Sam took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He took in the surrounding vista, just being present. Lifting the tail of the submerged juggernaut would be complex, and he wanted a clear mind. Even after thousands of hours spent diving, he still loved every minute of his time underwater. He allowed the chilly embrace of the water and the serenity of the seascape to engulf his thoughts, just for a moment. As the white mass of the aircraft loomed ever larger from below, the scale of the task at hand hit home.
At 235 feet in length, and a wingspan of 211 feet, the bulbous Dreamlifter was a beast of the air. Originally created to transport the pieces of the huge Boeing Dreamliner passenger jet to assembly locations, it is a monstrous creation. She had a payload over 840,000 pounds fully loaded, the largest capability in the air.
The entire front section of the airplane was compromised during impact, bashing in the nose of the plane like a squeezebox. This had rendered the side doors useless leaving only one point of access, the articulating tail section of the aircraft. During normal operation, the entire rear end of the plane opened like a huge door. It swung away to the port side, facilitating full access to the cavernous 65,000 cubic feet of cargo space.
With the first lift, Tom and Genevieve had successfully broken the suction of the fuselage from the seabed, so Sam hoped that they could hover the tail section a couple of feet off the sea floor using lifting bags and the new cradle. The Maria Helena would then drag the cargo door open after the divers manually disengaged the locking mechanism. It was a complicated and difficult maneuver, but Sam knew his tech diving crew well and trusted them to perform at the highest level.
Veyron had sent the lifting bags down ahead of Sam, and when he arrived at the bottom, Tom and Genevieve had attached almost enough to hover the fuselage with the nose down. Genevieve was filling the second-to-last float to half full, and Tom was attaching the final bag. The aquatic lifting bags looked like two rows of miniature hot air balloons, assembled for a race.
“How long have you guys been down now?” Sam asked over the radio mike.
“About two hours,” Tom replied, consulting his watch.
“I hope you put a good book in the decompression pod, you’re going to be in there for a while!”
“Yeah well, I’ve got good company, so it could be worse,” he said, grabbing the compressed air tool line from Genevieve and filling the last lifting bag.
“Too bad I can’t say the same thing!” Genevieve chimed in, swimming back to the other side of the sunken airplane.
A puff of silt clouded up from the body of the aircraft where it met the ground, and the huge cargo plane’s tail lifted ever so slightly. “We have lift-off!” Tom said.
“Nice! I’m hoping that the wings will stabilize this baby enough in the mud for us to swing the tail open. Let’s leave her as low as we can now that she’s off the floor.” Sam said.
“Genevieve, are you okay to check all the bags are secure? Tom and I are going to see about these locks.” Sam said.
“Sure thing.”
On the underside of the fuselage on both sides, there were emergency release levers for the hydraulic locks that keep the tail closed under normal conditions. Not requiring power, the releases break the seal on the closed fuselage, allowing emergency crews access to the stricken airplane. Sam and Tom took one of the levers each and broke the tail. The seal cracked, and a small amount of air escaped from the top of the body as the giant rear section opened about two inches.
Step one.
Tom and Sam swam the cradle around the bottom of the tail section and the top edge of the fin, securing the crane hook and cable into the open loops of the sling, and adjusted it to fit securely on the starboard side of the aircraft.
Sam reached up and toggled the switch on top of his mask. It adjusted the readout on the heads-up display inside to show a compass. “Okay Matthew, she’s laying almost due west. The heading is 268 degrees. When we're ready, if you can edge forward at the same heading for around fifty yards, with a bit of luck, we should see some movement on the tail.”
“Copy that. Heading of 268 degrees.”
“Okay Veyron,” Sam said into the radio, “Pull the hook in just enough to take up the slack.”
“Copy that Sam, I’ll luff around to mid stern and take it up slowly. I’ve set my weight limit alarm, but let me know when it’s tight. I can’t feel much up here with all this movement.”
Sam watched as the thick steel cable started edging away toward the surface, “Just there Veyron.” It came to a stop, curved, but taught.
“Okay everyone, let’s clear out down here. Give it a good fifty feet. Genevieve, are you still happy with all the bags?”
“They’re all good. I’ve tech screwed all the saddles to the fuselage so they won’t move now. Good to go.”
“Great. Tom?”
“I’m clear.”
“Okay Matthew, power on.”
“Copy that, throttle to fifty percent.”
The Maria Helena’s mighty twin screws took up the strain on the cable, and with her stern laying low under the strain from the crane boom, she dragged herself forward, displacing the swell and crashing through the breakers on her bow.
“Okay guys, that’s getting close to my maximum weight alarm,” Veyron said into the radio with the sounds of high pitched alarms following his voice in the transmission.
“Matthew? How are you going?”
“She’s laying pretty low, but I’ve still got a little way to travel.”
“It’s your call buddy, no movement down here yet, though.”
“Okay, I’m going to dump some ballast, and power up a little. Pumps up and engines to seventy percent.”
The Maria Helena dragged herself a little lower in the water, and the sea boiled angrily behind the stern as she ripped through the water, trying to produce some forward motion. Like a tugboat pulling a container ship, her stern swam side-to-side, heaving against the line.
Far below, the metal cable twanged and pinged out a metallic whale-song as it straightened up, straining under 40,000 horsepower of torque from the twin diesel power plants at the surface.
Bang!
The divers were startled as the cradle slipped a little higher on the plane’s tailfin, finally seating itself, and then a mighty groan issued from the cavernous belly of the fuselage as the tail swung open.
“We’re in!” Sam shouted. “Okay Matthew, that’ll do it. And Veyron, you can drop the hook now. Great work team, really. Great job.”
“That’s why we get paid the big bucks, hey Sam,” Matthew said over the mike, powering down the ship. “I knew she could do it. I’ll take back some ballast now, and we’ll hold steady topside. It’s still pretty hairy up here in case you’d forgotten, so feel free to be quick.”
“You got it, buddy. Tom, Genevieve – let’s see what’s in this plane, shall we?”
Chapter Four
Sam switched on his flashlight, shining its beam directly into the now open fuselage, before quickly swimming inside. Tom and Genevieve entered the gaping space at the rear of the aircraft. They swam single file into the gargantuan freight area. It was 65,000 cubic feet in volume and all of it empty. Their flashlights bounced around the cavernous void as they entered, lighting up numerical distance markers on the wall, and inactive emergency lighting strips that ran the length of the internal fuselage.
Tom’s beam flashed throughout the empty hold. “I thought this was meant to be fully loaded?”
“It was,” Sam said. “Some sort of heavy machinery. I wasn’t told any details.”
“Looks like someone got the aircraft’s cargo manifest wrong,” Genevieve pointed out, matter-of-factly. “It’s not like the heavy machinery’s managed to fall out of the cargo hold without damaging the rest of the aircraft.”
“You’re right.” Sam kicked his fins, swimming toward the cockpit. “Someone must have got the manifest wrong.”
He felt dwarfed by the awesome capacity of the room. It was like
standing in the center of a deserted motorway tunnel, but 100 feet under the water. Freight rollers lined the floor, stretching away into the distance, their perspective joined on the visual horizon like train-tracks on a prairie. The diver’s lights seemed tiny as they beamed from one end of the aircraft to the other. The beams were uninterrupted by anything in the visual field they illuminated. The cargo bay was completely empty. There was nothing in the plane at all.
“Good thing we’re not here to retrieve its cargo,” Sam said. “We’ve been hired to retrieve the aircraft’s data recorders.”
“What kind of data recorders does this thing have?” Tom asked
“It should have a Cockpit Voice Recorder, a separate Flight Data Recorder, and a Quick Access Recorder. The QAR is in the cockpit, but I doubt it will have survived.”
Tom nodded. “I should think it would be unlikely.”
The quick access recorder was an airborne flight recorder designed to provide quick and easy access to raw flight data through a USB drive, standard flash memory card, or wireless connection. Like the aircraft's flight data recorder, the QAR received its inputs from the Flight Data Acquisition Unit, recording over 2000 flight parameters. Its purpose was to sample data at much higher rates than the FDR, and for much longer periods. Unlike an FDR, it isn’t a mandated requirement by the Civil Aviation Authority and wasn’t designed to survive an accident. Even so, Sam knew it would most likely provide valuable information if it could be salvaged.
Sam said, “Tom, can you and Genevieve try and locate the CVR and FDR?”
“Sure, any idea where they will be housed in the Dreamlifter?”
“Yeah, they’re in the tail section, high up in the port side on an isolated tray. There should be a coarse wiring conduit to it. The box is bright orange.”
“Of course, that’s the color a black box should be,” Tom answered, smiling in his mask.
“All right, I’ll see you both in ten minutes.”
“Where are you going?” Tom asked.
“To the cockpit. I want to see if I can retrieve the QAR – it’s unlikely it survived the crash, but maybe Elise can salvage the data stored within.”
“No problem. Rendezvous in ten minutes?”
“Sounds good,” Genevieve said.
Sam consulted his diver’s watch. “I’ve got 04:40, see you guys here in ten minutes.”
Genevieve nodded, looking at her watch as Tom said, “See you in ten.”
Sam watched as Tom and Genevieve swam off toward the rear of the aircraft and the open tail section. He swam the length of the fuselage to reach the cockpit, then stopped in the center of the cargo area.
Swimming forward in the empty aircraft, Sam was struck by the strangeness of the whole wreck. The interior structures were completely intact, a little askew here and there on panel joins, but with the exception of the bent-up nose, the damage to the overall fuselage was minimal.
There’s no way she crashed at high speed, maybe the nose damage is from the sea floor, after a successful water landing. But why? Why wasn’t there a distress signal?
Sam swam on past the curtained off crew and galley area on his right without stopping and entered the open cockpit. There was no sign of the crew. He was expecting all three of them to be inside. The Dreamlifters are only licensed to carry essential crew, no passengers – they didn’t even have a jump seat. Still, the flight was about to cross the Atlantic, which meant a minimum of three pilots to rotate through the rest periods.
So, where were they?
The cockpit space seemed surprisingly cramped, compared to the massive fuselage. In the tiny room, Sam was restricted to minimum movements because of his tech-diving gear. He swept his beam around, surprised by how little the cockpit of the Boeing 747 megafreighter had changed since the 1970’s. This version was updated and rolled out from 2014, yet with the exception of some multifunction monitors replacing gauges, the fit-out was entirely utilitarian and distinctly last century.
The Quick Access Recorder was right where it should have been, under a flip cover at the third officer’s workstation. Sam retrieved the USB flash drive and zipped it into a storage pouch within his buoyancy control device.
He shined his flashlight around the cockpit searching for any other clues. He noticed that a gauge at eye-level had been destroyed. There was no other damage around it. He examined it closely and saw fragments of hair, bone, and blood – and just visible in the dead center of the dial – the base of a copper projectile.
He immediately knew where the pilots were.
Sam turned awkwardly in the doorway, his fins and gear obstructing his movements in the confined space. He pulled himself back along the tiny corridor with his hands and stopped at the galley. Drawing back the curtain, and looking up, he saw the bodies of two men in flight officer’s uniforms. They hovered like ghosts against the roof of the galley by the lifejackets they wore, with their legs hanging down below them like giant tendrils.
Sam added a little buoyancy to his BCD and joined the men at the roof. He gently turned to the closer of the two men and came face to bloated face with the plane’s chief pilot. The middle-aged man’s mouth was ajar and his black eyes wide open – frozen forever in a look of surprise. A cavernous hole in the center of his forehead created the ghoulish appearance of a third eye.
The man’s ID tag floated about his face and listed the name Michael Bateman. Anchored to his neck by a lanyard embroidered with the logo of the freight company he died flying for, Sam took the laminated card in his hand and examined it under his flashlight. Without expression and fine features, the puffy countenance bore little semblance to the man in the photograph, but enough to positively identify him.
Sam was racked with pity for these men, fellow pilots who met the same horrible, fearful end. He dropped his chin to his chest and made a silent covenant to retrieve the poor men’s bodies before the Maria Helena left the wreck site. He retrieved the names of the other flight crew members and moved out of the galley.
The question remained, where was the third pilot? And, if he had murdered the two other pilots, where did he end up? It’s not like there was anywhere else for him to go once he’d killed the two men.
He consulted his wristwatch and felt for the USB stick in his belt pouch.
04:49hrs, time to leave.
Chapter Five
Sam reached the open aircraft tail.
There, Tom and Genevieve had retrieved the data recorders from the tail section without incident and were already securing the data recorders into a large lift bag, which they were now attaching to the cable used to shift the aircraft’s tail. Sam glanced at the two orange boxes as they hovered in the water next to Tom and Genevieve.
“Did you find the pilots?” Tom asked.
“Yeah. Two of them. Both dead. Murdered.”
“Murdered?”
“Yeah, a single bullet wound to their foreheads.”
“What about the third pilot?”
“He’s missing.”
Tom turned and quickly flashed his light down the fuselage, as though the missing man might still be waiting, hiding there, about to attack. “I don’t understand. He killed them and then intentionally crashed the plane?”
“Either that or the plane crashed, and then he murdered them. Who knows? Either way, it doesn’t really explain where he is now.”
Genevieve said, “What if he intentionally brought the plane down, killed the other two pilots, and then stole whatever was inside the cargo hold?”
Sam said, “That’s quite a scenario.”
“Sure,” she replied. “But it’s sounding less impossible the more I look at it.”
Sam nodded. “You might be right. The question is, what was inside the aircraft’s hold that was valuable enough to make someone go to such lengths to steal it?”
Tom said, “Not to mention, why not just shoot the two pilots, and then fly the plane to a perfectly good runway somewhere to offload its valuable cargo?”
&nbs
p; “Unless…” Sam started.
“Unless what?” Tom persisted.
“Whoever’s responsible wanted to make certain no one would believe the cargo had been stolen?”
“Why?”
Sam said, “I have no idea, but I intend to find out.”
Then, in the back of his mind, he recalled how the secretary of defense had been specifically interested in the results of the aircraft’s flight data recorders.
Could her interest in the recovery of the flight data recorders have something to do with its secret cargo?
Tom let go of the lift cable. “All right, this is secure, let’s head topside. Genevieve and I already have more than an hour of decompression time in the hyperbaric chamber. No reason to make it longer.”
“Agreed.”
“I’m good to go,” Genevieve said.
Sam checked his dive watch. His bottom time was 15 minutes, with a total dive time of 25 minutes. He would need one short decompression stop, but Tom and Genevieve would need to decompress in the hyperbaric chamber on board.
All three of them ascended slowly, leaving their bounty of flight data recorders, secured to the lift bag. They would haul it up from topside. Right now, the safest place for it was to remain in the deep, and much calmer waters.
Sam exhaled slowly, keeping his eyes on his depth gauge, displayed on his heads-up display, to ensure that he didn’t exceed their maximum rate of ascent.
After making his required decompression stop, he, Tom, and Genevieve made their final ascent to the surface. All three of them reached the internal surface of the Maria Helena’s moon pool simultaneously.
The moon pool was built in the middle of the Maria Helena’s hull and served as a diving command center, as well as a relatively calm port to launch their mini-submersibles and to dive from. In the turbulent waters of the Barents Sea, the pool was still choppy, and water was splashing over the sides, running across the internal decking.
Omega Deep (Sam Reilly Book 12) Page 6
