Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

SANTORELLI: Captain. Roy, I’m taking over here now.

BLANE: Are we recording?

SANTORELLI: What?

BLANE: Make them stop hurting me.

SANTORELLI: (worriedly) Gonna be—

BLANE: Are we recording?

SANTORELLI: Gonna be all right now— A hard sound like a punch. A grunt, apparently from Santorelli.

Another punch. Santorelli falls silent.

BLANE: Are we recording?

As a timpani of thunder drummed an overture in the east, Joe said, ‘He sucker-punched his copilot?’

‘Or hit him with some blunt object, maybe something he’d taken out of his flight bag and hidden beside his seat while Santorelli was in the lay, something he was ready with.’

‘Premeditation. What the hell?’

‘Probably hit him in the face, because Santorelli went right out. He’s silent for ten or twelve seconds, and then’—she pointed to the transcript—‘we hear him groaning.’

‘Dear God.’

‘On the tape, Blane’s voice now loses the tremor, the fragility. There’s a bitterness that makes your skin crawl.’

BLANE: Make them stop or when I get the chance. when I get the chance, I’ll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I’ll do it. I’ll kill everybody, and I’ll like it.

The transcript rattled in Joe’s hands.

He thought of the passengers on 353: some dozing in their seats, others reading books, working on laptops, leafing through magazines, knitting, watching a movie, having a drink, making plans for the future, all of them complacent, none aware of the terrifying events occurring in the cockpit.

Maybe Nina was at the window, gazing out at the stars or down at the top of the cloud cover below them; she liked the window seat. Michelle and Chrissie might have been playing a game of Go Fish or Old Maids; they travelled with decks for various games.

He was torturing himself. He was good at it because a part of him believed that he deserved to be tortured.

Forcing those thoughts out of his mind, Joe said, ‘What was going on with Blane, for God’s sake? Drugs? Was his brain fried on something?’

‘No. That was ruled out.’

‘How?’

‘It’s always a priority to find something of the pilots’ remains to test for drugs and alcohol. It took some time in this case,’ she said, as with a sweep of one hand she indicated the scorched pines and aspens uphill, ‘because a lot of the organic debris was scattered as much as a hundred yards into the trees west and north of the impact.’

An internal darkness encroached on Joe’s field of vision, until he seemed to be looking at the world through a tunnel. He bit his tongue almost hard enough to draw blood, breathed slowly and deeply, and tried not to let Barbara see how shaken he was by these details.

She put her hands in her pockets. She kicked a stone into the crater. ‘Really need this stuff, Joe?’

‘Yes.’

She sighed. ‘We found a portion of a hand we suspected was Blane’s because of a half-melted wedding band that was fused to the ring finger, a relatively unique gold band. There was some other tissue as well. With that we identified—’

‘Fingerprints?’

‘No, those were burned off. But his father’s still alive, so the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory was able to confirm it was Blane’s tissue through a DNA match with a blood sample that his dad supplied.’

‘Reliable?’

A hundred percent. Then the remains went to the toxicologists. There were minute amounts of ethanol in both Blane and Santorelli, but that was just the consequences of putrefaction. Blane’s partial hand was in those woods more than seventy-two hours before we found it. Santorelli’s remains — four days. Some ethanol related to tissue decay was to be expected. But otherwise, they both passed all the toxicologicals. They were clean and sober.’

Joe tried to reconcile the words on the transcript with the toxicological findings. He couldn’t.

He said, ‘What’re the other possibilities? A stroke?’

‘No, it just didn’t sound that way on the tape I listened to,’ Barbara said. ‘Blane speaks clearly, with no slurring of the voice whatsoever. And although what he’s saying is damn bizarre, it’s nevertheless coherent — no transposition of words, no substitution of inappropriate words.’

Frustrated, Joe said, ‘Then what the hell? A nervous breakdown, psychotic episode?’

Barbara’s frustration was no less than Joe’s: ‘But where the hell did it come from? Captain Delroy Michael Blane was the most rock-solid psychological specimen you’d ever want to meet. Totally stable guy.’

‘Not totally.’

‘Totally stable guy,’ she insisted. ‘Passed all the company psychological exams. Loyal family man. Faithful husband. A Mormon, active in his church. No drinking, no drugs, no gambling. Joe, you can’t find one person out there who ever saw him in a single moment of aberrant behaviour. By all accounts he wasn’t just a good man, not just a solid man — but a happy man.’

Lightning glimmered. Wheels of rolling thunder clattered along steel rails in the high east.

Pointing to the transcript, Barbara showed Joe where the 747 made the first sudden three-degree heading change, nose right, which precipitated a yaw. At that point, Santorelli was groaning but not fully conscious yet. And just before the manoeuvre, Captain Blane said, “This is fun.” There are these other sounds on the tape — here, the rattle and clink of small loose objects being flung around by the sudden lateral acceleration.’

This is fun.

Joe couldn’t take his eyes off those words.

Barbara turned the page for him. ‘Three seconds later, the aircraft made another violent heading change of four degrees, nose left. In addition to the previous clatter, there were now sounds from the aircraft — a thump and a low shuddery noise. And Captain Blane is laughing.’

‘Laughing,’ Joe said with incomprehension. ‘He was going to go down with them, and he was laughing?’

‘It wasn’t anything you’d think of as a mad laugh, either. It was a pleasant laugh, as if he were genuinely enjoying himself.’

This is fun.

Eight seconds after the first yawing incident, there was another abrupt heading change of three degrees, nose left, followed just two seconds later by a severe shift of seven degrees, nose right. Blane laughed as he executed the first manoeuvre and, with the second, said, Oh, Wow!

‘This is where the starboard wing lifted, forcing the port wing down,’ Barbara said. ‘In twenty-two seconds the craft was banking at a hundred and forty-six degrees with a downward nose pitch of eighty-four degrees.’

‘They were finished.’

‘It was deep trouble but not hopeless. There was still a chance they might have pulled out of it. Remember, they were above twenty thousand feet. Room for recovery.’

Because he had never read about the crash or watched television reports of it, Joe had always pictured fire in the aircraft and smoke filling the cabin. A short while ago, when he had realized that the passengers were spared that particular terror, he’d hoped that the long journey down had been less terrifying than the imaginary plunge that he experienced in some of his anxiety attacks. Now, however, he wondered which would have been worse: the gush of smoke and the instant recognition of impending doom that would have come with it — or clean air and the hideously attenuated false hope of a last-minute correction, salvation.

The transcript indicated the sounding of alarms in the cockpit. An altitude alert tone. A recorded voice repeatedly warning Traffic! because they were descending through air corridors assigned to other craft.

Joe asked, ‘What’s this reference to the “stick-shaker alarm?”