National Security

CHAPTER 6

“Are you hearing this, Karen?” Northwest Captain Steve Holiday stared in dismay at his first officer as they listened to the flight attendants over the intercom. One passenger dead and four more were unconscious.

“Food poisoning?” Karen Banning said as she unfastened her seat belt. If it had been a terrorist incident, both pilots would have barricaded themselves behind the armored door of the flight deck. In a medical scare, it went without saying that she would check things out.

Captain Holiday reached behind his head and grabbed the oxygen mask. When alone at the controls, he was supposed to wear supplemental oxygen. His voice took on a detached, Darth Vader quality as he spoke through the mask.

“Be careful out there. Scoot back here to let me in on what’s going on. Follow protocol.” If Steve Holiday believed in anything, it was protocol. It drove his wife crazy.

The 747 was a spacious aircraft. It took the first officer three minutes to make her way through the upper-deck business class, negotiate the stairwell down to the main passenger compartment, size up the situation, and call back up to flight deck. To Holiday, each minute was an eternity.

Normally almost giddy, Karen’s voice was deadly somber as it crackled across the intercom. “You’re not going to like this, Steve…”

Her vivid description of the pandemonium in the rear of the aircraft hit Holiday like a straight jab to the nose. He ordered her back to the cockpit, where hours of training and well-established emergency procedures kicked into gear.

Holiday noted their position on the GPS — still five and a half hours from JFK — and called in a medical emergency via the satellite phone. He was told to stand by while a doctor was summoned.

When the doctor came on the line ten minutes later, Karen described what she’d seen like a child recounting a nightmare — coughing, fever, vomiting, bleeding from the nose and eyes. She looked across at Holiday, slight shoulders trembling as she spoke.

“It’s not isolated among a particular group of passengers?” the doctor mused, almost to himself.

“It is not,” Holiday snapped. He hated it when people talked to themselves when they should be talking to him. “This thing’s moving through my airplane like the plague. We haven’t been in the air four hours and already have five dead and…” Karen mouthed a number that surprised even him. “… and at least forty-two showing advanced symptoms.”

The doctor advised the pilots to use continued oxygen and have no more interaction with the passengers. With hardly a good-bye, he promised to make contact again in fifteen minutes and cut the connection.

Holiday gave a tight grin to his copilot. Blond, pert and almost elfin in appearance, Karen had always reminded him of his daughter. The sight of her trembling beside him broke his heart. She had to know she could still depend on him. “Chin up, kiddo. They’re probably trying to figure out what leper colony to divert us to.”