To the Death

Two minutes later, Chief Coulson surfaced next to the Grabber’s portside hull and called up, “We got her, sir. Those numbers were right on the money. Haven’t found the wings yet, and the fuselage is split almost in half. If we lift her, she’ll break. But if the cranes get two cables on her, she’ll come up one section at a time.”

“Will she take one around the tailplane and one through the cabin?” asked the commander.

“Not a chance,” said Chief Coulson, hauling himself up the ladder. “Tailplane broke off on impact. I never even saw it.”

“Can we get cables underneath the main fuselage?”

“I don’t think so, sir. She hit the riverbed pretty good and then skidded some. I’d say she’s embedded maybe three feet.”

“What’s the bottom like?”

“Kinda high-class mud. Doesn’t look dirty, more like silt, light-colored, and more holding than plain sand.”

Commander Wallace held out his hand and gave the chief a pull over the gunwale. “Great job, Mark. What next?”

“Get the diving engineers down there right away. Let’s get some decisions made. But one thing’s definite: she’ll come to the surface. No doubt in my mind.”

“How about the bodies?”

“Didn’t see too many of them, sir. I took a quick look, and everyone was still strapped in.”

“Do we move them now, or bring ’em up with the wreckage?”

“I’d bring the whole lot up together. Mostly because it’ll be a darn sight easier to get ’em in body bags up here than it will underwater.”

“Okay. Now you go and get some food and hot coffee. We’ll talk again in an hour. and Mark, thanks a million.”

Five hours later, the decisions were made jointly by the engineers, the SEALs, and the commanding officer. It was plainly too difficult to get cables right under the fuselage of Flight 62—at least, it was without very sophisticated equipment, the kind of hydraulic air pumping used for dock piles, driving out the seabed and hammering them in through soft disturbed sand. But that’s conducted from the surface. And it’s a whole lot more difficult to transfer this technology to operate sixty feet below the waterline. And a lot too slow.

Far better to thrust the lifting cables straight through the cabin, heave her out of the silt, and haul her in. As Chief Coulson had observed, the hull of the aircraft was split. She’d break as soon as the cranes moved her, and she’d come up cleanly in two parts. Meanwhile, a separate team of divers would begin the search for the tailplane and whatever fragments of the obliterated wings were still recognizable.

The Big Man had apparently stressed that no part of that aircraft must be left on the riverbed, since he didn’t want some smart-ass television monkeys groping around down there and coming up with Mystery Air Crash Baffles Government.

There was not, of course, an imminent danger of that, since the only information available about TBA Flight 62 was she had disappeared fifty miles offshore, out over the Atlantic Ocean, east of North Carolina, 180 miles away.

It was almost midnight now, and the temperature had plummeted to twenty-one degrees Fahrenheit. An icy wind whipped across the surface of the water, and there was no moon. Commander Wallace decided to have the cables attached to the hull of the airliner through the night, but not to attempt to lift the wreckage aboard the barges until after dark the following day.

It was slow going working underwater, and the engineers estimated it would take up to ten hours to fix cables to both ends of the fuselage. Meanwhile, the Navy divers would work in shifts through the night, using underwater metal detectors, trying to locate the smaller sections of wreckage that had broken off during the downing of Flight 62. Especially hardware from the engines.

To the northern end of the ops area, a four-foot-high floating notice board, anchored to the bottom, read: PROHIBITED AREA — U.S. NAVY EXERCISE IN PROGRESS. STAY RIGHT OF THE BUOYS.

To the south, an identical sign ordered northbound shipping also to keep right of the area. A line of flashing buoys now provided guidance, forcing any vessel to give the Grabber an extremely wide berth. The proximity of the Navy’s Surface Warfare Center on nearby Indian Head fortuitously gave the operation complete credence.

This was plainly a legitimate naval operation. It was very public; at least it was to passing captains and seamen. It most certainly did not give the appearance of a clandestine mission, designed to carry out one of the biggest, most diabolically deceptive tasks ever undertaken by the United States military.

In peacetime it was almost unprecedented. Politicians were shy of indulging in such adventures because most people still did not recognize the War on Terror as a true war. Still, it had taken the Flat Earth Society more than a century to disband.