Skyhammer

by Richard Hilton

  But 1,200 hours? L’Hommedieu was astonished. How young had Pate been when he learned to fly? He skipped back to the physical data. “Born May 10, 1945.” So Pate would have graduated high school in ‘62 or ‘63. That meant a year, at the most, before he’d joined the Marines. And by that time he’d already had those 1,200 hours.

  Where did all this take place? L’Hommedieu skipped to the personal data. “Birthplace: Kamiah, Idaho.” Where in Idaho was Kamiah? And how long did he live there? He turned back to the education section. “Graduated, Lapwai High School, Lapwai, Idaho, 1963.” L’Hommedieu shook his head at his own inefficiency; he could’ve looked up Pate’s graduation instead of wasting time doing arithmetic. But what did they grow in Idaho that Pate could dust? Potatoes? Pine trees? Was it important? Maybe. Knowing about the subject’s home turf could tell you a lot about the way he thought.

  L’Hommedieu got up and pushed aside the extra chairs to get to the U.S. map. But he soon realized it wasn’t detailed enough. “Ms. Lofton,” he said, “how can we get some kind of geographic profile on Lapwai, Idaho?”

  “That his home town?”

  “Looks like.”

  “Flow Control has an Atlas. I’ll run down and get it.”

  L’Hommedieu checked his watch again. He’d used a little over six minutes already. He reset the timer for five more, then began to scan the airline’s training records. He saw immediately that Pate had “outstanding performance” on all check rides. And he held a First Class FAA Medical, no waivers, 20/20 vision. There were no records from Westar. Had they been purged? The second page of the New World file revealed something, however. In August he’d received counseling from his chief pilot for “difficulties with New World’s cockpit resource management program” whatever that was. That same month he’d been “put off a trip” by the captain. In October he had been cited again for a “hotel disturbance” in Omaha.

  L’Hommedieu sat back to think about these two new pieces to the puzzle. How did they fit? Here was a man with exemplary professional credentials who was also a troublemaker. A lifelong maverick? Or a man changed by recent circumstances? But why blow a career like this? Vengeance, certainly, but why take it so personally? Did the guy have a Jesus complex? L’Hommedieu tried to fix his mind on that possibility. But the image of Christ—bearded, haloed, backlit—intruded. He had to think it some other way. What drove martyrs? Ego and pride. Rage and hatred. L’Hommedieu took off his glasses and used his thumb and first finger to rub his eyes. Then he got up again and went around the horseshoe to the principal’s station. He waited until Searing looked up.

  “Tell me about this Wester merger. How did it go?”

  Searing frowned, considering his answer. “Complicated. I don’t know half of it myself. First off, you need to understand about Jack Farraday, why most people in the business hate his guts. He’s a bottom-line man all the way—Wall Street type. You know what kind of men ran the industry before dereg? World War Two heros, astronauts. Guys who loved flying. I don’t know the ins and outs, but it all comes down to employees or profits, and Farraday only plays for money. So he breaks the New World strike five years ago by hiring replacements. Pilots’ union almost had him on the mat when he shot ‘em with Chapter Eleven.

  “How do you mean?” L’Hommedieu knew virtually nothing about bankruptcy laws.

  “Legal loophole.” Searing shrugged. “He tore up the contracts, said, ‘Okay, everybody back to work or else.’ Law’s been changed since.”

  “But what’s all that got to do with Westar?”

  “Simple. Just like that—no debt, big pay cuts—Farraday can sell New World seats for half the price Westar can. Runs them under, takes them over, forces a merger. They fought it. Who wants to work for a guy you hate bad? But it’s merge or shut down and lose everything. So they vote in favor. And this is the bad part: Instead of integrating the seniority lists, Farraday staples all the Westar pilots to the bottom. You got captains knocked down to copilot, flying under the scabs that broke the union, and taking hefty paycuts while Farraday’s selling off planes, routes. Downsizing, raising cash. Where’s this cash goin’, though?” Searing paused, asking with his eyes wide now on his black face. Then he slipped deep into his southern accent. “That’s the big queshun. You ever hear of upstreamin’? The rap on Farraday—he’s pushin’ all the money into his own pockets, pockets of friends. Then askin’ more pay cuts.”

  L’Hommedieu wrote “Justice” on his notepad. “So Pate, all these Westar pilots went back to work but mad as hell.”

  “Some.” Searing wagged his head. “Some quit. Some went off the high dive. Our boy’s not the first. About six months ago—no joke—they caught a couple ex-Westar pilots trying to plant a bomb in Farraday’s car. I’m surprised you didn’t read about that.”

  L’Hommedieu did remember reading about the incident. He remembered other headlines, too, other bits of the story. But it hadn’t been covered that well in the press. “So Pate’s one of these ex-captains and the captain he’s crewed with is probably a scab?”

  Searing gave him a serious look, the whites of his eyes big again. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the situation. And you know what it means.”

  L’Hommedieu did. If true, then Pate had a good motive for murdering the captain of the flight. Plus, Pate’s action, in his own mind, was probably a collective revenge. He was getting even for the sake of all the New World strikers and the ex-Westars, too. And maybe, as a further rationale, purging mankind of an evil? Certainly the martyr’s objective.

  “How’s it going otherwise?” Searing asked, glancing up at the clock behind L’Hommedieu.

  “Okay. I think we’ll have to start out somewhere in the middle, though. We’ll forgo confirming his intentions. The same for his demands, since he hasn’t made any yet. I’m also going to save the appeal to his sense of mercy. It’s too obvious—we’ll use it later. And yes, we’ll assume he killed the captain—intentionally. But we ought to bring it up. Ask him if the captain was one of the strikebreakers. I’d like to know. I might want to get to that early on. If he killed the captain, and says it was an accident, or that he doesn’t remember clearly—if he feels some remorse ... we need to make him see that the killing has not made his plans irreversible.”

  Searing nodded. “You getting any kind of profile?”

  “I think so. I hope they can find that chief pilot, though—someone who’s met the guy, knows him personally. So I can get an idea of what his flashpoint is. But my guess is that he’ll be fairly rational, on the surface anyway. What we’ll need to do is get him to let it out in stages. Maybe asking about the captain will help, I don’t know.” L’Hommedieu shrugged. So much depended on those first few exchanges that he couldn’t formalize a real plan before he talked to Pate.

  “You want some more time?” Searing asked.

  L’Hommedieu shook his head. “Go ahead and set it up. I don’t want to leave him hanging any longer.”

  L’Hommedieu went back to his station and made a note: Threat real? Captain dead? Weapon? He crossed out “Threat real?” Then he turned to the last page of Pate’s personnel record. An Albuquerque address had been scratched out, Pate’s Cleveland one handwritten in. The pilot’s life insurance record designated a “Katherine (Winslow) Pate” at the same Albuquerque address that had been scratched out. So chances were Pate was divorced. Maybe that was in their favor, though, if the reason for divorce was what he suspected. L’Hommedieu wrote “Katherine Winslow” on his pad, along with the old address and telephone number. He opened the line to Mac at the Bureau and told him to get someone in Albuquerque started on tracking her down, and to stay on top of it. Just as he hung up, his timer began to beep at him. Somehow he’d managed to stay on schedule for a change.

  “Everybody ready?” he asked.

  Travis and Lofton nodded.

  “What’s the passenger breakdown?” he asked Lofton.

  She looked at her notes. “One hundred thirty-four passengers and cr
ew. Three flight attendants. One hundred and one adults. Fifty-seven women, forty-four men. Three medicals.” Lofton looked up at L’Hommedieu. “Twenty-eight children.”

  Flight Deck

  New World 555

  18:37 GMT/13:37 EST

  The last of the stratus had dissipated, and visibility was excellent. Six miles below, the Kansas City metropolitan area drifted under the plane. Pate could see the gently looping, opaque ribbon of the Missouri River, trace it northward, past the mouth of the Kaw. From his early days at Westar, flying routes into Great Plains cities, he knew the river’s course. It was the path Lewis and Clark had followed. White men discovering Indian country. The river marked the western edge of Missouri, then drew the line between Iowa and Nebraska. Then it split South Dakota, sliced off the western third of North Dakota, found Montana, crossed it, and finally broke apart at the very edge of Idaho.

  In those breaks southwest of Bozeman, he thought now, the water was still clean—snowmelt from the peaks of the Bitteroots. And on the other slope of the divide, the Idaho side, the same kind of water would flow down the Lochsa into the Salmon, and then into the Clearwater, and on its way to the Snake it would flow past Lapwai, out of the heavy timber and down between the steep canyon walls, bare on the southern exposures except in the draws where syringa and birch and wild blackberry grew in dense tangles. At daybreak, there would be steam on the surface of the river and great blue herons standing motionless along the shallows, invisible until they moved. The river would smell of soaked wood. The sun would peer suddenly over the rim of the canyon and strike the beads of water spilling down the underside of a fishing line, and they would shimmer like pearls. Later with the sun full up, the long shadows gone and the air turning hot, the water would seem like liquid ice, sliding between the banks of fire-bright willows, beneath the dun-colored canyon walls, the cloud-traced blue of the sky.

  Pate smiled. He and Jeeps Henry had sometimes taken Jeeps’s boat all the way up to Orofino and put in there. Below Orofino, the canyon bottom was like a long staircase, the river flowing over it, shallow and then deep, the current fast then slow. Floating the river was like flying. In the fast current the bottom shot by, a yard under the bottom of the boat, a blur of rocks. And then would come the next drop-off and suddenly there was only a dense green, the current slowing to an almost imperceptible pace. Staring down into his own shadow, Pate would see nothing—nothing but green—until finally, deep down, ghostly shapes would begin to glide under him, more and more, until he could make out the bottom again, boulders still fifteen feet down but rising as the current picked up and the river approached the next shallows, the next drop-off.

  Turbulence buffeted the plane. Pate opened his eyes, startled for a moment, before he remembered where he was. Six miles up in a jetliner, a thousand miles from the Clearwater River. Now in the distance the horizon was sheathed in high thin smears of haze. He scanned the instruments, then took off his sunglasses and massaged his eyes and then his forehead, reminding himself that he had to quit thinking of the past. Only the present mattered.

  Below were the fields of eastern Kansas—the land cut up into postage stamps of gray and brown. He listened to the airplane, the relentless, monotonous cacophony of cockpit noise: the instrument cooling fans, the air blowing through the ducts, the hiss of the wind against the windshield. A wave of fatigue passed over him. Dehydration didn’t help. He needed to keep sipping water.

  But as he reached for the water bottle, the radio suddenly coughed static. Then the Kansas City controller’s voice came on loud and clear.

  “New World Five-fifty-five. This is Kansas City.”

  The response had taken over thirty minutes, but he had expected that, knowing they needed time to assemble the team on a Saturday. He gripped the hand mike but waited, running his mind once more over what he knew would happen. The sequence of steps called the established strategy. One man would talk to him, an expert negotiator. The first objective would be getting him to land the plane. The negotiator would steer everything toward that, playing mind games, trying to work him into some deal, like a cowhand working cattle into a chute. But there was no deal, nothing they could offer him. That was his first advantage. The more they tried, the more time he would get to make his point clear. And he could cut to an unknown frequency and leave them whenever he wanted to. That was his second advantage.

  He keyed the hand mike. “Yeah, K.C. Go ahead.”

  “New World Five-fifty-five,” the calm voice of the controller responded, “Request you maintain flight-planned route and present flight level. And contact Wichita ARINC, frequency One-three one point three.”

  Pate acknowledged. ARINC would give the Washington control center a direct link to him. He dialed the frequency in and flipped the control head switch. Then he put on his headset and adjusted its boom microphone. Now when he wanted to speak he only had to depress the trigger switch on the control yoke.

  “Wichita ARINC,” he transmitted. “New World Five-fifty-five.”

  A few seconds passed. Then came the reply: “New World Five-fifty-five, this is Wichita. Please stand by for a phone patch.”

  It would take a few seconds. Pate waited. Would they have talked to Charlie Overstreet, his chief pilot in Cleveland? He remembered his last meeting with Overstreet, not a good one. And what about Katherine? It would take them a while to find her. Too much time, probably. The important thing now was to play it like he’d planned—stay calm, collected. No ranting. Show them he was completely rational. There was no hurry. He’d let them work on him a little.

  “New World Five-fifty-five, how do you read?” It was a man’s voice—a little nervous maybe. The transmission was blurred by just a trace of static.

  “Five-fifty-five has you five-by,” Pate transmitted back.

  “Roger, Five-fifty-five. Emil ... Pate, is it?”

  “That’s me, pardner.”

  “I’m Agent Brian L’Hommedieu,” the man said. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  This was part of the strategy, exchanging names to create rapport. Pate was tempted to tell the agent he knew that, but no, he would go along with it. “Luh-hawm-adoo? That’s a hell of a handle, pardner.”

  “Emil Pate’s not exactly common,” the agent answered.

  A bad response, Pate thought. Why start with antagonism? To make him wonder exactly that, probably. He glanced at the altitude indicator, then for a moment stared at the ground-proximity WARNING sign directly in front of him, before he scanned the rest of the flight instruments. Then he keyed his mike.

  “So then, Mr. Luh-hammadoo,” he said, “We can forget the established strategy, can’t we?”

  NINE

  Aviation Command Center

  18:39 GMT/13:39 EST

  Brian L’Hommedieu had drawn a parallelogram on his notepad, one side of a three-dimensional cube. Now he drew diagonal lines from corner to corner and then began to fill the quadrants in with more lines. He knew that he had to answer Emil Pate without delay, but he hadn’t been ready for the tone of Pate’s voice. Men who hijacked airplanes were always wrought up, their vocal cords tight as guitar strings, but Pate’s voice sounded more like a bass fiddle. It was not the voice of a desperate man. Where was the venom, the frenzied anger, the frustration that had to be bubbling just beneath that surface tone? And where was the hint of fear? No, there was no trace of it. Not yet. Perhaps he had not yet realized that his death was imminent? Or did this indicate he was not really planning that—was in fact bluffing?

  L’Hommedieu finished filling in the parallelogram. He’d have to cut through that surface, he decided. Get to the stuff beneath it. Then maybe he’d know for certain.

  But how? By talking about mortality? That would call the bluff, and it was too soon for it. Following the strategy—to the letter anyway—wouldn’t get him very far, either. Pate was right about that. On the other hand, following it anyway, filling in some of the routine blanks, would make it seem that he had no other plan and maybe
put the subject off his guard a little. L’Hommedieu keyed the phone.

  “Mr. Pate, since you’ve given us no covert signals, we’re assuming you mean what you say, that you are in fact the initiator of this action. I would assume you know the policies for handling such action, and the penalties. I also want to make sure you understand public perception of such actions. Sympathies will be with the passengers—”

  L’Hommedieu was interrupted by a high-pitched squeal coming through the phone. He yanked the earpiece away from his ear.

  “He’s keying his mike at the same time,” Searing explained. “Stepping on you. Intended to get your attention, probably.”

  If so, it had worked. L’Hommedieu put the phone carefully to his ear again. “Mr. Pate? Do you have something to say?”

  “Yeah,” came the response. “Don’t talk about the passengers.”

  “Okay,” L’Hommedieu said, making note of it on his pad.

  “But let us know one thing if you will. Do they know what’s happening?”

  There was a long pause. Then Pate said, “No, and subject closed.”

  “All right,” L’Hommedieu said, “but I hope you understand what I meant—that you will only infuriate the public, which is counter to your objective.”

  “I don’t think so,” Pate responded. “Isn’t that exactly what I want? All the flack I can stir up? Sooner or later it’ll hit Jack Farraday.”

  “He’ll be one of the victims,” L’Hommedieu answered quickly.

  Pate was quiet again for ten seconds before he said, “What do you know about Farraday?”

  And this time his voice had carried a nuance of anger. L’Hommedieu was momentarily gratified. But now he would have to be careful.” I know what he’s done to you,” he answered.

  “You don’t know,” Pate said. “Only those on the inside, the ones swallowed up in it, know. I can’t make anyone know how that feels. But if I do this, everyone will know Farraday’s a slimeball, a monster. And when the press starts digging through the mess at New World Airlines, Jack Farraday’ll be done for. The New World board will stick his head on a stake and hand it over. They won’t have any choice. The public’ll be screaming for it. You read me on this, Mr. L’Hommedieu?”