied to the root of the wings directly away from the airplane, perpendicular to the sides. Very slowly.”
