Tiger's Claw: A Novel by Dale Brown

them to kiss my narrow hairy ass,” he went on. “Being forced to get jerked around in international airspace is bull. But we wouldn’t let them come any closer than a hundred miles from our ships, so I guess . . .”
    And at that moment, completely without warning, the entire interior of the Poseidon went instantly and completely dark, the engines started to spool down, and the cabin depressurized.
    “ Holy shit! ” Sanchez shouted, right after his last breath whistled out between his lips in a loud “BARK!,” and air that hadn’t leaked away instantly became a thick fog. Sanchez and Lister immediately slipped quick-don oxygen masks over their faces with well-practiced ease. “Troy, can you hear me?” he shouted through his oxygen mask.
    “Roger!” Lister shouted back. She was surprised at how calm she felt—this was very much like a scenario they might practice in an emergency procedures simulator session. Strangely, the quiet inside the plane was eerily relaxing—or was that hypoxia kicking in, the sudden lack of oxygen lulling her into a false sense of security? She checked her oxygen regulator just to be sure it was working. “You got the plane, Nacho?”
    “I . . . I think so,” Sanchez replied. He wasn’t yet sure. The full-color MFDs were dark, so he had to search for the standby engine instruments. “Christ, all the engine instruments read zero.” He moved the throttles. “No response to throttles, and flight controls feel like they’re in ‘mechanical’ mode.”
    “The freakin’ batteries are off-line too?” Lister asked.
    “We’ve got squat, Troy, except for standby pitot-static instruments—altitude, vertical speed, and airspeed,” Sanchez said. “Both engines flamed out, no battery power, no generators, no alternators, nothing ! Let’s get the power back on, then do an airstart.” While Lister retrieved her paper emergency checklists, Sanchez immediately began doing the first few steps of the checklist by memory, shutting off the aircraft electrical systems, checking circuit breakers—several were popped, an indication that the aircraft had experienced a massive power surge of some kind—and preparing to recycle the battery and generators.
    Richard Sykes, the designated message-runner between the cockpit and sensor cabin in emergencies such as this, entered a few minutes later wearing an oxygen mask and carrying a walkaround oxygen bottle in a green canvas sack slung over his shoulder. “Sensor cabin is secure, everything is shut down to shed the load, and everyone’s on oxygen and reporting okay,” he said. “No injuries.” He scanned the instrument panels. “You lost everything ? Both generators and the batteries? Can you get them back online?”
    “We’ll find out as soon as we reconfigure,” Lister said.
    “Any idea what happened?”
    “No friggin’ idea.”
    “Need an extra hand up here?”
    “No,” Sanchez said. “Better get strapped in. Tell the crew to run the ‘Before Ditching’ checklists, in case we can’t restart.”
    Sykes’s mouth dropped open in surprise, but he nodded. “What about the classified stuff?” he asked.
    Sanchez hesitated, but only for a moment before replying: “Better start destroying it. If we ditch, helicopters from that Chinese carrier will be on us in just a few minutes.” Sykes swallowed, finding his throat instantly dry, and headed back to the sensor cabin to order the crew to destroy the classified equipment and documents.
    “Okay, circuit breakers reset, all systems in the ‘Emergency Power Distribution List’ are off, and sensor cabin main power buss is open,” Lister said, reading through the items in her checklist. “Ready to recycle the battery switch.”
    “Here we go,” Sanchez said. “Battery switch off . . . battery switch moving to on.” He flipped the switch again . . . and nothing happened. “Oh, crap,” he muttered, then shut it off again. “Double-check everything, Troy.”
    Lister