Skyhammer (8 page)

“One-forty-six point five,” he read aloud. He thumbed through a packet of flip-cards, thinking that it all was completely
second nature to him, every step. He located the page for 147,000 pounds, and set the packet next to the weight card. They
were 2,500 pounds below maximum allowable takeoff weight. Both be and Boyd adjusted the pointers on their airspeed indicators.
Then they finished the before-takeoff checklist.

Now they were number two for the runway. Pate stared at the heat waves boiling from the engines of the jet parked ahead of
them. He had never really noticed before how furiously the heat attacked the cold air. He looked to his right, out his side
window. An American 757, its bare metal gleaming in the gray light, was about to touch down. A current of envy worked through
him. American had somehow kept clear of Farraday and all the trouble he’d caused. Sheer luck, he supposed. The toss of the
dice. He thought again about Senator Sanford and Mariella Ponti, and how luck of the draw played a part in everything.

“You want the first leg?” Boyd asked.

With a faint puff of blue smoke from its tires, the 757 touched down. Pate watched it decelerate. He’d always wanted to fly
a 757. Westar had never owned one, though, and, thanks to Farraday, New World couldn’t afford to upgrade its fleet. “No. You
go ahead and take it,” he said to Boyd. “I’ve got the radios.”

Boyd made a quick, canned briefing covering procedures in case of an engine failure or other major problem. A minute later
the tower cleared the aircraft ahead of them for takeoff. Boyd released the brakes and brought the nose around, and they moved
into the number one position. He set the parking brake, and they sat in silence, waiting again. Now the plane ahead of them
was at the far end of the runway, leaving the ground and climbing up into the gray sky, sooty trails of exhaust in its wake.
The runway seemed barren, vast. A hundred feet in front of them on the pale concrete were the black skid marks of tenthousand
touchdowns. Pate suddenly wished he’d called Katherine. Then he drove his mind away from that thought, focused it again on
the narrow, blank runway, stretching out, as pale as a piece of the sky.

The tower controller’s voice crackled in his earphone. “New World Five-fifty-five, wind zero four zero at twelve knots. Cleared
for takeoff.”

Pate acknowledged. He checked his watch; 11:42 Eastern, 16:42 Greenwich Mean Time. Boyd released the brakes and advanced the
throttles and steered the airplane around onto the runway centerline.

“Landing lights,” Pate said.

“On.”

“Checklist complete.”

Boyd advanced the throttles further, to vertical. Pate checked the N1 tachometers; they stabilized at near 60 per cent.

“Power stable.”

Boyd engaged automatic throttles, and the levers motored forward. Pate followed them up with his hand.

“Takeoff thrust set.”

With a gentle jolt, Flight 555 began accelerating down the runway, the nosegear humping over the expansion joints in the concrete,
the airframe shaking with each impact. Pate scanned the engine instruments and the airspeed. All was normal.

“Vee one, rotate,” he called as the needle passed 146 knots.

Boyd eased his control column aft, bringing the nose up steadily, and at 152 knots ship 109 broke from the ground. Abruptly
the thumping and shaking ceased, and they soared up into the cold, fluid light.

“Positive rate. Gear up.” Boyd emphasized the call with a palm-up motion of his hand.

Pate leaned forward and threw the gear lever up. The “clunk” of hydraulic actuators sounded through the cockpit, and, momentarily,
the noise of the nosewheels spinning down against their snubbers thrummed the floor beneath them.

Pate eased back in his seat and through his side window watched the white landscape fall away. Off to his right, the flat,
gray expanse of Lake Erie grew huge. It seemed they were caught in a liquid seam, between the land and the surface of the
seam—the overcast—as if they were a fish climbing through water, and for a long moment he pictured the river of his childhood,
the Clearwater, flowing through its steep canyon.

Then he turned from the window. They were passing a thousand feet now. Boyd eased the nose down and began accelerating. “Flaps
up, climb power,” he called.

Pate repositioned the flap lever and selected climb power. The autothrottles eased back slightly. In seconds they reached
the overcast and the world outside went white as they were enveloped in the stratus.

Most pilots continued to fly by hand, at least to 18,000 feet or so, but now Boyd switched the autopilot on.

A minute later Cleveland tower handed them off to the departure controller. Pate acknowledged, and dialed in the new frequency.
Departure cleared them up to flight level 230 and assigned them a vector toward Indianapolis, 240 miles to the southwest.

Two minutes later they passed ten thousand feet. There was only a trace of turbulence in the stratus now, only an occasional
jiggle. Boyd reached up and sounded the dual chime in the cabin twice, clearing the flight attendants to initiate their service.

At eighteen thousand feet, they reset their altimeters, and Boyd switched the landing lights off. At twenty thousand feet
they were handed off again, to the Indianapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center.

“Good morning, New World Five-fifty-five,” the Center’s controller responded when Pate checked in. “Climb and maintain flight
level three one zero; fly heading two five five; direct Indianapolis when able.”

At flight level 230, 23,000 feet above mean sea-level, they began to see patches of blue sky. A few seconds later the MD-80
was zipping in and out of the stratus’s ragged tops. And then suddenly they broke out into clear air, the undercast falling
away beneath them and brilliant sunlight flooding the cockpit. Boyd switched off the engine anti-ice. He pulled a pair of
sunglasses from his shirt pocket, put them on, and slid his seat back on its rails. As Pate watched him, at the periphery
of his vision, Boyd removed the telephone handset from its receptacle at the rear of the pedestal, and brought it to his ear.
It was all mechanical for him, Pate realized. The job meant only the uniform, the girls, the envy of other men. Not the flying.
Flying, for Boyd, was just the tedious price he had to pay for the prestige.

Boyd made the company-required announcement to the passengers, advising them of route of flight, time enroute, and the weather
in Phoenix. He flipped off the seat belt sign, making sure to request that belts be used when passengers were in their seats.
Then he told them he’d keep them advised of points of interest along their route, adding that the undercast of clouds was
forecast to break up around Kansas City.

“So sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight,” he concluded.“And thanks again for choosing New World Airlines.”

He returned the handset to its receptacle and resumed monitoring the flight’s progress. He looked Pate’s way once, as if he
wanted to get Pate’s attention, but Pate kept his eyes on the panel, watching the blinking LED’s.

Soon now, Pate thought. His palms were sweating. The hiss of the air rushing over the windshield seemed to penetrate his head.
He opened his jaw to pop his eardrums. They were passing 27,000 feet, climbing at less than 800 feet a minute, the engines
straining in the thin, cold air.

At 30,900 feet the flight mode annunciators switched, indicating altitude capture, and the autopilot began reducing pitch,
lowering the nose almost imperceptibly, initiating level-off to 31,000. When the altitude had stabilized, the annunciators
again flashed, changing to Mach cruise, and the autothrottles began working to establish the speed Boyd had commanded—Mach.78.
Even though 555 was cleaving the air at over 460 knots, a ferocious headwind was reducing their rate over the ground, nearly
six miles below, to about 360.

A minute later, the cabin call chimed. Boyd pulled the handset back up to his ear.

“Cockpit.”

“Hey, Kevin. Mariella. You ready for a refill?”

“Yeah, sure. Sounds good.”

Boyd had to reach back and rotate the lock on the cockpit door. With a little difficulty, Mariella pulled it open from the
other side, then leaned in and passed a fresh cup to Boyd.

“Emil? You still okay?”

“Fine,” Pate said, willing her to leave.

She closed the door. Thankful—suddenly and acutely sorry for her, though—Pate turned and made sure it was locked again. Then
he faced forward. He checked his watch. It was time. His heart thumped once heavily. He glanced at Boyd, at the smug set of
his mouth, his young, nearly seamless face. Still a kid. It was not good that he had to do this, Pate thought. But it was
necessary. He had considered all other ways.

Boyd sipped his coffee and set the cup down on the panel beside his left armrest. “Sounds like a beautiful day in Phoenix.
Too bad we can’t stay there.”

Pate couldn’t reply. He ran his palms along his thighs, wiping the sweat from them. Then he reached down to his flight kit
in the well under his side window and flipped open the leather pocket cover. He sat erect again, then let his head swivel
slowly as if he were making a routine scan of the horizon. He pretended to detect something, off to the left of the aircraft’s
nose.

“Traffic, eleven o’clock, on the horizon,” he said.

Boyd directed his attention to the area, leaning forward a little and searching intently. “I don’t see anything,” he said
irritably, still looking.

Pate by then had reached down into the pocket of his kit.

“I’ve lost him too. No problem. He was no factor.”

Boyd turned and scanned the instrument panel. There came a moment of doubt, a tremor that passed through Pate’s mind, as his
hand closed, his finger found its place. He could not do this after all, he realized. Not in this way.

But Boyd’s head turned, and now he could see what Pate had taken from his kit. Behind the amber lenses of his sunglasses,
his eyes frowned, then widened in disbelief. In another second he would react. Then it would be too late.

Boyd reached out, tried to grab hold of the barrel of the gun. But the silenced.22 in Pate’s hand snapped softly, a sound
barely audible above the normal cockpit noise. The ejected shell casing tinkled off the instrument panel. “Oh!” Boyd said
sharply, his hand flying to his chest, where a sudden stain was already spreading on the white uniform shirt. “God damn it!”
he said, staring at Pate in angry astonishment. Then he collapsed forward, trying to shield himself, shouting, “Son ofabitch!”

For a moment, Pate stared at him. But with the shock came only clarity of purpose. He fired a second time, into a point just
under Boyd’s arm, hoping the bullet would hit the heart. He didn’t want Boyd to suffer. But Boyd flinched and groaned sharply,
and then his right arm lashed out. He wasn’t going to die so easily. Pate grabbed his hand at the wrist, pulled Boyd toward
him and leaned in. He pressed the barrel of the pistol into Boyd’s left breast pocket and fired once more. Boyd shuddered,
his head snapping back against the seat. Pink foam spilled out of his mouth. Then he slumped, his hands moving feebly, as
if trying to find something. Pate recoiled away, horrified again, then lunged forward and slapped the hands from the control
yoke, the radio handset. They dropped, useless. Boyd’s head fell onto his chest.

Pate’s mouth had clamped tight. The air was shooting in and out through his nose. He let go his breath in a sharp cough and
fell back against the outer wall of the cockpit.

Boyd didn’t move. Pate watched him, waiting to see his chest rise, take another breath. A terrible gout of dread hit him.
Was Boyd actually dead? Had he done this? He felt his heart hammering in his chest and temples, the sweat pouring down the
insides of his arms. The gun dropped into his lap. His hands shook uncontrollably as he tore into his kit and found the carton
of cigarettes. He ripped the cardboard open. He could hardly get a pack open and light the cigarette.

But it was over. Right or wrong, it was done. Keeping his eyes closed, he put his head back and took another deep drag on
the cigarette. He had no choice now, except to follow through.

Flight Deck

New World Flight 555

17:17 GMT/12:17 EST

A month ago he had seen Katherine. He’d been living in Cleveland three weeks by then, thinking still that his life would—like
a film run backward—somehow fall together again. Thinking it, but knowing differently. He’d spent nights sitting in darkness,
treating his pain with silence, booze, and cigarettes, knowing they weren’t cures for the way he was feeling.

Katherine had called him. They had to settle things, she said. Pate could still remember the flatness of her voice. That strength
of hers working her through the pain that was eating him up. He’d flown into Albuquerque the next afternoon, arriving at sundown.
She had rented a house on the west side, a shabby box, located ironically, almost directly under the approach to the airport.

His stepdaughters met him at the door, Carrie leaping to hug him, Melissa cautious, not knowing if it was okay to show she
was glad to see him. When he hugged her, though, she whispered in his ear, “I still love you.” Melissa had always been his
best pal. He’d taught her fly fishing. They’d spent whole days together up along the trout streams east of Albuquerque.

He and Katherine did not even touch. They said next to nothing while they sat in the front room and the girls told him of
all the things they’d been doing. But later, when they were alone in the kitchen, she told him she’d found a job.

“Keeping books, helping manage a motel.” She stood at the sink, her back to him.

“I’m glad,” Pate said. He felt washed by sadness, though, realizing that she was back where she’d been after her first marriage
had failed. He saw her reflection in the dark window above the sink, saw that she was crying, trying hard to hold it in. And
then he knew she was thinking the same thing he was thinking: It was over, finished.