The Wrecking Crew

CHAPTER 1

The Dassault Falcon sliced through the sky, triple Pratt & Whitney jet engines rocketing a sleek windowless fuselage over endless miles of lawless Somali coastline. Inside, Dr. Fatima Nassiri’s eyes drifted across the panoramic view, a clever combination of powerful exterior cameras and curved video screens. The projected illusion was breathtaking, transforming the interior into an impossibly lifelike 360-degree view. If she let her busy mind drift away from the technological complexity for a moment, it almost felt as though she were floating among the clouds.

It was a great step up from her previous Somali expedition. Grant money was tight, so she’d crammed herself into an aging Mitsubishi MU-2 turboprop, elbow-to-elbow with her graduate students as they conducted their fifteen-hour data collection missions in a sweltering, unpressurized cabin.

While outside the African sun beat down on the fuselage like a blacksmith’s hammer, Dr. Nassiri sunk deeper into her plush leather seat, enjoying the gentle air conditioning with a hint of lavender perfume. Funny what happens when a Bahraini billionaire loses his favorite fishing spot to red tide — the trickle of research money became a flood, only this time with the added perk of a private jet. She was determined not to allow the opportunity to slip through her fingers — every dollar counted, every dollar brought her inches closer to understanding the growing red tide infecting the Horn of Africa like a plague.

Even now, she could peer at the high-resolution display and watch the spreading plumes of algae swirl like finger-paint in the deep turquoise of the shallow coastal ocean. At sea level, the thick, maroon intrusion stank of death as poisons asphyxiated the lowest single-cell rungs of the food chain, permeating through the food web to fish and mammals. Sea life could swim and starve or stay and suffocate.

Dr. Nassiri sighed. She was too old to cry over dead fish and dying dolphins and starving African fisherman.

The young, ponytailed graduate assistant to Dr. Nassiri’s left reminded her of herself in younger days. She was an environmentalist, a scientist, and a true believer in the power of good intentions. Dr. Nassiri would never admit it to anyone, but the student was her favorite, the type of girl she’d always secretly hoped her son would someday marry. The other, a heavyset young man sitting further up the cabin, was a top pick from her university’s oceanography program.

Security was the overriding concern, so the scientists dropped transponders according to a specified grid pattern. The plane would swing wide on the way south, considerably circumventing the coast of Somalia. The pilots would only hug the coast on the return route and never exactly the same course twice. No sense in telegraphing predictable movements. Somalia was bad territory, red zone, no place for a forced landing. At an altitude of only two thousand feet, their presence was close enough to annoy the pirates, some of whom occasionally fired a haphazard hailstorm of small-caliber fire skyward, or even the rare slow, arcing rocket-propelled grenade.

A flashing indicator on the closest screen interrupted her rambling, boredom-induced thoughts. She pressed the communication button on her gold-inlaid, wood burl armrest to reach the cockpit.

“We’re coming up on coordinate zero-zero-five-one,” she said. “Prepare for the drop.”

“Roger,” whispered the pilot over the silky intercom connection. “Go ahead.”

Dr. Nassiri motioned to one of her two graduate students. “Ready transponder zero-zero-five-one.”

The young man nodded and punched in the code to his computer console.

“Reaching coordinates in ten… nine… eight,” he counted. “Preparing to release… four… three… two… mark… release!”

Dr. Nassiri pressed the release button on her wall screen, allowing a wing-mounted transponder to drop into the airstream. It would be a few moments before the tumbling instrument impacted the ocean below. They were designed to record all data before reaching a modest crush depth of just a few hundred feet. The Falcon shuddered, the finicky aerodynamic trim of the craft disrupted by the drop. Soon enough, the transponder came alive as it sunk through the water, transmitting a host of high-speed oceanographic and chemical data.

“Holy shit,” exclaimed the female graduate student, pointing to the curved screen on her side of the plane. “These readings are off the charts. Do you think we dropped a dud?”

The doctor tipped her glasses and glanced at the live data stream. Heavy metals, exotic chemicals, radioactive isotopes… a veritable toxic soup of deadly man-made materials. Her mind flashed back to a rumor she’d heard years ago.

The very thought made her shiver. Mertvaya Ruka—could this be the first evidence of the Dead Hand? The Dead Hand was a legend spoken only in hushed whispers among her fellow faculty, and even then, most often followed by a shrug or dismissive wave. But whenever she read about a flock of seabirds plunging dead from the skies, three hundred porpoises beaching themselves on rocky shores as their organs dissolved, or entire fishing stocks collapsing without warning, she’d wonder if a single tendril of the Dead Hand had escaped its coffin. And then there were these off-the-charts readings, data that seemed as if she’d dropped the transponder into the well of Hades.

Or it could be just a dud, an expensive transponder down the drain.

“Alright, let’s circle back around to the last position,” she said. The pilots obliged, tilting the aircraft into an elegant turn. The young man resumed his countdown as Dr. Nassiri prepared to release another transponder.

As her graduate student prepared the drop sequence, she stopped suddenly — a strange black vessel materialized a thousand feet below the Falcon, clearly visible on the high-resolution video screen. It cut through the water like a surfaced shark, the prow underwater, but with a stubby central tower rising well above the waves. It looked like no fishing boat she’d ever seen. Two black-clad men stood in the tower. One of them lifted a long, tubular instrument towards the plane. Then a flash from below, a bright light trailing smoke. It circled, rapidly climbing towards the aircraft.

My god — is that—?

“Mi—missile!” screamed Dr. Nassiri. “Missile!”

Even if the pilots could hear her, they could do nothing. First it was a thousand feet below, just a speck of light followed by a plume of white smoke, and then—good god, it was fast — the missile detonated against the port jet engine with a blast like the entire universe had collapsed inwards on itself in an instant. The pressure wave tore through the passenger compartment, blowing out Dr. Nassiri’s left eardrum before she even heard the sound. The wall screens went dark, leaving the length of the windowless fuselage dark save for electrical arcs and daylight streaming through the gaping holes in the aircraft’s thin skin. Wetness streamed from her nose as a tearing pain bit at her chest and wrist.

The plane heeled over like a bird with a shot-gunned wing, and the young man to her right was sheet-white, open-mouthed and bleeding, holding onto one shredded arm with the other. She couldn’t hear his screaming over the wounded roar of the surviving engine.

Flames — she could see flames through the perforated carbon fiber fuselage of the dying jet. The exploded turbine had turned the plane’s composite skin into a ragged mess. Heat and wind and sound flooded the cabin with unimaginable ferocity. Twenty million alarm bells went off through her mind as the jet tumbled through the air, all of them screaming going to die, going to die, going to die. Through the shrapnel holes she saw sky, water, sky, water as she tumbled too fast to even catch a glimpse of the horizon.

The jet hit an updraft, slamming her down into her plush leather seat with monstrous force, pinning her down. To her right, the young man’s eyes rolled into the back of his head. Too much blood lost in just moments, his body simply shut down. The jet screamed, the whistle of wind through the fuselage blending in with the shrieking engine, a perfect maelstrom of mechanical distress. Then a wham, like getting hit with a blindside rugby tackle, like missing a step and taking that first big hit falling down the stairs, the jet bounced off the first of the whitecaps. Her entire chair tore loose, spitting sheared bolts and metal fragments as the aluminum mounts ripped free. Debris cartwheeled through the air, cracking Dr. Nassiri on the side of the head. Her vision swam gray.

The jet struck the water again, off-center, and toppled to a dead stop, slowly rolling over to total inversion, wrecked and flooding. Dr. Nassiri hung upside down, watching helplessly as a collapsing bulkhead fell onto her young female student, pinning the woman against the bench. Dr. Nassiri released her safety belt, tumbling helplessly through the air before splashing into the gathering flood of ice-cold seawater over the thick carpet. The freezing water was a gut shot, a snap back to technicolor reality. The aircraft was filling — rapidly.

She couldn’t tell if the body to her right — no, it wasn’t a body, it was her student — she couldn’t tell if he was living or dead, but he wasn’t moving and there was blood and—

A single image froze in her mind… exposed pink brain matter leaking from his crushed skullcap as angry, foaming seawater flowed over his motionless mouth and nose. Dr. Nassiri pushed herself to her knees, reaching with a shaking hand towards the collapsed instrumentation panel. The young woman hung upside-down in the leather seat, pinned down by the bulkhead. She whimpered as the rising water floated her long, sweat-soaked ponytail in a wet pile. Dr. Nassiri tried to push the debris off her, but it wouldn’t budge, wouldn’t even tremble.

“Help me,” moaned the young woman. “Please, help me, please, help me, please!”

It was then that Dr. Nassiri caught a glimpse of the jagged carbon fiber strut sticking not into but through the girl. She couldn’t bear to make eye contact; she could only see the terrible wound torn through her pupil’s chest. The girl probably couldn’t even feel it through the rush of endorphins and adrenaline.

Dr. Nassiri tried to speak, and then the water was over the young woman’s face, her dying student bubbling ineffectually beneath. Her ears popped with the pressure of the rising water. This couldn’t be it. This couldn’t be the last few seconds of her life.

Water flooded the interior with renewed force, pushing Dr. Nassiri upwards into a rapidly shrinking air pocket. The plane was upside down, everything was wrong. Pushing with her legs — and she treaded water now — she could just reach the manual release lever of the emergency door. She yanked on it, once, twice, to no avail. Horror flooded over her, as the last remaining vestige of rational thought told her too much exterior pressure.

The plane would need to flood and equalize the pressure differential before she could release the door. Her tiny air bubble would disappear — and then how long until the end?

She had no time to think, no time to consider any other options, she took one ragged, burning breath of jet fumes and smoke and thin air and ducked underwater as the last of the air bubbles flowed through a lattice of shattered carbon fiber and streamed to the surface. She fumbled blindly for the lever and—

And then it was free, just like she’d done a dozen times before. The door swung open. Her clothes caught on jagged metal as she squirmed her way out of the tiny opening. Freedom—kicking her legs, she pushed for the glistening surface, breaking into thick, smoky air. Sunlight streamed through her burning eyes amid a growing slick of flaming aviation fuel.

My lamb, my little lamb!

With three more kicks of her legs, she swam underneath and away from the field. She popped out of the water, gasping for breath. The stinging seawater cleared from her eyes just enough for her to slowly turn around, treading water. She saw no land, nothing but endless rolling waves and the burning fuel slick. No sign of the mysterious vessel that had sent the beautiful jet spiraling from the sky.

My little lamb, my beloved only son.

But then something in the distance — incoming boats, attracted by the smoke. Three of them, lost in the heat of the day as they sped towards her. Three low, fast fiberglass hulls, unpainted, filled with dark faces and bristling with weaponry.

Do not search for me, my son.

And then the pirates were upon her.