Richard Castle - Wild Storm

TO MY ALWAYS.

YOU MAKE SAVING THE WORLD MAGICAL.

NINETEEN THOUSAND FEET ABOVE YORK, Pennsylvania

At the very moment Flight 937 was targeted — the moment when the three-hundred-plus souls aboard were brought into a peril whose magnitude they did not understand — the man in seat 2B was thinking about a nap.

Seat 2B was partially reclined, and he was breathing deeply. A rakish sort, tall, dark, and broad-chested, he had his thick hair swept fashionably to the side. Beyond his apparent physical allure, there was also an ineffable quality to him — call it charm, charisma, or just natural magnetism — that made the flight attendants pay him more attention than was strictly necessary.

His face was tanned, albeit in something of a windburned way. He had just spent several weeks climbing in the Swiss Alps, finishing his trek by solo-climbing the sheer north face of the Eiger in a shade under four hours. Not record territory. But also not bad for a man who didn’t make his living as a climber.

He still wore his hiking books. Some of his gear was stowed above him in a weathered rucksack. The rest was packed below, in the belly of the Boeing 767-300 that had been plowing dutifully through the sky since Zurich.

They had been making a long, slow descent toward Dulles International Airport and the man in seat 2B was looking forward to the evening, when he planned to take his father to an Orioles game. It had been two months since they had seen each other, which was too long. They had bonding to catch up on.

The 767 banked slightly to the right, then straightened. It was a sturdy aircraft and the flight had been smooth, with only the barest hint of turbulence as the plane had passed under a high ceiling of clouds a few minutes earlier. The man in seat 2B had his eyes closed, though he was not quite asleep. He was in that transitional period, when the conscious part of his brain was slowly ceding control to the subconscious.

Then came the loud chunk .

His eyes opened. It was definitely not among the sounds one wants or expects to hear on an airplane. It was followed by voices, plaintive and panicked, coming from behind him on the left side of the aircraft. From above him, the seat-belt sign chimed. The plane was no longer flying smooth or straight. It had entered a shallow, wobbly dive to the left, pitched at roughly ten degrees.

Physiologists have identified the two possible reactions to a threatening stimulus as being fight or flight. But those are, in fact, merely the instinctive responses, the ones gifted to humans by their simian ancestors. Fancying themselves members of a more evolved species, H. sapiens have learned to overcome those base, brutish urges. They are polite, civilized, especially when surrounded by many other H. sapiens . They value decorum — even over survival, at times.

As a result, most people’s response to an emergency is to do nothing.

The man in seat 2B was not most people.

As the other first-class passengers exchanged nervous glances, the man in seat 2B unfastened his seat belt and walked back toward the midsection of the plane. His fight-or-flight juices were flowing — heart rate increased, pupils dilated, muscles bathed in red blood cells and ready for action — but he had long trained himself how to harness that chemistry in a productive manner.

Passing through business class into coach, he reached the emergency exit rows. Without speaking to the passengers, all of whom had their necks craned to see outside, he bent low and took his own gander out the window. It took perhaps a second and a half for him to assess what he saw, perhaps another two seconds to decide what to do about it. He walked back toward the first-class cabin. There he found a flight attendant, a pretty ash blonde whose name tag identified her as PEGGY. She was clutching the side of the fuselage.

The man’s voice did not rise as he said, “I need to speak to the pilot.”

“Sir, please return to your seat and fasten your seat belt.”

“I need to speak to the pilot now.”

“I’m sorry, sir, that’s not—”

His tone remained calm as he interrupted her again: “Respectfully, Peggy, I don’t have time to argue with you. Whether you want to recognize it or not, we have entered into what pilots call a death spiral. It’s just a slight pull now, but there’s nothing your pilot is going to be able to do to stop it from getting worse. Unless you let me help him, the spiral is going to get tighter and tighter until we hit the ground at what will likely be a steep bank and a very high rate of speed. Trust me when I tell you it won’t end well for either of us, whether we’re wearing our seat belts or not.”

He finally had Peggy’s attention — and cooperation. She walked unsteadily toward a phone, lifted it, and spoke into the receiver.

“Go ahead,” she said, nodding toward the door to the cockpit. “It’s unlocked.”

The pilot had the gray hair and crow’s-feet of a veteran flier. But in his many thousands of hours of flight time, he had never faced anything quite like this. He was leaning his weight against the flight stick, the muscles in his arms straining. The plane was responding, but not nearly enough.

The man from seat 2B did not bother with introductions.

“One of your ailerons on the left side is gone and another is just barely attached,” he said.

“I’ve added power to the port engines and applied the rudder, but I can’t keep us straight,” the pilot replied.

“And you won’t be able to,” the man from 2B said. “I don’t think I’ll be able to get your aileron functioning. But I think I can at least get it back in place.”

“And how are you going to do that?” the pilot asked.

The man from seat 2B ignored the question and said, “Do you have any speed tape in your flight kit?”

“Yeah, it’s in the compartment behind me.”

“Good,” the man said, already heading in that direction.

“We’re not the only ones,” the pilot said.

“What do you mean?”

“Three planes have already crashed. No one knows what the hell is going on. Air traffic control is calling it another nine-eleven. Planes just keep dropping out of the sky.”

The man from seat 2B paused over this news for a moment, then drove it from his mind. It was not pertinent to his present circumstances, which would require all of his concentration. “What’s our altitude?” he asked.

“One-eight-six-two-five and falling.”

“Okay. I’m going to need you to reduce airspeed to a hundred and forty knots, lower to fourteen thousand feet, and depressurize the plane. Can you do that for me?”

“I think so.”

“What’s your name, Captain?”

“Estes. Ben Estes.”

“Captain Estes, I’m going to get you back some control of this aircraft. Hopefully enough to get us down safely. Just keep it as steady as you can for me for the next five minutes. No sudden moves.”

“Roger that. What’s your name, son?”

But the man from seat 2B had already departed the cockpit. He stopped briefly at his seat, opening the overhead bin and bringing down his rucksack. He pulled out a Petzl Hirundos climbing harness, several carabiners, and a seventy-meter length of Mammut Supersafe climbing rope. The plane had slowed. It was now tilted roughly fifteen degrees to the left. The man in seat 2B felt his ears pop.

The woman in seat 1B was peppering him with questions: “What’s going on? Are we going to crash? What are you doing?”

“Just trying to avoid deep vein thrombosis,” the man in seat 2B said finally. “It’s a silent killer, you know.”