Blackout

CHAPTER 9

Lucy Haggar, the newly elected mayor of Austin, Texas, released her seat belt and got to her feet, brushing back her impressive mane of silver hair before walking to the galley where Claire Brown and Alice Naccarato were standing in tense silence. Still trim and attractive in her late fifties, Lucy was used to being in control.

She pulled back the privacy curtain and stuck her head in the galley. “Girls, excuse me, but I need to ask a question.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Claire replied, turning to face her.

“What in hell is going on here? And don’t fib to me, now. Flight crews don’t beg for passengers who can fly unless there’s one granddaddy of a problem. Are the pilots dead?”

She meant the question as a joke, but Claire, a young redhead, took a deep breath and nodded. “One of them is.”

Lucy felt her eyebrows flutter up involuntarily and her stomach leap to her throat. All the progress she’d made over the years in suppressing her fear of flying evaporated in the space of a heartbeat.

“You’re kidding. Oh Lord, you’re not kidding?”

Claire motioned her inside. “You’re… Mayor Haggar, correct?”

Lucy nodded. “Yes.”

“Mayor, we don’t know much yet either, except that something exploded in front of our aircraft and the captain’s dead.”

“But you have a copilot, right? Tell me he’s okay!”

Claire pursed her lips and hesitated a moment too long.

“Oh my God! The copilot’s hurt, too, isn’t he?”

The flight attendant nodded.

“How bad?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Oh Lord,” Lucy said, “I came back here to ask you to tell someone upstairs to please get on the PA and talk to us! I was only scared then. Now I’m terrified!”

The sound of the PA system clicking on precluded a reply. They could hear a man clear his throat before his strained voice began speaking.

The PA clicked off for a few seconds, and then on again.

Again the PA clicked off, then on. More scraping noises and a heavy sigh before Dan Wade’s voice resumed, echoing through an absolutely silent cabin. Over 200 passengers looked toward the overhead speakers as if they could see into the cockpit.

It was a full twenty seconds before Lucy Haggar and the two flight attendants with her could exhale.

“Okay,” Lucy began. “I asked for straight talk, I got straight talk. Now I think I need a straight bourbon. Maybe the whole damn bottle.”

“I can get that for you,” Claire replied, but Lucy had her hand up, her head cocked, and a strange smile on her face.

“I’m only kidding, Honey. Nightmares are best handled sober. But later I’m gonna close a few bars in Kowloon before I take the train back to Austin.”

She turned and headed back to her seat as Bill Jenkins began a translation of the announcement in Mandarin Chinese.

The Autopilot Disconnect Warning coursed through Dan Wade’s consciousness like an electric shock, causing him to jump at the same instant the huge 747 lurched downward.

“Gad!” He grabbed the control yoke, turning his head toward the captain’s seat. His left hand was already on the control panel along the top of the glareshield, feeling for the square button, which he punched again to reconnect the autopilot while holding the control yoke as steady as he could.

The feel of the panel was reassuringly familiar, and for a split second, he almost forgot his eyesight was gone. But reality came back in a tidal wave of fear. He felt the bandage and the salve that Dr. Tash had slapped on his eyes minutes before. Fear was eating at him, distracting him from the task of trying to land. Despite his reassuring words on the PA, a safe landing was anything but certain; that reality was clouding his judgment, pushing him to rush the landing to get it over with.

It seemed far too hot in the cockpit to Dan, but there was no time to fumble for the temperature control. He was thirsty, too.

“What’s my altitude, Geoffrey?” Dan asked the unseen passenger to his left.

“I’m — I’m looking,” Geoffrey replied, his cultured voice cracking in fear. “I believe it says… yes, it says we’re at just under twelve thousand.”

“Good. Please verify that the altimeter is steady.”

Another pause.

“It’s steady.”

“Geoffrey, did you push that sideways button on the control yoke?”

“Yes. I am most terribly sorry. I was just trying to get familiar with things.”

“That’s the Autopilot Disconnect button. I’ll ask you to punch that when we get on the ground, but only on my command, okay?”

“Certainly.”

Bringing him to the cockpit was probably a mistake, Dan thought. A few hours of instruction in light airplanes forty years ago was pretty thin preparation for being thrown into a space capsule. But what other choice did he have?

“First rule, Geoffrey,” Dan added, holding his left index finger in the air, his voice shaking slightly, “is never push, turn, punch, twist, or alter anything up here unless you know precisely what you’re doing, or I tell you to. We desperately need the autopilot to stay connected.”

“I understand. I apologize.”

Dan was sweating profusely, his breath coming in spurts, his hands shaking.

“How’re you doing?” Graham Tash asked evenly. It was mostly rhetorical. He could see how the copilot was doing. The copilot was in pain and struggling and scared to death, like every one of his passengers.

There was a derisive sound from Dan as he started to shake his head, then winced. “How am I doing? I’m sorry, Doc. I’m just… I’m just… trying to cope, ah, with all this, okay? We’re flying level on autopilot, we’ve got plenty of fuel — in fact, too much — and I’m just about ready to get this beast to land itself.”

“Did the shot help?”

“It took the edge off, but it feels like someone’s stabbing burning knives in my face and my eyes. I’ve… I’ve never felt pain like this, but I can’t let you knock me out with too much painkiller.”

Dan turned his bandaged face toward the British passenger in the captain’s chair. “Ah… Geoffrey?”

“Yes, Dan.”

“We need to go over the plan again.” Dan rubbed his forehead above the bandage before continuing. “I’ll, ah, tell you each step I need to take, and if — if you’ll read me whatever I’m pointing to, I’ll…” He stopped and grimaced as a wave of pain engulfed him; then, with great effort, he continued. “In other words, when Hong Kong Approach gives me a turn toward the localizer — that’s the radio beam that leads us to the runway — I’ll put my hand on the heading selector I showed you a few minutes ago… here.” Dan held his finger on the glareshield panel and moaned. He took a deep breath and readjusted himself in the seat.

“Okay. This… ah, is the heading selector. What heading is it dialed to?”

“Two-eight-zero, Dan.”

“Good.”

Geoffrey Sampson watched with great concern as the copilot hung his head and moaned again.

“Are you all right, Dan?” Robert MacCabe asked. Robert reached over to grab the copilot’s shoulder and shake him gently. “Dan?”

The copilot nodded, his head still down. He took a ragged breath. “I’m… fine. No. That’s a damned lie. I’m not fine. I’m in pain, but I’m going to be fine. I’m just trying to deal with it. Geoffrey, after the heading, I’ll… dial in a lower altitude, here.” Dan reached over with obvious effort to touch the altitude selection knob.

“Very well,” Geoffrey Sampson replied.

Dan pointed to the airspeed dial, his words coming with substantial effort. “Then I’ll slow us down… with this one and… arm the approach mode. That’s where I’ll need precise readings from you to make sure I’m hitting the right buttons.”

“I understand, Dan. And then the airplane will land itself, correct?”

There was a pause from the right seat. “As… ah… as long as I set it up right, it will get us down safely. I have to dial in the right radio frequency and… extend the flaps and gear… but the autopilot should do the job. The thing you’ll need to do is… hit the Autopilot Disconnect button when I tell you to… the one you accidentally punched.”

“I understand,” Geoffrey responded.

Dan slumped over again, his hand furiously rubbing his forehead.

Robert had been sitting in the jump seat immediately behind the captain’s chair. The doctor stood behind the copilot’s seat, keeping a worried eye on his patient. Robert got up suddenly and took Graham’s arm, guiding him to the rear of the cockpit for a whispered conference.

“I’m not a physician, Doctor, but I don’t know if he’s going to make it without a reduction in that pain. Have you been watching his reactions?”

Graham nodded, his face grim. “He has to disconnect every few minutes in order to hold on. But he doesn’t want any more painkiller, and, in truth, much more would leave us without a pilot.”

“Try asking him again, okay?”

Graham nodded, moving to the copilot as Robert slid back into the jump seat.

“Dan?” Graham asked. “This is the doctor. You hanging in there?” Graham put his hand on the copilot’s right shoulder.

There was no answer.

“Dan, this is Doctor Tash. Can you hear me?”

Dan nodded. “Yeah, yeah, Doc. I’m here. I’m… just hurting very badly.”

“Look, maybe you need a very small booster shot.”

“No. NO! Look… I’m sorry, but I’ve got to tough this out. Now… I need to go over with Geoffrey… what to do if… if, God forbid, we have to pull up and go around.”

Robert glanced at the worried eyes of the physician. Graham swallowed in a shared gesture of apprehension, then leaned over toward the jump seat to whisper in Robert’s ear.

“Would you keep an eye on him? I want to go talk to my wife.”

Robert nodded. “You bet.”

Graham moved to the cockpit door but stopped and looked back. It was like looking at a surreal scene through a thick lens, he thought. A terrifying dream, laced with the background hum of electronics and the sound of the slipstream, all of it leaving him momentarily dizzy and disoriented.

The man in the left seat — Sampson — had been just an ordinary passenger like him less than an hour ago. But in the blink of an eye, everything had changed, and now their lives depended on an automatic system and a blind pilot.

Maybe it would work. The agony of not knowing was weakening his knees.

Through the windscreen Graham saw a wall of puffy cumulus clouds looming dead ahead, illuminated by the landing lights, the impending impact inevitable, if harmless. The onrushing certainty of the collision with the cloud would be a chilling dress rehearsal for what might lie ahead in Hong Kong within the hour if the copilot lost control. He found himself feeling detached, wondering what the impact would feel like if the cloud were solid. They were racing toward it at over three hundred knots. There would be no pain and no time to scream. Not even time enough to tell Susan how much he loved her.

The thought of his beautiful new wife caused him to turn back toward the upper first-class cabin, where they had the aisle and window seats in the third row. He’d navigated through two failed marriages to find Susan, though she’d been there all along, working for ten years as scrub nurse on his surgical team — someone he always admired, and sometimes lusted after, but never knew. “You always knew me, though,” she was fond of saying, “just not in the biblical sense.”

He opened the cockpit door now, catching her eye and reveling in the warmth of her smile. He tried to smile in return, but the paralyzing fear that they could lose the exhilarating new life they’d found was too overwhelming.

Susan was terrified, too, but she could hide it better. She had helped move the captain’s body to a small crew bunk behind the cockpit, then returned to her seat to wait for him. How she could even force a smile amazed him.

Graham covered the twenty feet to where she sat, ignoring the haunted expressions on the faces of the other passengers. He sat down beside her, taking her hand.

“How bad, Honey?” she asked quietly, inclining her head toward the cockpit.

“If all the equipment works right, no problem.”