John Nance - Lockout

He met her eyes and nodded. She didn’t understand, of course, despite her training. His enemies were many, and while the worst of the lot were well outside the borders of Israel, they were equally determined to kill him. Especially the Iranian mullahs. Which was, he thought, why killing them first was the only viable option.

But for the moment, tactically, she was right, and that reality irritated him.

“Very well,” he replied, indulging in the slight vanity of puffing his tone up to make it sound like the idea was all his own. “I think it’s best to call in flight.”

He swiveled his squat, aging body toward the adjacent window of the Airbus dismissively, letting his thoughts return for the thousandth time to the stand he’d made in the Knesset—the no-compromise throw down that had destroyed what remained of the coalition that had made him prime minister. He was right, of course, that they would eventually be forced to launch on Tehran. But it would be too late. It would be a doomsday nuclear exchange, and two nations would essentially cease to exist.

If Israel waited.

Moishe snorted to himself, barely aware of the presence of the two pilots as they moved past him up the aisle toward the cockpit. As much as he loved this land, he was suddenly very anxious to leave it.

Mojave Aircraft Storage, Mojave Airport, California (8:10 a.m. PST / 1610 Zulu)

The manager of Mojave Air Storage looked up from his battered old desk trying his damndest to figure out how his most uncommunicative employee could have acquired a sense of humor in twenty-four hours. But the perennially taciturn man just stood there in his dirty coveralls as if he’d walked out of a Grant Wood painting without his pitchfork, expressionless except for the slight look of alarm in his eyes, his voice as humorless as a funeral director.

“Not there, huh,” the manager repeated, mocking the same Eeyore-class monotone his employee had used.

“No-pah,” the man replied, stretching the single word into two syllables.

The wind was whining around the cracks in the old desert line office, coating everything with the fine grit the rows of airliners outside were sealed against.

“Look,” the manager began, “I appreciate that you probably stayed up all night figuring out this little joke, but… see… it really isn’t funny to suggest we might have misplaced a $200 million airplane.”

“Not a joke, sir. I can’t find that serial number. That company in Colorado we thought was probably a front for the military? It was their airplane. One of the A330s we got out there. They need it by next Thursday. I thought you had seen the order.”

“How many A330s do we have out there?” the manager asked, a cold knot of apprehension beginning to make its presence known in the pit of his stomach.

“Nine. There were nine. Now we have eight, and that serial number… the one belonging to the Colorado group… isn’t one of them.”

“Okay,” the manager replied, “get the team and inventory the A330s, one by one, by serial numbers and placement, and come back and we’ll get this figured out.”

“Pad 79, where the Colorado A330 should have been, is empty. I think we sent the wrong one away,” the man said, leaving the shaken manager to reflect on the possibility that he might not have a job a week from now. The phone on his desk was mocking him, challenging him to call the hotheaded owner of Mojave Aircraft Storage who lived several miles away, but that was the last thing he intended to do until they were certain Mojave Aircraft Storage had actually delivered the wrong airplane to the wrong client.

Cockpit, Pangia World Airways Flight 10 (1610 Zulu)

With Captain Bill Breem and his first officer seizing the designation of primary pilots, Jerry Tollefson and Dan Horneman had been relegated to the status of relief crew and left to watch the takeoff from the cockpit jump seats. As planned, ten minutes into the flight, Jerry and Dan headed back for their programmed sleep period in the cramped underdeck crew rest facility.

“Programmed” always seemed so oxymoronic, Dan thought as he settled in. Some pilots could drop off on cue, but he had never been one of them. In addition to dozens of random thoughts keeping him awake, there was the “gee-whiz” factor of being a crewmember on such a sophisticated machine, and it hadn’t worn off yet. The amazed little boy in him was usually too excited to drift off to sleep and instead demanded— demanded —permission to stay up just to watch himself lounging in such a technologically advanced cocoon.

This time, however, sleep came uncharacteristically fast. It was startling when the alarm function on his cell phone corked off after almost four hours, the watch showing him it was 1951 Zulu and alerting him that it was time to get back to the cockpit.

Dan rolled out of the crew bunk and made his way up the narrow stairs to the main deck and into one of the restrooms, closing the door for a moment of solitude and looking at the deep circles under his eyes in the mirror. He loved this job, despite feeling like an alien in Pangia’s pilot culture, but there was no evading the reality that he was approaching a meltdown of cumulative fatigue. The impromptu vacation days in Tel Aviv he’d looked forward to were supposed to address that fatigue, but now they were gone.

The circles aren’t too bad! he thought, admiring his full head of dark hair which always seemed to fall into place with little or no effort. His face had never been described as thin, but his facial features were angular, almost chiseled, like an emotionless sculpture, according to Laura, the one lover he missed the most. Long before his tryst with Janice Johnson, Laura had given up trying to understand the world-girdling schedule she considered ridiculously unnecessary and had tossed that backhanded compliment at him the morning they’d parted for good. Strange that he would remember that so clearly among all the other things she’d said that morning—especially the hurtful words, like saying he would never be happy until he decided he deserved the things he’d worked so hard to acquire.

The rebound girlfriend he’d found after Laura had also backed away, equally unsure he was ever going to be comfortable in his own skin.

Gotta start dating again, he promised himself. He felt no compelling need to find a mate or make babies, but… it just wasn’t much of a life without sex and female companionship, and every pretty woman he saw just reminded him of what he’d lost when Laura finally gave up.

“You’re filthy rich, and I’m eager to sign a pre-nup, and there’s no reason not to retire right now!” she’d all but screamed. “Why the hell are you doing this? Buy your own damned jet! What are you trying to prove?”

The vivid memories faded again, and he sighed and straightened his tie, checking the crisp, professionalism of his image before leaving the restroom in time to tag along behind Jerry Tollefson as they made their way forward.

With the cockpit door closed and sealed, Dan watched Tollefson stoically endure the overly officious handoff briefing from Captain Bill Breem before sliding into the left-hand captain’s seat. Breem’s briefing was the usual litany: their current position, altitude, airspeed, headwind, weather, and fuel remaining, along with their estimated time of arrival in New York, but it was delivered in the fashion of a master about to turn over the wheel to a rank amateur. Breem and his copilot were scheduled to return to the cockpit in five hours and take the arrival and landing at Kennedy.

“So,” Breem finished, “your job, Tollefson, is to wake the A-Team in five hours, and don’t break anything in the meantime.”