“Whatever happens today, I hope it makes your life better,” Darcy said quietly into the microphone.
Ross could tell the guy was fighting with his emotions. He went to say something but stopped; some thought or vision had cut him off.
His mind was thousands of miles away, in Missouri.
He could see the burning treehouse, and the large tree with the body hanging from a rope around its neck, swaying in the wind.
Small eyes looking down at him from the treehouse window.
He’d seen all this in the darkness of the night too many times to remember.
He swallowed hard, and when he looked over to Ross, the pilot could see the tears welling in his eyes.
Darcy looked at the cockpit floor and in slow motion took the headset off his head. Ross looked at Tony; he wondered why Darcy suddenly become so emotional. It only took a second for Ross to realize what this flight meant to him. The guy wanted redemption, and he’d spent practically all of the money he had left trying to find it.
The awkward silence in the cockpit passed unbeknown to the thousands of people nearby, and the millions watching on TV. Darcy regained his composure and looked back to Ross.
“Let’s do this,” he said quietly.
Ross tapped his mike button, and in his pilot voice said, “Passengers, ensure your seatbelt is fastened low and tight around your waist. We are now ready to take off.”
Tony tapped on his mike and spoke in hushed tones to the guys in the tower at Vandenberg. To Darcy, the words used between pilots and the control tower seemed almost to belong to a language of their own. But the meaning of the quick-fire exchange was clear.
It was time to go.
“This is it,” said Lachlan Ford, the anchor for CNN’s news desk, the excitement in his voice echoed by hundreds of other reporters around the globe who were, in their own way, saying the same thing at that very moment.
“This event is, by all accounts, being currently viewed by well over half a billion people worldwide,” he went on to say, turning to his co-chair and waiting for her to speak.
Tabytha Abraham met his eyes and took over.
“The numbers seem incredible, Lachlan.” She looked into the camera locked onto her in the studio before checking out the live feed of the A380 taxiing to the end of Runway 2 at Vandenberg.
She looked at Lachlan, and then back into the dead center of the camera. “But by all accounts, it could be close to double that.”
The two news anchors nodded to each other as they looked down to their monitors, keen to not take their eyes off the plane for even a second.
After 45 seconds of insignificant banter, as they recited all the uninteresting facts about the day’s event, the plane finally reached the end of the runway. Both CNN anchors fell silent.
On the ground at Vandenberg, the thousands of onlookers drew one last breath in anticipation of seeing the ghost plane shoot off down the runway and leave the earth.
Ross took one last moment to look at the end of the runway. He turned to Tony for the final time before takeoff and smiled. Tony raised his friend an even bigger smile.
The two of them had been through a lot in the last six months, and something inside them told them the adventure was not over yet. Both in love, with the women they’d fallen for on-board, the adrenaline rush and the feeling of excitement about what may lie ahead consumed them.
As he looked forward out the cockpit window, Tony said eagerly, “If you don’t punch it, I will.”
So Ross did what he’d been dying to since waking up that morning.
He pushed the controls of the massive jet forward. The plane lurched ahead, and in a matter of seconds was hurtling toward the end of the runway.
The passengers on-board held on tight as the plane jostled them gently before reaching the speed required to leave the runway.
Lachlan and Tabytha, back at the CNN studio in downtown LA, gasped in unison as the plane’s front wheel left the ground, followed a couple of seconds later by the rear wheels.
“Godspeed, Flight 19 2.0,” Lachlan said, as cameras trained on the vast crowd back at Vandenberg showed the onlookers break into a wild cheer as the plane became airborne for the first time in over six months.
Chapter Sixty-Two
The A380’s engines lifted the big aircraft with ease. In a matter of seconds, the plane crossed the rugged Californian coastline, which ran down the side of the vast Vandenberg Air Force Base.
In the cockpit, Ross and Tony made eye contact only a couple of times during those moments. Their combined instincts and intellect, and the experience of having taken off together well over 300 times, removed the need for most communication.
With everything working correctly as the plane steadily rose higher into the air, Ross could feel the excitement in his bones growing even more intense. It was good to be back in the air; it felt like home.
The four air-force fighter jets designated to escort the A380 arrived quickly from the east, and after a couple of almost aerobatic-style moves formed a tight and very sleek-looking formation around the commercial airplane.
They knew millions of people were watching live across the globe; it was their chance to show off. They certainly looked good on TV.
The feeling throughout the plane was a cocktail of differing emotions. Many passengers felt conflicted: they didn’t know what to expect, and part of them feared the worst. For most of them, it was their first time in the air since they’d arrived in 2024.
Others, much like Ross and Tony, were more overtaken by the sense of excitement, as if they’d agreed to the ultimate dare.
But it went deeper than that. By getting on the plane again to fly out to Hawaii and back, most on Flight 19 2.0 believed they would find some sense of closure.
Many of them needed it.
Tim looked out through his window and felt a sense of déjà vu. The fighter jets were sitting alongside the A380; he thought that if Sandra were next to him, he could believe it was six months ago.
He closed his eyelids and took a deep breath, willing the universe to send him a miracle—Sandra magically reappearing in the seat next to him.
With his eyes still closed, he reached down and put his left hand into his backpack.
He found the artifact, pulled it out, and wrapped both his hands firmly around it.
“For the love of God,” Tim said, “Why—”
The artifact had suddenly started to get warm, and not from the warmth of his hands clenched around it. The object was heating up on its own, and quick.
Tim’s eyes flew open, and he quickly forgot the fantasy of his wife sitting next to him as the thing started making him feel nauseous. There was another feeling coming from it, too, but he had no idea what it was. Something was happening to it.
In the cockpit, Tony said matter-of-factly, “We are climbing steadily, Captain, 20,000 feet and all in the green.”
Ross nodded; a smirk appeared on the right side of his face at his best friend still calling him Captain. He knew Tony was taking the piss but welcomed the humor.
“Copy that, Ben Stiller,” Ross whispered.
Dave Collins stood to one side of the buzzing air traffic control room, a coffee in one hand, and his cell in the other. He watched the live-to-air coverage of the A380, which was now replaying the takeoff, cut with file footage of the aircraft, accompanied by news-anchor commentary.
The Darcy Airlines A380 had parted with its fighter-jet escorts a little over two hours ago. As per Darcy’s request, no other plane or aircraft would be allowed to be anywhere within 60 miles, until they were five miles out from the Hawaii coastline.
Kylie had called Dave a few minutes ago from Vandenberg, telling him she’d said her goodbyes to both Emily and Todd and they’d boarded the plane without incident.
She said many of the people who had come to watch the plane take off had since left the base.
Dave had asked why she was still there.
Kylie had lied and said sh
e just felt like staying and waiting for most of the people to leave. But really, she was trying to come to terms with her last conversation with her son.
A few weeks ago, during their dinner at the Casa Del Mar in Santa Monica, she’d confessed to Dave the dark secret she’d been carrying around for many years.
Close to 20 years earlier, Andrew had an affair with a barmaid, which he confessed to Kylie only because she’d found out about a year afterward.
At the time, Andrew had not known the woman had fallen pregnant from their short affair and given birth to a boy.
For nearly ten years, husband and wife were none the wiser to the fact that Andrew was the father of a young boy named Jason.
When Jason’s mother died of an overdose on his eleventh birthday, Jason came looking for his father. He knew who he was; his mother had pointed him out the many times they’d seen the California Highway Patrol officer on the local news, accepting—ironically, they thought—yet another award for being a good cop.
When Jason eventually tracked Andrew down and confronted him one day, he told the boy in no uncertain terms to “piss off.” Harsh—but those were his words.
Making things worse, Andrew told Jason to never come near him again.
When Jason ended up on the streets of South Central LA, homeless, drug addiction and petty crime soon followed. And his hatred festered for the guy who’d brought him into the world and then abandoned him and his mother.
It was only by sheer coincidence that the father and son crossed paths at the 7-Eleven on the corner of Normandie Avenue and Imperial Highway, Westmont, on Friday, July 23rd, 2021.
High on crack and sleepless for nearly 36 hours, Jason, along with some other street kids, had decided to check into the convenience store for some snacks. They’d just robbed a guy at gunpoint only a block away, and by sheer luck, he’d had $200 cash in his wallet. That’s a shitload of Slurpee’s and Doritos if you haven’t eaten for a while.
When some asshole had shouted out to Jason to pull up his pants just as the young criminal was about to walk into the store, Jason had taken offense.
When he turned and realized the guy shouting at him in an authoritative tone was, in fact, his father, the very man who’d not wanted a bar of him, the rage inside him exploded.
Seconds later, he looked down and saw the smoke coming from the gun in his hand, and his father lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Kylie would only find out that Jason was Andrew’s illegitimate child at his trial for the murder of her late husband.
After that, her feelings for Andrew were mixed, and sometimes very bitter. Stoically, she kept a lid on these feelings where the outside world was concerned. She couldn’t bring herself to tell Dave that her greatest fear had come true, when she called him from Vandenberg. Todd had murdered her late husband’s other son.
Dave looked at the screen on his phone, fighting the uncomfortable feeling that Kylie was holding something back. There was more to what was going on, he was sure of it. He decided to call her back and try and find out what she wasn’t telling him.
Just as he hit the redial button, someone shouted his name nearby.
“Dave! Jesus Christ—Dave!” The commotion erupted around him a second later.
Dave turned to the guy who had just shouted at him from the other side of the room.
He was pointing to the two television screens on the back wall.
When Dave’s eyes fell on the TV screens, the words at the bottom turned his blood to ice.
F19 2.0 HAS DISAPPEARED FROM RADAR
Sarah and Sean both gasped as the news coverage they were watching made the astonishing announcement.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have just received word from oceanic air traffic control in San Francisco—and before I say this —I need to make sure you know—” Lachlan looked to his co-anchor before turning back to the camera. “This is not a hoax.”
He took a breath. “Flight 19 2.0—has disappeared from radar, two hours into its flight to Honolulu. More updates to come.”
As Sarah burst into tears, Sean could feel something beside him getting hot. Along with the heat came a strange pulse on the right side of his body.
“Fuck,” he muttered. It could be only one thing.
The artifact Tim had told him to guard with his life.
He instinctively reached down the side of the couch and almost jumped in fright. The object was red hot. He yanked his hand away.
“Sean—what are you—”
The knock on the front door was as sudden as it was hard.
Sean and Sarah met each other’s eyes. The anchors on television kept repeating the same thing, “Flight 19 2.0 has vanished. We repeat, ladies and gentlemen—we have it now verified from oceanic ATC that the A380 formerly of Pacific International Airlines, which disappeared without a trace over five and a half years ago, has done what many believed impossible. It has vanished from our skies once again.”
The pain in Sean’s right hand from touching the artifact when it was blistering hot was already subsiding. He ignored it and moved quickly to the front door, where he bent down and put an eye to the peephole.
“It can’t fucking be,” he said, louder than he intended.
“Who is it?” Sarah shouted from the living room.
Sean wiped his eyes to check they were working correctly.
He leaned back down and looked through the peephole again, harder this time.
There was nothing wrong with his eyesight. If he could believe a plane could disappear into thin air, and that it had something to do with that thing Tim had given him, why not this?
While still looking into the peephole, he reached down and unlocked his front door.
He stepped back, pulling the door open.
“It can’t be,” Sean said to the guy standing at his front door.
“It can be, and it is,” Ben Erwin said before ushering himself inside.
“I’ve got a lot to tell the both of you,” he said, shutting the front door behind him.
It was business as usual back on the A380. Nothing was any different than it had been for the last couple of hours. The only passenger who felt something amiss was Tim Erwin. When he reached down to touch the artifact again, he felt a stab of panic pass through his entire body.
The artifact was stone cold.
In the cockpit, Ross, Tony, and Michael E. Darcy had been talking steadily for the last ten minutes. Nothing across the vast array of gauges, screens, and readouts of the A380 had indicated anything unusual or of concern to the experienced pilots.
Now they were focused on which bar they would head to in Waikiki after landing in Honolulu.
Then it happened.
A light but noticeable ping in their headsets told them a message had been sent through the CPDLC system from air traffic control.
Neither Ross nor Tony thought much of it. It was normal to receive the odd message from someone on the ground.
Tony looked down at the screen. “Shit!” he gasped, a second later. “You can’t be fucking serious.”
The message from the data link was as alarming as the date stamp on the message.
“What is it, bud?” Ross leaned forward to see what had caught Tony’s attention.
“Fuck me,” Ross muttered, shaking his head in disbelief.
He looked at the top-right-hand corner of the screen again and this time could feel panic shuddering through his entire body.
He reread the date and felt dizzy.
July 20th, 2021.
“Hold on, hold on,” Lachlan the CNN news anchor said, as words came to him in his earpiece.
“We have an update, Tabytha.” He looked to his co-anchor and waved his hand. “We have reports of the plane being picked up on radar—”
His words were stopped by more information coming to him from his producer in the newsroom.
“We are getting reports from oceanic air traffic control of a plane reappearing on their radar screens, but—”
; The silence, as Lachlan continued to listen to his headset, had half of America holding its collective breath.
“Fighter jets are in the vicinity; they are 60 seconds from visually confirming that the plane is the Darcy Airlines A380, which is still out of radio and radar contact with air traffic control.”
Many would later call the next minute, in which the world waited to learn the identity of the plane that had just appeared on radar, “the F19 60.” And it would be a part of news folklore for years to come.
The pilot of the first fighter jet to rendezvous with the plane hit his radio mike and spoke to one of his fellow pilots sitting a few seconds behind him.
“Am I seeing things, Tommy, or what? Over.”
The other pilot responded quickly.
“If you’re looking at a vintage biplane with two very confused-looking pilots waving their arms at us, you’re seeing what I’m seeing.”
“Hold on—I can see a name.”
“What is it?” the other pilot responded quickly.
“Hold on.” Tommy turned his jet around, and when he’d made it back to the strange aircraft, he slowed as much as the plane would allow.
The other pilot heard Tommy say something, but he didn’t get the name.
“Repeat that, over.”
“The Dallas Spirit,” he said.
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I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to do this.
Grant Finnegan, 2018
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