“The doctor and his wife have gone to help the others,” he said. “Everyone else, the galley up here, all the other seats — they’re gone. And I can’t… find the downstairs.”
Dallas heard the words, but the statement made no sense. How could one fail to find a downstairs? They had climbed to the upper deck originally, therefore…
She looked out to the side of the wreckage while Britta played her flashlight into the darkness. Where there should have been airspace some thirty feet above the ground, there was the ground itself, and branches, and shrubs, and trees at the same level. They had been in a heavily loaded 747.
This makes no sense! Dallas thought.
“We have the doctor and his wife, plus Mr. MacCabe, plus Mr. Barnes, plus you, Dallas. We have Dan, and…” Britta gestured to Steve.
“Steve?”
“Yes,” Britta said.
“How about the rest of them?”
Britta shook her head.
“Where the hell is the rest of this airplane?” Dallas asked in amazement.
Britta gestured toward the avenue of burning debris behind them, and Dallas’s eyes followed her, the reality pressing in slowly. Britta saw Dallas Nielson’s shoulders slump a bit as her mouth came open.
“Oh my dear Jesus! All of them?”
Britta shrugged, her voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t know. But so far, there’s only us.”
CHAPTER 19
A last line of thunderstorms had pelted the airport with hail the size of golf balls and moved on, leaving a resplendent starry sky in the hour before sunrise.
Kat had spent the previous hour sitting and thinking in the backseat of the Consulate’s car while the driver slept in the front. She startled him awake by getting out to stretch and look at the stars at the same moment Jake rang her satellite phone.
“Kat? Langley’s relayed the word that Meridian has gone down in Vietnam.”
Kat felt her legs get rubbery and she leaned against the car. “Oh my God!”
“All I have is a potential crash site, nine miles west of the coastal city of Da Nang, Vietnam, in some low mountains. No information on survivors.”
“Did it come down intact?” she asked, knowing instinctively that a jumbo jet couldn’t withstand a high-speed encounter with a forest.
“Ah… they mentioned a debris field almost a mile long, Kat, with active fires in the area. That doesn’t sound hopeful.”
The image of the cabin in which she had sat for a brief moment was etched in her mind, but she forced her eyes open and made herself concentrate.
“Okay, Jake, here’s what I propose to do.” She stood away from the car, commanding her legs to support her. “I should get the first flight into Vietnam and get to the site as fast as possible. Can you formally approve that and assign me to the case, and get me out of that obligation at the Consulate? I think we’ll also have to coordinate with NTSB.”
“I’ll need twenty minutes.”
“Call me back. I’m going to go pick out a flight. Oh… Jake, did they ever see that Global Express in the air?”
“Langley said no.”
“Can we check with NRO directly?”
Again Jake fell silent on the other end, long enough to register extreme discomfort. “You realize, Kat, that NRO is probably monitoring this call.”
“On tape, yes. But I have a reason for not trusting Langley on this. Methinks they doth protest too much on the subject of accident versus terrorists. If NRO saw the Global Express, Langley will want to discount the identification because it disproves their midair theory and leaves us with a terrorist attack. Therefore, they’re getting in the way of a criminal investigation.”
“You said the magic words, Kat. You don’t think much of them, do you?”
“I’m just a neophyte regarding CIA, but — let’s just say I think they’re developing a pointed habit of not wanting the Cuban crash and this one to be terrorist-related, and I don’t trust their motives. Heck, Jake, they’re trained to shade things. But we need their help. That Global Express crew is still a big threat in this situation.”
“How do you mean?”
“They’re going to be very concerned now that they’ve got a loose end. If anyone survived the Meridian crash, and there’s a chance that evidence of what the Global Express did has been left behind, they’ll have to go in and clean it up. That crash site needs to be found and protected quickly, and any survivors recovered.”
The first glow of dawn had begun to illuminate the jungle, revealing the details of individual branches where only dark outlines had been minutes before. The small group had helped each other out of the wreckage, and found a large metal panel to sit on by the time Graham and Susan Tash returned with ashen faces.
“What did you find?” Robert asked.
Graham Tash merely shook his head. There was silence for a few telling seconds before Dan raised his head in response. “Why is no one saying anything?”
Graham Tash knelt beside the copilot. “Dan, Susan and I went back to the main wreckage. It’s strewn behind us for a thousand yards, at least.” Graham stopped and cleared his throat. “We found no one alive back there.”
Dan Wade sat in stunned silence for a moment. “You… you mean everyone… down below and… in coach…”
“I’m afraid so. The entire lower portion of the airplane was… I don’t know any other word for it… shredded. Somehow the forward part of the top section, with us in it, came through, but nothing below. There are no other survivors.”
“Two hundred…” Dan said, almost in a whisper. “My God! And Mr. Sampson, who tried so hard to help — did he…”
“He had gone back to sit with his wife in coach, Dan,” Britta said, touching his shoulder. “He isn’t here.”
Robert MacCabe was pacing. “So what’s our plan?” he asked. “We need to formulate a plan.”
“I guess we sit here and wait to be rescued,” Dallas said.
Britta’s hands were in the air in a gesture of frustration. “But why aren’t they here already?”
Robert started to answer, then pursed his lips. “We can all walk, right?”
“Except for Mr. Barnes,” Britta replied.
“Okay,” Robert said. “We flew right over Da Nang just before the crash. I figure we’re no more than ten miles from there because we weren’t in the air very long. The jungle in here is pretty sparse and scrubby. Dan? You know the area from your Air Force years, right?”
Dan nodded slowly.
“Any reason we shouldn’t just walk out of here?”
Dan sat for several long minutes with his head in his hands before raising his head and speaking. “In daylight, without snipers trying to kill you, it won’t be that hard a walk.”
“Dan,” Dallas began. “Wouldn’t they be sending rescue choppers, or ground parties, or something?”
He shook his head vigorously. “They probably don’t even know we’ve crashed. We flew past a bunch of primitive facilities on a deteriorated airfield in the middle of a nighttime storm and disappeared into the darkness, and we haven’t been in radio contact since Hong Kong. Who in hell is going to know we’re here?”
“Well, wouldn’t there be villages around here?” Britta asked.
Again Dan shook his head forcefully. “No. Not in these mountains. There’s a road not too far from here called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but no one would have seen or heard us crash if we’re where I think we are. Charlie—” He stopped himself.
“Who’s Charlie?” Britta asked.