TARMAC
by Lynne Heitman

Prologue

    The sky might have looked like this in prehistoric times. Before cities, before streetlights, before electricity, there was only the pale moon and distant stars to illuminate the night. On a moonless night, there was nothing. Only darkness so thick you could reach out and lay the back of your hand against it. 
     But in prehistoric times there would have been nothing like the mammoth airliner that lies shattered across the side of the mountain. From a very great distance, the gleaming wreckage would look like a constellation of stars clustered around the ancient peak. Closer in, it would look more like a bright carpet spread across the rolling ridges and spilling down the steep incline to where the last piece of the aircraft, torn and gutted, had lurched to a stop. 
     After a while, the mountain regains its equilibrium, enfolding the wrecked airplane in a deep, gentle silence that is interrupted only by the crackling of the burning parts and the small, intermittent explosions muffled within the twisted remains. Every now and then a tree catches fire and ignites like a blowtorch.
     A large section of fuselage teeters on a ridge. With the agonized shriek of metal on metal, it rolls and settles on its side. No one hears. All two hundred and three souls on board are gone, their corpses strewn across the rough terrain with the struts and panels, books and tray tables, wires, seats, and insulation.
     Investigators will find the captain's watch still on his wrist, a Piaget given to him by his wife and four children to honor his twenty-five years as a pilot. It had stopped at 2047, thirty-four seconds after the aircraft had dropped from the radar, fifteen seconds after one air traffic controller had turned to the other and said, "We lost them . . ." 
     At 2209, a distant sound from the valley below begins as a soft swishing, grows clearer, more clipped, then thunderous as helicopters explode from behind the ridge, bursting through the black smoke like two projectiles spit from a volcano. They swoop toward the wreckage with engines roaring, blades hacking—all identifying markings concealed. Anyone looking would not be able to see, behind the powerful floodlights, the heavy equipment, the special 
extraction tools, the masks that the men wear to work around the dead. 
     One helicopter passes quickly over the holocaust, flying as low as the heat and the flames allow. The second pilot steers his ship in search of level ground. The sooner he lands, the sooner he can get men and equipment to the scene. 
     Every second is critical. They have to be gone before the rescuers arrive.