Chương 3
Then he picked up the interphone.
“Linda, cockpit.”
Her answer came almost instantly.
“We’re here.”
The plural caught me.
She had gathered the crew.
Reed swallowed.
“We have regained some control using engine thrust.”
A sound escaped from the other end.
Someone sobbing.
Someone laughing.
Maybe both.
Reed continued.
“We are diverting to Moses Lake.”
“Are we going to make it?”
Linda asked.
The cockpit went silent.
Reed looked at me.
I looked at the altitude.
Eighteen thousand feet.
Airspeed two hundred seventy knots.
Distance sixty-eight miles.
The numbers were not hopeless.
They were not comforting either.
“Tell them the truth,” I said.
Reed pressed the button.
“We have a chance.”
Linda did not answer for several seconds.
Then she said, “That’s better than what you told us before.”
Reed closed his eyes.
“Yeah.”
Her voice softened.
“We’ll get them ready.”
The line disconnected.
Parker looked down at the hydraulic panel.
“All three systems still showing nothing.”
“That includes standby?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“That makes no sense.”
Reed looked at me.
“It makes perfect sense if we lost fluid.”
“All three?”
“There could have been a catastrophic rupture.”
“In three independent systems?”
Parker leaned closer to the panel.
“They aren’t completely independent.”
“No aircraft designer puts every flight-control hydraulic path through one vulnerable point.”
“Not intentionally.”
I looked at her.
She was already thinking beyond the gauges.
“What are you seeing?”
“Nothing yet.”
She tapped a finger against the panel.
“Just something I don’t like.”
“Join the club,” Reed said.
It was the first dry thing he had said since I entered the cockpit.
Parker ignored him.
“System A quantity dropped first.”
“How long before B?”
“Maybe twelve seconds.”
“And standby?”
“Another eight or nine.”
I felt a coldness that had nothing to do with altitude.
Failures had sequence.
Sequence told stories.
Equipment rarely died democratically.
It died in order.
“Any maintenance write-ups before departure?”
Reed shook his head.
“Aircraft was clean.”
“Recent work?”
“Nothing significant that I saw.”
Parker reached toward the electronic flight bag strapped beside her seat.
“We can pull the log.”
“Not now.”
She looked irritated.
“You just asked.”
“I asked because the order matters.”
The airplane began to pitch downward.
The vertical speed needle moved past twenty-five hundred feet per minute.
“Power,” I said.
Reed advanced both throttles.
“Two percent.”
He went too far.
“Back.”
“I barely moved them.”
“Back, Thomas.”
He reduced them slightly.
For a moment, nothing changed.
Then the nose began coming up.
Too quickly.
Parker saw it.
“Airspeed bleeding.”
“Don’t touch anything.”
“We’re climbing.”
“Don’t touch anything.”
Two hundred fifty knots.
Two hundred forty.
The nose continued rising.
Reed’s hand moved toward the throttles.
I caught his wrist.
“Wait.”
His eyes flashed.
“Let go of me.”
“Wait.”
Two hundred thirty.
The climb slowed.
Then stopped.
The nose fell gently.
I released him.
He pulled his hand away.
“Do that again and I’ll put you out of this cockpit.”
“That would complicate things.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
Parker looked from him to me.
“Could both of you postpone the personality conflict until after we land?”
Neither of us answered.
“Great,” she muttered.
“Progress.”
The airplane settled near sixteen thousand feet.
Grant County remained ahead.
The controller gave us wind information.
Northwest at eight knots.
Almost aligned with the runway.
One small mercy.
I reached for the airport diagram.
Reed stopped me.
“You familiar with Moses Lake?”
“I trained there twice.”
“When?”
“Before you started shaving.”
“That recent?”
Parker snorted.
The sound surprised all three of us.
She covered her mouth.
Then Reed laughed.
It came out once, sharp and exhausted.
I laughed too.
For perhaps five seconds, inside a crippled airplane carrying 187 terrified passengers, we sounded like people sitting around a bad diner table.
Then another alarm reminded us where we were.
Parker silenced it.
“My father said you were impossible.”
The laughter left me.
“He was right.”
“He also said you were the best pilot he ever met.”
I studied the runway diagram.
“Your father had poor judgment.”
“He didn’t.”
Something in her voice warned me not to joke.
I glanced at her.
She was not looking at me now.
“He kept your picture in his office.”
My hands went still.
“What picture?”
“You and three other test pilots standing in front of an F-15.”
I knew the photograph.
I had forgotten David was in it.
My hair had been short then.
I was holding a flight helmet against my hip and squinting into the sun.
Behind us, somebody had written PHOENIX LIVES on a maintenance cart after an engine fire I had landed through.
“He never threw it away,” Parker said.
“Even after the Wraith.”
Reed looked toward us.
“Wraith?”
“Later,” I said.
Parker did not stop.
“He said they buried you.”
My throat tightened.
“Jennifer.”
“He said he should have spoken publicly.”
“Stop.”
“He regretted it.”
“I said stop.”
The cockpit became painfully quiet.
Parker’s eyes remained on the instruments.
“He testified internally.”
I looked at her.
“What?”
“He testified during the classified review.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“He did.”
“I read the findings.”
“You read the released findings.”
The air seemed to change.
Even Reed had stopped watching me.
I heard only the engines.
The same engines I was supposed to be controlling.
“Where did you hear this?”
“My father.”
“People say things when they’re dying.”
“He wasn’t dying when he told me.”
“Then he was confused.”
“He gave me a box.”
I stared at her.
“What box?”
“Documents.”
My hands had started shaking.
I curled my fingers around the edge of the pedestal.
Parker finally looked at me.
“I didn’t know you were still alive.”
The sentence struck somewhere deeper than I expected.
I had spent years assuming everyone who mattered knew exactly where I was and simply did not care.
Sometimes erasure was worse.
Sometimes a person disappeared so completely that even the children of old friends believed she had died.
Reed pointed forward.
“Cloud layer.”
May you like
I followed his gaze.
A broad bank of white-gray cloud had formed between us and Moses Lake.
