Swimming forward in the empty aircraft, Sam was struck by the strangeness of the whole wreck. The interior structures were completely intact, a little askew here and there on panel joins, but with the exception of the bent-up nose, the damage to the overall fuselage was minimal.
There’s no way she crashed at high speed, maybe the nose damage is from the sea floor, after a successful water landing. But why? Why wasn’t there a distress signal?
Sam swam on past the curtained off crew and galley area on his right without stopping and entered the open cockpit. There was no sign of the crew. He was expecting all three of them to be inside. The Dreamlifters are only licensed to carry essential crew, no passengers — they didn’t even have a jump seat. Still, the flight was about to cross the Atlantic, which meant a minimum of three pilots to rotate through the rest periods.
So, where were they?
The cockpit space seemed surprisingly cramped, compared to the massive fuselage. In the tiny room, Sam was restricted to minimum movements because of his tech-diving gear. He swept his beam around, surprised by how little the cockpit of the Boeing 747 megafreighter had changed since the 1970’s. This version was updated and rolled out from 2014, yet with the exception of some multifunction monitors replacing gauges, the fit-out was entirely utilitarian and distinctly last century.
The Quick Access Recorder was right where it should have been, under a flip cover at the third officer’s workstation. Sam retrieved the USB flash drive and zipped it into a storage pouch within his buoyancy control device.
He shined his flashlight around the cockpit searching for any other clues. He noticed that a gauge at eye-level had been destroyed. There was no other damage around it. He examined it closely and saw fragments of hair, bone, and blood — and just visible in the dead center of the dial — the base of a copper projectile.
He immediately knew where the pilots were.
Sam turned awkwardly in the doorway, his fins and gear obstructing his movements in the confined space. He pulled himself back along the tiny corridor with his hands and stopped at the galley. Drawing back the curtain, and looking up, he saw the bodies of two men in flight officer’s uniforms. They hovered like ghosts against the roof of the galley by the lifejackets they wore, with their legs hanging down below them like giant tendrils.
Sam added a little buoyancy to his BCD and joined the men at the roof. He gently turned to the closer of the two men and came face to bloated face with the plane’s chief pilot. The middle-aged man’s mouth was ajar and his black eyes wide open — frozen forever in a look of surprise. A cavernous hole in the center of his forehead created the ghoulish appearance of a third eye.
The man’s ID tag floated about his face and listed the name Michael Bateman. Anchored to his neck by a lanyard embroidered with the logo of the freight company he died flying for, Sam took the laminated card in his hand and examined it under his flashlight. Without expression and fine features, the puffy countenance bore little semblance to the man in the photograph, but enough to positively identify him.
Sam was racked with pity for these men, fellow pilots who met the same horrible, fearful end. He dropped his chin to his chest and made a silent covenant to retrieve the poor men’s bodies before the Maria Helena left the wreck site. He retrieved the names of the other flight crew members and moved out of the galley.
The question remained, where was the third pilot? And, if he had murdered the two other pilots, where did he end up? It’s not like there was anywhere else for him to go once he’d killed the two men.
He consulted his wristwatch and felt for the USB stick in his belt pouch.
04:49hrs, time to leave.
Chapter Five
Sam reached the open aircraft tail.
There, Tom and Genevieve had retrieved the data recorders from the tail section without incident and were already securing the data recorders into a large lift bag, which they were now attaching to the cable used to shift the aircraft’s tail. Sam glanced at the two orange boxes as they hovered in the water next to Tom and Genevieve.
“Did you find the pilots?” Tom asked.
“Yeah. Two of them. Both dead. Murdered.”
“Murdered?”
“Yeah, a single bullet wound to their foreheads.”
“What about the third pilot?”
“He’s missing.”
Tom turned and quickly flashed his light down the fuselage, as though the missing man might still be waiting, hiding there, about to attack. “I don’t understand. He killed them and then intentionally crashed the plane?”
“Either that or the plane crashed, and then he murdered them. Who knows? Either way, it doesn’t really explain where he is now.”
Genevieve said, “What if he intentionally brought the plane down, killed the other two pilots, and then stole whatever was inside the cargo hold?”
Sam said, “That’s quite a scenario.”
“Sure,” she replied. “But it’s sounding less impossible the more I look at it.”
Sam nodded. “You might be right. The question is, what was inside the aircraft’s hold that was valuable enough to make someone go to such lengths to steal it?”
Tom said, “Not to mention, why not just shoot the two pilots, and then fly the plane to a perfectly good runway somewhere to offload its valuable cargo?”
“Unless…” Sam started.
“Unless what?” Tom persisted.
“Whoever’s responsible wanted to make certain no one would believe the cargo had been stolen?”
“Why?”
Sam said, “I have no idea, but I intend to find out.”
Then, in the back of his mind, he recalled how the secretary of defense had been specifically interested in the results of the aircraft’s flight data recorders.
Could her interest in the recovery of the flight data recorders have something to do with its secret cargo?
Tom let go of the lift cable. “All right, this is secure, let’s head topside. Genevieve and I already have more than an hour of decompression time in the hyperbaric chamber. No reason to make it longer.”
“Agreed.”
“I’m good to go,” Genevieve said.
Sam checked his dive watch. His bottom time was 15 minutes, with a total dive time of 25 minutes. He would need one short decompression stop, but Tom and Genevieve would need to decompress in the hyperbaric chamber on board.
All three of them ascended slowly, leaving their bounty of flight data recorders, secured to the lift bag. They would haul it up from topside. Right now, the safest place for it was to remain in the deep, and much calmer waters.
Sam exhaled slowly, keeping his eyes on his depth gauge, displayed on his heads-up display, to ensure that he didn’t exceed their maximum rate of ascent.
After making his required decompression stop, he, Tom, and Genevieve made their final ascent to the surface. All three of them reached the internal surface of the Maria Helena’s moon pool simultaneously.
The moon pool was built in the middle of the Maria Helena’s hull and served as a diving command center, as well as a relatively calm port to launch their mini-submersibles and to dive from. In the turbulent waters of the Barents Sea, the pool was still choppy, and water was splashing over the sides, running across the internal decking.
Sam inflated his buoyancy control device and quickly swam to the edge of the moon pool. His hands gripped the ladder, and in a couple of seconds, he’d climbed out. Genevieve was next, followed by Tom.
The Maria Helena’s dive center housed their Triton 36,000 submarine, Sea Witch II, just forward of the moon pool. Secured to the starboard wall were two giant atmospheric diving suits, custom made to fit Sam and Tom. The exosuits looked like something out of a bad sci-fi movie but provided an anthropomorphic submersible capable of diving to 2,000 feet. Along the port side were a series of dive lockers, with dive tanks, sea scooters, and other diving equipment. Aft of the moon pool, and fixed to the deck by heavy steel welds, was something resembling a small submarine. It was made of reinforced steel and cylindrical, with a single porthole — its purpose was an emergency hyperbaric chamber.