16 Souls

CHAPTER TWELVE

Seven Months before — January 21^st

Minneapolis

Headquarters of Regal Airlines — System Operations Control Center

Normally, the Director of Regal Operations Control Center would not be hanging around the airline’s huge, mission-control style command center so late in the evening, but the thought of showing up at a wedding rehearsal dinner for a woman he detested was enough to keep him at work for a week. The witch was his wife’s friend, not his. It was bad enough he had to put up with her hanging around their house like a dark cloud all the time, bitching and moaning and complaining about life in general. But he couldn’t imagine spending an entire evening with the type of people she must attract — including the presumed loser she had convinced to marry her.

Lying about being unable to leave the command center was a ploy his wife would not forgive if she ever found out. But it was a risk worth taking.

Paul Butterfield had been perseverating over his social deception when word came in from Denver that a local TV station was reporting a Regal flight in trouble. It had taken two control room personnel to decide the call needed to hit the boss’s ear, and after a minute of questioning the frightened person on the other end of the phone, he realized she was one of their operations agents.

“Wait, wait… hold on… I know you’re excited, but I need you to slow down. The TV channel broke in and said what?”

“That our flight twelve has had a midair collision and is coming in for an emergency landing! It just came over the air!”

“We’ve heard nothing from FAA. Where are you physically?”

“Our operations office in Denver.”

“Have you talked to the flight?”

“No, sir. I haven’t heard from them, but someone from the airport command post called and says they really are coming back.”

“And, the flight said there was a midair collision? With whom or what?”

“I… they didn’t say.”

Paul turned to one of the supervisors who was wearing a decidedly pasty expression, his eyes wide.

“Can you get Denver ATC on the phone and check this out?’

“In progress,” he replied, pointing to three men huddled over a bank of phones. .

“And someone get an ACARS message to the crew to tell us what’s going on,” he said, referring to the onboard digital datalink letting them send printed messages to the cockpit.

He pressed the phone back to his ear. “Okay, we’ll take it from here. Alert your maintenance people to stand by and try to call the flight on company frequency. And go to your emergency checklist, okay?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, her voice trembling. “I just boarded them all less than an hour ago! All those people!”

A flash of sympathy nearly pulled him off target, but there were bigger problems to attend to, and he ended the call as gently as possible. Two tiers of consoles down, two of his people had been huddling over another phone. They turned around suddenly, both trying to talk at once, until one gave way.

“What?” the director asked, aware of the irritation in his tone.

“Paul, our flight apparently rammed a Mountaineer regional flight from behind. A Beech 1900. Our pilots are telling ATC the wreckage of the smaller airplane is stuck on their right wing.”

“What? Is that even possible?”

They both shrugged. “That’s what they told Denver Tracon, and no one can reach the Mountaineer flight, and there’s no reported wreckage on the ground.”

The thought of one of their airliners being involved in a midair collision and still airborne but without formal contact with the company was unacceptable. Hell, the whole idea was unacceptable. Must be a hoax, or a gross misunderstanding.

Take a breath, Paul thought. The number one checklist item he himself had written for the command post was to take a beat, take a breath, and slow your own heart rate. He let himself stare at the desk for thirty agonizing seconds before looking up and positioning his mouth in front of a small, gooseneck microphone connected to the PA speakers at each position. He pressed the transmit switch and adopted the calmest voice he could manage.

“Okay, folks, this is Butterfield. We’re going to a Stage One Alert. Our Flight Twelve out of Denver is reportedly preparing for an emergency return to Denver and has reportedly suffered a midair with a regional airliner. There are blizzard conditions there, as most of you know. I need the roundtable manned in five minutes with open lines to all duty officers, especially maintenance. I need Boeing in the mix for aerodynamics, and run the normal contact checklist for a Stage One. We need to try to get our crew on the satellite phone, send them an ACARS message that we’re trying, get maintenance control on alert, and get a line to Denver Tracon. This has already hit local television in Denver, so we need to scramble our communications team, and corporate.”

The quiet but intense scramble of control room personnel moving in their appointed trajectories began instantly, yet Paul Butterfield’s attention was on the phone number he had to dial next — the one that would presumably grab the full attention of Regal’s CEO. That Doug Nielsen was the very last human whose attention he wanted tonight was an understatement of epic proportions, and he girded himself for the experience while ticking off the one positive in all of this: The ‘Can’t Leave’ explanation to his wife was no longer a fib.