“He sure doesn’t sound technically competent. What about Edward Johnson and Wayne Metz. They almost pulled it off, didn’t they?”
“Johnson’s made a full confession. He says he was pulled both ways the entire time—save the airplane or save the airline.”
“Sure,” Crandall said sarcastically. “He says he did it all for the airline? Nothing in it for him?”
“That’s his story.”
Trans-United was certainly going to be under the microscope for a while, Berry thought. But his gut feeling was that the airline would survive it. Even the press seemed to be playing up the actions of individuals rather than organizations. Maybe that’s the way this thing would ultimately wash out. But Berry did understand, at least a little, why Johnson had not wanted Flight 52 to come back. He thought about Daniel Mc-Vary.
“Has there been any improvement in Dan McVary or the others?” Crandall asked, as if she had sensed his thoughts.
“No. The same. There’s no hope for any of them. The doctors told me that the brain damage is unquestionably permanent.”
“That’s what I had guessed,” she answered softly, shaking her head.
Berry nodded. “Me too.” He remembered a similar conversation with Harold Stein. Stein had been right, at least about his family. It was hopeless. Berry could feel his emotions begin to slide again. He was becoming increasingly maudlin. He pulled out a handful of grass and scattered it down the hill. He forced his mind to change gears. “Metz hasn’t said much yet, except to hint that it was all Johnson’s idea. He says he didn’t know what was happening with the data-link.”
“I doubt that.”
“Hell, I know he understood where we were going. The federal prosecutor knows it too.”
They both looked down the hill and watched Linda for a while as she walked along a brook. Berry coughed lightly to clear his throat. “I called home this morning.”
“How is everyone?”
“They’re fine.” He stood up, then helped Sharon to her feet.
“I’ll bet they can’t wait for you to get back,” Sharon said.
Berry considered. “Yes . . . that’s the way they sounded.”
Sharon Crandall didn’t speak for a few seconds, then said, “Why . . . why didn’t they fly out here?”
“Well, the kids have finals now, and Jennifer doesn’t like flying anyway. She never came with me when I flew. All our vacations were by car or, sometimes, by ship. I don’t think Flight 52 helped her overcome her fear of flying.”
“I shouldn’t think it would.” She watched a flight of gulls sail overhead. “When are you going back?”
“I’m not sure. I have to stay here for the next few days, just like you. We have a lot of questions to answer for a lot of people. I’ve taken a month’s leave of absence from work.” He hesitated, then went on. “They were good about giving me the time, but there’s something . . . demeaning in having to ask for time off after nearly twenty years, you know? I mean, they could have offered before I asked. And Jennifer could have arranged for the kids to take their finals some other time, had three martinis, and flown out here. My mother, who is seventy-two and not well, wanted to come out.” He lapsed into silence for a while, then said, “My wife started off predictably enough . . . great concern . . . terrible anguish. But ten minutes into the conversation I could already pick up the old line.” He pulled out another handful of grass and threw it into the breeze. “Things would be okay for a few months. . . . We’d make the round of cocktail parties and country clubs, and I’d have to perform for everyone for a while. Then it would wear off. . . .”
Sharon Crandall reached out and took his hand. “What do you want to do?”
He felt the pressure of her hand and returned it. “I’m not sure. But I’m going to stay here for a few weeks until I know. Sometimes I think I’d like to fly for a living. That’s what I wanted when I was young.”
“I don’t think anyone would doubt your ability to fly.”
“No.” He laughed. “It’s my ability to land that’s in some doubt.”
She sat up. “Do you have to go back to the hospital?”
“No. I’m discharged. I’ve got a hotel room at the Mark.”
She turned and looked at him. “Stay with me. I have a place in North Beach.”
He stared out at the sky for a long time. An aircraft came toward them, heading over the city toward the airport, and from a distance it looked like a Straton 797. They both saw it, but neither commented on it. John Berry thought about what lay ahead. Investigations, grand juries, courtrooms, news coverage. Like it or not, he and Sharon were going to be news for some time. “It wouldn’t look right. We have no private lives. At least for a while. It took me a half hour to shake the reporters on my way here.”
She released his hand and stood. “I have to get Linda back.” She slipped on her shoes and picked up her hat.
Berry stood beside her and took her arm. “You know I want to. . . . It’s easier for you to . . .”
“Why? Because I have less to lose? You’ve got nothing to lose. She turned to him. “What were your first thoughts when you got out of the cockpit and realized you were alive? How you couldn’t wait to go home and get back to work?”
“No . . . I thought about you. . . .”
She stared at him for several seconds, then turned and called to Linda. “We have to go, honey.” She looked back at Berry. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess. I’m sorry if I put you in a difficult position, but . . . I care about you. And I can see that you’re unhappy.” She watched Linda running up the hill. “I keep thinking about all the friends I lost on that flight. I think about Captain Stuart. He was a good man. A no-nonsense guy. You remind me of him. He once told me that he had family problems, too, and he couldn’t resolve them. Now he doesn’t have to. But you do.”
Berry thought for an instant about those he had brought back, the survivors who would never be able to go through more than the barest motions of life. Were they any better off than those who had died? He couldn’t decide. Was survival enough, or should there be more?
Linda scampered up the hill and ran toward them. “Are we going?”
Sharon smiled at her. “Yes.” She took Linda’s arm and began walking down the slope.
Just before she reached the bottom, Berry called after her. “Sharon.”
She stopped and turned. “Yes, John?” Linda was clutching her hand, and the two of them looked up toward Berry.
John Berry took a few tentative steps toward her. As he moved down the hill, he could see in the distance the tall towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. They stood majestically, bathed in the late afternoon sun, their rigid beams framing the scene in front of Berry. More than any other single moment, the first sighting of the Golden Gate Bridge towers had marked the beginning of their salvation, the beginning of their new lives.
He stopped halfway down the hill and asked, “Can we have dinner together tonight?”
“I can’t. One of my old boyfriends asked me to dinner.”
“I’ll pick you up at eight.”
“He’s picking me up at eight-thirty.”
“You won’t be there.”
Sharon laughed. “Do you know where I live?”
“I’ll find you.”
About the Authors and the Book
Thomas Block and Nelson DeMille met for the first time at Dutch Broadway Elementary School, in Elmont, Long Island, New York. They were both second graders, but due to some fluke in the system, Nelson was a full eighteen months Tom’s senior, an age difference that was advantageous to Nelson in Dutch Broadway School, but which became less important in their later years.
Tom and Nelson successfully completed elementary school together, perfect products of the suburban 1950s. They entered Elmont Memorial Junior and Senior High School and became involved with numerous activities, such as football, track, wrestling, and operating the stage lights for school plays. Nelson was elected to student government, while Tom w
rote a column for the school newspaper, The Elmont Oracle, which exposed corruption in student government. “That’s what friends are for,” said Tom recently.
Tom had begun flying lessons when he was fourteen years old and obtained his pilot’s license at seventeen, the minimum legal age. Nelson, at Tom’s suggestion, started lessons when he was seventeen and got out of the flying business at eighteen, much to the relief of his flight instructor.
After high school graduation in 1962, Tom attended Morehead State College in Kentucky, and Nelson attended Hofstra University in New York.
Tom left college and pursued his aviation career, joining the former Mohawk Airlines at age nineteen, becoming the youngest airline copilot in the United States. Mohawk survived the experience and went on to become Allegheny Airlines and subsequently USAir. Today, Tom is a Senior Captain for USAir, flying wide-body jets to Europe.
Nelson completed three years at Hofstra and, bored, joined the United States Army in 1966 to see the world, not fully realizing there was a war heating up in Vietnam. Nelson went to Officer Candidate School, was commissioned a Second Lieutenant, and trained in Panama, then was assigned to lead an infantry platoon in Vietnam, where he served from October 1967 to November 1968 with the First Cavalry Division.
Upon discharge, Nelson returned to Long Island, where Tom was living. Nelson went back to college and obtained his degree as Tom moved up the airline seniority ladder. Tom and Nelson discovered they both had developed an interest in writing. Tom had begun writing for aviation magazines, and soon became a columnist for Flying Magazine, the world’s largest-circulation aviation publication. Nelson began writing the Great American War Novel based on his combat experiences in Vietnam. Unfortunately, no one wanted to publish a Vietnamese Naked and the Dead . Tom transferred to Pittsburgh in 1972, while Nelson remained on Long Island.
In about the mid-1970s, Tom and Nelson began collaborating on general magazine pieces, none of which was published, but the experience of working together was a prelude of things to come. The years passed, and Tom became an internationally known aviation writer, while Nelson published a series of paperback novels.
In 1977, Nelson began an ambitious novel, By the Rivers of Babylon, in which Arab terrorists hijack two El Al Concordes. Nelson soon discovered that he didn’t have the technical expertise to write the aviation scenes that were important to his novel, so he turned to his old friend Tom for help with those portions of the book.
The process worked well, and By the Rivers of Babylon became a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection, a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book, and a national and international bestseller.
There is a section in By the Rivers of Babylon that reads:
Then there was the thing that bothered Becker from the first day he had taken the Concorde up to 19,000 meters. It was the problem of sudden cabin decompression of the type that can happen if you are hit by a missile, or if there is a small explosion on board, or if someone shatters a window with a bullet . . . at 19,000 meters, you needed a pressure suit to make breathing possible, even with an oxygen mask. Lacking pressure suits, you had only a few seconds of usable consciousness to get down to where you could breathe with a mask. There was no way to do that at 19,000 meters. You put the mask on, but you blacked out anyway. The on-board computer sensed the problem and brought the plane down nicely, but by the time you got down to where you could breathe with the mask, you woke up with brain damage.
One day, Tom said to Nelson, “We should collaborate on a novel about the high-altitude decompression of a plane, and what happens to its passengers and its crew.” And thus was born Mayday.
Tom and Nelson worked on the novel for over a year. Mayday was published in hardcover by G. P. Putnam in 1979 and was a critical and commercial success. The paperback appeared on bestseller lists across the country and around the world.
Tom went on to publish five more aviation adventure novels, and Nelson went on to publish eight bestselling novels. Although they never collaborated again, Mayday was a fun and exciting experience for both of them, a convergence of their interests in writing as well as a friendship-strengthening episode for the two kids from Elmont, Long Island.
Nelson has reached the pinnacle of success in his writing career, and Tom has done the same in his flying career and as an aviation magazine writer.
While neither Tom nor Nelson has any immediate plans to collaborate again on a novel, they both felt that Mayday, a timeless and edge-of-the-seat tale of high-altitude terror, deserved to be republished.
Working with me at Warner Books, Tom and Nelson updated some of the politics and technology in the story to bring it into the ’90s.
For old fans of Mayday, the authors hope this updated version is as immediate and exciting as the one you read in the late 1970s. For new readers, welcome to Flight 52. Fasten your seat belts and prepare for takeoff. You’ve never had a ride quite like this.
MAYDAY!
MEL PARKER
Publisher
Warner Paperbacks
Nelson DeMille, Mayday
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