Nelson DeMille - Mayday

Fitzgerald came to a gurney about to be loaded on an ambulance. On it lay a man wearing a bloodstained white shirt with epaulettes, and a black and white name tag that said “McVary.”

Fitzgerald motioned the attendants to hold up a moment, and he leaned over McVary, seeing that he was conscious and strapped down. Fitzgerald recalled meeting Dan McVary once briefly at a training seminar. Fitzgerald said, “Dan. Dan. Can you hear me?”

McVary looked at the chief pilot, a man who yesterday was his boss, a man with whom he’d always wanted to have a few words. But today, First Officer Daniel McVary wouldn’t have even recognized himself in the mirror and certainly did not recognize Chief Pilot Kevin Fitzgerald. “Aarghh!”

“Dan? It’s Kevin Fitzgerald. Dan? Dan, can you…?” No, Fitzgerald realized, no, you can’t, and no, you never will. “Damn it! Oh, my God, my God, my God…” Suddenly, he realized what Edward Johnson and Wayne Metz were about.

A fire truck came by, and Berry jumped on the running board beside the driver. He said, “Drive under the wing.”

The driver did a double take, but rather than argue a small point with someone who looked like he meant it, the driver turned slightly and drove toward the tilted wing.

Berry climbed up a small ladder fixed to the side of the cab and balanced himself on the roof. As the fire truck passed beneath the wing, Berry jumped forward and landed on all fours on top of the wing.

He scrambled up the slick, foam-covered wing toward the fuselage where the wing-top emergency door was located. He slid precariously sideways, then found some traction and finally reached the door, grabbing for the recessed emergency latch.

He caught his breath and pulled at the latch, but the small door wouldn’t open. “Damn it!” He propped his knees under the door and kept pulling, but the door held.

Down below, firemen were yelling to him to come down. Berry stood and edged toward the front of the wing, pressing his body against the fuselage for friction even as his shoes slipped on the foam. He inched his body closer to the hole in the fuselage, which was just above and forward of the wing.

A fire truck pulled up to the Straton only a few feet below him. The firemen were still shouting at him, and he saw now a hydraulic platform rising up toward him with two rescue workers on it.

Berry realized he couldn’t quite reach the hole in the fuselage, and he conveyed this to the firemen below by turning toward the rising platform and nodding his willingness to come down. The platform came up to a level position with the wing, and one of the rescue workers held on to a safety rail while reaching out to Berry with his other hand. Berry grabbed the rescue worker’s hand and jumped onto the platform.

Before the platform began to descend and before either of the rescue workers could react, Berry broke the man’s grip and dove off the platform into the hole in the side of the fuselage.

He found himself on the floor amid the pulverized and twisted wreckage. A few bodies lay in the swath of destruction, and Berry could hear a few people moaning. He pitied these men, women, and children who had lived through the terror of the explosion and decompression, then the oxygen deprivation, followed by the crash landing and smoke inhalation. It occurred to him-no, it had always been there in his mind-that he should have just pushed the nose of the airliner into the Pacific Ocean.

But he hadn’t done that, so he had left himself with some unfinished business.

The two rescue workers on the platform were shouting to him to come out. “Hey, buddy! Come on out of there! It could still blow. Come on!”

Berry glanced back at them standing in the sunlight and yelled, “I’m going up to the cockpit to get my wife and daughter!”

The Straton listed to the right and was pitched slightly upward. Berry made his way up the left-hand aisle toward the spiral staircase.

The windows were covered with foam, and the farther he got from the two holes in the fuselage, the darker it got and the heavier the smoke became. He heard people moving around him, and he felt someone push past him in the dark. It was strangely silent, except for an eerie sort of growl coming from somewhere close by. Berry thought it could be a dog.

He had given up on Barbara Yoshiro and Harold Stein a long time ago, but he had to give it a try. He shouted, “Barbara! Barbara Yoshiro! Harold Stein! Can you hear me?”

There was no reply at first, then someone, a male, close by in the dark, said, “Here.”

“Where? Mr. Stein?”

“Weah. Mista. Heah.”

“Damn it! Damn it! Shut up!” Berry felt himself losing control, and tried to steady his nerves. He was fairly certain that Yoshiro and Stein were either dead or unconscious, and beyond his help.

He continued on in the dark, crouching lower because of the smoke. Finally, he found the spiral staircase and grasped the handrails, discovering that the whole unit was loose. He took a few tentative steps up the stairs, then stopped and glanced back toward the shaft of sunlight passing through the holes in the midsection. He tried to see if any of the rescue workers had followed him, but all he could see was one of the brain-damaged wraiths stumbling around, his hands over his eyes, as if the light were blinding him.

Berry took another step up, and the spiral staircase swung slightly. “Damn…” He shouted up the stairs, “Sharon! Linda!”

A voice shouted back, “Shaarn. Linaah!”

Berry took a deep breath and then another step, then another, carefully making his way up the swaying staircase, shouting as he went, “Sharon! Linda!”

And each time he was answered with “Shaarn! Linaaah!”

He could hear people now at the bottom of the stairs, and also people in the lounge at the top of the stairs. Smoke from the cabin was rising up the staircase and, he guessed, out the open emergency door in the cockpit, so it was as if he were standing in a chimney. He found a handkerchief in his pocket and put it over his face, but he felt nauseous and dizzy again, and thought he might black out.

This was more than heroics, he thought. For one thing, he knew he couldn’t live with himself if he survived by getting down the chute and they died in the cockpit, so close to safety. Also, there was the matter of the data-link printouts, which would prove that he wasn’t crazy when he told the authorities that someone had given him instructions that would put the Straton into the ocean. And then there were his feelings about Sharon Crandall…

He took another step up the staircase. A shadow loomed at the top, and a hand from below grabbed his leg. A voice shouted, “Shaarnn!” Someone laughed. A dog growled.

He was back in hell.

Edward Johnson and Wayne Metz stepped out of the rapid intervention vehicle a hundred yards from the massive Straton, which was surrounded by yellow fire trucks that looked small by comparison, and Johnson was reminded of carrion-eating beetles around a dead bird.

Johnson surveyed the evacuation site-the aluminum trestles and stretchers, the gurneys, empty wheel-chairs, ambulances pulling away. He found a woman with a clipboard who looked official, and he identified himself as the senior vice president of Trans-United, which he was, and which he wanted to continue being, which was why he was here; he had to control the situation to the extent possible, and with any luck, the man named Berry would be dead, and so would the flight attendant, and the data-link printouts would be sitting in the collecting tray in the cockpit. If none of that was true, Johnson knew he’d have to make some tough decisions and do some unpleasant things.

The woman with the clipboard identified herself as Dr. Emmett of the airport Emergency Medical Service.