Nelson DeMille - Mayday

Stein looked up. “Or ever?”

Berry avoided his eyes. “I’m not a doctor. I don’t know anything about this condition.”

“Don’t you?” Stein suddenly took a step down the staircase. “There is something I can do for them now. I can get them away from the others. Away from…” He looked down the spiral stairs. “I don’t want them down there. Can’t you see what’s happening down there? Can’t you? ”

Berry gripped Stein’s arm firmly. He nodded reluctantly. “All right, Harold. All right. After Barbara gets back, we can help these people down into the cabin. Then you can bring your family up. Okay?”

Stein let Berry draw him back up the step. Finally, he nodded. “Okay. I’ll wait.”

Linda Farley called out. “Mr. Berry!”

Berry walked quickly toward the piano where the girl was kneeling beside Stuart and McVary. “What is it?”

“This man opened his eyes.” She pointed to Stuart.

Berry kneeled down and looked into the Captain’s wide, staring eyes. After several seconds, Berry reached out and closed Stuart’s eyelids, then pulled the blanket over the Captain’s face.

“Is he dead?”

Berry looked at the girl. “Yes. He is.”

She nodded. “Is everyone going to die?”

“No.”

“Will my mother die, too?”

“No. She’s going to be all right.”

“Can she come up here like Mr. Stein’s family?”

Berry was fairly certain that Linda Farley’s mother was lying dead in the rubble or had been sucked out of the aircraft. But even if she were alive… Berry’s mind whirled with the possible answers-lies, really-but none of them was even close to being adequate. “No. She can’t come up here.”

“Why not?”

He stood quickly and turned away from the dead pilot. He said to Linda, “Trust me. Okay? Just trust me and do what I say.”

Linda Farley sat back against the leg of the piano and pulled her knees up to her chin. She buried her face in her hands and began to sob. “I want my mother.”

Berry leaned over her and stroked her hair. “Yes, I know. I know.” He straightened up. He was not very good at this. He remembered other occasions of bereavement in his own family. He’d never had the right words, was never able to bring comfort. He turned and walked back toward the cockpit. He took Terri O’Neil firmly by the shoulders and pushed her away from the door.

The glow of his technical triumphs was dying quickly against the cold realities of the personal tragedies around him.

Berry entered the cockpit.

Sharon Crandall was on the interphone. “Hold on, Barbara. John’s back in the cockpit.” She looked up at Berry. “Barbara’s all right. How’s everything back there?”

Berry sat heavily in his seat. “Okay.” He paused. “Not really. The passengers are getting a little… troublesome.” He cleared his throat and said, “The Captain is dead.”

Sharon Crandall closed her eyes and lowered her head. She said softly, “Oh, damn it.” She felt a deep sadness, a sense of loss over Captain Stuart’s death. The signs were becoming ominous again.

“Sharon?”

She looked up. “I’m all right. Here. Barbara wants to talk to you about some wires.”

Berry took the phone. “Barbara? What’s up? Where are you?”

“In the midsection.” Her voice sounded distant, and the whistling of the rushing air and the jet engines was louder. “There’s a bundle of wires hanging down from the ceiling near the bigger hole. Some of the passengers brushed against them and nothing happened. There doesn’t seem to be any electricity in them.”

Berry thought for a moment. Everything in the Straton seemed to be working except the voice radios. Severed cables might account for that. He hoped the wires had nothing to do with the flight controls. “They might be antenna wires.” It was logical that on a supersonic jet, the antennas would be mounted in some low-drag area like the tail. He suspected that the data-link utilized a different signal and a flat-plate antenna, which would be near the noise. That was why the link worked while the radios didn’t.

“Do you want me to try to reconnect them?”

Berry smiled. In a technical age, everyone was a technician. Still, it was a heads-up suggestion and a gutsy one, too. “No. You’d need splicing tools and it would take too long, anyway.” If those wires were involved somehow with the controls, he’d have to go down eventually and try to connect them himself. “They’re not important.” Something else was bothering him, and Barbara Yoshiro was in a position to clear it up. “Listen, Barbara, did you see any signs of the explosion? Anything like burnt seats? Charred metal? You know?”

There was a pause. “No. Not really. No.” There was another silence. “It’s odd. There is absolutely nothing that looks like an explosion-except for the mess and the holes.”

Berry nodded. That had been his impression. If the holes had been in the top and bottom of the fuselage, he would have suspected that they’d passed through a meteor shower. He knew that it was an infinitely rare phenomenon, even at 62,000 feet. Could a meteor travel horizontally? Berry had no idea, although it seemed unlikely. Should he put something out about this on the data-link? Did it matter? “Barbara, how are the passengers?”

“About half of them are still pretty quiet. But some of the others are wandering around now. The turn stirred them up, I think. There’s been some fighting.”

Berry thought that her voice sounded cool and uninvolved, like a good reporter’s. “Watch yourself. Work your way slowly. No abrupt movements.”

“I know.”

“There are people congregating at the bottom of the stairs,” he informed her.

“I can’t see the stairs from here, but I can see part of the crowd on both sides of the forward galley and lavatories.”

“When you get to the interphone in that galley, call me. Or shout to Stein. One of us will help you back up.”

“Okay.”

“Take care of yourself. Here’s Sharon.”

Barbara Yoshiro didn’t feel like talking much longer. As she looked out of the flight-attendant station in the midsection galley, she saw that the passengers were beginning to pay too much attention to her. The station was a cul-de-sac, and her only advantage with these people lay in her mobility.

“Barbara?”

“Yes, I’m coming back now.”

“Is it very bad? Should I come down?” Sharon Crandall asked.

“No.” Yoshiro put a light tone in her voice. “I’ve been a flight attendant long enough to know how to avoid groping hands.” The joke came out badly and she added quickly, “They’re not paying any particular attention to me. See you in a few minutes.” She replaced the interphone and stepped into the aisle. She kept her back against the bulkhead of the lavatory and stared into the cavern that lay between the front of the airliner and herself, then looked back toward the tail.

The flimsy partitions of the Straton’s interior had been swept away by the decompression. Its entire length, which she remembered being told was two hundred feet, lay exposed, except for the three galley-lavatory compartments. They rose, blue plastic cubicles in a row, from floor to ceiling-one near the tail, the midship one she was standing at, and the one in the first-class cabin that blocked her view of the spiral staircase.

Dangling oxygen masks, uprooted seats, and dislodged wall and ceiling panels hung everywhere. Sixty feet from her, midway between the galley she was standing at and the first-class section, were two bomb holes-if that’s what they were.

Barbara Yoshiro studied the possible routes she might take through the aircraft. She could see that she had two return routes to choose from. The aisle on the left-the one she had come down earlier-was now nearly packed with milling passengers. The aisle on the right had only a few people in it, but it contained more debris. Worse, it passed very near to the larger of the two holes in the fuselage. Even from where she stood, she could see the Pacific and the leading edge of the wing through the gaping hole. Perhaps, she thought, she’d travel up the right aisle, then cross over before she got to the open area of debris between the holes. While her eyes fixed on the scene in front of her, she failed to notice that a young man in the aisle next to her was watching her closely.