People from all over the aircraft began migrating toward the focal point of the commotion. Some came out of curiosity, some were caught in the tide of bodies, some came to meet the perceived danger—Barbara Yoshiro.
She worked her way to the edge of the lavatory and peered around the corner. Less than twenty feet away she could see the spiral staircase winding upward. But the lower half was filled with people, and the intervening space between her and the base of the stairs was a solid mass of bodies. The open area around her was getting smaller. Hands reached out to her, and she slapped them away. A young boy caught hold of her blouse and pulled at it. The thin cotton tore and exposed her shoulder. Another hand caught hold of her blouse and tore it half off. Someone pulled at her hair. The young man who seemed to be normal was wedged inside the crowd that surrounded her, deliberately pushing his way through. She took a deep breath and screamed. “Help! Someone help me!”
Her voice sounded small against the wind, the roar of the four jet engines, and the excited howls around her. A hundred or more men and women competed with one another to make their sounds supreme in the jungle that was the Straton. She screamed again, but knew that her screams had become indistinguishable from those around her.
She slid around the corner of the bulkhead and groped with her right hand for the lavatory door. Her hand found the knob, and she turned it. The door gave way behind her. She turned her head and peered into the small enclosure, not knowing that it was the same one that had saved John Berry’s life a few short hours before. Two men and a woman stood shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall, staring at her. She slammed the door. “Oh God. Jesus Christ.” For a second she was reminded of the terror and disgust she had felt when she had opened her kitchen cabinet late one night and found it swarming with cockroaches.
Keeping her back to the wall, she edged farther down toward the staircase. The pressing crowd was only peripherally interested in her, and she found that if she altered between aggressive and passive behavior, she could slide by them. The young man in the blue blazer, however, was still purposefully making his way toward her.
Barbara reached the forward corner of the cubicle, close to the staircase. The press of bodies here was so thick she could barely push through. She called up again, but the din was so loud now that she could not even hear her own voice. She saw that the passengers had gone a few steps higher. One man staggered up the last few steps and disappeared into the lounge. A second later, he came crashing down and caused an avalanche of bodies to tumble over the winding staircase. Mr. Stein, she saw, was putting up a good fight. But he could not hear her, and even if he could, he would not be able to help her.
Yoshiro considered several alternatives. Playing dead was one, but there were so many people pressing around her that this was not possible, and she hadn’t the nerve for it anyway. She could see now that she was not being singled out by the crowd any longer, but acts of random violence made it too dangerous to try to mingle with them. Besides, that young man had singled her out. She saw that her only chance was to get into the galley area and ride the elevator to the below-decks galley. She would be safe there and she could call the cockpit on the interphone. With this goal set, she calmed herself and began pushing harder through the crowd. She noticed as she moved that she was becoming light-headed and was tiring quickly. She looked down. The blood was still running from her right wrist. She grasped it with her left hand as she moved. She kept her back to the bulkhead and edged along the forward-facing wall opposite the staircase to the next corner. She made the turn and inched sideways, back in the direction of the tail. She lost sight of the man with the blazer.
Her back slid easily along the plastic wall, and her hand felt the open space of the galley entrance.
The elevator. Get to the elevator. Blood continued to seep between her clenched fingers, and her legs were trembling with fatigue. Faces and bodies squeezed against her, foul breath filled her nostrils. Her stomach heaved, and she began to gag on the taste of bile.
Her shoulder slid into the galley opening, and she moved with more force until only her left arm was still pinned against the bulkhead.
The crowd around her seemed to part, and in the opening she saw the man with the blazer. He smiled directly at her. He looked so nearly normal that for a moment she considered calling for him to help her. But, she realized, he could not be normal. She was becoming irrational in her desperation. He stepped up to her.
She fell back into the galley and braced her hands against the door frame. She kicked out with her feet and caught the young man in the groin. He yelled out, and that guttural yell told her beyond any doubt that he was not among the saved.
She reached out and grabbed the accordion door and slid it shut. It bulged and began to give way almost immediately, but it gave her time to turn toward the elevator.
There were two men in the short narrow galley, both licking spilled food from the counters. She moved quickly, but calmly, past them into the open elevator.
Barbara Yoshiro steadied her trembling hand and slid the manual outer door closed. She frantically pushed against the elevator’s control buttons. Finally, the electric inner doors began to slowly slide shut.
The outer doors suddenly parted. Barbara stood eyeto-eye with George Yates. Before the inner door could finish shutting, Yates slipped into the elevator. The electric doors shut behind him. The elevator started down.
Barbara bit her hand to keep from screaming. Tears ran down her face and a pathetic whimpering sound gurgled in her throat. The man in front of her was staring intently down at her. She could feel him pressing against her, feel his body making contact with hers, smell his breath. His hands probed her body, ran over her hips and up to her breasts.
She took a step backward into the corner of the descending elevator. The man pressed against her harder.
The elevator stopped and the doors slipped open, revealing a small, dimly lit galley.
George Yates pressed down on her shoulders until her knees buckled. He stood over her, his hands grabbing her long black hair, and pulled her head to his thighs.
She tried to pull loose and rise to her feet. “No. Please. No.” She was bleeding badly now, and she felt very weak. “Leave me alone. Please.” She was crying harder now. “Please don’t hurt me.”
Everything was spinning now, and the dark enclosure became darker. She felt herself being pulled forward by her hair. She lay prone on the floor, trying to feign death or unconsciousness, or anything that would make him lose interest.
But George Yates was still very much interested. From the moment he had singled her out of the crowd, from the second his instincts told him she was different, from that moment, his only thought was to capture her and make her yield. None of these words or abstractions were his to use, but the instincts remained. He turned her over on her back and knelt down with his knees straddling her.
Barbara brought her knee up and caught him in the groin.
George Yates yelled out and stood up. This was the second time she had caused him pain, the second time she had rejected him, and he was partly bewildered, but partly he now understood. She was no longer simply an object of his attraction—she had become a threat, become an enemy.
Barbara raised herself on one hand and lunged for the interphone on the wall. Her hand knocked it off the cradle and it fell to the limit of its cord. She grabbed at it as it swung by her face. She then felt a sharp pain in her eye, then another on her cheekbone. She fell backward. The plastic headset dangled above her. Through the haze of semiconsciousness, Yoshiro realized that the young man had hit her; he had hit her hard with his closed fist. He had hit her hard enough to cause a great deal of pain.
The ceiling lights of the galley were blotted out by the huge black shape hovering above her. There was no noise around her, no light entering her consciousness, and this produced a sense of unreality. She simply could not believe this was happening to her; it seemed too remote, so divorced from the world she had been part of
just hours before. It was as if she’d stepped into a fog and emerged from it into a netherworld, a world almost like her own but not quite.
For the next few seconds, all Barbara could feel was the cool floor against her bare back and legs, and the steady throb of the engines as they pulsated through the airframe. Then she opened her eyes wider and focused on what was about to happen next.
After striking out at his enemy twice with his fists, George Yates had just enough of his mind and his learned reactions intact to know that a weapon was what he needed to ultimately protect himself from this perceived danger. On the floor to his left was a metal bar that had been used as a locking brace across the liquor supply cabinet. Yates grabbed the metal bar and, in one continuous motion, slammed it down hard against the upper body of his enemy.
The steel bar swept across Barbara Yoshiro’s left shoulder and into her skull with a sharp crack. She blacked out immediately from the blow to her head. As it moved across her body, the steel bar had ripped open another and even larger bleeding wound—this one across the top of her left shoulder and neck.
George Yates looked down at the growing pool of blood that surrounded the now motionless body of the person lying on the floor. As soon as he saw the new spurts of blood and her injury, he knew what it meant. The knowledge of her condition was too basic to be misunderstood: she was no longer a threat—this enemy of his had been totally defeated.
Now satisfied, Yates’s interest faded and he turned his attention elsewhere. He looked around the galley area. Like a wary animal awakened from sleep, he cautiously stalked around the small area, but he could see no avenue of escape. Yates gave no more notice to the growing mass of blood on the floor, or to the body from which it had poured. As the last of her lifeblood drained onto the metal flooring of the galley, Barbara Yoshiro died.
9
Edward Johnson strode briskly down the long corridor toward the blue door marked DISPATCH OFFICE. He stopped abruptly, stuffed an unlit cigar in his mouth, and tried on several expressions in the reflection on a glass door. He picked one that he called disdain mixed with impatience. He stared at himself for a second. Good jawline, hair graying at the temples, cold gray eyes. An executive. Vice President in Charge of Operations, to be exact. He had enough of the ex–baggage handler left in him to be considered salty and intimidating, yet he had cultivated a veneer to make him accepted by the people who were born into the white-collar world. Satisfied with the effect he would produce with the dispatchers, he strode on.
The windowless steel door at the end of the corridor loomed up before him. How many times had he made this walk? And for what purpose? After twenty-seven years with the airline, experience had shown him that nearly every one of these calls had been a false alarm. A real emergency had taken place more than three years before, and even that had been a waste of time. Everyone aboard that flight was already fish food long before he got the message.
So what the hell was it this time, he wondered. Someone in the Straton program probably lost his lunchbox, or some dispatcher couldn’t find his pencils. He stepped up to the door and grabbed the knob.
He paused and ran through what he already knew. It wasn’t much. Just a brief phone call that had interrupted an important management lunch in the executive dining room. A junior dispatcher named Evans or Evers. An emergency, Mr. Johnson. Flight 52. But it’s probably not too bad. Then why the hell had he been called. That’s what he wanted to say. Junior executives were supposed to take care of all the “probably not too bad” things.
Edward Johnson knew that Flight 52 was the Straton 797. The flagship of the Trans-United fleet. The Super-sonic Queen of the Skies. But as far as he was concerned it was a 412-ton piece of shit. At one hundred and twenty-seven million dollars per aircraft, any problem with one of their eight 797s was a pain in the ass. The aircraft itself was reliable enough and it produced a small fortune in profits. But as Operations Chief, the fiscal considerations didn’t concern him. The god-damned airplane was too precious and too visible to the Board of Directors, and to the media. It made him too visible, too vulnerable. To make matters worse, he was one of the people who voted to buy the 797s, and he was the one who had recently pushed through the huge cost-reduction program to cut back on lots of unnecessary maintenance and checks.
Johnson pushed open the door and strode into the dispatch office. “Who’s the senior man?” he demanded. He looked around the half-empty office. An awkward silence hung over the room, broken only by the sound of a loud telephone ringing. He took the cigar out of the corner of his mouth. Before the Corporate no-smoking policy, he was able to puff on it to good effect instead of keeping the damned thing unlit. Whimpy bastards. “Where the hell is everybody?” His intimidation techniques were working well today, he noticed, but he was not so insensitive that he couldn’t read the signs of trouble, smell the stench of fear in this place. “Where is everybody?” he repeated, a few decibels more softly.
Jerry Brewster, standing a few feet from Johnson, surprised himself by speaking. “In the communications room, sir. Mr. Miller is the senior man.”
Johnson moved quickly toward the glass-enclosed room. He stuck his cigar back into his mouth, pushed the door aside, and entered the crowded communications room. “Miller? You in here?”
“Over here,” answered Jack Miller, his voice the only sound in the suddenly silent room.
Several of the dispatchers backed away to allow Johnson to pass. A few of them quickly left. Dennis Evans moved unobtrusively away from Miller and stood near the door, prepared to go either way. Jerry Brewster reluctantly walked into the small room.
Johnson went up to the data-link machine. He looked down at Miller. “What’s the problem?”
Miller had carefully rehearsed what he would say. But now that Johnson stood before him, all he could do was point to the video screen.
Johnson looked up at the screen on the far wall.
TO FLIGHT 52: VERY NICE WORK. STAND BY. RELAX. EVERYONE HERE IS WORKING ON BRINGING YOU HOME.
Johnson looked down at Miller. “What’s very nice work, Miller? Relax ? What the hell kind of message is that to send to one of our pilots?”
Miller looked up at the screen. He’d been so immersed in this problem for what seemed like so long a time, he couldn’t imagine that someone didn’t know what was happening. “The Straton is not being flown by one of our pilots.”
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
Jack Miller quickly reached down and picked up the stack of printouts from the machine. “Here. This is the whole story. Everything we know. Everything . . .” He paused. “Everything that we’ve done. I’m afraid it’s worse than we originally thought.”
Johnson took the folded printouts and began reading. He took his unlit cigar out of his mouth and laid it on the table. He finished reading but kept his eyes on the printouts in his hand.
Edward Johnson’s lunch of poached salmon churned in his stomach. Less than half an hour before, they had been discussing his possible presidency of Trans-United Airlines. Now this. Disasters made and broke men very quickly. A man had to immediately sense the pitfalls and opportunities presented by these things and act on them. If this accident had been caused by any of the cutbacks he had personally authorized . . . Johnson looked up from the printout with no discernible expression on his face. He stared at Jack Miller for several seconds. “You told them to turn around.” It was a flat statement, with no inflections that might convey approval or disapproval.
Miller looked him squarely in the eye. “Yes, sir. They’re turned.”
It took Johnson a second to figure out that cryptic response, and another second to decide if Miller was being insubordinate. Johnson smiled a rare smile. “Yes. They’re turned. Nice work.”
Miller nodded. He found it odd that the Operations Chief had no further comment on what had happened to Flight 52. But on second thought, he expected no extraneous words from Edward Johnson.
Johnson looked around t
he room. Everyone was, in a perverse but predictable way, almost enjoying the drama they found themselves in. These were the situations on which were built the legends of the airlines. Every terse statement he made, every expression on his face, would be the subject of countless stories, told and retold. Only Jack Miller and his young assistant, Jerry Brewster, seemed not to be enjoying themselves.
“Sir?” It was Jerry Brewster. He took a hesitant step toward Johnson.
“What?” Johnson could see that the young assistant was nervous.
“I’m afraid I might have . . . contributed to the problem.” Brewster was speaking rapidly, getting his confession out as quickly as he could. “When I first saw the original SOS, I’m afraid I didn’t respond immediately. I thought it was a hoax.”
“A hoax?” Johnson raised an eyebrow. “What the hell kind of hoax could an SOS message be?”
“No, I mean a practical joke. I thought it was some-one’s idea of a joke.” Brewster fidgeted with the clipboard in his hands. This was going to be more difficult than he thought it might be. “But I didn’t wait very long. I went back as soon—”
“Any delay is too long,” Johnson said, cutting Brewster short. “I’ll talk to you later about this,” he said angrily, dismissing the young man with a wave of his hand. Johnson turned to the other men in the room. “As for the rest of you, I’d like to remind everyone that there’s no room in this business for jokes. Nothing should be treated as a joke. Ever.”
Brewster turned away, embarrassed, and left the room.
Johnson stood quietly for a moment. He was glad that he now had at least one ass to hang, if things came to that. He could use a few more. He turned to Miller. “Jack, who have you called? Who knows about this?”
“I had Evans handle that.”
Evans spoke quickly. “I did what was in the book, sir. The emergency handbook.”