Lightning, p.5
Lightning, page 5
At a normal landing speed of a hundred and thirty-five knots, an F-35C would apply under half of the cable’s capacity as it spooled out to slow and stop the jet. In any successful landing, this trap required three seconds and three hundred feet of the deck.
Standard procedures dictated that the moment a pilot trapped the wire, he retracted the jet’s speed brakes and advanced the throttle to max. If a plane broke a wire or tailhook, or missed all of the wires, it would become a bolter.
The pilot’s only hope of remaining aloft, if the plane did bolt off the short aircraft carrier runway, lay in power.
The added load on the wire by applying max thrust increased from the typical twenty-eight thousand pounds to forty-three thousand as LC Gabriel Brown drove ahead on full afterburners trying to get clear of the deck before whatever was burning his plane caused a catastrophic failure.
This load was still safely within the cable’s capacity.
But 892’s acceleration from LC Brown’s preemptive attempt to return to flight meant that he was traveling at well over two hundred knots by the time he snagged Wire Four, instead of the typical hundred and thirty-five. This increased the force on the wire by half again.
Snagged on the wire, the F-35C Lightning II jet fighter nonetheless did what it was designed to do—it drove up into the sky. The hydraulic pistons underneath the Theodore Roosevelt’s deck slowed the arresting cable despite the massive overload.
The cable’s three-hundred-pound weight played no factor in what followed.
Caught between the forces of the arresting cable firmly snagged by the tailhook and the Pratt & Whitney F135 engine at afterburner thrust, the plane rose to hover above the deck, angled forty-five degrees upward into the sky. It bucked and swung like a caught fish fighting the line.
The downblast of the driving engines sweeping back and forth across the deck killed nineteen members of the deck crew in the first two-point-five seconds—eleven were burned alive, six were tumbled into objects hard enough to break backs or cave in helmets, and Chief Petty Officer Maria Gonzalez and Seaman Melvin Friedman were blown overboard. They tumbled into the ocean and were never found.
Still striving upward but arrested in midair above the deck, the F-35C was no longer under the control of its pilot.
Its tailhook slid to the right along the loop of the arresting wire.
On Vulture’s Row, a narrow balcony directly aft of the Flag Bridge and four stories above the carrier’s deck, off-duty carrier personnel are welcome to stand. There, high up the side of the Island, they can observe flight and deck operations. For many of the carrier’s five thousand, six hundred and eighty crew, it is one of the few opportunities to see daylight whenever active operations are in progress. It was shortly after shift change between the two crews alternating twelve-hour shifts on the carrier. Twelve of the eighteen personnel observing LC Brown’s landing attempt were the main shift’s forward officer’s mess culinary specialists.
The F-35C, the variant specifically modified for carrier operations, had an additional four feet of wingspan to either side that could be folded up for tighter storage. That extension was sufficient for Number 892 to ram its starboard wing tip into the crowd of observers on Vulture’s Row. Six of them were cut in half as easily as slicing bread. Another nine died when the twisting flight tore the balcony off the side of the Island and dumped it to the steel deck three stories below.
At this moment, Lieutenant Commander Gabriel Brown performed the last act of his life. Still unable to see, but believing he must be clear of the aircraft carrier by now, he managed to wrap a hand around the yellow-and-black-painted half-inch-thick loop between his knees. He didn’t need to see it or feel its searing heat against his palm, a thousand rehearsals and thousands of hours aloft located it with his instincts.
He yanked the ejection handle despite the fresh source of burning pain.
Det-cord cut the canopy around the edges and across the center.
The cannon under the Martin-Baker ejection seat fired and launched Lieutenant Commander Gabriel “Angel” Brown clear of the F-35C Lightning II aircraft with a force of eighteen g’s.
As designed, the cracked canopy was knocked aside by the top of the seat.
Knocked sideways at high speed, it passed directly into the Captain’s Bridge. The captain and the executive officer had stepped to the window to see what was amiss.
With his head severed at the chin, the captain died immediately.
The XO only lost an arm, but no one else survived there to staunch the flow before he bled out.
The canopy had sufficient momentum remaining to break through the window on the far side of the bridge.
The rocket launch permanently compressed Gabe’s spine by two inches. He and Falisha Johnson were now the same height. This would remain true for several seconds.
In its proper sequence, the seat’s rocket motor fired. It was designed to automatically correct his angle of flight to straight up for two hundred feet before breaking away and deploying his parachute. As the seat raced aloft, it collided with the arm of the spinning element of Theodore Roosevelt’s long-range air-search radar mounted on the tall mast atop the Tower.
Gabriel Brown survived the collision with no new injuries.
The rocket guidance corrected for the momentary deflection. But the impact had damaged a signal wire within the ejection seat’s electronics. After the lifting rockets shut down, the electronic signal sent to cut the pilot from the seat failed to reach the triggering mechanism.
With Brown still firmly harnessed to the two hundred-and-twenty-seven-pound seat, his parachute was unable to deploy. He began the long fall to the deck he hadn’t yet fully landed on.
But the last flight of LC Brown’s F-35C Number 892 was not quite complete.
In PriFly, Mini-Air Boss Lieutenant Commander Falisha Johnson and the on- and off-shift Air Bosses had been frozen in place by the spectacle.
It was now three-and-a-half seconds since LC Brown’s belated attempt to abort the landing and return to the skies.
All three of them stared helplessly at the hard-firing plane for one-point-three seconds after LC Brown had ejected. There was no protocol for this scenario. No deeply ingrained training existed regarding the next right action for an unmanned, runaway jet held midair above an aircraft carrier’s deck by its tailhook latched to an arresting wire.
At full afterburner, 892’s engine consumed fuel at a prodigious rate. The last of its reserves would burn out in another eleven seconds.
They didn’t have that long.
The strain on the Number Four arresting cable near the end of its rated service life stressed it far past its design limits.
It parted.
As the severed ends of the inch-and-a-quarter-thick cable lashed to the sides, the near side executed two of the three survivors from the collapse of Vulture’s Row. The longer side of the cable snaked to port and sliced through the alert rescue MH-60S Seahawk helicopter kept at the ready during any active flight operations.
The crew members who weren’t killed immediately were too injured to escape and drowned as the helicopter fell backward into the sea six stories below and sank beneath the waves. The USS Theodore Roosevelt’s position placed it past where the Vietnamese continental shelf cliffed abruptly from six hundred to over four thousand meters in depth. The Seahawk helicopter rolled down the deep slope, creating a mudflow in its wake. Despite extensive search efforts, it would never be found as it and its four occupants were buried beneath two hundred and eighteen meters of silt and sand.
Freed like a Houston Oiler’s wide receiver released by the hike of a football, the F-35C Lightning II climbed aloft at last.
However, its angle of flight was no longer in alignment with the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s runway.
It flew directly into the wide windows of PriFly.
Mini-Air Boss Lieutenant Commander Falisha Johnson had a perfect view of what killed her one-point-six seconds later.
Lieutenant Commander Gabriel “Angel” Brown’s ejection seat had reached an altitude of two hundred and seven feet in nine-tenths of a second. With no parachute to arrest his fall, he outlived Falisha Johnson by seven-tenths of a second before he impacted the steel deck at seventy-eight miles per hour. His spine was shortened an additional inch-and-a-half by the impact. He and Falisha were no longer the same height.
But he had outlived her.
She’d been granted her wish and wouldn’t have to live on alone.
6
As a metallic blue Toyota Camry was still embedded in the armor of her SUV’s passenger door, Clarissa was unsure how she’d come to be standing in the middle of the intersection of North Capitol and E Streets Northwest.
But she was.
The pale blue rayon of her Victoria Beckham dress was wilting in the heat, DC was headed for a record-breaking Memorial Day weekend. And the heat of the fire reached her a half block away with all the timidity of a sledgehammer.
She stood like any other gawker, staring up at the fiery wreckage of the George. A few laggard guests stumbled out the front door. People who had crawled out of wrecked cars stood or sat on the pavement looking upward at the burning brick building. Other cars, ones that had been too close to the falling debris, no one would ever crawl out of again.
Clarissa could see people screaming, but a strange deafness had come over her and she didn’t hear them.
Police, then fire trucks, began racing onto the scene. Each flash of their strobe lights were an affront against her senses, but their sirens were no louder than a neighbor’s television.
Yet it seemed she could hear every snap and crackle of the fire tearing through the remains of the eighth floor. The roof collapsed with more of a sigh than a crash, disappearing into the flames. It did so with enough force to drive parts of the eighth floor into the seventh, which began to burn in its turn.
Between one eyeblink and the next, she was standing in a sea of emergency vehicles. Ambulances, fire trucks, and police had filled the street and the intersection.
Barriers were being raised.
When an overenthusiastic cop tried to move her along, she flashed her ID. Apparently being the Director of the CIA still had power, no matter what the House Intelligence Committee thought. She was left to stand where she was.
Another eyeblink and she stood alone in a small island of relative calm among a nest of gray-white firehoses snaking across the pavement like a badly woven basket.
Her driver moved in to help evacuate the dazed and injured. When a fresh explosion blew out a section of the sixth floor, he was under the debris fall. She managed a step, but even at this distance, she could see it was too late for him and stopped.
Beyond the new collapse, the fire had spread. The Hilton had caught fire as well. Flames now towered ten, now twenty stories over the entire city block.
Due to a slight rise in the street, it was impossible to see the White House, which lay a mile and a half farther along 2nd Street. Had they sent the jet?
Or…
Clarissa turned to face the Capitol Building to the south.
…them?
The fire was now so bright that it lit the night-darkened dome a blood red that the normal nighttime floodlights couldn’t wash away.
Had this attack been ordered from within those hallowed halls?
It was ludicrous that they would do any such thing, but she rubbed at her forehead to try and remove the feeling of a sniper targeting her there.
Who else had known of her monthly meetings at the George? Were they trying to take her out? It wasn’t President Roy Cole’s style, but she wouldn’t put it past the members of the House Intelligence Committee who squatted beneath their cherished dome. No matter how irrational, it felt possible.
If she was dead, their secrets would be safe—or so they thought. She’d made a go-public-on-my-death package that would perpetrate a devastating postmortem judgment upon the committee and several others. If she went down, it wouldn’t be alone.
It had taken all of her willpower in today’s meetings not to mention that. But it was a threat of last resort and she hadn’t yet been pushed to the edge of survival. Or so she’d thought at the time.
But…no, it wasn’t their style either. It would require initiative, a realm none of those partisan saps could muster in their mistresses’ beds, never mind the political arena.
No, it wasn’t them.
A shout went up and she turned back in time to see the collapse as the interior floors of the historic George folded in and down. The brick shell wavered, but mostly held. No one else would ever be exiting the building except in a body bag. The neighboring Phoenix Park Hotel was now also engulfed, repeating the scenario along the block as more firetrucks arrived.
Maybe it was merely coincidence that Senator Hunter Ramson’s suite had been taken out by the crash.
And…she was blowing smoke up her own ass if she was thinking that.
Being the D/CIA meant she had a far greater sense of paranoia than most. However, it also meant that her deep knowledge of domestic and international politics provided significant credence to that paranoia. Perhaps it didn’t classify as paranoia—she knew for a fact that much of it was based in reality.
With Clark dead and the White House slipped from her grasp, was she actually a major threat to anyone who would care? There was a depressing thought.
Her remaining power was…the great unknown. She had needed—
“Clarissa?”
The ghost of Rose Ramson stood in front of her, speaking her name.
7
“You’re dead.”
“I am?”
“Up there.” Clarissa nodded toward the upper story of the George, which was no longer there due to the building’s collapse. Further evidence of Rose’s demise was that she looked elegant and cool despite the brutal heat. Her ghost shimmered in an effortless Armani white linen skirt and jacket with a ruffled blouse of the palest green, which offset her deep red hair to perfection. Of course, Rose Ramson would look elegant even in off-the-rack Gap.
“I was afraid that you were…” Rose’s remarkably realistic ghost nodded upward. “I was running late.”
“Hunter?”
“I tried his phone. It goes straight to voicemail. He’ll silence the ring, but he never shuts off his phone. It would only go directly to voicemail if his phone was out of a reception area,” she swallowed visibly, “or it was destroyed. The George has, had excellent reception.”
“Oh,” was all that Clarissa could think to say. The ghost must still be an alive Rose. “Why were you late?”
Rose raised a small, gloss-white bag with no label that she’d been carrying in reply. Thick, high-gloss paper, with actual rope handles that were softer on the skin than the narrow twisted-paper ones.
Clarissa recognized it. Coup de Foudre was a very high-end and very discreet lingerie shop halfway between the George and the White House. “Cosabella?”
“Samantha Chang.”
Clarissa raised an eyebrow. An interesting choice for a woman of Rose’s generous curves. Though Rose at fifty could probably still fit in her Miss Utah bikini as neatly as she had thirty years ago. Clarissa herself never looked quite her best in Samantha Chang designs.
“I was—” Rose waved at the fire a little helplessly. Though they stood a block away, they had to raise their voices to be heard over the loud pumps on the nearby fire trucks and the rush of water from a dozen different nozzles and truck-mounted water cannons. “—was going to let him make it up to me. I have, had been, giving Hunter the cold shoulder for long enough.”
There was no need to ask why. Senator Hunter Ramson’s political machinations had gone terribly wrong. His actions had paved yet one more step along the path to Clark’s death, and her own loss of an eventual Presidency by riding in on his coattails. Hunter also would be the only one to know exactly who had sent that plane spearing into the George—if he weren’t dead.
They stood together and watched the fire in silence. The sun had set, but the street didn’t lack for light. The harsh emergency lights from the trucks flooded the street. The fire splashed blood orange off the glass face of the Hall of the States across the street. Half of the states had their official DC offices in that building.
No one would have complained if the jet had hit there instead, at least no one that mattered. But it hadn’t.
The states had such inflated ideas of their own importance, often undermining the very country they were part of. Someday she’d wander over to the FBI and do a little trading of good stories, tales of crazy countries in exchange for juicy tales of state psychoses.
“I guess I don’t need this anymore.” Rose stepped over to a small pile of flaming bedding, too unimportant for the firefighters to deal with yet, and tossed the bag of lingerie on it.
“Let’s get out of here.”
Rose looked at the fire and nodded. Her carefully composed features couldn’t quite hide her distress. Clarissa had been with Clark for under three years, married for less than one—and she was missing him. Rose had been married to Hunter for more than thirty. Like her own mixed feelings, was it a sadness and a relief? Clarissa wanted to ask, but knew she wouldn’t like the answer either way.
She stepped over to her car. The up-armored SUV was robust enough that it would still be drivable despite the abuse it had suffered. When she tugged on the door handle, nothing happened.
Rose tried the other side. “It’s locked.”
“Wait here. I’ll be right back.” Clarissa headed to where she’d seen her driver crushed by falling debris. The fire had been fought back from this end of the wreckage, so it was safe enough. The firefighters had moved away and the medical triage teams had already swept the area and removed the merely injured. The morgue teams wouldn’t start in until the forensic people had their photos and measurements.
Being careful to keep her boots well clear of the puddled blood oozing from where his head had once been and now a marble end table lay shattered, Clarissa squatted to fish the keys out of his jacket pocket.
