Crap! Now that would be on the tape forever if there was a future investigation. And if she couldn’t help them soon, there would be.
She keyed the radio right away.
“Shadow Six-four, this is Denver Center. Be aware your current airspeed is very high. Also your direct line of descent includes seven of the fourteeners.” They stood in a tight cluster barely southwest of Aspen, Colorado.
“Fourteeners?” Was the plane’s radio operator’s voice more strained? She couldn’t tell. The military pilots were even more resolute than the airline pilots. It was the private pilots of general aviation who panicked all the time.
She hadn’t known the word fourteeners either until Kenneth had told her about them over last night’s dinner. Out-of-state pilots weren’t used to mountains reaching that elevation, or the weather systems the mountain peaks generated for thousands of feet higher.
“Mountains over fourteen thousand feet tall. What’s your status?” She checked her map for the nearest airports. She needed one big enough. Oh. Maybe… “Kenneth, the Hercules is designed for short-field landings, right?”
He shot a thumbs up into her peripheral vision without interrupting. Kenneth wasn’t giving her any corrections, so she must be on track. She appreciated his oversight though. This was escalating too fast in many ways.
She keyed her mike. “Shadow Six-four, can you divert to Aspen or Glenwood Springs Airport? Each are roughly twelve miles from your current location.”
“Total LOC. Negative divert.”
Total Loss of Control.
They were falling through twenty-five thousand feet at over three hundred and fifty knots, four hundred miles an hour.
“Roger, Six-four.” She looked away from the radar to Kenneth. What could she say from the ground to help the pilots? They’d know they were doomed. This was a cargo plane, not a fighter jet—it wouldn’t even have ejection seats.
Kenneth cricked his neck to the side for a moment, then shrugged a little helplessly.
“Denver Center. Status, Six-four?”
“Negative control. Negative recovery.” His voice was dead calm. There was a pause, a sound she’d never be able to identify, then he said, “Aw, fuck.” He sounded more ticked off than scared.
She hailed him again, but there was no response.
Eleven seconds later, two new radar images appeared alongside the plane.
“That’s the wings,” Kenneth whispered softly. “Ripped off the plane.”
Nine seconds after that it impacted Snowmass Mountain, a fourteener, at twelve thousand five hundred feet, the very top of the ski area.
Missy looked down at the checklist. She managed to get her finger on the phone number for Mountain Rescue, but she couldn’t make out the numbers.
“I can’t see to call them. I can’t, Kenneth. I—”
He rested a hand on her shoulder and picked up the phone himself. Brushing aside where her tears had blurred the number on the call sheet, he dialed and called out the search teams.
They pulled her off the console and sat her in a small conference room. One of the assistant supervisors conducted the post-incident interview, recording and noting down everything she could recall. When they gave her a fresh mug of coffee, the scent actually made her puke into the wastebasket until she was a weeping, shivering mess.
The assistant super was nice enough to say that it happened all the time after a bad one. He was also nice enough to not mention her weakness when Kenneth checked in on her during breaks in his own round of interviews. Though she could see from his extra sympathy that Kenneth knew.
Fifty-three seconds.
First-call to crash was just fifty-three seconds. That fast—thirteen people lost their lives. She couldn’t get around the fact. How could life suddenly be so short?
When they were done, when all of this was done and the investigation was over, Missy knew one thing. She was so done with Vic.
She also knew the pilot’s final comment, that one final moment when his humanity had slipped past all of his military training, would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Aboard Shadow Six-four
Elevation: 27,000 feet
(23 seconds before impact)
As soon as Lieutenant Colonel Luis Hernandez broadcast the final report from aboard the diving plane—“Negative recovery. Negative control.”—he released his seat harness.
The plane wasn’t quite in freefall, so he fell into the yoke and flight console. “Aw, fuck.” Like it was going to hurt anything now other than his ego. The plane was safely past recovery and no one was left aboard to see anyway.
He pulled off his headset and began climbing uphill through the Hercules’ cockpit. He moved fast in the near freefall. Two of the thirteen bodies scattered strategically through the plane had ended up in the aisle and he was forced to crawl over them. They were wearing his and Danny’s dog tags. They were also close to their build and coloring just in case anything survived the crash. Hopefully not, they weren’t that close because no way did he look like the fake Luis. Homely bugger.
He continued aft quickly, having to struggle to shake off the memory of the last time he’d done this. He’d crawled over the bodies of his own crew when his C-130 Hercules had been shot down in Afghanistan due to insufficient fighter support in a war they never should have been in. He’d fought the plane all the way down—been one of the few to make it. He came to, crawling from body to body looking for other survivors.
At least this time, neither the iron stench of hot blood nor the stinging kerosene of burning Jet A fuel permeated the air. Everyone except he and Danny had been dead before they boarded this flight.
The ladder down to the main cargo deck was easier to navigate. They were in true freefall now and he could just pull himself along it.
Major Danny Gonzalez had left the forward passenger door open after popping it at thirty-nine thousand feet. Though, Luis supposed, his copilot was just Danny now. Their military rank was one more thing they’d all agreed to leave behind along with the dead.
Luis shrugged into the parachute rig.
He took a moment to ensure that he was oriented properly and then grabbed the bottom edge of the door. It wouldn’t do to fling himself out of the plane and straight into the massive four-blade propeller of the Number Two engine spinning at a thousand RPM.
The fuselage twisted sharply and he almost lost his grip as it began to tumble.
Looking out into the darkness once more, he saw that the propeller was no longer an issue—the entire wing had ripped off.
The temperature was a bitch though.
Even on a warm June evening, ten thousand feet above Aspen was damn cold. Be lucky if he didn’t have frostbite by the time he got down. But no time to pull on a balaclava—the ground was coming up fast.
He still made a point of flinging himself downward as he exited, just in case the tail was still attached.
As soon as he’d ejected, he opened his black tactical ram-air chute. It was for night insertions deep behind enemy lines, and, like his specialized clothing, had the radar signature of a bird—a small one.
He watched the plane continue down. Less than five seconds after he had his chute deployed and stable, the Hercules impacted at twelve thousand feet atop a high peak. It was supposed to plunge into the back-country wilderness beyond, but it didn’t really matter. At almost five hundred knots, the destruction was more than sufficient.