Breaking Point (10 page)

But he heard the grunting again. “J-Jed,” he croaked, and forced himself up on his knees, left hand down for support. His right arm hung useless. “It's okay … I got you … all right…”

Miguel crawled on his knees and one good hand toward the back of the flight deck. He'd thought Jed Holley was dead for sure. But if he survived, what a miracle. If Miguel could get to him—

He pulled himself with his left arm around the captain's chair and came face-to-face with a deer, lying on its side in the ruined deck, its torso caved in, legs flailing, eyes mad.

The deer stared at him until it died.

*   *   *

Kiki levered herself out of the space between rows 10 and 11. The plane rested on its side, she realized, the interior dark and filled with floating particulate, obscuring her vision. Steam hissed in the darkness. The entire fuselage groaned and vibrated. Moonlight beamed in from the left-hand windows, displaying the madcap Brownian dance of the dust particulate. Struggling not to fall, she rested her bare feet against the right armrest of Tommy's seat.

Peering down, she discovered seats 11C and 11D were missing. She bent low, peered toward the tail section. Rows 12, 13, and 14 were missing, too.

Isaiah Grey had been sleeping across seats 11C and D.

*   *   *

“What happened to the plane?”

The elderly woman in the hand-knit blue sweater blinked up at Calendar.
“Ya niz niyou,”
she said.

Calendar spoke Russian. She didn't know. Good. He rose, moving on.

*   *   *

Kiki lowered herself to the fuselage floor, which was actually a wall. And partly it was dirt. She stood on curved plastic-on-metal but also on earth and pine needles, littered with in-flight magazines and blood. She heard moaning in the dusty dark, heard the snap of electrical cables arcing. Smelled the electricity in the air.

She did a quick inventory of herself: left thigh bleeding under a three-corner tear in her jeans. Raising her arms hurt like hell and inhaling was no fun. At least one broken rib on her left. Nothing life-threatening.

She heard a cough near her feet. She inched forward toward the empennage. A hand grasped her ankle.

She knelt. “Tommy!”

He lay on his back. She touched his face, her fingers coming away tacky.

He coughed. “The … fuck are the odds…” he slurred. “Seriously! What are the … fucking odds that …
we'd
be in a crash?”

She peered through the dust and darkness, suddenly remembering that Tommy always carried a penlight in his khakis. She dug through his pockets, found the little light. She clicked it. Nothing happened. She tossed it aside.

Tommy squinted. His hair was matted with blood on the right side of his skull. She checked the rest of him, found no obvious wounds. No
obvious
ones.

It was too dark to check the dilation of his eyes, but given the head wound, she made an assumption.

“Sweetie? You're concussed.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, struggling to rise. “Probably … caused … by the concussion.”

“Shh. No, baby. Lie here. Rest.”

But he pushed himself to a seated position, leaned over, and puked up the coffee he'd drunk at the airport. “C-can't … skipper didn't … he didn't have time to dump his fuel. We gotta … get folks the fuck outta Dodge.”

Kiki helped him to his feet and he staggered like a drunk. She had a degree in electrical engineering; she knew nothing about treating concussions, about how smart or stupid it would be to walk around. But she also smelled the sulfur from the arcing electrical circuits. Tommy was right.

She'd been asleep, so her eyes were already adjusted to the dark. She realized there were gaps in the fuselage easily large enough for them to duck through. “C'mon, baby. Let's get you out of here.”

HELENA REGIONAL

The swing-shift supervisor for air traffic control called the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff's office. “Hey, it looks like we lost an airliner, five minutes ago. Possibly somewhere in or near Helena State Forest.”

The voice over the line said, “No way! Okay, we're airborne tonight. We'll get the chopper heading over that way right now!”

The supervisor hung up, searched the wall for the red acrylic clipboard and a telephone number, and called the National Transportation Safety Board emergency number in Washington, D.C.

13

P
AUL MCKINNEY'S CELL PHONE
rang at 12:02
A.M.
Friday. He was up anyway, hunting for an antacid and angry at himself because that bowl of chili at 9:00
P.M.
had been a dumb idea and he'd known it at the time.

“McKinney here.”

The voice on the other end said, “Chief? State police. Helena Regional reports they may have an airliner down in the state forest, not two miles from Twin Pines. Figured you'd want to know.”

“No kidding! Are you guys airborne tonight?”

“Sure are. Chopper's outbound, heading your direction.”

The police chief of Twin Pines, Montana, brushed back the curtains in his kitchen and saw the running lights of the state police helicopter heading straight over his little town.

“Thanks for the call. I'll get on up there, see if I can help.”

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

Her BlackBerry chimed to life. Beth Mancini jerked awake. She sat curled on the love seat, realizing she'd fallen asleep halfway through
All About Eve
. Dammit—that was two nights in a row! She contemplated holding it for a third try but—given that her special work phone was buzzing at her—decided just to send it back to Netflix. Chances were, she'd be on a flight within two hours.

She connected the line, knowing it could only be her assistant. “Hey, Rick.”

“Beth? We've got reports of a Claremont down over central Montana. It went down after eleven
P.M.
their time.”

“Okay,” she said, reaching for the remote and shutting down the TV. “Meet you in the office.”

Her heart raced. This would be her first major crash as intergovernmental liaison.

MONTANA

A mile from the fuselage, one of the dismembered engines hissed. Electricity arced between two wires, and a pool of kerosene—airplane fuel—ignited. In less than forty seconds, the engine, its propellers, and the intact section of the wing were on fire.

Being August, the underbrush in the vicinity caught fire, too.

The blaze began feeding itself with a long line of jet fuel that stretched about half a mile to the second engine. And from there to the fuselage.

*   *   *

Kiki half carried Tommy out through a great gouge in the ceiling of the fuselage, about halfway back. Outside, in the forest, she gasped: a trail of downed trees and debris stretched as far as the eye could see.

She found a freshly created stump and helped Tommy sit. “Okay, I'm going to go find survivors.”

“Hey,” he gasped, the blood on his scalp glinting in the moonlight. “Love you.”

“I love you, too.”

She limped back into the fuselage, stepping gingerly on the balls of her bare feet, knowing that shattered glass and shards of aluminum would be everywhere.

Tommy sat, dizzy, gasping, nauseated. He heard someone moan to his left. He staggered to his feet, stumbled a half-dozen steps, came to a girl, a teenager, lying on her stomach. Tommy dropped to his knees. He felt her pulse. “Ah shit,” he muttered, seeing that her left sleeve was black with blood.

He ripped her T-shirt, revealed a sweet bleeder just below her shoulder. The brachial vein.

Tommy shrugged out of his sport jacket, used the sleeve to tie a pressure bandage around the girl's arm. She spit leaves out of her mouth. “Am I dead?”

“Nope,” Tommy said. “Course, your doctor's got a concussion, so…”

A man crouched by Tommy's side, laid a hand on his shoulder. “Hey. What happened to the plane?”

Tommy blinked blearily. The guy was a little out of focus. He had silver hair. He held a piece of broken steel.

Tommy's mouth was too dry to swallow. “The hell should I know. Hey, put that shit down, man. No souvenirs. This is a crash scene.”

As he spoke, Tommy turned the girl over. Beyond the bleeding right arm, she appeared to be okay. The silver-haired man knelt, brushed blond hair from her eyes. “Do you know what happened to the plane?”

She shook her head. “W-where are we?”

“Okay,” the stranger said, and smiled with confidence at Tommy. “Stay with her.”

“Sure,” he slurred, as the man stood and strode off.

*   *   *

Kiki found the body of the boy who'd been playing Nerf football with the copilot at Reagan. He had a large gash in his abdomen. Kiki stared at him, then turned and bent at the waist and threw up, holding her hair back. Her eyes teared up. He had died quickly, she noted. That was probably a blessing.

She heard sobbing. A largish woman in her sixties hung sideways from one of the portside seats. The woman wore pink velour sweats with
MALIBU
across her bosom in cursive. Kiki helped her unbuckle her seat belt and supported her as she climbed down. The woman's eyes bulged as she stepped down out of her seat. She was sobbing, hysterical. “My leg! Oh my god, my leg!”

Kiki—who rowed in San Francisco Bay and played beach volleyball—put the woman's arm over her shoulder, her own arm behind her. “Not a problem. Lean on me.”

Once they were out of the airliner and twenty feet clear, Kiki helped the woman sit. They both peeled back the cuff of her sweat bottoms to find a fragment of white anklebone protruding from the skin. The woman took one look at the bone fragment and her eyes rolled up in her head. She passed out.

*   *   *

Kiki returned to the fuselage, stepping gingerly to avoid glass, and found another survivor in seat 7C. It was the first survivor she'd found in any of the left-hand seats. It was a man, unconscious. He was small, maybe five-two, and appeared Middle Eastern, wearing a tweed suit, a black tie, and a white shirt. He looked professorial, she thought, peering at him through the dusty dark.

A bright light engulfed the unconscious man. Kiki turned. A man stood behind her with a Maglite, holding it up near his left shoulder. “Hey, are you okay?” he asked. He wore dark clothing and good hiking boots, his hair silver and cut very short.

“Yeah. Help me get him up.” She bent over, unbuckled the man.

With the seats cocked at a ninety-degree angle, it was tough to do. The stranger helped lift the man up, took him by his shoulders as Kiki took his knees. As the stranger began walking backward toward the hole in the fuselage, he said, “So what happened to the plane?”

She had forgotten to ask Tommy. “No idea. I was asleep.”

*   *   *

Tommy knelt over the surprisingly calm teenager, his fists in the soil, fighting the urge to puke again. His vision blurred and his arms shook.

“You okay?” the girl lying on her back asked.

“Yeah. Hit my head.”

“I know,” she said, and pointed to Tommy's face. He reached up to touch his temple. His fingers came away tacky with blood. “It looks scary.”

He mustered up a wobbly smile. “Nah. I'm okay. You're awful calm.”

The girl said, “I'm on Prozac.”

“Your doctor's got you on Prozac? How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

Tommy said, “Your doc's an asshole.”

She said, “Yeah.” After a beat, she raised her good arm, stuck out one finger. “Can you help that guy?”

Tommy followed her finger. A man lay on the ground, on his side, curled up and moaning.

“Shit.” Tommy breathed deeply, steadied himself, rose to his feet, fell to one knee, and tried it again. “Don't move, darlin'.”

He staggered like a punchy boxer, made it to a pine tree. He leaned against it, caught his breath. He slid to his knees by the wounded man's side.

“Hey. Buddy. You okay?”

He reached out and shook the man's shoulder.

“N-no,” the guy replied, his teeth chattering. “I'm … I'm fucked up.”

Tommy shuffled his knees closer. He touched the man's hunched back, his neck. The man lay in the fetal position, arms pressed against his torso, knees up.

“I'm a doctor, man. Let me get a look.”

Tommy lifted the upward-facing arm—the man lay on his side—away from his gut and saw a large puncture in his abdomen. A portion of the man's lower intestines was revealed.

“Well, shit … Okay, hold on.”

Tommy looked around in the moon-glow gloom, found an airline pillow. He shuffled on his knees through the leaves, grabbed it. He brought it back, put it within the moaning man's line of vision.

“We're gonna make a pressure bandage. Okay?”

The guy nodded. He unwound a little from the tight fetal position, hissed as Tommy pressed the pillow against the gaping wound in his gut. Tommy whipped off his own belt, passed it around the pillow and the guy's waist. He cinched it tight, buckled it in the back.

“Okay, buddy. Just … Cavalry's comin'.”

*   *   *

Kiki and the silver-haired stranger set the unconscious man down about twenty feet from the fuselage. Kiki went to work touching his arms, legs, and torso, looking for obvious wounds. She found none. She wasn't aware that the stranger had walked away.

*   *   *

The fire reached the second engine, which ignited in a great
whoooosh!
A spear of flame continued moving toward the fuselage.

*   *   *

From where he knelt, next to the man with the gut wound, Tommy heard
tak!

Tommy froze. “You hear that?” he asked.

The guy in the fetal position moaned.

Tommy tried to shake his head, but that produced nausea. “Coulda swore I heard—”