ATLANTIS

The Plane Crash

PART II

THE PRESENT

CHAPTER ONE

The plane was eight miles out of Bangkok and climbing rapidly, heading due east, the four Pratt & Whitney TF33-P-100A turbofan engines at full thrust. Dawn was touching the eastern sky, coming out of the Sea of China and reaching over Vietnam toward Cambodia and Thailand.

The aircraft was a modified Boeing 707 that had been specially built over twenty years ago for the US military. Since its sale, the US Air Force insignia had been painted over and the entire fuselage was now a flat black, except for the plane's name, scripted in red on the nose: The Lady Gayle. The most notable change on the outside from the standard 707 was the large 30 foot diameter rotodome on top of the plane, just aft of the wings. There were also no side windows, hiding the interior from prying eyes.

After buying the used plane from the government for twenty million dollars, Michelet Technologies, the company that now owned it, had spent two years renovating it. The interior of the modified 707 had cost Michelet an additional forty million dollars to refurbish to its own specs. The company had recouped their investment and much more in the first three years the plane had been in service. Most recently, there was the mission over northern Canada where the plane had helped Michelet's special earth survey crew target eight sites as potential diamond fields. So far, two sites had turned up diamonds, three had been busts and the other two still had field teams on the ground. The two good fields had already yielded over eighty million dollars profit in product, with three times as much projected to be mined over the next two years. It would have taken ground survey crews years to find the sites and do the initial scans, something the plane had done in one day with one pass over the area.

The Lady Gayle was the latest and most unique wrinkle in geologic exploration, able to accomplish missions from looking for diamond fields to searching for deep buried oil. Of course, it wasn't the plane itself, but the forty million dollars of high tech surveillance and imaging equipment which produced the finds. The plane was the platform for the sophisticated equipment and the scientists. Their information was data-linked to Michelet Corporate headquarters in Glendale, California.

At both locations there was a member of the Michelet family, third richest in America according to those in the know. In Glendale it was the senior man himself, Paul Michelet, sixty-four years old and not looking a day over fifty. He ran the entire Michelet multi-national empire, but the Imaging Interpretation Center, IIC, buried four stories underground beneath the chrome and black glass Michelet Building, was his favorite place. He also had a personal tie to the crew of the Lady Gayle, named after his late wife, a woman with some distant connections to the English monarchy. On board the 707, his daughter and only child, Ariana Michelet was in charge.

This was no case of unfounded nepotism and every person on board the Lady Gayle knew that. Ariana Michelet had a PhD in earth sciences and a masters degree in computers. She not only understood the machines, she understood what the machines were coming up with. And she had spent the last ten years working in the field for Michelet Technologies before being promoted the previous year to head of field surveys. Besides her technical expertise, she also had an uncanny way with people, something her father could appreciate.