Page 70 of Air Force One
With each passing second, she was a hundred meters out of position as the plane continued on its course. Its crash course.
By twenty-three, it was clear that he was coming around and she didn’t have time to dose him. He braced a foot again.
At twenty-seven, she twisted hard to whack his head against the wall. It didn’t knock him out, but at least it dazed him for a moment. Then she turned around, and the two of them fell backward out of the hole at twenty-nine. Nine seconds, almost a kilometer late.
She did what she could to fly south, but she couldn’t open her chute too close to the plane. The human eye, and hopefully any radar, would be following the plane. Once it was well clear…
Holly waited ten seconds, watching the ground approach far too fast as it rose higher here than her intended drop zone, before she popped the chute. Mike had three thousand meters, almost ten thousand feet of descent to get down the mountain along his planned path. She’d planned on half that, lost a third of that to the changing mountainside, and had just used up two-thirds of what little she had in getting clear of the plane.
She considered dumping the asshole right here, which would give her the lift—maybe—to get clear of the ridge to her south. But Inessa would be saddened and Miranda, even though she’d never hear about this escapade, would be truly livid.
So Holly didn’t pop the emergency release on the pilot.
Instead, she bled out every meter she could, finally targeting a tiny gap in the trees, and plummeted down into the deep snow.
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The Bombardier Global 6000’s autopilot performed precisely as designed.
The autopilot advanced the jet’s throttles from the slow cruise that Mike had selected to ease the jump. With only one engine, it was slow to climb, but it reached five thousand meters, sixteen thousand four hundred feet, as it circled wide around the massive double-mountain’s south peak. The arc was big enough that it was like a girl wanting to make sure every eye was on her and her alone. Mike had gotten the idea from watching streetwalkers when he’d been conning on the streets of LA as a teen.
It leveled out only five hundred meters below the twin peaks but didn’t ease the throttles. The Rolls Royce BR710 engine still had enough power in the relatively thick atmosphere at five thousand meters. At its normal cruise altitude of fifteen thousand meters, there was only a quarter as much air to work with. This allowed the airplane to accelerate strongly as it continued its wide, circular route. Soon, it was racing along at nine-tenths the speed of sound, over nine hundred kilometers per hour.
Covering the length of three football fields per second, it headed directly toward the glacier that capped Mount Elbrus.
Alarms sounded in the empty cockpit.
Low Terrain warnings blatted.
These escalated from audible to painful. The control yoke shook mechanically to get the pilot’s attention, but he lay deep in the powdery snow fifteen kilometers away on the other side of the mountain—instinctively swallowing the blue pills Holly had just shoved into his throat.
The autopilot tried to correct the situation, except Mike had disabled that function. A detail that had been erased from all human knowledge except his by the destruction of the black boxes.
In full view of several Russian radars, sixty-million-dollars’ worth of luxury business jet slammed into the large crevasse field on the northwest face of Mount Elbrus. As Holly’s last charge fired off and destroyed the electronics of the autopilot, the thirty-meter length of jet didn’t crumple or break. Instead it collapsed on itself from nose toward the tail, like a crash-test car slamming into a four-foot-thick wall of unyielding concrete without even an engine or structural steel to buffer the impact.
By the time the front ten meters of the plane had been accordioned to a two-meter-thick pancake between the wings, the wings themselves had split open spilling thousands of gallons of jet fuel over the snowfield and pouring down into the crevasse.
Still driving ahead at full RPMs as the plane abruptly ceased all forward motion, the remaining engine broke free from the tail. It launched forward into a large puddle of fuel. Below its flash point temperature of a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, it did not immediately explode. But, because the engine’s inner turbine normally operated above the melting point of aluminum, an area of the fuel was heated well past its autoignition point of four hundred and ten degrees. Once it started to burn, the fuel still streaming from the ruptured tanks heated rapidly.
The initial fire, spreading over the spilled fuel’s surface, accelerated the process. From ignition to widespread fire required seven seconds. From raging fire to a devastating fuel-air explosion required only two more.
The fire that raged for half an hour afterward created a brilliant beacon of true fire in the night, making the crash easy to locate. Though it would be a long time before any rescue crews could approach it. That evening, it was deemed too dangerous as there were no high-altitude assets in the area beyond a few park rangers. The hundred-knot storm that slammed into the peak the next morning lasted for three days.
By the time the crews managed to reach the site—losing two people into crevasses during the ascent—nothing but the scorched tail section and a scattering of luggage across the snowfield remained. The rest had disappeared into the depths of icy caverns that would not reveal any secrets for decades or perhaps centuries.
On the fifth day, Inessa Turgeneva was officially declared dead.
Artemy Turgenev’s mourning and deep guilt was partially assuaged by the woman from Club Cloud 99. Tania entered his daily life soon after that announcement.
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If everything had gone according to plan, Holly would have packed the chute and harnesses, stripped the jump coverall off the drugged pilot, and given him a small push.
Their original landing zone was supposed to be fifty meters above the Mt. Elbrus ski area. He would stumble or slide down onto the ski slope and truthfully claim for the rest of his days that he had no memory of his final flight, how he’d survived the crash, or how he’d come to be where he was.
Now, it was a hard hike over a steep ice-and-snow-coated ridge to get there.
Holly considered letting him come fully conscious, make a deal with him, and help him hike to the ski slope. But then he’d know that perhaps Inessa had been rescued and wasn’t dead after all.
