Blackout

CHAPTER 18

Janice Washburn gently touched the sleeve of the technician next to her and gestured for him to zoom in closer. Normally the scenes they monitored from orbit carried no emotional reaction, but this was different.

The computer-generated picture assembled itself at last from the transmissions of two different satellites, causing her to gasp. “Am I seeing…”

“I’m afraid so, Janice. This is the hot spot I found a few minutes ago, right on the track they were flying, and there are no longer any airborne seven-forty-sevens within their flight range from the previous contact. They’re down.”

The picture coalesced to a field of intense white images defining the wreckage path of Meridian Flight 5.

“How about survivors?” she asked, in little more than a whisper.

“Could be, but it just happened. So far, I’m not seeing any.”

She whirled around to search his eyes. “That aircraft carried over…”

“Two hundred. I know, Janice. We just have to wait.”

“That’s the best you can do?”

He nodded. “This whole debris field is too hot, too many fires. The heat is masking any survivors who might be there. Remember, we’re looking at infrared.”

She lifted the receiver she’d been holding to relay the news to her senior, George Barkley, then turned back to the technician. “George wants to know if you could bring back the shot of that small jet?”

He nodded, entering a flurry of keystrokes into the keyboard. A still infrared image of a small two-engine jet appeared on the screen.

“Where is he?”

“When this was taken, he was ten miles east of Da Nang, off the coast. But we’ve lost him beneath a thunderstorm that moved over Da Nang a little while ago. He was right over the crash site earlier, but flew back offshore. He’s just orbiting.”

“What’s our confidence level he’s been tailing the seven-forty-seven?”

The technician said, “High. Very high.”

Janice raised the phone to her ear, still curious, reminding herself to feed the latest reports to Langley immediately.

The realization that he was alive came slowly to Robert MacCabe.

Aside from the flickering orange light of countless fires somewhere in the distance, it was dark — and cold. The feel of damp air on his face and the lack of familiar background noise of commercial flight jolted him back to the reality that he wasn’t awakening from a nightmare, he was still living it.

We were trying to fly… no, to land… and something happened…

Robert tried moving his right arm, and found it still attached and usable. He checked his left, and progressively his entire body, finding everything intact.

Where am I? Total confusion reigned for a few seconds until his short-term memory flooded back, causing him to sit bolt upright in what was left of the right cockpit jump seat.

Oh my God! We’ve crashed!

He tried to stand, but couldn’t. I must be hurt! But there was no pain.

Robert reached down with rising apprehension to feel his waist, the concept of paralysis hovering in the back of his mind.

He struggled again, hearing twisted metal parts rocking against one another. Still he couldn’t stand. Something was preventing him from moving his lower waist. Something was binding him to the ruined seat.

The seat belt!

With great relief, Robert reached down and snapped off the belt, standing up gingerly, his mind confused by the flickering images and ghastly shadows everywhere. He was in the remains of the cockpit, and the shell of the window frame was still intact.

There was a form slumped forward just below the broken windows. Robert moved to it, stumbling over debris that held his feet in the darkness. He pulled the body back, recognizing the bandage over the eyes. The copilot.

“Dan! Dan, can you hear me?” Robert doubted he was hearing his own voice at first. It was oddly pitched and strained. “Dan! Answer me!”

The figure stirred and tried to sit up. “Wha…?”

“Dan, this is Robert MacCabe. Can you hear me?”

Dan shook his head. “I… I can’t see you…”

“We’ve crashed, Dan. Somewhere in Vietnam. Do you remember?”

There was a sound to the left, a low moan, and Robert glanced over at the remains of the captain’s seat, now dislodged, the bottom end showing in his direction.

Dan was nodding, his hand on his head. “Oh my God.”

“Stay put, Dan. I’ve got to check on the others.” He picked his way through the jumbled debris on the floor of the cockpit and pulled the captain’s seat back upright, bringing Steve Delaney with it. He, too, was coming around, and basically uninjured except for a few minor cuts to his head.

Dallas was trying to dig herself out. She was dazed and shaking like a leaf.

John Walters had not been strapped in at the moment of impact. He was lying lengthwise on the broken front of the instrument panel. Robert reached for his wrist, aware of the awkward position of the man’s head and neck. There was no pulse.

“Where the hell are we?” Dallas mumbled, holding Robert’s shoulder.

“Dallas, are you okay?”

She nodded, her hand to her head, her dark face barely visible in the orange light. She sat on a remarkably intact jump seat. “Depends… how you define okay,” she mumbled. “How ’bout you?”

Robert sank back on the remains of his jump seat and tried to clear his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know why we’re alive.”

Thirty-five feet away in the shattered forward half of the upper deck first-class cabin, Dr. Graham Tash worked to extricate himself from the tangle of wires and tubes that engulfed him, the remnants of the overhead panels. He vaguely remembered feeling the jet pull up from a landing, but what had happened then?

Susan! he thought suddenly. Oh my God!

Graham turned to his left and began pawing through the debris that covered the aisle seat, exposing his wife’s blond hair.

“Susan!”

She stirred, giving him hope as he worked rapidly to free her from the tangle.

“Graham?”

“Honey! Oh my God, are you okay?”

There was a long hesitation as she took inventory, then nodded and opened her eyes, blinking at the reflection of fire on his skin and wondering why there was a campfire nearby. His voice seemed to fade away into a void.

Susan Tash sat up abruptly and looked around in shock. The remains of the 747’s upper deck still resembled a passenger cabin, but it was little more than the shell of sidewalls and windows attached to the floor that remained. Some of the seats were still visible as well, but most of the ceiling had collapsed, and she realized that there was nothing but debris behind her.

She took a ragged breath. “Graham… what… what…”

“We crashed, Suze! We crashed, but we made it!”

The airline CEO who had been sitting in the first row had not fastened his seat belt. The impact had catapulted him into the forward bulkhead where he now lay, moaning quietly.

Susan got to her feet, grabbing for support against rubbery legs, and tried to move toward him. “Graham,” she said, as her husband held her and guided her toward the front, “he’s hurt. We’ll need a flashlight.”

A beam of light snapped on by her shoulder, pointed at the shattered floor.

Susan looked over at the silhouette of a disheveled woman she finally recognized as Britta.

“We always carry these,” Britta said in a matter-of-fact manner.

“Are you okay?” Graham asked Britta.

Britta nodded, a shaky right hand brushing back what had become a wild mane of hair, while she tried to straighten a hopelessly torn white blouse.

There was a commotion ahead of them, and Britta raised the beam of light directly into Robert MacCabe’s face as he stumbled through what used to be the cockpit door.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” Britta said, lowering the flashlight beam to the torn and littered floor.

“Who’s there?” Robert asked, his voice unreal and raspy.

“Britta Franz and two passengers. Doctor…”

“Graham and Susan Tash,” Graham said.

Robert nodded drunkenly. “Dan and Dallas,” he began, stopping to clear his throat, “… and… and… Steve made it,” he said. “They’re up front. Be careful. The floor is jagged in places.”

Britta nodded.

“How is everyone downstairs?” Robert asked.

Britta looked at him blankly, her right hand rising, then falling limply to her side, an apparent attempt to gesture somewhere behind.

“I… can’t find it. There’s no… stairway either.”

Graham had been focusing on Rick Barnes’s prone body, preparing to kneel beside the man and examine him. He turned and looked behind them at the field of orange flames burning and flickering in a thousand places, all radiating toward what was becoming a light purple glow on the horizon.

A lightning strike somewhere in the distance shot a bolt of terror up Graham’s spine as if it had struck him directly. He realized he was looking at the remains of the storm that had almost killed them.

“I think… the others must be somewhere back there,” Britta said, looking blankly in the same direction, obviously in shock. “We… we’ve got to find them.”

Graham followed her gaze, recognizing the clearing of broken trees as the final flight path of the 747. He could see shapes in the distance, bits and pieces of fuselage, a shell with windows on one side, and other terrible shapes in the dark, but nothing as large as a survivable part of an airliner cabin.

There were over two hundred people on this airplane! he thought. My God! There could be hundreds injured back there!

“Doctor. Please. Mr. Barnes is injured,” Britta was saying.

Graham turned to look at the airline CEO and knelt down as Britta played the flashlight over his face. “Can you hear me, Mr. Barnes?” Graham asked.

Rick Barnes moaned, but didn’t speak.

Britta found the aircraft first-aid kit, and Graham went to work on the obvious facial injuries, stabilizing Barnes and concluding there were probably internal injuries in addition to a serious concussion.

“If you’re done for now, Doctor,” Britta said, “I need the flashlight to check the others.” Graham nodded, and she swung the flashlight forward at the tangle of debris in her pathway, stepping in toward Dan, Dallas, and Steve.

To the east, a pronounced glow was filling the horizon as dawn overtook them. They could hear a host of nonthreatening jungle sounds of birds and wind and the occasional buzz of an insect.

Graham Tash stood up and held Susan for support as he looked behind them at the wreckage path. “Susan, there will be others in terrible shape, wherever they are. We should go help.”

She nodded without a word and lifted the first-aid kit. Graham took the flashlight from Britta and stepped out of the wreckage onto muddy ground before turning to help Susan down the eighteen-inch drop. The air reeked of jet fuel. The two of them stepped carefully past jagged remains, wincing at the unique smell of the burning rubble to the east as they walked fifty yards away, then turned to look back.

The entire upper deck with the cockpit attached had sheared away from the rest of the fuselage. Somehow, the forward half had slid mostly intact into what was apparently a natural clearing, the lower fuselage having absorbed most of the speed and impact.

Behind them — toward the highway of flames and wreckage — the outlines of broken trees marked the final flight path of the disintegrated Boeing. Using the flashlight, they made their way in that direction. Susan stumbled in her low heels and twisted her ankle as they stepped gingerly through the macabre landscape of debris, both natural and man-made. They moved steadily, without speaking, until the first encounter with crushed seats and fragmented human bodies announced the western extent of the remains of Flight 5’s main cabin.

After ten minutes of searching, it seemed obvious they were wasting their time.

Susan and Graham made their way back toward the remains of the upper deck, stopping at the edge of the clearing to hold each other for what seemed like an eternity. The enormity of being unable to find a single survivor from the main cabin was too much to bear.

“When I was an emergency room nurse,” Susan said, “I… had to deal with survivors who couldn’t understand why they were spared, and others in an accident died. The ‘why me?’ syndrome, you know? Why did I survive?” Susan breathed heavily and Graham held her as tightly as he dared. She flailed a hand in the direction of the main wreckage, tears streaming down her face. “I’ve… never experienced it myself. But now — here we are alive, and… and all of them… are gone! Why?”

She buried her face in his chest and cried soundlessly, her shoulders heaving. Graham held her close, tears streaming down his own face as he tried to erase the images of the broken and torn human remains he had just seen.

“Let’s keep moving,” Graham said, as gently as he could. “We do have some of the living to care for.”

She nodded in staccato fashion, hanging on to him as they again picked their way toward the dark outline of what used to be the upper deck, the unique whalelike upper hump of a Boeing 747’s fuselage.

Dallas had lost consciousness again, for how long she didn’t know. The memory of Robert talking to her was there, but she had felt tired all of a sudden and had sunk back into the jump seat, intending to rest for a few seconds. Slowly she forced herself to swim up through the fuzzy layers of fatigue and shock to consciousness, vaguely aware that someone who sounded a lot like Britta was helping Dan Wade out of the broken cockpit.

Dallas got to her feet once more and turned to follow. She was almost at the rear of the wrecked flight deck when she remembered Steve Delaney. She turned back just in time to catch him in her arms as Steve tripped over something unseen in the still-dark cockpit.

“We didn’t make it, did we?” Steve asked her, his voice shaking and reedy.

“This ain’t a ghost you’re talking to, Darlin’. Yes, we did make it, but we sure banged up Dan’s airplane.”

Steve was breathing hard, almost in a panic. “I… tried my best…”

“What?”

He was shaking his head, his entire body quaking, his right hand gesturing to the front of the broken cockpit. “I tried… I pulled up… and… I didn’t mean to line up on the wrong lights… I…”

Dallas turned and seized the fourteen-year-old by the shoulders. “Look at me. LOOK AT ME!”

Steve looked up, his eyes huge with shock.

“You did everything right. You hear me? You did everything right, Steve! This just — happened.”

He began hyperventilating and she hugged him tightly, rocking him gently as they stood in the darkness of the wreckage.

“It’s okay, Steve! This is NOT your fault. It’s not your fault.”

There was no response.

“Do you hear me?” she shouted, satisfied only when he nodded his head. “Okay, Baby, let’s get the others and get to safety.” Dallas moved through the jumbled mess of the cockpit’s rear entrance and onto the buckled floor as Britta came forward again.

“We need to get out of here,” Britta said, finding another flashlight and snapping it on.

“You’re right about that!” Dallas agreed. “Who’s back there?”

Britta turned slowly, supporting herself on the broken wall of the cabin, as Robert reappeared.

“The doctor and his wife have gone to help the others,” he said. “Everyone else, the galley up here, all the other seats — they’re gone. And I can’t… find the downstairs.”

Dallas heard the words, but the statement made no sense. How could one fail to find a downstairs? They had climbed to the upper deck originally, therefore…

She looked out to the side of the wreckage while Britta played her flashlight into the darkness. Where there should have been airspace some thirty feet above the ground, there was the ground itself, and branches, and shrubs, and trees at the same level. They had been in a heavily loaded 747.

This makes no sense! Dallas thought.

“We have the doctor and his wife, plus Mr. MacCabe, plus Mr. Barnes, plus you, Dallas. We have Dan, and…” Britta gestured to Steve.

“Steve?”

“Yes,” Britta said.

“How about the rest of them?”

Britta shook her head.

“Where the hell is the rest of this airplane?” Dallas asked in amazement.

Britta gestured toward the avenue of burning debris behind them, and Dallas’s eyes followed her, the reality pressing in slowly. Britta saw Dallas Nielson’s shoulders slump a bit as her mouth came open.

“Oh my dear Jesus! All of them?”

Britta shrugged, her voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t know. But so far, there’s only us.”