Page 28 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

When the crew chief opened the cargo bay door, Holly surveyed the situation.

She pointed up at them and Miranda nodded—then she typed something on her phone before turning it to Holly.

Yes.

“Yes, what?”

Miranda just sighed and shook her head before tucking her phone away. Whatever she’d meant, time was definitely of the essence.

Checking the surface of the sea, Holly saw that the three big white USCG cutters with the wide orange slash across their bows were anchored in a triangle about a kilometer on a side.

In the center, a small fleet of the 47-foot MLBs were shuttling back and forth across the waves.

One slowed to pick up something from the water—briefcase-size, not body-size.

That was a relief. Though there’d be plenty of bodies soon.

Holly couldn’t tell if their escort to the ship’s bridge was a guide or a guard. She braced herself to keep fighting the battles against knotheads who should be left deep in the Never-Never with an empty canteen and no knickers.

“You certainly arrived quickly.” A man wearing the three bars and a star of a Coast Guard commander greeted them without rising from his chair on the bridge.

He was one of the only two present—three, counting their escort.

The other stood close by the helm. “We only dropped our hook a few minutes ago.”

“The VH-60N can travel at two hundred and eighty-two kph,” Miranda informed him.

“As your ship is presently anchored two hundred and thirty-four kilometers from the South Lawn of the White House, that gave us a transit time of forty-nine minutes. Steaming at your flank speed from your normal berth, seventy-two kilometers southwest of here, you had a transit time of approximately a hundred and twenty-two minutes. It is more by coincidence than planning that we arrived so closely in time.”

“Who the hell are you, lady?”

“I’m Miranda Chase, the Investigator-in-Charge for the NTSB.”

The commander stared at her long enough to make Holly shift up on her toes.

“Huh. Ms. Chase, since you arrived on a Presidential-lift helicopter, I’m assuming you can tell me what the hell is going on. Is that…” he waved a hand helplessly toward the triangle formed by the three anchored cutters “…really Air Force One?”

“Yes.”

Holly barely managed to suppress her laugh. It was inappropriate in such a moment, but she was kinda an inappropriate gal.

“Well…shit!” the commander finally concluded.

Her burst of laughter came out—a little more on edge than she liked, so she killed it quickly…but not fast enough. The Coastie guys turned to look at her and then turned away. Even Mike and Jeremy looked at her askance.

“Sue me!” she told them all. She hadn’t lost someone she cared about in a long time.

It was something she’d achieved, ever since losing her SASR team in an unnamable jungle, by the decision to care about as few people as possible.

But she respected the hell out of Drake and rather liked President Cole.

If these people didn’t like that their loss made her jittery, screw ’em.

Miranda hadn’t reacted at all. “Have we now dispensed with the pleasantries traditional for a new meeting of people? If so, I’m ready to start my investigation.”

The commander pushed out of his chair and stepped over. “Well, if you’re high enough up to co-opt one of the President’s Marine helos, that’s good enough for me.” He held out a hand. “Commander Randy Davidson. How can I help, Ms. Chase?”

Miranda cringed.

Holly stepped in and shook his hand for her. “Nothing personal, Commander. She’s not big on touching anyone, other than her new spouse—the short one.” She nodded toward Andi.

Andi’s punch landed fast and hard on the nerve in the radial groove of her upper biceps. A spike of pain shot up into her shoulder joint and down to her hand, where it hung out until her fingers felt thick and numb.

Duh! Don’t piss off the little Chinese woman. By her previous standard of Andi teases, it seemed rather an overreaction. She squinted her question at Andi as she rubbed her arm back to life.

“Sorry,” Andi actually did look sorry…and seriously sad. “The last person to tease me about my love life is…” she swallowed hard and nodded toward the center of the triangle “…down there.”

Now Holly was the one who felt like shit. “Uh, can we get this show on the road?”

“I thought I already asked that question,” Miranda looked puzzled.

“You did,” Commander Randy Davidson assured her. “And the answer is yes. I’m not much of an expert on jet planes but I’m guessing we don’t want this one just sitting in the water. I’m thinking we need to tow it out of here before that weather moves in.”

This time it was Jeremy who started laughing, which saved Holly the trouble. Except his wasn’t some nervous mess like her laugh had been…and her gut was. Two hours ago, she’d been watching Mike sleep with a baby girl in his arms and now she was at the site of a watery mass grave.

“I’m sorry, Commander, for what is about to happen.” Holly could tell that Jeremy was gearing up and nodded for him to go for it.

“Your ship weighs eighteen hundred long tons, that’s about eighteen-three in standard measure tons.

A Boeing 747-200B, before conversion into the VC-25A, has an empty weight of a hundred and seventy-six tons.

The upgrades are classified, but let’s toss in twenty tons as a working number.

And that’s Operating Empty Weight, OEW. To fly to Africa, it would have carried—” Jeremy stared at the metal ceiling of the bridge.

“Twenty-eight thousand, five hundred gallons,” Miranda said.

Jeremy nodded, “Right. About that. We’ll round that off to another ninety-seven tons. And now the fuselage is filled with ocean water. Water is a non-compressible fluid weighing eight-point-three-four pounds per gallon.”

“This is seawater,” Miranda corrected.

“Oh right, make that eight-point-five-five. The volume of the 200B’s fuselage is approximately seventy-three thousand cubic feet—”

“You forgot the tapered nose and tail. I’d estimated fifty-two thousand.”

“No, that would be sixty-one—oh wait. The non-water-permeable fittings take up some volume. And the people who are primarily water, so they aren’t going to compress much except for their lungs and stomach.

So, yeah, a fifteen percent reduction of volume works, which equals fifty-two thousand cubic feet. ”

“Fifty-two thousand seven hundred.”

“Right. Replace that with seawater. That’s another sixteen hundred and eighty-five tons.”

“That’s actually about four hundred-and-twenty pounds light, but it is sufficient for a first-order approximation.”

Jeremy nodded his agreement. “So the plane a) won’t float for towing, and b) it presently outweighs your ship by approximately—”

“Enough already!” The commander rubbed his face.

“I warned you.” Holly was feeling at least a little better. But maybe letting the comedy-duo of Chase and Trahn loose was kinda inappropriate to the moment. Even by her own low-humor standards.

Davidson nodded. “So we have a hellaciously heavy waterlogged aircraft—”

Miranda held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t forget that its nose is stuck in the mud.”

“How do you know that the nose isn’t crushed?”

“The plane hasn’t fallen over to the seabed, so something is holding it up. I expect that it is stuck like a lawn dart into the seabed.”

This time Andi had the inappropriate laugh—one that definitely leaned over into the edge of hysteria.

She covered her mouth and pulled it back.

“Sorry. Lawn darter is Army slang for Air Force pilots, especially of the F-16 that was known for doing a lot of high-speed nose plants during development.”

“Helmsman,” Miranda asked, “What’s the sea depth here, from the wave troughs?”

“Uh,” the man’s voice cracked at being called upon. He consulted his instruments, watching them through three waves. “It’s a hundred and ninety…three feet, ma’am.”

“So,” Miranda nodded. “Assuming minimal crushing of the nose, Air Force One is stuck thirty-eight feet into the mud. Applying mudhole parallels in a deep-water environment for strength of adhesion between differing materials isn’t well studied. There have been studies of bogs that—”

“Miranda,” Mike finally stopped playing observer. “How about we table that calculation for now and work out how to fix the immediate problem?”

Holly could see the gears clashing in Miranda’s head.

Mike could too and sent her a desperate look.

Maybe messing with the commander’s brain by letting Jeremy and Miranda run hadn’t been the best idea.

Holly had forgotten what it was like when the two of them geeked-out together; Miranda had screwed herself deeper into the ground than Air Force One had into the seabed.

Andi didn’t say a word. She simply stepped so close to Miranda that she almost knocked her over.

Miranda said a small, “Oh.” Then she hugged Andi.

Andi hugged her back.

After about fifteen seconds, Miranda let go and started speaking as if she hadn’t stopped—or been sidetracked by Jeremy in the first place.

“First, we need to recover the black boxes. We must determine cause first and worry about recovery later. That was President Feldman’s orders.

Mr. Helmsman, I see by the ping-back on your sonar that we’re missing the Number Four Engine.

Commander, could you please have someone find it? It will lie somewhere east of here.”

“That’s a heck of a big area.”

“You may limit your search to the closest two hundred kilometers along a line from here back to the turn I had General Owen initiate at,” Miranda rattled off a latitude and longitude.

“He didn’t mention losing the engine, so it is likely between here and that turn, since the final time I spoke to him. ”

“That’s still a lot of ocean. Can’t you call the general again?”

“I could, but I doubt that he’d answer. His cockpit is approximately two hundred and fifty-seven feet below the surface right now.”

The commander looked a bit sick.

Holly leaned over to Andi, after covering her upper arm with her other hand—it still throbbed—and whispered. “How did you do that?”

“Automatic hug threshold,” Andi whispered back.

“Christ, Wu. You’re talking like she is now.”

“Really?” Her face lit up. “Neat.”

Just what she needed, another Miranda.