Mayday (40 page)

John Berry felt the familiar pilot’s control pressures in his hands and realized that this was the first time he had attempted
to hand-fly the giant Straton. The warning horn sounded weak and the lights became dimmer as the electrical energy was being
drained away from the dying airliner. The cockpit became quieter as they dropped beneath the worst part of the storm. From
the lounge, Berry could hear the moans of the injured. He released one hand from the wheel and turned on the windshield wipers.
Through the rain and clouds, he thought he could see glimpses of the ocean. His heart pounded quickly. He forced himself to
look down at the altimeter. “Four thousand feet,” he said aloud. They were dropping at the rate of about forty feet a second.
“Less than two minutes to impact. Hold on. Sharon . . . the life vests . . .”

“Yes. In the orange pouch against the rear wall.”

Berry turned and looked at the orange pouch hanging on the wall, then saw the small emergency exit near the right rear of
the cockpit. “When we hit, you get the vests. I’ll open the door. Linda, stay in your seat until we come for you.”

Crandall grabbed his arm. “John . . . John, I’m scared.”

“Stay calm. For God’s sake, stay calm.” Berry held the controls tightly. He knew he should be thinking about how to bring
the aircraft in, and what to do if they survived the crash. But he couldn’t get his mind off the problem of the dead engines.
The fuel was shut off. But the fuel is now on again. What else . . . ?

A bolt of lightning flashed close outside his left window and the cockpit was illuminated with an orange glow, followed by
the crackling sound of unharnessed electricity. Berry sat up quickly. Suddenly, all the complexities of the overhead instrument
panel were swept away. “Oh, for God’s sake!” He saw in a moment of unbridled clarity his old Buick, rolling down a hill in
Dayton, Ohio, engine off, and he saw his hand turn the ignition switch, and heard again the sound of the Buick’s engine firing
into life. “Sharon! The ignitors! The ignitors! Listen. Listen to me. Get up. Get up!” He looked down at the altimeter. Two
thousand feet.

As she unbuckled her belt and slid from her chair, the Straton broke through the bottom of the thunderstorm, and Berry could
see the surface of the ocean clearly now. The sky was relatively calm, and the aircraft flew without much turbulence. But
even from this altitude he could see the towering white foam of the swelling waves. He knew that even if they could get out
of the aircraft, they wouldn’t survive that sea.

Sharon Crandall was holding his arm and looking at him. Berry realized in an instant that she had perfect trust and confidence
in him; as a flight attendant, she must have known that to ditch without a restraining belt meant almost certain death.

Berry spoke clearly and firmly. “I can’t look away from the flight instruments. . . . On the overhead panel there are four
switches marked ‘engine ignitors.’ Hurry.”

She knelt down behind the pedestal between the pilot’s chairs and looked up. Her eyes swept the instruments and switches above
her. “Where? Where? John . . .”

Berry tried to reconstruct the panel in his mind while he kept his eyes glued to the flight instruments. He finally glanced
up for a brief instant, for as long as he could dare. “Lower left! Lower left! Four switches. Yellow lights above them. Yellow!
Yellow! Turn them on. On!”

Crandall spotted them and passed her hand over all four switches at once, pushing them into the on position. “On! On!”

Berry looked down at the altimeter. Nine hundred feet. The rate of descent had slowed slightly, but they had lost some airspeed.
They had less than half a minute before the Straton would hit the water. He called out to Sharon, “Back in the seat. Strap
in.” He stared at the center panel and watched to see if the Straton’s engine instruments would come to life. He tried to
think if there was anything else he had to do to fire up the engines, but couldn’t think of anything. He focused intently
on the four temperature gauges. Slowly, the needles began to rise. “Ignition! Ignition! We have power!” But he knew that the
process of accelerating the jet engines and producing enough thrust for lift would take time, perhaps more time than they
had left.

He glanced at the altimeter. Two hundred and fifty feet. The airliner’s speed had bled off to 210 knots and the descent was
slower, but he sensed he was very close to a stall. As soon as that thought entered his mind, the stall warning alarm began
to sound—a synthetic voice repeating the word
AIRSPEED,AIRSPEED,AIRSPEED,
. Berry knew that he should push forward on the wheel, lower the nose, and pick up airspeed to avert the stall, but he had
no altitude left for that. Reluctantly, he pulled slightly back on the wheel and felt the nose rise. The Straton began to
vibrate, the tremors shaking the airframe so violently that it became nearly impossible to read the instruments. The Straton
was engaged in a test of strength between gravity and the thrust of its accelerating engines. As he glanced at his altimeter,
he saw that gravity was winning. One hundred feet.

He looked down out of the side window. The hundred feet that was showing on the altimeter seemed less than that in reality.
The swelling sea that sped by beneath him seemed to rise up to the wings of the airliner. He glanced out the front windshield.
Huge, towering waves rose and broke only a short distance below him. If even one of those waves reached up and touched the
Straton, the aircraft would lose enough speed to make a crash a certainty.

Berry scanned his instruments. Engine power was up, airspeed was good, but altitude was still dropping. Berry nudged the control
column, trying to keep the nose up. He was walking a shaky tightrope, and one slip would put them into the violent sea at
nearly 200 knots.

The synthetic voice announcing
AIRSPEED
continued, and so did the prestall vibrations. Berry worked the flight controls judiciously, trying to trade their few ounces
of available energy for a few inches of extra altitude.

The altimeter read zero, though he guessed the airplane was still about twenty feet above the water. It was becoming obvious
that the Straton was not going to make it, given the rate of increasing thrust against the rate of descent. Involuntarily,
the muscles of his buttocks tightened and he rose imperceptibly from his seat. “Come on, you pig—climb! Climb, you bastard!”
He turned to Crandall and shouted above the noise. “Locate the afterburners! Afterburners!”

She scanned the overhead panel again, near where the ignitor switches had been. She raised her arm and gave Berry a thumbs-up.

“Hit the switches!” He paused for a split second and said, “Then get into position to ditch.”

Crandall hit the four switches.

Berry heard and felt a two-phased thud as the after-burners kicked in. He had no idea what would happen next.

Crandall called to Linda. “Put your head down! Like this.” Crandall hunched over into a crash position, as well as she could
with the copilot’s wheel in front of her. Before she put her head down, she glanced up to see if Linda had done the same.

Berry felt the slight sensation of being pressed against his seat. The Straton was accelerating as fuel was injected directly
into the jet exhausts and ignited to give extra thrust to the engines. The prestall airframe buffeting lessened, and he pulled
farther back on the control wheel. The nose came up, and the ocean seemed to sink beneath his windshield. The stall alarm
voice sounded one more time, then stopped. The altimeter showed 100 feet and climbing. “We’re climbing! We’re climbing! We’re
lifting!”

Sharon Crandall picked her head up. She felt the increased Gs against her body as the aircraft rose. “Oh, God. Dear God.”
Tears ran down her cheeks.

Berry held the control column with his left hand, reached his right hand out, and spread his fingers over the four engine
throttles. For the first time since he had climbed into the flight chair, he was in control.

He called out to Sharon Crandall. “Afterburners— off.”

She reached up and shut them down.

The Straton decelerated slightly and Berry worked the four throttles, feeling the aircraft accelerate again. He watched the
engine temperature and pressure gauges rise and the altimeter needle move upward. Five hundred feet, six hundred. Berry sat
back. The unknown terrors of flying the airliner, like most unknown terrors, had been exaggerated.

No one spoke. All the lights in the cockpit came back on, and most of the warning lights extinguished. Outside, the violent
storm raged above them, but at their lower altitude it produced no more than rain and manageable winds. John Berry cleared
his throat. “We’re heading home. Sharon, Linda, are you both all right?”

The girl answered in a weak voice. “I’m not feeling good.”

Crandall released her seat belt, stood, and stepped over the girl. She noticed that her own legs were wobbling. She took the
girl’s face in her hands. “Just a little airsick, honey. You’ll be all right in a minute. Take a lot of deep breaths. There.”

Berry recognized the automatic words of the veteran flight attendant, but the tone was sincere.

Crandall leaned over and gave Berry a light kiss on the cheek, then slid back into the copilot’s chair without a word.

Berry concentrated on the instruments. He let the Straton come up to 900 feet, then leveled out before they rose into the
bottom of the thunderstorm.

He listened for sounds from the lounge, but heard nothing that penetrated the noise of the rain, the hum of electronics, or
the droning of the jet engines.

He shut off the windshield wipers, experimented with the flight control for a few minutes, then reached out and reengaged
the autopilot. The amber light went off, and he released the wheel and the throttles and took his feet off the pedals. He
flexed his hands and stretched his arms, then turned to Sharon. “That was about as close as it comes. You were very cool.”

“Was I? I don’t remember. I think I remember screaming.” She looked closely at him. “John . . . what happened? You didn’t
do something . . . no . . . I read the message.”

“Neither you nor I did anything wrong . . . except to listen to them.”

“What . . . ?”

The alerting bell rang. They looked at each other, then stared down at the data-link screen.

TO FLIGHT 52: DO YOU READ?

ACKNOWLEDGE.

SAN FRANCISCO HQ.

Berry motioned toward the console. “Those bastards. Those sons-of-bitches.”

Crandall looked at him, then back at the message. She had not had time to think clearly about what had happened, and had not
yet come to terms with what she’d thought about, but her half-formed conclusions suddenly crystallized. “John . . . how
could
they . . . ? I mean, how could . . . why . . . ?”

“God, I can’t believe what an idiot I’ve been. Hawaii. That should have been my tip-off. Shift the center of gravity. Fuel
gauges. Those goddamned lying sons-of-bitches.”

Crandall was still trying to understand all that had happened. “That was partly my fault. I talked you into—”

“No. I trusted them too. But I shouldn’t have. I should have known. I
did
know, goddamn it.”

“But
why?
Why, in the name of God, would they do that?”

“They don’t want”—Berry jerked his thumb over his shoulder—“
them
back.”

Crandall nodded. She’d thought of that for some time, but never pursued the thought to its natural conclusion. “What are we
going to do? What are we going to answer them?”

“
Answer?
I’m not going to answer anything.”

“No, John. Answer them. Tell them we know what they tried to do.”

Berry considered, then shook his head. “Someone who is trying to kill us has control of the situation down there. Someone
in that tight little room off the Dispatch Office. Talking to the man—or men—in that room is like shouting to the man who
just pushed you into the water that you’re drowning. I’m not going to tip them off that we’re still alive. That’s our secret,
and we’ll make the most of it.”

Crandall nodded reluctantly. “Yes, I suppose. God, I wish we could tell someone. If we don’t get back . . . no one will ever
know.”

Berry thought about the data-link messages. He tried to reconstruct them in his mind. “Even if we do get back, we’ll have
a hell of a time trying to make anyone believe us. It would be our word against theirs, and we are the ones who suffered decompression,
and we are the ones who can’t understand or follow the instructions of trained personnel.”

Sharon Crandall was beginning to get a very clear picture. “Those bastards. Oh, those bastards. Damn them.” She tried to imagine
who in the Trans-United hierarchy would be capable of something like this. A few names came to mind, but she decided it could
be anyone with enough to lose by having the Straton come back.

Berry was thinking of motives. “They probably don’t want to have to admit that their airport security was bad. They’ll discredit
the bomb message we sent them—if they even bothered to pass it on, and try to pin it on someone or something else. The Straton
Corporation. Structural failure. What a bunch of conniving, immoral bastards.”

“God, I can’t wait to get back and . . . But are they going to
believe
us?”

“We have to remember what we read, and believe that what we remember is correct.”

Linda Farley spoke. “We can show them the words printed on the paper.”

Crandall couldn’t follow what the girl was saying. “Did you understand what we were talking about?”

“Yes.”

Berry kept his eyes on the control panel and spoke to her. “Those men in San Francisco lied to us, Linda. They tried to .
. . they told us things that would make us crash. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“What words?” asked Crandall.

“In the back. Near where I was sleeping before. It’s sitting in a little door on the wall, and it printed while you were typing
and—”