“There it goes! Starboard engine RPM just dropped. We are losing the starboard engine!” yelled the co-pilot.
The King Air yawed toward the engine still under power. As the plane surged to the left engine, it was enough to jolt everyone in their seats.
The flight attendant opened the cockpit door.
“Do we have a problem, captain?” she asked.
“We’ve lost the starboard engine, but port engine is running fine. We are only about seven minutes or so from landing. Tell them we will hold course and should land as scheduled,” the pilot reassured her, but noted the co-pilot’s uncertain expression.
The highly trained, experienced pilot began his emergency procedures like clockwork, with no emotion visible.
“Feather the dead engine props,” commanded the pilot, trying to limit the windmilling effect wind speed had on the propellers. The propellers were causing a terrific drag on the aircraft, pulling the plane in a right-hand direction.
“Props feathered,” replied the co-pilot.
“Banking five degrees port,” announced the pilot, following the first rule in a twin-engine single failure, which was to raise the dead, meaning tipping the wing on the dead engine side to create more lift on the left wing.
“Cut fuel to starboard,” the pilot said.
“Starboard fuel shut off,” repeated the co-pilot.
The very second the fuel to the dead engine was cut, the remaining engine on the port side shot up in RPM.
“What the hell?” the pilot exclaimed, fighting the yawing effect with his stick and pedals.
The pilot knew that part of the protocol when losing an engine when not in take-off mode was to point the nose downward to gain airspeed, but that also reduced the margin for error. It was a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario.
“San Antonio, this is Governor One,” the pilot radioed the San Antonio tower. “We have lost our starboard engine. Requesting clear flight path to land and permission to lower to eighteen hundred feet.”
“Governor One, permission granted to lower to eighteen hundred feet. We will clear airspace for you immediately. Please stand by. Do we need emergency equipment on runway?”
“We should be okay. Port engine spiking in RPM intermittently. Lowering to eighteen hundred feet now,” returned the pilot as he began a fairly rapid descent.
“Go tell the governor where we are and what we are doing,” said the pilot.
“You got it?” asked the co-pilot.
“I’ve got it. I don’t understand the RPM spikes, but we are only twenty-four miles out,” the pilot re-assured him.
The co-pilot unsnapped out of his seat and climbed over the controls console to open the cockpit door.
When he got into the cabin, the co-pilot told the governor, “Governor, we lost the right engine but the left engine is fine. The back-and-forth effect you are feeling is the pilot adjusting the yaw effect caused by having power coming from only one side. We are about twenty miles from the airport and we are cleared to land,” the co-pilot stated, appearing confident.
“Do we need to be concerned?” asked Wilson.
“Well, we would rather have both engines,” chuckled the co-pilot, trying to lighten the situation. “But one engine will get us there.”
“I may need a flight bag,” Brahman told the flight attendant. He was getting motion sickness from the yawing effect of the plane.
“No problem, sir. I’ll fetch one,” she said.
In the meantime, the plain white van that had been parked at the end of the Austin runway was making its way south on Interstate 35 toward San Antonio, driving at posted speeds. The pair in the front seats was listening to a police scanner.
The co-pilot went back to the cockpit, closing the door behind him and crawling back over the controls console and was almost strapped in before multiple warning lights went off and the RPM on the port engine suddenly surged.
“Damn it!” said the pilot as he tried to look at his gauges, but he was busy fighting the stick and pedals. With the sudden surge in power, the King Air was literally trying to turn itself on its axis, twisting violently to the left, counterclockwise.
The co-pilot didn’t even bother to strap himself into his seat.
“RPM is redlining, sir!” he yelled. “Twenty-six hundred feet, dropping too fast, sir!”.
“I’m fighting this damned thing. What the hell is going on with this engine?” the pilot grimaced as he struggled with the stick.
The pilot, who had remained calm from the beginning, now had real fear on his face, and the co-pilot could see it.
The pilot had to make a split-second decision to cut the engine to keep the aircraft from turning upside down and beginning a deadly spiral.
“Cut the engine! Cut the engine!” he yelled to the co-pilot as he fought with the stick and rudder pedals.
“It’s not shutting down!”
“Try again. Keep trying! Keep trying!”
“My switch is not working!”
“Hit mine! Hit mine NOW!”
“Damn, it won’t shut off either!”
The King Air turboprop aircraft slowly started to roll over on its left wing.
“San Antonio tower, this is Governor One. Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! We have lost control of the aircraft!”
In the cabin, the flight attendant felt a sensation she had never experienced in her ten-year career―fear.
“Oh, my God!” she shrieked, grabbing the armrests of her chair.
“Oh, no, this ain’t good…” exclaimed Governor Brahman.
“God, please help us!” Wilson murmured under his breath as he also grasped the arm rests on his chair.
The King Air rolled to a ninety-degree angle as the pilots fought to cut off the engine and keep it from rolling further. Meanwhile, the plane was losing altitude. Had the pilots been able to cut the engine, they still would have had a major problem keeping airspeed to prevent the aircraft dropping from the sky. Their only hope would be to glide into some type of emergency landing, but there simply wasn’t enough altitude had they succeeded.
The King Air rolled to one hundred ten degrees and the engine cut off on its own. Now, almost completely inverted, the nose dropped and began an intense spiral from twelve hundred feet.
“Governor One, Governor One, do you read?” shouted the San Antonio tower.
“God forgive me,” said the pilot to himself.
Thirteen miles from the San Antonio airport runway, the King Air, in steep descent and traveling at a speed of more than 320 miles per hour, slammed into a hillside nose first right outside the small bedroom community of Selma, Texas.
A ball of fire rose up from the ground several hundred feet and could be seen in the Texas hill country sky for miles. Despite the fuel warnings on the aircraft, the King Air had plenty of fuel.
Within minutes, the chatter on the police scanner in the van traveling south on Interstate 35 increased rapidly. The two occupants looked at each other and smiled.
The special concoction they were able to load into the aircraft fuel supply was only a little more than a gallon but, in thirty minutes and under pressure, it caused the jet fuel to gel and clump. The clumping had the same effect as a clogged artery when it caused a heart attack.
The pair had solicited help from an employee of a contract jet services firm that contracted with the Department of Public Safety for aircraft maintenance. The employee had managed to get Volkov access to the King Air, and uploading the fuel additive was a simple procedure. With Volkov wearing the bright blue jumpsuit of the aircraft maintenance firm, nobody knew the difference.
Volkov picked up one of four cell phones in a cardboard box on the floor between the two front seats and dialed a number.
“The eagle has landed,” Volkov said in broken English.
“You confirmed it?” asked the voice on the phone.
“Watch the news. You’ll get your confirmation,” answered Volkov, ending
the call and handing the phone to his passenger to destroy.
In Washington, D.C., Nils Ottosson ended the call.
Two hours later, the pair knocked on the front door of the apartment the maintenance worker lived at in South Austin with his young wife and four-year-old son.
When the pair of Russians left the apartment, their silenced pistols were hidden inside their shirts, which were tucked neatly into their jeans.
Inside the apartment were the three dead members of the young family. The maintenance worker had a gunshot upward in his mouth through his brain. The wife and mother had been shot in the back of the head with a single bullet, along with the four-year-old boy.
The Russians’ only ties to the King Air were now dead, and the chances investigators could trace the jet fuel coagulant from a fiery crash scene were remote.
Chapter 36
“To oppose corruption in government is the highest form of patriotism.”
- G. Edward Griffin
American Author
Every morning at 5:00 a.m., Pops Younger saddled up Pecos, his big bay quarter horse, and rode the fence lines of his Hill Country ranch west of Austin.
It was a habit he continued for the forty years he owned the ranch. He never took a cell phone and claimed he did it to “knock out the cobwebs” every morning. It didn’t matter if it was one hundred degrees or freezing rain; Pops never missed his ride.
Today, instead of taking one trip around the outside fence lines of the sprawling ranch, Pops did it twice. The weight of the evidence he was shown by Zach Turner was heavy on his mind. Although he didn’t intentionally decide to be gone this long, he was so heavy in thought that he rode right past his turn-off to head back to the ranch house. The only other time that had happened to him was twenty-five years earlier when his wife Betsy died.
As Pops headed down the rocky back road, he turned the corner where the house, several hundred yards away, would be in sight. He immediately noticed at least a half dozen black Department of Public Safety SUVs parked in front of his barn.
“Here he comes,” said a trooper, pointing to Pops, with his signature Stetson, riding on his big bay, coming toward them at a slow trot, kicking up dust clouds behind him.
“God, I love that man!” said another.
Pops rode right up to the group milling around the vehicles.
“I hope y’all ain’t here for breakfast. I ran outta bacon this morning,” joked Pops. “I trust y’all ain’t here to share some kind of good news with me, are ya?”
Dick Dyson, Pops’ second in command, spoke up first.
“No, Pops, we’ve got some awful news,” Dick told him. ”
“Well, spit it out,” ordered Pops as he climbed down off the horse.
“There ain’t no good way to say it, sir. The governor’s plane went down a short time ago on his way to San Antone. There are no survivors. The pilot indicated they had some engine problems, then next thing you know the San Antone tower got a Mayday.”
Pops looked off into the hills, completely silent. He reached into the left upper pocket on his pearl snap shirt and pulled out a half-smoked cigar and began chewing on it. The silence was deafening.
“Who else was on that plane?”
“The lieutenant governor, a flight attendant and two pilots,” Dyson replied.
Pops was still holding the reins of the big bay. He motioned for one of his Hispanic ranch hands to come get it.
“Smitty. Damn it to hell. Does his wife and kin know yet?”
“It hasn’t been made public yet, except the crash site is hard to keep quiet. Everyone in the air traffic community knew it was Governor One, but nobody has confirmed the governor was on board to any news agency.”
“I need to git to the governor's mansion. Need to see Louise,” said Pops, referring to Brahman’s wife of forty-six years.
“Do you need to freshen up or change clothes, Pops?” asked Dyson.
“How I smell will be the last thing on Louise’s mind. Let’s just git over there now.”
Within minutes, a caravan of SUVs and black state trooper cruisers with lights flashing were headed east to Austin out of Johnson City. The forty-minute drive was enough travel time for the news to break before Pops could reach Louise. News agencies everywhere had picked up the story that Governor One went down with no survivors; however, no state agency would confirm it. A local Austin report, however, was able to get a Department of Public Safety airport hangar employee to state the governor and lieutenant governor were on the flight manifest.
Zach Turner was driving his large diesel pickup truck west on Interstate 10, headed to the Bunker, when he got a call from Will Turnbow.
“Zach, have you heard?”
“Heard what?” Zach asked.
“The governor’s plane just crashed south of Austin!”
“What? How? Are there survivors? Who was on the plane? Please tell me Pops wasn’t on the flight!”
“Pops was not on it,” Will confirmed. “There were no survivors. It’s unconfirmed officially, but our team had the governor and lieutenant governor on the flight manifest. He was doing a GOP women’s speech this morning before heading back to meet us in Austin this afternoon.”
“How did it go down?” asked Zach, still unable to grasp the gravity of the subject.
“The San Antonio tower got a mayday from the pilot reporting engine trouble. Apparently one engine went out, but they should have been okay. They went down only about twelve miles from the airport,” reported Will.
“My God, what the hell is happening?” Zach wondered out loud.
“I know where you’re probably going with this, Zach,” Will told him. “We won’t leave any stone unturned. We have lots of friends at DPS, and you know Pops will be all over this.”
“Two Texas governors in less than eighteen months,” Zach mused. “This better have been a real accident. You know I don’t believe in coincidences any more.”
“I’m with you, Zach. This is absolutely horrible. I wish I could say there is no way the federal government was not behind this,” Will said.
“Who’s next in line, the Speaker?” asked Zach.
“I believe so, Zach, and Strasburg is no real friend of ours,” said Will regretfully. Under the Texas Constitution, the lieutenant governor succeeds the governor in death but, since the lieutenant governor was also on the plane, the next in line is the Speaker of the House.
Speaker Jim Strasburg was not a friend of the hard right. A “rehabilitated” Democrat, Strasburg flipped political parties when he saw the handwriting on the wall twenty years earlier. He was not an outspoken public opponent of the independence referendum, but privately he was against it. A purely political animal, Strasburg tended to check the political winds on a daily basis, and his centrist approach got enough Democrats to vote for him in the legislature to vault him to the Speaker’s position, which wielded great power in Texas politics.
“No, he’s not, and he will be in way over his head dealing with the feds. He’s definitely someone I don’t trust with the evidence we have. We are really going to have to discuss this with Pops. This is horrible.” Zach sounded depressed.
By the time Pops’ contingent arrived at the governor's mansion, the press had already caught wind of the tragedy and had descended onto the street in front of the mansion.
“Damned scalawags,” Pops muttered under his breath as state troopers directed satellite trucks to make way for the group of SUVs in Pops’ party.
Once inside the mansion, the scene was exactly as Pops expected, with Smitty’s wife Louise bearing the burden of the sudden tragic news surrounded mostly by staff. It was only a couple of hours after the crash, and no family had made it to Austin yet.
Nobody had ever seen Pops cry, but when he got up from the couch after consoling Louise, he wiped a tear from his left eye.
Pops went way back in years with Smitty. Smitty was a long-time hunting bu
ddy and Pops was a true friend of the entire Brahman family. He had been to all the weddings of Smitty’s five kids.
Now two of Pops’ best friends, who had each risen in Texas politics to be governor, had died tragically only eighteen months apart. Popular Texas Governor Brent Cooper and his wife were killed in the failed raid by the feds at the Swingin’ T ranch in the Hill Country during the pinnacle of the Texas Crisis.
One of Pops’ greatest attributes was his gut instinct about things. Call it a “hunch,” but there were too many occasions where Pops’ ability to solve crimes went beyond sound investigation protocols. Pops just had the innate ability to see things nobody else could.
As he walked out toward the large solarium in the back of the mansion, he couldn’t ignore the deep-down gut feeling he had.
“This wasn’t no accident,” he resolutely said to himself, incensed that he may have lost both of his dear friends as a result of criminal administrations.
Chapter 37
“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.”
- Thomas Jefferson
3rd US President, Delegate to Continental Congress
Author of The Declaration of Independence, Founding Father
Zach Turner finally reached Pops’ second in command by cell phone. Pops had just left the governor’s mansion and was headed south to the crash site with Department of Public Safety officials and a contingent of fellow Texas Rangers. Understandably, Pops would not be able to keep his meeting with the trio from Free Texas that afternoon.
After Zach hung up, he sent out a coded message to his team, scheduling an emergency meeting at the Bunker for later that afternoon. This type of emergency meeting meant that anyone on Zach’s team that could reach the Bunker in the next six hours should be there.
Zach was struggling with the fact that he had not fully divulged the evidence Beard had gathered with the rank-and-file members of his security team and the nationwide network of operatives he had cultivated. In the same way that Pops’ gut instinct told him the crash was no accident, Zach sensed the Russian connection with Ottosson was fully capable of such a dastardly operation.
Purge on the Potomac Page 19
