The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

immediately enveloped by the smell of jet fuel. The snow was saturated with it. Every depression his boots made in the surface instantly pooled with the pink liquid.
    The airliner was less than a football field ahead now, pointed away down the valley and rotated a few degrees counterclockwise, so that its left side—with the wing intact—was more visible than the right.
    So far, no tracks in the snow.
    Ahead, the tail loomed over the valley floor, four stories above Travis’s head, even with its fin broken. The aircraft lay canted to the left by the weight of the port-side wing, both engines of which were submerged in the deep snow. He passed the tail and stopped ten yards shy of the wing, between the twin ruts carved by the engines’ passing.
    All three of the fuselage ruptures he’d seen from his campsite were on this side of the plane. The nearest, just steps away, was wide enough to admit him. Even from here, the darkness beyond the tear was featureless. The windows were even less help: tilted downward, they offered only a reflection of the snow.
    Travis inhaled deeply and shouted, “Is anyone there?”
    His echo came back in distinct bounces. There was no other reply.
    He went to the opening, tested the strength of the metal on both sides of it, and pulled himself into the plane.
    It wasn’t an airliner.

CHAPTER THREE
    Row upon row of instrument stations filled the space Travis had entered, a claustrophobic version of NASA’s mission control that extended from the tail of the plane to a bulkhead thirty feet forward of his position. Swivel chairs were bolted to the floor at each terminal; everything else in the room lay in ruins, heaped against the left wall, the low end of the tilt.
    The smell of fuel, still intense, gave way to something fresher. Familiar, too. In the close darkness, speared by shafts of window glare that only made seeing harder, he identified the scent just a breath before he saw its source.
    Blood. Pooled beneath the tumble of debris. Pooled beneath his feet.
    His stomach constricted; he turned to the rupture in the wall, thrust his head outside for fresh air and got a lungful of fuel vapor. It helped. Forcing control, his breathing shallow, he pulled back inside.
    He held up a hand against the glare and scrutinized the disarray for what he knew must be there.
    He saw them immediately.
    A dozen bodies lay among the debris.
    Atop the debris, actually. Which was strange.
    He moved closer, saw the reason for it, and felt ice in his stomach where the nausea had just been. They hadn’t died in the crash. Each victim had taken two bullets to the temple, tightly clustered.
    Travis went still and listened for movement aboard the wreck. Logic told him the killer, or killers, couldn’t possibly still be aboard. The plane had been down for three days. The killings had probably happened soon after. There would be no reason for the shooters to stay with the aircraft, and every reason to get away from it.
    He listened for another ten seconds anyway, and heard nothing but wind scouring the valley and moaning in the cracks along the fuselage. A hymn for the dead.
    He returned his eyes to them. They wore uniforms: black pants and crisp blue shirts, not necessarily military, but a long way from casual. The clothing was devoid of insignia or indication of rank. Even their nationality could only be narrowed by degrees: nine of the dead were white, three black. Seven male, five female. Their ages were hard to tell because of the bloating, but Travis guessed they ranged from thirty to fifty.
    Now an obvious aspect of the plane’s exterior occurred to him, one he’d overlooked amid the clamor of more pressing observations: the outside of the aircraft was completely blank. He hadn’t seen even a tail number.
    What was this thing?
    He’d watched enough middle-of-the-night programming on the Discovery Channel to know the government maintained special aircraft for dire situations—flying backups, in case command hubs like the Pentagon were taken out in a first strike. “Doomsday planes,” they were called. Billions of tax dollars, which, God willing, would remain wasted forever.
    But if this was a doomsday plane, wasn’t it that much more improbable that no one had found it?
    Well, someone had found it, hadn’t they?
    Travis rose and swept another gaze across the executed bodies and the machines they’d manned.
    A thousand questions. No answers.
    No need for any, either.
    This was none of his