Crashers (45 page)

Lucas lowered his field glasses. “Come on. Let's get the shotguns.”

He and O'Meara turned. A hellish image, vectoring in low and swift from the west, made their legs freeze up.

Because the sun was directly behind them and low, the gargantuan shadow shot up behind Dennis, eclipsed his position, and fluttered on like winged death. He jumped, startled. The engine noise was much, much louder now. He turned.

The Vermeer 111 was flying as slowly as possible without stalling. It was twenty feet off the ground and three hundred feet behind the three men.

At that speed, the jet chewed up all three hundred feet in less than two seconds.

Dennis screamed. He recognized the jet. He'd tried to kill it a few hours earlier.

Lucas and O'Meara made last-ditch dives for the cover of a Jeep, knowing it would be like hoping that a Japanese paper screen could stop a freight train.

The landing gear was still stowed. The curved belly of the jet hit the hard-packed sand, skipped once, came down again, and crushed the other Jeep, an axle flipping into the air, slinging into the Vermeer's number-two engine, which exploded.

The nose of the plane gouged a divot in the mesa, then slid off and down the far side, a drop of only twenty feet, but enough to shred the undercarriage of the liner. The Vermeer tipped to the right and both engines were wrenched from the wings, fuel catching fire, the right wing itself snapping and spiraling away from the fuselage.

The jet turned sideways on the slide down the mesa, hit the desert floor at an angle, and cracked in two, just aft of the wings, the latter end of the jet spiraling clockwise as the nose and remaining wing spiraled counterclockwise, away from each other.

A ten-story-high wave of dirt and rock and smashed cactus flared across the desert.

In its wake, one Jeep survived.

 

David Singh said, “My God!”

The laconic Eloise Pool rose as far as her restraints would allow, peering over the dashboard. “Did you see that, then! That plane pancaked into that mesa! Is that our Vermeer? What the Christ?”

Teddy McCoy toggled the RAIMS communication gear. “You've general broadcast, Captain.”

Eloise yelled into his mic, “Mayday, mayday! We have just seen a jetliner
crash into the desert, due west of the Cady Mountains and south of Barstow! Repeat: a jetliner is down!”

Susan, Walter, and Peter were hunched over telephones or computers, each working feverishly to help their airborne cohorts. Peter had linked one of the other computers to monitor the Radio-Audio Integrated Management System of the Airbus.

All three of them froze, stunned, as the copilot's voice echoed in the vast hangar. “We have just seen a jetliner crash into the desert . . .”

“No!” Daria pounded on the steering wheel of the patrol car so hard, she almost broke a bone. An airliner was on the ground, smoke rising from its shattered hulk. Tears flowed down her cheeks and she pounded on the wheel again. “Nooo!”

She was shrieking, not caring how much it hurt her side. She stood on the gas pedal, the police car bouncing off a culvert, rising airborne for a moment, then racing after the Jeep.

If she was so damn incompetent she couldn't save the passengers of that jetliner, Daria thought, she'd at least claim vengeance in their names.

 

Lucas Bell and Donal O'Meara rose from near the remains of the second Jeep, coughing, stunned. The nearby crash had punctured one of Donal's eardrums, but he hadn't realized it yet. The Jeep had been tossed ass-over-teakettle, landing on its side, amazingly missing both men who had dived behind it.

They glared at the carnage. There was no sign of the other Jeep or of their coconspirator. No survivors were stumbling out of the jet's fuselage. At least not yet. Every window was shattered, and the undersection of the jetliner, where the luggage and much of the flight mechanisms were housed, had staved in, leaving a trail of debris beyond. The tail cone, with its empennage, lay thirty feet back and to the left.

O'Meara stuffed his Colt Python into his belt and added a Para-Ordnance
LDA P14, with a five-inch barrel and a black polymer grip. He also grabbed one of the Benelli shotguns lying in the sand, its barrel still warm from decimating the motel's office, and began shoving three-inch shells into it.

Lucas found the Heckler & Koch PSG1 rifle under some sagebrush and slapped home a twenty-round magazine.

“B . . . Bell . . .”

Lucas glanced around. Under what looked like it might once have been an engine block for the other Jeep, he saw a smear of blood and torn cloth. He stepped forward. Dennis Silverman was half buried in sand, his right arm missing, his legs and hips under the tortured, twisted gob of metal.

He was alive. Stunningly, he hadn't lost his glasses.

“Bell . . . get me . . . I can't feel . . . my legs. . . .”

Lucas fell to his knees. “It was a hell of a plan, Dennis. Really. You are something else. You're in a league by yourself.”

Dennis spat up blood. “Th . . . thank you. Help me—”

Lucas shot him in the forehead. He rose to his feet, turned to O'Meara. “Let's go.”

 

They still hadn't seen any survivors, which was a good sign. They approached the front of the jet, peered into the gaping maw where the fuselage had separated. The airliner's skin had torn in ragged patches, and two dozen seats had been tossed out, strewn like a giant's discarded toys.

None of those seats had bodies in them.

They climbed up and into the fuselage, weapons trained ahead of them.

There were no bodies inside. All the seats were empty. Pillows and blankets had been tossed about, but there were no books, no coats, no shoes. No signs of life.

“Oh, shit,” Lucas whispered. “This isn't our jet.”

Donal couldn't hear him. “The fuck is this?”

The men glanced at each other.

Behind them, someone said, “Lucas?”

He turned. Ray Calabrese stood in the twilight gloom, his Glock raised in the two-handed position, feet spread, one eye staring down the barrel at his friend. The left side of Ray's face was tacky and glistening with blood, his hair spiky with it. Beside him knelt a badly shaken man, hands on knees, trying to catch his breath. A woman stood to Ray's left, also armed.
She held a short-barreled Kahr K9 and, even in the dim light, Lucas recognized it as the gun that Ray kept strapped to his right leg.

“Jesus . . . Lucas,” Ray said, his voice catching.

Everyone heard the sound of a car screeching to a halt somewhere on the far side of the fuselage. It startled Kiki, who turned. Lucas Bell did, too. But Donal O'Meara was an old hand at poker. Nothing distracted him when he was working.

He swung the shotgun up, ratcheted a shell into the pipe.

Ray Calabrese's first bullet caught him in the clavicle. The second one tore through his jaw. O'Meara was dead before his body landed in seat 18-C.

Lucas leaped to the side, landed, and rolled behind a charred seat from the jetliner. He continued his roll, coming out the other side, the seat blocking him from Ray and Kiki.

Lucas had a clear shot at Tommy, who knelt in the sand. And the others knew it.

“Walk away, Ray!” Lucas shouted. “I will kill this white boy!”

“Put it down,” Ray said. He began moving sideways, but his left leg almost gave out. He stumbled, his vision swimming.

“You're in no condition for a fight,” Lucas shouted. “Walk away, Raymond. Walk into the desert. We don't have to see each other ever again.”

Ray tried to answer but his brain wouldn't catch gear. He realized that he was concussed. Tommy couldn't catch a decent breath, didn't have the strength to rise. He was bleeding from his forehead again. Kiki had no experience with small arms. She didn't know what to do.

“You got options, Ray?” Lucas shouted. “Seriously. Look, let's talk about your options. You can decide to be Dudley Do-Right here, make your arrest, Mirandize me. But before you do that, I will have shot this lovely white boy by your side—hi, lovely white boy.”

Lucas edged to his right. Maybe, just maybe, he could slide out from cover and drop Ray Calabrese. All he needed was for the big man to look at his friend kneeling by his side.

“Or, and this is the better plan, you let me walk out. Just hike back to my car, give me an hour head start. And you never see my fucking ass, ever again.” The kneeling guy moaned and Ray let his glance flicker toward him. Lucas tensed to roll and fire, but Ray was giving him the dead eye again.

“You win, Ray. You saved the Irish delegation. You got the Red Fist. You got that fat turd Silverman. You'll make the cover of
Stoic Hero Quarterly
. Seriously. Do you have options?”

The kneeling guy tried to stand and Ray turned fully to him. Lucas rolled out of position, surprised when his hip hit something solid.

He turned. He'd run into the boot of Daria Gibron.

She slammed the butt of the highway patrolman's gun into Lucas Bell's skull. The cracking sound echoed. Lucas sprawled, his rifle clattering away.

Kiki moved forward, picked up Lucas's gun, but kept the Kahr trained on the strange woman before her eyes. Lucas lay on the ground, not moving.

“Wanna put that gun down?” Kiki asked the stranger.

“No,” the woman replied, her voice hollow, emotionless.

Ray limped between them, gently nudged Kiki's handgun aside. “ 'S all right,” he told both women. “Daria?”

With Kiki covering Lucas, prone on the ground, Daria stepped back. Ray limped to her side. She all but fell into his arms.

He didn't stop hugging her until she gasped in fine agony. He didn't stop trembling for a long time after that.

Tommy watched it all. He almost jumped out of his skin when someone rested a hand on his shoulder.

Isaiah Grey smiled at him, his left sleeve soaked in blood, arm dangling limp from his shoulder. Tommy raised his hand. Isaiah took it and lugged him to his feet. Tommy kissed the pilot, an inch over his ear. “Hell of a job.”

“This is the Daria we heard so much about,” Isaiah said, leaning on Tommy.

Tommy leaned equally on Isaiah. He squinted into the setting sun, took in the smashed airliner, the front section to his left, the rear to his right, the smoldering debris in between.

“ 'Kay,” Tommy said, and nodded. “That worked pretty good.”

In one of the conference rooms at the National Transportation and Safety Board headquarters in D.C., one entire wall, floor to ceiling, had been painted with chalkboard paint. That particular Friday afternoon, much of that wall was covered with chalk—outlines of a Vermeer airliner; a diagram of a partial deployment of blocker panels for a thrust reverser in a Patterson-Pate engine; a rough outline of how the Go-Team's engineering crews had worked out the trick with the Gamelan flight data recorder.

The long conference-room table was covered with folders as well as white paper boxes of Chinese takeout and water bottles and coffee cups and a few Diet Cokes.

The room's television was turned to CNN but the audio was off. The media had dubbed the three incidents—the CascadeAir disaster, the rough landing on Interstate 5, and the crash in the desert—the Black Box Bloodbath. MSNBC even created a graphic of a jetliner broken in two.

Susan Tanaka sat at the head of the table. It hadn't been planned like this—there was no seating chart—but to her left sat Kiki Duvall and Isaiah Grey. Kiki looked good as new, a week since the crash, but Isaiah's arm was in a cast and sling.

To Susan's right sat Walter Mulroney and Peter Kim. Delevan Wildman, director of the NTSB, stood, leaning on the far cabinet, which held a coffeemaker and accessories, his raincoat tossed over a chair.

“It's your call, people.”

Isaiah dug the last bit of sticky rice out of a box using a plastic fork. “Sir, the board has to recommend pulling every aircraft fitted with a Gamelan-brand flight data recorder out of the sky, now.”

Peter Kim raised his hand. “No. Look, the Gamelan is a game-changer. It gathers so much raw data, so fast, that it will alter crash investigations forever. We're used to working on a twelve-to eighteen-month calendar. We knew the cause of this crash in one hundred hours.”

Kiki moaned. Of the four investigators on the swap-out, she was the only one without a scratch on her. “The cause of the crash
was
the Gamelan!”

“No.” Peter was adamant. “The cause of the crash was one crazy sociopath, plus one bent federal agent, plus this guy we're reading about, the pedophile congressman ripe for blackmail, plus the Red Fist of Ulster. So, who believes that particular set of dominoes is likely to reoccur?”

Walter addressed Susan, partly because he knew that she held Tommy Tomzak's proxy vote. “The data from the FDR wasn't at fault. The X factor in all of this was Dennis Silverman's soul. He was, simply, an evil man. Take that away, and this Gamelan makes other flight data recorders look like toys.”

Peter agreed. “In technological revolutions, it's like going from the abacus to Texas Instruments overnight.”

“Peter.” Kiki picked up her chopsticks and helped herself to the last of the lemongrass chicken. “How many engineers on earth, today, right now, could MacGyver the Gamelan and create another crash?”

Peter frowned. “What? I don't know. Not many.”

“Two? Ten?” Kiki chewed the succulent meat. “A hundred? How many engineers are as smart and resourceful and driven as you and Walter? Because, when push came to shove, you and your crews brainstormed this problem for, what? Two hours? Two and a half? And you made the Gamelan gimmick work. So what I'm asking is: how many other people on earth can do what you did?”

Peter waved her off but Walter frowned. “A handful,” Peter said. “You could put them in this room. It's—”