The Zero Option

by David Rollins

  September 1, 1983

  Sea of Japan, southwest of Sakhalin Island. The 747 dived at close to its maximum speed. Vibration caused the lights across the instrument panel to shimmy like incendiary fires. Chun’s knuckles were the color of bleached bone as he gripped the control wheel, his feet braced hard against the rudder pedals for additional leverage. Beside him, First Officer Sohn’s face was etched with the strain induced by the physical effort required to help the captain maintain command of the mauled airliner.

  Outside, the airflow was howling. A harmonic vibration rumbled up through the airframe and into the controls, informing Chun and Sohn that the plane had suffered severe damage to its control surfaces, though how bad that damage was, and which surfaces had sustained it, they wouldn’t know until the plane leveled out from the dive. On the positive side, at least they were able to maintain a wings-level attitude in the dive with minimal tendency for the aircraft to roll inverted. But the vibration itself—that was worrying.

  ‘Eighteen thousand!’ yelled Sohn, his voice cracking.

  ‘Now!’ Chun called out a moment later over the shriek of high-speed air ripping past the windshields.

  Both men pulled back on their yokes, employing every ounce of their strength. Slowly the nose came up and the G-forces built, squashing them down in their seats. Chun’s eyes flicked to the gauges. Their speed was reducing rapidly. Engines two and four were operating within the normal parameters, the hydraulic pressure low but stable.

  The G-forces peaked and then rapidly faded as they attained level flight. Chun added throttle to keep their attitude steady, but as the aircraft accelerated it began to shake violently. He reduced throttle and the ferocious vibration abated somewhat. He eased the throttles forward until the shaking started again, then backed them off a touch, the limit established.

  ‘That’s the best we can manage?’ Sohn asked.

  Chun nodded.

  ‘225 knots and we cannot maintain level flight,’ Sohn observed.

  The captain was aware of the problem. The altimeter was registering 15,000 feet of altitude, but there was a descent rate of around 400 feet per minute. An airspeed of 225 knots was higher than the minimum speed normally required to maintain level flight, but they were still descending. There was a reason and Chun believed it had something to do with the wings, which was why he hadn’t descended to the emergency height of 10,000 feet that training mandated for a cabin decompression. They might end up needing every foot of altitude they could get.

  The aircraft shook under them like a car with a buckled front wheel. Chun, Sohn and Kim all knew they’d been struck by at least one missile, and probably two. Explosions and shrapnel had destroyed the number one engine on the left wing, number three engine on the right wing close to the fuselage, and caused a depressurization event. But what else?

  The light on the internal phone system had been blinking almost continuously since the missile hits, accompanied by a beeping tone. Chun slid off his headset and answered it. ‘Captain Chun,’ he said, keeping the tone of his voice as even as he could.

  ‘Captain! Captain!’ The stewardess was shrieking at him down the line.

  ‘Calm yourself,’ he snapped. ‘You are a professional.’

  The rebuke had the desired effect, the woman regaining a measure of composure. ‘Captain, what . . . what has happened?’ she blubbered.

  ‘Is there damage to the cabin area?’

  ‘Yes. There is a hole. We have dead and injured.’

  In his mind’s eye, Chun could imagine the situation near the missile strike. The shrapnel would have been a whirlwind of steel knives, killing, slashing, maiming.

  ‘Administer first aid as per procedures. Are there any doctors among the passengers?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. They are doing what they can.’

  ‘We think it was a bomb—terrorists.’

  ‘Terrorists?!’

  ‘I will make an announcement shortly,’ he said, ‘once we have assessed the damage. I will send someone back to inspect. Now, go and see to your passengers.’

  ‘Yes, Captain!’

  Chun hung up the handset.

  ‘We have to maneuver to see what is possible,’ said Sohn. ‘I think they have crippled us.’

  Chun agreed. ‘Okay. I have the controls,’ he informed the first officer.

  ‘We were in international airspace!’ Kim shouted.

  ‘Yes. We will sue them,’ Chun said over his shoulder. ‘I will try a turn to the left.’ He moved the wheel. The vibration through the controls increased and the aircraft made a small turn of no more than ten degrees. ‘A problem there,’ Chun said, speaking as much to himself as Sohn. ‘Now, a turn to the right.’ The aircraft banked thirty degrees to the right, but again with markedly increased vibration.

  ‘Kim,’ said Captain Chun, ‘go back and have a look at the wings. Reassure the cabin crew and the passengers.’

  ‘Reassure them yourself. If it weren’t for the both of you and your fighter-pilot egos, this would not have happened. We wouldn’t even be here.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Sohn.

  The captain could handle the controls by himself now that they weren’t in a dive or a turn. The descent rate hadn’t increased. Chun gave him a nod. ‘Be quick,’ he said.

  The first officer released his seat restraints, removed his headset and oxygen mask, and pushed himself up and out of his seat. He stepped past the flight engineer, glaring at the man.

  Chun checked the weather radar. Sakhalin Island was behind them. He began running through their options in his head. As he saw it, they had just two: ditch in the sea, or backtrack to Soviet territory and try for a landing. Neither was palatable.

  Sohn moved through the upper deck of the business-class section, which now resembled a trash heap of oxygen masks and strewn personal effects. The passengers were mostly holding onto each other, or retching into the yellow cups still over their mouths. He saw one man snoring loudly, oblivious to the situation, unable to be woken, his mask hanging against his cheek and his shirt and pants stained wet with alcohol and cola. Here and there passengers looked up at the first officer with a primeval fear. Sohn did his best to soothe them. ‘It’s okay . . . it will be okay,’ he said, patting shoulders, even though he knew in his heart it probably wouldn’t be.

  A flight attendant, her mascara smeared, sat in a chair rocking a young teenage girl whose body was racked by sobs.

  Trash, blankets, clothing, food, headsets, books, luggage and vomit filled the aisles. Sohn tripped and slid on it all as he made his way to the staircase. He gripped the rails as the aircraft shook like a sick man having a seizure, and took the steps carefully one at a time down to the main floor. Here the flight attendants were doing the best they could, administering first aid, speaking with the passengers, trying to answer questions they didn’t have answers to. Sohn was amazed at how calm some people appeared to be. The effect of naked shock, he decided, or the quiet reverence of individuals making peace with their gods, preparing to die.

  ‘Down the back, down the back. Aircraft right,’ yelled a flight attendant, rushing up to him, her eyes wide, a nasty gash on her forehead, the trail of blood smearing half her face.

  Sohn kept moving, bending down occasionally as he approached the area where the wing joined the fuselage, looking out through the portholes, scouting for damage. The noise levels increased markedly here, an unmuffled scream of jet noise mixed with the violent winds. Newsprint and tissue paper danced in the air beyond the economy lavatory and galley sections, tugged at by invisible vortices.

  That’s when he saw the hole in the starboard side of the plane, as the flight attendant had said. His mouth opened in shock. It was a yard and a half in diameter. A bundle of clothes appeared to be caught on the perimeter of the hole. Then he realized that the bundle was half a body—a young girl—her legs chewed off by the jagged metal of the torn fuselage and the airflow. Whole rows of seats adjacent to the hole—three in total—were gone.

>   Sohn crossed to the opposite aisle, to the port side, and saw that the rear of the plane had been evacuated. He looked over his shoulder, back toward the galley. It had become a makeshift triage area, the flight attendants having augmented their emergency first aid training with the help of any additional chance medical experience among the passengers. There was a lot of blood. A woman was having her head bandaged by a man in a bloody shirt. Nothing Sohn could do here. He crossed back to other side of the aircraft and continued moving aft past the hole. Engine number three was visible through it. He crouched to get an angle on the wing.

  ‘Shebal!’ he said aloud when he saw the jagged tear in the upper wing surface. Motherfucker! A whole section between engines three and four was gone. He crossed again to the other side of the cabin, leaned forward on a seat back and looked out through a porthole at the left wing, and the bottom of his stomach fell away. It was difficult to see in the starlight, but the entire wing section beyond engine number one appeared to be missing. Sohn tried not to let the fear show in his face. It was astonishing that they were flying at all. He noted that the fuselage skin was punctured in numerous places with shrapnel holes and many seats were bloodstained. A number of bodies were laid out across the center seats, blood-soaked blankets covering their faces. He counted six in all. A human leg was also wrapped in a blanket, the shoe exposed. Sohn tripped on something embedded in the carpet. He bent down and discovered a long blade of dull metal—missile fragmentation material.

  ‘What’s happened?’ a man shouted at him over the roar filling the cabin.

  Sohn stood up. It was an American. He recognized him as the US congressman the purser had introduced him and the captain to in Anchorage when the aircraft was still on the ground. The congress-man’s sleeves were rolled up and bloodstained, and there were wide crimson blood spatters across the front of his white shirt. He was the man who had been bandaging the woman’s head.

  ‘Are you alright, sir?’ Sohn asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Sohn nodded and began to move. The man gripped his arm with strong fingers.

  ‘What in God’s name happened?’ the congressman demanded.

  ‘A bomb,’ Sohn said, shaking his arm free. A flight attendant was running down the aisle toward them.

  ‘First Officer Sohn,’ the woman said, her face gaunt. ‘First Officer Sohn, Captain Chun wants you on the flight deck immediately.’

  Nami’s scalp throbbed dully as the bandage was carefully wound around her head and then secured by surgical tape.

  ‘You’ve lost a fair bit of blood,’ the man told her. ‘You might feel weak when you stand up. I had to stitch your scalp back on.’

  The man was older than she was, but he had a pleasant face. The white, bloodstained sleeves of his business shirt were rolled up beyond his elbows. She recognized him. ‘You’re the congressman.’

  He nodded. ‘Congressman Lawrence McDonald, at your service, ma’am.’

  ‘One of the other passengers told me your name.’

  ‘What’s yours?’ he asked.

  ‘Nami.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Nami.’

  ‘Thank you for this,’ she said, tipping her head slightly.

  ‘I used to be a flight surgeon in the navy, though my training was in urology, not head wounds. Pity you don’t have a prostate.’ He gave her a smile. ‘Your head wound could have been worse,’ he said as he stuffed a handful of bloody gauze in a plastic bag. ‘You’re very lucky.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed and looked across at where she’d been sitting. Lucky they hadn’t seated her a row further forward; lucky her seatbelt had been done up tightly; lucky that whatever had scalped her hadn’t struck a few inches lower and taken the top of her head clean off.

  ‘I wasn’t even supposed to be on this flight,’ he said as he gave his handiwork with the bandages a final check.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I was booked on a flight two days ago, but I missed it—decided to stay on in New York a couple of extra days instead.’

  ‘I think you were meant to be on board, to help.’

  ‘Well, you’re okay now, Nami.’ He put his hand up and beckoned one of the cabin crew, who hurried over. ‘Go with the flight attendant. They’re seating everyone from this section further forward.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, standing, helped by his hand under her elbow, feeling faint for a moment.

  One of the flight crew appeared on the other side of the galley to inspect the damage to the aircraft.

  ‘I’ll come and check on you later,’ said McDonald. ‘Take these when the local anesthetic wears off in around an hour’s time.’ He dropped two pills snipped off the end of a blister pack into her palm. ‘And if the pain persists, see your family doctor.’ He smiled at her again.

  Nami appreciated the gentle humor.

  The congressman moved off to talk to the pilot.

  Around her, passengers were dead and dying, sliced up by flying metal. It was like a battle zone. She made way for two men carrying a body between them down toward the makeshift morgue. Nami glanced at the pills the congressman had given her. An hour’s time? She hoped she’d still be alive then.

  ‘We must make a decision,’ Chun said as Sohn squeezed past him, took his seat and glanced at the altimeter: 14,200 feet and descending at the same previous rate of just under 400 feet per minute.

  ‘What is the situation back there?’ Chun asked with a gesture over his shoulder.

  ‘Bad. There’s structural damage to the fuselage and we have lost wing panels between engines three and four. We may have flaps or we may not—it was hard to see. The biggest problem is the left wing outboard of engine one—it’s gone.’

  ‘Put out a mayday call,’ Kim demanded. ‘Do it now.’

  ‘Shut up, Kim,’ Sohn spat.

  ‘Well, that explains our lack of turning ability,’ said Chun, fighting the shaking wheel. ‘How are the passengers?’

  ‘Frightened. There are many dead and wounded.’

  ‘Their deaths are your responsibility,’ Kim called out.

  ‘And yours, too, Kim,’ Sohn told him. ‘You agreed to this just as we did.’

  ‘You must make a mayday call,’ Kim again pleaded.

  ‘Why? We don’t need to. We can still fly,’ said Sohn.

  ‘There will be no mayday call,’ commanded Chun. ‘We can’t acknowledge that we know where we are. What about 015? They have given position calls in our name. We will incriminate them.’

  ‘Forget about their reputations. Our lives, the lives of our passengers, are what’s important now.’

  ‘We have spent the last half an hour ignoring Soviet calls on the emergency frequency,’ Sohn reminded him. ‘How do we explain that now we are suddenly able to transmit on 121.5?’

  ‘The ruse is over,’ said Kim. ‘We have failed.’

  ‘Enough!’ the captain shouted. ‘We have little time. Do we ditch or try to make landfall?’

  ‘If we ditch, you must send a mayday call,’ said Kim.

  Chun and Sohn ignored him.

  ‘What do you think?’ Chun asked his first officer.

  Sohn shook his head. ‘If we ditch, with little control at night? Our chances of survival would be nil.’

  Chun nodded. ‘That’s my thinking also.’

  ‘What is this rock below us?’ Sohn asked, checking the weather radar.

  ‘Moneron Island. It’s Russian. As you say, it’s a rock. Nothing on it.

  We can’t make a runway in Japan. Sakhalin Island is our only alternative,’ said Chun. ‘The Soviet base at Dolinsk-Sokol.’

  Sohn frowned.

  Chun knew what was on his first officer’s mind. ‘When we land, we can plead ignorance, disorientation, like the captain and crew of KAL 902.’

  ‘What about him?’ Sohn asked, gesturing over his shoulder.

  ‘If we make it, I’ll say what’s necessary,’ Kim insisted. ‘I don’t want to go to prison.’

  ‘We must make a turn,’ Chun
said. ‘I’ll need help. Keep a hand on the throttles.’ He gripped the wheel firmly with two hands.

  Sohn placed one hand on the wheel and one hand on the throttle levers.

  ‘Keep the turn slow,’ Chun said. ‘No more than twenty degrees of bank.’

  Sohn nodded and Chun fed in the pressure, turning the wheel. Suddenly, the aircraft banked sharply to more than forty degrees and their altimeter needle began to wind backward. The wheel shook and trembled.

  ‘Bring it back!’ Chun yelled, fighting the plane’s tendency to want to roll over. ‘Bring it back!’

  ‘I’m trying!’ Sohn told him, taking his hand off the throttle lever and putting his shoulder into turning the control wheel in the opposite direction to their turn.

  ‘Throttle!’ Chun bellowed.

  He saw that Sohn’s hand was no longer on the levers. He snatched across and jammed them forward. There was a roar of thrust and a forward surge. Chun hoped that more air over the control surfaces would give them extra authority. It worked and the plane began to pull out of its spiral, though the vibration caused by the additional speed was now almost bone-jarring. Chun reduced the throttle and the plane gradually resumed a wings-level attitude. He throttled forward to the previous setting and allowed his eyes to flick to the compass. They had lost almost 4500 feet of altitude and completed two and a half orbits of the island. But at least they were now pointed in the right direction.

  The light on the intercom phone came on. Sohn picked up the receiver and cradled it under his cheek. Droplets of sweat dribbled into the holes in the plastic over the mouthpiece. Chun could hear a woman’s hysterical voice coming through over the noise in the cockpit. Sohn reassured her that everything was going to be okay, and replaced the phone. Chun found himself wondering whether ignorance of their current plight would be preferable.

  They were at 10,000 feet with a sink rate now of less than 300 feet per minute in the thicker air. Airspeed was also now slower at 220 knots. Chun did the math in his head. Assuming the numbers didn’t change for the worse—and there was absolutely no guarantee that they wouldn’t—they had a little over thirty-three minutes in the air until they hit the water. In that time they could cover 123 nautical miles. Dolinsk-Sokol was 82 nautical miles from their current position. So they were within range, though there was very little room for error, especially if they had to ride the throttles to maintain speed.