Page 47 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

Once he’d convinced Miranda to stop apologizing for the sole error in her calculations and planning that had led to damaging his boat—and that had taken some serious doing—she’d turned into a whirlwind that even her companion said was unusual.

She’d identified best towing points without any use of a calculator.

It had been her advice to steam to harbor in reverse.

Coast Guard cutters weren’t designed to reverse gracefully, especially not for long distances in rough seas.

She’d arranged for a pair of the motor life boats to tie up just aft of the ruined bow.

From there, they acted like bow thrusters to keep him on course.

Even Zeb—his XO was generally the most creative guy on ship operations—had been impressed as hell by that move.

They were finally out of the heavy seas. The Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnels and Rip Raps Island lay behind them. The big waves were dissipating as they spread out over the broad inner bay of the Entrance Reach.

Command was kicking out plan after plan of what was supposed to happen next, and none of them agreed. He’d finally made his own command decision and called Miranda and Andi to the bridge.

“We need to stop here.” Miranda, typically he now understood, hadn’t explained. To her it was simply so obvious.

Not a single message sent by the various tiers of commanders trying to horn in on the glory had suggested such a thing—he called for an All Stop.

This was much easier said than done. The two big tugs had to slow, but not too fast. Stopping the Bear wasn’t enough, they had to stop the MLBs that were acting as his bow thrusters.

The massive small-boat entourage that had gathered around them surged ahead, then doubled back, causing a wide variety of collisions—mostly curses and scratched paint.

There were more boats than water in the six kilometers from the Naval Yard’s Vista Point out to all the craft run aground on the Hampton Flats Hard Clam Harvest Area.

Thankfully, that was now more the local police’s problem than the Coast Guard’s.

Once he had them stopped, she called for a floating crane.

“Not a rig in these yards can lift her.”

“They won’t need to.”

An hour later, he could only watch in amazement.

She had the crane sling a cradle around each engine.

Then, despite the passage of the storm dropping the air temperature back to a more typical five degrees above freezing, she personally went out to walk on the inverted wing with the Boeing technicians and studied each engine before she’d let them be unmounted.

Somehow, for reasons he didn’t quite understand, he’d ended up as the dogsitter while she did this.

Neither he nor Meg were particularly happy with the arrangement, but they managed.

Next came the unmounting of the wings. It was a much bigger operation; another task she watched closely.

Then she rode over on the crane’s hook and meticulously cataloged each item snagged on the Bear’s bow before they were lifted clear and set on the barges with the engines and wings.

She paid the same attention to the two bodies and the large radar array as she did to a pillow that must have graced the President’s bed.

While she’d been doing that, she’d left him with a long list of instructions.

First, Petty Officer Stanik led a crew out to seal up the passage between the ruined Presidential Suite and the rest of the plane.

He also fully secured the quick patch they’d managed to slap over the copilot’s missing window while fighting the rough seas.

Then they finished pumping the interior dry—or at least relatively dry.

Stanik reported that the interior was now a gloomy cavern lit by hundreds of windows, with water dripping from every surface to splash and pool on the ceiling of the inverted aircraft.

Next on his list had been to secure a long loop of line around the base of one wing stub—as she’d already removed that wing—and over the top of the fuselage. Once she had the other wing cleared, Stanik swam under the plane to tie another hawser over the other wing stub.

Back aboard, she arrived on his bridge still wearing the wet suit and tools that she’d been working with. “Now have the two tugs pull the two lines tied to the root of the wings directly away from the airplane, perpendicular to the sides. Very slowly.”

He passed on the command and wished he had a video camera with a long lens as he’d hung well clear.

Damaging his boat twice in one day wouldn’t go over well.

Who was he kidding? The news helos had all been grounded—because of all the drones aloft.

For every ten they knocked into the sea with lasers, rifle fire, and signal jamming, twenty took their place.

There’d be a thousand feeds of this on every social media channel any time he wanted to watch one.

As the two tugs, on opposite sides of the plane, tightened up their lines, the plane lazily spun on its long axis.

As it rotated, one of the giant horizontal stabilizers on the tail rose from the water.

When the fuselage had rolled onto its side, the tower of the vertical stabilizer surfaced and, after some initial resistance, it too swung aloft.

Finally, Air Force One rolled onto its belly.

Unlike that plane that landed on the Hudson River, no panicked passenger had opened the rear passenger door to the sea, making the tail fill with water, partially sinking the plane.

Because they’d pumped Air Force One dry, it rode high in the water as if nothing was more amiss than a damaged nose and missing wings.

“There. Now, if you’d be so kind as to tell them to tow it to Dry Dock 8 in the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, I can finally start working on what happened. Did you find Engine Four yet?”

He’d forgotten about that and had to call in his question.

He could only laugh at the answer. Miranda didn’t laugh when he told her, but at least Andi Wu seemed to think it was funny.

The reason for the damage to Air Force One’s nose was that it had landed directly on Engine Four.

It must have been ripped off the wing during the landing and raced the plane to the bottom.

The engine had stopped the plane in place before ripping free.

The broad nose of the 747 had landed on it like a pile driver.