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Praise for the Writing of John J. Nance
“King of the modern-day aviation thriller.” —Publishers Weekly
“Nance is a wonderful storyteller.” —Chicago Tribune
Final Approach
“A taut high-tech mystery that could have been written only by an airline industry insider.” —New York Times–bestselling author Stephen Coonts
Scorpion Strike
“Gripping.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Phoenix Rising
“Harrowing … Nance delivers suspense and smooth writing. A classy job.” —The New York Times Book Review
Pandora’s Clock
“A ticking time bomb of suspense.” —Chicago Tribune
“A combination of The Hot Zone and Speed.” —USA Today
Medusa’s Child
“So compelling it’s tough to look away.” —People
The Last Hostage
“A thrilling ride … [Will] keep even the most experienced thriller addicts strapped into their seats for the whole flight.” —People
Blackout
“A high tension, white knuckle thriller … Joltingly scary.” —New York Post
Turbulence
“Mesmerizing in-flight details [and] a compelling cast of realistic characters … once again prove John J. Nance ‘the king of the modern-day aviation thriller’.” —Publishers Weekly
Skyhook
“Readers are in for death-defying plane rides, lively dialogue, and realistic characters who survive crises with courage and humor.” —Associated Press
On Shaky Ground: America’s Earthquake Alert
“Gripping! Breathlessly unrolls a succession of disasters.… If you want a literary equivalent of the quake experience, On Shaky Ground is the book for you.” —San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
Turbulence
John J. Nance
To the Memory of my Father
Joseph Turner Nance
1917–1977
Senior International Lawyer
Army Air Corps and United States Air Force Officer-Pilot-Veteran
And the best Dad—and inspiration—a boy could want
PROLOGUE
Dr. Brian Logan careened his Lexus past a frightened patient and shot out of the parking garage of the hospital that had just fired him. An impossible mix of embarrassment and anger spurred him on, and he jammed the accelerator repeatedly to the floor, driving like a madman, shooting across the Charles River into Cambridge and daring any cop to stop him. He ran every red light he found and skidded around the corners through the quiet neighborhood streets until he screeched to a halt at last in front of his own address—the empty Georgian two story that he and his wife had loved so much.
Logan put the car in park, but his hands wouldn’t complete the job of turning off the engine or opening the door. He glanced down, realizing he was still wearing the green surgical garb he’d donned for the bypass procedure they had canceled without warning. The memory of storming through the corridors to confront the medical director was little more than a hazy procession of images now, fading against the kaleidoscope of thoughts whirling through his mind and obliterating the beauty of a late spring day.
He couldn’t recall when he hadn’t had surgical privileges at Mercy Hospital. He could easily find another place to practice, but to be thrown out was a horrible, disgraceful shock.
There was an endless blue sky overhead framed by an explosion of green leaves from the row of sturdy elms, but all he could see was the disapproving face of Dr. Jonas Kinkaid, his former mentor’s words still burning their way through his brain after his latest outburst: “You’re out of control, Doctor, and you’ve thrown your last tantrum in this hospital.”
Deep inside Logan realized Kinkaid was right, but to admit that was unthinkable, even now. Surgeons weren’t allowed to be human, to lose control. But in the year since Daphne’s death there had been no recovery and no form of deliverance, only numbness and disorientation punctuated by bursts of frustration and fury too often aimed at the nurses. The hurt had oozed into his personality like primordial mud, encasing and calcifying the chasm within, taking the form of the compassion that had once lived there.
Brian Logan forced himself out of the car and into his house. He closed the door and stood for a moment in the hallway listening to the hollow ticking of the grandfather clock, his mind replaying the music of Daphne’s voice and the way she used to sing out a greeting and run to his arms—sometimes with nothing on but a smile. The memory left him drained, and he trudged to the living room to sink into her favorite easy chair as he tried to conjure the feeling of her arms around him once more. She had been the only true love of his life, her beauty and sexuality beyond his wildest dreams, made all the more exciting and wonderful by her sparkling intelligence and the way she embraced life—not to mention the sharp contrasts with his first wife, Rebecca.
Brian’s eyes fell on the wing-back chair by the piano where he’d been sitting the day the call came. “We’re so sorry to tell you, Doctor,” an airline representative had said, “but your wife suffered a medical emergency in flight.” Daphne Logan, the center of his universe, had hemorrhaged to death at thirty-five thousand feet, taking their unborn son with her when the jetliner’s captain had refused to make an emergency landing. For an hour and twenty minutes she’d begged the crew to land, but if she was well enough to ask, the captain concluded, her condition wasn’t serious enough to justify the cost of an unscheduled landing. The hundred-million-dollar negligence suit Brian had filed would come up for trial next year, but there was no satisfaction in his attorney’s assurances of success. A million, a billion, so what? The money could never replace his wife and unborn son.
He could have saved Daphne. Of that he was sure. Even with crude instruments. Even airborne. And he could have gone with her on that trip to see her parents, but he’d stayed behind in Boston to work. He had been stupid and selfish, and now he was alone, and fired, and coming apart.
Brian jumped to his feet and began pacing, an array of thoughts cascading through his mind, including a useless urge to call Rebecca, his first wife, now remarried and living in Newport, Connecticut. She would be underwhelmed by such a call, though not unreceptive. She expected him to fail. He’d been a long-term disappointment to her, a project she couldn’t complete. Rebecca Cunningham, the beautiful, educated debutante from a proper monied New England family had been raised a dour pragmatist, and the young M.D. she’d brought home for her parents’ inspection so many years ago held promise only if she could mold him into the dutiful image of her father, a tenured professor of medicine at Harvard. Brian should plan to practice for ten years, she decreed, before entering academic medicine as a professor. He should publish. He should speak. He should smoke a pipe and be interested in long evenings of polite conversation. He should learn to regard the word fun as slightly subversive, as she’d been taught.
But Rebecca hadn’t counted on her new husband having a fun-loving nature. Such things were irresponsible and clearly unacceptable, and in the end, she decreed the project a failure by divorcing him.
Daphne had blown into his life five years after the divorce like a Caribbean zephyr, inspiring a renaissance and waking a sleeping heart. She was a starry-eyed romantic with a Ph.D., a true bohemian in designer dresses to whom all things were possible and beautiful, and she liked him just as he was. He had fallen for her absolutely—utterly, shudderingly in love with the very idea of her.
Brian glanced over quickly at the portrait of her he’d centered over the formal couch. Daphne stood there among the flowers of h
er garden, the petite vixen who loved being in love, and to whom sex was language and light. Brian the unchangeable had become a bumbling puppy falling all over himself to please her, and he was amazed that all she wanted was him in his original state. In the three years of their marriage, life had blossomed from a duty to a wild joy, and whereas Rebecca had held pregnancy at bay pending Brian’s probation during what he used to sneer was the “Federal Reconstruction of Brian Project,” Daphne wanted children as soon as possible.
Brian forced himself from the chair and wandered absently into the kitchen, spotting a forgotten airline ticket on the table. He’d agreed months ago to do a surgical lecture series in Cape Town, South Africa, and he was supposed to leave from Boston’s airport in two days. These were the tickets, and there was no point in canceling with a fat fee involved, especially since he’d be needing it while he looked for another hospital to take him in.
The need to do something propelled him back to the coffee grinder to start a fresh pot, a ritual as comforting and familiar as scrubbing before surgery. His hands went through the motions automatically, the aroma barely registering as the coffee pot filled. He poured a cup and sat heavily at the table, flipping absently through the airline ticket, reading everything on it with the desperation of an early riser studying the fine print on a cereal box.
He was on Virgin Atlantic from Boston to London. But on the London-to-Cape Town leg, his office manager had booked him on Meridian Airlines.
Oh, God. No! Brian thought, jumping to his feet as he held the offending ticket at arm’s length. He could feel his heart racing. Meridian was the airline that had killed his wife and son twelve months before. There was no way.
A handwritten note had been stuffed in the envelope, and he found it now and opened it.
Dr. Logan, Virgin Atlantic doesn’t fly to Cape Town. I’m really, really sorry, but there were no other seats available on anything but Meridian, and I snagged the last one. So it’s Virgin to London. Stay overnight. Then Meridian to Cape Town.
He wadded up the note and threw it at the wall, watching the crumpled paper fall short, just as his life was falling short of the acceptable. He would have to endure it, but it meant surviving for ten hours in the belly of a beast he wanted badly to gut.
Brian had prayed for Meridian’s bankruptcy, and even—much to his own horror—found himself turning on the network morning shows each day hoping for pictures of smoking wreckage with the Meridian logo clearly in view. The thought sickened the part of him that remained calm and reasoned, but incited a riot among the other facets of his personality. The need to hurt them, to retaliate, to extract the rawest form of revenge was almost consuming.
And now …
Dr. Brian Logan felt a sudden stillness descend over him like a dark veil of impenetrable rage, and for the first time since Daphne’s death, his mind became quiet and cold and calculating. And within that whirlpool of inchoate pain, the horror of the impending encounter with the enemy began to metastasize into something else.
CHAPTER ONE
FAA AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL TOWER
CHICAGO O’HARE AIRPORT, ILLINOIS
11:30 A.M. CDT
“This is nuts!”
Shift Supervisor Jake Kostowitz shook his head in pure exasperation as he muttered vague epithets to himself. The day was going to hell already.
Again he felt the deep craving for a cigarette, the fallout of quitting after twenty years. The FAA’s no-smoking policy inside control towers was unshakable, and he still felt a pang of resentment every time the urge became too strong to bat down without a surrogate stick of gum.
He hated gum. But he dug into his right pants pocket anyway now to find some.
All around him—spread out for three hundred sixty degrees and some two hundred feet below the new, glassed-in, air-conditioned O’Hare FAA control tower—the gridlock of overheated, delayed airliners inched forward along crowded taxiways past jammed intersections, baked by the relentless glare of the summer sun.
What was that figure he’d heard? Jake mused. Was it fifty, or sixty flights that were scheduled to depart O’Hare at precisely the same time every day? Whatever the figure, at least the system was fully recovered from the nationwide passenger panic following the loss of the World Trade Center. Jake shook his head slightly, a gesture no one else noticed. Never did he ever want to see his airport looking like a ghost town again, but the endless flow of airliners was now back to ridiculous, and the airlines refused to change it.
The aroma of hot cinnamon reached his nose, and Jake turned toward the stairwell to see one of his off-duty controllers munching on a huge roll and grinning. Jake shook his head in mock disapproval. The controller was at least eighty pounds overweight and a walking heart attack. He climbed the last few steps licking his fingers and stood beside Jake, surveying the intense action in the tower cab.
“Well, you think they’ll do it, boss?”
Jake turned to glance at him, trying to read his meaning. “Sorry?”
“That’s a good word for them. Sorry. I’m talking about America’s most dysfunctional airline. Dear old Meridian Air, or as a pilot friend of mine who works there calls ’em: ‘Comedian Air, where service is a joke.’”
Jake shook his head. “I sure hope they don’t walk. They’ve got twenty-six percent of this market now. That’s a lot of delayed passengers.”
“How would they know the difference?” The overweight controller laughed. “Besides, that would also mean twenty-six percent fewer flights for us to sort out.”
Jake chuckled and shook his head. “Yeah, right. As if United and American wouldn’t pick up the slack. We’d be just as stressed.” Jake pointed to the half-eaten sweet roll. “Any more of those in the break room?”
“Yeah. I bought a box. Have at ’em,” the man said, watching Jake slip past him down the stairway.
A TV was droning away in the corner of the break room as Jake swung through the door and headed for the box of Cinnabons, the mention of air traffic control catching his attention.
The set had been tuned to C-Span, and a congressional hearing was in progress. Jake recalled reading something about it the day before. Some congressman had seized on the latest air rage incidents to justify a hearing.
Another useless exercise in political grandstanding, Jake thought, his curiosity piqued by the sight of an Air Force officer sitting alone at the witness table in a hearing about the civilian airline industry. The officer wore the silver eagle emblem of a colonel.
“Mr. Chairman,” the senior officer was saying, “every day we have hundreds, if not thousands, of enraged passengers flying this airline system and just barely containing their fury. While excess liquor consumption often makes things worse, the underlying causes are a combination of massive overcrowding and poor passenger treatment, not enhanced security procedures.”
A gallery of still photographers was sitting on the floor in front of the witness table, and the click-whirr of their constant shooting formed a strange audible backdrop to the televised image.
“So how do we fix it, Colonel?” the chairman was asking. “Is your task force ready with recommendations?”
Jake absently picked out an outrageously caloric Cinnabon and began munching it as he watched. There was a small sign on the witness table, and it identified the officer as U.S. Air Force Colonel David Byrd of the FAA.
Ah! An Air Force liaison officer, Jake thought. He had fond memories of working with a Navy liaison captain assigned to air traffic control several years back.
“No, sir,” Colonel Byrd was saying. “We’re not ready to issue the final report as yet, but I can tell you this from my own research: Tougher criminal laws won’t do it, because people don’t plan to get angry and out of control. In other words, we can’t adequately change human nature by criminalizing it, and these incidents reflect the predictable responses of humans under great stress. You pack overheated people into overcrowded airports and airplanes and treat them like dirt, lie to them,
manipulate them, and price-gouge them, and the numbers of rage incidents are, by definition, going to increase. Mr. Chairman, this is a ticking bomb.”
The committee chairman raised his gavel to call for a recess and the next witness and Jake headed toward the stairway to climb back to the tower cab, the muffled roar from a departing 727 catching his attention as he stepped back on the top step. He tracked the departing jetliner for a few seconds, wondering how long that particular crew had had to wait at the end of the runway.
It was, indeed, a ticking bomb, Jake thought, because the delays and the crowding were worsening all the time, and it was already a typical day: there would be no on-time takeoffs the rest of the afternoon, yet the airlines would keep on shoving their jam-packed airplanes back from the gates to join the hour-long taxi delays while recording each push-back as an “on-time” departure. Only when the air traffic control system ordered them to stay at the gate would they do so, and even then, too often the airplanes were shoved out of the gate to make room for an inbound flight. The “penalty box”—as the ramp designated for waiting airliners was called—was usually full these days, and the airlines usually knew precisely which flights would be late. The passengers, of course, weren’t supposed to know.
What a scam! And we get blamed. It’s always the FAA’s fault.
The same thing happened every day with depressing predictability, and today the rapid approach of a line of heavy thunderstorms now beating up Springfield, Illinois, to the west was poised to make the daily air traffic snarl even worse. When the storm finally moved over O’Hare, everything would come to a halt and stay that way until it passed.
Jake looked to the west, catching the glint of lightning a hundred miles out. Hanging in the western sky between the black thunderstorms and O’Hare was a seemingly endless procession of expensive aluminum moving steadily toward the airport with landing lights sparkling against the dark clouds beyond. Their pilots, Jake knew, were struggling to comply with the precise airspeeds ordered by the harried men and women of Chicago Approach Control, located several floors below the quiet tower cab in a windowless room. Airliners as big as office buildings traveling at two hundred miles per hour were reduced to electronic blips on radar screens monitored by air traffic controllers who snapped off continual speed changes as they tried to keep the minimum legal distance between them.
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