Page 42 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

Already lightened by the removal of the fuel, Air Force One was shifting several degrees each way as the waves washed by her tail.

“Two meters, holding.” Miranda announced.

Randy Davidson would rather have one of his own men monitoring the gauges, but his senior chief told him no.

“She’s…” Senior chief petty officers were the backbone of the enlisted Coast Guard and were never at a loss for words.

“Shit, Skipper, pardon my language, but I know when I’m outclassed. You want her on those controls.”

So he’d set the senior to watch over her, literally.

Taller by a foot, he watched over the shorter woman’s shoulders but didn’t say a word.

Maybe she really was that good. He sure hoped so.

He checked on her dog, asleep at her feet.

Mike Munroe had tipped him off about keeping an eye on the dog to help judge Miranda Chase’s mental state. So far so good.

“Four meters of air evacuated, pressure holding. No increased motion.” Miranda announced.

“Keep pumping.” He left her to the job and twisted around to watch the scene. Big roller. Glimpse of the plane’s tail in the trough. Big roller—this time spewing enough spray to block any view of the tail.

How the hell was he supposed to tow this thing if it did surface?

He’d called in a pair of deep-sea salvage tugs and hoped they had a better idea than he did.

Miranda had suggested attaching a line to the front landing gear—except it was several meters below the surface of the mud.

Not wanting to lose the plane if it did surface, he’d lassoed the tail with a single run of two-inch hawser and attached a couple floats to it.

He also had two able-bodied seamen standing by where the line came aboard with axes if they had to cut it fast.

“Six meters, holding.”

“Now it gets interesting,” he mumbled to his XO. Zeb nodded but didn’t have anything to add.

They both knew that the first twenty feet had been clearing the rear electronics area and past the fold-down stairs.

The plane was still very narrow back there and the water pressure would only be two atmospheres.

Now, as they pushed deeper and had to increase the air pressure, they would be working their way past lines and lines of windows, lavatories, and a hundred other possible failure spots. Miranda had enumerated these at length.

The only solution they could implement rapidly was to send a diver all the way down to close the window shutters on every single window to add that bit more strength.

Another diver had gone down with a couple large tubes of epoxy and plugged each toilet.

Any more deep work and they’d have to fly in fresh divers.

All three ships had limited-out all their divers at depth over the last ten hours.

“Eight and holding. Increased swing with wave motion.”

“Physical or structural?” Another thing she’d explained was that the whole plane might start to move as a single physical piece—or their actions might blow the tail off.

“Indeterminate,” Miranda said as if she was sitting in a deli discussing which mustard she preferred rather than overseeing the highest profile plane crash in history.

“Great, just great.” He didn’t know if he died a little or hoped a little more with each meter they gained, filling the fuselage with air instead of water without shattering the plane.

The damn thing was only seventy meters long from tip to tail and they had blown out past fifty before anything notable happened.

Then it all happened at once.