Chrysalis

7

Piers Bridger sat, pleasantly alone, in the left-hand seat of his twin-engine Beechcraft King Air. At 15,000 feet, the atmosphere was quiet and the ride smooth: puffy cumulus clouds floated lazily beneath his wings. Now and then, he’d fly through the upper wisps of a particularly tall formation, and the windshield would be briefly obscured, like a car in a fogbank. Then he’d be out in the late-afternoon sun again; the wipers would clear the droplets away; and he’d continue flying northeast in his pressurized cocoon.

He gazed around the cockpit, then back into the cabin. The plane was much more enjoyable to fly than his single Pilatus had been. Naturally, he’d had it heavily customized from the usual six-by-six configuration into a small two-room suite where his family could be comfortable. But his kids were off leading their own lives now, and his wife was down at their winter home in Jupiter. Actually, in the past couple of years, what had once been a “winter home” was now, in truth, her permanent residence: they saw each other only half a dozen times a year. But they had come to a quiet understanding: Candice was content spending time with her nouveaux-riche friends, and he had his company to keep him busy.

Funny, how he didn’t miss spending time with her or the kids. After reaching sixty, he seemed to have become a different person, finding more comfort in solitude than among other people. Take this flight, for instance: although he could have used one of the AmTex corporate jets and the pilot who came with it, he’d decided to make the flight himself. The hours he logged would help his license stay current, of course, but the truth was that up here — three miles above the earth, without another living soul capable of disturbing him — was the only place he ever felt truly, comfortably alone.

As he cleared the upper edge of another cloud, he felt a moment of turbulence. It was so brief it didn’t even register on the instruments, but he’d been flying so long that he’d felt it nevertheless, like a sixth sense. It wasn’t uncommon to get a little turbulence with these kinds of clouds, and so far everything had been clear sailing. Nevertheless, it gave him an excuse to check the instrumentation. The plane was trimmed out; he’d leaned the engines and was cruising at 250 knots, with a twenty-five-knot tailwind. Naturally, the GPS was synced and the Garmin autopilot locked on — though pilots didn’t like to admit it, a monkey could fly a plane once cruising altitude had been reached. He’d heard stories about pilots falling asleep, or even dying of heart attacks, and their autopilots would just keep happily flying along to the preloaded destination… where the plane would circle and circle until it ran out of gas.

He glanced out the windshield: no more clouds ahead, just dark blue sky. At this rate, he would arrive in half an hour.

On cue, his radio came alive. “King Air Kilo Romeo 753,” came the metallic voice. “Leaving New York airspace. Contact Boston Approach on 124.1. Good day.”

“Seven five three, good day,” Bridger said into his headset. He decided he might as well complete the handoff. He cleared his throat, then spoke again: “Good afternoon, Boston Approach. King Air Kilo Romeo 753, with you on 124.1. Squawk one five zero seven and ident.”

“Good day, 753,” came the response — a woman speaking this time. There was a pause as the altitude calibration information was gathered. Then: “King Air 753, at flight level 150, altimeter 29.13.”

“Seven five three,” Bridger replied, signing off. Now he was in Boston’s airspace, and he wouldn’t have to talk to ATC again until he was on the glideslope to Hartford.

He shifted in his seat, grunting slightly at the old, familiar pain in his knee — now much reduced, thank God — and lapsed back into thought while the autopilot did the flying. One always heard that a preference for being alone was somehow wrong: you had a social phobia, or perhaps were somewhere on the spectrum. He knew himself well enough to realize that wasn’t the case. He’d raised two children, run AmTex as chairman and CEO for ten years, dealt with clients both military and civilian, hired and fired and presided over innumerable meetings. If he and Candice weren’t seeing eye to eye anymore, well… it was too bad, but such things weren’t exactly rare.

Suddenly, he felt turbulence again — only this time much stronger, enough to jolt his entire body. His first reaction was alarm, but this was quickly replaced by an instinct for problem-solving. Almost subconsciously, he checked all the important instrumentation, saw nothing unusual. The sky ahead looked clear, the altimeter had been set, and he’d received no weather warnings. He tuned the radio to the ATIS frequency to listen in on the conditions at Hartford. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. But he’d logged enough hours for his instincts to tell him that —

And then, just as suddenly, there it was again: turbulence that was almost like a physical blow, causing him to reflexively, protectively, duck his head, spasming in his seat. Heart beating fast now, he glanced more carefully at the instrumentation, glanced out the window for any signs of smoke or damage, then examined the autopilot settings.

Nothing. Jesus.

A thought came into his mind. It wasn’t something he cared to dwell on, but now and then he was forced to consider it, if only for self-preservation. Some of AmTex’s military contracts were highly classified. The people he employed were meticulously vetted. But there were entities out there who’d pay a great deal of money for his corporation’s crown jewels… and, no doubt, several unfriendly nation-states that would be just as happy if Pierson Bridger was no longer around. That was, in fact, one reason he preferred to fly himself… just as he let his bodyguard double as his chauffeur. Still, it wouldn’t require a rogue suicide pilot to do the job: somebody with the right skills could hack the complex elements of a modern autopilot system, and achieve results just as effective.

Thinking along these lines, he grew increasingly unnerved by the autopilot’s lack of response. After a jolt like that, it should at least have slowed the engine, corrected for any variation in altitude — after all, you couldn’t just force your way through rough turbulence at full speed: not if you wanted to keep the wings on the fuselage.

As a precaution, he disengaged the autopilot and put the controls on manual, throttling back and reducing speed. He’d take it himself for ten minutes or so, make sure everything was copacetic. A little extra seat-of-the-pants flying was probably a good —

Another jolt out of nowhere, even worse than before, like a baseball bat slamming against his headrest; he tried to compensate, but the violence of it sent a galvanic shock through his limbs, jerking the yoke closer to his chest. He tried to push it away, but it was as if his fingers were paralyzed. Then came a noise he’d only heard in a simulator: the stall horn, warning of interrupted airflow over the wings and consequent loss of lift. A split second later, the wing broke hard left and the plane began to corkscrew downward. Bridger stayed calm even in this crisis, remembering the steps required to break out of a spin. PARE: power pulled out, ailerons neutral, rudder kicked out opposite the spin while pushing the elevator forward. But even as he tried to follow through, he felt his hands growing cold, while perversely a terrible warmth spread through his head — could G forces be acting on him already? How had the plane gone out of control, so fast? And then for the briefest moment he recalled a nightmare he’d had during flight school, of looking over and finding his instructor pilot had vanished. The warmth increased, along with a noise that had nothing to do with the screaming of the engines… and then, just before he exploded in blinding pain, he realized it was the voice of the plane’s ground warning system, calmly giving him audible confirmation that his altitude had fallen below the recommended minimum.