Twelve Days

PROLOGUE TWELVE DAYS…

For as long as he could remember, Vikosh Jain had wanted to see India. His family’s homeland for a hundred generations. The world’s largest democracy. The birthplace of his religion.

While his friends moved out after college, he lived at home, paying off his loans and saving money for what he knew would be an epic adventure. The trip became an obsession. He mapped every train ride across the subcontinent, Mumbai to Delhi, Kashmir to Madras. Finally, when he’d saved the twelve thousand dollars he’d budgeted for a ten-week trip, he bought his ticket.

What a fool he’d been.

After a month, he couldn’t wait to get home. He was sick of India. Sick with India, too. He’d stayed away from street food and drank only bottled water. Even so, he found himself glued to a toilet a week after he arrived. The cheekier travel websites called what had happened to him “the Delhi diet.” It sounded like a joke, but by the time the doxycycline kicked in, he’d lost ten pounds. He could hardly walk a flight of stairs. His skin let him pass for local, but his gut was suburban New Jersey through and through.

Not just his gut. Coming here had taught him how American he really was. Every time he stepped into the streets, he was overwhelmed. By the dust coating his mouth. The shouting, honking, hawking crowds. The pushing and shoving and relentless begging. The way the men pawed women on buses and streetcars. He felt disconnected from all of them, even the ones who had money. Especially the ones who had money. He’d planned to spend a week with his father’s family in Delhi, but he left after two days. He couldn’t stand the way his aunt screeched at her maids and gardeners, like they weren’t people at all.

Before the trip, his parents had warned him his expectations were unrealistic. When he emailed home to complain, long paragraphs of frustration, his father had answered in one sentence: You need to accept it for what it is. And after another long screed: Don’t you see? This is why we left.

Even as Vik read those words, his stomach pulled a 720-degree spin, like a reckless snowboarder had taken up residence in his gut. He wondered what he’d eaten this time. He wasn’t scheduled to fly home for another six weeks. But enough. Enough was enough. He clicked over to united.com and found that for only two hundred dollars he could change his flight. He could leave this very night. He tried to convince himself to stay, that he would be quitting, betraying his heritage. But India wasn’t his country. Never had been. Never would be.

He reached for his credit card.

Now, after an endless taxi ride to Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, an hour-long wait to enter the terminal, three bag searches, two X-rays, and a barking immigration officer, Vik was almost free. He had maybe the worst seat on the plane, 45A, a window in the cabin’s last row. So be it. He’d be close to the toilets.

Nick Cuse had captained nonstops to Mumbai and Delhi for two years. After twenty-eight years at Continental — and he would always think of CAL as his employer, never mind the merger or the name on the side of the jet — he could choose his runs. Most captains with his seniority preferred Hong Kong or Tokyo, well-run airports that weren’t surrounded by slums like the one in Mumbai. But Cuse had started as a Navy pilot, landing F-14s on carrier decks. He was keenly aware that every year commercial aircraft became more automated. Every year, pilots had less to do. He wanted to end his career as something other than a glorified bus driver. Mumbai was a lot of things, but it was rarely boring. Twice he’d had to abort landings for slum kids running across the runway, airport cops chasing them like a scene from a bad movie.

His co-pilot, Henry Franklin, was also ex-Navy, just young enough to have flown sorties in the first Gulf War. They’d shared the cockpit three days earlier, and Cuse was happy to have Franklin with him for the ride back. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a civilian with a week of training could have done what they were about to do. But the hundredth time defined the job. A good pilot felt a crisis coming before his instruments did, and defused it before it became serious enough to be a threat. Cuse had that sixth sense, and he saw it in Franklin. Though the guy was a bit sharp to the crew.

Now they sat side by side in the cockpit making final preflight checks, their relief crew sitting at the back of the cockpit. A flight this long required another captain and first officer. Their Boeing 777 was just about full, making weight and balance calculations easy. Two hundred sixty-one passengers, seventeen crew members. Two-seven-eight human souls traveling eight thousand miles, over the Hindu Kush, the Alps, the Atlantic. They would fly in darkness from takeoff to landing, the sun chasing them west, never catching them.

Every time you leave the earth, it’s a miracle, Cuse’s first instructor at Pensacola had told him. You come back down, that’s another. A miracle of human invention, human ingenuity, human cunning. Never forget that, no matter how routine it may seem. Always respect it.

“Captain,” Franklin said. “We’re topped up.” An eight-thousand-mile flight into the jet stream required the 777 to leave Mumbai with full tanks, forty-five thousand gallons of aviation-grade kerosene. The fuel itself weighed three hundred thousand pounds, accounting for almost half the jet’s takeoff weight. They were carrying fuel to carry fuel, an inherent problem with long-range flights.

Cuse glanced at his watch, a platinum Rolex, his wife’s present to him on the day they signed their divorce papers. Nine years later, he still didn’t know why she’d given it to him. Or why he’d kept it. 11:36 p.m. Four minutes before scheduled departure. They’d leave on time. By Mumbai standards they had a good night to fly, seventy degrees, a breeze coming off the Indian Ocean to push away smog from trash fires and diesel-spewing minibuses. He looked over his displays one more time. Perfect.

Cuse liked to keep the cockpit door open as long as possible, a throwback to the days when pilots didn’t regard every passenger as a potential terrorist. Now the purser poked his head inside. “Cabin ready for pushback, sir.”

“Thank you, Carl. You can close the door.”

“Yes, sir.” The purser switched on the cockpit lock and pulled shut the door.

“Cockpit locked, Captain,” Franklin said. In aviation lingo, he was the “pilot monitoring,” with the job of talking to the tower and watching the instruments. Cuse was the “pilot flying,” responsible for handling the plane.

“Thank you, Henry.”

“Greetings, United Flight 49. I’m Carl Fisher, your purser. We’ve closed the cabin door and are making final preparations for our flight to Newark. At this point, United requires you to put your cell phone on airplane mode. To make the flight more relaxing for you and everyone around you, we don’t allow in-flight calls. But you are free to use approved electronic devices once we’ve taken off. The captain has informed me that he’s expecting our flight time to be sixteen hours. We do recommend that you keep your seat belt fastened for the duration of the flight in case we run into any rough air, as is common over the Himalayas…”

Vik thumbed in one last text to his mother—On the plane, see you tomorrow—and then turned off his phone. Even if his stomach settled down, he doubted he’d sleep. He was caught between the cabin wall and a chubby twenty-something woman wearing a Smith College sweatshirt and hemp pants. She smelled of onion chutney and positive thinking.

She caught him looking at her and extended a hand, exposing a dirty Livestrong bracelet. “We’re going to be neighbors for sixteen hours, we should know each other’s names. Jessica.”

Vik awkwardly twisted his arm across the seat to shake. “Vik. Let me guess. Yoga retreat?”

“That obvious? How about you?”

“I came to visit family.”

“That’s so wonderful. Getting to see the place where you’re from.”

“Sure is.” Despite himself, Vik liked this woman. He wished he could have seen the country through her eyes instead of his own.

It was 11:50 p.m. by Cuse’s Rolex when he swung the jet onto 09/27. For years, the airport here had tried to operate a second, intersecting runway, a prescription for disaster. Complaints from pilots and its own controllers finally forced it to stop. Now 09/27 was the airport’s sole runway. At this moment, it was empty, two miles of concrete that ran west toward the Indian Ocean.

“United Airlines four-nine heavy, you are cleared for takeoff on runway nine. Wind one-two-zero, ten knots.” The air-traffic controllers here had call-center English, clear and precise.

“United forty-nine heavy, cleared for takeoff on nine.” Franklin clicked off.

Like all new-generation jets, the 777–200 was fly-by-wire. Computers controlled its engines, wings, and flaps. But Boeing had designed the cockpit to preserve the comforting illusion that pilots physically handled the plane. Instead of dialing a knob or pushing a joystick, Cuse pushed the twin white throttle handles about halfway forward. The response was immediate. The General Electric engines on the wings spooled up, sending a shiver through the airframe.

Cuse lifted his hand. “N1.” For routine takeoffs, the 777 had an auto-throttle system for routine takeoffs, though he could override it at any time.

“N1.” Franklin tapped instructions into a touch screen beside the throttle handles. “Done.”

Cuse dropped the brakes and the three-hundred-fifty-ton jet rolled forward, at first slowly, then with an accelerating surge. They reached eighty knots and Franklin made the usual announcement: “Eighty knots. Throttle hold. Thrust normal. V1 is one-five-five.”

At one hundred fifty-five knots, the 777 would reach what pilots called V1, the point at which safety rules dictated going ahead with takeoff even with a blown engine. Franklin spoke the figure as a formality. Both men knew it as well as their names.

“One-five-five,” Cuse repeated, a secular Amen.

Cuse’s gut and the instruments agreed: V1 would be no problem. The engines were running perfectly. Cuse felt as though he were wearing blinkers. The city, the terminal, even the traffic-control tower no longer existed. Only the runway before him and the metal skin that surrounded him.

The markers clipped by. They passed one hundred thirty knots, one forty, one fifty, nearly race-car speed, though the jet was so big and stable that Cuse wouldn’t have known without the gauges to tell him—

“V1,” Franklin said. And only a second later: “Rotate.” Now the Triple-7 had reached one hundred sixty-five knots, about one hundred ninety miles an hour. As soon as Cuse pulled up its nose, the lift under its wings would send it soaring. Cuse felt himself tense and relax simultaneously, as he always did at this moment. Boeing’s engineers and United’s mechanics and everyone else had done all they could. The responsibility was his. He pulled back the yoke. The jet’s nose rose and it leapt into the sky. A miracle of human invention.

“Positive rate,” Franklin said.

“Gear up.” Cuse pushed a button to retract the landing gear. They were gaining altitude smartly now, almost forty feet a second. In less than a minute, they would be higher than the world’s tallest building. In five, they would be able to clear a good-size mountain range.

“United four-nine heavy, you are clear. Continue heading two-seven-zero—”

“Continue two-seven-zero,” Franklin said.

“Good-bye,” Cuse said. That last word was not strictly necessary, but he liked to include it as long as takeoff was copasetic, a single touch of humanity in the middle of the engineering, good-bye, au revoir, adios amigos, but no worries, I’ll be back.

They topped four hundred feet and the city bloomed around them.

“Flaps,” Franklin said.

“Flaps up. Climb power.”

Vik pressed his nose against the window, looking down at the terminal’s bright lights. He felt an unexpected regret. Maybe he should have stayed longer, given the place another chance. He might see it again. Once he married, had children, a trip like this one would be impossible. Unless he married a wannabe yogi like Jessica and got stuck taking trips to India for all eternity.

“I miss it already,” she said, as if reading his mind.

“What’s not to love?” He wondered if she knew he was being sarcastic.

Second by second, the jumbled neighborhoods around the airport came into view. At ground level, Mumbai hid its massive slums behind concrete walls and elevated highways. But from above, they were obvious, dark blotches in the electrical grid, the city’s missing teeth. Some of the largest surrounded the airport. Vik had read a book about them. He imagined rows of rat-infested mud-brick huts, children and adults jumbled together on straw mattresses, trying to sleep, plotting their next dollar, their next meal. So much desperation, so much bad luck and trouble. They pushed on. But then, what else could they do?

Then, from the edge of the slum nearest the airport, Vik saw something he didn’t expect.

Twin red streaks cutting through the night. Fireworks. Maybe someone down there had something to celebrate, for a change. But they didn’t peter out like normal fireworks. They kept coming, arcing upward—

Not fireworks. Missiles.

Following a failed al-Qaeda effort to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet in Kenya in 2002, the Federal Aviation Administration had considered making American airlines retrofit their fleets with antimissile equipment. But installing thousands of jets with chaff and flare dispensers, along with radar systems to warn pilots of incoming missiles, would have been hugely expensive. Estimates ranged from five to fifty billion dollars. Worse, the engineers who designed the countermeasures couldn’t say if they would allow a passenger jet to escape. Passenger planes were far less maneuverable than fighter jets. Their engines gave off big, obvious heat signatures. And major airports were so congested that the systems might have caused jets to fire flares in each other’s paths.

The seriousness of the threat was also unclear. Despite their reputation for being easy to use, surface-to-air missiles required substantial training. After a few months of memos, the FAA shelved the idea of a retrofit. And so American jets remained unprotected from surface-to-air attack.

From the cockpit, Cuse felt the missiles before he saw them. Something far below that didn’t belong. He looked down, saw the streaks. They had just cleared the airport’s western boundary. Unlike Vik Jain, he knew immediately what they were.

“Max power.” He shoved the throttle forward and the turbines whined in response. “Nose down—” He dropped the yoke.

“Captain—”

Cuse ignored him, toggled Mumbai air-traffic control. “Mumbai tower, United four-nine heavy emergency. Two missiles—”

“Repeat, United—”

“SAMs.” The tower couldn’t help him now. He flicked off, snuck another look out the window. In the five seconds since he’d first spotted them, the missiles had closed half the gap with the jet. They had to be deep in the supersonic range, twelve hundred miles an hour or more. A mile every three seconds. Of course, the Boeing was moving, too, at three hundred miles an hour and accelerating. With a two-mile horizontal lead and a thousand feet of vertical. If the SAMs were Russian, they had a range of three to four miles. At three miles, the jet would probably escape.

At four, it wouldn’t.

The world’s deadliest math problem. Those beautiful deadly streaks would either reach him or not, and the worst part was he’d already played his only card. He couldn’t outmaneuver the missiles, or hide from them. He could only try to outrun them.

In 45A, Vik had felt the surge of the engines. Then the plane leveled off, more than leveled off, started to drop. They know. They’ll do whatever they do to beat these things and we’ll be fine. But the missiles kept coming, closing the gap shockingly fast, homing in on the jet, arrows from the bow of the devil himself.

He grabbed Jessica’s hand.

“Whoever you pray to, pray. Pray.”

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee—” The words tumbled out of her. Vik just had time to be surprised. He’d expected a yogic chant. One of the streaks flared out, fell away.

But the other didn’t.

The Russians referred to the missile as the Igla-S—igla being the Russian word for “needle.” NATO called it the SA-24 Grinch. The Russian military had put it into service in 2004, updating the original Igla. They’d invested heavily in the redesign, knowing that man-portable surface-to-air missiles had a wide export market. Armies all over the world depended on them to neutralize close air support. A single SAM could take out a twenty-million-dollar fighter. The Russians more than doubled the size of the Igla’s warhead. They improved its propellant to allow it to catch even the fastest supersonic fighter. They added a secondary guidance system.

And they lengthened its range. To six kilometers.

Twelve seconds after its launch, the Igla crashed into the Boeing’s left engine. The warhead didn’t explode right away. Its delayed fuse gave it time to burrow inside the casing of the turbine. A tenth of a second later, five and a half pounds of high explosive detonated.

In movies, missile strikes inevitably produced giant midair fireballs. But military jets had Kevlar-lined fuel tanks. In the real world, missiles destroyed fighters by shearing off their engines and wings, sending them crashing to earth.

This time, though, the Hollywood myth was accurate. The 777’s fuel tanks weren’t designed to survive a missile strike, and the plane carried far more fuel than a fighter jet. It was a flying bomb, fifty times as big as the one that had blown up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

The explosion started in the fuel tanks under the left wing and created a superheated cloud of burning kerosene that tore apart the cabin less than two seconds later. From Nick Cuse, in the cockpit, to Vikosh Jain, in the last row, all two hundred seventy-eight people on board were incinerated. The ones nearest the fuel tanks in the wings didn’t die as much as evaporate, their physical existence denied.

Despite his immediate action, Cuse couldn’t save his jet. Even so, he was a hero. By getting the Boeing offshore — barely — before the missile struck, he saved the city from the worst of the fireball. If the explosion had happened over the slums, hundreds of people would have burned to death. Instead, Mumbai’s residents lifted their heads and watched as night turned to day. The tallest buildings were the worst damaged, so for once the rich suffered more than the poor.

The fireball lasted a full thirty seconds before fading, replaced with an unnatural blackness, a cloud of smoke that didn’t dissipate until the morning. By then, the toll of the attack would be clear. Besides the two hundred seventy-eight people on the plane, two people on the ground died. One hundred sixty-five more suffered severe burns. Planes all over the world were grounded.

And the United States and Iran were much closer to war.