Crashers

by Dana Haynes

  Ray said, “For what it’s worth, the brass at the L.A. field office agrees with you about the Irish delegates. We’re promoting them to most-likely target.”

  John Roby took five paces back to their little party. “Best take your seats. Isaiah is about to take off. This works, Peter should activate the screens, show us a movie.”

  “Yeah?” Ray piped up. “What’s playing?”

  “Dunno. Something with Will Ferrell.”

  “Jesus.” Tommy winced. “Couldn’t Petey just crash the fuckin’ plane instead?”

  Dennis reached into the glove compartment of his Outback and pulled out his home-built radio rig. He slid it into the gaping hole in his dashboard, where the factory-original radio would have gone. Normally, when he drove, Dennis took advantage of his technical skills to entertain himself. He’d extensively modified it to scan the frequencies dedicated to cell phones. Over the years, he’d listened to hundreds of calls around the Portland area. The vast majority had been dull. A few had been hilarious. Occasionally, some were pornographic: his favorite.

  The night before, while they’d been sharing a beer, Dennis had asked to see Tommy’s comm unit. He’d noted the frequency and, now, adjusted his radio to match. He was immediately rewarded by a harsh squawk and then the voice of Susan Tanaka.

  “Walter? They’re rolling.”

  Dennis quickly turned down the audio before the two men under the umbrella heard something.

  “We have them visually, Susan.” It was the voice of Walter Mulroney. “Here they come.”

  The Vermeer reached takeoff velocity and the front wheels lifted off the tarmac, marked with thick stretches of melted rubber. The aircraft rose smoothly, passing directly over the stretch of low brush, then over both parked cars and both Gamelan transceivers.

  Peter tapped the Return key. “Message sent.”

  A fifth of a second later, Dennis hit a knuckle-buster combination of keys. It was his own get-out-of-jail-free card, a program he’d plugged in to the Gamelan, just in case. His message traveled at the speed of light to the Vermeer roaring overhead.

  The message: Abort all changes. Maintain status quo.

  Whatever message the NTSB boys sent, Dennis just erased it.

  In the cockpit, Isaiah peeked at the Gamelan monitor, sitting at two o’clock relative to him. A red warning light blinked twice on the monitor screen in less than half a second.

  Tommy, Kiki, and Ray watched the movie screens in the front of first class. If this trick worked, the DVD player would blink on. John Roby was busy watching oscilloscopes attached to the Gamelan.

  The trio behind him continued to watch the movie screens.

  Tommy raised his voice. “Are we there yet?”

  Isaiah Grey’s voice came back over the PA system. “Yeah. We’re there and well beyond there. Did anything happen?”

  “Oh, poo,” Kiki said. “We missed the dinner show.”

  Susan Tanaka was standing in the simple, unadorned box on stilts that served as the Valence tower. From the hasty cleaning job and the dust-free squares marking the walls, Susan suspected that the tower crew had quickly squirreled away any girlie pictures before she arrived. She appreciated the gesture.

  Ricky Sanchez had tuned the ATC radio to the speaker mounted on the wall. Isaiah’s voice piped up. “Ah, ATC, this is November Tango One. Negative, repeat, negative results on Gamelan test.”

  As the tower controller responded, Susan hit the controls of her belt satellite-phone unit.

  “Nothing, Walter. It didn’t work.”

  Dennis Silverman chanted, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” as softly as he could, not knowing how well sound traveled in the rain.

  He’d done it. He’d beaten the NTSB’s best. And there was still time to catch his flight out of McNary Field, in Salem. He’d be late getting to the rendezvous, but he’d make it.

  He reached for his homemade radio, which was plugged into the cigarette lighter, and turned it up. Walter Mulroney’s broad, Plains accent sounded. “Okay, Susan. Tell them we’re a go for test number two.”

  Dennis blinked. He stared at the radio as if daring it to retract that statement.

  “I’ll tell them,” Susan said. “Be advised, this storm is getting worse. They just closed Portland International. Isaiah’s only got about another thirty minutes for these tests. That’s, what? Ten passes, tops.”

  Shit! Dennis slammed a fist into the dashboard.

  It was Dennis’s worst nightmare. He’d driven like a bat out of hell and had gotten to the parking lot behind the Glidden Paint shop with seconds to spare. He’d managed to negate whatever signal the Go-Team had sent to the swap-out, thus making it look like a Gamelan flight data recorder couldn’t be used to sabotage an aircraft. Everything was going his way.

  Then the wide-body began wheeling around for another pass.

  Only this time, the jet would fly over his position first, then the NTSB rental car. That meant the FDR would catch his signal first, then theirs. It was simple physics. There was no way he could order the Gamelan on board that jet to belay their orders if it hadn’t received them yet.

  The jetliner finished its arc. Even with the leaden sky and the rain, Dennis could see it out there, a faint blob amid the clouds. It was maybe ninety seconds away, headed right for him.

  He hadn’t wanted to do this. He’d set out just to discredit their theory about the Gamelan. But now he needed a stronger move. With the Vermeer sixty seconds out, he slipped a flash drive into the port of his laptop, watched the programs pop up on the screen.

  A prewritten set of instructions began scrolling across his screen.

  John Roby turned around. “I know we didn’t get our test right, but something happened. This monitor shows a double spike of energy to the Gamelan.”

  Ray, Tommy, and Kiki digested that, not sure what it meant.

  John gave them a shrug.

  “Second pass. Gonna try the same test,” Walter relayed to Susan via their ear jacks.

  “Excuse me.” Susan touched the air traffic controller on the shoulder. “Can you tell the pilot we’ll try the same test on this pass?”

  In the cabin, Tommy, Kiki, and Ray began concentrating on the blank movie screen.

  The flicker of light blinked onto the screen. About a third of a second after the Vermeer began shaking itself to pieces.

  45

  ALBION AIR FLIGHT 326 passed through a minor bit of turbulence over Nebraska. Normally, Captain David Singh wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But normally, he wasn’t playing chauffeur to high-ranking officials—or so Captain Singh had been assured—of the Irish government and a sitting U.S. congressman.

  Teddy McCoy, the jovial navigator, unlocked the flight-deck door and let himself in. He carried three cans of soda pop and his hands were so huge, all three fit in one. The Scotsman stood over six-two and was as thin as a hockey stick. He also had a constant smile plastered on his long features.

  “Here you go, then.” He handed a Coke Zero to the captain and a Diet 7UP to the copilot, Eloise Pool, who nodded her thanks. Even on a long, dull cross-Atlantic flight, Eloise didn’t say three words other than the count-off checklists. It wasn’t that she was shy, it was that she was the world’s worst conversationalist. It was the same in the pilots’ lounge or taking a cab from the airport hotels. The woman seemed incapable of making small talk.

  Daya Singh, fifty-five, had started calling himself David in his teens. He’d been born in London of Indian parents and he wanted to be as much a Londoner as every other kid at school. He’d excelled at cricket, which had gotten him into King’s College on a scholarship. From there, he’d joined the Royal Air Force with one goal in mind: to fly. It was David Singh’s one true passion; or it had been until meeting his wife and the birth of their three now-grown girls.

  But even today, after all these years, all those cockpits and flight decks, David Singh was never happier than riding the left-hand seat of his aircraft.

  He removed his watch
and adjusted it for Pacific Time: it was 3:30 P.M. in California.

  Teddy McCoy took his seat, which was behind Eloise’s, and turned ninety degrees from the other two. He adjusted the four-point harness before opening his Coke. “Are we flying anywhere near that Vermeer that went down Monday?”

  Captain Singh slid his soda pop into the holder to his left, which was fitted with a gimbal to be steady even in turbulence. “That was in Oregon, north of California. I’ve heard naught about a cause yet.”

  “Aye, it’s early days.” Teddy checked his state-of-the-art navigational equipment. He also had the assignment of handling internal and external communications for the mammoth aircraft. “These things take bloody months, don’t they.”

  “I’d met the pilot,” David said wistfully. “Black girl, ’bout your age. It was just about, I don’t know, eight months ago. She spoke on a panel about wake vortices. Very keen, that one. Told her so, after the conference. That’s why I remember her. Shame.”

  “Damn shame,” Teddy agreed.

  Eloise Pool, it seemed, had no opinion on the topic.

  OVER VALENCE

  For every flight that Tommy Tomzak had ever been on—every single one of them, without fail—an attendant had instructed the passengers to wear their seat belts. The one time he’d boarded an airplane with no flight attendant, he’d forgotten.

  The Vermeer quaked like an epileptic in a grand mal seizure. Tommy went flying, landed hard in the aisle, his head ricocheting off an armrest. He caught a half-formed glimpse of Ray Calabrese, also airborne.

  Tommy scrambled for a purchase, anything solid would do. But as his hands reached for a seat back, the plane’s lurching increased. He went skidding backward down the aisle.

  . . .

  “Dammit!” Isaiah Grey shouted at the yoke as it shivered badly in his hands. The Vermeer careened crazily, the nose too low, the fuselage vibrating like a tuning fork. He could feel the wings “slipping”—the port wing falling back, the starboard wing moving faster than the fuselage.

  “What do we got!” he bellowed over the roar.

  “I don’t know!” The copilot, Burke, sounded panicky. “Telltales are green! Monitors green! We—”

  The stick shaker rattled, warning of a stall.

  Isaiah glanced out at the lights of downtown Valence, a retail region maybe two blocks by two blocks with nothing but fast food, motels and gas stations. A commerce zone aimed entirely at the drivers of Interstate 5. He didn’t like seeing the lights so well, so close. His hand reached for the lever that would dump his fuel. But something made him stop. It was a thought—too low, too primal to be called a plan. More like a gut reaction, his hominid fight-or-flight instincts grafted to a lifetime’s experience in cockpits; especially in fighters.

  Isaiah reached to cut off engine number three before he realized he’d done it.

  “Three off!” he shouted.

  “There’s nothing wrong w—” Burke started to protest. But the buffeting stopped. The yoke no longer vibrated.

  Isaiah wiped sweat off his brow. Outside the cockpit window, the city of Valence was perilously close. He was only ten or twelve stories off the ground—and the cockpit stood three stories high with wheels on tarmac.

  With one of the two starboard engines out of the show, the Vermeer began angling to the right. The tip of the left wing scythed through the afternoon sky, barely clipping a tall Burger World sign on a long pole. It exploded, electricity from the lighted sign rippling off its surface.

  Isaiah tried to correct. Dropping power to the dead engine’s counterpart—interior engine, portside wing—would have balanced the thrust. But at this altitude and speed, the Vermeer would stall out and drop like the hammer of a gun.

  Instead, he boosted power to the right-hand outboard engine, redlining the Patterson-Pate turbine. A warning whistle sounded as he pushed the engine beyond its maximum stress load.

  With one engine on the right putting out almost as much thrust as two engines on the left, the flight straightened out. The right wing missed a Taco Magnifico sign by seven inches.

  That was the good news. The bad news: they were flying directly away from the only runway Isaiah knew in the region.

  He vectored toward Interstate 5 and away from the residential and commercial developments of Valence. He could see details on the tops of farm trucks on rural roads beneath him. He needed some altitude. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted the close-clustered, dark purple clouds roiling over Portland, not thirty miles north of his position, and gave thanks that he was only clipping the edge of the storm. He crossed the highway at a thirty-degree angle, heading for the Willamette River with its twin corridors of tall evergreens along both shores. Beyond the river lay—what? Isaiah didn’t know the region. Something flat, he prayed.

  Either that, or get this beast to stay in the air long enough to get back to Valence.

  The boards perched on the tops of seats had been an ideal place to put the black box and monitors, as long as the flight remained relatively smooth. When the Vermeer began to buck like a rodeo bull, the wood went flying, equipment smashing into the fuselage or the floor.

  Kiki got to her feet first, as soon as the violent shaking stopped. “Tommy!” she shouted, and edged back toward his prone form. The jet was swinging in weird patterns; in a car, she would have recognized the motion as fishtailing. A flash of lightning flickered outside the left-hand windows, and bits of metal and plastic pinged off the fuselage. Kiki winced and stumbled, banging her knee against a seat. She pitched forward as Tommy sat up. She landed atop him, nose to nose.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, surprise and worry in his voice.

  “Am I?” Kiki rose to her hands and knees above him. She touched his forehead, her fingers coming away slick with blood.

  Tommy sat up and touched his skull. Bleeding, all right, but it wasn’t hurting much. “It’s okay,” he said, rising. “Superficial.”

  Ray Calabrese’s face came into view over Kiki’s shoulder. “You two all right?”

  They scrambled to their feet. Tommy said, “The fuck’s going on?”

  Ray glanced out the windows to the right and saw a fast food sign slide by, almost close enough to touch. “I think we’re screwed.”

  Tommy sidled past him, toward the flight deck. “John, did you get a reading on—”

  Tommy stood for a moment, blinking as a trickle of blood reached his right eye. He wiped at it with the back of his hand.

  Kiki moved forward. “Tom—”

  She stopped, seeing the limp, dead body of John Roby, his neck snapped, his eyes glassy and unfocused.

  Just as Kiki started to cry, the crazy buffeting started again.

  The Vermeer was losing altitude. Normally, it could run on three engines just fine, but the buffeting that followed the crisis had chewed up way too much forward thrust. They had been within seconds of a stall-out.

  The jet screamed over a high, dense cluster of trees and was suddenly above the Willamette River, choppy and gunmetal gray in the overcast weather. The buffeting increased.

  Isaiah Grey shouted, “Calabrese! Get up here!”

  “Dammit!” the copilot screamed. “The board’s green! What the hell’s happening!”

  The door to the flight deck banged open and Ray Calabrese stumbled in, his face pasty and slick with sweat. He’d climbed over the body of John Roby to get there.

  Isaiah cut the power to engine number two—the inboard engine on the port wing. It was a wild-assed guess but it proved to be right. The bucking stopped.

  And the Vermeer sank lower.

  Isaiah pointed to the Gamelan monitor and the twisting vine of cables leading to first class. “Calabrese! The wires! Shoot ’em!”

  Ray knelt, pulled his Glock 9 from his belt holster, and aimed at the bundle of wires. He fired from an inch away. The noise was deafening in the enclosed space. The wires shredded.

  Ray said, “Will that help?”

  Isaiah shrugged, his fist
s squeezed around the sluggish yoke. “Damned if I know.”

  The stick shaker sounded. Isaiah goosed the two remaining engines, avoiding the stall yet again. He glanced out at the dark gray river and the tree-covered hills beyond and said, “No good.”

  He turned the jet back, a nice, soft roll to port, sacrificing speed and precious altitude. The copilot said, “Oh, Jesus . . .”

  Ray said, “We got a plan?” He couldn’t be positive—Isaiah’s face was cheated three-quarters away from him—but he could swear the pilot was grinning.

  “Wouldn’t call it anything as fancy as a plan.” Isaiah spat the words through gritted teeth.

  46

  DENNIS SILVERMAN’S OUTBACK HYDROPLANED onto I-5 south to a symphony of horns. He missed a Subaru by inches. His windshield wipers slapped madly at the rain and he leaned forward, his face just inches from the steering wheel.

  A produce truck pulled into the middle lane and Dennis skittered between it and a Ford F-110, drawing a blaring horn from the truck, as he juked the Outback into the fast lane and hit the gas.

  He prayed that the company’s Gulfstream was ready for him in Salem and that the weather wasn’t too bad for a takeoff.

  OVER INTERSTATE 5

  The Vermeer swap-out hung in the air reluctantly, maintaining all the aerodynamics of a refrigerator. The stick shaker rattled twice, and twice Isaiah Grey cajoled the wounded bird into staying aloft.

  Burke, the copilot, moaned. “Where are we going?”

  Isaiah said, “Gonna find us a runway.” The tendons in his neck stood rigid and extended, but his voice was casual, calm.

  Standing behind their seats Ray watched the pilot carefully, looking for signs of tension. Mostly, Isaiah looked energized.

  Isaiah forced a quick smile over his shoulder. “Ask,” he said, “and ye shall receive.”