Mayday

  Fitzgerald indicated the data-link chair. “Jack, sit here and monitor. Send about once every two or three minutes, and then wait. Wait for an answer, Jack.”

  “Yes, sir.” Miller sat at the data-link.

  Johnson watched Miller hit the repeat button to send Fitzgerald’s message again. The Straton was down, and no one could change that—not Kevin Fitzgerald, not Jack Miller, not all the company executives, not the company president or the chairman of the board. And he’d done this for them as much as for himself—but they’d never understand that, and never know it.

  Kevin Fitzgerald picked up the company phone and dialed the executive conference room. “Let me speak to the president.”

  Johnson knew his uneasiness was starting to show. He took a cigar out of his pocket and clamped it in his jaws.

  Metz wanted to leave but thought it wouldn’t be a good idea. His hand reached into his jacket and touched the wad of data-link printouts. He noticed Johnson glaring at him.

  Fitzgerald spoke into the phone. “Yes, sir. Fitzgerald. Just got the word. Damned bad business. I’m at the dispatch office with Ed Johnson and Mr. Metz from Beneficial. Yes. We’re leaving a dispatcher here to keep sending and to monitor. We’ll be along in ten minutes. Fine.” He hung up and turned to Johnson. “Press conference for six o’clock. You’re the star. Can you handle it?”

  “Of course.”

  “There are relatives of the passengers assembling in the VIP lounge. I have to speak to them. I wish I was as confident as you.” He looked at Johnson closely. “I don’t know exactly what happened here, but when those reporters start firing away at you, you damned well better have your act together.”

  “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

  Both men glared at each other. Metz edged out of the door and stood awkwardly in the middle of the dispatch office.

  Miller pretended to be concentrating on the data-link machine. He knew that Fitzgerald was proceeding very rashly and very dangerously. He hoped to God that his suspicions—vague as they were—had at least enough substance to ensure that the chief pilot was not sticking his neck out too far.

  Fitzgerald finally broke the silence. “Johnson, we’re going to find out what happened to Flight 52, what happened here, and who was negligent. And I don’t care how long it takes or who gets burned.”

  Johnson took his cigar out of his mouth. “You act as though you think I planted the fucking bomb. Don’t try to use this accident to discredit me, Captain. I know how to survive, and I promise you I’ll come out of this looking just fine. Just fine.” He turned and walked out of the room, breathing the clean air of the dispatch office. His head was pounding and his stomach was in knots. He walked past Wayne Metz, past the dispatchers whose heads were down over their desks, and out into the corridor that he had walked through not so long ago.

  Retired Rear Admiral Randolf Hennings leaned heavily on the rail that ran along the passageway of the 0-2 deck of the Nimitz ’s superstructure. The passageway was deserted, and it would most likely remain that way for some time. He looked up at the two white stars painted above the stairwell designating the Admiral’s Passageway. This passage was off-limits to anyone of lesser rank without a specific duty there. It was another of the Navy’s long-standing traditions to have an uncluttered passageway for an admiral. Hennings had always realized how anachronistic things like that were. Pointless traditions. But he also knew how much he enjoyed them. Codes of honor. Allegiances and oaths of duty. They were all manufactured from the same need, and they all served the same end. But they were artifacts of a vanished world, and like him, they belonged in a museum . . . or a tomb.

  Hennings let out a long breath. He rubbed his fingers along the rope-lined handrail. Just the feel of the twisted hemp brought back a flood of memories. The South Pacific—or the South Seas, as it was called in old days. Blue water, sunny skies, palm-lined beaches, and the young officers in their tropical tan uniforms. Standing on the decks or sitting in the wardroom, listening to senior officers telling firsthand stories of the war. The great sea battles and the amphibious assaults. But those memories were tainted now. Like a submarine breaking through the surface of the sea, one word kept rising through the depths of his mind and formed on his lips: “Murder.”

  Hennings descended slowly down the deserted gray passage, then opened a hatch and stepped out onto the sunlit flight deck.

  A moderate breeze swept the wide expanses of the nearly deserted deck. Seventy-five yards forward of the conning tower sat the S-3 transport. The pilots were giving it a final line check. An orderly had already collected Hennings’s luggage from his stateroom, and it was sitting near the baggage door. It seemed so long ago that the S-3 had brought him here. Hennings turned and walked away from the aircraft.

  The Pacific sun lay directly astern of the ship, and the asphalt flight deck gave off waves of undulating heat. He spotted a seaman working near the aft starboard elevator, and he turned to avoid him. He crossed the deck diagonally and walked toward the fantail. He approached the edge of the deck and stood with his hands on the chain rail. Below, he could see the white foaming wake left behind by the giant nuclear-powered carrier. Straight down, mounted on the stern, a huge American flag hung from its mast. The flag snapped nicely in the wind, its bright colors standing out against the white wake.

  Randolf Hennings thought about his wife, Mary. He had spent most of their thirty-nine years of marriage away from her. And with her death coming so soon after his retirement, he had never really had the time to do the things with her that he had put off for so long.

  He thought about his friends. Most of them were dead, some in battle, some from natural causes. The remainder were living out their lonely retirements. As a Navy man, he had no roots, no hometown, no family that knew him.

  More and more he had come to understand that he was not only lonely, he was an anachronism as well. He had always believed that today’s scientific advancements and solutions were going to require some unexpected and unacceptable payments tomorrow. Now he realized that tomorrow was here. And today’s situation ethics as practiced by James Sloan, often led to more unhappiness and more dire consequences than yesterday’s rigid moral code. It was this runaway technology, with no clear sense of ethics and no accountability, that killed the Straton and everyone aboard her. That killed Peter Matos. Hennings had tried to fit into the new scheme but had succeeded only in being an accessory to a monstrous crime.

  He had heard the S-3’s engines starting on the forward service elevator 200 yards behind him. They would be looking for him soon. Captain Diehl and a few officers and men would assemble quickly to pipe him off, then get back to more important duties.

  Randolf Hennings stared into the churning wake. He thought of those officers he knew who were buried at sea, and whose lives had ended in the sea. They had lived shorter lives than his, but had died before anything could erase their heroic deeds.

  Someday, he believed, on the Judgment Day, the sea and the earth would give up its dead, and give up its secrets as well. Then men would point to their murderers, their torturers, to those who falsely accused them, to those whose negligence and stupidity had caused their deaths. Then God would judge each man in turn and mete out a fitting punishment.

  He heard the ship’s address system call his name in the distance.

  Randolf Hennings slid beneath the chain rail and strode purposefully to the edge of the ship’s fantail. Without breaking stride he stepped from the carrier’s deck, fell past the safety net, past the unfurled American flag, and dropped unnoticed into the white wake of the USS Chester W. Nimitz.

  16

  John Berry’s shoulders ached from the strain of hand-flying the Straton, and his body was beginning to react to the beating it had taken during the violent descent and his battle with McVary. Bruises covered his face and arms, and there was a stiffness in his joints. His head was beginning to throb, and his eyes were blurry. He looked down at the fuel gauges. Less than
one-eighth remained in the tanks. “What time is it?”

  Sharon looked at her watch, set to San Francisco time. “It’s five minutes to six.”

  The autopilot disengage light glowed a steady amber, as it had done for the last three hours. Berry felt an irrational anger at the malfunctioning machine. “Sharon, take the wheel.”

  She reached out and took the wheel in her hands.

  Berry stretched his arms and legs, and rubbed his burning eyes. The life vest was becoming uncomfortable, but at 900 feet—less than one minute to the water—he thought everyone should leave the vests on.

  “The first one to see land gets a bottle of champagne, just like on a ship.”

  “And I get dinner in New York if we make it to the airport.”

  “Right. And Linda . . .” He turned his head. “What do you want when we land?” Berry was sorry he’d brought it up.

  Linda Farley looked up from her chair and shrugged. “I want something to drink. And I want to see if my mother . . . is . . . is okay.”

  Berry turned back to the front. He looked out the windshield at the ocean. The sea was becoming calmer, but there were still occasional high, rolling waves, any one of which could swamp the Straton if they ditched. The sky was dotted with white cumulus clouds—signs of fair weather, but that could change at any time. His prediction of sighting land no later than six o’clock raised their hopes too high. Sharon and Linda seemed to hang on his words. He’d have to be more guarded in what he said from here on.

  He looked down at the radio console. Using the charts he’d found under the copilot’s seat, he had set the captain’s navigation radio to the Salinas Station frequency, south of San Francisco. Sharon had set the co-pilot’s navigation radio to San Francisco Airport. The radios—which were more like electronic compasses than voice radios—had a limited range, but Berry thought that they should be close enough to receive a signal from either of those airports—unless he was so far off course that he would never be within range of them. “Do you see any movement in the needle there?”

  Sharon Crandall looked down at the bearing indicator on the copilot’s navigation radio. “Nothing.”

  Perhaps, thought Berry, the antenna cables to those radios were severed along with the voice radios. Voice communication was not that critical for a landing, but unless he could get a good radio navigation signal, and lock onto it, he would not be able to get a bearing for the final steer toward the airport.

  Crandall glanced down at the West Coast radio chart in her lap. “Are you sure we’ve got the navigation radios set up right?”

  “Let me see the chart again.” Berry reached out for it, glanced at the chart and then the navigation radio, but he knew there was no mistake in the settings. Maybe he was still too far from the coast, or he was too far north or south, or worse, the radios simply weren’t working. He didn’t know, and he might never know. He handed the charts back. “We must still be out of range. Keep watching the needle on your side. If it moves, even a bit, let me know.”

  “Will do.” Her eyes involuntarily passed across the data-link screen. The message sat there, then disappeared as someone at the other end pressed the repeat button. The alerting bell rang again, and the same message began to print across the screen as it had done every three or four minutes for the last three hours.

  TO FLIGHT 52: IF YOU CAN RECEIVE US,

  DON’T THINK WE HAVE ABANDONED YOU.

  THIS LINK WILL BE MANNED

  CONTINUOUSLY UNTIL YOU ARE FOUND.

  SAN FRANCISCO HQ.

  “Maybe we should answer.”

  Berry didn’t bother to look at the message again. Every time the alerting bell rang, he turned to the screen. He was beginning to feel as conditioned as Pavlov’s dog. His will was weakening, and he wanted to answer. But then he might still be persuaded to do whatever they said.

  “John, it’s inconceivable that they would keep repeating this message if they—”

  “They just want to be absolutely certain we’re down.”

  He thought about that rapid succession of fifteen to twenty messages that had come in hours before. They had made the alerting bill ring continuously for more than a minute. “More probably they have to show that they’re still trying to do something for us. They’ll send messages until some government official or some airline executive determines that if we were still flying, we’d be out of fuel. It’s probably standard operating procedure. I don’t know exactly what’s going on back there, but don’t forget the Hawaii vector, and don’t forget those informative instructions on how to shut off the damn fuel.”

  Crandall nodded. The words looked so sincere, sitting there on the screen. “John, maybe—”

  “Change the subject.” Berry had spent a good portion of the last few hours trying to imagine the scene at the other end of the data-link. Bastards.

  “John? Do you think we should practice any more?” Sharon pointed to the flap handle.

  “No. You’ve got that routine down okay.” The two of them had been going over the landing sequence so that Sharon could operate the flaps and landing gear at Berry’s command. That would free him to concentrate on the runway—or the surface of the ocean, if it came to that. “You don’t want to be overtrained, do you?” Berry asked, smiling.

  She forced a smile in return.

  The cockpit grew silent and allowed the sounds of the lounge to penetrate. Berry could hear crying and some soft moaning, but for the most part it was quiet. They were sleeping, he thought. Then the piano began to play again, loudly this time, and Berry recognized the piece. It was unmistakably a passage from Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1, though in a terrible deranged arrangement. “Hold the wheel.”

  Berry ripped off his seat belt and moved quickly to the door.

  “John, what are you doing?”

  Berry pushed the door open against the stretched nylon and held it while he craned his head around the edge. He looked back into the lounge. The twisted forms of the dead and dying lay everywhere, like broken dolls strewn about the room of a disorderly child. Many of the passengers were still moving, however, roaming aimlessly over the body-strewn carpet. Daniel McVary was standing, facing the cockpit door, his face battered and one eye swollen shut. He walked slowly, with a limp, toward Berry.

  At the piano sat Isaac Shelbourne, his long white hair wildly disheveled, and his hands moving dexterously over the keyboard as Berry had seen them move so many times on television. “Stop! Shelbourne, shut up! For Christ’s sake, stop it!”

  “John!”

  Linda called out. “Mr. Berry . . . please close the door.”

  Berry drew his head back and let the door be pulled closed by the tension of the nylon. He turned and walked slowly back to the flight chair and climbed in. He sat staring down at his lap for several seconds, then lifted his hands and took the wheel. “All right, I’ve got it.”

  Sharon Crandall looked at him and reached out to touch his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I’m fine.”

  There was an awkward silence in the cockpit.

  Linda heard a noise behind her and turned in her seat. She screamed.

  Berry and Crandall looked back quickly.

  Several groping hands crept through the door opening. A few hands wrapped around the edge and pulled.

  Crandall unbuckled her belt. “Damn it, you stirred them up again.” She rose out of her seat.

  “Stay here. I’ll go.”

  “No. I can handle it. Fly the plane.” She stepped to the bulkhead and took the fire extinguisher from its wall rack, then moved to the door and examined the length of panty hose. “You stretched it.”

  Berry didn’t answer.

  Crandall looked at the knot wrapped around the broken latch. The knot was secure, but the fiberglass door around the latch was cracked, and she couldn’t remember if it had been that way before. The rivets on the latch assembly seemed loose also. She looked up and saw faces and bodies at the opening, which was about six
inches wide. She raised the fire extinguisher and pointed it directly at Dan McVary’s face. She pressed the trigger, and a rushing cloud of vapor blasted into the door opening. Excited squeals came from the other side of the door. Most of the hands disappeared. She raised the extinguisher and brought it down on one of the remaining hands, then struck out at the finger still gripping the door. She waited for a moment, then turned and replaced the extinguisher in its rack and sat down. “The door area around the latch is cracking.”

  Berry nodded.

  “The copilot . . . Dan McVary . . . seems to be instigating. . . .”

  “I know.” Berry wondered how a single obsession could take hold in that damaged a brain. How was he communicating his leadership to the others?

  “The extinguisher feels like it’s nearly empty.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I got a little carried away. Okay?” She nodded, and tears started to form in her eyes. “I’m sorry, too. It wasn’t your fault. You’ve done so well, John. I don’t know if any of our regular pilots could have done the same.”

  “No, they couldn’t have. Because they would have realized it was hopeless from the start.” He reached out and ran his hand over the side of her face. “I have a good crew.” He turned and looked down at Linda Farley. “You’ve been a good member of the crew.” He smiled at her.

  Linda gave him an embarrassed smile.

  Sharon Crandall put her hand on his arm. “Want me to take the wheel?”

  “No. I’ve got it.”

  “Do you want to try to engage the autopilot again?”

  “No. It’s just as easy to fly it myself. I need the practice.”

  “Okay.”

  Berry would have liked to have the autopilot, not only to relieve him at the wheel but because the autopilot might have made it possible for him to try for an automatic landing if they found the airport—although he didn’t really know how to set that up, either. Without the autopilot, he would have to hand-fly the damaged Straton right into the touchdown. He scanned the horizon and watched his radio bearing indicator.