Kat snapped a series of pictures before finding the small sleeping compartment behind the cockpit. The captain’s body was crammed against the forward bulkhead of the compartment, but without major wounds. She reached past the buckled wall and turned him over. He appeared uninjured, though as she looked more closely at his face, there was something about his eyes — his pupils — that looked very odd. It was as if he had cataracts in each eye. Probably related to the explosion, Kat thought. It must have been terribly intense. We desperately need an ophthalmologist on the autopsy. She took note of the torn uniform shirt and several marks on his chest. CPR, I’ll bet.
Kat emerged from the cockpit and moved back through the truncated upper deck before climbing down. She glanced at the ground she had stepped on, noticing the unusual number of footprints emanating from the wreckage of the upper deck where stepping to the ground was the easiest. The ground was muddy, and many of the footprints were deep. A few led back toward the main debris field, but several people had moved around to the west and the north, heading into the jungle.
Kat knelt to read the prints more closely. Two were clearly women’s pumps, the small heel unmistakable confirmation that a woman had stepped from the wreckage. And a third, even smaller woman’s heel led off in a different direction.
Kat walked to the Vietnamese commander as her interpreter rushed over. “Colonel, have there been any other women up here on the rescue force?”
The colonel frowned and shook his head. “Only men.”
“One more question, please,” Kat replied. “Have any bodies been removed from the forward section?”
“No. None. May I ask why?”
Kat pursed her lips and nodded. “I’m wondering where the rest of the flight crew and the passengers in the upper deck are.”
The colonel frowned again. “I do not know. This is how we found it several hours ago.”
Kat returned rapidly to the same spot, making mental note of the number of different shoes impressed into the muddy soil along with several sets of men’s footprints moving toward the west, one of them walking backward, the prints deep enough to indicate something heavy was being carried.
She spotted something else in a small puddle alongside the prints and knelt down with a stick, poking at the substance.
Blood! Lots of it. Someone was carrying a body, and it was bleeding out.
Kat reentered the wreckage of the upper deck and sat in one of the intact passenger seats.
Okay, what went on here? There should have been survivors up here. Were there? Did Robert make it?
She remembered her question to Jake about the Global Express. The Company had said nothing about NROs seeing evidence that the Global Express was shadowing the 747, but had they been? Could they have reached the crash site first?
The footprints told a tale. At least three females must have survived, and several males. But where were they?
Kat got to her feet and looked back to the east, toward Da Nang. If I found myself alive and knew there was a city back there, would I walk out?
Kat moved to the black plastic sheet and looked underneath. Someone impacted this spot at substantial speed. She could read the bent metal now: The crushed beams held a completely different damage pattern than the rest of the wreckage. Is there a way a body could have catapulted here in the crash?
Something shiny was visible at the corner of one piece of bent aluminum. Kat had to crawl up to get to it, reaching carefully into the tangle and moving aside a piece of human tissue to retrieve it. She stood up again and looked at what was unmistakably a woman’s pierced earring.
Oh my God!
Kat jumped out of the wreckage and carefully followed the footprints to the south, to the edge of the clearing, and then to the east, toward Da Nang. She was about to turn back when a disturbed area of soil and brush caught her eye, an area filled with footprints heading in the opposite direction, to the west, into the heart of the jungle and mountains. She knelt to examine the footprints carefully.
At least four males, but only two females. One’s missing. The one with the smallest heel.
Once more she returned to the plastic sheet. Beneath the twisted metal she had recalled seeing a flash of yellow. It took several minutes of digging, but the search finally yielded a woman’s yellow pump, ripped and blood-soaked — a shoe that matched perfectly one set of footprints by the wreckage, footprints missing from the group that had headed west from the edge of the clearing.
Kat left the shoe in the wreckage as she fought a primal urge to run to her helicopter and get out of there. The woman with the yellow shoes had been alive and walking just after the crash. Later, she had fallen from a great height into the wreckage. Had a helicopter rescue attempt gone bad?
Or was she dropped intentionally?
The survivors running into the jungle undoubtedly knew, and they wouldn’t be running, she concluded, unless they had seen something that panicked them. The bad guys got here first! Whoever was in that Global Express was here.
Kat motioned to the interpreter and headed for the helicopter. “I need you to fly slow and low directly to the east,” she told the pilot, “following the same path anyone would follow if they tried to walk out of here.”
She saw the question in his eyes. “Don’t ask. Just please, let’s go.”
“I will need to refuel in Da Nang,” the pilot said, “but okay for a while.”
Pete Phu jumped aboard as the rotor blades began to turn. Kat settled in the cloth seat nearest the open door, snugly buckling her seat belt, well aware that she was breathing hard.
It was MacCabe. Wherever he is, this whole disaster was to get him.
It was an illogical conclusion on one level, but on another, it was something she should have seen in Hong Kong, and the thought made her sick.
The five remaining survivors of Meridian Flight 5 sat huddled together in shock on a mossy log in a pouring rainstorm, slightly more than a hundred yards from the spot where Britta had died.
The cloudburst had begun several minutes before, but they sat wordlessly until Dallas Nielson finally looked skyward, blinking back the water flowing into her eyes. “Thank God for small favors. At least the flies are gone.”
Robert MacCabe shook his head and sighed as he straightened up and took inventory. Dallas was coping, as was he, but he could tell that Dan was convulsed with agony and blaming himself for not warning about the dangers of booby traps.
Young Steve Delaney sat staring at the ground, his shoulders shaking slightly as he tried to come to grips with the nightmare he’d seen.
And then there was Graham Tash, whose expressionless face and wordless demeanor reflected the unfathomable shock of watching his wife murdered. MacCabe wasn’t sure if Britta’s death had truly penetrated Graham’s consciousness.
I’ve got to get us moving! Robert concluded as he got to his feet. “I think it’s time,” he said, inclining his head toward the west.
One by one they rose from the log and followed.
The jungle vegetation was unbelievably slippery beneath their street shoes, and all of them fought a constant struggle to stay upright as they tried to ignore the misery of being soaked to the skin.
The expensive beige silk and brocade outfit Dallas had worn from her Hong Kong hotel now lay plastered to her body. Her hair was soaked, giving her the appearance of a moving apparition emerging from a swamp. She kept losing her wet shoes in the underbrush and thought longingly of the comfort of her dry, soft satin slippers at home.