White Top

by M. L. Buchman

  Major Tamatha Jones watched the President emerge from the Oval Office.

  President Cole was a creature of habit, which wasn’t always a good thing for security, but the Marine in her appreciated it.

  His feet hit the South Lawn of the White House at precisely two minutes before scheduled departure. He took four questions from the gathered newsies. By his gestures, this time they were all about the new helicopter. She concentrated on looking busy, only watching with her peripheral vision.

  At thirty seconds to go, he waved goodbye. When she glanced directly at him after he turned his back on the newsies, she could see the deep exhaustion he’d been hiding from them. Seven years in office had definitely taken their toll. Yet he saluted Mathieson neatly. Then he stopped to shake hands with him before boarding. A leader who treated his underlings as people was far too rare outside HMX-1 in her experience. Marine pilots were nonpartisan, but she knew in that moment that whether she flew one President or several, Roy Cole would always be the one she’d think of.

  And that the President was ready to lift precisely on schedule was a surprise, though McGrady had forewarned her.

  She bit her tongue when a fist thumped on her shoulder.

  “Damn sharp helo you’ve got here,” Roy Cole’s voice was even deeper in person than on television.

  “Brand-new just for you, Mr. President.”

  “I see that you finally shoved McGrady aside. Good to have a fellow Boulderite at the helm. Well done, Major Jones.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She’d never actually met the President before and was shocked that he knew her name and knew they shared a hometown. “He fought against it but it had to be done. I hope you won’t miss him too much, sir.”

  To the President’s left, Vance grinned. Her joke would definitely be getting back to the commander.

  The President chuckled, “Not so’s I’d notice. Going to get me to the airport in one piece?”

  “That’s the plan, sir. Unless you had something else in mind.”

  He squinted at her. “What? Like in two pieces, delivered separately for later reassembly?”

  Vance rolled his eyes in mock panic.

  She should have kept her damn mouth shut.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of a sunny day on the Chincoteague shore. We can be there in under forty minutes, Mr. President.”

  “That suggestion, Major, just might get you made a colonel. You’re on…next time.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Go Marine,” he held out a hand and she shook it. That he also shook Vance’s was decent and would probably be the highlight of his mere Texan existence.

  “Semper Fi, Mr. President. Now, if you’ll sit down and buckle up, I’ll see what I can do about the in-one-piece part of that deal.”

  He chuckled again as he turned for his seat, sounding lighter than he’d looked when he’d boarded her aircraft.

  The rest of the flight went precisely to plan.

  White House to Andrews, she departed twenty-eight seconds late but was careful to make up the time so that she landed exactly on schedule.

  After the President had exited her helo and Air Force One was aloft, she lifted and turned for Quantico. The fog had burned off enough that she was able to land without needing her instruments. Once down, she and Vance headed for the mission debrief.

  Sergeant Mathieson was already changing out of his dress blues. Even after so short a flight, the VH-92A would now undergo a full inspection that would take several hours.

  “You’re wackier than a horned toad at a frog-jumping competition, Jones.”

  “Gee, and I don’t have being from Texas as an excuse.”

  “Offering to cut the President into pieces? Go Marine indeed.”

  They were both laughing as they entered the debrief room. Every step from the shift to Anacostia and the thirty-minute test flight that happened before every Presidential lift—called “burning off some fuel”—to the final touchdown would be reviewed in detail.

  This was HMX-1 after all.

  The squadron had a perfect record of never once since its 1947 founding, having an incident while delivering the President and other VIPs. That’s all she ultimately cared about—their record was still intact on her watch.

  1

  Six days later

  Boeing Field, Seattle

  Elevation 17’

  “Caravan 34Z, cleared for straight-out departure. Runway 32 Right. Climb and maintain fifteen hundred.”

  Larry Block didn’t answer the Boeing Field Tower. With five hundred flights a day off their two runways, they didn’t want a radio call, they wanted you gone.

  He eased the throttle lever forward, released the brakes, and rolled down the morning-shadowed runway. Right on schedule, they’d be climbing into the sunrise in moments.

  “You’re in for a sweet ride,” he told the passenger in the copilot’s seat. The Cessna 208 Caravan was rated for nine passengers but had ten seats because everyone except the FAA had certified it for all ten. He never flew with a copilot, and therefore one lucky passenger got the sweet seat rather than being stuck in the middle of the cramped triple at the rear. He’d considered ripping it out, but it was a bonus space for the rear passengers. To keep it fair, he always let the passenger with the closest birthday sit up front. It had already gotten him several extra tourists who came back on their birthday to get the seat.

  “Awesome!” Stephen’s thirtieth was only three days away. He was practically vibrating with excitement.

  It was the first flight of the day, “The Sunrise Tulip Tour.” Bless Marie. His wife was great at marketing.

  No plane liked to fly the way a Caravan did. Sixteen hundred feet down the runway at seventy knots, Larry eased back on the wheel and the plane floated aloft. To the left was all Boeing: big hangars and a line of parked jets undergoing customization or awaiting repairs. To the right lay the two flight schools, the terminal building with its tower, and his own little tour operation.

  Larry Block waggled his wings to wave at Marie, who always watched from the office window—no better woman anywhere. She’d stuck with him through the service years while he’d been flying as a crew chief on C-130 Hercules cargo lifters in and out of war zones. Now he’d done his twenty years, gotten his pension, and they were in the good times.

  He and his daughter had earned their commercial licenses together just in time for the spring tours. If business kept building like this, they’d be able to afford a second plane. Then, instead of having to take turns, the two Blocks of “Around the Block Air Tours” could fly simultaneously, even offering personal aerial photos from the other plane—for a fee of course. Another one of Marie’s great ideas.

  “Wow!” Stephen gasped out.

  As they climbed above South Seattle’s light industrial area, the city came into view just as the first sunlight peeked over the Cascade Mountains to light the tops of the downtown towers. Seattle was a shadowed spread, climbing the steep hills, wrapped in a crescent around the most beautiful bay in the world.

  It was one of those crystal blue spring days, the white-capped Olympic Mountains to the west shone as bright as torches, and the even more impressive Cascades still silhouetted to the east.

  He could hear the camera shutters snapping from the passengers behind him.

  So could Stephen in the right seat. He jolted in surprise, grabbed his bag from where he’d stuffed it at his feet, and dug out a big SLR camera with a forearm-long lens. Then he jammed the bag back down.

  Larry glanced over to make sure Stephen had followed instructions to keep it well clear of the rudder pedals as he’d instructed. Stephen had. The knapsack was tucked against the sidewall and he’d planted a foot on it to keep it there. Good man.

  They were at a thousand feet over the Seattle waterfront. Larry eased the nose down to level the plane for a moment so that Stephen could get the best shot of the Space Needle rising from Seattle Center at the north end of downtown. At the moment, onl
y the top saucer shape was sunlit, so it really did look like a UFO hovering over downtown.

  Stephen’s camera made that zip-zip-zip rapid-fire photo sound. Oh God, he was one of those types. Larry made a bet with himself that the guy would shoot a thousand photos in the one-hour flight and never actually look at anything with his own eyes. He just hoped that Stephen didn’t run out of memory before they reached the La Conner tulip fields—the main selling point of this flight.

  Right now, hundreds of acres of tulips color-blocked the Skagit Valley in glorious swathes of color. They weren’t quite peaked yet but they were close enough to wow the customers and ensure that he had four more full planeloads scheduled today. Each one, twenty minutes there, twenty minutes circling over the flowers and the San Juan Islands, twenty minutes back.

  They were over Elliot Bay at the moment, and the curve of the shoreline placed the Space Needle directly ahead—a perfect shot.

  Larry eased back on the controls to continue his climb to fifteen hundred feet as Stephen’s camera continued making its steady buzz of zip-zip-zip sounds.

  Except the control wheel wouldn’t move.

  He could twist it a little side-to-side, but it definitely wouldn’t pull back for a climb.

  Had something broken?

  He hadn’t heard anything, not that he could have over the stuttering barrage of Stephen’s cameras.

  Airspeed was good. Engine RPM was fine. No imminent stall or engine failure.

  He kicked the rudder a little to the right and left, he still had good control.

  But the wheel wouldn’t pull toward him.

  “Something wrong?” Stephen stopped with the camera and looked over at him.

  “Not a thing.” Panicking a customer was never a good idea. But his voice must have given him away.

  “What’s wrong?” Stephen’s voice was loud enough that Larry could hear it being picked up by the passengers behind them.

  Larry shut out their escalating questions and focused on the problem.

  The more he struggled to pull the wheel toward him, the more it moved in and angled the nose down.

  Trim! He adjusted the trim to raise the nose.

  No change.

  From a high point of one thousand feet reached sixty-two seconds into the flight, the Cessna 208 Caravan began descending.

  At seventy-three seconds, Larry Block gave up on trying to climb the plane as they descended toward seven hundred feet.

  They were now exactly even with the top of the Space Needle, which towered six hundred and five feet above Seattle Center’s hundred-and-fifteen-foot elevation. It seemed to be drawing them like a giant magnet and he couldn’t get the plane to climb away.

  If this was a C-130, he’d know exactly what had gone wrong. Every noise and shimmy of the four-engine Hercules was in his blood after twenty years.

  He’d owned the Caravan for less than three months. It was a much simpler aircraft, yet he had no idea what had happened.

  One mile—seventeen seconds—from the Space Needle, Larry knew this wasn’t going to end well.

  Crashing into the Space Needle wasn’t an option.

  He’d turn for the water and do his best there. The plane’s fixed tricycle landing gear would catch the waves and probably destroy the aircraft, but it was better than ramming into a crowd of civilians.

  Except now the plane wouldn’t even turn.

  The wheel was jammed and he couldn’t move it.

  At eighty-seven seconds into the flight and three hundred and seven feet above sea level, he was now aimed at the center of the Space Needle.

  He kicked the right rudder and managed to steer the plane aside and miss the tower, carving a circular arc around the spindly tower legs that looked so impossibly substantial this close up. The flight, captured on video by an early morning jogger, would make national news, and win several photography competitions for its drama and beauty.

  The arc continued.

  At ninety-three seconds and an elevation of two hundred and thirty-two feet, he glanced over at the petrified Stephen braced in his seat. He wanted to apologize that he’d never get to see his birthday. That—

  Then Larry Block spotted what had happened to the controls.

  At ninety-four seconds, two hundred and thirteen feet above sea level, and traveling at one hundred and eighty-three knots—two hundred and eleven miles an hour— the Cessna 208 Caravan slammed into the stage tower of McCaw Hall, Seattle’s opera house.

  2

  Six thousand, nine hundred and seventy-two pounds of Cessna 208 Caravan impacted the west side of the hundred-and-ten-foot-high loft above McCaw Hall’s stage.

  The thin steel wall and its lightweight supports burst inward like a bullet tearing a hole through a playing card. The fifty-two-foot wingspan cleared the heavy structural beams at the corners of the tower. Had it failed to do so, the fuel-laden wings would have ripped open and a fireball would have consumed the plane, the tower, and destroyed eighty-five percent of the hall as well as the opera and ballet offices to either side.

  Instead the high wing held strong, slicing a wide slot high on the wall. The single hundred-and-six-inch, three-bladed propellor mounted on the nose shredded a large hole directly in front of the fuselage.

  The landing gear were sheared off by a lateral support beam. The three wheels would fall nine stories, impacting the roof over the three-thousand-seat house at fifty-four-point-six miles an hour. Their broken mechanical supports would each impact first, punching into the roof, leaving only the tires exposed to the sky.

  Other than the missing landing gear, the plane entered the building largely intact.

  The sole fatality until this moment was the pilot, Larry Block. One of the lightweight supports, rather than being shredded by the spinning McCauley propeller, was snipped off and heaved through the windscreen like a javelin that slammed into his heart. Little blood spilled as he died speared to his seat. Had he avoided the crash, he would have suffered a major heart attack over the tulip fields and died along with all of his passengers and two entire busloads of Japanese tourists who had flown to America specially to see the blooms.

  But he died in the opera house instead.

  The purpose of the fly loft tower was to allow for scenery, curtains, and lighting instruments to be lowered into view as needed yet stored out of sight above the stage when they weren’t. To achieve this, a hundred feet above the stage and fifteen feet below the roof, a vast metal grid was hung. From this grid, one hundred and twelve pipes dangled horizontally above the stage, each spaced six inches apart.

  Each of those pipes was supported from above by a series of ropes that ran from the pipe, up through the grid and over pulleys, then tracked sideways to the end wall. From there, the gathered ropes for each pipe turned once more to lay against the wall and descend into a vast system of counterweights: a centralized control area thirty feet above the stage.

  The myriad array of ropes—some simply attached to an empty pipe but others from which hung hundreds, even thousands of pounds of lighting instruments and scenery—acted like an aircraft carrier’s arresting wire to assist in a jet landing.

  After the Cessna 208 Caravan punched through the wall, it had lost only twenty-seven knots of its speed at impact. The remaining one hundred and fifty-six knots were absorbed as the plane snagged more and more of the horizontal ropes.

  Pipes jerked aloft as the plane was slowed by not just one-of-three arresting wires as on a carrier’s deck, but by hundreds of heavy manila lines sharing the shock.

  This is when the only other fatality occurred.

  Stephen’s side of the windshield had saved him from the debris, shattering in the process. At the moment of impact, the heavy camera and lens shot forward and tumbled onto the grid. The strap, which he’d placed around his neck out of habit, broke his neck before it slipped free.

  As Stephen’s body went lax due to his severed spinal column, his foot slid off the knapsack he’d been keeping pinned to the fl
oor. The abrupt deceleration of the aircraft was accompanied by a sharp nose-down movement. The knapsack, floating independently in the chaos, flew free and followed the camera out the missing front windshield.

  Though the Caravan was not destroyed, neither were the wings undamaged.

  Highly volatile Jet A fuel spilled from a punctured tank and caught fire.

  Because of the open nature of the steel grid on which the Caravan now rested, the fire spilled down over the set of tonight’s opera.

  To keep the audience safe—if there’d been one at this early hour—several events happened simultaneously.

  Temperature sensors triggered the fire alarms.

  The heat above the stage was sufficient to melt three thermocouples.

  One released a massive deluge of water from the sprinkler system that showered the plane and the set.

  A second opened the large louvers atop the fly loft roof and large fans engaged to suck the fire-heated air up and out.

  The last thermocouple released the fire curtain. A metal-framed wall, covered on both sides in burn-resistant fiberglass, slid down across the proscenium. The sixty-foot-wide, thirty-five-foot-tall opening between the stage and the seating was now fully blocked.

  The surviving eight passengers in the “Around the Block Air Tours” Cessna 208 Caravan—now parked atop the fly grid one hundred feet above the burning stage—began to scream.

  3

  Miranda Chase always enjoyed a daily walk to monitor her island. Spieden was one of the last of the San Juan Islands before the Haro Strait that divided Washington State from Canada. It had been her family’s since before she was born and hers since her parents’ deaths when she was thirteen.

  Two-point-eight miles long and half-a-mile wide, it was her domain. Her kingdom. And her happy “subjects” were sufficiently exotic that walking among them always made her feel normal, or more normal than she knew she was. Spotted Asian sika deer, big-horned mouflon sheep, a hundred transplanted bird species—all left over from the island’s brief period as a stocked game hunting park. It had been more like a shooting gallery, and she was glad that it was forty years gone. Good riddance.