Blackout

CHAPTER 6

First Officer Dan Wade hesitated by the forward main-deck galley and glanced back, trying to maintain contact with the eye candy moving up the stairway, an attractive young woman wearing a black leather miniskirt slit partially up the back, tantalizingly matched by the seams on her dark stockings. He tried to turn away before Britta could catch him looking, but it was too late.

“Danny! Get your eyes off my passengers!” she kidded, as he tried to look innocent.

“I was just worried she might be cold in that dress she’s almost wearing.”

“Yeah, sure, President Carter.”

“What?” Dan asked, not comprehending the reference.

“You remember: ‘Ah had lust in mah heart’? You’re in lust. A girl can tell.”

“More accurately, a mother superior,” Dan mumbled.

“I heard that!” Britta shot back.

The station manager had handed a sheaf of flight papers through the door before closing it, and Bill Jenkins, the only male flight attendant, handed them in turn to the copilot. Jenkins, round-faced, balding, and good-natured, was a thirty-year veteran putting triplets through college. He frowned at the papers. “How’s the weather doing, Dan? It was looking ugly out there a while ago.”

The copilot nodded, arcing a thumb toward the ceiling. “In an hour this place will be roiling with thunderstorms, so we need to get the flock out of here.”

“In the vernacular, of course.”

“Of course.” Dan smiled back.

“You fellows up there on the bridge do realize,” Bill Jenkins continued, “that we’ve got a bigwig trade delegation aboard tonight, including some big-city mayors?”

“We heard. Captain Cavanaugh and I were trying to calculate how much lift the additional hot air could give us.”

Jenkins laughed as he pointed toward first class. “We lose an engine, let me know, and I’ll ask them to make speeches.” He winked at one of the female flight attendants, who winked back as she watched the copilot climb the stairs. Dan was in his early fifties, newly divorced and on the prowl.

On the flight deck some fifty feet above ground level, Captain Pete Cavanaugh toggled the Engine Start switch for the right outboard engine. The driver of the tug four stories below slowed the 747–400’s backward movement from the gate. Dan Wade, in the right seat of the two-pilot cockpit, checked the engine gauges and radioed the ground controller for taxi clearance before looking at Cavanaugh with a grin.

“You’re sure you’re awake enough for this?”

“Oh, give it a rest, Dan!” Pete said with mock disgust. “I wasn’t sleeping the entire layover.”

“Worst antisocial act of hibernation I’ve ever witnessed,” Dan said, shaking his head sadly. “I couldn’t even get you out of the room for dinner yesterday.”

“I love thirty-six-hour layovers, okay? No yards to mow, no phones to answer, no grandkids or cats to wake me up at seven A.M., and no copilots to give me a hard time. My only job is to rest. So, how about that Before Taxi checklist?”

“Roger. How about that Before Taxi check?”

Pete grimaced. “Ten thousand comedians are starving in Los Angeles…”

“And I’m trying to be funny. Okay. Stand by for the checklist,” Dan replied. The entire southern sky lit up in a massive display of lightning. “By the way, we do have our taxi clearance when the tug lets us go, which I hope is soon, because I’d sure like to beam out of here before that weather arrives.”

“Beam out?” Pete rolled his eyes. “Lord, please deliver us from Trekkies.”

The click of the public-address system echoed softly through the cabin as Britta swung onto the stairway to descend to the lower deck. Pete Cavanaugh’s voice filled the cabin. He sounded and looked the part of the seasoned captain, she thought. Deep, calm, steady, and reassuring. The senior captain stood over six foot two, thin as a rail, his perpetually smiling face crowned with a mane of silver hair, carefully cropped in Julius Caesar-style. Britta smiled to herself. She considered Pete unflappable in the air. A wing could come off and he’d probably order coffee on the way down.

Dan, on the other hand, was more excitable and kinetic. Funny and friendly and slightly overweight, his inadvertent trademark — and the bane of his existence — was his thick, somewhat wavy dark hair and his incessant attempts to keep it under control. No matter how hard he tried to contain it under his pilot’s hat, a lock or two always seemed to escape and curl up somewhere around the hat band, giving him a slightly avant-garde appearance. Women seemed to love his slightly disheveled lost-puppy manner. When Dan Wade, at five foot nine, and Pete Cavanaugh flew together, the Mutt and Jeff contrast caused heads to turn.

Britta reached the bottom step just as Pete finished his greeting. Ten hours of flight time ahead to Honolulu, he’d said, with routine weather on a routine flight. The passengers were settling into the sumptuous environs of the main first-class section as she moved through it. Coats and shoes had already come off and the personal TVs installed at each seat were in use now that the usual life-vest-and-evacuation demonstrations had been done. The aroma of leather filled the air.

“Did you get a blanket, Sir?” Britta asked a distinguished-looking man in the first row; he smiled and nodded. She moved aft, her eyes scanning the passengers for fastened seat belts and any looks of discontent.

A well-dressed black woman with dreadlocks and an infectious smile looked up and beamed at Britta. The woman was busily plumping up several pillows beyond their normal capacity.

Britta glanced toward the rear of the cavernous aircraft, judging whether she had time to walk the entire cabin. I’ll make the time, she decided.

Alice, Jaime, and Claire, all old friends, were buttoning up the forward galley as Britta moved through business class and into coach, letting her eyes range over the passengers. She noted the forty-five-person tour group headed back to the States after a ten-day excursion of China, most of them tired but smiling. The tour director caught her eye and waved from across the cabin.

Somewhere to the rear, Britta heard the squawk of a shortwave radio. She moved on down the aisle, spotting a teenage boy with the red-and-white-striped badge of an unaccompanied minor clipped to his shirt. He was trying to plug in an earphone to silence the speaker of a handheld scanner.

“I’m sorry, Sir, you’ll have to put that away now,” Britta told him gently, unprepared for his response.

The boy yanked the earpiece from his ear and glowered at her. “This can’t hurt the instruments,” he said.

She knelt beside him. “The rules on this airplane require us to have all radios, even this one, turned off until we’re in flight. Okay?”

“It’s an aviation scanner, okay? Buzz off!” the boy snapped, stuffing the earpiece back in his ear.

Britta felt the 747 turn to the left. The final announcement for takeoff would come any second. She reached up and caught the wire, yanking it back out of his ear.

“OW-W! That hurt!”

Britta metered her voice to a low growl of authority. Her slight German accent intensified the intimidating effect. “You turn the radio off now, or you’ll permanently lose it.”

The boy glared at her, but the possibility that she could carry out the threat forced him to snap off the switch. “Okay. Jeez.”

“What’s your name, young man?”

“Steve Delaney.”

“You need to learn some manners, Steven Delaney.”

He started to speak, but she held up a finger, and he thought better of it.

Britta stood and left the boy sulking. She turned toward the rear galley at the exact moment the captain jammed on the brakes, throwing her into the aisle. She pulled herself up immediately and took inventory, brushing her skirt, smoothing her hair, and trying to smile at the shaken people around her. All the passengers had been seated safely, but two of the other flight attendants had also been thrown to the floor, and she could see Bill Jenkins in the distance standing up and dusting himself off near the forward galley. The sound of cascading items hitting the floor in the rear galley had reached her ears, and she walked back quickly to check on the mess. Pete Cavanaugh’s voice returned to the PA.

In the cockpit of Meridian Flight 5, Pete Cavanaugh was shaking his head as Dan Wade pressed the Transmit button. “Hong Kong Ground, Meridian Five. We had to panic stop for a business jet that pulled in front of us. Where did he come from?”

An American-accented voice cut in before the ground controller could reply. “Sorry about that, Meridian. We thought you were going to hold for us.”

“Who is this?” Dan asked.

“Global Express Two-Two-Zulu.”

“Thanks a lot, Two-Two-Zulu! We had the right of way here, and we weren’t even aware you were on the air patch.”

“Well, no harm done.”

“Tell that to our passengers and flight attendants!” Dan snapped, noting Pete’s right hand raised to calm him down.

“Enough, Dan!” Pete said.

“Meridian Five, caution please for the emergency departure ahead of you,” the tower controller said.

“Who is he?” Dan replied on the radio, anger still audible in his voice.

“We’re an air ambulance medivac flight, Meridian,” the Global Express pilot interrupted. “Again, we’re sorry.”

Dan shook his head. “That’d be a great thing to happen to you in your last six months before retirement, Pete. Crush a forty-million-dollar bizzjet with a hundred-seventy-five-million-dollar Boeing.”

Pete chuckled. “You’re right. That’s not how I’d like to be remembered. Dan, check with our folks downstairs and make sure everyone came through that okay.”

Dan was reaching for the intercom handset as the chime rang with Britta on the other end.

“No one’s hurt, but would you two please not do that again real soon?”

“Sorry. I know we’ve got white-knucklers aboard.”

“Always!” Britta added. “I know the passengers are spooked when I can’t hear your PAs over the clicking of the rosary beads.”

Dan laughed. “Yours or the passengers?”

“Mine. And I’m not even Catholic.”

Britta replaced the intercom handset and rolled her eyes at her aft galley crew as they picked up the last of the spilled items. Pete’s voice was on the PA again.

Pete sighed as he looked at the approaching storm now showing up on the 747’s radar as a line of angry red splotches fifteen miles out. “I hate it when they hold up our takeoff clearance.”

“Probably for that air ambulance,” Dan said. “Probably going in the same direction. That’s a U.S. call sign he’s using.”

“I’m astounded,” Pete replied, studying the approaching thunder-heads in the distance, “that anyone would be using something as ritzy and expensive as a forty-million-dollar Bombardier Global Express for an air ambulance. That’s the six-thousand-mile-range rival to the Boeing Business Jet and the Gulfstream Five. Looks a little like the Canadair Challenger. Same manufacturer, in fact.”

“Here comes our takeoff clearance, Pete,” Dan said, holding his earpiece with one hand and copying the clearance with the other before reading it back to the controller. He nodded to the captain as he changed to the tower frequency.

“Hong Kong Tower, Meridian Five, ready to go.”

The slightly accented voice issued the takeoff clearance. Pete pushed up the throttles and guided the 375-ton aircraft onto the runway. Dan ran through the last items on the checklist and clicked on the landing lights.

“All ahead full, Danny. Steady as she goes.”

Dan shook his head, pretending disgust.

“‘All ahead full’? Jeez, you Navy guys! The proper terminology, Captain, Sir, is ‘Power set, N1 checked, autothrottles engaged.’”

There was another burst of lightning to the southwest as the huge aircraft began moving forward, the airspeed indicators coming to life as both pilots let their eyes scan around the cockpit, verifying all was normal.

“Airspeed alive both sides, eighty knots,” Dan called.

“Roger,” Pete replied, his eyes roving over the instruments once more before returning to the runway, which seemed to be moving lethargically beneath the nose as the 747 approached flying speed.

“Vee one, and rotate.”

Pete Cavanaugh pulled back gently on the yoke, lifting the 747’s nose into the air, increasing the wing’s angle of attack until lift exceeded weight and the big bird rose gracefully from the concrete. The slight shudder of the sixteen wheels of the main landing gear extending on their struts could be felt rather than heard in the cockpit.

“Positive rate, gear up,” Pete commanded.

Dan reached for the gear handle, speaking the requisite words—“Roger, gear up”—as he raised the handle to the Up position.

This was the crystalline moment Dan loved so well, the moment of transition between ground and air, when the laws of aerodynamics took over the job of physical support of the jet. He’d become a pilot for this very moment: the feel of mighty engines and the roar of the slipstream, all converging on the reality of sustained flight on an invisible highway of air. Flying was a thrill in even a single-engine airplane, but to levitate a leviathan — a metallic eggshell longer than a football field and heavier than a house — was a magic he could never quite comprehend. Every liftoff was a philosophical wonder that left a broad smile on his face.

The gear lights went out in sequence, indicating all the wheels were up and locked. Dan glanced to the right as he moved the gear handle to the Off position, drinking in the twinkling lights of ground-bound civilization as they dropped away and the 747 soared over the water, steadily gaining altitude into the night.