Chapter One
The thunderstorm appeared in front of the Boeing 747 without warning. At 33,000 feet, in a calm, clear night over the Pacific Ocean three hours out of Honolulu International Airport, it should not have been there.
Jordan typed the request to veer off their assigned flight path to air traffic control, using one of the three cockpit keyboards. UAL 58 REQUEST 100 NAUTICAL MILES TO THE LEFT FOR WEATHER.
As the captain, Brian Wendt, lifted the hand-microphone to his mouth and transmitted over the PA, "Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts," Jordan scrutinized the radar screen. Other than the bright, multicolored blob, periodic sweeps of green speckles showed a storm-free sky, an ideal night to fly over the Pacific.
A chime announced the incoming message from ATC: clearance to skirt the storm. The captain turned a knob connected to the autopilot, banking the 747, while Jordan lowered the lighting in the cockpit and peered into the night.
One good peek outside is worth a thousand sweeps of the radar. That was an old saying among pilots of the modern era. And it was usually right. Far below, tiny puffs of clouds glowed in the light of a quarter moon. Below the clouds, the sea was smooth. No lightning flashed on the horizon. Nor did Jordan see any towering cumulous clouds to back up the radar's warning. Yet, on the odd chance the thunderstorm was too far away to be seen or was obscured by wispy cirrus clouds, standard operating procedures dictated that they circumvent it. Common sense, too. And whatever common sense Jordan wasn't born with, she'd learned. Sometimes the hard way.
For eight years, she'd been flying around the world, and through more bad weather than she cared to remember. Even one-million-pound jumbo jets couldn't risk flying through thunderstorms. She knew-she'd read the post-accident reports of those who'd tried. There was no faster way to end up as a smoking hole than to think you could out fly Mother Nature. Hail punched holes in hulls and snuffed out engines; lightning knocked out electrical and communication systems; extreme turbulence wrenched off wings. Jordan preferred her life to be less exciting.
A lot less.
She had enough on her plate as a single mom who juggled flying for a living with raising a six-year-old. Flying paid the bills. But every heartbeat, every breath, every cell in her body was devoted to her daughter Roberta, affectionately known as Boo. That wasn't to say that at thirty-two, Jordan wasn't proud of her accomplishments-graduating flight school, getting hired by the airlines, making sure she was good at what she did-but existing as one of the many anonymous cogs in United Airlines' global transportation wheel was fine with her. Unlike her retired fighter pilot father or her fire chief older brother, she didn't go looking for action. Dull as it sounded, glory was not her goal. Maybe the limelight might have appealed to her, once. But these days, her idea of adventure was braving the Saturday afternoon checkout lines at Costco.
A ripple of turbulence dragged her attention back at the radar. The glowing oval was in the same relative position. "That's weird." She leaned forward. "We turned left. The storm cell should have shifted to the right. But, look, it's still off the nose."
"It's a radar problem," Brian surmised.
"I'll write it up when we get to San Fran."
Then the airplane rolled abruptly to the left. "So much for blaming the equipment." Choppy air meant the storm was real.
"Seat the flight attendants," the captain ordered.
Jordan made the announcement. "Flight attendants take your seats." Brian slowed the big airliner from the faster speed used for cruise to what was recommended to penetrate turbulence. Jordan turned on the ignition, lighting a continuous fire in the engines, insurance against all four huge turbofans flaming out should they plow into heavy rain or hail.
"Tell ATC we need-" Brian calculated the distance and direction they'd need to skirt the rapidly intensifying storm. "Eighty more to the left."
Jordan busied herself doing what he'd asked. The bright oval shape had increased in size and clarity. But something had covered the slice of moon, making it impossible to see if something was actually outside, in front of the airplane. According to the radar, there was clear air to either side of the storm, which would allow the luxury of a wide girth as they went past.
A chime sounded. Jordan answered the incoming call and passed along the message to the captain. "ATC says-yes. We can deviate."
Again, they went through the routine of circumventing the storm. But the crisp-edged ovoid mirrored their evasive maneuvers, almost as if it didn't want to let them pass by. A crazy thought. Yet, a flicker of unease prickled inside Jordan, a whisper of apprehension. It was that first hint of inner acknowledgement that something wasn't going right, that a situation might not pan out as planned.
Jordan could almost hear Boo's husky little voice, could feel her skinny arms in a death grip around her neck. You'll come home, right, Mommy?
Jordan winced, pressing her lips together. Her husband Craig died five years ago. But she was lucky to have parents nearby who were happy to watch Roberta several times a month when Jordan worked. Roberta loved staying with her grandparents. Never once had she needed reassurance that her mother would return for her. Stranger still was that Roberta had balked at this trip, a mere overnight to Hawaii. Had her daughter sensed that something might go wrong?
Jordan's spine tingled. Before 9-11, an airline job was fraught with the usual risks: bad weather, mechanical malfunctions, and air traffic control errors. Now, she fought on the frontlines in the war on terror-whether she wanted to or not. She'd never wanted to be a soldier, or a hero. But it seemed that sometimes life had different ideas.
"I promise," she had whispered into Boo's hair.
Jaw tight, Jordan scrutinized the sky ahead. She almost missed it, at first. Black against black, looming in front of the plane, was an oval of the same relative shape as the storm depicted on the radar screen. It didn't look anything like a thunderstorm. It appeared ... solid. "Is that an aircraft?" "An aircraft?" Brian peered into the night. "What kind of aircraft?" "I have no clue. I don't see any lights. Or wings." And it looked larger than their 747. Much larger.
It was deathly quiet. The moon winked out of view. The black shadow loomed. Jordan felt like a field mouse in the shadow of a hungry hawk.
"Do you read United Five-Eight?" she transmitted on the radio. "Do you have us in sight?" Slowly, her hand fell away from the microphone button. "I don't think they can hear us. I don't know, Brian; I don't think anyone can hear us."
Promise, Mommy? Jordan gave her head a quick shake and tried to block thoughts of her little girl.
The object rushed out of the darkness. St. Elmo's fire slithered along the oval's smooth edges. Framed in blue-white streamers of electricity, the object yawned open like a nightmarish Venus Flytrap. At five-hundred knots, they hurtled toward its shadowy maw. Jordan's thoughts bogged down in disbelief. Whatever was out there, they were going to hit head on. Death would be instant.
"I can't turn away," the captain yelled, banking the airplane hard to the left. Several blinding flashes of light filled the cockpit. "Here we go."
No! The primal urge to survive exploded inside her. She didn't think. She reacted. Her hands shot out. Her boots hit the rudder pedals. But she barely had time to brace herself before the shadow engulfed the airplane and swallowed them whole.
* * *
"Terrain, terrain!" The 747's ground proximity warning system protested loudly. "Pull up-whoop whoop-pull up!" urged the computerized voice.
Convulsively, Brian's hand shoved the throttles forward, as he was trained to do. Jordan's gaze jerked to the radar altimeter. God. The computer was right: they were only a few feet above the ground-and getting lower. Impossible. Just seconds ago, they were at thirty-three thousand feet!
But they were alive, still alive.
"Max power," she shouted, backing up her captain. Her hand pressed against his, pushing the throttles as far as they would go.
Think. Think. She swerved her attention to the two main altimeters that read pressure altitude, not absolute altitude like the radar altimeter did. She'd hoped to gain insight as to what was happening to their aircraft. No dice. The altimeters were headed in opposite directions.
One hundred thousand feet and climbing, read one. The other instrument was on its way down to sea level. Damn it. The airplane was as confused as its pilots were.
The 747's computer announced a set of altitude call-outs in feet issued only when the aircraft was landing: "Fifty ... thirty ... ten." There was a grating noise. Then a sharp deceleration threw her forward against her shoulder straps.
The engines stopped running. The silence was thick. Suffocating. Impossible.
Her breaths hissed in and out. She peered around the dim cockpit, tried to find something that made sense. Without engine generators to make electricity, standby power had taken over, powered by the aircraft's battery. All but the most essential electrical equipment was dead. The silence magnified the thunder of something huge slamming behind them.
The booming thud reverberated through her teeth and jaw. Was it a bomb?
The entire aircraft plunged into darkness. Not even starlight seeped into the now oppressively black cockpit. The battery, their last remaining power source, had been snuffed out, too.
The glow-in-the-dark face of Brian's watch blazed like a full moon. Fixating on the light, she listened to the muffled sounds of passengers screaming from beyond the closed cockpit door.
It was dark. Silent. The people were terrified. Understandably. But without electricity, she had no PA, and no way to communicate with them from the cockpit.
Jordan and the captain dug their flashlights out of their flight bags that they kept next to their seats. Without the engines running, the airplane should have been plunging toward the ocean, losing air pressure at a rapid, eardrum-wrenching rate. But it wasn't. In fact, the airplane was so motionless that it felt like they were parked at the gate.
Jordan glanced around uneasily, trying to work moisture into her mouth. "It feels like we landed."
"Where?" the captain snapped. "The Pacific? We're not a hundred percent airtight- where's the water?"
"Okay. No water. But we're not flying, either. Or at least I don't think we are. And if we're not flying, then where are we?"
Jordan and the captain swerved their flashlights out the forward window. His indrawn breath echoed hers as the faint glow from their flashlights illuminated the area in front of them. But it wasn't the ocean. Or the nighttime sky. What surrounded the 747 looked like a ribbed, concave ... wall.
"We're inside something."
The captain made a sudden, strangled noise. His shaking hand flew to his neck and he fumbled with his tie.
"Brian! What's wrong?"
He tried to talk. Couldn't. His flushed face deepened in color. Then the hand at his collar became a twitching claw as his entire body stiffened. Was he convulsing?
She threw off her shoulder harnesses and jumped out of her seat. With her fingers, she pressed firmly against the captain's neck. No pulse.
The thunder of what had to be multiple fists pounded on the cockpit door. Darkness prevented her from seeing out the peephole. And the newly installed external video monitors were as dead as the engines. Outside the door might be hijackers who'd hurt or kill the incapacitated captain.
What's closer-the stun gun or the ax?
The ax was within arm's reach, but she was trained in firing the Taser, a super-powered stun gun capable of delivering a 50,000-volt blast from twenty feet away. Whipping the gun from its holster on the cockpit sidewall, she disarmed the safety switch. "Who's there!" she shouted, the weapon clutched in her sweaty hand.
"It's me, Ben. And Ann and Natalie!" the chief purser yelled.
Jordan lifted the heavy metal bar blocking the door. Then she pulled open the door, stepped back and took aim. Three flight attendants lurched into the cockpit.
"It's just us," Ben gasped, his dark eyes slewing from the red laser on the stun gun to the slumped-over captain.
She could tell that first on their minds had been to find out what happened to the airplane. Their shocked expressions reflected their change in focus. He has no pulse-we need the defibrillator!"
"Natalie-go." The purser dispatched one of the two women for the emergency medical kit. The Automated External Defibrillator, or AED, could restart a heart, even after sudden death from a heart attack.
Jordan shoved the Taser into its holster. "Help me get him out of here." She raised the armrest on the captain's seat and shifted his legs away from her and the center of the cockpit. Then she lifted a lever, sending the seat as far backward as it would go. Ben pulled Brian free of the seat and dragged the unconscious man out of the cockpit, where there was little room on the floor, through the open cockpit door, and into upper deck business class.
In the dark, Ben laid him in the center of the carpeted aisle. The passengers fell silent at the sight of their captain illuminated by the beams of several flashlights, lying prone and blue-lipped on the floor. As they edged closer, Jordan saw the terror etched on their shadowy faces.
"Stand back!" ordered Ann, the other flight attendant who had come upstairs with Ben. She was short and somewhat plump, with a round, sweet face and Asian features-Korean, she'd told Jordan-but she could bark orders like a drill sergeant. "We need room! Stand back!"
There were thirty or so passengers on the upper deck. Jordan asked, "Is anyone here a medical doctor or nurse?"
The replies were all negative. Ann met Jordan's gaze. Her eyes broadcasted fear, but her voice was steady and calm. Like Jordan, she was calling on her extensive training to keep cool in the midst of chaos. "I'll go downstairs and find one," she said.
"Good. Are there enough seats down there to reseat these passengers?"
"I think so."
"Then bring them with you."
Ann nodded. Jordan addressed the onlookers. "Go downstairs with Ann. You'll be in a better position to stay updated if we need to make announcements to the whole group."
As Ann herded her charges down the staircase to the main cabin, Jordan crouched by the captain's side. Ben had already started CPR.
Natalie returned to the upper deck. Like a salmon trying to swim upstream, Natalie pushed her way up the aisle past the passengers. In her arms was a case containing the defibrillator.
Urgently, Jordan told her, "He's still not breathing."
Ben tore open Brian's shirt and yanked his undershirt over his head. Natalie readied the defibrillator. The AED led the woman through the series of verbal prompts, telling her what to do. They gave the captain one shock. His body arched; spittle leaked from the corner of his mouth.
"Come on, come on, Brian. Fight!" Jordan clenched her teeth. Brian's heart didn't restart. Natalie raised the paddles.
"The unit says we can try again."
"Do it!" They were running out of time. Jordan's stomach clenched. Sweat trickled down one temple. Every second that ticked by stole precious oxygen from the captain's brain and increased the risk that he'd be permanently damaged by the attack, if not killed outright.
Natalie placed the paddles against Brian's chest. Again, a shock blew through the captain's chest cavity. Come on, come on, Jordan prayed silently.
Ann herded a man and woman down the aisle. "We've got doctors!" she shouted. "Two of them!"
Breathlessly, the two doctors introduced themselves. An internist and a pediatrician. They dropped to their knees and dug through the open emergency medical kit supplied by the airline, while Ben and Natalie brought them up to date with what they had and hadn't tried to resuscitate the captain.
Jordan stood, wiping her arm across her forehead. She couldn't let the captain's condition distract her from the safety of the rest of the crew and the passengers. The leadership role wasn't one she desired, or felt comfortable in, but here she was, in charge of almost three hundred passengers-a population greater than many small towns-plus a crew of eighteen flight attendants.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Contactby Susan Grant Copyright © 2002 by Susan Grant. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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