Page 69 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

The autopilot advanced the jet’s throttles from the slow cruise that Mike had selected to ease the jump.

With only one engine, it was slow to climb, but it reached five thousand meters, sixteen thousand four hundred feet, as it circled wide around the massive double-mountain’s south peak.

The arc was big enough that it was like a girl wanting to make sure every eye was on her and her alone.

Mike had gotten the idea from watching streetwalkers when he’d been conning on the streets of LA as a teen.

Covering the length of three football fields per second, it headed directly toward the glacier that capped Mount Elbrus.

Alarms sounded in the empty cockpit.

Low Terrain warnings blatted.

These escalated from audible to painful. The control yoke shook mechanically to get the pilot’s attention, but he lay deep in the powdery snow fifteen kilometers away on the other side of the mountain—instinctively swallowing the blue pills Holly had just shoved into his throat.

The autopilot tried to correct the situation, except Mike had disabled that function. A detail that had been erased from all human knowledge except his by the destruction of the black boxes.

In full view of several Russian radars, sixty-million-dollars’ worth of luxury business jet slammed into the large crevasse field on the northwest face of Mount Elbrus.

As Holly’s last charge fired off and destroyed the electronics of the autopilot, the thirty-meter length of jet didn’t crumple or break.

Instead it collapsed on itself from nose toward the tail, like a crash-test car slamming into a four-foot-thick wall of unyielding concrete without even an engine or structural steel to buffer the impact.

By the time the front ten meters of the plane had been accordioned to a two-meter-thick pancake between the wings, the wings themselves had split open spilling thousands of gallons of jet fuel over the snowfield and pouring down into the crevasse.

Still driving ahead at full RPMs as the plane abruptly ceased all forward motion, the remaining engine broke free from the tail.

It launched forward into a large puddle of fuel.

Below its flash point temperature of a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, it did not immediately explode.

But, because the engine’s inner turbine normally operated above the melting point of aluminum, an area of the fuel was heated well past its autoignition point of four hundred and ten degrees.

Once it started to burn, the fuel still streaming from the ruptured tanks heated rapidly.

The initial fire, spreading over the spilled fuel’s surface, accelerated the process. From ignition to widespread fire required seven seconds. From raging fire to a devastating fuel-air explosion required only two more.

The fire that raged for half an hour afterward created a brilliant beacon of true fire in the night, making the crash easy to locate.

Though it would be a long time before any rescue crews could approach it.

That evening, it was deemed too dangerous as there were no high-altitude assets in the area beyond a few park rangers.

The hundred-knot storm that slammed into the peak the next morning lasted for three days.

By the time the crews managed to reach the site—losing two people into crevasses during the ascent—nothing but the scorched tail section and a scattering of luggage across the snowfield remained.

The rest had disappeared into the depths of icy caverns that would not reveal any secrets for decades or perhaps centuries.

On the fifth day, Inessa Turgeneva was officially declared dead.

Artemy Turgenev’s mourning and deep guilt was partially assuaged by the woman from Club Cloud 99. Tania entered his daily life soon after that announcement.