Then there was a sound like a bomb going off, and all he could see in the binoculars was a hanging column of pure blinding white.

3

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” Gannon called into his radio as he immediately throttled up, wheeling toward the crash site. “This is Donegal Rambler, Donegal Rambler, Donegal Rambler. VA number three eight seven five. I am at GPS heading twenty-seven point one-four-nine by seventy-seven point three-one-five. A plane is down! I repeat. A small commercial jet plane has crashed. How many people involved is unknown. Send help. Donegal Rambler is a forty-foot diving boat. Over.”

He let off the handset’s thumb key. There was nothing but choppy static. He checked to make sure that he was on the Channel 16 distress band then spun the volume dial as high up as it would go. The static only came in louder.

“Mayday! Mayday!” he was saying again when he remembered the snapped antenna.

He cursed as he roughly clipped the useless handset back into its holder. When he glanced forward over the dip and rise of the console, he made out the plane’s tail fin on the horizon. Seeing that it was upright, a brief flutter of hope rose in his chest.

Then he looked with the binoculars.

No!

The plane had snapped in half. You could see its pale white tail section with its huge high fin and about twenty feet of it. Other than that, there was nothing. He panned over the water left and right. There was no nose, no wings. The whole front part of the aircraft was completely gone.

He was still trying to reckon this terrible fact when he began to encounter debris. A cluster of water bottles went by. A white garbage bag. A snapped piece of varnished wood paneling with drink holders in it. A man’s black Nike sneaker.

On the other side of a swell to starboard appeared a huge white drumlike object. It was bouncing up and down in the water like a giant fishing bob. He couldn’t think what the hell it was. Then he came close enough to smell the jet fuel and see the glistening steel turbofan blades still rotating inside of it.

A football field beyond the ripped-free jet engine lay the plane’s dissected rear fuselage. Gannon eased the throttle back. He looked up at its aerodynamic rear stabilizers as he came alongside it. G550 was written in high-sheen blue paint upon its pale side.

He slipped the boat into full idle as he came around to the front, where the cross-sectioned fuselage had breached asunder. From its top hung a spaghetti of aluminum framing and electrical wiring and tattered fiberglass. Yet through these ragged streamers, the rear interior of the aircraft was almost perfectly intact. There was cream-colored carpet on the floor, a window seat covered in bungee-corded luggage, a highly varnished wood sideboard.

Behind the sideboard was the open doorway of a restroom. Gannon stared into it, mesmerized. The white marble sink basin within it looked like something from a five-star hotel.