A bolt of lightning flashed close outside his left window and the cockpit was illuminated with an orange glow, followed by the crackling sound of unharnessed electricity. Berry sat up quickly. Suddenly, all the complexities of the overhead instrument panel were swept away. “Oh, for God’s sake!” He saw in a moment of unbridled clarity his old Buick, rolling down a hill in Dayton, Ohio, engine off, and he saw his hand turn the ignition switch, and heard again the sound of the Buick’s engine firing into life. “Sharon! The ignitors! The ignitors! Listen. Listen to me. Get up. Get up!” He looked down at the altimeter. Two thousand feet.
As she unbuckled her belt and slid from her chair, the Straton broke through the bottom of the thunderstorm, and Berry could see the surface of the ocean clearly now. The sky was relatively calm, and the aircraft flew without much turbulence. But even from this altitude he could see the towering white foam of the swelling waves. He knew that even if they could get out of the aircraft, they wouldn’t survive that sea.
Sharon Crandall was holding his arm and looking at him. Berry realized in an instant that she had perfect trust and confidence in him; as a flight attendant, she must have known that to ditch without a restraining belt meant almost certain death.
Berry spoke clearly and firmly. “I can’t look away from the flight instruments. . . . On the overhead panel there are four switches marked ‘engine ignitors.’ Hurry.”
She knelt down behind the pedestal between the pilot’s chairs and looked up. Her eyes swept the instruments and switches above her. “Where? Where? John . . .”
Berry tried to reconstruct the panel in his mind while he kept his eyes glued to the flight instruments. He finally glanced up for a brief instant, for as long as he could dare. “Lower left! Lower left! Four switches. Yellow lights above them. Yellow! Yellow! Turn them on. On!”
Crandall spotted them and passed her hand over all four switches at once, pushing them into the on position. “On! On!”
Berry looked down at the altimeter. Nine hundred feet. The rate of descent had slowed slightly, but they had lost some airspeed. They had less than half a minute before the Straton would hit the water. He called out to Sharon, “Back in the seat. Strap in.” He stared at the center panel and watched to see if the Straton’s engine instruments would come to life. He tried to think if there was anything else he had to do to fire up the engines, but couldn’t think of anything. He focused intently on the four temperature gauges. Slowly, the needles began to rise. “Ignition! Ignition! We have power!” But he knew that the process of accelerating the jet engines and producing enough thrust for lift would take time, perhaps more time than they had left.
He glanced at the altimeter. Two hundred and fifty feet. The airliner’s speed had bled off to 210 knots and the descent was slower, but he sensed he was very close to a stall. As soon as that thought entered his mind, the stall warning alarm began to sound—a synthetic voice repeating the word AIRSPEED,AIRSPEED,AIRSPEED,. Berry knew that he should push forward on the wheel, lower the nose, and pick up airspeed to avert the stall, but he had no altitude left for that. Reluctantly, he pulled slightly back on the wheel and felt the nose rise. The Straton began to vibrate, the tremors shaking the airframe so violently that it became nearly impossible to read the instruments. The Straton was engaged in a test of strength between gravity and the thrust of its accelerating engines. As he glanced at his altimeter, he saw that gravity was winning. One hundred feet.
He looked down out of the side window. The hundred feet that was showing on the altimeter seemed less than that in reality. The swelling sea that sped by beneath him seemed to rise up to the wings of the airliner. He glanced out the front windshield. Huge, towering waves rose and broke only a short distance below him. If even one of those waves reached up and touched the Straton, the aircraft would lose enough speed to make a crash a certainty.
Berry scanned his instruments. Engine power was up, airspeed was good, but altitude was still dropping. Berry nudged the control column, trying to keep the nose up. He was walking a shaky tightrope, and one slip would put them into the violent sea at nearly 200 knots.
The synthetic voice announcing AIRSPEED continued, and so did the prestall vibrations. Berry worked the flight controls judiciously, trying to trade their few ounces of available energy for a few inches of extra altitude.
The altimeter read zero, though he guessed the airplane was still about twenty feet above the water. It was becoming obvious that the Straton was not going to make it, given the rate of increasing thrust against the rate of descent. Involuntarily, the muscles of his buttocks tightened and he rose imperceptibly from his seat. “Come on, you pig—climb! Climb, you bastard!” He turned to Crandall and shouted above the noise. “Locate the afterburners! Afterburners!”
She scanned the overhead panel again, near where the ignitor switches had been. She raised her arm and gave Berry a thumbs-up.
“Hit the switches!” He paused for a split second and said, “Then get into position to ditch.”
Crandall hit the four switches.
Berry heard and felt a two-phased thud as the after-burners kicked in. He had no idea what would happen next.
Crandall called to Linda. “Put your head down! Like this.” Crandall hunched over into a crash position, as well as she could with the copilot’s wheel in front of her. Before she put her head down, she glanced up to see if Linda had done the same.
Berry felt the slight sensation of being pressed against his seat. The Straton was accelerating as fuel was injected directly into the jet exhausts and ignited to give extra thrust to the engines. The prestall airframe buffeting lessened, and he pulled farther back on the control wheel. The nose came up, and the ocean seemed to sink beneath his windshield. The stall alarm voice sounded one more time, then stopped. The altimeter showed 100 feet and climbing. “We’re climbing! We’re climbing! We’re lifting!”
Sharon Crandall picked her head up. She felt the increased Gs against her body as the aircraft rose. “Oh, God. Dear God.” Tears ran down her cheeks.
Berry held the control column with his left hand, reached his right hand out, and spread his fingers over the four engine throttles. For the first time since he had climbed into the flight chair, he was in control.
He called out to Sharon Crandall. “Afterburners— off.”
She reached up and shut them down.
The Straton decelerated slightly and Berry worked the four throttles, feeling the aircraft accelerate again. He watched the engine temperature and pressure gauges rise and the altimeter needle move upward. Five hundred feet, six hundred. Berry sat back. The unknown terrors of flying the airliner, like most unknown terrors, had been exaggerated.
No one spoke. All the lights in the cockpit came back on, and most of the warning lights extinguished. Outside, the violent storm raged above them, but at their lower altitude it produced no more than rain and manageable winds. John Berry cleared his throat. “We’re heading home. Sharon, Linda, are you both all right?”
The girl answered in a weak voice. “I’m not feeling good.”
Crandall released her seat belt, stood, and stepped over the girl. She noticed that her own legs were wobbling. She took the girl’s face in her hands. “Just a little airsick, honey. You’ll be all right in a minute. Take a lot of deep breaths. There.”
Berry recognized the automatic words of the veteran flight attendant, but the tone was sincere.
Crandall leaned over and gave Berry a light kiss on the cheek, then slid back into the copilot’s chair without a word.
Berry concentrated on the instruments. He let the Straton come up to 900 feet, then leveled out before they rose into the bottom of the thunderstorm.
He listened for sounds from the lounge, but heard nothing that penetrated the noise of the rain, the hum of electronics, or the droning of the jet engines.
He shut off the windshield wipers, experimented with the flight control for a few minutes, then reached out and reengaged the autopilot. The a
mber light went off, and he released the wheel and the throttles and took his feet off the pedals. He flexed his hands and stretched his arms, then turned to Sharon. “That was about as close as it comes. You were very cool.”
“Was I? I don’t remember. I think I remember screaming.” She looked closely at him. “John . . . what happened? You didn’t do something . . . no . . . I read the message.”
“Neither you nor I did anything wrong . . . except to listen to them.”
“What . . . ?”
The alerting bell rang. They looked at each other, then stared down at the data-link screen.
TO FLIGHT 52: DO YOU READ?
ACKNOWLEDGE.
SAN FRANCISCO HQ.
Berry motioned toward the console. “Those bastards. Those sons-of-bitches.”
Crandall looked at him, then back at the message. She had not had time to think clearly about what had happened, and had not yet come to terms with what she’d thought about, but her half-formed conclusions suddenly crystallized. “John . . . how could they . . . ? I mean, how could . . . why . . . ?”
“God, I can’t believe what an idiot I’ve been. Hawaii. That should have been my tip-off. Shift the center of gravity. Fuel gauges. Those goddamned lying sons-of-bitches.”
Crandall was still trying to understand all that had happened. “That was partly my fault. I talked you into—”
“No. I trusted them too. But I shouldn’t have. I should have known. I did know, goddamn it.”
“But why? Why, in the name of God, would they do that?”
“They don’t want”—Berry jerked his thumb over his shoulder—“them back.”
Crandall nodded. She’d thought of that for some time, but never pursued the thought to its natural conclusion. “What are we going to do? What are we going to answer them?”
“Answer? I’m not going to answer anything.”
“No, John. Answer them. Tell them we know what they tried to do.”
Berry considered, then shook his head. “Someone who is trying to kill us has control of the situation down there. Someone in that tight little room off the Dispatch Office. Talking to the man—or men—in that room is like shouting to the man who just pushed you into the water that you’re drowning. I’m not going to tip them off that we’re still alive. That’s our secret, and we’ll make the most of it.”
Crandall nodded reluctantly. “Yes, I suppose. God, I wish we could tell someone. If we don’t get back . . . no one will ever know.”
Berry thought about the data-link messages. He tried to reconstruct them in his mind. “Even if we do get back, we’ll have a hell of a time trying to make anyone believe us. It would be our word against theirs, and we are the ones who suffered decompression, and we are the ones who can’t understand or follow the instructions of trained personnel.”
Sharon Crandall was beginning to get a very clear picture. “Those bastards. Oh, those bastards. Damn them.” She tried to imagine who in the Trans-United hierarchy would be capable of something like this. A few names came to mind, but she decided it could be anyone with enough to lose by having the Straton come back.
Berry was thinking of motives. “They probably don’t want to have to admit that their airport security was bad. They’ll discredit the bomb message we sent them—if they even bothered to pass it on, and try to pin it on someone or something else. The Straton Corporation. Structural failure. What a bunch of conniving, immoral bastards.”
“God, I can’t wait to get back and . . . But are they going to believe us?”
“We have to remember what we read, and believe that what we remember is correct.”
Linda Farley spoke. “We can show them the words printed on the paper.”
Crandall couldn’t follow what the girl was saying. “Did you understand what we were talking about?”
“Yes.”
Berry kept his eyes on the control panel and spoke to her. “Those men in San Francisco lied to us, Linda. They tried to . . . they told us things that would make us crash. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“What words?” asked Crandall.
“In the back. Near where I was sleeping before. It’s sitting in a little door on the wall, and it printed while you were typing and—”
“John! There’s a printer at the rear of the cockpit! I forgot about it.” She tore off her seat belt and jumped down from the flight chair. She moved quickly to the aft bulkhead and peered into a space in the corner near the fuselage wall. “Here it is.” She reached in and tore the narrow sheet from the printer, then grabbed a stack of folded messages from a collecting basket. She held them up and stretched them out. “John! It’s all here. Everything.”
Berry found that he was smiling. Nothing, he admitted, is as sweet as revenge. “Let me see them.”
She brought over the stack of perforated paper, no more than five inches wide, and let the loose end fall. It reached down to the center console between the seats. Each small perforated section held a computer-typed message.
Berry scanned the messages hanging in her hand. “That looks like all of them.” He turned back and stared out the windshield. He could see Sharon’s reflection in the dark, wet glass, standing beside him, the paper trailing down from her hand as she read from it.
He watched her for a few moments, her movements, her facial expressions.
Sharon refolded the messages. “We have to get back and expose these people.”
Berry nodded. If they died in the crash and the cockpit were destroyed, or if they put down at sea, the printouts would probably not survive. He turned to Crandall. “Give me those. Get life vests for all of us.”
Crandall opened the pouch on the bulkhead and handed out the orange life vests. She watched as Berry and Linda put on their life vests, then put one on herself. She took a first-aid kit from the emergency locker on the bulkhead and treated a small cut on Linda Farley’s forehead. She moved beside Berry. “Hold still. You have a lot of scrapes and cuts.”
Berry watched her as she dabbed antiseptic cream on his arms and face. “Where did you get that kit?”
“In the emergency locker.”
“What else is in there?”
“Not much. Most of the emergency equipment is in the cabins and lounges.” At the mention of the lounge, Crandall looked toward the cockpit door. She had, until just then, forgotten about what was on the other side.
Berry handed her the printouts. “Put these into Linda’s vinyl pouch on her life vest. Try to wrap them so they’re waterproof.”
Sharon Crandall understood that he was trying to prepare for the worst. She walked to the locker behind the observer’s chair, took out two items, and brought them up front to Berry. “This is a waterproof flash-light. These are asbestos fire gloves.”
Berry smiled. “Very good.”
Crandall unscrewed the end of the flashlight, removed the batteries, and stuffed the printouts into the empty battery case. She screwed the end back on and slipped the asbestos gloves over both ends of the flash-light. She wrapped the entire package securely with a length of bandage from the first-aid kit and placed it in the pouch fixed to Linda’s life jacket, then snapped it shut. “Linda, you know this is important. If anything happens to us, show this to . . .”
“A policeman,” said the girl.
Crandall smiled. “Yes. A policeman. Tell him it’s very important.”
She nodded.
Sharon Crandall sat back in the copilot’s seat.
Berry reached out and took her hand. He said to her, “No one can say you didn’t earn your flight pay this trip.”
She squeezed his hand and smiled. “When you first came aboard, I said to myself, ‘That guy would make a good pilot. . . .”’
“You noticed me when I came aboard?”
“Well . . . you were wearing blue socks with brown shoes.” They both laughed, then Sharon sat back and listened to the engines, and felt their power vibrate through the airframe. She turned back to him.
“John, can you land it?”
Berry looked out the windshield. The rain was tapering off and the sky was becoming lighter. Below, the ocean seemed less turbulent. He glanced at the weather radar. It seemed less cluttered with images, and as far as he could determine, the weather to their front was clearing. “Depends on the weather in San Francisco.” He knew it depended a great deal on his ability. He glanced at the fuel gauges. “Depends on the gas, too. The afterburners drank it up. We’re eating it up now at this altitude. But we can’t use any fuel to climb back up there, and the weather at those altitudes might turn bad again.”
“Do you think we have enough fuel to make it?”
“I don’t know. Too many variables. But I’m willing to bet you a dinner that we at least see the coast before we run out.” Berry smiled to hide his real feeling. He knew what a sucker’s bet it was.
“I’ll bet you we make it to the airport. I want to go to the Four Seasons in New York.”
Berry nodded. “All right.” Then his smile faded. “Listen, if we have to ditch at sea, I’ll know in enough time and we can prepare ourselves. That close to the coast, we should be picked up.” But he wondered if they would go down near a shipping lane. He thought about the possibility of sharks but didn’t know how prevalent they were on the West Coast. He wanted to ask, but decided to wait until they were close. The more he thought about ditching in the sea, the more it seemed to be a beginning, not an end, to their problems. But something else was bothering him. Even a safe landing at San Francisco might not be the end of it. “Sharon, we’ve got to come up with a plan. Something for after we land in San Francisco.”
“What?” She was puzzled. To her, getting the damaged Straton safely to the airport was all they had to do. “What are you talking about?”
“These people,” he said, pointing to the data-link, “tried to kill us. They won’t stop just because we’ve landed.”
“That’s crazy.”
The two of them sat silently for a few seconds. Sharon wondered if Berry could be right. Perhaps she was making too little of it. She said, “If we land at San Francisco in one piece . . . well, we’ll have to be aware that not everyone on the ground is happy to see us.”