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.
“Were we expecting this thing to be loaded?” Tom said.
“As far as I know, yes. I was told it was carrying a payload of machine parts.” Sam answered.
“Well there’s nothing here now, that’s for sure,” Genevieve said.
“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.