by Jack Lance
‘It’s so quiet,’ the woman with the Ray-Bans said.
Sharlene pricked her ears. It was true, it had become deathly quiet inside the aircraft. But she had been so lost in thought she hadn’t sensed the moment when the engines ceased operating.
Sharlene got up and hurried toward Aaron, who had returned to the main galley. Alexandra, Devin, Gloria, and Rosette were already there with him. Their faces radiated grave concern over the sudden eerie silence.
‘This is not good,’ Aaron said.
‘What do we do now?’ Devin asked.
‘Everything possible to keep the passengers calm,’ Aaron replied without pause. ‘We wait until we hear from Jim. I’m not going to call him. There must be a crisis in the cockpit.’
‘How is this possible?’ Gloria cried out.
‘Control yourself, Gloria,’ Aaron snapped. When she nodded her understanding, he said, ‘All I know is that more than one system has failed. We have no navigation, no radio. Jim didn’t say anything about engine trouble, so this is probably as much of a surprise to him as it is to us.’
He looked at them each in turn.
‘All right, let’s get to work.’
They left the galley. Sharlene was about to follow her colleagues, but Aaron put his hand on her arm, holding her back.
‘We are going to be OK, Sharlene,’ he told her in no uncertain terms.
The stress clearly etched on his face seemed to belie his words. She knew that he had no real knowledge of the nature of their problems, let alone a solution to them. He had no more notion of where they were than did the pilots. What’s more, he had no idea what or who was aboard the plane with them.
Which was just as well, Sharlene thought. He couldn’t understand.
‘We’ll be back on the beach in no time, just like yesterday,’ he said.
‘May it be so,’ she said wearily.
‘Come on, we’ve got work to do.’
Outside the galley, the murmurs of passengers talking among themselves was growing louder. To Sharlene it felt as if they were seated in a sold-out movie theater just before the curtain was raised and the show began.
When one of the passengers demanded Aaron’s attention, he told the man not to worry, it was simply a matter of technical difficulties. Sharlene wondered if she would be as adroit in withholding the truth from the passengers. She was afraid she wouldn’t. So she stood motionless near the galley, as if frozen in place.
Suddenly the overhead lights started flickering.
It resembled a ghostly phenomenon in a haunted house, Sharlene observed with horror, except unseen intruders had now seemingly entered this Boeing 747-400.
Shrieks erupted in various sections of the cabin. A woman screamed. Aaron and the other members of the cabin crew tried their level best to keep everyone calm, but they all recognized that they wouldn’t be able to maintain the charade much longer. Every soul on board sensed that something terrible was happening.
Inside her mind, Sharlene heard an old, familiar, frightening voice. Planes go down, Sharlene, they go down!
Lights started going out.
Dark settled in.
Sharlene could still discern the seats nearest to her, but her vision beyond those seats was negligible. She glanced toward Cassie’s seat, but could not determine if the girl was trying to make eye contact with her. Aaron had disappeared. He had probably gone forward. More screams erupted among the passengers. Crew members strode through the dark aisles, trying whatever ruse they could to quell the rising tide of panic.
Why didn’t Jim announce anything on the PA? Because, Sharlene answered her own question, he had more important things on his mind, as Aaron had assumed.
Or had he become incapacitated, not able to tell them anything?
They’ve taken over the cockpit too.
Aaron needed to check on the pilots, to ensure they were all right – to see if they were still alive.
An hour earlier she could not have dreamed anything like this could happen. That was when she had assumed they were simply having problems with MEG and she was just being plagued by old anxieties. But a lot had changed since then.
She started moving forward and immediately felt a presence behind her. Slowly she turned halfway around and saw Devin Felix walking past in the opposite aisle. He glanced at her, then looked at something she would have seen too had she turned completely around.
He appeared shocked. His jaw went slack and he raised his arm, pointing at something behind her. At that moment a passenger, clearly upset, pulled on his other arm, forcing Devin to divert his attention.
Sharlene then did make the complete turnaround.
Devin must have pointed toward the toilet stall where the body of Jerrod Kirby was being stored. The door should have been locked. But now it wasn’t.
It was wide open.
She was no more than three steps away from the small, dark space. Of the dead man she glimpsed, from where she stood, only an extended foot.
Something was with Jerrod inside the stall. She sensed it.
Devin must have seen what it was.
Something that shouldn’t be here, Sharlene thought in horror.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Door
Aaron was having his hands full placating the passengers. Tension was increasing by the minute, on what was fast becoming a nightmare flight.
‘Technical difficulties,’ he announced. He kept to himself the brutal truth that if all the engines had failed – and that certainly seemed to be the case – their situation was worse than dire.
He was in the tail section of the aircraft when a number of ceiling lights started flickering. As some of them went out, he heard frightened cries surging around him like a covey of startled quail flushed from their nests.
Jesus, why was everything falling apart? What legions of hell had been unleashed on them? Aaron’s first impulse was to run toward the switchbox, to at least try to repair the lights. On his way there he was accosted by two passengers. He kept a straight face when talking to them, and even managed to smile and assure them nothing was seriously wrong. Then, in front of him, a giant of a man rose from his seat.
‘Please sit back down, sir,’ Aaron advised him. ‘We’re having some difficulties …’ The passenger ran a finger across his throat as if to say ‘Shut the fuck up!’
‘I don’t hear the engines,’ the man said with authority. ‘And we’re losing electrical power. I happen to be a pilot. I fly a Cessna. You can’t fool me. This crate won’t stay in the air for much longer. We’re losing altitude and we’ll have to land as soon as possible. Tell me this, can we make it to an airport?’
The man’s booming voice commanded the attention of everyone around him. Aaron decided that arguing would be pointless. Better not to lie, to be honest with this man and appeal to his common sense.
He stepped close and lowered his voice. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I know as much as you do, which I admit is not a lot. Believe me when I say the pilots are doing everything they possibly can. At the moment, my primary concern is the passengers. Please, may I ask for your help with this? You’re a pilot; you should understand. A panic would make things infinitely worse.’
The man stared at him intensely, then nodded in resignation. ‘OK, I get it. But I would have preferred a different answer.’
‘I think we all would, sir,’ Aaron said sotto voce.
Sitting near the man was a middle-aged couple, who started barraging him with questions. ‘What did he say? What did he say?’ Aaron heard them demand to know. When the man turned toward them and spoke in soothing tones, Aaron breathed a sigh of relief. One fire out, but the forest was still ablaze and out of control.
As Aaron remained in the tail section for a few more minutes speaking to passengers, something started to nag at him. He felt as if he had overlooked something important.
We’re not going to Sydney, but you’ll believe me only when it’s too late.
He kept thinking of the Danny DeVito look-ali
ke. What had that man whispered to Sharlene?
That was what had been bothering him. Aaron searched through the semi-darkness. Where was she, anyway?
She had to be close by, of course. They were on an airplane. But suddenly he felt concerned and longed to see her.
He saw Alexandra just down the aisle from him.
‘Do you know where Sharlene is?’ he asked her.
She gave him a look that seemed to say she couldn’t imagine in her wildest dreams why that would matter, given their current predicament. Besides, she was jealous of Sharlene and hated her guts. She didn’t say that to him, of course. She didn’t need to. Aaron understood well enough and thanked God he had never fallen for the bitch.
He hurried forward. Despite all his worries about the Princess, he felt for some reason more worried about Sharlene, inexplicable as that was. He ran into Nicky, Jessica, and Joyce on the way and asked them if they had seen Sharlene. None of them had.
He threw to the wind the long list of things he should be attending to and went in search of his girlfriend, throughout the main cabin. Not finding her, he concluded that she must be on the upper deck in Business Class.
Then he met Devin in the aisle.
‘Devin,’ Aaron asked with some urgency, ‘have you seen Sharlene?’
Devin nodded. ‘She was just over by the toilet.’
‘Which one?’
‘That one,’ Devin pointed. ‘The one with the dead man inside. The door was open. That surprised me a lot.’
‘What?’
They were near the stall Devin had indicated. Aaron looked over the heads of passengers toward it. He did not see Sharlene and the door was closed. Just as it had been a few moments ago, when he had walked past it in the gloom of the cabin.
‘What are you talking about?’ he asked. ‘The door is closed, isn’t it? So where’s Sharlene now?’
Devin raised his hands, as if in surrender. ‘I had a passenger who needed my attention. When I finished with him, she was gone. She must have closed the door.’
‘Did you see her close the door?’
‘Well … no. I assume …’
‘When was this?’
‘I’m not sure. A few minutes ago. Look, Aaron, shouldn’t we …?’
Devin gestured impatiently toward passengers waving their hands in the air at him, like students trying to get a teacher’s attention.
Aaron headed toward the toilet stall, ignoring a man who was writing something on the back of a menu. The morbid thought crossed Aaron’s mind that this might be the first passenger on board to start writing a goodbye note.
As Aaron stood outside the toilet stall, he was suddenly assailed by the notion that Jerrod Kirby wasn’t dead at all and was in fact looking at him. It was insane, utterly ridiculous, but—
Just at that moment the oxygen masks dropped down and dangled above the passenger seats. Now, it seemed, everyone was astir. Panic was bubbling up, as within the depths of a volcano, and threatening to erupt at any moment in a gush of shouts and screams and cries of woe.
His crew started assisting people with the masks. They must have come down because the cabin pressurization had failed. Aaron could feel the plane descending. He purposely yawned to relieve the pressure in his ears, and that helped a little.
Then he looked back at the toilet stall, the one Devin said had been opened.
Sharlene must be in there with Jerrod Kirby, Aaron thought.
She must be behind that door.
TWENTY-FIVE
Catastrophe
The challenges confronting Jim Nichols had gone from bad to worse, to insurmountable. At first he had worried about the mysterious defects in the cockpit computers. Then he had started worrying about his state of mind. He began imagining the weirdest things. Had the Princess disappeared from radar and vanished into the unknown? Would he be able to function properly as the captain tonight? Had he murdered his wife?
When Aaron Drake had come in half an hour earlier to report that one of the passengers had been found dead in one of the toilet stalls, he had done his utmost to stay as calm and collected as a highly trained and experienced airplane captain should.
But then, shortly after five o’clock he found he had much more to worry about. A shrill alert sounded through the cockpit – a loud jarring noise that cut to the quick of his very being.
Equally shaken, Greg stared at EICAS.
‘Engine failure,’ he reported. ‘Flame-out. Engine two.’
Jim couldn’t believe it until he saw the readings for himself:
ENG 2 FAIL
GEN 2 FAIL
‘What the bloody hell?’ he cried out, no longer able to mask his concern behind a professional mien.
Air speed and the temperatures of the engines were falling fast. When Princess rolled to the left, Jim stepped on the rudder with his right foot to stabilize the aircraft. Greg grabbed the checklists and searched for the FAIL ENGINE instructions.
‘Turn autothrottle off and close the fuel valve,’ he read out loud.
When Jim complied, engine two shut down.
‘I thought we had plenty of fuel,’ Ben said, confused.
‘We do, according to the totalizer,’ Greg said. He raised his hands French-fashion, as if to say he couldn’t make sense of it either.
‘Try a restart,’ Jim said. ‘We’re at 30,000 feet, so we don’t have to descend. We’re good to go.’
‘OK,’ Greg said. He clicked the fuel valve, a switch beneath the gas regulator, to the up position to restart the engine. ‘It’s going to be two to three minutes before we know if it’s going to ignite.’
‘Have any of the fuses blown?’ Ben asked.
Greg and Ben studied the overhead panel. If any of the fuses had become overloaded, it would have clicked out from the casing and could simply be pushed back in.
‘Well?’ Jim asked.
‘I don’t see anything,’ Greg said.
‘So we’ll just have to wait and see if engine two will turn over,’ he said grimly.
Jim realized that these failure readings confirmed what he had long suspected: EICAS was, in fact, functional. Nor were there malfunctions in the radios and flight-management systems.
If all that were true, the problems they were experiencing had come from some source outside the Princess.
Twenty seconds later his musings no longer mattered.
Suddenly the EICAS screen exploded with alerts. To Jim’s amazement, engines three and four stalled at nearly the same moment. The aircraft rolled haphazardly to the right.
Just as his copilot switched off the stalled engines and Jim was again able to use the rudder to stabilize the plane, engine one also quit on them.
‘We’ve lost all four engines within ninety seconds!’ Greg cried out, visibly shaken. ‘That’s impossible!’
‘Apparently it’s not,’ Jim said solemnly.
For him and for pilots like him trained as Navy pilots, danger actually increased a sense of calm and efficient decision-making. As the alarms went off in the Princess, it was as if a fog inside his mind had lifted. He was a pilot in his heart and in his soul, and for the first time in a long while he actually felt like one.
Jim focused on what needed to be done. He determined that the autopilot was still functioning, at least for the time being, and that was a good sign.
‘Start the APU,’ he said.
First order of business. Without engines, they had to rely on the plane’s batteries for power and those batteries would drain within thirty minutes.
Greg turned the starter button of the auxiliary power unit toward the right and let it go, thus activating the small turbine engine in the tail of the aircraft. Several alerts disappeared from the EICAS screen.
‘Now get the engines up and running again,’ Jim said.
Greg went to work.
‘How much altitude are we losing?’ Jim asked.
‘Normal descent without engines is about 2,000 feet per minute,’ Ben answered.
>
Jim quickly did the math. That had to be right.
‘OK, what happened?’ he said, frustrated to his limit.
‘Volcanic ash?’ Ben suggested.
Jim shook his head. ‘No, we would have noticed. We would have seen a kind of sparkling rain.’
‘Saint Elmo’s fire?’ Greg put forth.
‘That’s it, yeah,’ Jim said. ‘And we would have smelled something strong. Like sulfur.’
‘Hmm,’ Ben mumbled. ‘If we’ve remained more or less on course, we should be flying over the Ring right about now. You can’t discount it.’
He was referring to the Ring of Fire, an area in the Pacific that was infamous for its volcanic activity.
Jim shrugged. ‘Maybe. It could also be a fuel leak, or maybe the fuel is contaminated. Or it could be a problem with the fuel lead.’ He rubbed his face and shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Number two is not igniting,’ Greg reported.
‘Keep going. Start them up one by one,’ Jim insisted.
He glanced at Greg, who had used the fuel valve to start engine three and was now waiting, biting his lower lip so hard Jim was sure it was bleeding.
Within a minute and a half, his aircraft had been transformed from a jumbo jet into a jumbo glider. If he didn’t get engine power back, and soon, they would have about thirty minutes before he would have to perform an emergency landing.
That was the cold reality, and every pilot on the flight deck was keenly aware that it was.
‘What do you want to do if we can’t get the engines back on line?’ Ben asked. ‘Should we keep trying a manual restart, or are you going to try a general restart?’
Jim considered the options. If Greg’s efforts to manually start the engines failed, he had one last resort: a general restart. He would have to increase air speed for that, by pointing the plane’s nose down and allow air to flow through the engines. Then they would start all the engines simultaneously, hoping and praying that the maneuver would prove to be successful.
It was a Plan B. The downside to Plan B was that, if it failed, there was no Plan C.
‘Too risky,’ Jim said. ‘It would be all or nothing. If it doesn’t work, we’d be going down fast and there would be nothing more we could do.’ He shook his head. ‘No, we’ll have to restart the engines manually, and if they don’t respond we’ll descend in a slow slide. Then I can try to land on the water at the lowest possible speed. So that’s it, my friends – we either get things going again or we ditch.’