"The mirror is acrylic over quarter-inch aluminum honeycomb," David whispered, his breathing thin and ragged around the edges of his flight attendant mask. "If you hit the center, the shock absorbs into the honeycombed core. You have to take the perimeter fasteners." "Hold the bottle steady," I told him. I adjusted the green rubber mask over my mouth and nose, breathing in the cold, dry bite of pure bottled oxygen. My knuckles tightened against the rubberized shaft of the axe. In the F-16, egress was an explosive canopy jettison—two pounds of shaped charge blowing polycarbonate into the sky in four milliseconds. Commercial wide-bodies were built to keep pressure in and passengers out, but every square inch of internal bulkhead had an engineering compromise.
The mirror frame sat flush with the composite wall directly opposite the toilet module. At the four corners and along the mid-flanges, six flush-mounted countersunk shear rivets pinned the blowout panel to the structural titanium rib separating the passenger cabin from the lower avionics crawlspace. The panel was built to blow outward into the cargo cavity in the event of an explosive decompression, equalizing hull pressure before the cabin floor could buckle. I turned the axe head sideways, seating the hardened steel pick under the top-left mounting tab where the composite seal showed a hair-thin seam. I drove the pick home with the heel of my boot.
The first rivet gave with a sharp, metallic screech that vibrated through the floorboards. David winced, glancing back at the louvered door, but there was no time to care about noise. I gripped the axe handle with both hands, using the leverage of the five-foot shaft against the vanity frame, and threw my entire body weight into the pry. The second rivet sheared clean, its aluminum head snapping off like a rifle shot and skittering across the vinyl floor. Cold air rushed through the widening gap—not the filtered air of the passenger deck, but the biting, kerosene-scented gale of the unheated forward electronics bay. Down in the darkness beyond the breach, thirty feet below the pressurized passenger cabin, wire bundles as thick as human thighs swayed in the turbulent drafts of the fuselage belly.
I jammed the flat blade of the axe into the seam, twisting with my forearms until the remaining four rivets tore out of their housings in a cascading series of metallic thuds. The rectangular panel dropped inward, crashing onto an aluminum cable tray four feet below. A blast of freezing, chemical-heavy vapor hit my face, carrying the sharp, eye-watering stench of industrial malathion. The pesticide was thick enough to taste through the intake valve of my mask—an oily, metallic film that coated the back of my throat. Beneath the opening, crouched on the narrow steel walkway between the primary flight control computers and the lower crew rest bunk, Jerry Covington froze in the beam of his handheld inspection light.
He was fifty years old, thick-shouldered, wearing an unbuttoned dark work jacket over a Queens line-maintenance jumpsuit. In his right hand, he held a heavy twelve-inch adjustable pipe wrench. His left hand rested directly on the brass handle of the flight deck air-mixing valve, which had been turned hard to the right, locked open with a length of braided safety wire. Next to his work boots sat a commercial five-gallon pressurized steel canister, its discharge nozzle plumbed directly into the air duct with reinforced clear plastic tubing. The green liquid inside the tube was surging in pulses, drawn straight into the cockpit ventilation loop by the vacuum of the cabin circulation fans.
CHAPTER 7
"You're out of your depth, Captain," Covington said. His voice was muffled behind an industrial dual-cartridge half-face respirator, but his eyes were wide, cold, and entirely focused. "You step down through that frame, and I drop the wrench into the rudder cable pulley. You won't even have to wait for the ten-thousand-foot relief valve. The aircraft will spin into the sea before you clear the ladder." "You drop that wrench," I said, my voice muffled by the oxygen mask as I lowered myself through the opening, "and you die in the same freezing water as the rest of us."
"I have a survivable descent profile programmed into that black box," he snarled, taking half a step backward on the narrow steel grate. "A soft ditching five miles south of the Flemish Cap. The locator beacon stays dark. A trawler is waiting twelve miles off the shelf. Nobody finds five hundred million dollars in unregistered lithium-ion prototypes in three miles of silt, and nobody looks for a dead mechanic." "Five hundred million in stolen battery patents doesn't buy you out of international water, Jerry," I said, dropping my boots onto the steel catwalk three feet in front of him.