“We should make some tough decisions right now on what to do if anything like Flight Sixty-six ever happens again. Sir, the facts are, if the Hauptmann Strain hadn’t mutated, we could have lost up to ninety percent of the population of North America. There would have been no way to stop this once it got started.”
ESTES PARK, COLORADO—TUESDAY, MAY 14
As a little girl, Rachael Sherwood had always loved the Rocky Mountains, but only as an idea. The thought of waking up among them had never been a considered possibility. One didn’t live in the Rockies. One merely visited there on high-speed vacations in the family car.
She smiled at the memory now and stirred her coffee as her eyes traveled across the magnificent view of snow-capped granite peaks and deep blue skies. She was still having trouble jogging in the rarefied air of seven thousand feet above sea level, but her endurance was improving and the altitude headaches had stopped.
A billowing column of cumulus clouds was clawing its way skyward over Longs Peak some thirty miles to the south, diverting her attention in that direction. She had decided to climb Longs next year. It was a firm goal.
There were still letters to write. She preferred letters to phone calls for the more profound partings from longtime friends on the East Coast. Phone calls were too immediate, and she wanted to feel the distance in space and time. Besides, there was no way that the beauty before her now could be adequately described in a phone call. The vista outside the glassed-in living room, the new house on Devil’s Gulch Road, and her new life all demanded a careful telling in her own hand, preferably accompanied by snapshots. Yes, only letters would do.
A plume of dust announced the presence of a car on the dirt road a half mile distant, toward the town of Estes Park. She glanced back over her shoulder toward Devil’s Gulch Road as it crested a small ridge leading toward the tiny village of Glenhaven. A determined flight of buzzards had been circling ominously over the ridge all morning, and her curiosity was growing.
She looked back toward the town in anticipation. The car was a quarter mile away, and she could make it out now.
He was right on time.
The whirlwind of activity and publicity following the trauma of the Christmas flight, and the intense media attention on Lee Lancaster’s role, had almost engulfed her through early January. Lee had been hailed as one of the heroes of the drama, and she’d been proud to be his assistant—and prouder still of the self-effacing way he’d met those accolades.
But the real hero was the quiet man in the left seat of the 747, and he had all but disappeared trying to avoid the spotlight. There were book and movie offers in seven figures, she had been told, as well as television shows clamoring to get him on and a thundering herd of media people aiming their lenses and their pens at James Holland.
But James Holland was nowhere to be seen.
She had assumed he was back in Dallas—until the doorbell to her small apartment near Georgetown rang on the cold, rainy night of January 15 and he had been there, dripping wet, embarrassed, unsure what to say, but determined to find out whether she would be willing to go out with him.
“Why didn’t you call?” she remembered asking, not unkindly.
“I … frankly wasn’t sure how to, ah, what to …”
“What to say?”
He nodded.
She smiled and said, “Well, you could start with, ‘Hi, Rachael, will you go out with me?’”
He looked down self-consciously, but she could see a smile on his face before he looked up again.
“So it really would have been that simple, huh?”
She nodded, suddenly aware of her slightly accelerated heartbeat.
“So here I am,” she said at last, shifting her weight to her other foot, “if you want to give it a try.”
“Okay,” he said with a broadening smile, “let’s see if I can get this right.” He cleared his throat as she cocked her head and regarded him with a feigned skeptical look.
“Rachael?”
“Yes?” she said.
He stepped forward without warning and enveloped her in his arms, kissing her hungrily as her hands wavered for a second, then closed around his back, pulling him closer.
Just as suddenly he pulled away and reached up, cupping her chin with his large right hand and raising her eyes to his.
“Rachael,” he’d said then, “will you marry me?”
The car was approaching the front drive now, and as expected, it was the small gray Blazer. She moved to the front door and waited for James to get out. They had been married for three months, but every day—and every night—was a honeymoon, and they kept surprising each other with the depth and variety of their lovemaking. The shared experience of the new house, the mountains, and the eternity they had spent together aboard Flight 66 bridged the occasional silences, but he was working hard on that, and she understood.
He had moved from Dallas gleefully, she from Washington reluctantly, but the idea of leaving Estes even for a day now seemed assaultive. Living in these mountains had been James’s lifelong dream, and now her enthusiasm was as intense as his. She’d already grown accustomed to his commuting to Dallas to pick up his flights for Quantum.
She’d persuaded him to accept the joint invitation from the FAA and the Air Line Pilots Association to come back to Washington, D.C., to be honored. It was far more than presenting a medal and plaque, they had explained to her when James turned his back on the idea. He represented what was good and solid and dependable about airline pilots. He was an example. The nation needed a positive example.
James finally, reluctantly, agreed to do it, and they were to leave for Washington in the morning.
Rachael had lounged in her bathrobe all morning, wearing nothing else, waiting for his return from Dallas. Now she loosened the sash around the robe and let it fall open as James came through the door.
A broad smile painted his features. He hurriedly closed the door behind him and came to her.
NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM, WASHINGTON, D.C.—THURSDAY, MAY 16
The formalities were impressive, but James Holland’s discomfort at taking center stage as the honoree was obvious. Halfway through the reception that followed, however, Rachael finally saw him relax.
She turned away for the first time, intent on finding the ladies’ room, as a dark-haired man of medium build moved quietly to the captain’s side.
James Holland sensed the man’s presence, turned, and took his outstretched hand.
“Captain,” the man said, “permit me to add my congratulations. What you did with that aircraft was magnificent airmanship.”
“Thank you. And you are?”
“An admirer, and a fellow pilot.”
There was a hint of an accent in the man’s voice, but his face seemed familiar, an image from somewhere in the past, a face he knew instinctively he’d have great trouble placing.
James cocked his head slightly. “You … weren’t aboard my aircraft, were you?”
There was a slow smile in response—a rather sad smile, James noted. The man’s gaze had wandered to the far end of the hall. He turned back now and spoke.
“There were many with you that day who were not physically present,” he said.
“That’s very poetic,” James replied, turning the phrase over in his mind.
The man looked at James and met his gaze, his smile brightening as he brushed away the subject with his right hand. “Anyway, I just wanted to meet you in person and tell you that all this”—he gestured toward the reception—“is richly deserved.”
James smiled. He had been listening to similar embarrassing accolades all day. His response was becoming familiar, and rote.
“You’re very gracious to say that, but it was a crew effort. What it came down to was teamwork. I was just the visible element as captain.”
The man was shaking his head slowly and knowingly.
For several long moments he didn’t speak.
“No, Captain,” he be
gan at last, “what it came down to was an impossible duel between unequal adversaries. Sometimes when the hunted refuses to die, the overconfident hunter loses his life. Reversing the pretended death spiral when you lost your first engine was brilliant, as was your final move at Ascension.”
James Holland studied the man’s eyes. There was a hard kindness there, he decided, and a glow of true respect. James extended his hand again and the man took it and pumped it gently.
“You … must have studied the details of the accident report very thoroughly,” James said.
The man nodded as he withdrew his hand.
“More closely than you can imagine.”
He nodded and turned before James could say more.
There were others competing for the captain’s attention on his left, and James watched the man stride quietly toward the door before turning back to a line of smiling faces that included the Secretary of Transportation.
James Holland nodded and began speaking appropriate words to the secretary, but stopped himself in mid-sentence to turn back toward the door. A faint memory of an injured male passenger lying on the concrete at Ascension Island had suddenly floated across his mind. James looked in the man’s direction just as he stopped at the door and looked back as well.
No, James concluded. He said he wasn’t aboard my aircraft.
The man smiled suddenly and gave the captain a smart, military salute. James returned it in abbreviated form—puzzled—his mind turning over the man’s words again and again.
Yuri Steblinko pushed through the front doors of the National Air and Space Museum and hurried down the steps as he glanced up Independence Avenue to where his American-made car was parked, a fantastic new Buick registered, along with the comfortable house in the Virginia countryside, to a new American named Yuri Raskolnikov, an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency at Langley.
The choice of a last name had been his—a small Russian joke of his own, with a wink of respect to Dostoyevsky.
Yuri glanced at his watch and quickened his pace.
It was four o’clock, and Anya would be waiting.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With heartfelt appreciation to my agents, George Wieser and Olga Wieser, and to Editor-in-Chief David Gernert, Publisher Stephen Rubin, my editor Lori Lipsky, Jayne Schorn, Ellen Archer, and all of my new literary family at Doubleday.
And with special thanks to the following: the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta; the Boeing Company in Seattle; Captain Gary Rhodes, U.S. Air Force F-15 pilot; and Jay Molyneux, for his assistance with Ascension Island.
About the Author
John J. Nance is the author of thirteen novels whose suspenseful storylines and authentic aviation details have led Publishers Weekly to call him the “king of the modern-day aviation thriller.” Two of his novels, Pandora’s Clock and Medusa’s Child, were made into television miniseries. He is well known to television viewers as the aviation analyst for ABC News. As a decorated air force pilot who served in Vietnam and Operation Desert Storm and a veteran commercial airline pilot, he has logged over fourteen thousand hours of flight time and piloted a wide variety of jet, turboprop, and private aircraft. Nance is also a licensed attorney and the author of seven nonfiction books, including On Shaky Ground: America’s Earthquake Alert and Why Hospitals Should Fly, which, in 2009, won the American College of Healthcare Executives James A. Hamilton Award for book of the year. Visit him online at www.johnnanceassociates.com
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1995 by John J. Nance
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2794-6
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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