Phoenix Rising

by Nance, John J. ;

  There was the unmistakable sound of a lightoff then—the ragged, almost pained acceleration characteristic of small jet engines as the sudden presence of hot expanding gases rudely forced the turbine wheels to spin up to operating speed.

  “There!” The APU stabilized, and Tyson’s hand moved toward the electrical panel to reconnect its generator. He toggled the appropriate switch to reconnect the APU electrical power. Instantly they were awash in light and the sound of heated air coursing through the vents.

  They sat in tense silence for nearly a minute, watching the gauges and listening, Brian expecting the APU to die again at any second.

  But for the moment it remained stable.

  “What do you think?” Brian asked at last.

  The copilot shook his head, lips compressed.

  “I don’t trust it. I …” He gestured toward the overhead speaker. “I talked to the rescue forces about ten minutes ago. They relayed the latest forecast. Brian, they don’t expect any change in this storm for at least another thirty-six hours! This low is deep and stable, and it’s killing us.”

  Brian winced.

  “Sorry,” Tyson added. “Poor choice of words.”

  Brian swiveled around and put his face close to the frigid glass of the side window as he reached up to flip on the left landing light. Columns of dry snow were streaming horizontally past them in the teeth of forty-knot subzero winds. The gusts had continued to shake and shudder the aircraft all day and all night, slowly causing it to weathervane into the gale. As a result, the tail and rear fuselage of the Boeing 767 now hung over the embankment of the lake.

  Brian gestured out beyond the window.

  “That amazes me, that we’re not getting any snow buildup on the wings.”

  “Wind’s too high,” the copilot replied.

  “I’m going to have to go out there, Tyson.”

  The sudden statement caught Tyson off guard.

  “Brian, you can’t—” Tyson began.

  “No,” Brian continued, “I’m going to have to go out there and try to get us fixed. You heard Seattle. If we can pull that box and find out whether someone’s screwed around with it, we might be able to get the engines restarted. Then we can live without the APU.”

  “We’ve been through this before, Brian. It would be a crazy risk. The wind-chill factor’s close to a hundred below. We don’t have a ladder to get up to the electronics bay, and you don’t have the cold-weather gear—plus, we haven’t got the slightest idea whether Seattle knows what they’re talking about. You …” He let his voice trail off.

  Brian had been incredulous at first when the suggestion had come over the satellite phone.

  “I don’t think you understand what you’re asking,” Brian had said to maintenance. “One of us would have to go down an emergency exit slide into this deep-freeze and somehow not only manipulate the forty-below-zero metal hatch release on the electronics compartment, but then pull himself straight up through that hole—and then reverse the process to get back.” “Captain,” the voice on the other end had said, “if it’s what we think, someone sabotaged that black box, and with our help you could repair it.”

  At the time maintenance was talking to him, all the cabin doors of Clipper Forty hung more than ten feet above the surface. Since then, the wind had pivoted the aircraft nearly 90 degrees. The tail and rear fuselage now hung only a few feet over the embankment. Suddenly, getting out and in without a jetway or stairs could be fairly easy.

  Brian took a long, deep breath. “I’ll bundle up and cover every inch of skin. We’ll toss out an empty galley food container to stand on. I’ll just have to pull myself up into the compartment.”

  Tyson had opened his mouth to protest again when the APU died once more.

  This time it took several attempts to get it restarted. Whatever opposition Tyson had felt to Brian’s plan was overwhelmed by the very real fear of facing the Arctic cold without a source of heat.

  Within a half hour, Pan Am’s maintenance team in Seattle had reassembled in the Seatac hangar, the company’s top avionics man sitting once again in the electronics bay of the company’s other 767, wearing a telephone headset, while Bill Conrad and several others waited below on extensions.

  Anchoring the other end of the satellite phone was Tyson Matthews in the cockpit of Clipper Forty, ready to relay instructions to Brian Murphy—provided Brian could get into the electronics compartment.

  Brian zipped his coat over several layers of sweaters and opened the right rear door, pulling the handle on the emergency slide and letting it flop out and inflate. The slide filled with air and lay at a shallow angle on the frozen tundra that formed the perimeter of the lake. With help from two bundled-up flight attendants, he positioned himself and slid down the plastic slide into a pain-filled void of wind and cold deeper and more frightening than anything he’d ever experienced. He looked up, then, as the flight attendants closed the cabin door behind their captain, leaving him alone in the alien world that had only been an image outside their windscreen until now.

  The electronics compartment lay a hundred and fifty feet ahead of him in the frozen gloom. With the cabin access hatch closed off, a small hatch in the belly of the 767, just behind the nose gear, was the only way in. If he could get inside, he could plug the headset he had stuffed in his pocket into an interphone panel and communicate with the copilot, one floor above in the cockpit.

  The wind was an incredible torrent of icy fury sucking his body heat away at a furious rate. The lake ice beneath his feet seemed impossibly slick, and the need to keep his face covered was disorienting. The distance from the tail to the nose gear seemed to stretch into miles—every step an agony of fighting for balance and traction against a wall of painfully frigid wind.

  Brian stole a glance to one side, expecting to see the wing’s leading edge now behind him.

  It wasn’t. It still lay ahead. He looked forward slightly, startled at how little distance he had covered.

  Slowly he taught himself how to move forward without falling, passing the main landing gear step by step, and moving with greater urgency now toward the nose strut.

  All the warmth he had felt in the cabin was long gone, and the cold had penetrated his inner core. His toes felt slightly numb, as did his fingers in the inadequate leather gloves he had borrowed from a passenger. The need to get into the warmth of the electronics bay was becoming urgent.

  The food carrier box he had dumped out the forward galley door had been blown backward. He retrieved it and positioned it under the compartment.

  He could touch the hatch, but the aircraft was sitting with its nose strut fully extended and a slight depression in the ice right under the electronics bay, leaving the hatch painfully high. He had begun to shiver now. A bad sign. There wasn’t much time left.

  Brian stepped gingerly up on the box, feeling it slip slightly on the ice, his numb fingers feeling along the surface of the smooth, frigid aluminum underbelly of the 767 as he searched by feel for the recessed door lever.

  There!

  He pushed his fingers in around the arms of the recessed T-handle and pulled on it with both hands, clumsily, his trunk beginning to shake energetically now as his core body temperature began an alarming drop.

  He pulled with wide-eyed determination, but nothing was happening. The handle stayed recessed, apparently frozen in place.

  He put his entire weight on it then, lifting himself in the air, finally feeling the handle snap down and out of the recess—at the same moment the howling wind whipped the metal food carrier from beneath his feet, leaving him dangling by the handle.

  He bent his knees and let go, letting himself roll when he hit the ice as his feet slipped out from under him.

  The wind was too loud past his bundled head to hear the APU, but he had the landing lights and the windows to help him see as he got to his feet—a steady source of light that felt comforting as he struggled to retrieve the box.

  Suddenly the lights went
out.

  The APU again!

  In near-total darkness he fumbled for the metal carrier and repositioned it, praying that Tyson could bring the APU back to life once more. He was proceeding on faith now. He could hear only the wind and the sound of his heart, which was pounding.

  By feel alone—shaking and shivering violently—Brian pulled himself back on top of the box and stood up, reaching for the frigid metal belly above him. Without the APU, they couldn’t start the engines even if he was successful in fixing the problem. Without the APU, he wouldn’t have enough light to work. All he had was a tiny flashlight. Maybe it was a mission impossible, and Tyson had been right. Maybe he should move back to the rear door and get back on board and forget the electronics bay before he literally froze to death.

  But there was residual warmth in that electronics bay, and none outside. He had to get in!

  He grabbed the handle again, and pulled. This time it came out without a fight. Slowly, gingerly, he applied a twisting movement, feeling nothing move in response. He had to turn it a full 180 degrees. His arms ached. It wouldn’t be long before he wouldn’t have the strength to support himself.

  The sound of something distant distracted him. As he tried to decide if it could be the sound of an APU, the lights came back on with a glorious—if painful—glare.

  Brian jerked at the handle then with renewed confidence. Over and over, as the shaking of his body became distractingly violent, Brian hung on and jerked at the hatch handle, praying for some indication that it was going to move.

  He had made the decision to give up and scramble for the rear entry door when he realized with a start that the handle had moved!

  Not much, but a little.

  He renewed his efforts now, putting everything he had into it. His teeth gritted, Brian was rewarded at last by the sudden surrender of the mechanism as the hatch moved inward and the handle twirled around to the full open position.

  He slid the hatch out of the way. Then, feeling the slight warmth spill from the compartment above as he gripped the edge of the compartment to haul himself inside, Brian tried to ignore the burning pain of using nearly frozen arms and protesting muscles for the task. His body was clearly in emergency override.

  Brian reclosed the hatch from the inside and braced his back against an electronics rack with his eyes closed, letting the heat radiate back into his clothes and body. The shaking was severe now, but slowly it subsided. In the glow of several red and yellow indicator lights on various rack-mounted boxes, he managed to find the light switch.

  Tyson would know by the Door Open light that Brian had succeeded in opening the compartment, and now in closing it. Brian had thumped the ceiling—the floor of the cockpit—to let him know he was inside.

  But now they needed communication.

  Brian pulled the lightweight headset from his pocket and found the interphone panel, plugging it in and making the appropriate switch selection.

  “Tyson, you there?” He was panting.

  “Thank God! You okay?”

  “A little worse for wear, but warming up.”

  “I’ve got them on the line, Brian, and I’ll relay when you’re ready.”

  “Just keep the heat coming down here.”

  “I will. Brian, uh, did you open … ah … any other compartment?”

  Brian’s head was still muddled. He decided he had misunderstood the question. Tyson must have meant the electronics bay.

  “You mean the electronics bay?”

  “You didn’t open anything else?”

  Brian shook his head. “No. Why?”

  There was momentary silence from the cockpit.

  “And no one else came out with you, right?” Tyson asked. “There’s no one else out there?”

  “Tyson, what’re you asking?” Brian’s tone was short.

  “Uh, Brian … the rear cargo compartment Door Open light?”

  “Yes?”

  “It suddenly came on a few minutes ago, and I felt something up here too, at the same moment—a sideways nudge.”

  Brian found himself staring at the closed hatch at his feet with a renewed cold chill down his back. That was an alien world out there. Alien and frightening. But there was no one else out there, and nothing that could physically open a 767 cargo door—as far as he knew.

  He thought about polar bears. He thought about wandering Eskimos looking for a shelter. He thought about Bigfoot and monsters and anything else that could explain what they were hearing and feeling, and he realized it didn’t matter.

  But he fought down the feelings of fright—fear of the unknown—and latched onto an explanation.

  “Probably just the Door Open microswitch. It’s too cold or out of rig or something,” Brian told him.

  The electronics compartment suddenly moved sideways with the rest of the airplane, as if it had been thumped by something. Tyson’s voice came through again.

  “There it is again, Brian. It came on steady, now it’s off, and one of the girls in the back called up here, asking if you’re in the rear cargo compartment. She says she hears someone moving around down there!”

  “Tyson, forget it. We’ve got more important duties. Whatever’s causing that, there’s a logical explanation.”

  If he couldn’t convince himself, at least he could put Tyson’s mind at ease.

  The thought of polar bears, however, reimposed itself. What if there was one out there now, waiting for a midnight snack to emerge from the electronics bay?

  Thursday, March 16, 1:00 A.M.

  London, England

  Elizabeth stared at the ceiling of her London hotel suite and wondered what was really going on. The copilot of Clipper Forty had said that Brian wasn’t available just now, but he wouldn’t elaborate, and he wouldn’t let her hold.

  The fact that she could still reach them was comforting, but there was no hope of sleeping.

  Elizabeth threw off the covers at last and dialed Ron Lamb’s private office number, which rang only on his desk. He should be home, but she suspected he’d still be at the office, yet the phone rang with no answer.

  For some reason she let it ring twenty times, which was ridiculous. If he was there, he would have answered. Yet she kept on—physically startled when the receiver was suddenly raised, six thousand miles away.

  At least someone had picked up Ron’s private line. Elizabeth heard the sound of the receiver being hit by something, as if bumping against a hard surface.

  “Ron? Ron, are you there?” she asked.

  No answer. Just the bumping and scraping from the other end.

  “… hee … heeah …” The sounds were human, but words weren’t forming.

  “Ron? Is that you, Ron?”

  The banging and scraping had stopped, but she could hear the sound of a hand moving on the plastic receiver.

  “… whaa …?” The voice was nothing more than a strained whisper that didn’t sound anything like Ron Lamb, and yet …

  “Ron, this is Elizabeth. Ron, are you okay?”

  Elizabeth had her finger a millimeter from the disconnect button before she stopped herself. Instead, she grabbed the cellular phone.

  Within three minutes she had reached the emergency center in Seattle, giving them instructions on where to find the owner of the small voice on the other end of the phone connection to Ron Lamb’s office.

  For nearly fifteen tense minutes she listened to what sounded like the distant sound of labored breathing before a new noise—that of hurried footsteps and voices approaching—rose to a crescendo as the paramedics burst into the office and began working.

  She half expected someone to replace the receiver and cut her off. Instead, a worried guard picked it up.

  “Hello? Anyone here?”

  “Yes!” She explained who she was and asked what he was seeing.

  “It’s Mr. Lamb. He was on the floor behind his desk.” She heard the guard ask a question, then return to the line. “The paramedics say it looks like he’s had a s
troke.”

  Wednesday, March 15, 9:00 P.M. EST

  Clipper 40

  Brian Murphy sat with the opened electronics box in his lap, feeling helpless.

  Working by intercom with Tyson, who in turn was relaying instructions coming over the satellite phone from the team in Pan Am’s Seatac hangar, he had located the “black box” that controlled the engine instrument displays and opened it—but found nothing out of place.

  “Tyson, tell them I see nothing unusual in here.”

  With the difficult lighting and only a pocket flashlight, it had taken Brian some time to analyze the myriad circuit boards in the black box. It took even longer to relay the questions and answers back and forth to Seattle about strange wires, odd clips or connectors, or other obvious signs that someone had tampered with it. He could see nothing out of place.

  “Did they check out the overall serial number on the case?” Brian asked.

  Tyson had relayed the serial number a half hour earlier. Now he was back on the intercom.

  “That box, Brian, was stolen from United’s bench stock in San Francisco. They want you to read the serial numbers of each circuit card.”

  One by one, Brian pulled the electronics-laden cards and relayed the numbers.

  The sixth one held the key.

  “Tyson! Tell them this one looks funny. There are marks all over it, as if things have been resoldered sloppily. There’s also a tiny device that doesn’t look like anything else wired to the card. I couldn’t see it before.”

  He read the serial number. It didn’t match United’s records.

  They were discussing it when the lights went out for the seventh time.

  Brian waited for the APU to start again and the lights to come on. Instead, Tyson’s voice rang in his headset, battery power alone keeping their connection alive.

  “It’s not starting, Brian! I’ve tried it three times. If I keep on, I’ll be out of battery.”

  “Okay … okay, let’s think this one through. I’m going to plug this box back in without the bad component.”

  “Yeah, but we still can’t even try an engine start without an APU.”