Turbulence

by Nance, John J. ;

  Phil reached up to the auto-flight panel and slowly rotated the heading knob clockwise, bringing the selected course to the right, ten, then twenty degrees, as he studied the radar scope to make sure his intended flight path would remain far to the east of the storms. The tops of such monsters routinely soared to altitudes above sixty thousand feet, he knew. He’d seen and avoided countless such thunderheads over the midwestern U.S., but over the vastness of the Sahara, they were sure to be worse.

  Where is that on the map? Phil wondered, looking for the high aeronautical chart and deciding just as quickly that it didn’t matter. He was over the trackless Sahara anyway. Who cared which country claimed it? Besides, he was in emergency status and squawking a hijack code, and the world was legally required to let him do anything he needed to do to get back safely.

  Fifteen feet to the rear on the other side of the cockpit door, Brian Logan watched the world swim back into focus as a fresh gust of oxygen forced its way into his lungs. Colors flashed around him as he regained his bearings and realized someone’s hand was holding the mask hard to his face.

  Brian looked up, finding Janie Bretsen’s eyes. They were green and wide and expressive, he noted, and very prominent above the facial anonymity of her oxygen mask.

  She swept the mask aside for a few seconds to speak.

  “Can you hear me, Brian?”

  He nodded.

  “Keep the mask on. We’re pressure-breathing and your other bottle ran out.” She replaced her mask and breathed deeply a few times before pulling it aside once again. “We’ve only got a few minutes if he doesn’t lower the cabin. I think we’re the last ones still conscious. These bottles don’t have much left.”

  It was Brian’s turn to speak, and the renewed rush of oxygen in his brain was spurring him to the reality that breaking through the door would only bring more dangerous gyrations at the hand of the frightened captain. And there was also the annoying fact that he hadn’t been able to break the lock. If they had just a few minutes of consciousness, then negotiation was the only remaining solution.

  He pulled his mask aside. “Where’s the interphone?”

  Janie looked up and around, spotting one within a few feet. She left him with the fresh oxygen bottle and stood to grab the handset.

  “Keep that mask on. Your time of useful consciousness may only be thirty seconds with it off.”

  He nodded and put the mask back in place.

  “You want to call him?” she asked, pointing to the closed cockpit door.

  He nodded more energetically and she punched in the numbers and handed it to him.

  Phil Knight hesitated before answering the call chime. He estimated that at most one or two of the flight attendants might still be conscious as they sucked the last of the oxygen out of their bottles, but now he felt a flash of worry that once more he’d somehow miscalculated. Raw curiosity won out. He swept the handset to his face, startled to hear Logan on the other end. He glanced down at the console video screen. Logan was no longer in view.

  “I’ve got enough bottles,” the physician began, “to give me enough time to break through and kill you where you sit, and there’s another pilot aboard who can take over, but … I’ll make you a deal.”

  “What?” Phil asked after several seconds of tense silence. “What deal?”

  “Lower this cabin back to ten thousand or better immediately, and we’ll … leave you alone. But … but you also have to promise you’re really going to London, or somewhere we can accept.”

  “I’m going to London, dammit! I told you that.”

  “And no more acrobatics?”

  “All right.”

  “And turn on those screen things … that moving map that tells us where we are, so we can make sure you’re complying.”

  “I guess I can do that.”

  “So … we have a deal?” Brian asked.

  More silence as Phil Knight tried to break through the roaring in his mind to consider the offer. No more break-in attempts in exchange for oxygen. He could get in deep trouble anyway if any of the passengers sued Meridian for making them pass out, so maybe this was a better solution.

  “Understand, Logan,” Phil replied, “if you go back on your word, I’ll just turn off the pressurization and open the valve and we’ll go straight to thirty-nine thousand feet and you’ll be unconscious almost instantly.”

  “Yeah. I understand. Of course I’d be in there and have your neck broken before I passed out, but I hear you. Do we have a deal?”

  “As long as you comply,” Phil said, caution still ricocheting around his head. In the background he could hear a female voice murmuring something about the passenger oxygen masks as Logan’s voice returned.

  “Okay. Hey, you pulled some sort of circuit breaker for the passenger masks, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Phil answered hesitantly.

  “Push it back in.”

  Seconds ticked by before a sudden flutter of noise coursed through the upper-deck cabin as a rubber jungle of yellow oxygen masks cascaded from the overhead panels.

  “All right. The breaker is in. Have the masks dropped?”

  “Yes. I just hope you haven’t killed anyone. No one’s awake to put the masks on.”

  “I have the authority to do anything necessary to put down a mutiny in my airplane,” Phil snapped.

  “Lower the cabin altitude. Quickly. I want to feel my ears popping, now!” Brian added.

  Phil Knight reached to the overhead panel and flipped the appropriate switches, his eyes shifting to the cabin altimeter to verify that the cabin pressure was starting to increase, and the cabin altitude descend.

  “All right. I’m repressurizing.”

  “You’ve probably given a dozen people the bends back here, you stupid fool. You know that?”

  “Screw you, Logan! You’re going to the gas chamber for air piracy and murder anyway. Do you know that?”

  Silence filled the void for several seconds as each man dealt with the standoff and the futility of his respective rage.

  “Look,” Brian said, “you said a while ago that you weren’t suicidal.”

  “Of course I’m not suicidal!”

  “Then you’ve got to have a plan, and I want to know what it is. Why did you turn around when we told you to go to Cape Town?”

  Phil Knight snorted into the receiver.

  “You were too busy issuing threats to hear me, Logan. We didn’t have enough fuel to make Cape Town. It’s that simple. We’re going back to London, as I said, and even then, if I have to deviate around too much weather, we might have to land in Paris instead.”

  Brian looked past Janie into the upper-deck cabin. None of the passengers seemed to be stirring yet, but he was already having to clear his ears, so the pressure was increasing.

  “You need to make a PA announcement for everyone to clear their ears,” Brian said.

  “You’re so good with your rabble-rousing, riot-inciting PAs,” Phil replied. “Make it yourself.”

  A few profane retorts popped into Brian’s mind, but the reality that the captain’s beginning compliance might be fragile dictated caution, and he decided to hold back the avalanche of insults and invectives he wanted to scream at the man.

  “All right,” Brian said, toggling the handset off, then on, and entering the PA code.

  Folks, this is Doctor Logan. Listen to me! Wake up! WAKE UP, everyone! We’re repressurizing the cabin, but you need to stay ahead of your ears. When they begin to feel full, hold your nose firmly, then dose your mouth, and then blow into your nose. Your ears will click and clear. That’s a Valsalva maneuver. Do it every minute or so.

  Brian toggled the phone again, and for a reason he couldn’t quite fathom, reentered the cockpit code.

  Phil answered just as quickly.

  “Yeah?”

  “I want to know something.”

  “What, Logan?”

  “Why did you leave the copilot back there? He was bleeding to death. How cou
ld you do that, for God’s sake?”

  “I didn’t leave him! I mean, I didn’t see him until we were on takeoff roll, and if you hadn’t noticed, I had about three hundred others to think about, too. I thought he was aboard when I started the takeoff. That’s the honest truth.”

  “I told you he wasn’t aboard. I told you he’d been shot.”

  “I never heard you say anything like that until we were airborne and you were screaming at me.”

  “Godammit!” Brian snapped, “I know you’re lying. You know why? Because I told you to stop the plane and you hit the brakes instantly in response.”

  “I never heard you say anything about stopping, Logan.”

  “The correction was good. I could hear cockpit noises,” Brian said.

  “Maybe you did, but the handset was on the floor. I was trying to control the damned airplane, not talk on the phone. It so happens the end of the runway was coming up and I was taxiing at high speed. I had to stop or run off the end. It had nothing to do with you.”

  “You’re saying you didn’t hear me?”

  “Hell no, I didn’t hear you! But I sure as hell heard my chief flight attendant and what she saw you do to Garth … my copilot.”

  “I tried to save him.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Wait a minute! Exactly what did Jackson say to you?”

  “She’s an eyewitness to the fact that you clubbed him to death and dumped him out of the electronics bay, or at least kept him outside long enough to fall off.”

  “WHAT? Jeez, man, that’s a complete lie!”

  “Don’t … don’t deny it, Logan,” Phil Knight replied. “She’s sitting right here and nodding. She saw you clubbing the copilot with an oxygen bottle.”

  “That wasn’t the copilot, you idiot! I told you before. That was … there were … two soldiers trying to get in after the copilot had been shot and had fallen off!”

  There was more silence from the cockpit.

  “Why should I believe you, Logan?”

  “Why in hell would I hurt the copilot? He’d already told me what an asshole you are. If I’d wanted to club a pilot to death, it would have been you, not him, considering what you’ve put us through.”

  “Just stay out of here,” Phil snapped in response, the tension returning to his voice. “I can still blow the cabin altitude with the flick of one finger.”

  Brian started to reply, but there was a summary click as Phil Knight broke the connection.

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  HEADQUARTERS,

  LIBYAN ARMY COMMAND,

  TRIPOLI, LIBYA

  11:05 P.M. Local

  The fact that the thrice-weekly airline flight called Meridian Six had made an emergency landing in Nigeria in the previous six hours had already attracted the attention of Libya’s extensive security apparatus. Flight Six was routinely monitored by Libya since its flight path passed close to Libyan airspace. But the sudden reemergence of the normally southbound flight on a northbound heading became a matter of heightened interest even before Nigerian air traffic control informed most of the world that Flight Six had been hijacked.

  Libyan Air Force radar began searching to the south and waiting to acquire Flight Six as curiosity turned to concern, but when the American 747 finally appeared on Libyan radar, the controllers suddenly realized the pilots had altered course. Flight Six was tracking straight for the southwest corner of Libya without clearance.

  Despite the fact that the southwest corner of Libya encompassed some of the most inhospitable desert on the face of the planet, an approaching hijacked American aircraft was more than an automatic affront to the hair-trigger sensitivities of Libyan dictator Mu’ammar Qadhafi. It was a license to shoot, given the American war on terrorism. Never again, Qadhafi had decreed a decade before, would the Americans be able to sneak up on him the way a flight of U.S. Air Force F-111s had done in the early eighties when Tripoli had been pounded and the Libyan dictator had barely escaped death. The mere possibility that the Meridian 747 could be a flying bomb was enough to spur immediate action, especially when word of what had happened in northern Nigeria reached Libyan intelligence.

  Within fifteen minutes, doors to an alert shack on an impossibly remote Libyan Air Defense base in the southern Sahara clanged open and four fighter pilots raced through the doors, pulling on their gear as they ran across the gritty nighttime tarmac to their aging, well-armed MiG-21 fighters with orders to get airborne and prepare to intercept.

  The rules of engagement were simple and came straight from Qadhafi himself: If the 747 violated Libyan airspace, it was to be destroyed.

  SITUATION ROOM,

  THE WHITE HOUSE,

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  5:15 P.M. EDT

  The image of the President of the United States digitally assembled itself in full color on the liquid crystal display covering the entire wall at the far end of the small conference table, the multiple digital cameras aboard Air Force One sampling enough angles of the President at his airborne desk so that a high-speed computer was able to assemble and transmit a live stream of three-dimensional information to be reassembled as simulated reality on the Situation Room wall. It looked, staffers were always remarking, as if the President were merely on the other side of a crystal-clear window, not hanging in the sky aboard Air Force One. The state-of-the-art system had been installed in the year following the WTC attacks when Air Force One had been forced to dash to the old Strategic Air Command headquarters near Omaha just to give the President visual teleconferencing capability with the White House Situation Room.

  Chief of Staff William Sanderson nodded to his old friend as he looked at the display, still amazed that the twenty-eight camera lenses looking back at him were an invisible part of the LQD display. It worked even better than they’d planned.

  “Okay, Bill,” the President said. “What’s the latest?”

  Admiral Sanderson chuckled and shook his head. “Sorry, sir. I can’t quite get used to you just materializing like that. You look like you’re right here. This technology is incredible, as you know.”

  “Yeah, same here. I was about to conclude you were a stowaway. You look that real on this end.” The President shuffled some papers and looked up again. “Okay, where are we?”

  “Meridian Six has changed course. It’s headed squarely for the southeastern border of Qadhafiland, and the looney colonel himself has scrambled four MiG-21’s to wait for the crossing.” Admiral Sanderson saw the President shift position and cock his head.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The picture I’m getting here, Bill, shows severe weather radar returns along the Libyan-Algerian border”—he leaned forward, studying a corner of the screen—“or, more precisely, along a north-south line perhaps a hundred miles west of that border.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, the question is whether the pilot of that craft intends to violate Libyan airspace, or whether he’s trying to get around the weather and doesn’t realize where he’s headed.”

  “Hard to believe,” Sanderson began, “that someone who can handle a 747 can’t figure out where the Libyan border is, especially if he or she’s a trained terrorist.”

  “Maybe he or she isn’t a trained terrorist.”

  “Sir?”

  “Maybe whoever’s in that cockpit is just some fool pilot with the right qualifications hired for a ridiculous sum of money to do what he’s doing on the naive assumption it’s a benign smuggling mission or something and that his employer is going to let him live to collect.

  “That’s possible. Hard to believe anyone would knowingly fly a terrorist mission these days.”

  “What does Langley think?” the President asked, pointing to another man at the table in the Situation Room. “Jeff, is it?”

  “Yes, sir. Our best guess, Mr. President, is that this aircraft has a European target, as I mentioned in our first contact last hour. If this was a Libyan operation, thi
s aircraft wouldn’t be flying toward Libya, since Qadhafi knows only too well the immense and immediate penalties you’ll trigger if he’s even involved with such an attack. It is remotely possible the plane is headed to attack Tripoli, but we think not.”

  “And if it’s an inadvertent mistake on the part of the pilot?”

  “Qadhafi will shoot it down the moment his border’s crossed. Remember, the plane is of American registry, which makes it de facto hostile, and this southwest corner of Libya and southeast corner of Algeria are disputed territory claimed by Libya. And with our new worldwide rules of terrorist engagement, an unresponsive, hijacked civilian airliner is to be shot down long before reaching population centers.”

  “Okay. Where’s the Pentagon on this?” the President asked.

  “Off line for the moment, sir, but I can brief you,” Sanderson replied, consulting some papers. “All our naval assets in the Mediterranean are on alert, as per your orders, and as previously briefed. Other than sending some sort of radio warning to the pilot of that 747, which we can’t do since he’s not communicating, we have no assets capable of interdicting southern Libyan airspace even if you wanted to risk it.”

  “Mr. President, there’s one other consideration,” Jeff said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Since we believe the passengers and crew are not aboard that aircraft, and since we believe that whatever it’s carrying is more than likely a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon of mass destruction, and since we’re preparing to intercept and destroy it over the Mediterranean …”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if Daffy Qadhafi could do it for us?” the President interrupted, chuckling. “Is that where you’re headed?’