Forty-seven feet above the tarmac, Phil Knight sat with his right hand on the throttles and keyed his transmitter. “Roger, understand you’re aboard. Hang on.” Phil jammed the four throttles full forward, his mind whirling as he tried to sort out how the military leader they’d dealt with so successfully could be letting his troops fire on their aircraft once more. It didn’t make sense.
Garth had barely leaped onto the bottom rung and started to climb when his left leg suddenly collapsed in blinding pain beneath him, leaving him flailing for the ladder and hanging on with one hand, unaware that a bullet had just found its mark and torn through his upper left leg. His body rotated counterclockwise, leaving him hanging precariously as he tried to wrap his other hand around the ladder. He finally succeeded.
Phil felt the engines winding up just as he remembered he hadn’t released the parking brake. He reached down to the center console and snapped it off, regretting the move instantly and hoping he hadn’t knocked anyone down in the main cabin as the big jet jumped forward.
Just behind the nose gear, the sudden lurch dislodged all but Garth Abbott’s right hand from the ladder as the Boeing began accelerating forward, dragging him along. His left side was in agony, his left leg useless, and he cried out for help. He hopped along on his right foot trying to reattach his left hand to the rungs of the ladder, but the acceleration of the jet was too great, and he was losing the battle.
In the electronics bay above, Brian had been thrown backward into a radio rack as the brakes were released. He grabbed for a handhold, his hands closing around a wiring bundle, which ripped away from one of the black boxes as he fell backward. Brian’s head slammed into the bulkhead. He heard a shout down below above the scream of the engines but forced himself forward, peering over the edge in time to see the copilot hanging on by one hand. Brian fell on his stomach and hooked his left arm through part of the rack structure as he leaned down and reached for the copilot’s other hand. Something hit the ladder at the same moment, and he realized it was a bullet.
“HOLD ON!” Brian shouted, encouraged that the copilot was looking up as he reached for his free hand and connected, pulling him far enough up the ladder for Garth to get his right foot on the lower rung. Brian could see his leg was covered with blood. The bullet could have severed an artery, he figured. He would have to act fast as soon as he could pull him in.
In the cockpit, Phil Knight glanced at the ground speed readout as it rose above sixty knots. I’ll hit eighty and then reverse and brake hard, turn us around at the end, and then go for it, he told himself. There was still a light competing for his attention on the fault annunciator panel, and he glanced at it now long enough to realize it was the lower electronics bay hatch. Abbott must not have had a chance to lock the hatch in place, he concluded. He’d probably see it go out any second.
Seventy-five, and … eighty. Phil pulled the throttles back to idle and gauged his distance to the far end, braking hard.
Brian was in the process of reaching both arms down to pull Garth Abbott back up through the hatch when a series of frightening pings announced the impact of several high-energy slugs on the structure of the ladder. He felt the copilot jerk and drop and realized the gunmen had found his other leg. The man was hanging tight with both hands now, but both legs were dragging on the runway, and Brian realized there was no way he was going to be able to lift the man’s dead weight all the way in.
“HANG ON!” he yelled to the copilot as he pushed himself back from the hatch and grabbed the interphone again, pulling it to his mouth and relieved for a microsecond to hear cockpit sounds on the other end.
“The copilot’s been shot!” he barked. “Stop this damned airplane!”
Almost instantly the 747 heeled nose down as the captain tramped on the brakes, and Brian could feel the engines revving up in reverse and see the pavement slowing through the hatch.
He threw the handset down and dropped to his knees, getting in position to descend the ladder and drop to the ground as soon as they’d stopped. He could boost the copilot up and inside, he figured, but it had to be fast. There would be only seconds.
“HANG ON! HE’S STOPPING!” Brian yelled downward as the noise diminished.
“I’m hit!” The copilot said, his voice almost an octave above normal.
Brian Logan looked up toward the main floor to see several faces peering into the electronics bay. He started to yell at them for help, for someone else to come down, but a renewed flurry of gunfire broke out from beneath him and he felt the ladder sway.
Brian looked down and realized Abbott was no longer there. He scrambled back inside the hatch and turned around on his belly as fast as possible to stick his head out and look backward, searching for the copilot, spotting him at last lying on the runway a hundred feet or so behind the slowing 747. As Brian watched, a dozen soldiers in fatigues raced toward the prone figure from the north side of the runway and grabbed him, dragging Abbott away.
Oh, God! Brian thought, the outrageous helplessness of the situation all but overwhelming him.
The 747 had stopped and was swinging around to the left to prepare for takeoff, the nose passing from east through north as the captain turned toward the west.
Brian prepared to pull himself up and grab the handset again to yell for the captain to stop, but more soldiers appeared from the north side, several of them yelling and running directly for the ladder and the nose gear. Brian’s head was upside down sticking out of the hatch, his eyes darting to the copilot’s injured form as the soldiers dumped him on the side of the runway and took aim with their rifles. One of the onrushing soldiers raised his gun, trying to get a bead on Brian’s head less than fifty feet away.
Brian yanked himself inside again and tried to retract the ladder, but it wouldn’t budge. There was a latch of some sort, he realized, and the hatch wouldn’t close until the ladder was in.
Brian Logan heard the sound of shouting voices and running footsteps getting closer as the 747 steadied out on a westerly heading and the engines started rising in power again. He forced himself to slow down and quickly study the top of the ladder. The release mechanism was there and he found it just as the footsteps below clattered within yards. He pressed the release button and began hauling the ladder up as fast as he could, but one of the soldiers jumped on the bottom rung, pulling it back to full extension again. The man tossed his rifle to his companion and started climbing as Brian spotted a bright yellow metal oxygen bottle inside the compartment. The soldier was pulling himself into the compartment as Brian snapped off the latches holding the emergency oxygen bottle. He yanked it up and took as much of a backswing as he could before bringing the full force of it down on the man’s uncovered head.
The soldier fell from the ladder with an audible thud. The 747 began moving forward again, the engines screaming.
Two more soldiers were on the ladder now and climbing, both holding guns, one aiming over his buddy’s head and looking for whoever the attacker above might be.
Once more Brian took aim with the oxygen bottle and braced himself as the acceleration tried to push him backward. He could hear angry grunts and see a cocked pistol precede the first man into the compartment. Logan knew he would have only one chance to stop them.
Judy Jackson had been holding on to the captain’s seat with white knuckles until he turned to her suddenly.
“Get down there and make sure that hatch is closed.”
“Hatch?”
“The electronics bay. Move!”
She left the cockpit and descended to the main cabin, forcing herself to look at the passengers as she moved to the open hole in the floor, which was confusing. She’d never known such an entrance existed. She knelt down, trying to see below through the maze of equipment.
“Get back,” one of the male passengers standing by the hatch demanded. “The doctor’s down there. He went after the copilot.”
She looked up in confusion, then turned back to the opening, sticking her head
and shoulders far enough inside the hatch to see.
In the weak light filtering into the compartment from behind her, Judy could see a figure kneeling beside the open hatch as the 747 turned left for what seemed many seconds. The engines began revving up again and she saw what appeared to be the copilot’s head pop into view above the lip of the hatch, and at the same moment, the man in the compartment swung a heavy yellow object down on the other man’s head with incredible force, the impact producing a sharp “crack” she could hear from ten feet away.
Judy gasped as she recognized the assailant as Logan. He was fighting to keep the copilot out! She could hear the engines winding up to full power and felt the big bird rumbling forward, and suddenly Logan was at it again, swinging the bottle repeatedly below at the copilot, the impacts striking metal as well, creating a cascade of sparks as the bottle hit wiring bundles.
And within seconds he had succeeded. She saw Logan pull up the ladder and close the hatch.
Oh my God! Judy thought as she pulled her head back out of the hatch and wondered whether to slam it shut before he could emerge. Maybe if she had enough passengers stand on it, he couldn’t get out.
She jumped to her feet and looked around with a feral expression, connecting with two of the men who’d angrily chased her to the cockpit hours before.
“That … that doctor just knocked the copilot out of the airplane. I think he killed him!”
“What?” one of the men said, incredulously.
“Down there,” Judy said, hyperventilating and swallowing hard. “I saw … I saw him bash the copilot in the head as he tried to get back in! Quick! Please! Help me close this hatch and stand on it so he can’t get in!”
“What, and lock the man in there? Hell, no,” one of them said.
Judy dropped to her knees again and was starting to close the hatch herself, when one of the men yanked her away.
“You leave him the hell alone, woman.”
She turned to look at him, ready to protest, but the fight in her had been replaced by shock and panic and she got to her feet and retreated to the galley to find the interphone, her hands shaking violently as the acceleration of the departing airplane pushed her against the back edge of the galley counter.
“What’s going on, Judy?” Cindy asked, breathing hard herself as she sat in the adjacent jump seat, too rattled to fasten her seat belt.
“We’re … leaving the copilot behind,” Judy said in a daze. “I saw the doctor kill him.”
In the coach cabin behind them the passengers who were still standing following the rapid taxi down the runway were suddenly gripping anything handy and trying to maneuver their way back to their seats as Mary, one of the flight attendants in the rear galley, grabbed a handset and punched on the PA.
“SIT DOWN, EVERYONE! STAY SEATED! GET YOUR SEAT-BELTS ON! WE’RE TAKING OFF! STAY SEATED!”
Twenty knots, Phil thought to himself on the flight deck as he scanned the instruments and then looked at the runway ahead, ablaze in the 747’s powerful landing lights. He wondered if bullets were going to cascade through the cockpit at any moment.
There was movement to his left on the periphery of the lights and he glanced down, wondering why someone was lying in a white short-sleeved shirt on the left side of the runway in what looked like a pool of blood. There had already been too many shocks to digest, and this was just another outrageous sight he didn’t comprehend, but his eyes involuntarily snapped back to the bloody figure, discerning more details of the image as the accelerating 747 rumbled past.
There were small, striped epaulets on the shoulders of the figure, and the sudden recognition of what he was seeing nearly stopped his heart.
Oh my God! That’s Abbott!
Phil’s mind reeled in denial. But it can’t be! He radioed aboard!
He pressed his face against the glass, trying to find someone else there, but the figure on the runway raised a hand at that moment in a gesture for help just as the edge of the light beams passed over, leaving the image a nightmare now invisible in the wake of the passing jet.
The jumbo was accelerating through forty knots now, and there were trucks and soldiers on both sides of the runway, though no bullets seemed to be striking the aircraft.
He had a split-second decision to make: Yank the power off and stop, or continue the takeoff.
Phil fought the rudder pedals to keep the huge airplane in the center of the runway, his hand poised on the throttles, the airspeed leaping upward every split second. He pulled the throttles back halfway, intending to pull them to idle, but the sudden loss of power shocked him enough to force his hand forward again to full throttle.
He was leaving his first officer behind. The first officer was injured, bleeding, lying on the concrete of the runway. How? He had reported himself back aboard, hadn’t he? The thoughts were flying at light speed through his cranium as the airspeed came through eighty knots, but there was no copilot to make the “eighty knots” callout. Was that legal? He was back there bleeding on the runway. Why?
Once again Phil felt his mind order his hand to yank the power off, but this time the end of the runway was clearly approaching and he canceled the impulse, telling himself in the same microsecond that there was no longer room to stop.
Or was there? He couldn’t tell, and he couldn’t take the chance. Yet the indecision was tearing him apart. He didn’t know what to do, so he pressed on.
Phil Knight held on and watched the airspeed climb above one hundred and twenty knots. It would be a close contest to see which value they hit first: flying speed or the end of the runway.
The speed was above a hundred thirty-five now. He needed one hundred and forty-five to fly and a few seconds to rotate the nose up so the wings could generate enough lift to pull them into the air. There were no red lights at the end as on most runways, and no runway-remaining distance markers. Only a dark void beyond. Even at a hundred and thirty the 747 seemed to be barely moving, the eye-to-runway height of forty-seven feet and the small circle of light from his own wings creating the illusion they were crawling.
One hundred forty!
The end was definitely in the landing lights now and less than a thousand feet ahead. There was no time left. Phil pulled the control yoke back sharply, feeling the nose leap off the runway and the deck angle rise to more than fifteen degrees as the tree line disappeared below the nose. He felt the shudder of the gear coming off the runway and kept pulling, the deck angle increasing second by second. The trees were right below their belly now, flashing past at over a hundred and seventy miles per hour as the Boeing clawed for altitude. He imagined he saw sparkles of light to the right and feared they marked the muzzle blasts of rifles aimed at his aircraft.
Gear! Phil leaned over the center console in a lightning-fast gesture and pulled the gear lever to the up position. He could detect the big gear doors opening a hundred and fifty feet behind the cockpit and feel the corresponding shudder as the huge landing gear began retracting sideways.
An unexpected shudder rumbled through the cockpit, and a small icy feeling shot down his back as he imagined the gear plowing through the treetops and jamming in the up position.
But the green lights indicating the gear was safely up and locked came on simultaneously, giving him renewed hope that whatever they’d hit had done no damage.
His eyes dropped to the radar altimeter as it gave the absolute altitude above the surface.
Fifty. One hundred feet. One hundred and fifty feet.
A series of cockpit call chimes rang again, but he ignored them and concentrated instead on keeping the 747 climbing as he began to retract the flaps. He felt his heart pounding, and realized he had a blinding headache and a roaring in his mind.
We made it! Phil thought to himself, but the momentary feeling of deliverance sank at the same moment in the quicksand of self-recrimination for what he’d done, and not done. The emptiness of the copilot’s seat mocked him, and the ghastly image wouldn’t evaporate: Garth A
bbott lying injured on the Katsina runway and looking up in agony, reaching out for help, as his captain left him behind to die.
On the tarmac below, Garth Abbott fought his fading consciousness and tried to deal with the image of his aircraft disappearing down the runway into the dark. Barely conscious, weak from loss of blood, and racked by immense pain, he suddenly heard running footsteps and managed to open his eyes enough to see several figures approaching in the weak lights of the airport.
But the effort was too great, and he closed them again, his last conscious thought a despairing and unanswerable “Why?” The sudden volley of shots ringing out at close range didn’t register any more than the boot that probed his body.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
IN FLIGHT,
ABOARD MERIDIAN FLIGHT SIX
9:14 P.M. Local
Brian Logan sat in the gloom of the departing 747’s electronics bay, breathing rapidly, his mind whirling. He was aware of the sounds and motions of the takeoff, and equally aware that the frightening rumble that shook the compartment moments before had been the heavy nose gear retracting into place a few feet forward of where he sat.
Anger was metastasizing like a mindless cancer, his outrage at the loss of the copilot propelled by preexisting hatred for Meridian Airlines and his deep and growing suspicion of the captain, who he alone knew had purposely left his first officer behind.
The copilot’s face was vivid in his memory. What was his name? Brian thought, frustrated that he couldn’t recall it instantly. At the very least he should be able to recall the guy’s first name.
Garth. His name was Garth.
He remembered warning Garth that the captain was trying to get rid of him. I was right all along. Brian felt a twinge of illogic, but brushed it aside. He’d witnessed what the captain did himself, hadn’t he?
The captain heard me. I told him on the interphone that the copilot was gravely injured and he had to stop the aircraft, and he hit the brakes instantly. He knew. But he took off anyway.
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