“Let me get some help.”
Hudson weakly nodded, closing his eyes.
She went back to the console area. Ariana tried to remember but the last thing her mind played back to her was giving the command for everyone to lock in and prepare for crashing. She grabbed Mark Ingram's shoulder and shook him. Soon he was blinking, looking about.
“What happened?” he asked as he unsnapped his harness and stood up.
“I don't know,” Ariana answered. “We're down but we seem to have made it all right.”
Ingram unbuckled and stood, looking about. “The pilot's must have managed to make it to a landing strip somewhere.” Then he spotted the body under the jacket.
“It's John. He's dead,” Ariana said. “Mitch is pinned against a console up front. He's hurt.”
Others were standing up now, stretching, trying to get oriented, thankful to be alive. She directed two men to the front to help Hudson.
George Craight, a camera tech moved toward her and Ingram. “Where are we?” he asked.
Ariana had been thinking about Ingram's comment that they'd made it to a landing strip. If that were the case, why weren't rescue personnel cutting their way in? For once she wished they had windows in the bay. Given their location when the trouble had started, she knew there were no landing strips marked on the map within a hundred kilometers. The last thing she remembered was the pilot shouting, but he’d made no sense.
Ariana turned toward the front of the plane. “Let's find out.”
Ingram and Craight followed her as she passed through her office into the communications area. Hudson’s legs had been freed and he was carried to the rear to be bandaged. Ariana grabbed the latch that led from the commo area to the cockpit. It was reluctant to give way, then turned with a sudden snap as Craight added his strength to hers. A gust of thick air blew in. Ariana took an involuntary step back as she saw that the top half of the cockpit had been cut out, leaving exposed metal edges and wiring. Beyond, a thick yellow-gray mist was swirling about. She thought she could see what appeared to be the faint outlines of some very tall trees in the fog just in front of the plane, but it was hard to make out. Ariana remembered the scene the forward video camera had showed her just before it went dead-the same fog. Her eyes lowered to the seats.
“Oh God!” Ariana staggered back another step. The pilot's body was still strapped in; what was left of it. The top half was gone, leaving just legs and the beginning of a torso ending in a red, gooey mess where the stomach should have continued. Loops of entrails trailed from the body to the torn out metal and disappeared over the edge. The co-pilot's seat was empty, but the cloth was covered with bright red splashes of blood. The seatbelts ended abruptly.
Craight and Ariana tentatively stepped forward into the cockpit, Ingram edging up behind them. Ingram mutely pointed to the right. The navigator wasn't in his seat. Ariana followed the line of Ingram's finger. The navigator must have tried to get away from whatever had happened to the other two in the cabin. His body was crammed under the console holding the plane's flight radios. One arm was wrapped around a stanchion, the fingers rigid. The other arm and half his chest was gone, cut off smoothly as if by a surgeon's knife. His face was contorted with a look of pure terror.
“What happened to them?” Ariana asked, more to push away the horror than expecting an answer.
“It must have occurred during the crash,” Craight offered.
Ariana didn't believe that. The cargo bay was relatively intact. How could the top of the cockpit be ripped out? She looked more closely at the edge of the metaclass="underline" it was cut smoothly, as if removed by a blowtorch, not torn apart by a crash. It was as if someone had popped the front of the plane off to look inside. What could have cut through metal like that, Ariana wondered? Surely not the force of impact, since it was on top of the plane, but there was no other way she could logically explain it to herself.
She staggered as if she'd been hit in the back of the head and a bolt of pain ripped across her consciousness. For a second she thought she'd been hit in the head, but when she turned there was no one there. She realized that the pain was inside her head.
“Let's get out of here,” she said.
Craight was moving forward toward where the front windshield had been, trying to see where they were. Ingram edged back toward her and the door.
“Craight!” Ariana snapped. He half-turned and all that did was allow Ariana to be able to see the expression on his face as a beam of golden light touched him in the back. The light expanded and covered his entire body. Craight's left hand was grasping the edge of the pilot's seat and the light touched the metal, backed up and snapped shut at his wrist, neatly severing his hand.
Craight screamed as blood gushed from the wound but Ariana could see that the blood was kept in by the field around Craight, bizarrely flowing up along his arm as if there were a transparent golden cap on the wound. Ariana focused on Craight's eyes, seeing the pain and shock that they expressed. The light rose up, lifting Craight with it so that he was suspended five feat above the plane's floor. Then he was swiftly withdrawn out of the cockpit into the mist. As he went, Ariana could see that his mouth was open, his throat working as if he were screaming, but there was no sound. Then he was gone. She looked back inside. The hand was still clutching the top of the pilot's chair.
Ingram staggered back toward her. She grabbed him and pulled as another beam of light narrowly missed him. They jumped into the commo area, the wind slamming the door shut behind them, but they didn't pause there, continuing through her office, stumbling into the console area where the others were gathered.
Everyone inside the cargo bay looked up as a loud noise grated through the interior. It sounded as if something impossibly large was sliding across the top of the plane.
“Where the hell are we?” Ingram whispered.
Patricia Conners had a wonderful imagination, her husband had always kidded her about that, but she was also very conscientious. The blurs on the three pictures of Cambodia had been bothering her as she worked on other projects and taskings. Finally, her in-box empty, she decided to check everything one more time. Maybe she had missed something the first time around.
She ran a diagnostic on her own computer and printer. Everything worked fine. She went over the KH-12, both the imaging gear and the satellite's on-board computer. Both checked out.
Conners took a pad of paper and put it on her desk. She drew a circle at the bottom of the page and labeled it Cambodia. Then she put a smaller circle in the middle of the page and labeled it KH-12. She drew a line from the bottom one to the middle one. That was the imagery path. It was processed by the on-board computer, which had just checked out. She drew another small circle at the top of the page and labeled it “ME”. She drew a line from the middle circle to the top one. But she knew that that line was composed of several elements. She turned to her computer to find out exactly what they were.
“KH-12 bounced to MILSTARS 16,” she muttered, tracing the data's path. She checked an index binder. MILSTARS 16 was one of the numerous satellites put in geosynchronous orbit by the military to sustain their secure global communications network. This particular one stayed in place over the South China Sea. It covered all of Southeast Asia and the Philippines.
Conners was very aware of both the capabilities and specifications of MILSTARS satellites and the communications system they supported. They were designed to be extremely secure and interception/jam resistant. They could antenna-hop, frequency-hop and burst-transmit. They were also hardened against nuclear attack and electro-magnetic pulse (EMP).