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  While the passenger area was probably a land of mayhem and panic, the cockpit was a quiet refuge. The two pilots discussing emergency checklists and rates of descent as if they were chatting quietly over crumpets and tea. Maybe it was worth giving up her tail-section seat to not be a part of whatever was happening back there.

  Quint was doing a respectable job of not giving in to his nerves. But Miranda would like Dani Evers’ nerves—in this crisis, she didn’t give a single sign that she even had any. At the moment she was pure pilot, and Holly appreciated that.

  They’d descended from thirty-nine thousand feet to fifteen thou, and they still had two wings.

  She really should message the others. That’s what many of the passengers would be doing, or trying to. Not a lot of cell reception in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Her sat phone could reach Mike easily enough.

  But she had no idea what to say to him.

  Besides, her training had long ago taught her that the only direction to look during a crisis was ahead.

  Still. A short message—

  “Holly, could you go look and see just how bad off the wing is?”

  “Oh sure, Quint.”

  She appreciated the interruption as an excuse to tuck the phone away unused.

  “You’ve just kicked the entire cabin into full alert. No worries. I’ll just mosey my civilian ass out of your secure cockpit. If some wuss packing a death wish like it was his best mate busts in, you can deal with that. Then I’ll just make a point of staring out at the wing with stark fear on my mug. Should I return the air marshal’s Glock while I’m about it or just shoot any passengers who really are chucking a wobbly?” If Quint had unnerved her with his instructions to the cabin crew, it seemed only fair turnabout to tease him some.

  “You never were one for following orders.”

  “Not on your bloody crew, mate.” Actually, she’d been damn good at doing precisely that, in a way. Eleven years in the military had taught her how to follow orders. Of course, Special Operations Forces was more about making up the rules as they were needed—not exactly the land of conformists. “Besides, will knowing if we’re all about to die change any of your choices?”

  “She’s got you there, Quint. Let’s stay focused.” Whether Dani was ordering herself or Quint wasn’t clear in her tone.

  Holly soon wished she had taken the offer of strolling through the panicked crowd; at least it would be something to focus on other than how small Johnston Island Airport looked. In the middle of Johnston Atoll, which was four tiny islands and a ring of submerged coral, was the biggest of the four islands that broke the ocean’s surface. And Johnston Island was a runway…and not much more. A pinprick in a wide blue ocean that made it seem far smaller than the numbers said it was.

  The coral ring outlining the atoll was mostly submerged. The lagoon was a tropical blue but outside the ring it was the blue-black of the Pacific depths. She knew it would get bigger fast, but for all her flying, she’d never approached a runway in an airliner. The fit seemed very unlikely from the air.

  Why did Miranda have to remind her of quite how deep that dark blue was? It was a depth from which Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was never recovered, or even found.

  Three other tiny islands were all that dotted the ten- by twenty-kilometer lagoon. Johnston Island itself was emphasized by a too-geometric semidarkness around its perimeter. The runway must have been built on dredgings from the lagoon’s reef. That would explain the island’s nearly perfect rectangular shape and only being a little longer than the runway that stretched along the whole centerline of its surface.

  Sterile cockpit rules during essential operations—like not crashing—meant she couldn’t even distract herself with some easy banter.

  She unbuckled long enough to peek out the left-hand windows. The outer wing section, which was all she could see from up here in the cockpit, was flexing a lot in the last stages of the descent. Crossing to the other side, she couldn’t tell if the intact right wing was better or worse.

  Patience.

  It was one of the hardest skills she’d ever learned in the SASR—one of the hardest for all grunts to learn. There were times when the only real option was to park your hind end and wait. So she parked it and buckled back in. It could be days, waiting for a target to pass within range of a lookout or a sniper hole. Weeks and occasionally months could go by between deployments. Of course, the intensity of the constant training required to remain at peak performance had filled those times reasonably well. As had the easy access to a watering hole for a nice frothy pint or three afterward.

  Five thousand feet.

  Dani and Quint were doing pilot jabber.

  “Descent rate fifteen hundred feet-per-minute.”

  “Flaps One.”

  “Speed Two-zero-zero.”

  “Range twelve miles. On planned glide slope.”

  “Three minutes down.” Assuming the wing lasted three more minutes.

  She noticed that the landing gear was still up. Miranda’s warning that lowering the gear might put too much stress on the wing was being listened to.

  Once Quint had called their operations department, it had taken them almost ten minutes to confirm what Miranda had known off the top of her head. At least if she herself was going to die, it would be based on the best advice that Miranda could give. It was just bloody awkward that the landing gear was attached to the wing itself, rather than the body.

  The best-chance strategy of surviving a crash was remarkably counterintuitive to her.

  The Special Air Service Regiment’s training had taught her to maximize body flexibility. The way to take a hard blow in hand-to-hand combat was to stay loose—absorbing the blow with motion rather than resisting it.

  Parachute training was about absorbing the shock with soft knees, then flexing into a roll onto thigh, butt, and shoulder to absorb the impact in stages.

  In a crash, the rule was to line up your body and brace hard. The chances of a snapped neck dropped dramatically if she aligned her head with her shoulders and spinal cord, and she tightened her muscles to keep it there. Back injury protection was augmented by no twists in the spine at time of impact. Bracing as hard as possible at the moment of maximum force made it less likely to sustain any torsion or compression injuries.

  “Descending at fifteen hundred fpm.”

  “Flaps Two.”

  “Speed One-seven-five.”

  “Range eight miles. On planned glide slope.”

  “Two minutes down.”

  Each word they said, she followed from instrument to instrument. At Dani’s call for “Flaps Two”, Quint pulled back on the large black lever in the horizontal console close by where Holly had braced her feet again.

  She jerked them to the floor and hoped neither pilot noticed.

  Of course they were rather busy.

  Dani’s partial turn and half smile said that Holly had been caught red-footed.

  The runway looked impossibly narrow from the front seat of the jetliner. To the south, there was a taxiway and airplane parking area. To the north, there were plenty of footprints of buildings that had once served the island but only one building of any size remained—a lone blockhouse of heavy concrete.

  “Flaps Three.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Quint asked with his hand on the lever. “More flaps increases wing stress.”

  Damn it! Holly should have kept Miranda on the phone.

  “Belay that,” Dani stated in a perfectly chill pilot way.

  “Speed One-fiver-zero.”

  “Range four miles. On planned glide slope.”

  At two miles Dani ordered, “Gear down.”

  Quint rested his hand on the gear lever at the center of the console above the throttles. It had a black handle shaped like two side-by-side tires. With impressively little hesitation, Quint then moved it down as if Miranda hadn’t predicted it to be the most dangerous moment prior to the landing itself.

  There was a dul
l whir and grind—more felt through the soles of her feet on the deck than through her ears.

  With a distinct thud, they locked into place and the three down-pointing green arrows directly above the lever lit brightly.

  Nobody moved for a full five seconds.

  Quint’s voice sounded thin and breathless as he managed, “Gear down and locked.”

  “Confirmed,” Dani sounded little better off.

  For all her vaunted confidence in her ability to handle anything, Holly wasn’t sure she could have spoken, even if called on to do so.

  “Okay,” Dani nodded to herself. “Okay. Set Auto-Brake to low. We need to minimize stress on the port wing. We’ll depend as much as possible on the starboard engine reverser. Quint, you ride that carefully. Don’t spin us off the runway.”

  “Roger that. Thirty seconds.”

  Johnston Island, which had looked so small moments ago, now dominated the forward view. The pavement, so narrow from above, now looked comfortingly wide and safe.

  “One mile. Three hundred feet. Speed steady at one-four-zero,” Quint read off.

  “Half mile. One hundred.”

  In her estimation they were going to crash hard into the front end of the runway. She wanted to shout “Too low! Too low!” but kept her mouth shut.

  “Flaps Three. Do it now.”

  Quint didn’t hesitate.

  Holly braced while wishing for her seat back in the tail.

  The additional flaps gave the plane extra lift, making it seem to float the rest of the way to the runway threshold.

  The wing held and Dani kissed them down onto the first X painted broadly across the pavement—declaring the runway wasn’t a legal runway anymore—so smoothly that Holly barely felt it.

  4

  Miranda waited a very frustrating twenty minutes after stowing her jet in her hangar at Tacoma Narrows Airport. She had covered the ninety-eight miles far faster than Jon was taking to cover ten.

  By the time she’d finished with the jet, three of the members of her normal investigation team had arrived and gathered in the office to wait.

  She’d stayed outside despite the light rain—staring at the sky to the east. She could see JBLM’s airspace from here, including Jon’s terribly belated takeoff into it.

  The fourth member, Mike Munroe, her human resources specialist, had waited with her…sort of. Without saying a word, he had paced back and forth in the rain with such jarring steps that she barely recognized him.

  Finally, a slim C-21A Learjet had slipped into the sky above Joint Base Lewis McChord and turned in their direction.

  Three long minutes later, he landed here at TNA and taxied over to her hangar. The others came out with their site investigation packs and personal go bags just as he eased to a halt.

  “Miranda,” Jon called out as he descended the steps of the US Air Force C-21A Learjet. “I’m not your personal taxi service. You’re lucky I was local. I was teaching an advanced incident investigation class at JBLM next door.”

  Major Jon Swift was a member of the US Air Force Accident Investigation Board. However, the idea of him teaching anything past an intermediate class was a disconcerting concept. He simply wasn’t that good at it. After all, he’d missed Taz Cortez’s not dying in a crash he’d investigated—there had only been thirteen people who had died in that military incident—yet he hadn’t reported her body as unaccounted for. Even in a fiery civilian crash involving hundreds, all bodies were eventually accounted for and most remains were identified.

  “The crash is on an ex-military base on what is still US government restricted-access land.” It should be obvious why they needed a military pilot. And it required no profound knowledge to conclude that her team’s little Cessna Citation M2 bizjet didn’t have the reach to cross the Pacific.

  “That doesn’t mean that it was necessary to call my uncle.” Jon’s uncle, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, often helped Miranda when a crucial military investigation was being blockaded or interfered with.

  Miranda glanced at Andi who smiled happily.

  “When Jon refused, I took the liberty of unleashing Taz.”

  “I’m not your fucking dog,” Taz growled, surprisingly like one. But she was smiling and Andi didn’t appear to be worried, so perhaps it was okay.

  Taz was the newest member of their team, and Miranda understood her even less than she comprehended the mannerisms of her other team members—or most people.

  “Christ, you two are a pain!” Jon also sounded…angry? Growling, but without Taz’s smile probably meant angry. She still wasn’t sure of Taz’s emotion.

  Miranda took a quick peek at her autism reference notebook. Taz’s face did match happy, but her tone…? She wasn’t ready to consider the concept of a tone communicating a different emotion from an expression. That seemed terribly complex. She didn’t even make a note for future reference before tucking her notebook away.

  However, Miranda couldn’t agree with Jon’s assessment that Taz and Andi were both a “pain.” She’d found them each immensely helpful on crash investigations or she wouldn’t have included them on her team.

  Taz ignored Jon. “I didn’t have the chairman’s number, so I took the liberty of calling his wife. General Elizabeth Gray was actually the one who got Jon’s Air Force ass moving.”

  Andi and Taz smiled at each other. They were both shorter than Miranda’s five-four. But, despite Andi being of Chinese descent and Taz of Mexican, their smiles were nearly identical for reasons that eluded Miranda—even without any tonal elements to confuse matters.

  Jon just groaned.

  “Why are we wasting time? They should have landed twenty-two minutes ago.” Mike grabbed her arm, clutching it hard. “Have you heard from her yet?” It was the first words he’d spoken aloud since arriving at the airport.

  Miranda checked both her phone and her satellite phone. “Not yet. Let’s go.”

  Mike looked as if Holly had just punched him in the gut—even though she wasn’t here.

  And seeing his posture—and a quick glance at his face—she finally understood. It was the way she’d felt when her parents had gone down in TWA 800, when the 747 had exploded off Long Island, New York. She’d been thirteen, but her insides had felt just how Mike looked.

  She turned to Andi, “I get it now.”

  Andi glanced at Mike, then nodded.

  Mike and Jeremy climbed aboard the little jet.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Jon stopped her on the first of the three steps ascending into the gray US Air Force C-21A Learjet.

  Miranda couldn’t think of what.

  “Sure, Jon.” Andi pushed Miranda to continue aboard. “Thanks, Jon, for not making Taz and me come over to Joint Base Lewis-McChord to kick your ass in person to get you moving.”

  Miranda wouldn’t have phrased it quite that way, but the statement was accurate.

  “Yes, thank you for that, Jon. That would have taken far more time than it already has.”

  Then she ducked low enough to enter the plane and turned for the rear to join the others.

  It was only after she sat down that she realized her lover had probably wanted a hug of greeting. Even during an emergency? Apparently yes. She jotted down an entry in her personal notebook under the Relationships heading.

  5

  The landing of the Airbus A330-900neo unfolded with a movie-like slow motion feel—even more painfully drawn out than watching Engine One destroy itself and the wing.

  At least that’s how it appeared to Holly as the adrenaline surge slowed her perception of time.

  It began with Captain Dani Evers’ landing, so perfectly smooth that it didn’t seem real. Only the screech of the tires accelerating from zero to a hundred and forty knots indicated they were in contact with the runway.

  Keeping an eye out the left window, Holly could just see the left-side wingtip continue down to the ground, spark, then flop onto the ground. Not breaking free, it dragged at that side of
the plane.

  “Reversers on Engine Two full!” Dani and Quint shouted out in near perfect harmony, trying to slow the right side with the engine enough to match the drag from the broken left wing.

  The roar was so loud that Holly’s ears popped.

  “One-twenty.”

  “One-ten.”

  Holly braced as hard as she could. For once, she truly didn’t appreciate Miranda’s assessment of a plane’s airworthiness. Her eighty-two-point-five percent chance of wing failure on landing had just paid out.

  How—

  Of course! In flight, the wing was flexing upward with lift. The undamaged bottom skin of the wing had remained under tension. But as soon as that lift was lost on landing, the damaged upper surface couldn’t hold the wing’s weight aloft.

  Gods, but Miranda was so good. Holly should have figured that out, but Miranda simply knew it.

  But even though she probably knew, Miranda hadn’t said what might happen next.

  Holly had seen enough accidents to have a very vivid imagination at this particular instant.

  At one hundred knots, the left landing gear let go. The left wing and landing gear broke away and skidded to a halt. The left side of the jet’s fuselage lurched sickeningly down onto the runway. The sudden drag of two hundred and nine feet of aircraft hitting the runway twisted it sideways on the pavement.

  However, the momentum of two hundred tons of plane and fuel, twenty-five tons of passengers and baggage, and twenty-five more tons of cargo—all still moving at ninety-three knots, a hundred and seven miles an hour—was not to be denied.

  If the landing gear had held, they might have been sent careening sideways across the rough side field into the ocean, but the struts weren’t designed to withstand a force at ninety degrees—to the side—as the plane twisted.

  Both the nose gear and the remaining right-side main gear buckled, then tore away at the lateral force.

  The aircraft, now sliding fully sideways to the direction of travel, began to roll.