Ian Slater - Payback

“Yeah,” cut in Tony. “ ’Cause it’s supposed to look like one of them smiling fish.”

“Yes,” said Susan Li, deciding that this wasn’t the time to correct Tony Rivella’s grammar. “And the way they’ve painted the inside of the fuselage, that’s the body of the plane we’re in, looks so graceful, like a porpoise.”

“They say,” said Michael O’Shea, his eyes sparkling with anticipation, “that this Dreamliner can reach point eight five Mach.”

“That’s not fast,” said Tony. “Not even the speed of sound. This crate’s no faster’n a jumbo.”

Michael was stymied for a second, and Susan Li felt sorry for him. The gap of a missing tooth in his upper row from a recent Rollerblade argument with a brick wall, together with his crestfallen look, evoked the mother in her — she had a boy of her own — and she wanted to embrace him, hold him. But these days, no way. You didn’t dare touch a child. “I didn’t know that, Michael,” she said instead. “Point eight five Mach. It sounds pretty fast to me.”

Michael, rallied by her response, felt emboldened enough to parry Tony’s disdain further by adding, “Yeah, and the Dreamliner only needs two engines. Old jumbos used to need four.”

“So,” retorted Tony, “what if one catches fire?”

“Tony!” Susan Li cut in. “Don’t say such things.”

Michael O’Shea wouldn’t be outdone. “My dad says the airlines have ordered, like, a hundred and fifty Dreamliners and that a Dreamliner can fly on one engine and—”

“You’d crash and burn, man!”

“You two!” Susan scolded them, “stop arguing and watch your monitors.”

Tony’s aggressive retort to Michael, who was an inherently shy boy, upset Susan Li more than she cared to show. She hated any kind of petty one-upmanship because it reminded her of the mean-minded verbal bullying she had been forced to endure as a Taiwanese immigrant to the U.S. — the daily gauntlet of “slant eyes” and other racial epithets she had run into every day. The worst of such abuse, she knew, was that you never knew when it would be unleashed against you. You’d just start to feel safe, accepted by your peers, when out of the blue “Chink!” would be hurled at you and you’d feel like melting into the floor. When it was just you and your tormentors, it was bad enough, but ironically that was much easier to deal with than when you were with friends. Even now, at twenty-nine, the memories of the childhood humiliation made her face burn with indignation.

Oh, to heck with the paranoid, no-touching rules. She put her arm around young Michael. “What are you looking forward to most, Michael?”

His smile was golden, and it struck Susan then that the boy was starved for affection at home.

“The guards at Buckingham Palace,” he said, “with the big bearskin hats.”

“Not bearskin!” cut in Tony. “Can’t kill bears anymore. It’s artificial fur. I read about it.”

“Well, before artificial fur came along,” said Susan, “people had to keep warm in the winter with animal skins and fur.”

“Gross,” riposted Tony.

“Tony Rivella,” she said in a tone seldom heard from her, “what is your problem? Aren’t you looking forward to seeing London?”

He glowered up at her. “Yeah.”

“Well, what would you like to see?”

Tony shrugged. “Dunno. Big Ben, I guess.”

She turned to Michael, raising her voice above the high scream of the engines approaching full pitch. “How about you, Michael? You want to see Big Ben?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen it in the movies,” boasted Tony, but his tone was suddenly less pugnacious.

Susan put her other arm about Tony. “We’re going to have a great time. Right?”

Both of them said, “Right.” As the Dreamliner lifted off, Susan instinctively held them closer.

Michael glimpsed the buildings of JFK rushing by, the Manhattan skyline in the distance and headlights coming on along the expressway, a wink of one bright light pretty against the purple dusk.

It was the last thing he saw, the missile slamming into the starboard-side engine, fragments penetrating and igniting the wing’s fuel tank. The pilot had no chance. The 7E7 plummeted hard right from seventy feet, the wheels not yet retracted, their spinning throwing off burning fuel like a grinding wheel spitting sparks, the fully loaded and fully fueled plane slamming into the tarmac at 122 miles per hour; the time elapsed between the Boeing taking off and it crashing into an inferno, 3.8 seconds. It was 4:48 P.M., Eastern Standard Time.

In Los Angeles it was 1:48 P.M. West Coast time. Japanese Airlines Jumbo Flight 824 taking off from LAX was struck on its port-side number-two engine. At Dallas/Fort Worth, the terrorists, in the final act of simultaneous horror, brought down a Brazilian Air jumbo bound for Rio.

Unbeknownst to the general public, as CNN’s anchorwoman Marte Price explained during the network’s sensationalist “Triangle of Terror” report on the New York — L.A. — Dallas/Fort Worth hits by the three MANPADS — Man Portable Air Defense System — missiles, modern jet engines and their mountings are built to contain a wide range of explosions. But what had presumably happened in all three crashes, as Marte Price’s audience of 14 million were told, by virtue of quickly generated computer graphics and by aeronautical experts, was that shrapnel had probably penetrated the wings, and thus the fuel, which in LAX’s case the air traffic controllers saw spewing out of the starboard wing in a plethora of high-pressure leaks, had been ignited by sparking nine seconds later. Exit stairways were deployed by flight attendants on the JAL plane, allowing some people to temporarily escape, even though most of these perished in the flash fire that swept under the fuselage from starboard to port, once the flood of fuel had been ignited, the flames fanned by the brisk San Fernando breeze.

“Tragic though it is,” Marte Price continued, “those nine seconds probably saved some of the two hundred and fifty passengers aboard.” She paused. “Unfortunately we cannot say that about either of the attacks on the Boeing 7E7 at JFK or the Brazilian Airlines Boeing 777 flight out of Fort Worth/Dallas. For more details of the attack at Los Angeles International, we go to Adrienne Alamada.”

“Marte, the scene here, as you can tell, is horrendous. The smell, smoke, and confusion…” Alamada covered her left ear in an attempt to muffle the screaming of sirens as dozens of fire trucks and ambulances sped away from the remains of the JAL 777 Jumbo, only its blackened, smoking tail section and cockpit resembling anything like the remains of an aircraft. “Marte, it’s too early for any details, but ground crew who’ve asked to remain anonymous have suggested that many of the dead probably succumbed from lack of oxygen because of the dense black and white toxic clouds. There have been reports of people in the airport hearing an explosion prior to the crash, but this has not been confirmed.”

Some burn victims had mercifully died while waiting on the tarmac for medical attention, which was slow in coming because of what initially had been a paramedics’ strike against the city. The labor protest, however, collapsed the moment the alarm bells began ringing in the various precincts, but by the time the fleet of ambulances arrived at LAX, more burn victims, many of them children, had died from shock and/or multiple burns, others expiring en route to area hospitals.

Half an hour later, Marte Price announced on CNN that while precise numbers were not yet available, airline officials had confirmed that there had been at least a thousand passengers and crew aboard the two fully loaded jumbos and the one fully loaded Dreamliner.