After over an hour of monotonous black ocean, the sudden deck lights of the USCGC Surmount were as bright as a rock concert.
Ruby’s stomach churned in time to the change in pitch of the chopper’s turboshaft engines as they came to a hover. She loved flying in airplanes and was actually a licensed pilot herself, but like so many others in the military, helicopters always made her nervous.
As they swung in above the rear flight deck helipad, outside the window she could see several sailors in life jackets and hard hats along the 270-foot cutter’s aft rail.
“Okay, Lieutenant, if you’re ready, we’re going to lower you down in the bucket,” the Dolphin crew chief said with his Southern accent in her intercom headphones.
She turned and looked at him in horror as he showed her some kind of harness.
“What?” she shrieked.
“Gotcha,” the helmeted crew chief said with a grin. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. Roy will land it. Maybe even on the boat, if we’re lucky.”
The officer who met her on the chopper pad’s edge was fair-haired and clean-shaven and, like almost everyone else in the coast guard, looked young enough to still be in college.
“Welcome to the Surmount, Lieutenant Everett. I’m Lieutenant Martin,” he said, shaking her hand as he led her up a short set of steps through a doorway.
Inside, there were three blue-uniformed seamen on the bridge. She dropped her bag in an unobtrusive corner, the air-conditioning delicious after the humid heat in the chopper.
“So you’re the investigative team,” Martin said as they watched out the pilothouse glass where a team of coasties with a hose was already refueling the Dolphin.
“The first,” she said. “There are four of us altogether. The others are on the way. So what do you have? A downed aircraft?”
“It’s a plane,” Martin said, nodding. “One of our guys on watch spotted it on our radar about five hours ago. We do long-range drug-interdiction patrols out of Miami Beach, so we thought it was a boat in distress on the water at first.
“But as we approached, we saw its tail fin barely sticking up out of the water. That was only from its rear section. It’s actually broken in two. The front part is under a hundred feet of water. I was about to call the local airport on Little Abaco for any missing aircraft, but then I saw the bulletin. My father’s buddy Al Litvak works at the naval safety office, so I called him first directly. You know Al?”
“Yes,” Ruby said. “He’s one of my boss’s bosses. You said there was a bulletin?”
“Yep. It was on our OPREP board. I saw it when I came on watch. It said something about a missing air force jet to be on the lookout for.”
She thought about that. No one had told her about a missing jet.
“So it’s a jet? What kind? Do you know?”
Martin took out an iPhone and brought up a picture.
“Not a military one, as far as I can tell. It’s some kind of corporate jet. Our diver took a photograph of a dataplate on a piece of debris near the tail section. Gulfstream, it says. See?”
She looked at the image. Gulfstream was all it said. There was nothing stamped in the boxes for model and serial number and FAA certification.
Maybe it was an EC-37B, she thought. The EC-37B was the new military version of the Gulfstream 550 that had electronic warfare capability. It could jam radar and other electronic systems.
Perhaps it was on a test flight? Which was maybe why it hadn’t been picked up by local airports’ radar?
Ruby peered at the photograph again. She had never seen a blank dataplate before. It was like staring at a car license plate with no number on it.
“After we spotted it, we immediately did our rapid emergency rescue response to check for survivors. There was no one in the tail part. Then we saw that the sunken front portion was within diving range, so I had one of our rescue divers go down for a peek. Six aboard it, including the two pilots. All dead.”
“That’s terrible. Where are they now? Below deck?” she said.
“Who?” Martin said.
“The deceased,” she said, blinking at him.
“No,” Martin said, looking at her. “We didn’t do the recovery yet. I got a call from my base commander to stand down and let you guys take care of it.”
She gave him a funny look.
“Is that right?” she said.
“What’s the problem? Is that not protocol? With the bodies, I mean?”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “I’ve never heard of the deceased being left in place before. We usually get brought in after all remains are recovered from the wreckage.”
Martin squinted, puzzled.
“He was pretty insistent about us not going near the aircraft again until you guys showed,” he said. “He said a navy salvage vessel is en route.”
“My boss didn’t tell me that. I thought he was waiting to hear from me first,” she said.
“Well, looks like somebody’s getting their wires crossed, I guess. What else is new,” Martin said.
A burly older man in a bosun’s mate uniform came out of a door on the other side of the ship’s glowing control boards.
“Hey, Lieutenant, you got a call,” he said.
Martin looked at him then back at Ruby.
“Give me a sec,” he said.