Page 15 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

The strongest part of any plane is the wing box where the wings attach to the fuselage.

With the right wing boring downward, the left wing—that shone so brightly and so briefly on the US Coast Guard helicopter’s radar—stuck high in the air before the fuselage twisted around to plunge nose first into a wave trough.

The trough formed by the same wave interference pattern close ahead of the rogue was also far deeper than normal.

Streamlined to fly through air, Air Force One dove cleanly into the ocean depths.

The skin of the airplane was designed to keep pressure inside the aircraft when exposed to the low-pressure environment of two-tenths normal pressure existing outside the airplane at its normal flight level. It was not designed to keep out water pressure measured in tons per square foot.

This would have had two effects. One was that the plane’s glide, while landing in the same spot, would have taken seven minutes longer and the storm surge would have already passed through that area.

The second was that the dumping of fuel would have made the plane a hundred and ninety thousand pounds lighter, which would have kept the plane from penetrating so deeply into the water.

He hadn’t. Fuel is only typically dumped if an emergency is declared shortly after takeoff and the plane is too heavy to safely land.

The pilot’s view from the USCG helicopter only revealed the tail section of Air Force One, which stuck straight up in the air. The fighter jets had overflown the mark and were circling back.

Outside Air Force One’s cockpit, the water pressure reached five atmospheres—seventy pounds per square inch, five tons per square foot.

The jet might have refloated…if the rogue wave hadn’t continued moving.

It overran the plane’s position before collapsing once more to normal heights as the surge moved in one direction and the surface waves in another.

In that instant, what had been a deep depression became a towering pinnacle of water, burying the plane nine meters deeper. This added thirteen more pounds per square inch of pressure—an extra ton per square foot.

The copilot’s side window imploded without warning; holding one moment and ripped from its frame the next. The acrylic panel beheaded Colonel Sandra Ames, providing a rapid death and sparing her any pain.

The single atmosphere of internal air pressure didn’t measurably slow the in-rushing column of high-pressure water.

It slashed across the cockpit with the force of a pile driver, smashing the upper half of John and Sandra’s bodies fully sideways above the hips.

John’s death wasn’t as immediate as Sandra’s but not by enough to make his experience any different than hers.

The heavy cockpit door was designed to stop hijackers.

It was the only door on the plane stout enough to confine the flood of water to the small compartment of the cockpit.

As it had been left ajar by the officer of the communications center on the 747’s upper deck—as a courtesy to General Drake Nason—the deluge continued unimpeded, sealing the plane’s fate.

The inflow spent the next stage of its brutal power as it drove vertically upward through the communications deck.

At the rearmost seat, now vertically the highest on the 747’s upper deck as Air Force One remained nose-down, General Drake Nason had enough time to snatch a breath, but it was blown back out of his lungs by the force of the water striking him.

He was knocked out when his head struck the console and was blissfully unaware of drowning.

High-pressure seawater flowed up the now vertical steps into the main cabin in a single arc like a massive fire hose.

There it divided. The bulk tumbled like a massive waterfall as it collapsed into the air-filled nose of the plane normally forward of the stairs.

Plunging along the starboard-side hallway, the impact killed those strapped into the seats that had marked them as vital personnel who must stay closest to the President.

This included his secretary and the officer with the nuclear football.

Once the nose had been filled, the rising tide rapidly flowed upward, compressing the air toward the tail of the plane. This increased the air pressure rapidly, bursting the eardrums and most of the lungs of those who were not yet inundated.

Most of Air Force One’s passengers didn’t care because their necks had been snapped by the brutal impact.

This is the reason that people are trained to brace for a crash landing with the head against the seat ahead of them, so that impact g-force and the commensurate instantaneous significant increase in a head’s weight doesn’t snap the neck.

Few seats on Air Force One were arranged in the proper configuration for this, being placed around conference tables and work desks.

Few aboard had viewed the Safety Briefing Card’s helpful diagrams about how to properly brace for impact in other types of seating.

There were two compartments of typical aircraft seating aboard Air Force One, both at the very rear of the plane. There, two sets of fourteen business-class-style seats are arranged in typical rows.

Allyson Liddell had copped her first-ever flight in the port-side set of fourteen seats reserved on Air Force One for the Secret Service Protection Detail.

Divided by the fold-down rear stairs, she sat opposite a similar fourteen-seat area reserved for reporters.

When Rose Cole married the President, her protection detail had been automatically augmented.

Allyson had called her parents the moment she’d been chosen for the team, and they’d celebrated together long distance to Adair, Iowa.

She sat in the second row from the back of the plane by the window. Allyson had asked for the window because she’d always dreamed of seeing Africa and didn’t want to miss a moment.

One of the few aboard to have read the Safety Briefing Card, she wore her life vest and was properly braced against the back of Victor Conklin’s seat.

He’d made a very clumsy pass at her earlier in the flight—so clumsy it had been rather sweet.

On consideration, she had decided to encourage him to try again after this mission.

The overpressure of the water driving in through the cockpit compressed the volume of air inside the plane into one quarter of the fuselage.

High up in the tail of the bobbing aircraft, Agent Allyson Liddell was still breathing—though her ears hurt like hell.

She would need hearing aids for the rest of her life if she survived.

But the increased pressure finally blew out her window.

Despite fastening her seatbelt properly, she was ripped free and blown out the window by the hurricane-force release of compressed air.

Because of her life vest, which automatically inflated once she was in the water, she traveled rapidly to the surface.

Regrettably, she never recovered from a wave that inundated her and filled her lungs in her first gasp for air.

Hers was the first body that the Coast Guard recovered.

The 747, which had briefly hesitated with its tail still showing above the calming waves, now flew straight down to the ocean bed—the bent right wing inducing a leisurely corkscrew spin.

It struck the soft mud bottom, built from millennia of runoff from the Great Dismal Swamp, ten meters later.

The broad nose of the 747 drove downward until it had buried the cockpit, the President’s private quarters, and his onboard office in the marine sediments.

President Roy Cole was spared drowning as his neck was broken by the force of the initial impact.

His final act hadn’t been Presidential. Or even personal.

It had been instilled into his reflexes by a long-ago Green Beret drill instructor—protect the innocent.

By that deep-embedded training alone, Roy’s twist to brace Rose at the instant of the crash had saved her but left his own neck at a vulnerable angle.

It snapped with the eight-g impact that the plane had experienced—exactly as Miranda had predicted for a worst-case scenario.

The strength of the well-latched President’s office door made First Lady Rose Cole the final survivor on the plane. Though it was only a matter of eleven additional seconds before the water pressure caved in the door, it felt far longer as she cradled her dying husband in her arms.

The aircraft remained vertically pinned in place by the nose section now embedded ten meters into the muddy bottom.

Once the storm-driven pressure wave continued to the north with the flow of the Gulf Stream, and the wind-driven waves again moved in east-to-west parallel lines, the tail of Air Force One was just visible in each wave’s trough.

As the deep wave passed due east of Baltimore, the ocean rose in a long swell. The crews of several cargo ships experienced a jolt too minor for their experienced crews to note consciously—they just braced against the unexpected roll, then moved on about their duties.

Ironically, President Roy Cole’s last-ever official act as President of the United States of America was to release federal emergency relief funds to the State of Georgia for recovery from the out-of-season winter hurricane.

The same one whose passage had created the subaqueous pressure wave that killed him and his airplane.