“How’re you doing?” Brian asked.
“It … hurts,” the man said, his eyes coming open. “I’ll survive, but … Are you a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I can breathe, man, but it hurts. Broken rib, maybe.” The effort of the analysis caused the man to grimace again as Brian repositioned him and opened his shirt, carefully probing his chest and side as more voices filled in the story of Judy Jackson’s wall-pounding officiousness.
“Is your child okay?” Brian asked Karen Davidson, who nodded before, answering, “Yes. He caught her in midair. She would have hit the floor headfirst.”
Brian tried to focus on doing all the appropriate things for the injured man, relieved there was no evidence of internal bleeding or a compound fracture or anything that would require the immediate ministrations of his medical expertise. Having made sure the passenger was as comfortable as possible, Brian stood, his mind absorbing the outrage of the people around him, focusing like a crystalline lens on Judy Jackson.
“I’ll check on you later,” he said absently, pushing forward and striding up the aisle. He found the staircase and moved to the top landing three treads at a time, brushing past the three men he’d seen scrambling after Jackson, all of whom were standing empty-handed near the upper-deck galley wondering what to do.
The cockpit door was ahead, and as he approached it, the door to the rest room opened and a pilot with three stripes on each shoulder and an appropriately dour expression emerged.
“Hey! Captain!” Brian barked. The pilot froze in his tracks and turned, scanning the approaching angry customer as he held up his hand.
“I’m not the captain. I’m the copilot.”
Brian pushed into the small alcove, trapping the pilot between him and the closed cockpit door.
“Do you have any idea what’s going on here?”
The copilot snorted and rolled his eyes. “Yes, sir, I think I know what’s going on here. But I’m not the captain, so I can’t control it,” Garth Abbott said. “May I ask who you are?” he added.
Something in the copilot’s voice stopped Brian in his tracks. This was the enemy, but on a deeper level there’d been a sudden flash of kinship he could neither explain nor place, and he realized he was actually extending his hand to the copilot.
“I’m Dr. Brian Logan. Thanks to your lead flight attendant, there’s an injured man downstairs. I’ve just been treating him. He’s got several fractured ribs.”
Brian heard his own words, metered and calm, as if they were coming from someone else. He wanted to scream and snarl and gesture, but if this was an ally …
The copilot sighed and shook his head. “She’s a real piece of work, that one. What’d she do?”
Brian gave a quick synopsis before pointing to the closed cockpit door. “I think she’s hiding in the cockpit.”
“Could be. What can I do for you, Doctor?”
Brian hadn’t expected that question. For a moment, he realized he hadn’t a clue what the answer should be. He wanted what they couldn’t provide. He wanted Daphne back. But in lieu of the impossible, he knew what he craved was mindless revenge. He wanted them bankrupt for what they’d done to him … to his wife, he corrected himself. He wanted their money, their corporate life, and complete and utter public condemnation of them. He wanted people to be ashamed that Meridian had ever been called an airline. He wanted the captain who’d killed Daphne to be fired, prosecuted, and ruined.
And here was one of the enemy’s pilots asking him what he wanted.
Brian’s jaw came open two or three times as he tried to spit out the venom sloshing in his mind, but it wouldn’t come on cue.
“Doctor?” The pilot prompted him again.
“I want that woman to get back here and apologize to everyone.”
Garth stood stock still for a few seconds, then began nodding. “Understood.”
“There’s not a passenger on this aircraft who hasn’t had it with your crew, especially that idiot.”
“You mean Jackson?”
“If that’s her name.”
“It is.”
“So where is she? Hiding in the cockpit?”
He nodded. “Essentially, though she says she’s too disgusted with everyone to come out.”
“That bitch needs to be fired,” Brian said, pointing again toward the closed cockpit door as the copilot scratched his chin. “Are you aware of what she did?”
“Yes, but the captain isn’t, and … I think he needs to hear all this from you firsthand.” Garth glanced at the cockpit cipher lock, then back at Brian. “Doctor, would you take that empty seat in the first row back there, please. I … can’t talk to the captain with anyone standing here.”
Brian complied as Garth raised the handset and asked for entry before sliding his hand in the appropriate position in the cipher lock.
“Who’s with you? I can’t see anyone on the monitor,” Phil was saying.
“No, he’s seated, as per the procedure, Phil. But I think you need to talk to him.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. You need to hear this.”
The sound of the locks unlatching reached his ears and Garth turned and nodded to Brian Logan to come forward, motioning him into the cockpit before following and securing the door.
A startled Judy Jackson looked up from the copilot’s seat with a trapped expression. “Phil, Judy has created a near revolt downstairs and didn’t bother to tell us what really happened, but one of our passengers here will give you the straight story.”
“You!” Judy said, rising from the seat, her eyes on Brian Logan.
“Sit!” Brian ordered, pointing at her as he turned to the startled captain in the left seat, who was alternately looking between Brian and Garth’s surprised expression.
“Abbott, what’s this about?”
“Tell him what happened, Doctor,” Garth said.
Brian Logan described what had happened below as he watched Phil Knight turn and glare at Judy Jackson.
“Something you forgot to tell me, Judy?”
“It wasn’t important,” she replied.
“Captain,” Brian continued, “I want you to arrest this woman for assaulting a passenger, after you have her apologize on the PA. And I want your public apology as well for never talking to us and for all the other ridiculous things that have happened on this flight.”
Phil looked back over his shoulder at Brian, his face a scowl. “You don’t make demands of me, I want you out of my cockpit.”
“No, Captain,” Brian replied, his voice hardening, “you’re going to force this bitch to apologize.”
Phil laughed nervously. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I have the authority of three hundred angry passengers who’ve had it with this lousy excuse of an airline, and are tired of being abused and lied to and fed garbage.”
Phil tried to pull himself up in the seat as he glared at Brian Logan. “I said, get out of my cockpit!”
“No! Not until you apologize on that PA and force her to apologize publicly.”
Garth placed a hand on Brian Logan’s shoulder, but the physician shrugged it off and leveled a finger in the captain’s face as Judy shook her head in disgust.
“In effect,” Brian said, “you’re no longer in command of this airplane, Captain. We are! Your passengers are in charge, and we’re demanding immediate apologies, and the arrest of this woman.”
There was a derisive snort from the copilot’s seat and Judy rolled her eyes. “Yeah, like you’re going to get anything but a decade in prison for making hijacking demands. You know what we do with hijackers these days?”
Phil Knight caught his copilot’s eye. “Get this man out of here,” he snapped, motioning to Brian. Once again Garth tried to put his hands gently on Brian’s shoulders, but this time the doctor whirled around and raised a fist in the copilot’s face.
“Don’t touch me again!”
The copilot backed awa
y, his hands in the air, his mind on the crash axe mounted on the inside wall of the cockpit just inside the door.
Brian sensed the change in Garth’s attitude and began moving quickly past him toward the cockpit door. He put his hand on the door handle as he watched the three of them warily. “What’s it going to be, Captain?” he asked. “Time’s up.”
Phil forced himself to swivel around in his command chair and make eye contact with the man in the back of his cockpit. His heart was racing, and he struggled to stay calm.
“Look, she’s going to stay up here, okay? I’m confining her.”
“You’re WHAT?” Judy snapped. “I’m not the problem here, buster!”
“Shut up, Judy,” Phil replied.
“Go to hell, flyboy,” she shot back, tossing her head and folding her arms.
“She’s out of the way,” Phil said. “But no one’s apologizing on the PA. Now get the hell out of my cockpit!”
For several tense seconds they stared at each other. Brian nodded at last. “For now. But you will apologize.” Garth opened the door for him.
“What was your name again?” Phil asked, trying to regain a modicum of control.
The effect on Brian Logan was immediate. He turned back to the front, partially closing the door behind him as he stared at each of them in turn, his expression only semirational.
“My name is Dr. Brian Logan. By the way, why don’t you get on your phone and ask your corporate headquarters who Daphne Logan was?”
He turned and slammed the door behind him
The cockpit was silent again except for the hum of the instruments and the myriad cooling fans. Judy exhaled first, inclining her head toward the door.
“You see what I’ve had to deal with? I can’t believe you were mollycoddling him!”
“What did that mean?” Garth asked. “Ask about Daphne Logan?”
Judy was shaking her head. “I have no idea.”
Garth was watching Phil Knight, waiting for the inevitable torrent of blame as the captain shook his head, his voice strained. “Nice move, Abbott, bringing a wild man to the cockpit. The company will probably fire you for that.”
“I didn’t know he was unbalanced.”
“That’s no excuse.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
WASHINGTON, D.C.
12:05 P.M. EDT
The loud chirping of his cell phone prompted an immediate apology as David Byrd reached for the offending instrument he had thought was in vibrate mode. The three other men around the table—all FAA management-level friends—waved it off as he punched the on button and said hello.
“How soon can you be at NRO headquarters?” an instantly recognizable male voice blared from the other end.
“Colonel … Blaylock?” David asked.
“Who else would be calling you from my phone? Please answer the question.”
“In an hour or so, but …”
“Good. It’s eleven-thirty now, and it’ll take me ninety minutes. I’ll meet you in the main rotunda at one.”
“Wait! Why?”
“Why?” Blaylock sounded incredulous.
“That’s right. Why?”
“You really want me to have to shoot you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then don’t ask. Trust me. This a very nonsecure line, and I’m a very nonsecure reservist.”
“So I’m beginning to understand.”
“Ah, good. Insults. The bedrock of a good friendship. See you in ninety minutes.”
David punched off the phone and looked up to find two of his three colleagues also engaged in cell-phone conversations.
“Gotta go?” the other one asked.
“Not yet,” David replied, shaking his head and smiling at John Blaylock’s bull-in-the-china-closet style. “First, I’m going to finish my coffee.”
John Blaylock was waiting when David Byrd entered the NRO’s lobby, but the newly scrubbed and uniformed version of the man he’d met dockside in Annapolis looked wholly different.
A few hairs out of place, but within standards, David mused to himself as Blaylock stowed his flight cap and pointed to the security desk, deflecting the inevitable questions until they were inside and under the escort scrutiny of a senior analyst named George Zoffel.
“So, can you tell me now without risk of homicide?” David asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said, turning to Zoffel. “Are these halls secure, George?”
Zoffel smiled and nodded without comment.
“Why are we here, John?” David pressed.
“Because you want to know about the state of alert we’re in looking for a Trojan Horse, and because you need to know how commercial aviation fits into that twenty-four-seven search, and you need to see what the satellites are seeing.”
“Something’s up?”
“Something’s always up, David.”
Zoffel stopped in front of a door unlabeled except for a number, passed a card through a cipher lock reader, and motioned them in when it swung open.
“And this would be?” David asked.
“This would be very hard to explain to the civilian world,” Blaylock quipped, “but despite its astronomical cost of several billion, Georgie here can sit us in front of an array of monitors and call up real-time satellite pictures of most of the fissile material on planet Earth.”
George Zoffel was nodding.
David followed them into a room bisected by a curved table with a half dozen comfortable swivel chairs facing an equally curved wall of large liquid crystal screens. The table itself was really a control console housing a dizzying array of switches and push buttons and keyboards.
George Zoffel ran his hands over the panel with experienced ease, punching in authorization codes and responding to several prompts, including having to place his hand in an identification scanner. The screens came to life, thirteen of them showing a dizzying variety of views and maps.
“Our current European scan array,” Zoffel said, giving him a quick briefing on the constant scan for fissionable nuclear fuels and the impossibility of detecting raw hardware such as nuclear triggers from space. “But what we also do is keep a gimlet eye on all commercial shipping. Airlines, ships, trains, even trucks, to the extent we can, as they move through high-risk choke points. Much of the evaluation is done by highspeed computers using very sophisticated algorithms we’ve developed, but they’re anything but foolproof. For instance, we can’t see a biological or chemical bomb generically from space, but we can see suspicious movement or shipments, and we’re constantly cross-checking commercial shipping and known commercial flights against flight plans and known legitimate shipments.”
“This is needle-in-a-haystack territory, then,” David observed.
“Absolutely. And now it’s getting worse. We’ve got a full staff working around the clock looking for that needle.” He glanced at Blaylock. “Topsecret crypto clearance active for Colonel Byrd?”
“Confirmed.” John Blaylock nodded.
“Okay. Twenty minutes before you gentlemen walked in, we were directed to divert as many of our resources as possible to watching sub-Saharan Africa for a possible terrorist incursion. That’s a major shift. Before today, the big emphasis was our shores.”
“Where’d the directive come from?” John Blaylock asked as he studied the world map on one of the screens.
“The White House. We’ve been told to expect a major terrorist attack on a major European city within forty-eight hours.”
IN FLIGHT ABOARD MERIDIAN FLIGHT SIX
6:09 P.M. Local
Phil Knight looked out over the southern expanse of the Sahara and tried to convince himself the remaining hours to Cape Town would pass quickly. He’d purposefully said nothing to his copilot for the past ten minutes, but Garth Abbott could see his eyes darting constantly to the large center instrument display as he watched the gauges for number four. He knew Phil Knight was waiting and probably hoping for any indication that he’d been right all a
long and number four was bad.
“It’s steady as a rock, Phil,” Garth said, deliberately throwing the fact in Knight’s face. Predictably, there was no response.
Judy Jackson was silent as well and sitting like a dour sphinx in the jump seat behind the captain. She was still shaken by what had gone on in the cabin.
The interphone chime sounded, and Garth reached for the handset when he realized no one else was going to answer.
“Is this the captain?” a stressed female voice asked.
“No. This is the copilot. Who’s this?”
“Uh, Cathy, in coach.” She sounds agitated, he thought. “Would you please make an announcement that the seat-belt sign is still on? They won’t listen to us. Several passengers are wandering around refusing to stay seated. As a matter of fact, I know you’re not supposed to, but if you or the captain could come down here and talk to them directly, it would help a lot.”
Garth glanced at Phil Knight and repeated the request. Again there was no response.
“Phil, dammit, this silent treatment is childish,” Garth said. “Answer the question if you’re still in command. Should I go downstairs and take a look?”
At last the captain looked around, his face grim and tight, his eyes narrowed in anger. “You know what? I don’t give a damn,” he said. “But you know the rules. Someone threatens to cut your head off: I don’t open the door, too bad. I don’t open the door.”
Garth suppressed the retorts that flashed through his mind, nodding instead as he unfastened his seat belt.
“I’m well aware of the rules,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He opened the cockpit door and moved into the upper-deck cabin, subconsciously expecting the usual friendly reception. But there was no friendliness in the eyes of those who looked up. It was as if he had stepped over the transom and fallen headfirst into ice water, the atmosphere of unrest and dislike almost as bad as the crucible of hatred he’d left behind. The idea of leaving the hostility of the cockpit had been inviting, but this wasn’t much better, he thought. Uniformed pilots normally got smiles and nods in flight when they entered the cabin, but all he saw was a sea of distrustful eyes marking his passage as prisoners watch the movements of their captor.
Turbulence Page 18
