Nelson DeMille - Mayday

Surely they would try to be seen. They would want to get Matos’s attention. To get Matos’s help.

“Okay, Matos. Nothing in the cabin. Go to the cockpit.” Sloan’s voice was again impatient. Commanding. Bullying, according to most of the Nimitz ’s pilots. The man obviously wanted the job done quickly. For what purpose, Matos could not even guess. He wondered for a moment what sort of orders he would receive next.

Matos nudged the throttles and maneuvered his aircraft slowly forward. As he passed the widest section of the Straton’s fuselage, he inched his F-18 to the right, placing his wingtip within a dozen feet of the 797’s flight deck.

As he finished his maneuvering, something caught his eyes. He had been directing most of his attention toward his wingtip clearance, but suddenly he had an impression of movement. Something on the Straton’s flight deck. Someone in the cockpit. Someone alive, Matos said to himself.

He stared intently at the Straton. The relative narrowness of the cockpit and its broad expanse of glass made it easier to see into than the cabin. Far side. Copilot’s seat.

Something on the right side of the 797’s cockpit had moved. At least he thought that it had. Now he was not sure. On closer scrutiny, he could see nothing. No one. If anyone was still there, they were slumped down below the window line.

It must have been a reflection. A glint of sunlight. A distortion in the cockpit glass. No one alive, Matos thought. He sat there for another minute and looked at the Straton, then he maneuvered the F-18 outboard and slightly away.

Lieutenant Peter Matos’s emotional wound had reopened. “Homeplate. There is no one in the cockpit. There is no one alive.” As much as he tried to control himself, Matos could not be the uninvolved technician any longer. His heart had risen to his throat. Es tu culpa, Pedro.

The F-18 slackened its formation on the Straton. It drifted aft. As it did, it flew alongside the upper lounge and within sixty feet of the rows of windows that lined it. Unable to force himself to look at the devastated Straton airliner any longer, Peter Matos kept his eyes focused straight ahead.

Jack Miller sat at his long, functionally modern desk in the center of the starkly lit, windowless room. He glanced at the wall clock-11:37-then looked over at his assistant, Dennis Evans, who sat at a smaller desk, flipping desultorily through some papers. “I’m breaking for lunch in five minutes, Dennis.”

Evans glanced up from his desk. “Okay.”

The Trans-United Airlines dispatching office at San Francisco International Airport was experiencing its usual midday lull. The morning departures were well into their routines, and it was too early to begin the flight plans for the late-afternoon trips. The half-dozen dispatchers read newspapers, their assistants made an attempt to look occupied, and the junior aides tried to appear busy and eager.

Miller yawned and stretched. After twenty-eight years at Trans-United, he had enough seniority to get the two things he’d always wanted: a nine-to-five dispatcher’s shift, and assignment to the Pacific desk. Now that he had them both, he was bored. He almost yearned for the night shift and the more hectic South American desk again. Such was life.

Miller flipped absently through the pages of his Sports Illustrated, then laid it aside. He looked at his computer console, at the display of assigned trips. He was, at that moment, responsible for monitoring only four flights: 243 from Honolulu, 101 from Melbourne, 377 to Tahiti, and 52 to Tokyo.

The weather across the Pacific routes was good, and all the flights had ample reserve fuel. No problems. Not much to do. On days like this, he found himself watching the clock. Miller’s eye caught an empty entry on his display screen. He regarded the blank column for a second. “Dennis.” He spoke in a voice that years of practice had trained to penetrate the ambient sounds of the room without actually rising above the noise. “Dennis, did you forget 52’s update?”

“Hold on.” The young man walked over to a stack of computer messages on a countertop and leafed through them. He went through them a second time, more slowly. He looked up and called across the room. “Didn’t get one. It’s overdue. Want me to send a request?”

Miller didn’t like Dennis Evans’s choice of the word “overdue.” Overdue connoted something quite different from late in airline parlance. Miller looked at the wall clock. The fuel and position report was only a few minutes behind schedule. Late. It was purely routine. Minor information. Yet Miller would not, under any circumstances, turn anything over to Evans that wasn’t perfect. Twenty years before, he had left an open item on his sheet and gone to dinner. When he returned, he’d found the dispatcher’s office full of company executives. One of their new Boeing 707s had gone down somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico. That was the night that the euphemism “overdue” became clear.

Miller glanced back at the wall clock, then at the computer screen again. He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t overly concerned. “Well… we’ve got time.” He punched the computer keys to get a different screen, then looked down at the names of the crew. He was familiar enough with the name Alan Stuart. Like a lot of modern business relationships, this one was totally electronic. Just a voice on the telephone and the radio. Yet he felt he knew the man, and he knew that Flight 52’s captain was dependable. Miller wasn’t familiar with the other names on the crew list, but he knew that Stuart ran a tight ship. Miller was certain that Stuart would soon discover the oversight and send an update. Bugging a pilot, especially a conscientious one like Stuart, was the quickest way to become a disliked dispatcher, and Jack Miller had no intention of doing anything like that during the remainder of his career. It was the sort of stunt that Evans was noted for. He looked up at Evans, who was going through the messages again. “We’ll get the update soon. If we don’t, then…” Miller paused and considered. He didn’t want to request Flight 52’s updates by relaying a message through air-traffic control for everyone to hear. His eyes fixed on the door to the small glass-enclosed communications room that housed the data-link machine. “If we don’t hear from them by, say, twelve o’clock, type out a request to them on the link.”

Evans grunted a reply. The radio was faster and easier than the data-link-sometimes link messages just didn’t get through-but Miller was always concerned with discretion and politeness. If a captain was sitting on his thumb up there, he ought to be called on the radio and told about it. Evans pushed the computer messages aside and sat back at his desk.

Miller glanced at the computer screen again, then punched a button to turn off the display. “It’s a nice day out there,” he called to Evans. “They’re drinking coffee and daydreaming.”

Evans mumbled something as he worked on another flight’s data.

Miller watched the clock. The room became still except for the background noises of the electronics. Miller focused on the sweep second hand. He was accustomed to this kind of waiting, but it always made him uneasy. Like the times his wife was overdue. Late. Or his teenaged son or daughter. The clock moved, not slowly, but quickly, at times like this, running through the minutes, making the awaited party more awaited. Making one wonder all sorts of things.

John Berry sat strapped into the captain’s seat of the Straton. The midday sun poured through the cockpit windows, bathing him in bright sunlight. He pressed the talk button on the hand microphone again and spoke loudly. “Do you read me? Does anyone read?” Beads of perspiration dotted his forehead, and his mouth felt dry.