Chapter 2 - Through the Armored Door
The walk down the darkened first-class aisle felt like walking down the ramp of a hangar at two in the morning. Every sense I had spent forty-eight months trying to dull snapped back into razor-sharp focus.
My inner ear registered the aircraft's attitude before my eyes could see an instrument. We were nose-low by about one and a half degrees. The twin turbofans beneath the wings weren't singing their normal, smooth cruising song; they were hunting, their engine pressure ratios fluctuating in tiny, ragged pulses as the autothrottles struggled against contradictory air-data computer inputs.
Clara punched an emergency access code into the armored cockpit door keypad. The red light blinked twice, switched to steady amber, and then the magnetic strike released with a heavy, mechanical thud.
She pushed the door open just enough for me to slip inside, then pulled it shut behind me, sealing us off from the three hundred souls sleeping behind the curtain.
The smell hit me first.
It wasn't the clean, ozone-scented air of a modern high-altitude flight deck. It smelled of scorched wiring, ozone, and the sour, sharp odor of human bile.
"Holy God," I breathed.
The captain was slumped forward against the left-hand control column, held in place only by his four-point harness. His head lolled to the side, his graying hair matted with sweat. His face was a sickly grayish-purple, lips slightly parted, a trail of dried foam at the corner of his mouth. His right arm dangled uselessly toward the pedestal, entirely limp.
In the right seat, First Officer Daniel Ramos—according to the gold wings pinned above his pocket—was clinging to his yoke with white knuckles. He was barely thirty years old, his eyes bloodshot and dilated, his breath coming in shallow, frantic wheezes. He had a portable oxygen mask strapped over his nose and mouth, but his hands were vibrating with tremors so violent that the control wheel was physically shuddering.
"Captain... Captain had an acute massive stroke forty minutes past Waypoint Gander," Ramos gasped through the mask, his voice sounding like sandpaper scraping across sheet metal. "Then... electrical fire in the forward electronics bay. We blew the halon bottles, but toxic fumes... toxic fumes breached the flight deck ventilation before the scrubbers kicked in. I inhaled... I inhaled too much smoke trying to secure the captain's harness."
I moved instantly into the jumpseat space, bracing myself against the center pedestal. My fingers went straight to the captain's carotid artery.
Weak. Thready. But still beating.
"He's in critical shock," I said, my voice dropping into the cold, clinical rhythm of emergency triage. "Have you initiated the emergency descent?"
"Can't," Ramos choked out, his head jerking back as a violent coughing fit wracked his frame. "Autoflight system failed. Primary flight display on the captain's side went completely black when the smoke cleared. We lost navigation computers one and two. I'm flying on the standby attitude indicator and raw air-data needles. My vision... ma'am, my peripheral vision is going gray. I can't feel my legs."
I looked at the instruments.
The center standby display—a tiny, four-inch artificial horizon—showed our airspeed decaying through 240 knots at flight level 350. That was dangerously slow for an aircraft this heavy at this altitude. We were skating along the edge of the coffin corner, where the margin between high-speed stall and low-speed stall narrowed to a sliver.
"Get out of the seat, Daniel," I ordered firmly.
"Ma'am, company regulations—"
"Daniel, look at me," I commanded, grabbing his shoulder and squeezing hard enough to cut through his oxygen-deprived haze. He turned his bloodshot eyes toward me. "You are passing out from carbon monoxide poisoning. If you black out while holding this column, you will drive this nose down into Mach tuck, and three hundred people will break apart over the North Atlantic before you wake up. Unlock your harness. Now."
He stared at me for half a second, recognized the authority in my eyes, and hit the quick-release buckle.
I hauled his limp, sweating frame out of the right seat with the practiced leverage of an Army officer who had dragged wounded crew chiefs out of burning Blackhawks. Clara helped me pull him back into the entryway, propping him against the bulkhead with an emergency oxygen bottle strapped tightly to his face.
Then I stepped back into the cockpit, slid into the right seat, and clicked the four-point harness over my green sweater.
My fingers touched the cold, textured aluminum of the control yoke.
May you like
For four years, I had promised my son I would never touch the sky again.
I closed my eyes for one half-second, whispered his name, and wrapped my hands around the steel.
